I had a lot of emotional stuff happen to me in that second deployment. You know, my idol, Matty Roberts, I've talked about him a couple of times. I really, really hung on to that dude. Like he was my true north, like he was the guy. And when he got shot up, when you see it happen, you know, I think that was the closest call for fire mission the entire Iraq war.

Like inside of 15 meters. I mean, Corey, Mike, Mike, my AC-130 gunship. I mean, it was on top of you. Like a bell fed machine gun, just chewing us up. Everybody shot up except for me and one other guy. And we're all crowded behind this tractor tire. Just, you felt like a victim.

Like I felt helpless. You know, I'm getting rounds poured all over me. And at a certain point you just go, I'd rather run back into the front of this thing and get killed with all of them, than be the lone survivor. - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is DJ Shipley. DJ Shipley is a retired Navy SEAL who served for 17 years, much of that time as a tier one operator, meaning part of an elite, highly selective special operation unit within the SEALs.

In recent years, DJ has emerged as a top public educator on the topics of how to structure your days to maximize your mindset for sake of physical and mental health, as well as performance in work or school, and to best support and build your closest relationships. As you'll soon learn from DJ, there are key points in your day when you can take specific physical steps, including but not limited to physical exercise, to shift your mind away from rumination, distraction, and frustration to a state of immense clarity, focus, and drive.

Through trial and error, DJ has figured out, and he shares with us, how that process is done and how you can do it too, right down to the details. And what he describes goes way beyond a standard morning routine or evening routine, and most importantly, is accessible to all of us.

You also won't hear any cliches or fluff in today's discussion. DJ is very specific about what to do and when and how in order to become the best possible version of yourself. You'll often hear those words out there, how to become the best version of yourself or reach your potential.

But what DJ does so beautifully is he explains exactly how to do that. And he shares his story of how he joined and moved through the SEAL teams and the victories, but of course, also the immense challenges and losses that he and his teammates experienced. We also discuss addiction, PTSD, and depression, and new paths for overcoming those.

In particular, a new medical treatment, ibogaine, followed by DMT, and how that's being used to help veterans overcome addiction, PTSD, and suicidality. I've paid close attention to that work over the last five years, because the brain imaging aspect is being done by my colleague, Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford.

I should mention that the ibogaine DMT process we discuss is not a recreational one. Rather, it's being done as part of clinical trials and dedicated research studies. DJ explains that process firsthand. And at the same time, I should mention that ibogaine and DMT are still illegal in the United States.

They are not FDA approved, so no one should explore their use outside of these clinical trials. However, the FDA is looking seriously at these compounds, and approval for them seems quite likely in the next 12 months or so. Today's discussion is one that anybody, male, female, young, or old, can benefit from.

DJ has immense knowledge, he has immense experience, and he has an incredible ability to take what he's learned and turn it into actionable steps so you can improve your mental health, physical health, and performance, and become the best possible version of yourself. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with DJ Shipley. DJ Shipley, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, man.

Let's talk about mental health, physical health, and spiritual health, but not all at once. You talk a lot about, and you post a lot about mental health, but I've noticed that a lot of that takes on a sort of a protocol-y approach where you use physical steps to approach mental health and vice versa.

So what's your framework on this thing that we call mental health? I'm not asking you to solve the mental health crisis in one swoop, but when you think about your own mental health, the people close to you, people you've worked with in the teams, you know, how do you approach mental health as a concept and as an actionable thing?

I've lived so many different stages of my life. High points and low points and everything in between. And at my lowest point, I had no physical connection. I was either down hard with an injury, coming back from surgery, and then my mental health, rapid decline right after that. And for someone who never suffered from mental health issues, it's shocking and you feel like you're the only person going through it, especially when you come from a subculture of special operations.

Nobody ever talks about it. So when you find yourself in that dark room alone, really contemplating some terrible things, it's hard to wrap your head around because you're the only person that's ever gone through it. And, you know, I had some really good strength coaches and coming back from injuries, and the better I got physically, my mental health naturally started to pull out of it.

And, but everything we did was for the group. So all my physical attributes, everything I'm training is for the betterment of the group. Now it's betterment of my family, of my tribe, of whatever I have. But, you know, I talk about this thing, stacking up micro winds. My morning routine is structured in a way to where I can do that same routine everywhere I go.

Everywhere. At any point of day, I can lock that thing in. But it all starts with an evening routine. So when my phone goes off at 5 a.m. and I spring feet out of bed, I know exactly what I'm going to do for the next 12 minutes to put myself in position to not be stressed.

So I've got to power down my home life and I've just got to think about what's coming next. So playing out the clothes the night before, my bottle of water is filled, my pills are out, my toothbrush is out, everything is set. So as soon as I get up, by the time I get to making my morning cup of coffee, I've done 25 things inside of my control.

Do you know off the top of your head what those things are right now that maybe you could just list them off? You said your alarm clock goes off 5 a.m. Yep. And that's regardless of when you went to sleep? Regardless of when I went to sleep. Typically. I mean, if I'm out here, I'm on a different time zone and I can change it.

But if you get to bed at midnight or you get to bed at 9 p.m. or you get to bed at 2 a.m., alarm goes off at 5 a.m., you're up. My wife gave me this the other day. I came home on a red eye. I didn't walk through the door until 2.30 in the morning.

And alarm clock goes off at 5 and she rolls over and she's like, what are you doing? I'm going to work. And she's like, you can take a day off. I'm like, no. I'm not taking a day off. This last five days is the first time in as long as I can, 20 years, that I've actually taken five days of not working out when I had the physical ability to do it.

I've never taken five days off because I'm so afraid my mental health will drop. Something will happen if I leave that routine. So I wake up, unplug my phone, shut off the alarm. I walk in, toothpaste on toothbrush. I go to the bathroom while I'm brushing my teeth, spit it out, all the pills I got to take in the morning, you know, vitamin D, all the stuff I take.

And then I get dressed. Left sock, right sock, right shoe. Everything I do, I do it in a very specific order. Even the way I put on my bracelets, if I put them on in the wrong order, I'll stop and I'll de-jock them all and I'll redawn them just because that's one simple thing.

I'm not rushed. I'm not under duress. I'm in control of this entire timeline and that way when I get to the kitchen, I don't feel like I'm frantic. Where are my keys? Where's my wallet? Where's my bag? Everything's in a system right now to where I can step in that car.

I'm not stuck behind a school bus. My car has gas in it. My phone's at 100% because we've all been there. Everybody's a normal person. I wake up. My wife wants to have a 15-minute conversation. That puts me behind that school bus and I'm typically not behind. Now I'm late for my first meeting.

I've got to rush through my workout. I don't have time to take a shower. All that is going to cascade. It's going to put me to be the person I don't want to be when I have to walk into that first meeting. It's like I'm trying to optimize everything that's within my control so when I step through the threshold, this is a DJ that I'm purposely presenting to you right now under my control.

And that really sets the entire framework for the whole day of being in a good headspace. I'm controlling the things that are controllable and the things that I can't control, I don't think about them anymore. I block them out. I love the regimen and your adherence to it. I'm curious about your mindset when the alarm goes off, meaning where is your head?

I guess I know you're human and I understand enough about the brain to make an assumption, which is that you don't wake up every morning with the alarm going off at five thinking, great, I'm going to get up and just roll right into the day. that there may be times when you consider going into fetal position, it's warm under those covers, but also that your mind, like anyone else's, you probably start spinning.

It leaps to the past, leaps to the, even a little more stress than you'd like, a little more lethargy, this kind of thing. Do you purposely stack up to-dos so that you stay out of all of that? And if some of that persists as you're brushing your teeth, what's the way of dealing with that?

I just keep pushing. I just keep myself in motion the entire time and I talk about dials not switches a lot with people and it sounds selfish, but I have to be selfish right now in order to be selfless later. So I tell guys, as soon as that alarm clock goes off, I'm not thinking about my wife, I'm not thinking about my kids, I'm thinking about being as efficient as humanly possible and I'm trying to hit that gym so I unrack at 0-7, the best version of me.

And I can't do it if I'm thinking about a fight or an argument we have with the wife the night before, the kids and this and that. I have to be selfish right now because it's the only block I'm going to have for me to optimize myself because at 10 a.m., I'm going to get pulled from 50 different directions.

It's the exact same thing when I go home. So now between the hours of 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., I'm only thinking about work. I don't think about my wife, don't think about my kids, I only think about the team and everything we're trying to do. At 6, you can watch it and I tell everybody, if you would put a hidden camera in my car, it'd break the internet.

I do it every day. I slam that car in the park. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. I check social. I check all my texts. I'm good. There's no phone calls and I've got a 12-minute drive from door to door. Those 12 minutes, I put on Chris Stapleton, something that makes me feel good, that calms me down, and I pre-rehearse everything that's going to happen the moment I hit that garage door opener.

Really? I do it every single day. I realize it's personal, but to the extent that you're willing, maybe share a couple of what you're rehearsing. I pull onto the driveway, I slam it back in park, I check my phone one more time and I tell myself, you're only going to have three hours from six to nine to be the person they need you to be.

You've got to be a full-time dad right now. You've got to be a full-time husband and I don't get it right every time. Some days I drag that stuff home with me two-hand texting frantically, but I really try not to and before I hit that garage door, I tell myself, they don't know what's going on.

They don't know the stress you're out at work. She's had her own day. They've had their own day. I've got a daughter in seventh grade, I've got another one in second grade. We've got to work through this whole thing together and it's like, what version of me do I want to present to them right now?

I'm going to walk in, bags over my right shoulder, I'm going to clear the threshold and make an immediate 90-degree turn and there's going to be that seven-year-old and she's a huge ball of energy. She gets all shaking, she runs at me at full blast and I pick her up, shake her, kiss her, like 100% love.

Take an immediate right in the kitchen, there's my oldest, usually eating something before homework's about to start. Give her a kiss, give her a hug, ask her how her day was, straight to the room to see my wife because she gets like a 30-minute buffer before she has to go upstairs and lock in with seventh grade homework.

Check her, what do you need? If you can fold the towels, if you can start dinner, done, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So my last interaction in the morning was positive. I left on a positive note. The first interaction you're getting at the end of the day is in a positive note and regardless of how I'm feeling, if I have to fake it, I'll fake it.

I got three hours and if you space out over the course of the five days, I don't have a lot of time to make positive memories just because of work and stress and everything else. I'm trying to maximize those three hours and then when I do, it feels like you can do no wrong but every night after we finish dinner, me and my wife do a 20-minute walk.

10 minutes for her. So as soon as we start it, tell me about your day. Everything she wants to vent through, everything we get to get caught up on, we get the halfway mark right around this park and then it's my turn for 10 minutes. Average human can walk a mile in 20 minutes.

Helps circadian rhythm, helps digestion. I mean, mental clarity, I'm not on my phone, there's no stimulus. I mean, I'm watching the sun set. But now it's 20 minutes just for us to reconnect and we do it every single day unless it's a torrential downpour. We're doing it every single night and our marriage has never been better.

My physical health has never been better. And then my time with my kids, I can be accountable for every single minute in my day. Did I maximize that opportunity? No. Why? Because I drug that dude home with me from 2.30 in the afternoon. I drug him all the way home until 6.

That's not who they need. They don't need a commando. They don't need a business owner. They don't need an entrepreneur. They need a dude that's going to have a tea party right now or a guy that's going to talk about how difficult navigating 7th grade is. Like she really needs a husband that's going to be fully present because I haven't been for the majority of our marriage.

I've been gone 300 days out of the year. She really just needs a buddy who's going to help parent. And if I'm not mentally there, I'm never going to get there. So I set conditions to where I can be the person I need to be no matter what threshold I'm walking through.

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Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. What an awesome example. And the two dues are super impressive. I wonder if we could just explore a little bit of the to not dues. A lot of what you described, it's clear requires having the phone away. I mean, I could go on and on about phones, but the incoming is incessant, and the temptation is really tough to deal with.

So when you walk in the door, because you're with family, phone is in the car or it's just shut off. During the day when you're going about your work, is it understood that if your wife wants to get a hold of you, she can, but that there's a high threshold for that?

Because I think a lot of couples get into, you know, like just pinging each other here and there, this and that. Even in business teams, there's a lot of unnecessary communication. I'm fortunate now that my wife actually works inside the business so she gets it and she knows that once I lock in, when that camera turns on, that microphone goes on, you got to leave me alone.

And I tell people, like, I'm not trained to do this. I'm a normal dude, so I'm really susceptible to negative energy and they know better. Don't slam me with something negative before I have to turn that microphone on because I'm not going to be able to compartmentalize it all the way.

I need to be the best version of me right now, so wait till I'm done and then deliver the bad news. And she's the same way. She's an absolute gangster and she knows. She's like, hey, when you get done today, we got to talk. I'm like, what is it?

And she's like, nothing bad. It'll definitely be something bad, but she doesn't even give me an inkling because she knows it'll rob me of bandwidth. She's like, go do what you do. As soon as you get done, we'll talk. And on that 20-minute walk, she'll drop it. But now we're here.

I'm in a clear head space. I've had a productive day. We've had a great 10 minutes into this. Now he went to bad news. Last 10 minutes, we'll solve it together. But not get on that social media first thing in the morning. I used to be the guy. I'd roll over.

I immediately open up Instagram and I'm checking it. What are the comments? How's the posting doing? How's this? How's that? You'll stay there for 40 minutes. And then if you see something negative, I'll ride that. I'll wear that jacket all day long. I can't get it away from me.

So I don't take a Zoom call. I don't take a phone call. There's nothing that happens inside of my orbit before 10 a.m. from 7 to 10. That's my morning block. I've got the whole team in there. We do fitness from 7 to 9. I make them all do a 20-minute walk.

I make the whole team protein shakes. I take a shower and at 10 a.m. I walk out. Hit me with it. What have we got to do? We're going to range and my training and we're shooting content. What are we doing right now? You have full bandwidth until I leave here.

And if I run till midnight, we run till midnight. But you have both barrels with me at 100% because I've controlled that entire morning routine. And it's been the best thing that's ever happened to us. But you've got to be consistent. It's like everything else. What's the best diet?

The one you'll stick to. And that morning routine has been the biggest game changer I've had. That's awesome. I feel like the teams and I've been fortunate to know and work with some folks from the teams seem to have what I call kind of an unconscious genius like as a whole, as a system.

We could talk about buds. We could talk about selection for tier one stuff. We could talk about any of that and we will. But it seems to me that a lot of the practices that are built up in the teams and in team guys who are successful when they transition out are built around this notion I just call unconscious genius where they weren't thinking about like what's the underlying neural circuitry or this and that.

And everything you describe, by the way, is extremely actionable for anybody. I love that you told us and I'm going to underscore this, highlight it, and bold it right now is that it doesn't matter if you went to bed at 2.30 a.m. or you went to bed at midnight.

You're getting up at the same time. It's actually critical for keeping sleep rhythms healthy and one thing from the literature I'll just share is that it's clear that if people have the same wake-up time each day that whatever sleep they get prior to that wake-up time you get the maximum amount of growth hormone release that's possible which is of course crucial for recovery not just growing muscles but recovery, etc.

So there's that. You guys came to that. There's that kind of you didn't need to know the science. You just arrived at it. But also the brain is so context-dependent and throughout your description I'm hearing that you'll wear that jacket all day long like it can pull you in.

I mean you're a strong-minded individual you know how to control your own behavior clearly but you are susceptible like anybody else and I always think of mental states as that we can either be like a ball bearing on a flat surface where that ball bearing can go anywhere with even just the slightest tilt or even a breeze versus little dimples in that surface where it can kind of reside but it can get blown out or pushed out easily and ultimately what we're all seeking is to drop like a ball bearing into a trench and rage bait and numbing out which are the two kind of core features of social media except there's this other opportunity to learn I feel like those drop us immediately into that trench and so I feel like our brain wants to be the ball bearing at the bottom of that trench but it's tempting to not do the work to get there and so there are things in the world highly processed highly palatable foods you know certain aspects of social media because I don't think all of it is unhealthy that provide that opportunity to drop into that trench and so clearly the unconscious genius here is that you arrived at it seems an understanding that you're very context dependent you know it's not that you're so robust internally that you can throw anything your way it's exactly because you're if I may you're not that robust internally that you understand the brain that you can't let anything come your way but if you set the context internally then the rest of your day is maybe not a breeze but it's workable and you'll stay that ball bearing in the trench that you're determining do I have that right?

