[0:08]I worked myself so hard that I turned a person this fucked up into this motherfucker right here.
[0:20]Not off of reading a fucking book off a theorist, off of going to work on myself and saying, I don't know how to do this.
[0:29]But I know that to get over there to that fucking side, I got to grind myself into a fucking fine powder.
[0:39]And I did it.
[0:43]Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.
[0:46]Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.
[0:53]Alright, today's guest is widely recognized as the toughest man alive.
[0:58]The only member of the U.S. Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, the U.S. Army Ranger School where he graduated as enlisted honor man and the Air Force Tactical Air Controller Training.
[1:08]He entered Bud's Hell Week three times in one year, completing it twice despite a seriously damaged knee, multiple stress fractures and a hernia.
[1:17]He served in combat in Iraq, was the bodyguard for the Iraqi Prime Minister, completed an ultra marathon with pneumonia and once held the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups in 24 hours with 4,030.
[1:30]All in all he's completed over 60 endurance and ultra endurance events, often winning or at least placing in the top five, and when he was asked how he's been able to accomplish so much, he says simply that he hated what he saw in the mirror enough to make a change.
[1:43]Having grown up bullied and abused both physically and mentally, by the time he graduated high school he was by his own admission broken and weak.
[1:51]But instead of accepting that, he turned inwards, stopped saying woe is me and got to work becoming the man he wanted to be.
[1:58]To do that, he learned to embrace suffering and leverage pain as a way to toughen his mind, and the resulting man that he has become and his indomitable spirit has so inspired the world that he has become the one that the driven among us hang on their mirrors as a reminder of just how much is possible.
[2:14]As iconic NFL coach Pete Carroll said, in my pursuit to understand and learn from the greatest competitors in the world, he is the one that sets the standard.
[2:26]So please, help me in welcoming the man who once ran 205 miles in 39 hours without stopping, the author of Can't Hurt Me, the legend himself, David Goggins.
[2:45]So, I am beyond excited to be doing the second go around with you.
[2:50]The first one for me was utterly transformational.
[2:54]Just researching you and the way that your mind works, I'm really, I mean, as evidenced by the shirt I'm wearing.
[3:00]I really am that guy that like put your picture up and it was just became this reminder of of what we can all do if we're willing to push past that pain and all of that.
[3:09]But speaking of pain, I want to know, why is the book called Can't Hurt Me?
[3:15]There's some, I guess, some inside fuck yous to people in there, but it's an overall message to people that we're all, you know, a lot of us are going through a hard time in life.
[3:26]Some people have been bullied, some people are distressed out, some people are insecure.
[3:30]Some people are fat and overweight and the world puts a lot of this shit in your mind.
[3:36]It's not just you. Yeah, you help it. And my whole thing is about, I had to develop a mindset.
[3:42]A mindset that was indestructible. I had to armor plate my mind.
[3:48]And it's about what you're saying to yourself, but it also comes with work.
[3:52]So, whenever I was getting beat down, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever I was going through, just saying, you know, I would put, you know, you can't hurt me.
[4:00]Can't hurt me, just became a message.
[4:03]I, you know, I would say to myself. And that's just kind of where it comes from.
[4:07]What I find so interesting is your concept of the governor, that basically, I have the chills, that an expert is somebody who's going to tell you what your limits are, rather than the person that's out there practicing getting you beyond the limits.
[4:21]So what is the governor and how do we strip it out of our lives? I believe that most human beings are only living at about 40% of their capability.
[4:30]So, the mind has a governor, like a car.
[4:33]If you're driving a car, and the car has a governor on it, the car may say 130 miles an hour.
[4:39]But the governor is set for 91. Once that governor sets in, you get the 91 that car starts doing this.
[4:44]The car wants to go. The car wants to go, but that fucking factory said, uh-uh, we're not going past 91.
[4:51]We have a factory, a nice governor in our brain.
[4:55]And it's a survival mechanism, it protects us from pain and suffering.
[5:00]The second we feel that shit, our mind says, oh no, this isn't fun. We should back off, we should sit down, find something more comfortable.
