#940 - Cameron Hanes - The Harsh Price Of Extreme Performance

I can't believe it's been two years.

I can't believe that it was two years since I was with you.

I know.

We got a good, lot of good material out of that discussion and that time, that day.

I still see clips everywhere.

Did anything stick with you from the few days that we spent together?

I like, you know, you've kind of repurposed some stuff.

Like, so I love seeing that, but I think it's just that

footage going up the mountain with the rock and you chose it it talking about chosen and unchosen suffering.

That that's going to last forever for me.

I mean, it's such a good

point, you know, and just that setting to have that message delivered at that time

was just so powerful.

So, yeah, yeah, I uh, I really appreciate how complimentary you were about me in the book.

Uh, it feels like most of the first chapter is some bullshit that I've stolen or said.

Well, well, look, I, if we need to take a 72-pound rock up a hill, you carrying the rock and me spouting nonsense, that feels like we're specializing in where our skill sets lie.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I see.

Yeah, but you carried the rock.

Also, would we do 11 miles?

Too much.

Too many.

At least 10 too many.

So that was the, I mean, that's the furthest that I've run,

maybe ever, was that with you.

And that was trail running.

And

it was great.

I actually felt great the next day.

Sometimes, I mean, you'll know this, or maybe you won't because you're always running, but the non-runners will know this.

You've always got one body part.

If you've taken a big break from running and you're not conditioned, there's one body part that always hurts.

Like, fucking, for me, it's my ankles and my calves.

Okay.

Like, just, it is always on fire.

And maybe it's because we were trail running.

Maybe it's because the pace was right.

Maybe whatever.

But I felt fine the next day.

What I was concerned about was whether or not you would have wrecked me so much physically on day one that when it came to like my bit, which was the sit down and spout nonsense stuff, that I would be sat there going, it's so much fucking pain, I can't even focus.

You're great, yeah.

And that I, I, uh,

I'm thankful we were able to go out to you know where I grew up and I could share that part with you too, because I, I just wanted, and I've heard you mention like on a few of your podcasts, you mentioned you know, the poser on the rock and the gym and like the stuff that I do and kind of reference to

that lifestyle or how I grew up.

Because I, I wanted to share with you because it's so much different than, well, in some ways, different, but in some ways, I felt alone too, just like you did.

But I think when people, they hear like little nuggets from somebody else, and then they always latch on to whatever they can identify with.

So, there's a few things that you mentioned that

really resonated with me, but I was just thankful to share everything,

my little slice of the world with you.

And it was awesome.

Eugene, Oregon's a fun, cool place.

I loved it.

There is

a lot of differences growing up in the northeast of the UK, growing up in Oregon, but I think the principles end up being the same.

You know, this sort of

question

about what do I deserve from life.

That was a great analogy.

And I can't, maybe it's in the book also, but that Puritan work ethic, you know, we talked about where, you know, you're supposed to work.

And I think you mentioned,

I can't, but like the work, I can't remember how you told the story,

but was it about the priests that used to work out in the sun?

In the fields.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this

belief that suffering was in service to God.

Yes.

Right.

That

they're hoeing the fields and the sun's beating down on their back.

And, you know, this is kind of the same as like, you know, like whipping yourself

to.

that the actual suffering itself was a tribute.

And

it's in some ways it's noble because you're building up your resilience to difficult things.

But in other ways, it's fucking pointless because the suffering is not in service of a thing.

Now, obviously, if you're theologically minded, then you're like, yeah,

the tribute is there.

But

yeah, I think even though very different places,

a lot of similarities.

I was very surprised with that.

And then probably in retrospect, totally shouldn't have been.

Working class, you know, limited opportunity towns probably end up producing similar sorts of mindsets in that way.

Yeah, probably.

It's, yeah, even though it's other side of the world, similar in some ways.

But yeah,

I think people love the discussion, but you're so good at articulating thoughts, ideas, sharing things you've read, just really putting, giving context that people can really take home.

That's, you know, you just get these sound bites that are so powerful.

So that's your skill set.

You're great at it.

Yeah, I've collected the best of what other people have already figured out and repurposed it onto the internet.

So I guess, like I say, I get to turn the tables today.

And we missed each other on the first book on Endure.

And then you've got Undeniable, which is a new one, which is fucking awesome, by the way.

Thank you.

I wanted to ask this when we nearly spoke the first time.