exactly okay so I think this is important because I think a lot of people hear about special operators and high performers and their structure and their routine and they assume they wake up and they're like into the day nothing's gonna bother me it's because things have the potential to bother you that you have to structure it that way okay for me that's very helpful to hear and I think you're also defining the difference between an artist I know a lot of artists who need it they kind of float about their day they're two hours late to things and then the stuff emerges right I mean I can tell you stories about people in Los Angeles and how meeting times and I'm a little guilty of this but it's incredible the way that things just kind of orbit around certain people and then they're but then they bring the magic and so the world continues to orbit around them versus an operator and I feel like everything you described is like the essence of being an operator you're approaching your civilian life the same way presumably you did your operating life so let's say you have a morning where something goes wrong there's no toothpaste in the toothbrush or something more serious like your wife really needs to talk about something maybe she's so you know together that that never happens will you forgo those minutes or do you make or how do you deal with that the situation really dictates when I was in I wouldn't I'd wake up before everybody else is in there and it's a lot of stuff I tell the new guys in special operations like if you sacrifice your sleep when it doesn't affect anyone else you can really lay the foundation for greatness right your first four years don't rush to make her your girlfriend don't make her your wife don't have a kid don't get a dog just focus on being a green beret focus on being a navy seal and just do that then when that girlfriend turns in her fiance you can have the bandwidth to do them both it's very hard to do that job you know build that build that boat at the high seas and now you're dragging your wife into it it's hard to do but you know situation dictates if it's something I really have to solve we really have to solve it but she knows no matter what I'm unracking at zero seven I'm not missing this for you I'm not missing it for anybody else because she knows what's going to happen so she'll either grab me at lunch hey do you have a block here we can talk for sure we'll maybe start the initial conversation if it starts going south or I think it's going to take long I'll look down at my watch honey I gotta go I got 12 minutes to be there she's like okay we'll catch up at lunch cool and we'll go I can't miss morning movement I can't do it that will ruin my day and if I'm rushed through morning movement if somebody comes in somebody beats on the door and they're like hey we were in the neighborhood just wanted to come see you can we talk for 20 minutes no you can't no I'm sorry and I know it sounds bad you can't because I know what happens if I miss this day and I'm not willing to take the chance on you right now you can wait an hour wait till I'm done but it's hard you know and now we've kind of restructured the whole day to where I can get my time in in the morning and I can leave with just enough time to see my kids wake up now they're pouring cereal so now I get that little dopamine hit of seeing them and I kick off their morning in a positive way right I'm doing red light therapy in the morning I'm still gonna unrack at 0-7 I'm still getting up at 5 but now I'm just in the house getting everything processed I'm gonna leave on my terms and that way they get to see me first thing in the morning I only get 3 hours at night well if I get 30 minutes in the morning stack it over the course of a year that's a huge difference we've restructured the entire day but the whole team is also on that exact same schedule it's not just me it's not just my world business partners Cole and everybody else everybody who does that morning block of fitness that's why I've been pushing this whole time if you look at anybody in the military anybody in the fire department anybody in special operations the military in general everybody's day always starts with fitness when you're in boot camp you wake up you do a workout and then you eat when you go into buds you wake up you work out essentially all day long go to sleep it's the same thing when you get to the SEAL team you do the same thing everybody wakes up everybody does fitness the very first thing and then we start our day it's been really successful why would I ever break that you see guys when they transition out they get away from it they gain a bunch of weight they start drinking you working out five days a week no why you've been doing it since you were 17 years old why would you break it now why yeah why do you think that that happens I think guys use excuses injuries limitations lack of motivation like oh there's no reason for me to be in shape longevity of life everybody says oh I take a bullet for my kids you won't lose 40 pounds for them you won't prolong life if you think you're a real asset to your family why wouldn't you try to maximize that time so I look at them out it doesn't take a whole lot like you don't have to be David Goggins you don't have to run 100 miles a day you can wake up and do a 20 minute walk every single day and you'll be better off for it you can grab a set of kettlebells 30 minutes in your garage that is something every single day that makes you exponentially better just through the repetition of being there being present being a little selfish right now so you can be selfish later so for me if I don't get that workout in and everybody's got stuff going on and I do too if I don't get that block of fitness in I will think about that all day long I'll think about it for weeks we go back the next time we hit that muscle group I don't get the same numbers I thought I would well that's because I took Monday off I'm never going to put myself in that position I don't want to have to have an excuse so I just set the foundation I lay it down I stamped it on a piece of paper that's what I'm doing I'm not compromising on it and it's been it's been great for us that's awesome I mean as somebody who got into resistance training in his teens and running I confess over the years I felt some guilt around working out because in my community of scientists I mean now I have a much broader community you know you go to meetings everyone's sitting all day and eating bad food and then you know and then it was happy hour I was never much of a drinker but I would participate a bit until eventually I just stopped drinking entirely and occasionally I would sneak off during some of the I'll just be honest the weak talks I was like I've seen this person speak before I'm going to get a workout in and only once did I ever run into a colleague in the gym at one of these places and we both were like it was like getting caught doing something bad but then the years went by and I saw my colleagues start to die I saw my colleagues start to get sick I saw my colleagues start to resemble melted candles and these were people that had a lot of robustness and they also had a lot to offer and families and friends and so I think nowadays people think about physical fitness a little bit differently they understand it's an investment and therefore it's beneficial to the people around you but I still see a lot of people kind of couch it especially with respect to anything that relates to muscle as kind of selfish and narcissistic and this kind of thing and I think it's so important that people understand the mental health benefits but also the benefits that it can bring the people in your life and not just longevity but just the person that it brings you really understand yourself you know in the back of my mind I'm thinking about you know the oracle know thyself it's like so important if you don't get that workout you're going to have to force out being best husband best dad best teammate and if you do get that workout they still get that best dad everything but it's that much more genuine and it comes it probably is in abundance one of the things that nobody ever talks about is your body awareness when you do fitness for a long time 50 years old you've been doing fitness for a very long time you are so in tune with that vessel that when something does pop up you identify it right away when you don't you're like uh my back kind of hurts where uh you don't know i'm in tune with that thing so well that when i walk into a doctor i'm like take a needle three inches down rotate it over 45 degrees and that's where it is i'm like okay this is it i'm so in tune with it so when anything pops up i can diagnose it i can walk in and give them actual feedback what's happening i'm not just sitting on the couch all day long just my neck kind of hurts no i know exactly what it is i'm doing a full diagnostic approach the entire day and that's why i've got vernon i mean he's the best strength coach in the world if i wouldn't have that guy i would be i mean he's brought me back from the dead more times than i can count but it's five days a week i mean he's in there every day so if i walk in and i've got a slight limp on my left side he's like hey my man come over what is that and i was like i had nothing he's like bruise heel yeah how'd you know it was a bruise heel he's like i watched that broad jump on friday like you landed a little funky i want to see if he's gonna mess with you he ideas it i ideas it i just wasn't gonna say anything okay what are you gonna do about it right be proactive instead of reactive but that's because you're chipping away and you know you're understanding yourself so well because you are constantly in tune with your body and people just forget about it like why aren't you sleeping or i had caffeine at four o'clock oh i'm accountable for everything i put in my body and then everything comes out of me the gym's just one of the methods that really ties them all together for me the body awareness piece i think is something that we should also underscore a bit i think one thing that happens if people don't develop body awareness is that they don't learn the difference between something that hurts and an injury a few years ago right before going on cam haynes's podcast where you know you carry that rock i was about to say he makes you carry the rock but you don't have to you know carry the rock it's the thing it's heavy it's 72 pounds it's slippery it's muddy it's a thousand feet of elevation and people do it right you can do it but i popped a hamstring on the hamstring curl machine like a couple days before but i didn't pop pop it like it didn't unravel you know unravel up the up the tendon so i was like i'm just not going to talk about it i'm not going to say anything i'm not going to because that's going to create its own thing i was like i'm hurt it hurt but i'm not injured and knowing that line is really important because if you are injured it'd be the stupidest thing in the world to carry that rock up that hill right you end up out for six months potentially or four months i had years ago a back pain kind of sciatica thing and i couldn't stand up and i actually it was online it was instagram and i have no business affiliation to this kid but there was a i think he's a chiropractor he has this channel called rehab fix and he convinced me that what i need to do is some like up dog things it looks like you're kind of like humping the floor you know your pelvis is down and you're pushing up and you repeat those it's kind of like like lizard push-ups you know and then against the wall if you can't actually do that from the floor within three days it resolved itself and i was thinking about pain meds which i don't like to take in fact i avoid them entirely i was thinking am i going to have to have surgery i mean i could not stand up i couldn't move i couldn't do it and i realized then i was like okay the line between hurt and truly injured is often kind of blurry and you need to be able to work through that space and you think about this and it through one lens and it sounds like a selfish thing oh it's all about being able to work out more you think about it through another lens it's you know people who think they're injured or who are in pain and don't resolve that are very difficult to be around very difficult i've been that person it's just everything grates on you and male female young or old people now you know they talk about their neck or they sleep right and i think being able to suck stuff up is really great it's also important to know when you have a real issue and so the body awareness thing i think is a gift to oneself you can avoid a lot of costs a lot of unnecessary medical interventions you can know when it's time to take action with proper medical intervention but also it really allows you to be in life with people without being the person that's always complaining about stuff or is just difficult i think a lot of people who are difficult are in pain and they don't know how to resolve that pain and they think they have a problem with pain so then they take pain medication and that's a whole cycle so i just you know wanted to underscore that kind of where we're headed here it seems again and again is with you know what seems selfish is actually one of the most selfless things you can do let's talk about what you call unracking at 07 tier 1 operator former tier 1 operators of the lingo so that i'm guessing is that unracking the weight that's when the workout starts phone is off phone's on because we run an app on it okay we have vernon griffin but you're not looking at text messages no and you're not shooting selfies of your calves and biceps right i point that out in semi jest because i always joke that the first rep of every set now seems to be guys in the gym taking pictures of themselves the last rep of every set seems to be guys taking pictures of themselves so 07 so what's that workout look like you're doing it five days a week i know it's going to be different for different people but you have this program that i really want to explore with you today about how to measure progress and set standards and meet new standards higher standards what does that workout look like for you so i linked up with vernon right when i was getting when i was getting i was getting medically retired around 2019 i came back from a gnarly shoulder injury i blew it i had a dislocation it came through my armpit shredded out everything and i went from about 215 to about 180 pounds got stuck in a rehab clinic in uh in bethesda maryland for 31 days inpatient and i came out like death warmed over worst i've ever been in my life worst my mental health has ever been i did not want to play the game anymore and navy seal foundation hooked you up with this uh physical rehabilitation program in virginia beach ran by a former seal and vernon was the lead strength conditioning coach and he was my coach and we walked in we did full body assessments and what's interesting about him is he took all your limitations and developed concepts and movements to establish confidence in that area so when i came back you know day one he's like okay let's try to hang from the bar i looked right at him no he's like what no i'm not hanging from that bar i'm done like i've done i've done more pull-ups than most people on the planet my pull-up days are done man like i'm not doing it again he goes you gotta trust me it's not gonna happen on day one slowly but surely i mean i mean he's at the point where he's holding my knees i can't even extend my arm overhead like i'm that's humbling for a guy that for a guy when it was a tier one operator that's humbling i was so bound up by a fear that it was gonna come because that was my first shoulder surgery and if you've never had one shoulder surgery is the worst rehab i've ever had and i've had a lot of them the shoulder rehab was brutal and i didn't want it to pop and i'd extend and i couldn't do it i couldn't do it he's like you just gotta trust me man like doctor cleared you the anchors have set everything is there but you cannot go through the rest of your life like this he's like you're not even 40 he's like do you want to go another 40 years without doing a pull-up you're gonna have to trust me he'd pick me up by the legs i'd put my arm on there and he'd slowly but surely start to extend me down until we got full range of motion and we did that for days and weeks then we went to a band then we took the band off i just want you to hang now we're gonna focus on going back up and we built back to i mean i can do sets of 25 pull-ups now you're you're pulling your weight which is what right now you're i'm like 215 you're 6'1", 215 yep and you're doing sets of 20 yeah 20-25 non-kip pull-up yep and it's all bouncing back from him but the whole program we did you know because i'm i'm not a unicorn by any means but i've had all the injuries that everybody else has had i've had double hip surgery i've had double shoulder surgery i've had my abdomen blown through a couple times i mean i've had them all i've had thumbs i've had a rebuilt blown through blown through i mean just everything when i got electrocuted it blew out everything and we had to rebuild that entire thing so all the guys that are in this process if you're a SWAT team a fireman on a SEAL team anybody in between we've all got injuries that become limitations and we just avoid them you can't avoid them forever and this program is designed to get you back in shape and it grows with you as you go so every single week you're chasing numbers some week before and pushing on the days you don't have it on the days you wake up and you're bound up just lacking motivation we're going with 100% of what we have to offer that might be 75% i'm giving 100% of the 75 i have today but monday's a pull day from the floor usually trap bar deadlifts and we do those because of all the injuries i've got a really long torso it puts my back in a weird precarious situation so we do trap bar deadlifts we do those a lot of pull-up work a lot of grip work a lot of core stability stuff tuesday's a press day heavy upper body bench incline that kind of stuff wednesday's an upper body lower body disassociation so we get the upper body moving in one direction the lower body moving in the other a lot of course example of that we'll do a lot of bandit work we'll drop down to a knee like almost in a shooting position and we'll do cross body pulls with bands resistance training but just you know rotational stuff and sort of anti-rotation stuff on that day we'll do plyo stuff box jumps height distance and broad jump that kind of stuff farmers carry walks all the stuff just trying to connect all the dots thursday is the most brutal leg day you've ever had and it's amazing we've got a belt squat machine so anybody who walks in regardless of the injuries limitations you have we have equipment to accommodate that and when you say brutal leg day it's just i have a belt squat i love that thing i love throwing a lot of weight on that thing it's nice it doesn't load the spine up but um yeah it's a uh i like to think it's brutal can you describe are you talking about like an hour and a half two hours of of usually from seven to nine low weight um high weight pretty high repetitions you know so high weight high repetitions trying to yeah always trying to push but a lot of single leg movements bulgarian split squats i mean a lot of lunges a lot of lunges with heavy weight i mean 70 pounds in each hand for me that's a lot of weight so not calf raises leg curls no but on days some days we'll do a feel-good day like some days we'll come in he'll take a pulse of the whole room and he'll go we're all gonna hit the same muscle groups we're just gonna do it in a more traditional so we're gonna do hamstring curls leg extensions we're gonna do belt squats we're gonna do pulsing lunges really just pump the blood flow and just chase a really good pump everybody loves doing that and friday's a really it's a feel-good day it's an arm day we'll do some shoulders some accessory work you know and then we add in sprints in between probably two to three days a week you know 200 meter repeats 300 meter repeats done where in the workout in between sets at the end at the end we always save it at the end and we always did that with the military too it always ends with a run and i've tried every combination doing sprints you know pre and post and it really just zaps a workout for me yeah Pavel Setsulin you know the Pavel Setsulin sat in that chair right where you're at now and said you know if your goal is hypertrophy and you're gonna come in do a pumping workout it doesn't really matter if you do cardio first or last but if you're gonna if you're serious about strength and performance and form do your cardio after if at all you know because a lot of times those kettlebell workouts or some of these leg workouts they're not quote unquote cardio but they definitely get heart rate up in a serious way so on Wednesday if we're doing a sprint workout it might be 10 by 40 50 meter sprints right nothing crazy we'll do that at the very beginning get the fast switch muscle fibers going and then we'll do whatever the normal Wednesday workout is and then we go to the flat range every Wednesday so we train we bring him out too so all the stance the grip the presentation everything we talk about in the tactical setting he's there with us so when I talk about flexing your right glute to add stability to a stable shooting platform he's there driving home this is why it's important think big toe down drive your heel down so I mean he's as much of a coach as I am on the flat range but he can connect the dots so well and that's why I love him he's not gonna let you take that limitation and then live it forever you don't want to be like that and it doesn't help he's bigger stronger faster than everybody else so you've always got a good lifting buddy to kind of chase he always pushes you but he's so good at navigating the human terrain because some days I'll walk in and whatever's happened over the week he'll see me in the morning he'll look at me like how are we holding up I'm like 100% yeah yeah come over here what's going on I'll talk to him he's like we'll shake it all out we've got two hours here just us nothing else matters let's just focus on this I find myself pacing a lot so in between sets I'll block out everything else I'm not thinking about social I'm not thinking about my wife I'm not thinking about the business I'm thinking about putting myself in the best mental spot to pull that off the floor at 100% with no distractions and I think that's why I like it so much because it allows me to isolate my thoughts nothing else matters you don't matter this doesn't matter just that movement let me get through that the best of my ability set it down re-cock walk around get ready for the next one here we go 8 reps I'm going to put so much intent behind this pull that if I get 8 or 12 it doesn't matter every single one is all out and you know Dorian Yates talks about it intensity is what really drives and I really try to drive intent behind everything I do now and yeah he's a huge man I can't I can't tell you how many times he's brought me back I mean the worst injuries you can imagine and he's there every single time and I think that's why so many people get on with it they see the injuries you've gone through and it's like well you can still perform at a high level only because I'm I don't want to say I'm even ego driven I've been so ingrained into sitting with the routine it doesn't matter what injuries I've had I mean I come out and we've got pictures of me in there double slings like when I got electrocuted double slings I can't even I can't even tie my shoes he's tying my shoes like he's putting the belt squat on me I'm squatting down he's clipping it in he's unracking it the entire thing he's my guy tell us his first and last name Vernon Griffith and you met him when you were injured right and he's a former operator as well he's not so his business partner was a former operator he was actually in the air force and transitioned out got a strength conditioning all his quals and he's got such an interesting look to mobility impact and the high level athletes that come through him and that's really what it is he gets big guys tricked into doing mobility and liking it because nobody wants to do mobility it's not a sexy thing to do I mean we get first round draft picks that are pouring through that gym all week long and you see him because it's the truth like we're trying to keep you at a super high level as long as humanly possible the average guy plays in the NFL three years but I'm trying to keep you in there for 12 how are we going to do it you have to maintain that vessel at a super high level because all these young kids are trying to knock you off the team and then the reality of the sport is trying to knock you off the team as well so we got to keep you really really mobile and healthy and I've never seen anybody that can connect thoughts better than that guy he's an absolute lifesaver we've known for a long time that there are things that we can do to improve our sleep and that includes things that we can take things like magnesium threonate theanine chamomile extract and glycine along with lesser known things like saffron and valerian root these are all clinically supported ingredients that can help you fall asleep stay asleep and wake up feeling more refreshed I'm excited to share that our long time sponsor AG1 just created a new product called AGZ a nightly drink designed to help you get better sleep and have you wake up feeling super refreshed over the past few years I've worked with the team at AG1 to help create this new AGZ formula it has the best sleep supporting compounds in exactly the right ratios in one easy to drink mix this removes all the complexity of trying to forge the vast landscape of supplements focused on sleep and figuring out the right dosages and which ones to take for you AGZ is to my knowledge the most comprehensive sleep supplement on the market I take it 30 to 60 minutes before sleep it's delicious by the way and it dramatically increases both the quality and the depth of my sleep I know that both from my subjective experience of my sleep and because I track my sleep I'm excited for everyone to try this new AGZ formulation and to enjoy the benefits of better sleep AGZ is available in chocolate chocolate mint and mixed berry flavors and as I mentioned before they're all extremely delicious my favorite of the three has to be I think chocolate mint but I really like them all if you'd like to try AGZ go to drinkagz.com slash Huberman to get a special offer again that's drinkagz.com slash Huberman today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs Eight Sleep has just launched their latest model the Pod 5 and the Pod 5 has several new important features one of these new features is called Autopilot Autopilot is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages it also elevates your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep the bass on the Pod 5 also has an integrated speaker that syncs to the Eight Sleep app and can play audio to support relaxation and recovery the audio catalog includes several NSDR non-sleep deep rest scripts that I worked on with Eight Sleep to record if you're not familiar NSDR involves listening to an audio script that walks you through a deep body relaxation combined with some very simple breathing exercises it's an extremely powerful tool that anyone can benefit from the first time and every time if you'd like to try Eight Sleep go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5 Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide including Mexico and the UAE again that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 The way you describe him and your interactions with him it almost takes on a sort of mythical like quality I mean like we could be talking about a movie but this is real and we'll talk about just how real it is some very real things have happened to you by virtue of the high risk high consequence career that you undertook but you know when you hear about this person who's able to bring back a high performer and then get him to exceed his previous notions of what he could do and under conditions of duress and hopelessness it's you know this is real life though this is not this isn't Star Wars this is real life and so without ever having met him you know I can feel the the respect and the admiration and the gratitude you have for him and I'm I'm sure everyone else can too so this is the stuff of mythology but it's real so here's what I know about you you live in Virginia Beach at one point you were interested in skateboarding and partook in skateboarding at some point you decided to become a Navy SEAL at some point you got electrocuted fill in the blanks for us yeah man I was born in San Diego California my dad was a SEAL my mom was in the Navy so when my dad graduated my mom was nine months pregnant with me so his whole first four years at you know the West Coast SEAL teams I was one of the only kids there so kind of grew up in the culture you know really ingrained into it my first bottle on Coronado yep it's my first bottle I'm wearing a SEAL team one onesie you literally were raised on Coronado yeah so I did that we moved to the East Coast you got transitioned over to the East Coast I grew up the rest of my time there fell in love with skateboarding that's all I wanted to do I wanted to go pro got into a fight with the old man around 15 years old something like that and he signed me up for summer school to graduate early so I graduated at 17 hit delayed entry program joined an AV a month later was that a contentious interaction I mean oh yeah I mean skateboarding was clearly not the right career for you I mean I'm sure you would have done exceedingly well there but having grown up a bit in that culture and also knowing a bit about the culture you eventually decided on you know it's hard to say which one is you know the better career choice one is definitely more life threatening which is that in many ways but you just said okay like you're a Navy SEAL you want me to be a Navy SEAL so I'm gonna I'm gonna hang it up it was always in the back of your mind like that was always what you thought you were gonna do but at 15 years old in your mind you can do them both you're like oh I can be a professional skateboarder and then I can be a Navy SEAL later you don't realize what it actually takes to do it even though you grow up in the culture so when that happened you know the towers had just fell I was 17 years old delayed entry program straight out to Coronado got through SEAL training came back to the east coast where I've been essentially my whole life and yeah joined the Navy in 2002 and I got medically retired in 2019 right around 17 years I think it was 16 years and like 10 months something like that can I ask you about Buds a lot of people have heard of Buds and they understand that it has a hell week with minimal if any sleep you know maybe an hour or two tops but probably not even that how hard was Buds relative to other things that you did in the teams you know I've heard people say it was the hardest thing they ever did I've heard some people say it was extremely hard but not nearly as difficult as like some aspect of like guys who hate the jungle and humidity are like that was worse and you never know if people are joking around I mean did you learn a lot in Buds about yourself if you can make it through Buds you can do anything it is such a brutal program and I just a hell week just secured and I saw a bunch of the guys took them out the dinner the other night and I was explaining to a group of civilians that were out there with them like their parents like you guys all see it every single person does that pipeline it's not just Buds it's you know the Q course for Green Berets it's RIP for the Rangers MARSOC selection every single kid that's doing that selection program is the biggest deal in his hometown the biggest thing in his high school everybody knows he's going and the amount of external pressure that's riding on that kid unless you've done it you have no idea you just don't it's like playing D1 college ball everyone in your family is expecting you to be a pro they're expecting you to be in the NFL and if you don't get drafted it's like oh my god it's so much pressure on you and it's the same way and it's self-selection because people quit they're not in general they're not asked to leave although that can't happen so if somebody doesn't make it through Buds it means they quit yep pretty much and it's a lot of pressure right the GWAT just kicking off all the instructors were coming back from Afghanistan and they were larger than life you really look up to them and I was just very fortunate that I grew up in the culture and I knew a lot of the guys going in so I knew what the end state was most of these kids are from Biloxi, Mississippi you've never even seen a Navy SEAL in real life until you showed up here I grew up with one all my family friends were SEALs we didn't have a single civilian friend growing up the only thing I've been around were commandos so I felt really natural around that environment but I knew it was going to suck I just knew it was did your dad have you running with him and doing push-ups and things like that at home or was it mow the lawn and then go skateboarding you know mow the lawn go skateboarding and then as we transitioned we got closer it was turn it on download the Stu Smith guide to Navy SEAL prep and did that like everybody else did it's a phenomenal program for anybody who's trying to go but I was I was so young I was so immature didn't have a cell phone didn't have a car I lived on the barracks and the only thing you had to do was get through the program but what I will say is the 17 year old me that showed up in 2002 if I would try to be a Navy SEAL in 2025 they wouldn't even take me my performance scores like you have to pass a screen test push-ups pull-ups run swim the whole thing your scores now have to be so competitive they wouldn't even take me oh so the standards have changed standards are the same but the people going through the program are so better prepared they wouldn't even take you so if you're not if you're not 120 push-ups 120 they don't even look at you like for me I basically barely scratched through I was a strong swimmer but technique wasn't my thing and until you take the test you don't realize how hard it is and I got through it and I went out to Buds and I was successful but I was by no means a star athlete and you guys you know Coleman Ruiz Naval Academy they are freaks they're phenoms they're professional athletes and there you are 6'1", 145 pounds pot smoking skateboarder we are not on the same level but mentally you couldn't mess with me I didn't care like we're getting surf tortured and you'd watch these guys that would just see studs get up and quit and you're like it's not gonna stop and I feel like I always had the inside scoop like if you think this is gonna end it's not like my dad did a lot of diving I was like I've seen the conditions they dive in breaking through the ice like it is only gonna get worse dude if this phases you this is not the program for you and I was right if that phases you the SEAL team is gonna chew you alive so not everybody should make it through that program I was just fortunate enough that just good enough to get by and you know maturity came later but BUDS was definitely not the hardest thing I've ever had to do at the time it was and when you get through and you see all the you start with 200 and something people you graduate less than 20 those were 200 of the most physically capable people of that year in the United States Navy and they couldn't make it did any of the people that not made it through as well as made it through surprise you for not making it through or making it through not making it through for sure I mean all the guys that they you've been around the Captain Americas Navy SEALs have a certain look they have a certain mystique a certain or and they do in training too it's not like you just develop that you've had it your whole life and there were definitely guys you look at that look like Dolph Lundgren from Rocky you look at him you're like oh that dude is definitely going to make it he's gone in 20 minutes you're like how?