[5:07]And there's something about the mind. The mind has the tactical advantage over you at all times.
[5:15]At all times of your life, the mind has a tactical advantage over you. Why is that? It knows what you're afraid of. It knows your insecurities, it knows your deep, dark lies.
[5:24]And it starts to push you away from that shit, it pushes you in the direction that is comfortable.
[5:31]The mind controls everything. So what I realized was that, when I was growing up, and I was 300 pounds and I got all fat and I got all insecure, I realized that my mind kept taking me in this direction when things got uncomfortable for me, when I was facing my insecurities, when I was facing my fears, my mind said, oh no, we have the tactical advantage.
[5:51]We need to get you, separate you from this feeling.
[5:56]This feeling over here, life's all about feelings. We want the happy feeling. We don't want that feeling of, this sucks. Why am I here? And you don't have any, so, so you can't answer those questions, so you leave.
[6:07]I started realizing that if in that moment, you can answer those fucked up questions and you are now in charge of your brain versus your brain ruling you, that's where all that stuff comes from.
[6:20]So, so, so the 40% rule is all of that.
[6:23]You get to 40%, your brain says, we're done.
[6:26]Let's roll, man. This is starting to get painful, this is uncomfortable. So you sit down. You get to figure out ways, and everybody's different, that's how the book kind of talks about, like, we all have these things about, you know, five steps to this, and and four steps to this.
[6:40]It's it's a lot more than that. That's all bullshit. It's it's a practice that you have to, it's a habit.
[6:47]So, if you know that at 40%, I'm still, you know, I'm feeling pain.
[6:51]At 40% I'm feeling pain, that's where the 40% rule kicks in.
[6:55]Now it starts, okay, I'm I'm I'm feeling pain. My mind's saying all this shit to me, it's saying get out of here, run, flee.
[7:02]The fight or flight kicks in. Okay, we're done. We're not good enough. It starts telling you all these things, you start to believe it, because the mind controls all.
[7:12]This is the time where you have to gain control back of your mind. It said, okay, let me see if I can go 45%.
[7:17]And once you start giving yourself more and more hope, and start realizing, okay, the mind starts to be, okay, what what are you doing?
[7:25]We're supposed to be going right and you're going left.
[7:29]You start then controlling your mind. Start finding more in, you know, in yourself, and then it goes from 40% to a lot further than that.
[7:35]But that's the start of it, though. Get to, get to the spot where your mind is saying, stop.
[7:41]Wherever that is, you got to get there first, and then that's when that shit starts to work for you.
[7:46]You got to control yourself in that moment.
[7:49]Dude, we're going to try to thread a really powerful needle right now.
[7:53]So, your response to all of that has been so incredible.
[7:58]So, all right, mind has a governor, it starts to kick in when you hit pain, you're looking for areas of comfort.
[8:04]Most people then live their entire lives there, they never try to get out of it, but you had such a fascinating response.
[8:10]Uh, you said two things which I think need to be explored.
[8:13]One is that you created this alter ego, Goggins, which I think is insanely powerful and it reminds me of Eminem talked about the same thing with creating Slim Shady, was it was the way he once he had the persona he could face his fears and he could get up.
[8:26]Um, and then the other thing was, you said you need to shut the fuck up and listen, but talking about just yourself, like not to try to get a distraction, not social media, not TV, nothing.
[8:36]Like go in room by yourself and really listen.
[8:39]How do those two things, the the creation of the alter ego and that listening to the, the sort of dark, hateful things that you're probably saying to yourself, how do those work together?
[8:48]So a lot of people can live with themselves. That's the first thing, a lot of people can live with themselves, look in the mirror and say, I'm okay with being afraid.
[8:56]I'm okay with going on this easy highway over here. The easy highway has all these fucking signs and shit, directions how to get somewhere.
[9:03]And you have to first be uncomfortable with how you feel about yourself.
[9:08]With that voice that a lot of us like to run away from, we all have it. We all have that voice that's saying, hey man, you know, you're you're kind of wimping out right now, you're kind of being a little punk right now.
[9:17]But a lot of us say, okay, that's okay.
