How to Build Immense Inner Strength | David Goggins

The episode opens with Andrew Huberman identifying himself as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, then introducing David Goggins through a dense stack of credentials: a retired Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, a highly accomplished ultramarathon runner whose races are often longer than 200 miles, an inductee into the International Sports Hall of Fame, a former holder of a Guinness World Record for the most pull-ups completed in 24 hours, and a graduate of Army Ranger School. He adds that Goggins authored two best sellers, Can't Hurt Me and Never Finished, and frames the life as an arc from an abusive home and an abusive school environment, essentially no positive resources directed his way, to obesity above 300 pounds in his 20s while working a job he despised for minimal pay, and from there into the Navy SEAL, ultramarathon runner, bestselling author, and extraordinarily positive and influential man he is today. Huberman attributes the turn to an inner dialogue that forced Goggins to explore the demons born out of his childhood and the position he found himself in as a young man.

Huberman explicitly differentiates this conversation from Goggins's earlier podcast appearances. He says they will of course cover the accomplishments and the mindset that allowed them, but that today Goggins really lets us under the hood, into a form of inner dialogue he has to embrace and grapple with daily, sometimes multiple times throughout the day and night, in order to impose the self-discipline he is known for. He promises to get into scientific mechanisms underlying willpower and into Goggins's current endeavors, including his exploration of science and medicine as an intense scholar and practitioner. He warns that curse words will appear multiple times, distinguishes cursing from cursing at somebody, acknowledges it is not for everybody and that parents especially might object, and says the episode is probably not for anyone who does not want to hear it, while assuring those who can tolerate it that the discussion is highly worthwhile. He also states that the podcast is separate from his teaching and research roles at Stanford, though part of an effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

Before the conversation begins, Huberman delivers three sponsor reads that belong to the podcast format rather than to the argument. Maui Nui Venison is pitched via a general consensus that most people should strive for approximately 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight and a high protein-to-calorie ratio, with jerky offering as much as 10 grams of protein per stick at something like only 55 calories. AeroPress, described as better than a French press, was developed by Alan Adler, a Stanford engineer who also built the Aerobie Frisbee, which Huberman believes at one time held the Guinness Book of World Records for furthest thrown object; Huberman says he has used one for well over 10 years and brews with it in hotels and even on planes. Eight Sleep is justified by the claim that body temperature has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees to fall and stay deeply asleep and increase by about 1 to 3 degrees to wake refreshed, and Huberman says he has slept on one for almost three years. He also mentions drinking coffee usually about 90 to 120 minutes after waking, although not always. These numbers are the host's own framing, not findings from the interview, and they bracket the discussion before Huberman finally says, 'And now for my discussion with David Goggins.'

Credential set Huberman supplies for Goggins: retired Navy SEAL with service in Iraq and Afghanistan; ultramarathon runner at distances longer than 26 miles and often longer than 200 miles; International Sports Hall of Fame inductee; former Guinness World Record holder for most pull-ups in 24 hours; Army Ranger School graduate; author of two best sellers; a childhood and young adulthood marked by an abusive home and school, no positive resources, and obesity above 300 pounds in his 20s.

After a short greeting in which Huberman recalls Goggins visiting his Stanford lab in late 2016 or early 2017 and doing some work later that day down in San Jose, Huberman says Goggins embodies discipline and doing hard things and proposes starting right off with the bold truth. He pivots to a topic raised just before the hot mics: that Goggins is currently spending time learning and doing things most people do not typically associate with him, and asks him to describe it.

Goggins says most people see him only as 'the guy that runs and yells as he's running,' a performance done to motivate people, whereas his day is actually broken into segments: he works out, eats, sleeps, but spends most of his time studying. He says he is a paramedic in Canada and spends a lot of his time trying to 'nuke every single thing' about the medical world, not merely to learn veins, arteries, and how the heart pumps, but to reach the point where he can save someone's life by dissecting exactly what is going on and figuring out what medication goes where. He calls this learning 'the algorithm of what's going on.'

Huberman takes up the word algorithm and turns it into a teaching principle: when he teaches biology or learns anything related to biology and especially the human body, he needs the nouns, but 'it's the verbs that matter,' because saying that a brain part sits there does not tell you how it all works together. He then asks what Goggins's studying process actually looks like, imagining a camera in the room and a microphone dropped into his inner dialogue, and asks whether the same resistance Goggins has described around physical work also comes up around studying, or whether he wakes to the books with a fresh-day eagerness.