he passed everything he didn't like that cold water okay and then you see another guy who he was worse shape than me barely squeaked by everything and he is the hardest dude you've ever met in your life nothing phases him every run every swim just miserable he doesn't care he he's kind of it sounds like you have to not mind being miserable you have to get used to it you have to embrace it it's going to suck it's supposed to and you just got to tell yourself it's worth the price of admission it's going to be miserable you bought the ticket you're going to get the whole show and it's totally worth it but you got to be there at the end you mentioned Coleman Ruiz who's been a guest on this podcast is a good friend of mine and yours as well and you worked with him and I'm probably going to get this a little bit wrong but I think once he said because I think he was an instructor at Bud's also for a short while I think he was and he said you know when you look at the guys that make it through Bud's nine times out of ten they've had one at least one of the following three things either spent some serious time in detention in high school played a varsity sport in high school divorced parents and you know that raises a whole bunch of other questions about you know friction and and kind of for lack of a better way to put it like some internal sense of like F you I'm going to push through this anyway or just F you to something so when you're going so let's assume that Coleman having given the fact that he's not a scientist he's not he was a former operator so he knows do you think that there were there were moments or many moments where it was you against them like you and your teammates because you're you know you're on boat crew or whatever with your teammates you're working as a team and learning how to do that it's not just about you it's about the group and it's about you and it's about the expectation but how many different bins of motivation do you do you have to access to get through BUDS is it and is F you to the instructors or whoever to the cold water is that part is that a critical bin it is and it isn't because sometimes you get caught up in the moment you don't even think about it you just want to finish that evolution so when you're doing a four mile timed run that was one of the big things you have to do a four mile timed run it's got to be I think a seven minute mile or less and nowhere in there does it say the condition of the beach matters so if it's high tide low tide you have to run it on the berm and soft sand the time standard is the time standard and talk to anybody at any point in that training you are going to hit a wall where you think your heart's going to stop like if I take one more step I'll die right here because your heart rate's so high and you're like I can't do it and at some point you just don't care you're like I'd rather fall stone cold dead in front of all of them and die right here than I would failing or quitting yeah at least you don't have to go home head hanging and shame exactly you just push anyway sometimes you'll get it you'll be getting surf tortured by the instructors and just laying down that 60 degree water just miserable and I tell this story quite a bit we had dudes getting up and leaving mass exodus just and the biggest strongest dudes it's broad daylight 70 degrees on Coronado Island the most beautiful day you've ever seen we're laying there just jackhammering and you look over and all the west coast SEAL teams are up to your right and you can see SEAL team 1 out there doing log PT feel like they're morning PT and you can look it down to the left and you can see the Hotel Del and this little what I call a 7 year old with a big pink flamingo jumping in the water having the best time of their life and I'm like it's all about your perspective be a palace or a prison however you want to see it right now that they're still doing it that kid time of their life and we're in the exact same water just change your mindset this is all part of the process and if you want to wear that shiny gold thing on your chest you must do this just do it and I remember that was one of the things like you're not going to break me no matter what you say I'll die right here in this water I don't care and that kind of that mindset has really been beneficial throughout the entire process because there's parts of there's parts of buds and parts of being in special operations where you think it's going to kill you and then a certain point you just don't care if it kills me it kills me I don't care and you get through it like you know I'm so terrified of heights like I can't jump out of the back of this airplane you watch 15 guys go in front of you and you get right to the ramp and you go I don't care and you just for whatever reason they just jump like what made you jump like everybody else did it I didn't want to be the guy who said no sometimes that that performance anxiety that pressure to perform on demand it gets you through the hump and it shows you there is nothing if it can be done by a human being I can do it and it just it rings true it's like how far can you run as far as I have to well how fast can you run as fast as I can like if you can run that I can run it if you can get up and over that mountain I can do it too how are you going to do it one step at a time brother here we go and it it makes you so mentally resilient and I think that's the that's really the defining factor is you can make them believe in their mind they can get through anything now collectively as a group now you stack 25 of those true believers together you can do anything and I've seen some dudes do some Herculean feats and they do it just because they're too afraid to say no can you do that yep you sure if it can be done I'll do it I've seen it time and time again but yeah I mean everybody hits those moments and buds where it's just I cannot believe I'm doing this right now but it's magic once you get through it it's awesome I mean I I think setting a threshold for if it kills me it kills me is in many contexts is unhealthy but in that context is yeah healthy adaptive it's called adaptive I'm not going to decide what's healthy or unhealthy I'm sure some people are listening to this and they're thinking oh god like this is how this is how guys get themselves killed and indeed outside of the context of buds that's yeah sometimes guys do dumb stuff I always say there's something about having a Y chromosome that through you know I wasn't around tens of thousands of years ago but I'm guessing the first homo sapien male who picked up a rock the first thing he did hit himself in the head with it and was like ouch then he hit the guy next to him with it and he go ouch and then they decide to take it and throw it against a wall and see what happens and on and on and here we are you know and obviously you know those with two X chromosomes took a different path and we need the collaboration in order to survive as a species obviously but there's something about that let's just see what happens if and if it kills me it kills me that actually is a core feature of human evolution that's brought us to some incredible positive places so clearly buds is one such micro environment so you make it through and then I realize there are a lot of other iterations there's jump school and there's a bunch of other things and you often you start oping right away yeah I get stationed at SEAL Team 10 in Virginia Beach Virginia and we deploy in 2005 the Iraq war had just kicked off so we I check in and it was early 04 and we deployed yeah we deployed probably 7 months later and sent out Iraq was phenomenal everything you ever wanted it to be scary like you don't know anything the IEDs were really bad and just being a really young kid I mean I was stormtrooping out Iraq and 19 years old I mean you forget how young you are at 19 so you're 19 you're kicking doors down driving in Humvees blowing stuff up yeah and seeing friends get blown up if you talk to anybody who's in Iraq the chances of you not hitting an IED were so rare and we never hit one they'd hit the convoy in front of us the one behind us we'd get delayed at the gate for two minutes we'd turn and boom they'd go off in front of you they're just not hitting they're hitting everybody else but you and you know you would tell yourself things like oh the reason they're not doing it is because we look so aggressive because we have flames and death skulls on the Humvees it's not that man it's just it's not your time you'd be the best trained dude in the world and that IED hits you the lights are over and on that deployment we lost all the guys in Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan that was the other half of our SEAL team that was an idea that was the that was the helicopter that the the now I don't know whether I'd call it famous or infamous forgive me I'm gonna step in it one way or the other Lone Survivor amazing book I should say I really I really enjoyed the book the movie does I think a pretty good job of extracting some of the key moments from the book but more than a movie or a book it's a true story and that's the the four guys that got the three of them got killed on the ground and then one helicopter blown up attempting to come save them to save the the one guy save the one guy yeah Marcus and that was so hard to wrap your head around as a 19 year old so you gotta think you know in my mind I'd essentially been in the community for 19 years up at that point and during my dad's time it was peace time the whole time so you weren't going to funerals all day long like Navy SEALs getting killed was it was like folklore it's like oh it's a bad training a bad parachute accident you know we had Neil Roberts got killed in the early G-Watt in Afghanistan Roberts Ridge you ever heard of that story that's a gnarly one Russell Benske got the Medal of Honor John Chapman the Air Force guy got the Medal of Honor gnarly firefight but outside of that it wasn't happening very often and then when all those guys got killed in one shot it was like a slap of reality they were the best dudes you've ever seen like they were the highest like unbelievably trained unbelievable experience and they're gone in an instant no goodbye no fanfare no you know holding him like tell my mother it's nothing like Hollywood they're gone and that was kept under wraps for a long time before the book and the movie I mean people really didn't know there wasn't a lot of discussion about SEALs no it wasn't in popular culture when the book came out it started to gain steam and people started to read more about it but for being inside the SEAL teams that was your own private 9-11 every single SEAL cried in an instant throwing up I mean just you cannot believe that just happened and then for everybody else who's still fighting the war you have to try to explain to your wife and your family why that's not going to happen to you and it's a lie it's not like they did anything wrong that's just the way it is sometimes it just happens you were married at this point I wasn't single thank God intentionally intentionally yeah I try to wait as long as humanly possible to try to do that good advice but yeah it's hard it's hard to try to it's hard to do that job at full time and trying to be a full time boyfriend that turns into a fiance that turns into a husband turns into a father it's very hard unless you're able to compartmentalize really really well and fortunately for us that's the thing you're the best at is I can wall it off so fast and never think about you again now when you transition out of the military that's not really a superpower anymore but in a moment it served you so as more and more guys are getting killed did you find that getting into action each day the same way that you describe civilian life now and getting into action each day being really adaptive did you find that that was key to being able to not go down mental traps and at the same time I acknowledge that you must have also just been really busy there's stuff coming at you all the time like just because I mean it sounds cold but just because guys get killed doesn't mean that the opping stops in fact it probably picks up even more you go out the next night you have to you gotta keep going you gotta get back on the horse keep going the last thing that we wanted is those guys get killed let's pull them all back let's take you know six months to you know regroup no no no no we gotta go out right now same thing with the parachute axe and I told you about the the electric I gotta do it right away if I don't get back on the horse I'll just build up this this dread and I'll lose my confidence in the whole process like we have to go and NSW did everybody did full gas full steam ahead let's go and just kept going we did another one in 2007 if you've seen the stuff with Jason Redman I talked about my buddy Matty getting shot up that 2007 deployment was dicey but it's the same thing like two of your close friends yeah and you know pretty mangled crazy mangled and you know you start to find out really really fast it doesn't matter how much you train if your number's called you're getting pulled and it's hard to justify because now you have a girlfriend you have all this stuff and people are dying and you have to reassure them why it's not gonna happen to you and you get really good at compartmentalization like I can't control that the only thing I can't control is this I'm shooting as much as I can I'm doing as much CQB as I can I'm jumping as much as I can I'm around the boys building team camaraderie as much as humanly possible because I can't control anything else control the things you can't control building confidence but reality when it slaps it slaps hard and definitely slapped us as the public understanding of what the seals even were and are started to grow and change in the movies the lone survivor movie and I should think again I think they did a good job with the movie I know the book and the movie were approved by the military so there was a lot of kind of vetting of the material but I think it hit powerfully at the time I was living in San Diego so you know the movie theaters were packed but that was true everywhere I mean it made a big impact but then with like the Bin Laden thing you know being you know televising the White House watching and you know I feel like the whole world came to understand that there were these guys called Navy Seals and they're doing this really dangerous stuff and taking out bad guys was there anything that changed about the job just knowing that it wasn't as vaulted as it once was I mean what you're doing is vaulted on a day-to-day basis but you know just this idea like this is in movies and there it is on the cover CNN there's Obama and you know Secretary of Defense watching the op you know and people then there's a movie made about it very quickly and it was I mean it was all happening and it was weird in real time and on the movies and it just for a civilian it was a little bit of a mind bend I can't even imagine what it was like if that's your job and so much of being able to perform the job well relies on people not knowing what you're doing and how you do it what was that like?

