#1212 - David Goggins

Boom. And we're live. David Goggins, your book is fucking fantastic, man. This has been my running partner. The audio version of it has been my running partner for the last week. It's fucking amazing, man.

Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Well, you guys are doing something very unusual. The book is great. I've read. I've read it, like, sat down and read, read. But the audiobook is really interesting because you and the gentleman you wrote it with.

Yeah. Adam.

Adam. Adam Skolnick, Adam Scholnik. Who reads it. Then you come on and talk about things in between. So it's more than just the book. It's the book plus. It's the book plus, like a podcast, right?

Yeah. So how that came to be, man, is as I was going through this book for the last year, we would go through, change stuff up. I have so many stories, man. We went through interviews, so many people, so many stories. He would come back and read it to me, all my changes. And when he reads, I'm like, man, this guy has a great reading voice. I love his reading voice. And I started getting these different ideas about doing. I was like, you know what? Maybe he can read. And I can do my podcast thing on the side, and he can, like, after each chapter in between chapters, make it real interactive type of thing. And that's kind of how it came to be, man.

In the beginning, I got to be honest, at the beginning, I was like, who is this motherfucker talking for David Gardens?

I was going to call Dave.

Like, Dave, you redo this, why don't you do you? But it works, right? It really does. As. As it goes on. And I got also, it's very obvious that you and him are good friends. So when you guys are talking, then I don't mind him reading for you as much, for some strange reason. I know it doesn't make any sense.

Well, I want to say we're good friends. I'm just joking. Adam, though, you can hear right now. He became a pain in my fucking ass during this process, man, because he's a real anal guy. He helped out a lot. I'm a real raw, sadistic type of mindset, and he helped me put that on paper, man. So I give him a lot of credit for that.

Well, it comes across. The book is outstanding. And it's more than just sitting, like, sitting across you and you telling your story is one thing, but this long, detailed history of how you became. To be the person you became, I think it's very educational for people because they can realize, like, oh, he wasn't always this guy, right? This is what's fucked up about people like, you see a guy who's like you, who runs. I mean, how many ultra marathons did you run in a row? You had some insane.

I ran eight hundred s and eight weekends in a row.

Just stop and think about that, ladies and gentlemen. 800 means 8100 miles races. Eight weekends in a row, 100 miles race will put you out for fucking six months, right? And you ran eight of them. Eight weekends. It's a fucking insane accomplishment.

It was nuts.

You think about a person like that, you think of them as in this static, fully formed version, right? You don't usually get to see, and especially someone like you, who you went into so much depth about your rise and fall and rise and fall. It wasn't like a straight linear process between you getting inspired and then you becoming this bad motherfucker.

No, it wasn't like, what's that show called? That Will Smith plays that black guy who kind of makes it in the financial world. Pursuit of happiness.

I never saw that.

Yeah, it's a great movie. It wasn't like pursuit of happiness, man. Like, where the guy struggles and he gets over it and he makes it. I fell on my ass. I thought I got the top of Mount Everest and Mount Everest just fucking slide right underneath me, man. I was like, God, I got to start from scratch again. Scratch became my friend. Literally, man. So that's how you put in the book, man. Just going up, going down, going up. Just a real raw version of how my life was. It was so in depth. To go back through your life with a fine tooth comb that I almost got embarrassed to even put it out there to people. Yeah, that's what I understand, man. Even me right now to talk to you. I'm in the car for a fucking hour getting pumped up because I'm a shy, introverted, leave me alone type of guy. I'm still that motherfucker who is six years old at a play who can't say his line because I know I'm going to stutter in front of five people. So I walk off stage. That's still me. So every day I'm fighting that dude. So people think, oh, my God, man, you're in a podcast. Look so crazy, so evil. No, I'm trying to be locked into Joe so my mind isn't very off, saying, let's run out the damn door because people are watching me on the fucking podcast. I want to open this damn door and get the hell out of here, man. So that's the real me. So I'm not sadistic, man. I'm focused on what I have to do to stay locked into the game of life. And that's why I tell people, man, I go there. I go there.