Goggins insists on keeping it real. He says he was nervous at first, that he is not a real smart guy, that he was born with ADD and ADHD, that his brain cannot retain information, and that he is no genetic freak at running or lifting weights, but 'absolutely the bottom of the barrel.' He anticipates that people will never believe him. His method is brute repetition: he studies the same page over and over while Jennifer, who knew nothing about the material, can learn it on the spot just by quizzing him, which he calls the most frustrating thing in the world. He sits with pen and paper, writes everything down every single day, and studies a page until it becomes photographic memory from writing, then relearns it, then learns the small things within it. For a medication he first learns how to pronounce the name, since the words are very big and not like albuterol, then learns the dose, and he stresses this happens every single day, with no point at which he can say he has got it. His summary is that everything he does in life sucks.

I am absolutely the bottom of the barrel.

Goggins connects this to his origin. At 300 pounds and 24 years old, he says, there was no epiphany about becoming a Navy SEAL or losing weight; he knew his entire life was going to be a struggle and simply ignored it, refusing to try to learn how to read, write, memorize, and become something he was not. Out of that process, he says, he realized why he feels sorry for no one, and he braces for listeners who will think he is lying, fibbing, or exaggerating: he describes himself as the lowest form on Earth, with no talent and no ability to learn, someone who literally knows what it is to be rock bottom and to build up from there. Now, he says, at 49 years old and a multi-millionaire, he does not have to do any of it, yet what he once longed to escape became 'a way of living,' a discipline, a regimen, and a choice. He frames that choice as what you are willing to sacrifice and give up to find every bit of who you are as a human being, and says he was willing to give up everything.

Huberman says he loves that Goggins is studying, recalling an interview or podcast in which Goggins casually floated maybe becoming a scientist, and says he believed it because he knows Goggins and has seen his work, even though learning medicine and human physiology is so detailed. He gives a concrete illustration of that detail: in a textbook, veins and capillaries are drawn in different colors, but when the body is open they are not different colors, some things have different color contrasts, and nothing is labeled when you pop it open. Goggins agrees repeatedly, 'Right, right, right,' and 'Exactly.'

Asked whether he rehearses the material on runs or segments his day, Goggins says he is, as he speaks, back at the table writing, and that he writes in a way that lets him memorize a specific page, page 69, so the writing and the page sync together in his brain and he can look at the book in his mind, literally flipping through pages while taking national tests to become a paramedic or advanced EMT and recalling where a fact sat on a page. When he runs, he says, he cannot recall any of it, because the focus required is total. He says he is not a great runner and is not injury free: for the first 20 minutes of a run he is limping after several knee surgeries, his body was twisted and is now untwisting, and he is focusing on how to get the best out of a broken body. Everything he does, he concludes, is a total focus on what he is doing at that point in his life.

Huberman offers the first of two extended metaphors. He says Goggins seems to have trained away or somehow gotten away from the ADD he mentioned, picturing a deep V-shaped trench with a ball bearing that can only travel forward or back rather than sliding around the concave bottom, and asks whether full focus while running versus studying feels like the same groove applied to a different thing or a completely different world.

Goggins answers that it is a completely different world and that both are suffering, but suffering in wholly different ways. He recalls third grade, when ADD and ADHD were not met with medicine but with the proposal that he be put in a special school because he was so far behind he would never learn. Refusing to be treated differently, he says he never took medication for it, which is why he can look Huberman in the eyes. This produces one of the exchange's most contested claims: he does not feel bad for people with ADHD or learning disabilities, though he immediately qualifies that some are impossible because a person simply cannot, while a lot of people could learn and simply do not want to go through the process of focus, of teaching yourself how to truly focus. He says this is where his message gets lost, because he swears out of passion, since it takes everything for him to learn a sentence, and he cannot speak about David Goggins calmly, because he wakes knowing the journey it takes to find his greatness. He explains that his tempo rises as he speaks because he is back there doing what he does every day to become a human being. He says running sucks but you have a choice whether to sit down and go back to the guy you once were, and that he does not do podcasts to maximize money or recognition, noting this is only his second podcast since Rogan and since the book came out, because he does these things in case someone out there understands and can grow from it.

Huberman names the shared theme, saying friction feels like a word cast above them in bold face, highlighted, underlined letters, and Goggins reduces it to a flat equation: friction is growth. Huberman tests it by imagining Goggins going to the coffee maker, stretching, and saying good morning, sunshine, and asking whether there is really friction from the moment his eyelids open.

Friction is growth.