Terrible terrible I mean the very next day you couldn't drive on the compound every news channel across America was sitting outside of that thing and not only taking photos everybody comes in they know what you look like they're looking for guys with long hair beards covered in tattoos driving jacked up pickup trucks that's what they're looking for and now you can't go anywhere now they're going out in town to all the bars and restaurants you go to and they're pulling you aside asking you it's like it's very uncomfortable they'll see wives in there with a little trident stick on the back of their car they'll nail her in a Whole Foods parking lot your husband nobody's ever done this before it's like mom's the word everybody kind of just collapsed on ourselves and really really tried to hush this thing down but it made the job very very difficult it felt like you were just under a microscope the entire time and then when extortion happened then everybody started that it was an inside job you know they come on man I know it's probably not something you want to get into but maybe just explain for people what extortion 17 was and why that was so additionally impactful after what happened with Operation Red Wings yeah I mean you know we had Operation Red Wings that happened June 28 2005 you had a bunch of really historic things that led up after that you had the rescue of Captain Phillips in 2009 that was a huge milestone win like everybody's cool yeah yeah yeah and they made a movie they made a movie and it's great and like but nobody in the teams is on social media they're not on I didn't watch a YouTube video my entire time in the SEAL teams like what do I watch a YouTube video for like nobody knew how bad it was spinning outside of your control and nobody Bin Laden happens and then August 6th 2011 we lose an entire troop of guys in Afghanistan Hilo gets shot down kills them all in an instant killed 31 total people and it was like we were reliving June 28th again but now it's double as bad and now you truly have the best that have ever suited up if you look at the experience level they have most of those guys were pre-9-11 guys 10-12 combat rotations gone you'll never replace it never you've never filled that void since that moment and then you have all these people just hateful rhetorically always an inside job and you know they knew too much they knew they were on the Bin Laden raid so we killed them do you know how hard that is living in Virginia Beach doing that job seeing those wives at Whole Foods wearing a memorial t-shirt knowing you're saying that do you know what that does to a family you know what that does to little kids who wake up and they read the comment section mom was dad killed yeah was he killed by the government that's what they read because that's what you're saying and it's not the truth it's just not that was an op that went wrong it's a dangerous job and when you fly in those big gigantic black helicopters and they're slow to land you can shoot them and that's what happened and it's as simple as that it's a dangerous job like what are you gonna do but it is very hard to live in Virginia Beach that is so small everywhere you go it's around you I mean you're sipping through black t-shirts all day long which memorial shirt are you gonna wear it just is and now you get there now people are starting to erode that from you and it really starts to lose your confidence so for me now I'm married I'm in the organization we had to fill we had to fill a lot of those guys from other squadrons and one of my best friends had to go over and unfortunately he got killed in December 8, 2012 on a hostage rescue Ed Byers got the Medal of Honor for that operation my buddy got the Navy Cross and you know we went to Bud's together his name was Nick Check one of the greatest most pure operators you have ever met came from Pennsylvania big wrestler always in a gym always training he represented what the essence of being a Navy SEAL was and everyone knew it when he died a piece of me died that I've never gotten back I'm trying not to cry the hardest thing I've ever had to do was look at my wife and tell her that it wasn't gonna happen to me after he died because he was the true north so when she looks at me and she goes well the reason you're away from us the reason you spend 300 days on the road is because you're perfecting this craft because you say it buys down the risk what about that and you can't justify it you just look at it and you're like I just hope it's not my time I'm just gonna try to exhaust all my resources right now to put myself in the best position surrounded by the best people to buy down as much risk as humanly possible if my number's called it's called what do you want me to do and that's where the compartmentalization really took hold you have to be able to leave Virginia Beach your wife your two kids and completely block them out like I can't run through that door with bullets coming out of it thinking about my wife and kids and how I'm gonna orphan them you can't I don't have pictures in my room I'm not trying to FaceTime all the time I'm trying to separate myself out so I can just do this job and it makes you it makes you really distant it makes you not be the person you want to be or the person you used to be because you can't you've been the person you need to be in order to eventually be able to go back and become the person you want to be is what it sounds like to me and you know I say to the guys now and it'll sound messed up so forgive me but I never chased a guy who had a perfect family there was never a Navy SEAL I ever wanted to emulate who had the picture perfect family ever they were all either on their second marriage bad relationship with their kids because they were so devout at work and you looked at him like that's a master class like it's white it's like watching Tiger Woods drag around his golf bag that's the best it's ever been ever and he has no 50-50 there is no dial for that man he is living this at 100% and the moment he retires I really hope he takes all that energy all that focus and becomes a better husband and father but you can't do it both ways my mind has come to change now but I've never seen it and I most certainly had no balance I wasn't even trying to find balance I was trying to wall them off as much as humanly possible to focus on the task at hand because any distraction was dangerous and it's hard to do but it was necessary at the time I don't know any high performers especially ultra high performers and especially ultra high performers in high risk high consequence careers that don't have some unresolved dark aspect of themselves of their life or something that you mentioned Tiger it's public knowledge he had issues outside of his golf game and it sounds like he's resolved I think he got married again recently and I think everyone should wish him the best and them the best especially in the United States we hold people up and we expect perfection from our so called heroes historically as well as ones that are alive and perfection doesn't exist because so much of what's required from high performance is total focus total compartmentalization and that being a human being is a lot more complicated than that it's something I think to keep in mind I also just want to just briefly double click on this this thing about comments you know I'm not gonna tell people stop saying mean stuff about me if they want to or mean stuff about somebody they're gonna do it anyway it's not the issue but when it comes leads to kids reading about their dead parents their dead dads in this case and last week we had a you know public assassination there's a dead dad and people making up theories and coming up with ideas that they somehow know things that other people don't know and sometimes these people have a professional background in politics or in the military or in law enforcement and it adds additional weight to these theories but the repercussions on the kids and family and the legacy is it's really bad it's really bad it's a shame there isn't a thicker filter I'm all for free speech 100% for free speech but there's a lot of damage done with those thumb clicks that I don't think people can really comprehend so I'm glad you pointed that out I mean yeah just imagine like you're a 14 year old kid and you've grown up worshipping your father and he gets killed in Afghanistan and you see a post about him you start to read down like he was killed by his government by this and this mom mom it raises doubt and then that little seed of doubt is going to be with him forever it's like it takes the entire collective like listen to me they've never even met a Navy SEAL dude that's some kid in the middle of nowhere who's typing in his mother's basement who's just writing some hateful stuff it's not real it's hard to block it out when there's 500 of them or guys that were in the military that didn't make it through selection they're pissed or have some resentment for some guy that was jacked in high school who said something and they didn't get the date or you know I mean resent is like the ego and resent are a bitter combination it lasts you know can last a lifetime negative comments many times are irrelevant but in this context have a potential lasting very corrosive aspect I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Function last year I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health this snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health hormone health immune functioning nutrient levels and much more they've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics and tests for PFAS or forever chemicals Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your 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it felt normal did you feel like you had to outdo them and I would ask that of anyone military or not there's this notion well let me just briefly back up a friend recently we were talking about kids and family building family and and and he said you don't want a son you got daughters he has all daughters and I go no you know I think I'd like you know want to be a true but who cares I'd have daughters I'd have sons you know I don't care and he said no because if you have a son he's gonna he's gonna try and be better than you and then you're gonna be in conflict and I was thinking I almost said no and then I was like my dad's a scientist and so I was like there's a point in your life where you go can I fill those shoes can I exceed those shoes it's natural human son to father behavior I think and so was there ever a moment where you're like I gotta I gotta exceed or or just or was it irrelevant I think it was irrelevant but just because the timing you came in you know spent his entire time at peacetime I did nothing but combat the entire time a lot of deployments back and back back never took a shore duty station just by that amount of experience you already surpassed it but it doesn't need to be said why not leave guys one of your closest mentors and friends gets killed I mean the retirement plan I'm guessing is pretty good but it's not that awesome that's a plug for the military to increase the retirement salaries and you get some medical care right you know some things come to your family for staying in 20 years I think it is but did the thought ever cross your mind like hey guys are dropping off and you're right in the center of it maybe leave not for a moment I should have known that wasn't gonna be the answer at that time it's so different because a lot of people think about special operations in the global Ontario is the marines pushing through Fallujah broad daylight just getting smashed those are the bravest dudes that served during the GWAT like the marines there is nothing more impressive than a 19 year old marine in the things they'll do like they just are like they're heroes of mine my experience in a GWAT was very different it's always at night it's always you know select targets it's not like hey you and your team are gonna go raid this village no we're going for a very very specific person and then when you look at it Hemingway said it best once you've hunted our men long enough and liked it you'll never care for anything else thereafter there is nothing like hunting a human being who's hunting you nothing and you are so afraid you're gonna miss it so that's why you hide injuries you don't get surgery you do everything you can to put yourself in a position to be on the op to not miss the deployment and I think that's what it is in the essence is you know you have all the intel folks and all the technology that are giving you this one thing and you just stare at them I know everything about you where you live your secondary house everybody you talk to you're right handed left handed how many windows how many doors the inward opening outward opening these are storm doors what's the window those made I know everything about you and then we know exactly when we're going to go get you we know you're bad we know everything you've done I know everything you've said on that phone for the last six months I know everything there is to know about you and we are coming to get you and when you're successful it becomes addictive and you just keep chasing that feeling like I am pulling these people off the earth and it makes a difference I'm not just not carpet bombing anything like that one singular dude has done all of this we have to remove him let's go and it makes you feel like you're important it makes you feel like people actually need you and you chase it for as long as possible my buddy Jimmy Hatch wrote a book called chasing a dragon and that's what it's like you chase him long enough you'll find him and you don't want to jump off that train you're so afraid in the teams in special operations the military does a really good job of painting a narrative that if you leave this your life is over there's nothing that's going to surpass us the SEAL teams are the only thing you know how to do and it's the only thing you'll ever feel at home and it's the truth you get guys to get out and they go work at Goldman Sachs and they do this and they do that if you really get a couple beers and you sit down they're miserable they miss it even all the stuff you didn't like the things you hated about the military the people you hated working for at the end of the you don't remember any of that you only remember the good times and because you had you know the entire time at war the whole aspect the whole career was just amazing you know standing on the shoulders of giants I've got to work with people that are the greatest thing you'll never get to see like there's 12 people on the planet that were there that saw that thing and we won't even address it because it's not cool if you address it I cannot believe you just pulled that off that's the most impressive thing I've ever seen in my life and you don't even you don't even talk about it like the regular people never get to see the level of detail that goes into doing that job they see they see it on a flat range shoot or whatever and they're like oh I can do that but you can't jump out of 35,000 feet at night into a place you've never seen and been to it but you can't do that like you know how hard it is to put yourself in a position to do that operation they have no idea and they're shooting back at you yeah there's that there's that piece the targets on a flat range don't shoot back yeah this is a two way range this isn't aerosol it's not call of duty like those are real people that dude has five kids and he's going through that threshold regardless what's coming out of him without a second thought it's amazing to see and I said it to a group of guys the other day you know when the tower fell I've never felt more patriotic in my life in those moments you never think about the flag you never think about the American people you never think about that you think you do it for the country you really do it and you stay doing it for the culture the culture of the SEAL teams was worth every ounce you had to pay for it and it's every other group will tell you the exact same thing like the culture is what keeps you there you're so afraid to leave it because you know you're never going to find it anywhere else and that was the same way I mean when me and my LA were going through our worst moments I told her if you don't like the train jump I'm not stopping for you I'm not and that's why I was really concerned we first got together because she was married to Danny Deeds was on Operation Red Wings on the ground her dad was a SEAL I mean we were we're embedded in this you guys are both came up in it oh yeah man like we're embedded in this and you know I met her three years after Danny passed I didn't know Danny I didn't know her mutual friends we connected around 2008 nine and I told her when we first I fell in love with her instantly and it scared me because I was getting ready to screen and try to go with the tier one command and the the pace was so fast and I was so worried that she'd look at me one day and go I can't do this again and I wasn't gonna leave it for her and I told her that don't ever ask me to leave because I won't like if you don't want to do this I get it like we can be best friends we can do whatever but I'm not leaving this for you and that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do and for whatever reason she's a unicorn she has been the quintessential team wife above and beyond every deployment full steam ahead hot water heater blows up tree falls to the minivan she doesn't even tell me she just solves it she's amazing and I still blocked her out like I did everything else because I still thought that my love for her was a distraction and like those are the times I look back on and I regret but in the moment I don't think I'd change it I don't think I could I don't think I could do that job at the level that was required to do it and have that love hanging around my neck I couldn't do it it all ended up working out in the wash but it was it's hard man it's hard to sit there and just wait for your number to get called and just hope it doesn't I mean the best dudes in the world or getting killed and you can't just it's not lack of training it's not lack of funding it's not lack of experience it's not lack of commitment what is it it's a dangerous job man that's what it is it's a super dangerous job and people are trying to kill you all day long you just hope you're better than they are but some days it happens regardless and it's hard it's hard putting guys on the ground especially when you've grown up with them your whole life you definitely picked the right woman I lassoed a unicorn I did she unbelievable I have a good friend he because I know you've got daughters and and he said you want to marry a woman that were you to have daughters with her that you'd be very happy if they turned out like her which is one of the best pieces of advice that I didn't hear until fairly recently and the moment I heard it I was like wow that's really good they don't tell us that in high school no they don't but clearly you bullseye on that one so you're opping you're alive guys are dying you got a family and it sounds like you love it too you're loving the work which is so key right I don't because in moments of stress and you know I mean all the other stuff that's clearly important love a country flags and all that stuff it sounds like it's necessary but it's not sufficient in those moments the culture is really the glue then you start incurring some damage I mean so what do you see in your mind as kind of the first high impact event that's not someone else dying like that your body is starting to take a toll I had a lot of emotional stuff happen to me in that second deployment you know my idol Matty Roberts I've talked about him a couple times I really really hung on to that dude like he was my true north he was the guy and when he got shot up when you see it happen you know his arm shot off it flipped around his shoulder it looked like his arm was completely gone my fingers are inside his arm we're trying to solve this thing they're shooting at us from really really close proximity and I think it still has a record I have to ask Jay Redman but I think that was the closest call for fire mission the entire Iraq war like inside 15 meters I mean Cordy Mike my AC-130 gunship I mean it was on top of you a belt fed machine gun just chewing us up everybody shot up except for me and one other guy and we're all crowded behind this tractor tire just you felt like a victim and it at one point right when the initial contact happened I sprinted to a tree and got a piece of cover so there's me three guys that are all shot up and one other guy who's behind this tractor tire and I'm screaming at him I'm like hey I've got it out come over here and he screams out in Blackhawk down like nope come to me and you're looking back at it you can see all the muzzle flash and just the way it happened you had blue forces or friendlies that were in behind him so you couldn't shoot into this veg line because you knew there were friendlies that were back there so you're in this weird dance where I can't do anything like I felt helpless you know I'm getting rounds poured all over me and at a certain point you just go I'd rather run back into the front of this thing and get killed with all of them than be the lone survivor I don't want to walk through this I don't want to live with this survivor's guilt I'd rather just run back up and let's just catch it and be done with it and I ran right back into the center and dropped down on that tire and started working all the guys back and putting on tourniquets and quick clot and all the stuff when I came back from that I was mentally scarred for the rest of my life and I just never ever processed it I just blocked it off because it was so close I think because it was the first time I felt helpless like I was just waiting to die right like the guy that I looked up that I wanted to be like he was a physical representation of what I thought the essence of being a Navy SEAL was and he's dying in my arms and I can't shoot back I mean we're hunkered down and rounds are just skipping all over you and you're just if that JTAC wouldn't have called in a fire mission we'd all be dead I mean it's only a matter of time before he stands up and just realizes he can just walk us down I mean there's no elume night vision's all messed up at this point I mean everything that could have went wrong went wrong and now we're inside of 10 meters getting pounded by a belt fed machine gun you can't move and it was the first time in my life I truly felt helpless and everything worked out everybody ended up surviving it we got them in the helicopter and did all that I just think I never got an opportunity to ever talk about it and when I went back home you know you're taking a shower the showers in Iraq aren't the best as you can imagine and I'm standing here in ankle deep sludge water that's just filled with blood it's all in my mouth it's all over my hair I remember taking the shower and just seeing it all and not knowing if he lived or not and thinking do I want to be washing this off because they call me in 20 minutes and tell me he's dead this is the last piece of him I have so I saved the camis I saved the boot I saved the shirts I saved everything I wore I shoved it on the bag and I kept it in case he died but it was hard man like the back of that helicopter looked like black hawk down just blowout kits and tourniquets and magazines and rounds all over and just the most blood blood I've ever seen and you're just slipping and sliding in it just like out of the movies and it's not it's dudes you've wrapped your arms around and told you I've loved you a hundred times like this is not what I thought it was gonna be like I didn't think this was gonna be like this I didn't because I'd never seen it my dad has never been through that none of his friends ever went through that now I am this 20 year old kid this is what I'm living with and it was hard because you got to walk back in the culture of the SEAL teams and we're not talking about that nobody's ever addressing that when you see him you know you always make a joke like hey could you scream any louder like I'm surprised we all get killed by how loud you were yelling you always make a joke about it it wasn't a joke man I was traumatized like I worship that guy and to see the reality like he's not Superman and neither am I fortunately for me he did the most heroic thing I've ever seen and that moment has stuck with me forever when that initial contact happened everybody got shot including him and he stood back up and ran forward and grabbed our corpsman who was all shot up and started dragging him back and I watched it happen get shot again it spins him drops him on the floor and he gets right back up picks him up again gets shot arm spins over his shoulder keeps dragging him back gets shot again hits the ground gets back up keeps dragging him it's like at no point was he ever gonna leave that dude could he have yeah he could have ran dough behind that tractor tire and sent me out there to go fetch him he was so committed to the process of I am never going to leave you if he would have took one right in the head and he would have died right then he would have never batted an eye about it if he would have known the outcome he would have went anyway and that part has stuck me the entire time like a true believer will go further than anyone else in the moment of total duress because they're conditioned to it he's already made up in his mind how far are you willing to go the entire way right now I'm just looking for an opportunity to prove it and that was his moment to prove it he proved it to everybody and still to this day I mean probably still my biggest inspiration in the entire teams is Matt Roberts unbelievable human I'm trying to get emotional but yeah just amazing human I mean intense in in in every way to hear about so I can only imagine what it's like to be there and your reverence for people around you that do amazing things is super impressive I notice you you're constantly noticing the people that you've been blessed to be around that show you things and the extent to which you internalize it is awesome I realize it also carries some some weight when they're not doing well it's so interesting I hope people hear what I'm hearing I'm sure they are which is that it's never about you it's always about seeing this other person that you you know was like of almost like a like superhero status like really they're human and it sort of brings reality back but all the while you're a central figure in this interaction this wasn't like watching it on an iPad from a distance and wishing you could do something like you're in there too and and that's not lost on on us as as as you tell this so you're carrying this in your head and you're still going back out so you didn't process it then let's talk about you getting electrocuted because you keep bopping fortunately you're not killed and then you're pretty close to the time when you can leave feeling like you've done sufficient time in the teams you've you've done your work was there a desire to stay in past 20 years oh I never planned on getting out never I nope you wanted to be one of these so-called bullfrogs one of these guys yeah I know one I won't mention his name because he he won't appreciate it but he did something like 32 years or something and he's a friend and I actually asked him once what his training regimen he's getting up there now he's gonna give me shit for saying that but but he's in great shape obviously and I and he he says he finds some way to make sure that he's breathing super hard and his heart rate is max for an hour a day just work out like that's doesn't get any simpler than that yeah I didn't ask him the variety of things he's done to accomplish that but I think it's running I think it's lifting heavy objects I think it's swimming I think it's but yeah it doesn't get any simpler than that and in addition to his physical durability his mental durability he says directly linked to that an hour a day breathing as hard as he can at max heart rate that's that sort of bullfrog mentality so you want to be one of those guys but you decided at some point like it might be wise to lean into the the family life no no god no nope okay so okay bad guess Andrew yeah my first major injury I made it all the way through you know came in in 2002 in 2010 I was going through selection for the tier one organization and about three quarters the way through we do a big skydive block out in Arizona and I love jumping it's my jam and I had a bad landing downwind landing hit this ravine and I snapped my femoral neck broke that thing and I was so afraid they were going to wash me out of the program I just didn't say anything so I can barely walk I can't drive a car I mean it's full atrophy it's bad and I'm I'm jacked up on so many Toradols Tramadols and 800 milligram Motrin that I'm able to get through and jump they know something's wrong with me but they know I'm not going to quit they know I'm not going to ask for any help so as long as I can pass the evolutions we're good and all I have to do is jump we graduate that you know we get drafted and all the different organizations you're going to go to and I walked into rehab and I went okay now that's over my back's broken and they were like oh why do you say that and they told him we had gotten a we got an MRI on my hip when we were in Arizona and nothing showed up they were like I think you tore your hip flexor and I was like oh if I tore my hip flexor I don't care we're good I thought it was my back we get home they run new new images and my femoral neck is snapped off and you know the deal you lose a femoral neck blood supply total hip replacement you're out of the military and I walked in saw the doctor and he you know he's sitting there in front of my command master chief and all the rehab guys and he goes hey we got emergency surgery for you tomorrow morning zero seven no no and he's like what I'm not getting surgery I've never had surgery I'm not getting surgery nope I got deployment coming up I'm not doing that and my command master chief looked at me and he goes um let me rephrase this you're getting surgery tomorrow at zero seven if you don't I'm gonna shit candy out of the program it's like oh okay what is and he's like 15 inches of titanium three lag bolts we're gonna pump him in there here's a rehab protocol you're still gonna deploy and you know I think it was a month and a half and we did but I got through from the time I broke it I did another 85 skydives on it went through Utah I mean up and up and down that crazy elevation just really just sucking it up but it was a test for mental resiliency how far are you willing to push to be a part of the organization the entire way did your team teammates know you had a broken femur okay we got through we did the emergency surgery had a nasty complication got infected you know wound backs the whole thing and they were so cool they uh they flew a rehab guy over to Afghanistan with me and that's how we tested out and you know the final test like we're doing vo2 maxes and broad jumps and all the things make sure your hip can take it and the very last thing was this huge box probably a 48 inch box got a full kit on and he looks at me his name's Mike and he goes okay we're gonna have you drop off this and land on the bad leg and he goes DJ do not step off that box if you don't think it'll hold I knew it wouldn't hold there's no way it's gonna hold like it feels so bad inside me stepped off it hit it felt like a bolt of lightning went through me and I looked at him and he went how do you feel I went hundred percent got my stuff down the helicopter made it through all that the screws ended up backing out going through my t-band a couple months later had to have another surgery and just it was just a long history of things that happened to me but it really got you used to we talked about it before are you hurt or are you injured I got to the point very very fast in the SEAL teams I could not tell the difference I don't know the difference everything hurts everything's got a limitation and I'm just pushing through it regardless and again it's not like I'm a unicorn if the amount of people over there need major reconstructive surgeries eight out of ten everybody needs it and they just don't do it because you have a deployment coming up or you have a trip you can't miss there's something going on the way you can't miss it so you sacrifice yourself just don't do it the same thing was happening though had a gnarly shoulder dislocation blew it out had to have major reconstructive surgery I had an admin wound four rounds of plastic surgery couldn't get it to close I mean all the complications are happening after the shoulder surgery it was so bad medical retirement was imminent so hey we're going to medically retire you same benefits if you do 20 years but you can't do this job anymore they wanted to fuse my lower back my neck shoulder surgery shoulder surgery double hip surgery so I had three years of surgeries lined up it's like I'm not going to sit here in rehab for three years doing surgeries taking up a slot I'm not doing it I was like I'll just get out I'll retire and I'll deal with it on my own that's that's kind of the whole process so I I got put on a laundry list of medications 60 something pills a day probably 25 30 different prescriptions we were on goodness I mean Cymbalta Adderall Gabapen heavy heavy doses um Cymbalta they got you on antidepressants oh yeah and yeah Cymbalta when you come off Cymbalta it gives you the jolts oh yeah Cymbalta is a treat um Lyrica um I've been on everything um Amitripaline to sleep taking a heavy dose of those Ambien obviously everything everything in between you take it all and you don't realize that you're smashed all day because you're not you're not hitting alcohol you don't realize that you're processing pharmaceuticals 24 hours a day every single day 52 weeks out of the year you don't realize it you're not sober and that was my hardest thing to kind of walk away with is I came out of this rehab program they put me on these medications and I felt like a million bucks I got really hurt in 2013 amnesia forgetting where I was at and I went down they gave me these pills and I felt like Jesus came down and touched me you gave me Adderall and Cymbalta okay what else you have oh we got this we got this we get give them to me stellate ganglion blocks in my throat give to me Reiki give to me anything you have I'll do it there's not a protocol on the planet I have not done and I've done them at a hundred percent full value and they buy you a little bit of relief we got to the point where I was taking so many different medications a bunch of them you were not allowed to take together and I had a new doctor came in he's trying to refill all my prescriptions and he's like you can't take these four medications in combination he's like it'll give you a stroke dj it'll kill you and I went well it's 2019 I've been taking them since 2010 like I have to keep taking he's like you're gonna have to a med washout they send me down to Walter Reed the 70s it's a neurobehavioral ward I don't know that I think it's like a team guy clinic where we're gonna go work on shoulder mobility and whatever else because I just came after a lap couldn't help it oh I mean you know I was you don't know right I don't know I go down there they start taking my shoelaces they take everything I have and my what is this I mean there's fighter pilots during those green berets that are in there like I went through seer school I don't need this seer school it's torture training yeah yeah I don't know why I'm doing this they don't tell me it's a neurobehavioral ward they tell me it's for a med washout he's like hey you're gonna go there he's like you're gonna focus on shoulder rehab because that was a gnarly shoulder surgery he's like they're gonna focus on that we'll get you washed out of these meds we'll come back you'll be in a good spot medical retirement transition next phase awesome I went in that hospital broken my eyes were jet black I was 180 pounds just death warmed over I didn't want to do anything and I laid in that hospital bed and I had these I had the most amazing nursing staff and I laid down that bed I I started getting sick and I was like I can food boys throwing up pissing myself I mean the whole thing and I remember throwing up in this bucket and beautiful black nurse that has this wet washcloth and she's washing my face off and I was like I don't know what I ate I was like I'm so sorry like I feel so embarrassed and she's like it's okay it's okay it's like I haven't eaten anything I was like I never get food poisoning she's like oh honey it's it's okay and I can remember the look she gave me like you have no idea why you're here Wow I was like that for probably 10 days around the 10th or 11th day I finally came out of my room I got sunglasses on my photophobia was so bad if you shine light my eyes I'd throw up like my TBI was it was controlling everything I had wasn't sleeping had insomnia had everything you could have and that was the first time in a decade I had been truly sober no booze no nicotine no pharmaceuticals of any kind and that was my baseline and if you would have given me the ability I would have closed out that chapter right then I was done I could not believe what I had done to myself what I turned myself into and there's no way to get better like I'm stuck like this now you're gonna kick me out of the only thing that I've ever loved what am I supposed to do now rock bottom and we started spinning up art therapy so I had I'd been there before we done art there before and I found it really beneficial and actually the the Red Cross used to bring me in dogs they'd bring me in a St.

Bernard drop in my bedroom and I just I do dog therapy for a little bit and she's like do you want to do art therapy and I was like I'd love to and she's like well what do you want I was like I'd really love a skateboard and they snuck me out of that hospital not supposed to and they drove me down this little skate shop right outside of Walter Reed and there's a skate shop there and I walk in you know I've got my gown and stuff on like I'm all I'm all jacked up hair super long beards long I look like a hobo and I told the guy my story I was like hey I grew up skateboarding like it was my passion and I really would love to have a skateboard just to paint do art therapy yeah because I got a couple bolts in my femur that ripped through a couple tendons and you know I just got got detoxed and didn't realize it and I'm here can I ride a skateboard love it so he gives me a bunch of blank skateboards and I go back and I'm paper mache I'm doing hands coming out of them just a bunch of really dark demonic stuff but I felt so good when I came out my best friend Cole Fackler same guy I started tribe skates with and GVRS with we went to BUDS together he grew up in Virginia Beach with me and so we've been thick as these for 25 years now and he's like open up an LLC he opens up the backside and he's like let's just make skateboarding your art therapy so we had an artist come on board we'd start drawing you know motivational things you know old school UDT stuff for firemen stuff for police officers memorial skateboards and then I found fracture burning so you essentially take a microwave transformer pull it out and you hook it up to jumper cables and then run a lead out to an octopus outlet like 110 so when I clip it on top of the wood and I pour an electrolyte solution on it coca-cola baking soda with warm water was my favorite and I hit it it'll burn the wood grain and they'll connect scrub all that out fill with resin just make these beautiful pieces and that was my art therapy I could sit there and burn skateboards all day every day it was it was amazing like it truly changed my life and I don't know why I didn't grow up around electricity obviously I'm not very good at it and it was something about having to sit there and sand the lacquer off that skateboard I mean I'd buy brand new skateboards I'd sand the entire graphic off of it and then we'd burn them you have to sand them off you'd have to rinse them wait 24 hours pour the resin wait 24 hours sand them off pour it again 24 hours I mean it's a seven-day process to make one board and we'd bring in guys that were transitioning they'd do it too it was their form of art therapy and I felt like I was making a difference and I'm scheduled to retire at the end of August 2019 this is Father's Day so was that into June it's like mid-June is that right something like that right before I'm scheduled to retire Father's Day morning around 9 a.m.