[9:20]It's okay to tell these little white lies to ourselves. So we first have to face the real you. The real me is David Goggins. The real me is a guy looking at you right now, saying, I don't want to fucking be on this show right now because I used to stutter as a kid, and I'm afraid of that.
[9:34]I'm afraid that here in a second, I'm going to start fucking stammering and stuttering, and the whole world is going to know that I have all these issues.
[9:42]But that's when I see right now, okay, Goggins, you got to go on this fucking show.
[9:47]That's Goggins. Goggins is saying, okay, David Goggins, you're a punk.
[9:53]Life made you this way. We can't live like this, we can't live in fear, we can't live in judgment.
[9:59]We can't be afraid of what the fuck people right now are looking at me saying about me.
[10:02]We cannot be afraid of that. That's Goggins. Goggins is saying, fuck all of you who don't like me, who don't want to, and that person then comes in.
[10:12]But you have to be David Goggins and say, man, I'm afraid of this, I'm fucked up here, life made me this way here.
[10:18]I stutter, I I have these issues with with with uh, reading and writing and and I'm I'm fat and I'm insecure.
[10:25]You have to face that in that dark room.
[10:30]In that dark room is who you are.
[10:33]But in that dark room is where you have to create another human being that walks out of that dark room to face who you are.
[10:42]That's the only way you're going to get over all those things. You have to create someone else.
[10:47]Not that you have two different personalities, it is you, but you have to find strength.
[10:52]And that visualization of almost me cracking out Goggins, like almost like that Superman cape, like like like I'm coming out a different person, a person that doesn't give a fuck about anything, who doesn't care about being judged, who knows I'm weak, who knows I'm afraid, who says whatever you think about me, take it, whatever, I'm here.
[11:10]That's Goggins. In the dark room, you face yourself, you realize you want to be better, you realize you don't want to be this weak, insecure person in the world who has all these problems that we all have.
[11:22]We all have. Social media is a great platform to tell you who we want to be, not who we are.
[11:29]So that's where that dark room is. I didn't know if you were going to be able to surprise me today because I I know you so well from sitting across from you, from researching you as much as I have, but I just really got emotional as you were going through that because it's so tempting to make you extraordinary as a way to not have to live up to your standard.
[11:53]Like even now, and I don't do it on purpose, because I know better than that, and I want to be extraordinary myself, but even I, like, I find myself getting caught up in that and hearing you just now talk about still being nervous that you're going to start stammering.
[12:23]Like, dude, that's when like, again, I have the fucking chills, because when you think about what you're, what any of us are going to be able to achieve in our lives, it's because we finally get willing to look in the mirror and say, you're dumb, you're fat.
[12:37]And I know right now people are freaking out when they hear me say that.
[12:41]But talk to me about raw talk. Talk to me about how you started talking to yourself in the mirror because if they get this, David, like, this is the transformational moment.
[12:48]So in my book I talk about a lot, um, it was my junior year in high school and I fell back a lot.
[12:56]I fell back in this fucking hole of life. The second you think that you've overcome it, you climb Mount Everest, you're on that last hold and life will say, not today, motherfucker.
[13:07]And it'll push you down.
[13:10]And my junior year in high school, I uh, missed a whole bunch of school, was lying my mom, have like a one point something GPA.
[13:16]I was just jacked up. I mean, it was, it was, I was in one one of the worst spots in my life.
[13:22]And my mom was going through a lot of shit too, and she didn't have time to sit back and baby me.
[13:28]It was me against me. And my parents were down on my knees, I was just, I was not whatever was going on, I was in a bad shape.
[13:34]So I went to the bathroom and I had this weird haircut cause I wanted attention.
[13:39]I was an attention getter. I went to an all white school, pretty much.
[13:43]Um, some of the kids liked me, a lot of them didn't like me, whatever, didn't fucking matter.
[13:47]I was looking for something, so I would dress differently, crazy haircuts, and I went to the mirror.
[13:53]And the reflection in it revealed a lot of bad things.
[13:58]A lot of things that I was hiding behind the saggy pants.