I'm interested in what drives you because you've done some pretty stupid, pretty extreme things to yourself across a variety of domains.

I'm just intrigued into where that sort of relentlessness comes from.

Man,

what, yeah, I don't know.

What's crazy is I don't, I don't remember ever being asked this before.

So what,

man, I don't know.

Now, now it's like when you go through life, and there probably was decision-making at some point, but now it's kind of just what I do, sort of.

And,

you know, I'm just going to get up.

I'm gonna get my the whatever work I have I'm gonna get it in whether that's 20 miles or whatever it is shooting the bow um you know now it's content creation you got that's a never-ending process but now just the hard stuff I think you're talking about like the challenging and the mountains that's just what I do um

before it was what before it was what I do

I don't know I think that was where that was uncertainty.

It's like, where do I fit in this world?

What do I, and it's not even like, I never even asked myself, what do I have to offer?

Cause I didn't think I had anything to offer.

So you never even got to that, that part, but it was just like,

is this it?

Is this

just going to work and

trying to pay bills?

And it's like, I remember like even a tactic I had,

I haven't even done a checkbook in a long time, but my wife's in charge of that.

But like even just writing out checks and I would just, I was never thought, I never thought it was going to,

anything I did was going to last.

So I'd be like, if I, if I had a check for like $17, I'd just make, make it for $20, put it in a thing.

And I'm like, well, at the end of the day, I should have more in here.

Instead of being exact, I just wanted this cushion of like, I just want to have a little bit more than what I think.

And then I can just get through if a challenging time.

That's as far into the future as I ever thought.

It's just like, let's round up in the check.

Yeah, just so I got a little buffer and that there is no future.

If I was thinking about the future, that's all I did right there.

I know the difficulty of trying to put yourself in the mindset of somebody before

a

trait became a habit or before sort of an effort became a habit.

Yeah.

In my experience, I think

where most people get stuck, and this is why

consistency is such an unsexy topic,

what people are looking for for the most part is getting from zero to one.

So I'm not,

a lot of the habits or a lot of the ways that I show up in life and a lot of the things that I'm doing aren't going well.

Please explain to me the first few steps to get to a place that I want to be.

And that's great and pretty doable.

You can go and explain to somebody how to

effectively run a 5k.

It will warm-up, pre-race preparation.

Here's some good shoes that aren't too expensive, and here's a cool down process.

But what's really difficult to explain to somebody is how you do a 5K three times a week for five years.

Like you kind of can't explain how to do that.

The same thing with going to the gym.

Mike Isratel, who you should have on the show, I think he'd be a great guest.

I'd fucking love to see you two together, actually.

He can explain how to do the perfect tricep pushdown, the maximum muscle hypertrophy, and, you know, he can all of those things.

But he can't explain how you do that with progressive overload once a week on that cycle and two other muscle groups on other cycles for a decade, you know, to get the physique that you want.

Right.

And

when you look at someone like you, who is very consistent, who is disciplined in that way,

you almost,

it's such a part of your being, the habit is what's kept you going.

And whatever the fuck it was that got you started, this fear of insufficiency, this desire to not be nothing, this need for validation or to prove yourself, this desire for control over your environment, you know, this sense that things are maybe a bit destitute or a little bit hopeless, but fuck, like in the gym.

I remember this, dude, when I, when I first started training, I started lifting weights when I was 18 when I went to university, the Center for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University.

Yeah.

And

I remember I had this idea in the back of my mind, which was

everything in my day can have gone to shit, like everything.

And I've woken up and just, you know, face planted from

attempt to attempt.

Uni went badly and girlfriend and me had an argument and this thing went wrong and that thing went wrong.

But I went to the gym and it just felt like this

area that I had complete control over.

And

that was absolutely in the first instance what got me there and a desire to be stronger and feel a little bit less weak and vulnerable and, you know, be more attractive and gain confidence in myself.

And then now it's just, why do you go to the gym on the morning?

It's like, which I don't know.

It's, it's, it's 7.40 a.m.

That's where I am at 7.40 a.m.

I'm in the gym.

That's what happens.

Yeah.

So yeah, something gets you started.

And then I guess habit keeps you going.

Yeah.

That's, I mean, and that's the secret because most people, like you said, you started to get a little muscle, started to feel a little bit better about yourself.

But how many people get there and then slide back and then have to start back over to get there again?