I've been up since 5 burning skateboards I've got a big bay window looks out my backyard and I've got the seesaw set up these boards and I've got an EOD guy explosive ordinance guy from Navy he's making paddles for retirement so he comes over they're covered in lacquer and I'm like yo my man I can't burn them while they have the lacquer so he's got a sander out I've been burning so I unplugged my machine he plugs into my octopus outlet and it's sanding down the lacquer when he's done I'll clip in I'll burn him real quick he'll finish him off and my wife I'll never forget I look up and she bangs on the window and she's like it's Father's Day we're supposed to go eat brunch and I was like last burn last burn he had unplugged the sander and plugged in my machine into the octopus outlet and now there's a charge going to it it's sitting on the ground I don't know it and the way I run the protocol is there's no electricity running to it so I mean you can put these things in your mouth there's no electricity so I pick them up to adjust them because then I'm going to walk back plug it in everybody's clear flick the outlet and when I readjusted him the whole thing lit me up I had him in both hands you closed the circuit yep so they were live on the lead just sitting on the ground I didn't know it so I went to readjust him I made contact with him and it spun me around and I faced him about this far away and I can remember the back of my head was trying to touch my tailbone I was trying to fight it I could feel my teeth heating up and I was squeezing this thing as hard as I could and I heard a pop pop and I stepped back that was my collarbone shattering from flex my scapula they both shattered but in the process you take a hose and you wash off all the ash so right behind me is ankle deep standing water and now I'm holding on this thing I step back and my wife both my kids are turned around watching me from eight feet away I pop up I levitate and it launches me about 20 feet across my backyard still holding on to the leads he thank God has a wherewithal to unplug it so when I wake up my hair standing straight up my hands are smoking and I exhale and all this smoke came out of my mouth and I remember laying on the ground and he's right in my face and he goes do you know where you're at and I said on the ground and he went can you move and I went my shoulders dislocated for sure anyway can you set up no help me and he pulled me up and as soon as he put pressure on there I could feel my scapula just gravel I could feel this all hinging in there my hands are smoking like so it blew out of my finger blew out of this thumb it fused my tendon to the nerve bundle so it was stuck like this I couldn't move anything up here he stands he stands me up and I tell him I'm gonna drive myself to the hospital my wife is freaking out they're trying to unplug the machine you know my kids are running out there and I don't want them to see me like this I don't have a shirt on I don't even have shoes I'm just got a pair of shorts and my shorts are on fire so I had little um ingrown hairs my thighs electricity was shooting out of those and caught my shorts on fire anywhere I had them so out of top my head one uh one next my nether region I mean just exit shots coming out of my body I don't know anything about electricity but it's not good and I take a turn and I've probably got to walk maybe 35 40 feet to my car so he's in there with my wife trying to get the keys trying to get me in there and I turn and I step to the door have you seen kill bill remember the five finger death touch five steps I took one step and everything went I took another one and it started closing and everything started going black I was like oh god third step and I was like oh no fourth fifth and I'm looking through a toilet paper straw and I'm like oh my god I took one more step and everything went black and I was in total blindness staying out there I'm opening my eyes as wide as I can and I'm panicking I can hear my wife running through the house screaming I can hear him running around screaming trying to get everything together and I'm stuck on the side of my house like this just shaking I can't see anything and I start power breathing as deep and as hard as I can and I saw a little speck of light and I just kept doing it just forcing it inhaled the nose and mouth just power as much as I can it started to open up open up open up and probably 20 breaths into it it was like I had superhuman vision it was like I was interconnected with everything on the planet it was like I had a DMT trip everything was super vibrant I was totally aware of my whole body I knew everything that just happened to me I could recall things from in the past and I knew everything was gonna be fine I'm good I walk right over the truck I open up the car I get inside it we hit every single speed bump and pothole from there until the ER just jostling around me you can hear the remote just to remind you your shoulder uh was a little messed up yeah shoulders shoulders plural so I walked through the ER and Princess Anne Sentara in Virginia Beach has an amazing staff what they also have is a staff of really really beautiful nurses but now it's COVID so now everybody has a mask on and all you can see their eyes and they had the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen and I'm laying on my back you know I walk in and they can see it like if one of the nurses made a comment like who brought in barbecue and it's my hands like they're melted like they're smoking it's so bad like it's making me nauseous to think about it they get me in that table and I'll never forget this nurse came over and spun her face and she goes I'm so surprised you still have a penis it's a what and she went honey when you get electrocuted usually fingers come off your nose comes off everything comes off you and she's like as far as we can tell you're intact and you haven't lost anything right now she's like move your fingers I'm moving everything open my mouth can you hear I can hear and she's like okay well here we go they transfer me I think I took an ambulance ride I kind of blacked out for a little bit and then I woke up in the burn unit in Norfolk and I had the specialist came in my wife is now with me we're laying there double slings you know trying to identify how bad everything is they know we've got to do an emergency surgery on all this and he goes DJ so this is after my two months with Vernon so this is the best physical condition I've ever been in so I came from 180 now I'm 220 6% body fat I'm in phenomenal shape like I don't need to retire I could probably still suit it up again and now I'm laying in this hospital bed I have to show you the photos and he uh he walks in he's like you know what rhabdo is and I said yeah and he goes when you get electrocuted your body releases an enzyme everybody has but it multiplies rapidly and your muscles liquefy and they go toxic then it goes septic and you die your issue is you're a big dude if these enzyme markers hit this level I got to start cutting stuff out of you man taking muscle off yeah he's like pecs lats shoulders delts hamstrings quads like so every hour I'm coming back here and we got to start doing these enzyme markers so I'm laying in that bed can't move I can't run can't do anything and I'm looking at my wife and I'm just imagine Dr.

