David Goggins on "Taking Souls" - Joe Rogan

The thing about it, man, I talk about my book, Open-mindedness. What separates me from a lot of people is they go into a daunting task, and the task is overwhelming. Like when I heard the pull-up record was 4020 pull-ups, and I was talking about breaking this record, people are like, oh my god, I went right to a pen and paper. They're like, what are you doing? I'm doing the math, man. What are you talking about? I'm open minded to the fact that, okay, if I do five pull-ups in a minute for so many hours, I can get so many pull-ups in. How much time do I have to rest? I was breaking the math down. You have to be open minded to the possibilities that I can do this. Once you shut your mind down to the possibility that it can be achieved, there's no way it can happen. So that's why my eyes and my body light up about things, because I know that if you're in a fight, you have to attack. You have to keep attacking. The enemy has to know he is not going to give up. You must break the soul of whatever the fuck is in front of you. That's what I realized. I was never breaking the soul of anything in front of me. So that's why I came up with a thing called taking souls in my book. I started to devise ways to break a soul of a human being, of an object, of whatever's in front of me. If you keep on attacking something, nothing wants to stand in front of anything that is relentless. Nothing. The taking soul part of the book is really interesting because you talked about like the mind shift that you had when you were in buds. Yes, sir. That's an intense part of the book. That's when a lot of stuff started clicking, man. I started watching those instructors on the side. There's three shifts. There's eight instructors, three shifts. The guys going through Hell Week, they're up all day and all night for 130 hours. This is the promised land of mental hardening for me. I love this place. And you have the instructors who, they've been there, done that. Now they're instructing you. So they do the eight hour shift. They have their parkas on. It's usually cold, coffee, drinking their coffee, and they're beating the crap out of us. And when I started to realize, I started playing mind games. I was like, you know what? I bet these fuckers are looking at us judging themselves about when they were going through Hell Week about, let me see, I'm looking at Goggins right now. I was better than him. I was better than that guy. I was better than that fucker over there. And I was like, okay, okay. You got to judge me, right? All right. This is something I do to you. So what I started doing was I got my boat crew. Boat crew too. It's in the book. It's a great, great story. I said, come here guys. You can't break boat crew too. Can't break boat crew too. So it's Wednesday and everybody's broken. Everybody's beat up, man. And like this, I mean, you start moving like a robot. Everybody's like just kind of just trying to get through Hell Week now and your energy's zapped. And they know Wednesday's like that over the hump. I love that you talked about that in the book too, that they put it in your head. Wednesday you're going to be tired. Oh yeah. And that's another thing. They, they tell you how you're supposed to feel. So you are feeling that way. I was like, uh, don't let these motherfuckers tell you how you're supposed to feel. No, it's day one motherfucker. This is hour one. So I was getting my boat crew all jacked up. I said, we're going to take these motherfucker souls. So when they had us doing this simple thing that guys are struggling with, broke crew too is just lost in the fucking boat and you're yelling. Yeah, you can't fucking hurt us. Can't hurt boat crew too. And I looked on the instructor's faces and it looked like someone had just fucked with their soul. And I looked at my guys in my book and I said, Hey, guess what? Those motherfuckers aren't fucking tonight. We own space in their fucking head. We own space. They're going to think about us tonight. They're going to think about how the fuck you're killing boners. That's right. Charging. And we start fueling off of that. We start fueling off the fact that man, it takes one second of energy to steal everybody's and then you have all the energy you need. So you need, you need to look at someone's eyes. You know how it is when you fight somebody and you broke that motherfucker. He's like, Oh God, man, I don't want to go back to the next round. And you feel like my God, I can fight all day. I can fight all day long. That's what taking souls is. But you have to have the will, the heart, the courage to go that distance. When you're exactly jacked up, we have nothing left to give and give more. That is an interesting thing about the mind is that you can find inspiration. And when you find inspiration, when you get charged up, all of a sudden you have energy. That's right. It's right. It's weird. I talked about in the book also is about, I learned how to control my adrenals. If you know how, you know how you get that fight or flight response when you get the move real quick. Yeah. And you know, I started learning the mind a lot, how to get myself jacked extremely fast, like in a horrible environment. When everybody's miserable, I learned how to really find strength in the misery. When everybody's suffering, everybody's all poopy pants and their mentality is down and everything. I started just like, my God, this is where I shine. And I started using all that misery for tons and tons of, tons of drive and motivation to, to, to then lead people further. Cause you can get a lot of power through misery. And once people see that my God, God is this fucking going, then everybody says, Roger that, let me get my shit and go too. So I started realizing that if you can just find strength, just a little bit longer, you will have a crew of people following you along the way. And that is another thing that no one can ever teach you. Because you, you're going to have to learn that on your own. You're going to have to figure out how to pull that energy out of your mind on your own. There's not, there's, there's no book you can read that all of a sudden I have it. I've got the technique now and know how to do it. Yeah. No, it's, it's a grind that you have to start and finish on your own. You have to take great pleasure in the fact that no one wants to be with the fuck you're at right now. Great pleasure in that. Most makes, you know, it has to bring a passion out of you. It has to bring something very, very weird out of you, man. Like, you know, people don't really understand what that is when you're in the worst environment possible, the worst situation possible. And everybody's looking like God, man, I hope this ends. And you see that time slows down and you see that you're, you're feeling that everybody has that look on their face. Like God, it's got to go. I don't want to be anymore.