You know, so they get a lot of times they get a little of that,

dopamine is whatever, but a little of that positive reinforcement hit and that feels great, but then they still can't

make that consistent, you know, because life gets in the way or I don't know, or they get distracted or they lose enthusiasm, whatever.

The key is that consistency decade after decade after decade.

And that's why, like, I even think like me back in high school, yes, I was an athlete, but there was better athletes.

Now I've been doing it for 40 years.

There's nobody that was better than me that's better than me now.

Right.

So is that the, but who can probably no one that's still even running.

Who can think 40 years in advance, right?

So, so all you're thinking is about, well, this is what I do and I just got to keep doing it.

But it's, sounds really easy.

Isn't it interesting?

I don't know of any books that have been written about consistency.

I know about books that have been written to do with discipline

and motivation and overcoming hard things and resilience and becoming undeniable and stuff like that.

Yeah.

I actually think that consistency would be such an unsexy book.

It'd be a pretty short book.

Yeah.

Don't keep doing the thing, don't stop.

Yeah, just keep doing the thing, don't stop.

And, you know, I think that

you asked that question, you know,

why or how or whatever, but I wonder if like

everybody goes back to their their childhood.

I mean, childhood trauma does kind of affect us forever, right?

But, like, my childhood was pretty, a lot of upheaval, a lot of ups and downs.

So, maybe the one thing I could control was what I was doing, you know, like even in the first book I talked about as a five-year-old, I was in first grade, and I would go before school and run a mile by myself.

And I would do is 31 times from the fence to the fence.

You had to do it 31 times back and forth for a mile.

And I would, I started school early.

I'd do that as a five-year-old.

So maybe

nothing was,

I wasn't in control of anything, but I was in control of that.

So maybe that hasn't changed.

Maybe like, no matter what happens, I know I'm getting my run in.

I know I'm going to, even if the whole day goes to shit, I think you kind of mentioned this, you at least got one win.

There's a win in there somewhere.

Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons why injuries for people just feel like such an unfortunate curse you know it's this weird fucking irony that all of the people who uh sit on the couch and don't have a health and fitness routine have perfect spines and it's all of the people that have tried to do crossfit and yoga and brazilian jiu-jitsu that are all bulging hemorrhaging degenerated disc lost half an inch in my heart and blah blah um

and

this was something toward the end of my 20s that i had to deal with where i had you know five-year period where i was pretty much always injured in one form or another.

So annoying.

Bulging disc, second bulging disc, ruptured Achilles,

hurt shoulder.

I was, you know, my entire identity, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in being, you know, like the big, muscular guy in his 20s around other big sort of dudes and that giving me confidence and making me attractive.

And then I had to be in the corner doing bird dog rehab in the CrossFit gym while everybody else was sending it and getting after it.

And I was watching myself get fatter, slower, and skinnier all at the same time.

That's rough.

And

an interesting thing there is, okay, so where do you take your sense of self-worth and well-being from

when your coping mechanism, because let's, you know, it is a coping mechanism.

Training is, yeah.

Yeah.

For a lot of people,

if you wanted to be really,

you know,

RX plus super difficulty level resilience, it's, okay, how good can your mindset be when you're not allowed to train?

Because to you, the thing that's easiest is going out and going for the run.

Right.

The hardest thing would be, okay, for the next two weeks, you got to sit on the couch in the morning.

Yeah.

Like, what?

Well, you can't meditate either.

You can't use it to do something else productive.

Right.

It would tear people up inside.

Yeah.

It's a, I've been, I've been injured.

And I have a big race coming up Monday.

And

I've been injured.

It stemmed from my foot, but now it's up to the hamstring where every time I tried to run hard, it would tweak my hamstring.

So I was supposed to do Boston with Truitt, my son.

I was supposed to do Eugene.

We're going to do that as a family and race and do all that.

And I couldn't do either one of them, right?

So, but I knew I had this big 250-mile race coming up on Monday.

And I'm like, well, I can't just not train.

So I just had been walking around Eugene.

And I was, one day I walked 27 miles.

Took me

six hours.

Fuck.

It's quite quick walking, I think, as well.

Yeah, it's, it's so, you know, and that's kind of like these long races, like 250 miles.

You are walking because you can't run all the uphill, you can't run for three days with no sleep, right?

So, you have to, there's strategic walking.