Kevorkian coming in here and chopping me up in little pieces I've never been in a low spot like that outside of being stuck behind that tire with Maddie this is the first time since then where I was a true victim of circumstance there's nothing I can do to prevent this there's no magic pill I can take there's nowhere to run there's nothing I can do I'm either gonna lay in this hospital bed or I'm gonna let that dude come in here and chop me up into pieces and I'm just consumed with anger guilt envy I just don't want to be here right now and he came back in the hour and he's like levels are good levels are good came back next hour levels are good third hour fourth hour fifth hour and he's like DJ every person on the planet has this enzyme in your body everyone not only is yours not climbing not increasing there's not a trace of in your body now he's like I've never seen anything like it he's like tomorrow morning you're free to go okay they planned the surgery they put in two plates 20 something screws did the whole thing but didn't have to chop me up and you know from talking all the other people typically people get electrocuted by one touch so this arm comes off you know ribcages blow open they were like we don't know if it's because you had leads in both hands and you just completed a circuit and were able to ride it we don't know what would happen if you would have held it for another second and a half where's your heart starting and stopping just the perfect timing all the stars had to rely on for you to be here right now and it's a medical mystery so I took it with that medical mystery and now we're here but I had to walk back in so I get dropped off my house and this is where Vernon really comes into play is I'm sitting in my house in double slings I've got two kids I've got a wife I've got no income I've got no job I've got no one that can hire me and I can't do anything physically nothing I'm just laying in there in mental health straight down the tube and I'm laying there at my kitchen table just feeling absolute the worst I've ever felt and I get a jump up to the door open up the door and there's my trainer Vernon he's like how are you doing big guy not good he like gives me this this half-assed hug we walk in the kitchen we're sitting down and he's like talk me through it I can't do anything he's like okay well now that we've established that what can you do it's like nothing well can you make a fist you know my hands are all bandaged up I was like yeah and he goes can you move your wrist yeah anyway can you walk I can walk he's like perfect pulls out his back pocket this little blue two pound dumbbell and he sticks it in my fingertips he's like curl it and I curled up and I did a wrist curl and he went roll your hand over okay so we can do grip and we can walk here we go and we did that every single day until I could pressurize my upper body enough to where a sneeze wouldn't cripple me and then we were straight back in the gym so I'd walk in double slings he's like the only thing we can do is belt squats lunges and mobility that's all we're gonna do belt squatting and double slings uh-huh that's awesome but I walk in so you're not holding on to the hole it's none of that I can't do anything so I'd literally walk in I'd step through like a hula hoop he would bring it up around me I'd step on the platform I'd squat down he'd clip me in I'd stand up he'd unrack it I'd do my set re-rack it he'd take the belt off me over and over and he rebuilt me back every single day five days a week we have never missed a session together since 2019 never saved my life man that is awesome he is the best human he's been more of a life coach and a strength coach he has unbelievable and without him if he wouldn't have walked in with that two-pound dumbbell there's no telling where I'd be at right now I told that story at the tactical strength condition conference like no one does that no one is going to come over during that moment and push you everybody's going to walk over and put them I'm so sorry for you oh I can't believe this happened not him it's like control things you can't control can you make a fist can you turn your wrist wrist girls in 20 minute walks here we go and that's what we did every single day bounce it all the way back I mean he's been there had to get a surgery on my hand had to rebuild this whole hand all the strength and everything we've had to do the stomach the kidney everything in between and he's been there for how many years ago was that the roughly that was in 2019 so what is that it wasn't that long ago six years and now you're feeling great super robust we'll talk about your training now and what people can do with that training I've gleaned a lot of really useful information about your from your current training program about setting standards and um that is a wild ride I always say like at least give me a cool story with it like you know I get this kidney thing going on not a cool story electrocution it's a cool story you know it's a feel-good story at the end it wasn't going through it but I mean surround yourself with people better than you and they'll definitely pull you out of the depths of despair I mean it's an amazing story I at one point I thought when you made the return to the skateboarding thing I thought oh you you know start skateboarding again you feel it almost it almost killed you and didn't even have trucks and wheels on the thing yet exactly oh man I'm gonna take a second to absorb all that um I was gonna ask you this later when we talk about ibogaine and DMT um and some of the emerging therapeutics for PTSD substance abuse and other things that veterans are really uh fully embracing now and and that are making uh a clear march toward broader treatment of mental health issues but uh I'll ask you now and I'll probably ask you again later at any point in this um or headed into this whole set of things um setbacks and comebacks um did you have feelings of higher power I mean I don't want to put you on the spot but were you raised religious do you believe in God any of that I mean you know were it not for the fact that uh a very very seriously scientifically educated friend of mine Stanford medical school Harvard uh medical um who was a lifetime atheist turned turned to me recently and he said you know I he said he's in his words I believe in miracles I said miracle miracles or medical miracle miracles and he said miracle miracles I said really you of all people uh and he said yeah I believe in and I said how and he said because um I don't want to reveal who this person is out of um you know it's his right to talk about these things but he said that uh because of his math training he said you know that some of the things he's seen and experienced have have exceeded um probability statistics that it's impossible for the that literally impossible for these things to happen this isn't you know one in a trillion or one in 10 trillion that it that some of these miracles go beyond what chance could provide uh intersecting chances and so you know to hear a story like yours people will come up with their own interpretations and I'm a scientist I believe in science I I do happen to believe in God but I it's an individual choice for everybody but did you ever step back and and wonder whether or not in addition to Vernon in addition to Maddie in addition to your teammates in addition to your wife whose father happened to be a team guy I mean there's some things around Virginia Beach they could have predicted that perhaps but did you ever pause and just go yeah maybe there are forces beyond everything I can see that are uh watching out for me because you've you've had a number of second third fourth chances that starting to sound miraculous they are we didn't grow up religious at all I was always spiritual always like and I mean you experience things in life that can't be can't be explained and then when you see religious people like well that's a miracle you're like is it a miracle or am I just lucky you start to look at it and then you do five and you realize like yeah yep it's got to be it's got to be real like there has to be a higher power there has to be something that's pulling the strings it's making this happen like divine intervention there's no reason I should be here after that after this this you add up all these things like there's not a chance like why like what am I supposed to be doing here how am I supposed to pay that forward like if somebody's pulling the strings to make sure I'm sitting in this seat what am I doing to make sure I'm not wasting this opportunity but I mean it definitely makes you question I mean I I definitely see why guys get I don't say hung up on religion but when they they really buy in they really turn the page you know like how much of that is just for tv none of it with that guy right like he felt it he saw the change and I mean I've seen too many miracles happen to believe that somebody's not behind it some things not behind it yeah appreciate you sharing that um I realize that especially on a science health podcast and we talk about other things but it's talked about it more and more recently just I mean I can't help but be a curious human being and wonder about these things um whatever the case may be uh you you made it through um you retired you you did you uh I couldn't imagine if your wife had uh had um heard that you were not going to retire I I mean I'd like to think that nothing can break your guys's uh marriage but man that's got that's a lot to bear she was over it yeah with the kids seeing this um yeah you know and I had turned myself into something that I was I wasn't proud of you know I talk about dials not switches like being able to power down powered up powered off I never did that so she got to see the transition from being at Siltington and then going over the tier one organization and what that does with you the pressure to perform the performance on demand it it changes you it has to you can't be the same person you were at 17 19 20 and then do that job you can't you have to be able to change and I think a lot of that it was just it was wearing her down I mean I was going so much and a lot of that I try to explain to the guys now like don't do what I did I would go on every single trip I could because I was living these multiple different lives like I would go out to Arizona and I would skydive for months on end like I mean I think I did almost four thousand jumps in seven years like we went we turned the page and that's deploying that's every other training trip that's just sacrificing every weekend and making big pushes out there but when you go no one knows who you are they don't know what you do for a job they just think you're a normal skydiver like we're doing these big wave formations and you know trying out for world records and doing all this stuff and it's amazing but it just takes you so far away from that person I have to be in Virginia Beach become addicted to it and then when I go here I can be someone else completely no one knows who I am I go on this trip no one knows who I am you don't talk about the job you do you make up a line I'll throw them out there and it'll make them all mad we tell everybody you're part of the Red Bull Air Force Red Bull Air Force yeah like we skydive with all the boys we know them all and because you skydive enough you can speak the lingo like they see you out all the drop zones they see you can fake that really really well some guys will be a hot air balloon pilot you'll be an MMA fighter you'll be a hockey team or we had real long hair you can adopt these different personas and I think a lot of that is just trying to compartmentalize what you have back home it's where I don't have to think about it because you'll literally I mean your buddies will tell you you'll be sitting on the couch at two o'clock in the afternoon and when that pager goes off you're gone right now like you got 30 minutes there's no goodbye there's no oh let me swing by work real quick and give you one kiss you don't go on fishing jump in a car and you're gone and you got to be able to shut it off it's very very hard to do when you're just so obsessed with being the best husband and the best father you can't shut that off the whole flight in you're just thinking I'm like if this happens this happens how my daughter's going to react like oh my god they're gonna come here what point of the day she's gonna get the news how what do they give me I'm not gonna be there for the marriage I can be here for this this you start to think about everything you're gonna miss cloud your judgment and it makes you hesitate at that moment you can't you can't hesitate especially when no one else does and you paint that in your mind nobody else in here is thinking about being a full-time dad or a full-time husband right now nobody cares if I'm a 63 percent husband nobody cares they need me to do this job at a hundred percent because that's what this craft deserves but it turns you into something you don't want to be long-term it's hard man but she was done she was begging for me to hang it up because all of our friends are dying and then all the guys that transition out they started doing contracting jobs they're getting killed they're getting shot we're picking up from the hospital what else you want me to do there's no retirement club you don't know work at home depot what do you want me to do I only know how to do this one thing and that was the plan I was going to retire and start contracting with one of the government agencies and essentially do the same job I do now just make a little bit better money a little better schedule and one thing led to another and ended up not doing it I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors roca roca makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality I'm excited to share that roca and I recently teamed up to create a new pair of red lens glasses these red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down they filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights which are the most common indoor lighting nowadays I want to emphasize roca red lens glasses are not traditional blue blockers they do filter out blue light but they filter out a lot more than just blue light in fact they filter out the full range of short wavelength light that suppresses the hormone melatonin by the way you want melatonin high in the evening and at night makes it easy to fall and stay asleep and those short wavelengths trigger increases in cortisol increases in cortisol increases in cortisol are great in the early part of the day but you do not want increases in cortisol in the evening and at night these roca red lens glasses ensure normal healthy increases in melatonin and that your cortisol levels stay low which is again what you want in the evening and at night in doing so these roca red lens glasses really help you calm down and improve your transition to sleep roca red lens glasses also look great they have a ton of different frames to select from and you can wear them out to dinner or concerts and you can still see things I don't recommend you wear them while driving just for safety purposes but if you're out to dinner you're at a concert you're at a friend's house or you're just at home pop those roca red lens glasses on and you'll really notice the difference in terms of your levels of calm and all the sleep stuff I mentioned earlier so it really is possible to support your biology be scientific about it and remain social at the same time if you like if you'd like to try roca go to roca.com that's r-o-k-a.com and enter the code huberman to save 20 off your first order again that's roca.com and enter the code huberman at checkout I want to talk about ibogaine dmt mental health but first I want to talk a little bit about posture recently I heard you talking about physical posture in the gym literally form and how upright one is with their stance or squat and how that translates to mental posture and it was the first time I've ever heard anyone talk about translating the physical into the mental in this way so if you don't mind how do you think about mental posture and physical posture and how the two intersect I think in that analogy the metaphor I used physical posture if you think if I stand feet shoulder-width apart and I put a barbell on me you slide on 45s I'm strong two more 45s I'm strong you could load up eight nine hundred pounds and I could sit there and hold it or if you put 315 pounds on it I can drop butt the floor and I can squat it if I hold it at 90 degrees and you add on a 45 it feels like a ton you start adding on tens everything starts to quiver I use the same thing as my mental health if I wake up in the morning I've set my morning routine and I'm firing on all eight cylinders you can stack on everything on top of me because I'm in an optimal state I can take it just like I'm in a full posture just keep giving it to me keep giving it to me if I wake up my morning routine's not there I start reading some hateful stuff in the morning don't have a good input with my wife first thing I'm stuck behind the school bus late my first meeting now you hand me a parking ticket it feels like the world is collapsing on top of me and I can't do anything for it so throughout the entire day that's the whole purpose of the micro win kind of formula stack up as many wins to put yourself in optimal head space because reality isn't going to know it's going to smack you either way and if I keep myself blocking everything that's externally toxic to me when something does get put on me that I have to wear I'm in a good posture to put it on that jacket might weigh 55 pounds I put it on and I'm still strong because I've been dropping off everything that I don't need to wear all day long yeah I mean but you'll see it I mean I know you say you analyze people all day long when people are in a negative head space their posture changes their head drops their shoulders roll forward they're always looking at the ground they're never up processing information it's because they're dragging whatever just happened all day long now you add in one more thing your mom's got cancer oh your wife's gonna leave you oh your kids are so everything just starts to weigh down you and it feels feels like something you'll never get past insurmountable it's at some point and that's all because you will start to let it slowly but surely chip away at you it's like control the things you can control and the things you can't control you either avoid them completely or you take them as that's a reality you have to live through right now I don't know why you have cancer but you do and you got to get through it okay well what positive things do I have great relationship with my wife great relationship with my kids great relationship my friends my social circle has shrunk everyone around me is better than me and they want me to be better okay well I can take on a whole lot if I don't have a tight circle no relationship my wife ostracized my kids everything now you start to add on that external stress it it cripples me really really fast and I know I'm not the only one so when I say it to everybody whatever you have going on right now whatever is absorbing all your bandwidth it's us too but you're choosing to wear that jacket all day you're putting on another one and then another one and you add the external pressure of having to provide for a family and be you know that emotionally stable figure for the household it's hard to do all day long and a lot of people lose sight of it and I think that's why so many people close their chapter early they offer suicide because they think there's no way I can write the ship like it's go it's gone too far right now and I don't want to have to sit here and rebuild it and they close the chapter out it's like if we could have eliminated all those things and given yourself a breath of fresh air would you have done the same thing if I would have grabbed you right before the moment like this isn't permanent you can fix this right now you just have to change these aspects they would in the moment though and I've been there you don't have the clarity you don't have the vision and and a guy told me a long time ago he goes I think a lot of people want to hit the reset button on the Nintendo cha-ching restart restart the game you're not restarting the game it's over forever and I hate seeing people do it I think now you know after I've come out of the medicine I've done a bunch of therapy and cut out a lot of toxicity out of my life I've gotten that breath of fresh air and I'm just you know I told Marcus and Amber Capone when I came out of the treatment I'm going to jump on the nearest building I'm going to shout it from the rooftops like this will help there is a way out of this funk it's just one step further than you've currently gone like there's light at the end of that tunnel just one step further one step further and just continuously go and it'll get better but yeah for me posture is a huge thing I mean in combatives it's a huge thing in processing information it's a huge thing in dealing with stress it's a huge thing I can't let myself collapse because once you start adding another pound of me it hits me to the floor really fast so control the things you can control and a lot of it is just your posture and your perspective great message would you agree that lying down in bed on one's phone on social media is a very dangerous posture because I would argue that and I also tell guys if you are going to lay in the fetal position and tweet out how bad your mental health is stop go to a Starbucks go to Whole Foods walk around and see normal human interaction and tell a stranger you're suffering for mental health they don't do it you're just going to sit there in a fetal position feeling sorry for yourself and you think it'll get better tomorrow it won't I've already lived that life I've already painted the picture for you I played you the movie you've watched it it's not going to work you're going to have to get out of that bed and you're going to have to do something every single day that brings you out of that dark depression and for me it's physical movement if you have the ability to move move don't lay in that bed don't just sit there and scroll you know Vernon says it your diet's important not what you eat but what you consume visually audio the music you listen to we all know there's some music you listen to that just changed you ever so slightly is that the person I need to be walking to the store do I need to blare mega death right now no I need to play Ludovico that's what I need I need to walk into this room at a hundred percent full capacity and just receive whatever energy is in the room right now it's hard to do if I'm in the depths of despair right now so yeah I try to put myself in position where I have optimal posture all day you mentioned uh Marcus and Amber Capone now is probably a good time for us to just reference who they are and um the work that you guys have been doing and uh and anytime I sort of plug something or mention something I want to be very clear I don't have any formal affiliation to this upcoming Netflix um show movie is it what film excuse me uh to this uh upcoming Netflix film but it's going to be a an incredible film I know this because I've seen bits of it uh maybe just mention who Marcus and Amber Kaponar and what they've been doing and the film I do think this is something everyone should see I'm definitely going to see it and I'll just say that um I think their organization Veteran Solutions is one I've been paying attention to and trying to support in ways I can uh over the last gosh it's been three four years and um so maybe tell us about Marcus and Amber and the film so Marcus uh joined the SEAL teams right pre-911 married Amber had a baby right now in the SEAL teams got stationed on the east coast with me at SEAL team 10 and you could watch him change throughout the years like everybody else but because he's such a big polarizing figure he's hard to miss I mean he's probably six five two four he's a big guy and he was extremely intimidating but he always had a light in his eyes he always seemed like a dude you wanted to be around and after the conflicts into multiple deployments I mean you'd see him out in town and his eyes got jet black and he would be a guy that if you were walking on the street and you saw him come out just the way he looked at you you would cross the street and he became one of those guys I gave the analogy walking to the SPCA and you see that pit bull ears been shaved off there's scars all over his face you're not going to put your hand in that cage Marcus Capone was like that he leads the SEAL teams has a very rocky transition gets job in finance moves around and you hear it through the rumor mill about how bad he's doing drinking just not the person you wanted him to be and definitely not the transition you wanted for him and then it got so bad you know suicide was definitely on the table circling the drain drinking way too much just toxic in every way you can imagine and Amber being the angel that she is started to research different solutions he did MERT meditation yoga talk therapy drugs did everything you could and she found Ibogaine and 5-MEO DMT and convinced him to go down there and it was one of those things much like mine you're going to go do this treatment and this is our last attempt and if this doesn't work I'm leaving you and for a team wife to throw in the towel after the career is over that lets you know how bad it is because they have combated that entire thing I mean they were in the heart of NSW in the heart of the GWAT and buried more friends you ever count care to count and after all of that she's finally going to throw in the towel that's how bad he's gotten and you know you hear that he came back and you wouldn't even recognize him like you won't believe what Marcus Capone looks like and I hadn't seen him but you got to understand coming from the east coast and I'm an idealist like I'm a true believer and when you hear that Marcus left the east coast and went to the west coast and now he's doing yoga meditation and smoking toad venom you're like west coast typical I knew you'd turn him and then you see him you're like that's the best version of Marcus I've ever seen and he's not a pacifist he can still roll that dial all the way over but he has full control over it you know 20 years old flick the navy seal switch and just live that life until the fullest never had a balance point never needed one never tried to adopt one so during my whole transition I'll say when he got out they sit dormant on that medication for a while because it was so out there and you didn't want to shock the culture you didn't want to shock the community and it's taboo I mean doing psychedelics it's not a thing that navy seals do yeah and ibogaine is a 22-hour psychedelic it's very esoteric most people have heard of psilocybin or even lsd or mdma it's and dmt I mean it's a this is as far out there as you possibly can go I'm sure someone sitting there is like no there's some chemical made and you know but this it's extreme it is and just like the seal teams you do everything to the extreme and that's where you go theme there yeah and you know I was going through a similar thing but when they came out one of his very good friends Chad Wilkinson committed suicide and I think enough was enough and that was one of his best friends and it crippled him and when you see him get the news you can watch that this oh god I'm trying to cry you can watch that loss affect him in a way that nobody else will understand and he knew he was holding on to the secret like this saved my life and if I would have given that to him he'd still be here and I'd know it what am I going to do I got to start a 501c3 I got to start saving as many people as humanly possible and selfishly I'm going to save as many seals as humanly possible and once he saved one save two three four five army rangers green brace fighter pilots they all just start pouring in here it's the same trauma doesn't matter how you got it you're at the brink of it you're going to close this chapter out and this medicine is going to give you that breath it's going to give you that relief to not do it and they made this little infomercial that was on social media talking about psychedelics and I had heard about it and I kind of whitewashed it and my wife was at the same point she was getting ready to leave me and take the two kids and I can't do this anymore and we laid in bed one night and she watched it and she was crying and she leaned over and she made me watch it I started bawling because I could see the difference the last time I saw Marcus and this Marcus is very very different and she looked over and she goes if you love me you'll go I went I'll go do psychedelics with my friends in Mexico sure I don't I never thought it would do anything because I had messed up so much until that point all the pharmaceuticals all the mistakes I had made the infidelity everything had led me up to that point and I had that secret inside me and I did not have the strength to tell her I didn't want to break her heart about all the things I had messed up and for me if you think me going down to Mexico is going to save our marriage I will 100% do it but I never thought for a chance it would never and I went down there with a bunch of guys that were legends inside of the community and you know Ambio Trevor Jose Jonathan Brianna everybody Ambio Life Sciences they run the best facility I've ever been a part of in any facility that medicine is so strong and I think that's why guys get such relief it's the only thing stronger than your ego because you've turned yourself into this vessel you think represents the essence of what being a Navy SEAL is you're hard you're determined you'll never lose like you you'll sacrifice everything right now if the group asked you to do it but you won't do it for yourself you'll never put your individual needs above the needs of the group and this is one point where you have to you have to go for the good of the group I have to suck up my ego got to suck up my pride and I have to try to kill it right now and we went down there and took that medicine and I have a combatives instructor his name's Tom Kyer from Seahawk Tactical Group if you've ever watched uh the movie The Hunted with Denicio Del Toro the knife fighting that's what they do and they are the best in the world and Tom Kyer is a knowledge transfer specialist he's changed my life in mindset more than anybody else on the planet and he told me a quote the other day that it references this kind of and we were talking about experience he goes if you understand no explanation is needed if you don't understand no explanation is possible and that came from Dave Joyce another Seahawk disciple and it's the truest thing I've ever heard unless you've done Ibogaine unless you've done psychedelics in a therapeutic setting you'll have no idea how powerful it is and when I woke up that next day everything I had ever done negative positive erased everything negative every conversation every bad deed every time I've hurt anybody every time I've made my wife cry every time I've not been present was in the forefront of my mind and I felt absolutely terrible I felt like a monster for everything I had done every time I had not been present every time I had sacrificed them for this thing I didn't want to go home and at the same token it was the only time in my life I'd ever been homesick I wanted to teleport and go home and wrap my arms around those three but I was so embarrassed at everything that I had done there's no way I can do it I can't go home and break their heart and you have the gray day after you do Ibogaine I mean it feels like you get hit by a freight train just in your fields dudes are throwing up all day depending on how your experience is the next day you do five MEO DMT and that's the ego death you know comes the Sonoran desert toad they milk out the poison glands and that's essentially what you're smoking it's pretty intimidating looks like you're smoking crack rock and that experience when you smoke that it must be like either we're finding religion or what dying's like well you almost died with the electrocution and we had a uh very accomplished neuroscientist on the podcast uh Christophe Koch who talked about um he's been studying consciousness for a long time and he talked about his experiences on five MEO DMT uh total dissolution of self total dissolution of space and time but he described um that he that the his mind was still there but nothing else was there and again if someone hasn't done it I've never done it but if someone hasn't done I'm guessing that no description will will suffice I've heard it like from another team guy being described as being strapped to the shock wave of an atom bomb I feel like um you know I've I've heard a bunch of different descriptions sounds when you come out of that experience however how did that reframe the electrocution the loss of I mean we could spend three days talking about every single guy that you know that's been killed and still probably only uh touch on a small number of them sadly you know so how does all that get reframed coming out of an experience like that the biggest concern doing Ibogaine was that you were going to be stuck inside of your own thoughts everybody you had lost you were just going to relive it you were going to be in the back of that helicopter you were just going to have to relive that for 24 straight hours and I will tell you that not a single person that I've ever done Ibogaine with has ever had any military experience it's always been your childhood and then reflection of what you've done to your wife and kids it gaps it so I've done Ibogaine four times I have never had a singular military experience ever nothing childhood childhood big time childhood and then in in the actual medicine it would allow me to relive past events with my father with my mother hard conversations you know blow ups arguments screaming things you had forgotten things I'd forgotten things that were never on my conscious mind and now I'm reliving them and then it would shift and it would be me doing that exact same thing to my wife to my kids and then it'll put you in their position so when I'm screaming I'm projecting just this hate and this venomous shooting out of me I can be that seven-year-old little girl and I can feel how frightened she is by what she's watching her father turn into so real empathy that is what it is you become so empathetic to everyone and everything and it's the forefront of your mind like I don't want to go home because now I know what I've done I can't mask it anymore there's no more compartmentalization I've done I've done all those things I've said that terrible stuff and I'm never gonna be able to re-earn my seat at the table and it's one of those weird predicaments where I want to go home but I don't because I don't want to face that I actually did and said that it's like out of every good thing I've ever done it all got erased on that moment the only thing we're going to focus on is all the bad stuff you've ever done and said so when we came into 5MEO I did six rounds of 5MEO my first time down there every single one is the most painful thing you've ever been a part of it feels um and Trevor says it beautifully down at AMBO he said whatever's gonna happen let it happen if you think you're gonna explode explode you think you're gonna die die you think you're gonna drown or blast off in the stratosphere do it don't try to control it that medicine will take you exactly where you need to go you just have to let it and every time i would i would start i would scream and then i would cry and convulse throw up and i'd wake up and i'd look around and he'd look at me again hit him again and i'd do it again and i'd do it again