That's one of the reasons why this book is so good, is because you're so honest about your vulnerabilities and how you overcome them. And for people that see someone who's a beast, who's done great things, you just assume that they're different than you, right? But then you hear about your insecurities and your pitfalls and all the things that went wrong with you, and you realize, well, God damn it, those are the same things that go wrong with me. Maybe I have that inside of me and I've just never summoned it, right?

And I'll tell you this. I started really realizing that when I started overcoming myself. I started getting around these real alpha males, these hard, hard men. And I always put people way above me when I was growing up. Like, my God, they had to have a lot more than me to get to where they're at, and a lot of them did. But once you get around the best of the best of the best people, you can kind of start breaking them down and realizing, man, you're just as fucked up as me. But all you did was you hit it better. Your upbringing, your mom and dad, your society, the way you were raised, it hit it better than mine. You weren't the only black kid, or there was like, five in a school. I can't hide. Going through buds, I was only black. You can't hide. But I started realizing, just because I look different than you, a lot of you mufflers can't hide, either. So it started giving me courage through watching people, that we all have a story. We all have a jacked up life in one way or another. Some of us don't have the guts to talk about it, though, and that's where I found the guts to talk about mine.

Well, there's purity in physical pursuits, right? Because it doesn't matter what your social status is. It doesn't matter how people perceive you. When it comes down to how long can you stay in that pool? When it comes down to how far can you run? When it comes down to how much can you push yourself past the part where you want to quit, how far can you keep going? There's a purity in that that dissolves social order. All that bullshit, all the what people think about you goes out the window. It's, who are you right now?

That's right.

Who are you right now?

That's a true statement, man. And I look at it as psychological warfare. And that's where I started learning that life is one big psychological warfare that you play on yourself. You play on yourself, man. The most important conversation ever had is with myself. And the shit I was telling myself was so fucked up, it was so wrong, it was so misguided. And other people start to write that dialogue for you also, and it starts to be what you say to yourself every single day. And I started creating a whole nother warfare, a whole nother battle started becoming. I was like, oh, hang on a second, goggins, you have these tools. You have these tools. Your life was basically the perfect grounds for training for where you need to go in your life. All the beatings, all the bullying, all the you going through, learning disabilities, all the struggles. It was the absolute perfect training ground for you to go to where you need to go. And that's how I start looking at my life. Versus woe is me, poopy Pants, kick a rock down the street mentality. It was. Nah, God just hooked you right the fuck up. He hooked you right up, man. With the perfect place. You were training for the first 18, 1926. You were training for this stuff, man. You had the advantage of everybody else versus, my God, they're so above me. They came from a great family. Mom and dad love them. They didn't have a learn. They didn't start. They didn't struggle. No, man. Your struggle is what made you who you are now. So I started flipping this into a whole different. I started being a master of what I was scared of. I was scared of my mind, and I became literally a master of that mind. And that's what now, from now on, it sets me apart from most people. I started diving into that.

Well, that is a big part of the story, is when you go over your childhood and your abusive father, and then having this great guy that was going to become your stepdad, and then he gets murdered. It's like, right when you're about to get out of it, everything looks good.

Boom.

Then he gets murdered. It's like these things really did sort of set you up to start from scratch again and just go, okay, roger that. We start from scratch. And now you have that attitude. You developed it through all of these horrible personal experiences, all the trials and tribulations, all the evil shit that people try to do to you, that sort of set you up to be able to deal in a way that a lot of people can't.

Well, I used to look at my life from a different vantage point. And when you're in all the muck and you're just walking in muck and walking in muck and walking in muck, you don't see that if you look off to the fucking left of the muck. There's a sidewalk, brother. Get off of it. You have your head down looking in this muck. Once I saw the sidewalk, got the sidewalk, I got a little break, and I got a different vantage point. And then from the sidewalk, I found a cliff, then I found a mountain. I got way up high on top of my life and looked back down on it and said, okay, I got to figure this out, man. I'm not going anywhere. I'm starting to lie. So when you have a messed up foundation. I started lying about everything. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be accepted in some society of life, some social society. I was like, man, this isn't the right way.