[14:02]And I'm looking at myself in the mirror and going like, God, dog, dude, you got to, you are something else, man.
[14:06]Like you have created a character. I want to be the cool guy table and whatever I could do to to to get attention I did.
[14:15]And it wasn't me. It wasn't who I was inside, but I was scared for anybody to know who I was inside.
[14:22]So in that accountability mirror, I call it, I got real with myself.
[14:28]And I said, you have a third grade reading level, which is hard to admit when you're a junior in high school that you copied on every single thing you did because a fear, they're going to put me in a special school.
[14:38]We all know what special means, I'm going to have a a title on myself the rest of my life.
[14:43]And being cool, you don't have a title on yourself. So I started cheating. I was dumb and people say, oh, you know, you have a learning disability.
[14:50]I had a learning disability by realizing I was lazy.
[14:54]So, um, I called myself out there.
[14:57]I called myself out every rich way possible. I didn't call myself out, I was just honest.
[15:01]I was honest. Look at yourself, man. Look at yourself.
[15:08]And it was that day and a couple of other days after that, I just got real with myself, and every day I came home, I called the accountability mirror.
[15:15]What am I going to do today to change what I see in this mirror?
[15:19]What am I going to do today? And a lot of it was, I stopped sitting with the cool guys. I actually tucked my shirt in, went to school, looking like, hey man, this is how I'm going to look.
[15:28]If you don't like it, so be it. I had to really wear this this layer of skin.
[15:33]I had to develop a really callous skin on me to to take, whatever you're going to call me, you're going to call me, whatever I'm going to be, you know, I want a geek, but whoever I am, you're going to see me.
[15:43]You're going to see me for who I am, cause I need to change who I'm not.
[15:48]And that accountability mirror just became raw.
[15:51]And I became fat over the years, I fell back in the hole, I called myself fat, because I was fat.
[15:57]And people don't want to do that. They want to say, oh, don't call yourself fat. Don't call yourself dumb. If you're not real and raw with who the fuck you are, nothing's going to change.
[16:09]And in this nice new world that we live in, we want to hear, you're just a little big.
[16:13]No, man, you might be fat.
[16:16]And it's okay to hear that from yourself and from everybody else, so that's where it started at.
[16:20]And it's raw, it it gets ugly sometimes with me and that mirror, but I'm also proud of myself to be able to tell myself that and then fix what's in that mirror.
[16:29]That that's what hits me, and that's what I really want people to hear is that you can say those things, A, because they're true, and B, because you can fix them.
[16:40]And your whole life has been about addressing those things.
[16:45]So, walk us through how in the book do you help people start addressing it?
[16:50]Because that's what I think's so powerful about your book.
[16:54]So the first thing about it is, once you realize it, and you have to realize it, you got to call yourself out.
[17:00]Addressing it is very small. It's it doesn't go from like one morning, I'm this way, next morning I wake up and presto, the, you know, five steps to greatness.
[17:06]No. It ain't that, brother.
[17:11]You read my book, this is hard work, it's every day, like like right now.
[17:15]I had to be honest with you, man.
[17:18]I'm even shaking right now, being on this show. I'm a big time introvert. How you address it is you face it.
[17:24]You face it every day, you face it every single day of your life.
[17:31]Where you say, okay, like if you're fat, you need to lose weight, it's patience.
[17:35]It's patience in this fact of accepting who you are right now, I'm fat.
[17:40]I don't like myself. Accepting the fact that if you lose three or four pounds, that's a huge accomplishment.
[17:47]You have to live in your own fucking world.
[17:50]You cannot judge yourself. That's why social media and all these things are horrible. You can't judge yourself off of the so called competition that we have made up in our mind.
[18:00]The things that, how people look, how people act, how smart someone is.
[18:03]This is a race that you run completely alone.
[18:07]And you're all by yourself. I had tons of sticky notes all over my mirror. It wasn't like, be better than John, or be as fast as whoever.
[18:17]Okay, David, yesterday you did this, today our next goal for the week is this.
[18:22]So I had a year goal, weekly goals, daily goals, hourly goals.
[18:28]And the big was I lied a lot growing up.