and it was the very last time i did 5MEO you understand i was super depressed and i was most certainly suicidal i did not want to come home and face reality and i took that last one and right before i did i can't remember if it was the the nurse or because we used to have team guys who would sit there and hold space for you not taking the medicine just they were there to basically safeguard the house so you could just focus on you because it's hard to be put under essentially anesthesia in a foreign country and you don't know what's going to happen to you so just comforting knowing there's team guys around you and he was either the nurse or one of the team guys goes you want to kill yourself right i said yeah and he goes then do it do with this right here and i changed my intention for the medicine and i told myself it was this pink toxin this purple toxin i'm going to inhale it i'm going to coat my entire body with this i'm going to kill myself right here so i don't have to go home and that changed the entire experience for me everything shrunk down jet black and a single white pixel showed up and it exploded and it looked like it was star trek taking off all the tracers and everything it felt like your sternum broke open and your soul left your body and it was the true ego death and it went from screaming thrashing to complete bliss and love and affection and empathy and compassion and everything and i woke up and i looked at him and i could not believe the way i instantly i mean the most sober you've ever been you're not on any medication not cannabis not not an adderwell nothing you can't be on any medication when you go down there so this is true sobriety at its finest and when you wake up it's exactly like the electrocution everything is more vibrant the table edges are slick and clean like i can feel the taste and the texture and i can feel the energy coming out of everybody and it's like i can tell her i can go home and i can confess everything right now because i understand that i have done more good than bad and she's going to see it she just has to see the new me and we went home and you know everything kind of unfolded and all my past indiscretions came to life and it was it was the darkest moment for me because i didn't think she was going to take me back and she ends up pulling my sunglasses off she pulls them off and looks me and essentially collapsed in my arms like i was back i'd been gone for 15 years and now i'm home and the greatest thing that's ever happened to me and if i wouldn't have gone down to mexico there was no talk therapy there was no meditation there was no cold plunge it was going to get me there it was something stronger than me and when you look back i've been building that physical vessel this mental resilient vessel this entire time so nothing could break me and i needed something stronger than that to break me and the moment it did my whole life changed everything changed and i really became an advocate for the medicine because i've been there i've been sitting in my guest room with that pistol in my lap staring around the ceiling wondering where my brain matter is going to go and what my wife's going to see and how she's going to have to clean it up and resell the house and just all the things i mean that's where you're at and that's where a lot of guys are and they don't believe they can get a breath of fresh air and that medicine will give it to you it is not a cure-all even you have to go back and restructure your entire life and cut out the toxicity and that was one of the most powerful things we did is i came back from that medicine i sit down the edge of that bed with my wife after we had gone through everything i had done and i went through my phone and we blocked and deleted about 150 people out of my life best thing i ever did like you're never coming back in here i've been trying to foster and save that relationship the better part of a decade i'm not doing it anymore you're robbing bandwidth and you're robbing the little time i have left on this planet that i'm going to try to devote to my family because i have to re-earn this seat at the table every single day and it gave me the ability to do that and i came home started preaching about the medicine and then as i started to tell guys you'd see guys that were interested and they were like well if it worked for him because i'm a true believer i'm devout and they're like if it worked for him it'll work for me but they're scared to go so i was probably home maybe a month or two i went right back down and i essentially hosted one i'm cooking breakfast for the boys i'm cleaning snot off of them i'm doing the whole thing just trying to push them and slow but surely you start saving guys 10 guys at a time over and over and you know that's really all because of marcus and amber if they would not have made that little infomercial airing out all their dirty laundry and how open and transparent he was like that is not the navy seal way that is not how you're supposed to do it and when he did it it was so empowering to me i mean i looked up to him i mean he was on his second deployment when i came in and you know marcus is larger than life to me so when you see that openness that transparency i can do that i can do that too and if i do that some kid going through the exact same thing as me that's stuck on that island alone will see me and go if he can do it i can do it you got to want to change and you have to put steps in in place to where you can live at a full value the morning routine i don't break it because i know what happens if i don't have it the worst i've ever been i wasn't living that morning routine i was still working out but it was chaotic at best right like my range wasn't there my combatives wasn't there i slowly let it drift away to where i was a shell of myself and once i got that breath of fresh air i am never going back i mean i just came back on saturday i went back down again took down a bunch of veterans a bunch of civilians that were down there and it's so interesting to see because you have fighter pilots that are down there you have normal housewives that have drinking problems toxic marriage sexual abuse all this different stuff and everybody's ended up the exact same spot we've tried everything we tried the drugs we tried the talk therapy the cold plunges the saunas all that and it's helping but it's not getting us over the goal line and when those people wake up the very next day they are at total rock bottom and when they come out of that 5 meo dmt they their feet don't hit the ground for months you are on cloud nine and you cannot believe how good you feel i just want the world to be able to experience that it doesn't matter what trauma you have going on it's not a navy seal medicine or a medicine for special operation this is a medicine to save humanity and if you were at the bottom of the barrel right now they'll save you i mean i went on 60 pills a day i'm not on anything not a single pain med i mean i've got more screws me than home depot and i feel like a million bucks but you know for me my family deserved it and if i have to go down there and go through all that trauma over a five-day period to give them a better version of myself i'll do it every single time that juice is so worth the squeeze but it's scary man it is because you're afraid and when i talk to guys they're so afraid they're going to come out of it and be a pacifist they're afraid they're going to lose the edge and like well what if you did that medicine while you were in the teams could you still do that job 100 i just wouldn't have drug him home with me i could have done that job and empowered it off and i could have done my same routine now and i could have went home been a full-time husband a full-time father i could still compartmentalize it when i went to work and i could just focus on work because i'm running on dials and not switches you can't just turn it on shut it off you can't you got to be able to back it off slowly that's why i use that drive into work every day i'm not thinking about my family in three two one all i'm thinking about is a lift because that's the only priority i have once a lift is done what's the piece of content we're shooting what's the training course we're doing who do i need to be when i walk through that threshold and that medicine really gave me the ability to navigate between those spaces better than anything else i've ever found and i'm so thankful for it i know it sounds hokey and i am not that guy you know yoga and you know crystal i'm not that dude and it's very foo-foo a lot of it is and a lot of people practicing that stuff they push it so far out and left that you think that you end up like one of the lost boys running around the rainforest with feathers hanging out of your hair it's it's not like that it's not like that at all it's an amazing facility it's an amazing program and i'm just so thankful that they had they had the ability to share that message if they wouldn't have we'd be in the exact same position i think they've put in i think three or four thousand people through that medicine in the last i think three years they're absolutely saving people's lives it's uh been remarkable to see the growth of veteran solutions again i have no formal affiliation it's just something that i observed and i i really uh respect and my colleague who's been a guest on this podcast and dr nolan williams he's a triple board certified physician he's my colleague at stanford and um you know a couple couple of reflections that i think uh perhaps are also important for people listening to to hear because um you said go down there it's done in mexico uh because it's still not legalized in the united states um it requires supervision uh this is very different even than psilocybin mdma lsd that there's there's really no recreational use of of these things uh that is reasonable or safe so just i'm not saying that just to protect myself i'm saying that to protect people listening um that said you know nolan and i have talked a lot about this he's the one scanning guys that go down there and come back and um i think it's fair to say that pretty much every positive shift whether it's an improvement or a cure from a mental health issue is brain plasticity something gets rewired and these are tools to enable brain plasticity i think it's helpful perhaps for people to hear it that way because psychedelic sounds like um tie-dye sounds like kaleidoscope sounds like magic carpet sounds like the 60s sounds like people staring at the sun burning their eyes out and then talking about how they've seen god and everyone else needs to have the same experience summer love dirty feet and all that okay um it is amazing to me that the veterans community and a bipartisan effort i will say this is one of the few truly bipartisan efforts out there everything's so polarized but former governor rick perry of texas who is self-described knuckle drug dragging republican he said that i'm not saying that about him he says it every time has fully embraced ibogaine and what heart medicine is sometimes called the mdma therapies as well and it's been really working with people on the democratic side of the aisle to try and uh get fda approval for this stuff in the united states first for the treatment of veterans and other people with substance use and and and severe trauma issues first and then it will be explored how this could wick out into the broader population but i just think of them as incredibly powerful tools for brain plasticity um and then maybe that just kind of softens for people in their minds a little bit of what just how wild and crazy it is i mean the experiences are extreme as you said it's it's challenging to be in the ibogaine heard that from everyone who's done it uh i haven't yet done ibogaine at some point i will but i've certainly um done therapeutic uh sessions with mdma therapeutic and a high dose psilocybin and it can be terrifying and you need to be someone there to help guide you through it at times but i'm so happy that marcus and amber undertook this project that you joined up with that project and the netflix movie we'll provide a link to it if it's out otherwise we'll just cue people to the fact that they should definitely watch this it's extremely compelling um an important story for people to hear i can't help but mention just because um i've had the the great uh uh experience of of being able to interact with some people around this and the effort is so wholehearted and is so um deeply rooted in trying to help people and i think that's really important for people to hear too because anytime there's a business association with things people all start to color that it's just there's just so much pure intent in all of this i also have gotten to know sarah wilkinson a little bit um she's amazing she's amazing chad's chad's wife um first through veteran solutions and um you know she she's an amazing woman and you know and and i think it's been challenging to see all these guys that he was friends with get better right and it's it's so tragic that someone has to take their own life for for things like this to eventually get stimulated but the amount of good that veteran solutions is catalyzing is really spectacular and so i'm glad we're taking some time to talk about it i think it's been discussed on other podcasts i think this movement's just going to grow i think it's broken through now and hopefully this will continue to help it break through when the whole thing first started john shank and bonnie cohen reached out about doing the film in ways in war and they actually kind of tricked me to be a part of it they told me that marcus and amber were spearheading this project so i was like if marcus and amber and i'm in i owe them anyway they save me i'm into it that wasn't really the case they spearheaded me i'm on board and then they convinced marcus and amber to join on board now it's essentially his whole story unfiltered unbiased my whole story and then us going back for my buddy maddie and how all our lives are entangled in teams and just all the trauma we all share and how we're all getting through it but you know it kills addiction in one shot which is crazy people are addicted to heroin like i dipped copenhagen for 17 years never wanted to quit i woke up the very next morning from ibogaine and never had a dip so it's so wild and i want to dip like i miss it and as soon as i smell it i can't do it it's like i didn't drink coffee for six months it's like i want to drink coffee and then i have no desire my energy levels are through the roof like everything is better i kind of just want to be normal again it's like slow but surely introduce coffee and whatever else but you have no addictions and i was at the bottom of the barrel i mean i was taking extreme doses of gabapentin tramadol toradol everything else and you know tramadol is not habit forming yeah take it for 12 years and tell me it's not like it most certainly is and to be able to whitewash all of that gone in one shot i mean the doctors i was never getting off those meds never like if you want to function in society you have to take these medications for the rest of your life and i was fine with it i'm totally good and then on the back side you see that it doesn't matter if i was drinking a 12 pack a day or if i was just popping these 60 pills i was under the influence of something all day every day for 15 years that's not how i want to be it's not how i want to live my next 40 years it's like it's really put me in a position where i'm so hyper aware everything that i input and then everything that i output but it it gives you that it gives you complete control and i think some guys just need to they need that breath of fresh air they need that instant relief to go okay okay i could live with this now and if you just keep living that positive lifestyle it'll become your new norm right but you have to really want to change for me i've never found anything that powerful in my life and because a lot of guys are scared they're scared about going down to mexico and whatever it is there's a 25 person staff in that house with you three paramedics three rns they got cardiac cert they have everybody in there the chefs in there are amazing michelin star quality the food you eat and there's indoor swimming pools there's a reiki lady in there that will crack your soul open in 15 seconds flat i never thought reiki was a thing until she puts her hands on you the massage therapy the breath work i mean it's a whole holistic approach but because you've never just you've never allowed yourself to be vulnerable in that position and once you are they just start to unravel you so fast and that medicine's really the catalyst for the whole thing and once you see what you can be like i can be the same guy that i was now i can just control them i think that's what a lot of guys lose when they leave the teams like well i built myself into this because of that well i can't take that with me so what do i do with this my wife doesn't want this i don't want this my kids can't build a relationship with this what am i supposed to do now and that's when people make those rash decisions they don't know where to go and i think that's what's so powerful the medicine is that's the only thing stronger than the ego you've built up purpose built is that medicine yeah it changed my life for sure it's been great where my mind goes is you know um people who aren't in the military um these days are also really struggling also i didn't point out um and you know the united states in particular like we're we're at a pretty dark moment it took me a while to actually like really internalize that i was like man like like it like last week the charlie kirk thing that or same week or just a few days before that woman getting killed on the light rail um you got conflicts all over the world you've got a ton of domestic unrest and people have come on this podcast and argued that you know in the last century there were a lot more deaths due to war and this kind of thing and you know statistics and is are one thing and they're important but um seeing people murdered in cold blood in either very deliberate or in what seemed like almost kind of like random like okay there was a person there so he killed he killed her if it was someone else they might kill maybe not who knows what the motivation was you know and and to think about how traumas like that just the pain of the world can be lifted it's hard to imagine it happening in mass right it's hard and yet i think we all deep down know that that has to happen and i think an attention to what young people are exposed to and trying to save them is you know the best thing about our species right protect our young make them put them into a world that's better than than the way we found it and at the same time i i what you're describing is it's kind of a it sounds like the the medicine for lack of a better way to put it at that the society and like this like kind of global consciousness really needs i i've said before and i'll say it again i i think if you look at humans across history we've always had conflict we've always created trauma for each other we've not ever really been perfect ever we're not perfect we're flawed we're all flawed i think that's that's important to remember and that things will improve over time perhaps this can be like a sawtooth up and to the right kind of graph but you wonder if there was going to be a massive shift in collective consciousness and people were going to really heal their traumas and really start to see other people differently um now that's going to require some very powerful tools and i just can't help but think there is no magic solution people have to want to change and on and on but um the ibogaine sounds like a special tool different than the other psychedelics because of the amount of attention and detail that's required to keep people safe while they do it you need you know heart monitoring and it's a medical treatment in many ways i think we should probably talk about it and frame it that way going forward it's a medical treatment the word psychedelic is a very loaded phrase and it's one of the things that i worry about in terms of trying to get ibogaine and other treatments implemented more broadly in the same way that when about 10 years ago we would think about breath work and i want to study respiration physiology in my lab calling it respiration physiology you know we have a clinical trial that we publish on that if we called it breath work it's kind of wacky you call it respiration physiology which is also true people are more willing to embrace it so these to me are neuroplasticity tools to help rewire one's brain for the better and i am very hopeful that what you've done i mean again thank you you know it's like you know we always thank people for their service but here now you've got people that that served who are now going into this highly novel at least for americans a treatment to help cure trauma and addiction and you guys are first in and marcus and amber are you know early and first in and um and people will argue you know these things have been around for a long time in native cultures in the and in jungles and i will say just like meditation just like yoga nidra just like hydrotherapy light therapy it's exactly because it's been shrouded in complicated language that it isn't more broadly implemented and i'm willing to say that a thousand times over if if we truly care about people we don't care what it's called sure we want to uh pay respect to people that developed these things long ago but enough is enough like it's not about getting credit it's about getting it out there and you're exactly right when you say psychedelics everybody automatically labels it a certain way and one of the best quotes i've ever heard is we gave uh we gave ibogaine to my buddy maddie and he woke up next day and he goes there is nothing recreational about that nope there isn't terrifying it can be some people wake up and it's bliss the entire time and i'm so glad you have that but if you were laying in stanford right now and you gave me ibogaine hooked up the heart rate monitors you were running a study they wouldn't bat an eye like oh yeah it's the same thing you have the same people around you they're taking detailed notes everything you say i mean this you might as well be at a clinic you are it's in a beautiful house beautiful staff and the entire thing but that's what it is this is a treatment this is not a bunch of guys eating smoking doing whatever peyote in the middle of desert it's not what that is this is a very structured thing because you have some serious trauma i think a lot of people label it like oh this is for guys with ptsd i didn't go down there for ptsd i went down there for whatever had i've turned into i was trying to get rid of that and i'll tell you before nothing in my military career has ever come up none of it that's not what haunts me it's not what plagues me at night it's not what keeps me up till two three in the morning that's not that and i've resolved all the things that was troubling me and it's because that medicine's so powerful i just hope more people will will get a hold of it i think if we had the right people putting out the right message on the right platforms people they get a hold of it so many people want to hear hate speech like negativity goes a lot more than positivity a lot of times because people hang on to that it's like you know i read something they were talking about the um the best public speakers in human history and hitler was in the top five and they're like well just imagine if he was preaching positivity he could have turned that entire country and really given them something to hang on to he just didn't and you wish that he would have been preaching the gospel you wish he would have been preaching love and kindness for all of humanity and then what would have happened in world war ii wouldn't happen yeah humans have an appetite for first for that uh anger there's a famous experiment by a guy named robert heath he was a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon and um very controversial guy for all sorts of reasons but he ran an experiment on humans where he was in the brain stimulating different brain areas and um uh he would implant little electrodes in humans and um people had the opportunity then later to stimulate different brain areas and different brain areas when stimulated evoke different subjective experiences so they'd hit a lever they'd feel kind of drunk hit another lever they'd feel sexual arousal hit another lever they'd feel laughter others they'd feel less well do you know the number one brain area there weren't many subjects in this is a difficult experiment to do but the number one brain area that these subjects all wanted to hit again and again and again was an area of the what's called the midline thalamus that evokes feelings of mild anger and frustration it's linked to the dopamine system and it's associated with drive and it's what we learn if we're adaptive to funnel into creating things building things doing things but it's very clear that we are hardwired to be pulled into environments and discourses that evoke anger i feel like anger and numbing out are the two most dangerous things and look i love social media teach on social media but being online makes it very easy to feel anger and to numb out and you know it's the ultimate drug really to offer that in my opinion and then there's this other lane of life right which is harder to access um where the real richness is where the real stuff is where real meaning comes from where time doesn't just disappear and where you build things that are lasting and that with if i die in in 10 seconds i'll know that i'd spent some time in that lane or enough to know that like that's where the really good stuff is and it's a bit more difficult or a lot more difficult to access but that's real life and the rest is is uh is a game that's being played on us that takes advantage of some hard wiring that i wish didn't exist but exists in all of us i think if we knew that that existed in all of us just like we have an appetite for sugar you know it's hardwired uh that we would make better choices so i'm i'm so glad that you've done ibogaine and dmt in that setting and that you guys are getting the message out there and i don't know what the broader implementation looks like but i like to think that with collaboration with nolan what's having veteran solutions ambio and other clinics like it and really good for once really good politicians on both sides of the aisle arguing for this i'm hopeful i i fully support my tax dollars going to the expansion of this i really do they've been spending a lot of time in the beltway getting funding you know clinical trials research doing the entire thing and they've got a whole coalition now navy seal foundation stepped up the green breeze foundation i think uh might be the recon foundation and wounded warrior project they all came go coalition they're all going to get behind this and i'll kind of push the exact same message let's get the funding let's get the research let's prove that it works and hopefully bring it to the u.s like we have to start with the veterans because smaller population less than one percent of the population let's target them let's get first responders and let's open this thing up and you know marcus is doing a lot to really beat that war drum and i'm just so thankful one of the things he said we went down there because you don't realize how how palpable toxicity is like you want to be hateful sometimes and they're like hurt people hurt people you've been hurt and now you want someone else to feel that exact same thing so when you see something hateful on social media what's the first thing you do you go to the comment section you read yep i feel that too i like that comment i'm a comment underneath it yep yep you just start to project that hate over and over and over again if i say look at it i'm not gonna get involved in that actually i'm just gonna unfollow this person because every time i see you're saying something hateful slow but sure it's getting out that toxicity it allows the the best form of you to continue to go forward but yeah i mean you have to you got to protect your peace you got to surround yourself with positive people that are better than you that want to try to drag you up that hill and thank god for people like that because man i mean if you haven't been there if you have not been that only guy on the island alone just because i mean i often say i was the first guy in the seal teams to suffer depression anxiety and suicide ideation because i'd never heard of it before right so i'm in my living room just my wife's not there and we talk about dogs one of the number one reasons i never did it was when i would get to the point where i had made up my mind that dog would walk in that room and drop his head on my lap and look at me oh not today i'd get up and i'd go on a walk with the dog is your japanese mastiff yeah amazing breed folks i just learned about it today i absolutely want one of these what is the proper name tosa inu they are beautiful beasts they're amazing yeah so my wife's uh first husband danny they had a japanese mastiff and an old english bulldog so when he passed i met patsy three years later those are the dogs i inherited and you couldn't pick a better dog breed it was the most beautiful dog i've ever seen in my look a bangled tiger 200 pounds but a gentle giant but one of those things when you walk in the house and that thing sees you your heart just goes to 180 you're like i'm so happy to be home and see this dog right now it pulls you out of a depression i mean therapy dogs are a real thing and you know shout out to the red cross i i didn't know what the red cross did in you know 2020 like what do you do they bring in dogs on the hospital beds what they do for sure they did it for me and there's nothing like laying in a hospital bed you've been throwing up for a week and you're just you don't have your cell phone you can't call your wife and they bring in some giant saint bernard that jumps into bed with you and it is heaven on earth it is it's like that little bit gets you through the hump what do you bring me tomorrow like we get some cocker spaniel's like bring him in here i don't care what it is now it's like i just need i need a dog i need something that makes me feel better and yeah dogs are amazing they are an old english bulldog just like costello i mean that's that's those are my people my my creatures um i just might get a japanese mastiff um i'd like to talk about your standards i've heard you say worst situation is being a big fish in a small pond not many people say that let's talk about standards uh first starting with physical standards and let's actually get back to the program just briefly um you mentioned the five day a week program a little while ago i saw you put out um it's a fit test basically that's designed to be done anytime no preparation after you've done uh it's gbrs yep is your program i'm going to sign up for this this is not a promotional i'm just going to do it i'm going to pay full price i'm going to insist on paying full price like everyone else and doing this because i turned 50 in about a week and i want to stay fit going forward and um let me see if i got this right it involves a broad jump some pull-ups and push-ups would you walk us through what the test is and what the program actually provides um because i know a lot of people listening are already exercising and are attached to their program right guys are like they want more lower bicep rear delt stuff but this is different this is about all around functional fitness at any age men or women so what's the program so we started that program is like a recovery from injury right i'm just trying to maintain a high standard i've i've had a high standard physically since i was 17 right i've gotten better i've had really really high points and low points coming back from injury but i wanted something to be able to maintain a high standard and we got out you start working with swat teams seal teams every team in between firemen and everybody else and it's such a physical component that cannot be ignored but so many people in the 80s 90s even early 2000s like good is good enough like you ever seen the show rescue me dennis leary and a bunch of guys a bunch of firemen in new york and they had the fat firemen big handlebar mustaches you had the young guys and you see all this stuff and now if you look at the majority of firemen they look like professional they look like crossfitters like they're in shape because they understand we've got so much data on human potential and how to get there nutrition sleep recovery training protocols and they realize that you are your first lifeline your physical vessel is the thing you can get in the airport through tsa i can get in the white house i don't need to bring any tools with me this is a really really good tool and it's always with me if i keep it at a high level so we're going through here and you know the majority of the military screen test and swat teams it's all body weight push-ups pull-ups running seal teams and special operations swim test and that's about it you'll do o courses and some other stuff but the majority of it that's just what it is well it's not reality you don't walk around there's no way in you don't walk in in a pair of board shorts and weigh in you're wearing body armor helmets you know pano night vision it's a lot of heavy stuff you have to carry so you're always under an extreme load but the physical standard was so high as a tier one level i mean the in the entire force is but you have to maintain such a high level because everybody else is around you so when i'm looking at all these guys swat team guys if you had a physical standard every swat team in the country held if the lowest dude on team could pass this test the top guys are at the super elite level you're so well-rounded you can solve anything physically and that's one of the big things in the military is you never want to have to say no can you 25 guys get up over this mountain and assault that target by zero four in the morning if if it can be done physically we can do it no matter what we'll find a way move heaven and earth we'll get it done it's really really hard to make a good decision on the back side when you are so physically taxed because no decision you're ever going to make is without being under extreme duress if we elevate the physical standard we can make better mental i mean we can we can make better decisions through mental clarity when we're not just sucking wind also true very much so in civilian life right everywhere like emts i mean business entrepreneurship school teachers everybody right if you're not physically labored you can make better decisions so that's the whole goal i don't care if you're a 45 year old fireman that has an extra 35 pounds of weight on you or if you're a 19 year old kid who's in their prime if you have to run up 10 flights of stairs carrying that hose when you get to the top execute a good decision the guy whose heart rate isn't 180 is going to make a better decision they just are and we all know it so let's set a standard that you know i don't care if it's wednesday if it's two o'clock in the morning on a saturday if you spring out of bed and take this test you should be able to pass it no matter what now what level are we trying to adhere as high as humanly possible if i hit the elite standard right now in three weeks i should hit the elite again if i start to taper off why lack of sleep poor nutrition you know just really crazy op tempo i'm in the red the whole time okay maybe i need to take a couple days off get back on my training plan to maintain that high level but we do a broad jump so power output on the