Andy Stumpf : The Most Important Thing I Learned As a SEAL | Joe Rogan

When you're sleeping at night. Ooh. We camped. We would do snowshoe, like just deep into the back. So we would go and do, you had to do your cold weather training, so getting your dry suits on and swimming through the surf at nighttime. Oh, wonderful. Which is an ice cream headache over and over and over again as the ocean breaks over your head. It's pretty bad. And the cold weather immersion test is there where you have to get into the water with just a pair of shorts on for five minutes and just then rewarm yourself. So they get you to a point of hypothermia right to the edge? It's, I think as many things are in my old job, there is a aspect of learning and there is an aspect of tough it out and you combine the two. So it sucked and there was a reason that they wanted it to suck, but they were also trying to teach a lesson. Right. But God forbid they just teach the lesson. So they make you suffer to ingrain it probably. Yeah. So one day you wake up and on the board, like a little whiteboard that has the list of gear you need. It just says shorts, running shoes. And I'm like, okay, this is February in Kodiak. What are you talking about? Literally it was said, shorts, running shoes. Oh no. Get out in the Ford Econoline van. So we all get out there and they drive to the beach where seawater is freezing at the edge and they say, okay, go out. You have to completely submerge yourself neck deep water five minutes. And the timer starts when the last person submerges their head. Oh God. So you might be first, you might be like an overzealous fellow. You can rush out there and be all fired up and you're just going to get seven and a half minutes is what you're going to get. So you go and you sit there and it's the cold, it hurts for a minute and then you're numb. The worst thing about it actually is rewarming. It feels like you're just getting pinpricked over and over and over again. Yes, that's actually Barklow. Oh, that is Barklow. Look at him standing up there on that rock. Well, Barklow has a great rewarming drill that we actually played on the podcast before for Sitka, where he takes their gear and jumps into a lake. So that is the test that they're doing. Yeah. And then re-worms himself with basically all Sitka's gear and figures out how to get your body back to... I thought it was interesting that I never really considered was that eating food actually ramps up your body heat because you have to burn off the calories. Yep. Your body starts processing the food actually is good for elevating body temperature, eating food, especially if you can get hot food, of course, but just eating. So the drill he was doing actually had much more, I would say, educational benefit because they would make them, they would take them there with all of their gear. Their gear list would say, whatever they were wearing, plus bring your tent, your sleeping bag and all your stuff, because we're going to put you into the water and then you need to survive your way out of it. Oh. So they would have to erect a tent. They would have to get their sleeping bag out, all after being in the water for five minutes, which is exactly what a survival situation is going to look like. For us, we went in there, got back into the van and I sat in a hot tub and drank beer for the rest of the day. So I got the understanding of what it feels like to be hypothermic and that just, see, they have to push their head underwater. That guy right there is either screwing everybody or was the first person to complete it. Now Wim Hof does so much of this cold water submersion stuff and he actually enjoys it and loves it. Yeah. Do you think that there's a way that you could use his methods and get through that with less pain? Potentially, even though all of the skills that I used in Kodiak, I did not ever use a single one of them operationally. I use his breathing method in the cryo tank. That makes sense. That makes cryotherapy. That makes sense, but those Arctic conditions, I don't know, at least in the modern theaters of war, we're engaged in, I don't know where the applicability would be. So it might be a little bit of a benefit versus time expended to teach the guys that stuff. Hmm. You know, because unless it's, we're talking like Korea, probably farther in the northern, you know, latitudes, I mean, it's, the training was amazing. Like I said, I didn't use a single bit of it. Right. But it's something, well, it's also building mental toughness and determination. And that's why I said there's an aspect of learning and there's an aspect of just, this is going to suck. Hey, you guys, guess what? You're going to do a 20 kilometer hike into the back country in snowshoes. There is no end state to this. There's no target you're going to do anything on. You're just going to go out there and you're going to do it and you're going to survive out there and it's going to suck for three days. And then you're going to come back. You just embrace this stuff. Or you learn how to pack your backpack better, you know, or you learn how to move better over that terrain or you learn how to navigate in that environment. So there's always an essence of it, but it just happens to be that there's usually a pain component with it as well. Yeah. A lot of military training is like that. There's an essence of pain compliance and then the actual learning technique as well. Yeah. It's the learning technique. I mean, it is really, you're, you're learning a technique to manage your mind under sucky conditions. That is a technique as well, right? So I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this recently. I'm of the opinion that really the only thing that I learned how to do when I was a SEAL was to enhance my ability to learn other things. It's you're selecting for people and to get to that point, you got to maintain control of your emotions, whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're cold. So there's that essence of self-control, but then they require so many different skill sets and so many different things that the selection process is looking for. And then at the end of it, teaching people how to become better learners. And then you just refine that over and over and over again, over a career. It's the ability to learn is probably the biggest takeaway that I have from my time in the service. I think that's the best thing you could ever really learn is learning how to learn, like learning how to learn correctly, learning how to actually pay attention to what someone's teaching you and absorb it and follow the steps rather than fuck it up with your own ego and your own insecurities or whatever it is, it's going to trip you up. If you can get good at something, you can apply that to almost anything if you really focus. Yeah. And then they would pair it with, we'll surround you by, okay, we want to make you better at shooting. So we are going to go find world champion pistol carbine shooters. Go apply your ability to learn with them and we would do it for weeks. Okay. Now you're going to specialize, you're going to be a point man. So you need to be able to navigate and climb. So we're going to send you out to Joshua Tree for two weeks with world-class climbers. Go apply your ability to learn with them and then jumping and then diving and then tactics and then fill in the blank over a career.