[18:31]I wanted to be accepted. One goal was let's go one day without lying.
[18:36]Let's go one day and then when I would lie to somebody, I would say, hey man, and I go, I had to go back now and apologize, say, man, I lied to you.
[18:44]You know how hard it is to go back to somebody and say, I lied to you?
[18:48]Hey man, you know what, back there, I lied to you, dude, I was really jacked up.
[18:52]So I figured out these ways of total, total accountability.
[18:56]Like right now, I had to run this morning before I talked to you, because why?
[19:01]That's what I'm about. I'm about mind, mat, body, fitness.
[19:06]A lot of folks talk so much shit about, hey, I'm going to change your life, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.
[19:14]Are you accountable for what you're doing?
[19:17]Are you accountable and I mean to the tea for what you're saying?
[19:21]I am. And that's where it started. It started with that total, total accountability of let's not lie today.
[19:27]Let's tell people the truth about who you are.
[19:30]And when you can get on and tell someone, like I'm doing right now, exactly how fucked up you are, that's the goal in life, to put your life on a billboard on the busiest road in the busiest highway in the world and say, this is how fucked up I used to be.
[19:46]Take it or leave it. The first time we talked, I didn't really understand, um, why the the, um, being called a N-word on your book, and you said, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because the principal told me, oh, they're just ignorant.
[20:04]And you said, that in that moment I realized nobody was coming to save me. And it hit me, but it I didn't really understand it till I read the book.
[20:10]And in reading the book, really understanding how one thing after another, from the abuse from your father, to fleeing that, to your mom being MIA, and then thinking she's finally found love, and then the fucking guy gets murdered the day after Christmas.
[20:27]I was like, really, no one came to save you.
[20:30]No. And seeing that now and hearing you tell these stories, I realize like that's the crux of the power.
[20:40]But how did you stop feeling sorry for yourself?
[20:43]When you really sit back at your life and you in that dark room and you're looking at where you started from and you tell yourself, God, dog, man, my mom is this way, my student dad got murdered, my dad beat the shit out of me.
[20:58]I can't read and write to save my fucking soul, I've lied about it to everybody, I've cheated on all these tests.
[21:04]My God, man.
[21:07]And then you put a goal in your mind.
[21:10]How you going to feel, man, when you accomplish this goal coming from that shit?
[21:16]Coming from the fucking hell you came from. A lot of people start from a good starting point. They have a good foundation.
[21:23]What if you can surpass all of these motherfuckers?
[21:26]We have everybody who was fucking way up here.
[21:29]Started up here, and you had, you started with no legs, you had to grow fucking legs to even start walking, then crawling, then running, and then you start passing people with all that's given to them.
[21:40]I had to use all this negative shit that was making me weak and horrible as a person.
[21:46]I had to use this as the power that now fueled me.
[21:50]I had to flip it on its head and say, hold up.
[21:53]This might be exactly what I need. The darkness is exactly what I need.
[22:00]It's how you look at your situation. And I was looking at it all fucked up. In the book, you tell people to make a list of everything working against them, every real, valid excuse.
[22:11]Why do you have them do that? There's a lot of power in that list.
[22:17]So in that list of who you are, what makes you fucked up, all these other things, it goes back to once again, accepting.
[22:24]You have to first accept it before you can fix it.
[22:29]A lot of people walk around, oh man, I'm good. I'm good. No, you're not. You have to accept what you're not. You have to, and and people don't want to do that.
[22:40]And that's the only way you can fix it. You have to accept it first before you can go on the journey.
[22:46]A lot of folks never even start the journey, man.
[22:49]They never start the journey because they live in this fake life. That who they want to be, they act like they are, but they're not, because they haven't fixed all this stuff yet.
[22:57]You got to fix this first before we can start our journey in life.
[23:01]So I have to make this list. You fix these problems, now your journey can begin because you no longer care about how people are judging you.
[23:09]When you care more about how someone's judging you, you're going to stay right there.
[23:14]There's no forward momentum. So that so that's the whole thing about that list. All right, speaking of making that list, accepting where you're at, so that you can address it.