floor in a dynamic fashion landing proprioception so just have people stand on a line jump as far forward as they possibly can and this the the lowest standard is your height your height right so if i'm six foot tall i should be able to broad jump past six foot what's the next level up from that one foot one foot past your height yep so seven feet would be you know middle of the road okay if i can jump eight feet that's really the standard like for me i'm trying to get to a ten foot broad jump like i want to hit ten feet and i want to hold that as long as humanly possible and you can swing your arms no running start but you just swing your arms forward jump swing your arms jump feet low to the ground dynamic fashion and i always tell the guys in reality you are not going to have time to negotiate the obstacle you are not going to be able to run up to that ditch and stop and look at and go okay i need to get i need to back it up a little bit you're going to have to go as a cop chasing this kid down this city park you're going to have to scale that eight foot fence right now not look for a step stool not oh what can i climb on to get over this you're going to have to hit that thing at full value and go up and over it you should have the physical ability to do that so we have a broad jump and a lot of people vernon has a really good thing about monkey bars like everybody was swinging on monkey bars when you're a kid in a certain point in adulthood you stop doing it but you'll look at your kid nine years old swing a monkey bar she's like oh you're doing it wrong do it this way i'll jump up there and show them if you haven't been on monkey bars in 40 years expect to be humbled really really fast it's like you lose it use it or lose it it's going to happen so we're always trying to test ourselves like what is going to make me a dynamic participant throughout the whole process broad jumps a really good expression we have that in the seal teams we had a legacy test it was a bodyweight bench press nfl it's 225 bench press it's not fair for me to give 225 to a kid that weighs 160 pounds or 140 pound woman or 50 pound one yeah your body weight though and we go minimum standard 10 repetitions 10 repetition single set with your body weight that's minimum standard 15 next level up 20 plus is elite if you can bench press your body weight 20 times you are in top tier this is full range of movement bar touches your chest your pressure not all the way to a straight arm all the way 20 reps on that pull-ups with no weight and we do that because so many guys have so many injuries so many shoulder injuries and if your technique isn't there and you're dropping out of the hole i don't want you to dislocate and jam up a shoulder so pull-ups are in there we have a farmer's carry how many pull-ups sorry the uh 10 15 and 20 plus so 10 with your body weight 15 is the next level up and then 20 20 plus is elite okay and in a perfect word we do it with weight in the seal teams we add weight to it but for everybody if you can do 20 straight dead hang pull-ups you're at the top physical game this lesson no kip uh chin clears the bar chin clears the bar okay we do a farmer's carry so with your body weight so if you weigh 200 pounds you have a 100 pound dumbbell in each hand you get up and you walk it as far as you can i'd have to look at the exact feet measurement but i think the elite is almost 300 feet 275 and 250 somewhere around there and it's not an easy thing to do but we work so much grip for the pull-ups and everything else like grip matters we say that a lot it's very hard to climb up a caving ladder on the side of a cruise ship when it's underway your grip's the only thing that's going to get you there so we really put a lot of focus on gripping firemen needed cops needed if i'm trying to if i'm trying to manipulate a full-grown man through time and space against their will your grip is a key factor in that you ask anybody who grapples when somebody who grapples and you know how to use it grabs a hold of you you instantly know you're in a world of hurt you grab some ncaa wrestler and he grabs a hold of you the first thing you feel is his hands oh no i'm just grabbing hold of a grizzly bear right now this is not going to be good we need everybody to have that same strength also someone's got to open the pickle jar exactly gotta be able to open the pickle jar but when you pick up that weight everything's in your core's in there your posture really matters upright i've got to be able to control my breathing ocular focus where am i looking and then how long can i hold on to this i've got to keep a rigid frame i can't lean over and let it take control of me i can't lean back i've got to be present throughout the entire movement and then just push so we've got that we've got a trap bar deadlift we use the trap bar because the majority of guys in that career they've already got some injuries stacked up and we actually put 45 pound bumper plates to pull from a little bit of an elevation because i've got a really long torso and the big thing we push in that program is we want you to be able to train 52 weeks out of the year there is no off season for a fireman there's no off season for a swat team guy there's no off season for an army ranger and if you get jammed up in the gym and i've done it really bad the mission doesn't care you have to go anyway and now you're not at 100 and the entire patrol in you're thinking about your lower back and if you're going to be able to be able to perform on target we can't have that we're trying to increase your confidence never decrease it so that's why you pull from that that is one and a half times your body weight is the minimum standard for how many repetitions five one and a half times your body weight okay and then two times your body weight i think it's two and a half times your body weight is the elite for a set of five you know you can obviously do more i think i did a set of 12 in that video but it's just can i pick up double body weight under control without slamming on the ground proper form in control the entire time so we add in all those so the broad jump the farmers carry the body weight bench the pull-ups the trap bar deadlift and we have an 800 meter run we also have a plank for time so a minute and a half two minutes no it's two minutes two and a half minutes and three minutes just in the forearms yeah planking however you want to hold it and we were going to do sit-ups originally but sit-ups is such a hip flexor dominant position because i have that long torso if i don't anchor my feet 50 sit-ups is really really hard for me and how do you gauge it are your hands interlocked behind your back there's a whole bunch of ways to cheat it it's very hard to cheat a plank but your core is so important and that's something that vernie got me doing i had a lot of lower back injuries as we all do i started walking around with my core at like 40 to 50 flexed all day every day my lower back issues went away instantly so i walk around with a little bit of tension all day long just imagine walking around the pool your shirt off a little bit of tension your abs and it protects my lower back so we always say be an active participant throughout the entire movement i'm never going to let my core go to jello because my lower back will spasm everything is locked in everything is in control my intensity is there my focus is there and i blocked out all the stray voltage so we get through that and then we do an 800 meter run i wanted to do 400 meter repeats do a 400 stop as long as it took you to run execute another one in the same amount of time well the swat team they have an 800 meter run we're like well since you already do it i don't need a guy that can run a marathon i need a guy that can throw a 200 pound guy over his shoulders run him up 10 flights of stairs and make a good decision so being a marathon runner while it might be great for you it doesn't really give me everything i need i really need that hybrid athlete and that 800 meter i didn't realize and then i talked to everybody who's a distance runner the 800 is brutal it's too fast to fully sprint and you can't slow down because that time metric i think is 3 15 3 minutes and 245 to be the elite so i think i'm in like the 240 range right now but i haven't ran it since i snapped my hip other than sprints i don't distance run because it hurts my hip too bad but i'm able to get through it i've got a laundry list of injuries and we did that entire test cold war we basically wrote it down and the whole thing when i sit down with vernon i was like i need something to drive to i do better when there's a target goal on the wall like two years ago it was a 400 pound bench press i have never been able to bench press 400 pounds i've missed it every time my shoulders were all blown out and i was like with all the injuries i want to press 400 pounds one time before i hang it up forever retrain the entire year hit 407 re-racked it now what i need to hold a high standard what is it well if i was on a seal team or a swat team and every dude could pass that test we have a physical dynasty because not everyone can but it gives you something you look at me and it's like i've got a laundry list of injuries dude i'm on the wrong side of 40 right now i've never taken my foot off the gas and neither should you you're 22 years old you should be running circles around me and if you're not just because you don't care enough like no one has slapped you that's the whole concept of be a pro everything i'm doing is putting me in position to be the best version of myself because the team deserves it everything i do everything i say everything i represent should be putting the group in a better position and for us because it's such a dangerous job your physical readiness it can't be ignored that is the one thing that everyone should be able to count on and they should look at you well i know john cares look at him like he didn't wake up like that that dude is in the gym five days a week because he wants to be the best fireman he can possibly be and that's where we push out and the standard has been great i mean a lot of guys get super humbled by him and you know some guys lie because i see their numbers like there's no way you did that but it keeps them honest yeah and it's tough i mean i looked at those numbers i mean i think most people who've been training regularly will find that maybe two or three of the things come naturally to them and others are difficult because everyone's got different like i have a really short torso long arm so certain things are easier certain things are harder like i think that's what i really like about it it's spread out across the table so that no one person can dominate just by virtue of some you know previous sport history or natural proclivity based on body shape or something um how often are you having people self-test on this we tell the guys whenever they're ready we did a 12-week block on it i've been traveling a lot so haven't really been able to retest we're coming up on it maybe the next two weeks or so gonna retest just to see where it's at but that was the interesting thing is i call back to the command to our strength conditioning coaches and i pulled out all my scores from a test that's very very similar bodyweight bench max pull-ups did the whole thing my numbers now 15 years later some are better than they were when i was in my 20s awesome and it's like i'm not training for that this is just the program it keeps me at a super high level and we had um we had a doctor from duke university come down and do uh some cqb testing on me and we had to test vo2 max i haven't trained for vo2 max in 20 years and my vo2 max is still on top zero zero zero one percent of the earth all elite athletes i don't train vo2 max and i my breathing is so inefficient and that's what he laughed about your ultrasounding my diaphragm he's like your breathing is terrible but it translates to where your vo2 max is awesome he's like you can live forever that's that's how we determine how long you're going to live for is vo2 max and your vo2 max it's through the roof i don't train it if you just do the program maintain it consistently it'll give you such a well-rounded approach to everything and you know that's the big thing it's i don't want to have to say no hey can you pick that up yeah can you jump over that yeah can you move that out of the way yep can you move him through time and space yep also because you have kids and they you know yeah swimming playing running around and also setting a high standard within family you know i think um there are always two sides to the fitness nutrition conversation one is i'll just say it you know i feel like the standards in the united states have drifted so far in terms of what we consider healthy um what we're willing to accept um my dad who is not he's a first generation immigrant here i'll never forget in the it was like in the mid 90s or something he said to me he said you know today what he was talking about himself he he said i went to the movies and i uh and i saw people in pajamas i was like what do you mean he's like people go to the movies now like as if they just woke up in their slippers and pajamas and i said oh yeah and he said um this is the beginning of the end he said because when that slips then pretty soon it's like you're willing to tolerate things on the street you know then people aren't weeding their lawns and then pretty soon you know it just breeds this this general um disinterest in taking care of of things and then you know i can't link it directly to people going to the movies in their pajamas but and everyone likes to be comfortable so i don't think he was saying everyone should avoid wearing sweatpants but i think what he was saying is you know etiquette and self-care and self-respect is projected outward so that's one side of it right um we have a 30 35 of the united states is obese not just overweight but obese on the other side is the opportunity right so it's always good to think about the opportunity and um the program that you're offering it clearly is great for first responders and people high intensity high demand um work but the reason i'm interested in it is because i want to be fit for the next 50 years and so i'm going to try it because um i want to train to be able to do these things when i'm 70 or 80 or 90 i figure if i get out that far it's kind of like how could i possibly do it then well by doing it every day until then right that's you know it's obvious the solution is obvious so is this a program that women men um everyone could do and is the and the training doesn't just center around these these movements it centers around the five day a week program and my understanding is there's tutorial in there like you get some you get some support because i think this is really what's missing from most online programs because anyone can go to youtube or look online go you know what's the we even have a foundational fitness protocol is what i've been you know doing for the last 30 something years and i'm always you know starting to modify that now based on gbrs uh and this fit test but it's a whole other thing to have support and have people working with you because this is about not being the only fish in the pond one of the things that program does better than anything else i've ever seen is there's probably 800 to a thousand movement tutorials they're either guided by me with vernon doing all the coaching cues big toe down feel this roll this hip over you'll feel this he's he navigates it so well verbally and physically you can watch him he'll manipulate me demonstrating exactly what you'll feel and touch then the message board on the backside so when you finish the workout everybody else who's done that workout all you know thousands of people they comment on how they're feeling and he'll read that and he's like hey guys looks like everybody's getting a little fatigued after the last couple weeks after this you know this power block we just did hey we're going to taper off the next five days we're going to regroup and following monday we're going to push and this is what we're going to do so he'll sprinkle in more running you know when summertime comes around we'll start to add a little bit more but we add in 20 minute walks every day so everybody gets them right after you leave i steal a bunch of stuff from you like shake in the sunglasses let's get some vitamin d straight in our eyes first thing in the morning set circadian rhythm i do the same thing at night it's like they've all been saying the same thing man like if you just make it part of your routine and schwarzenegger says it too like hey did you work out yesterday uh-huh i'm gonna work out tomorrow and the next day i brush my teeth twice a day too i'm going to continue doing it's part of my routine and i'm not going to miss it i've been doing this and i haven't missed session for six years and i am not going to miss one tomorrow why would i you're seeing what it's doing for me i mean i've got a laundry list of injuries and i'm silly to perform at a super high level because i'm not taking my foot off the gas there's nothing magical about me i'm a i'm the most normal dude you'll ever meet but you mean we have 65 seven-year-olds on that program and if you can't do one if you have a limitation so do we you can do a drop down menu and there'll be 40 different exercises to pick from so if i go to a hotel gym i don't have it very first thing i do i walk down i scan the whole thing i sent to vernon he's like oh only dumbbells to 50 huh i was like yeah and he'll send me a workout or i'll just drop down the menu like okay well because today's my leg day i'm actually gonna do friday's workout and i'll shift thursday because i'll be home my home gym i'll do thursday's workout on friday flexible oh it's flexible yeah it's so important i mean i think really i mean standards are what we all need for ourselves and standards are what honestly i think this country needs and and it's tricky because within this new administration you know the whole notion of maha quickly got um kind of stained by the by the politicizing of like the motives and all that like in the end people need to eat better train better and there are real medical issues out there people are contending with but just imagine if people actually started to take their physical body seriously you know this is something i i really want to i'm going to say it again later but i want to say it now very clearly one thing that i think is so absolutely clear from everything you said about your backstory where you're at now the ibogaine work your care for first responders your care for your teammates your family is that you take yourself seriously yeah so for you it's a yeah i think most people take their feelings seriously they take their responses to what's going on in their life seriously you know the at the center of our consciousness a previous guest said you know is our ego that the us the me that we're all like that to some extent but taking oneself seriously as a form of self-respect and building up one's ability to support others and to do important things for other people in our life our family and for the world is so key and i feel like taking oneself seriously is the cornerstone of everything i've heard you say today and everything you're doing that it it's not taking a feeling in a moment seriously in fact sometimes it's about doing that and sometimes it's about going no i'm gonna push that aside now i'm gonna brush my teeth i'm gonna lean into that i'm gonna do not do what i prefer to do in the moment so that i can really show up but that we need to take ourselves seriously you do you have to and i have this big thing i do i've been asked to a lot of motivational speaking lately and a lot of that i tell this story about a kid that grows up to want to be a fireman and how he got inspired by a fireman because that guy was a physical representation of what that kid thought a fireman would be looked apart act apart he's heroic he might as well put a red cape on this kid and send him through the door i mean that's what it is but that's you representing everything you think a fireman should be not just what you say what you wear how you speak do everything so for me anybody who i meet i'm giving you both barrels right now because i'm trying to live the actual life that i think i should be living that translates all the positive stuff i'm trying to put out if you saw me and i was 50 pounds overweight at a bar drinking my 12th beer talking about mental health you wouldn't take me serious talking about how you were a navy seal back when that does nothing for them yeah it's like that's not how i identify yeah i did that job and yeah you think that gives me credibility i don't care about that a bit that doesn't give me credibility the way i live my life now my daily routine gives me the credibility because no matter who you are you can adopt that same lifestyle that same routine you can grab it as a housewife you can wake up early and go out and do a 20-minute walk every single morning before your kids wake up you're just refusing to do it i don't know why but i promise you if every single person ever watches this you wake up and do a 20-minute walk in the morning in one after dinner and you do it for seven days on the eighth day the world doesn't fall apart it only gets better the more you do it it just will people just don't want to put in the work they want this quick fix they want to zimpic they want this or they're saying and i hear this and uh it's trickier for me because i'm late to the game on kids uh and family but um but mark my words but in your case you've already had kids you got a wife you have a functioning family and a very busy demanding career and a previous career that carries with it incredible experiences but also challenges and that you're resolving now and you've resolved and you have a mission in the world and so a lot of times i'll hear people say well that's easy for you to say because you don't have kids and and i'm kind of muted at that moment and i want to respond and say listen when i was a graduate student i worked 100 hours a week but i was in my 20s and i didn't have kids so i i have very little ammunition there in your case however uh you have kids and you're getting up and you're doing two 20-minute walks and you're including your family in these practices too you said your evening walks with your wife are a crucial part of your connection if anyone is struggling with building that bridge especially guys transition out of the military or career you watch it with tom brady and everybody else when they leave the thing they were put on this earth to do there is a fall from grace it can't be ignored and most of the time that splits with the wife right like the person you are now she's not used to being home and now you don't have anything if you are struggling to rebuild that connection with your wife with your partner that 20-minute walk has saved my marriage i have given it to thousands of people that right there if i could give everybody a gift the power of that 20-minute walk it's changed my whole life man that is the one constant thing i don't compromise on i mean even to the point where as dumb as it may be when i'm walking through the atlanta airport i don't get on the little conveyor belt i'm not doing that i'll walk from terminal e all the way to terminal a because it's a 20-minute power push i do it and i film it on social media i'm getting my steps in no matter what i'm not on my phone i'm showing you you can find the time instead of sitting there at starbucks for 45 minutes waiting on my flight i'll just walk back and forth i just got a 40-minute walk in straight i'm good so when i get back home it's 2 30 in the morning i don't feel guilty i haven't done anything physical today i wake up in the morning 5 a.m and i gear it up and i spin it again you can find the time rarely you have to make the time if you're waiting for it just to pop up and like oh here's a free 20-minute block you're not going to have it and people just that's the thing i can't get past like oh you know i can't wake up that early you have a thousand dollar smartphone that does anything there's not a question you can ask it it doesn't have the answer to and there's a a clock on it if you set it it'll go off when it goes off get out of bed like i've been doing it my whole life i don't understand it they just don't want to they've never felt the power of being in control of the small things why stacking up the micro winds lay out your clothes the night before i mean how many people wake up you know 20 minutes for the supposed to leave the door and just frantic like where's my black shirt where's my black shirt who moved my shoes where my car keys like that's a terrible way to start today but you're the one who's doing that if you just spend 10 minutes the night before take your shower lay out the clothes put them in the logical order you're about to get them dressed in next morning and go you'd be surprised how fast you're actually making a cup of coffee like man i did my entire morning routine in less than five minutes what i do with my next 40 whatever you want do 10 minutes of meditation sit there in a dark room and just tell yourself 10 things you're truly grateful for like i am so glad i have my wife i'm so glad i have two healthy kids i'm so glad i have a company i'm so glad i have two arms and two legs i'm so glad i'm still alive cool what are you going to do i'm going to make the most out of it go to work and do that people just don't want to make the time because they've never seen the example so a lot of stuff we try to put out is i'm trying to be a physical representation of what i'm trying to mass produce physically strong mentally resilient capable patriotic americans that's what i'm trying to do i just want you to have accountability i've accounted for all my failures all my successes and everything else in between and i'll show them exactly what happens when you do it wrong i think that's what a lot of people like the most about is i will tell you all my deepest darkest secrets because you're going to learn a lot more from those than you are about climbing everest right everybody wants to see the picture at the top of the mountain they don't want to hear about you know how many sherpas you lost on the way to the top they don't want to hear about that i do i want to hear about the real struggle like how hard is it to be you talk me through it i can learn so much from the hardships of people just unfortunately we're in a a place now where not too many people are willing to share it but yeah just trying to help out as many people as possible before i hang this whole thing up and retire man well you are absolutely helping a ton of people and today's discussion is just going to amplify that i have to say i'm immensely grateful for you i felt a kinship with you from the very first time i saw you on sean's podcast because you mentioned the skateboarding thing and i think i heard the words uh that you prefer dogs to people sometimes i think you you've embraced people uh as well um and your love of dogs uh that was the hook and then uh we have some common friends in the teams community and um that i respect very much some of whom have been guests others who are still behind the veil but um your message is so important you have very high standards for yourself and you meet those standards and you're constantly trying to meet and exceed those standards and it's also very clear that you've learned this is this unconscious genius part about maybe it's teams maybe it's just some people in it but it's clearly uh very alive in you you learn to use physical decisions real world actionable implementable decisions to create internal change so that you can engage with the world in more functional and more meaningful ways it's like the waking up early thing i i confess i've been a little weak on the waking up early thing about prioritizing sleep and this kind of thing and um there's also a strong antidepressant effect of waking up early that i've noticed and that's exist in the literature so i'm going to get back to that i'm definitely going to do the gbrs program i'm hoping other people will as well um again it's not a promotional for that i think how amazing would it be if as a country people started to really take their physical body seriously not expect some you know package to arrive on their doorstep if they were to take that pill or or that thing and suddenly they were going to be healthy and instead to really just lean into these 20 minute walks sunlight the gbrs program sounds like an awesome way to get all around fitness and to maintain that for a lifetime i just want to thank you for everything you're doing you you've definitely opened up on an emotional level to the world today and elsewhere you've opened up uh your protocols you've made it very clear that you're human that you're not perfect and that despite all that you're still going to keep striving striving striving it's a it's a magnificent example at every level so i'm really really grateful i got something i want to give you for me slide you those okay so i'm going to tell you the backstory real quick so we started doing in-house embroidery and we wanted to do an american flag hat but we sat down with tyer millican he runs all our stuff and we got an apprentice sophia that does all our embroidery in-house six-headed embroidery machine and we wanted to do an american flag hat and i got so i'm gonna try not get upset i get so sick of people ordering american flag patches off amazon from china and border stitching them on hats and letting that be a patriotic symbol is that how it's typically done yeah i mean you can go to amazon i can buy 500 of those and those are made in china yeah and i can border stitch them on there i can hot glue them on there we've got this embroidery machine and tyler's a wizard with just embroidery files and everything else and we were like let's make the american flag hat it's not going to be a border stitch it's not going to be a patch we sew on this thing like what's it going to be and he looked right at me he goes i can make you the hat but we are never going to make money on it and i was like i ain't about making money and he's like well i can't mass produce them either it's like the hat in the story i'm going to tell is not meant for mass production so when you launch those hats that hat is almost 24 000 individual stitches it takes 60 minutes just to make the flag the quality control that goes inside that if a single thread is pulled rolled anything we cancel it we toss it but that hat and i actually stitched into the bag no it's not i see what you're saying it's not a patch stitch onto a hat it's it's it is the hat it is yeah and got it you know when we first dropped those things i told everybody i was like this hat is for the people they get emotional when they hear the national anthem this hat is for the people whose children say the pledge of allegiance with hand over heart they go to the baseball games they have a visceral response when they hear the national anthem played they're not kneeling at football games they're not playing all the left side and right side they are patriotic americans and i told them if you are going to wear this hat and let anything poisonous come out of your mouth while you're wearing that hat i will fly there and i'll snatch it off your head everything you're going to do needs to represent what you think the essence of america is everything that flows out of your mouth while you're wearing that hat better be done with dignity respect because a lot of brave men and women have sacrificed everything just for that little piece of cloth so we don't mass produce and we drop them a couple times a year we'll do it like a be a pro drop a couple different times and they fly like wildfire and it's so cool to see because the people that know they know like we have done so much for that flag and i hate seeing it being misrepresented in any way shape or form you do it such in a beautiful light i would love for you to have those so those came from the boys at gbrs and i know that when you wear them you'll preach the gospel and you represent the american people in a beautiful way but if you don't i will fly out here and i'll snatch them off your head like i will anybody else but i believe you but those things those represent we've got a bunch of patriots and a bunch of veterans that work inside with us so every time we do that drop the entire the entire company we're 40 something people strong now and when that hat comes out everybody can feel it like beating the war drum on just being a good patriot and i know i isolate it for just americans but the overall message i want everyone to be a patriot everyone in the uk australia new zealand canada france if you have ownership and you are patriotic where you come from you represent it so much better than anyone else if i've never met a person from australia and i go there and i meet one person it's a positive experience for the rest of my days i'll talk about that experience so when i wear that hat i try to represent what i want the american people to be like so when somebody meets me from you know zimbabwe and i'm wearing that hat that interaction is going to be the best i can possibly be because of the weight of that thing sitting on my head oh yeah when i came out here you know i was telling the boys like i gotta i gotta bring andrew a hat and they spun him up real quick we don't drop those things till november but i wanted you to have the first one so thank you for everything and thanks for having me on man oh and thank you i'm i'm honored i will uh wear it and i will uh uh i will meet and i will strive to exceed the standard that you describe and i fully believe that if i don't you'll come out here and kick my ass that's uh that's part of the part of the deal uh we can also provide a link to uh where you guys make these and um yeah again i just really want to thank you it's clear that quality and standards is in your dna and it's in more importantly it's in everything you do right right down to the hats so thank you so much dj come back again i will thank you so much thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dj shipley to find links to his website as well as the links to the fitness program that we described please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our youtube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both spotify and apple and on both spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review and you can now leave us comments at both spotify and apple please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the huberman lab podcast please put those in the comments section on youtube i do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard i have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that i've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course i provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body and if you're not already following me on social media i am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's instagram x threads facebook and linkedin and on all those platforms i discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the huberman lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the information on the huberman lab podcast again it's huberman lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page pdfs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep how to optimize dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training all of that is available completely zero cost you simply go to hubermanlab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and i should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with dj shipley and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science