So, I'm like, okay, fuck it.

I guess I'm just gonna hone my walking game.

And I've just been trying to get 15-minute miles, which is a pretty good walk, you know, if you try to get four miles an hour.

And I was just doing that.

So, that

I think it was last week, I walked 150 miles.

Yeah.

And

so I would, instead of sitting and rehabbing like I should, I'm not, I'm not running, I'll just fucking walk all day.

So that's what I did.

Right.

That sounds like a very sort of litigious way to get around.

I've been told that I can't run, but they didn't say anything about warping.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

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Yeah, dudes, I

we need to have a chat about Truitt.

What the fuck is what is he built of?

He's

yeah, he's a machine right now.

You know, it's

it's weird because I get credit for my kids, you know, and they're like, oh, you must have done such a good job.

I didn't.

I mean, I pushed those boys way too hard.

I mean, I was just, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

I was young.

I was in my 20s.

So

I didn't know how to be a dad.

My dad was never around.

I hated my stepdad.

So I knew I definitely didn't want to be like him, but I didn't know what a dad was supposed to be.

And I'm like, well,

okay, I'm I'm just gonna prepare these kids.

I know how life is, I know life will fucking kick you in the nuts, so they're gonna be ready for anything.

Life is competition, they're gonna be ready to compete.

So,

I had, I pushed them really hard, and it was not great all the time.

So, what did you do?

Um,

you know, it was just always a battle, it's just like

you know, it's we're running every day.

You guys

got home from school.

Okay, get your stuff on.

We're going to go do Pisco.

No kid wants to go run a mountain.

And I'm like, no, this is, because the way I thought of it, thought it of, of it was,

I had a terrible childhood, but it made me tough.

So I'm like, you guys have everything.

You have everything I ever wanted.

Your dad's around.

Your mom is here.

She loves you.

You have every shoe you want, every basketball camp you want to go to, you go to.

I said, so

the way this is going, you're going to grow up to be a couple of big pussies.

We're going to make you tough.

So I would just make them do hard things.

And

I made it, they both did half marathons when they were seven and eight years old.

True just put up a picture.

He looks like he's this tall.

He was tiny at

eight years old, but he ran a 154 half.

like this tall, which is eight something minute miles.

And

all that to say that, yeah, I had the kids do really hard things for many years to prepare them for what I said was life's challenges.

And it made it,

you know, if I was, it reminded me, did you ever see the movie Tree of Life?

No.

So Brad, Brad Pitt's in it and a great movie, but he was super hard dad there.

When he would leave, it was like, fucking playtime, right?

Mom, kids, jumping on the beds.

And then dad would come home and be like, oh, God.

So I said, this reminds me of me when I was, when you go out of town, it's just playtime, come back.

It's like, oh, shit.

So that's not great when you're the bad guy all the time.

You know, dads are usually the disciplinary and that's whatever.

But I was also like, you know, making them do these really hard things.

So they see now and they see all the success, but it wasn't great.

And anybody from the outside in would look and say,

what's wrong with that?

That dad is pushing those kids too hard.

You know, it's like any basketball game, I'm just like, a loose ball, you better be on that floor.

And I said, I want to see floor burns on your knees.

I want you diving on, I want you playing

harder than any kid out there.

So that's a hard, that's a hard

thing to live up to.

Kids just want to have fun.

They want to play.

They're not looking to compete every day, but I made them compete.

So it was a challenge.

Now you see what that results in, you know, and you know, Tanner, he was a Ranger.

He's freaking badass.

It's probably tougher than Truitt.

And then Truitt is, you know, doing these crazy things and getting all this attention.

And yeah, I mean, it's great.

I'm glad to see it, but I didn't, I wasn't perfect raising.

Do you regret it?

Yeah, I regret.

I regret.

I remember when Tanner went to the Army, he was a deputy deputy back home, very proud of him.

Such an important job.

He, you know, a corrections officer, just worked at the jail, but still, it's, you know, a good job.

It's like paid the bills.

I was proud of him.

We need people who need men to do that.

So

he said he was going to join the army

and he wanted to be a ranger.

And I'm just like,

you know,

you get deployed.

And I'm thinking, what if,

you know, he, I think it was because I would tell them that average is failing.

If you look around, you see the average person, that's not us.

That's not what we want to be.

So we're not, yes, I know people need to work at gas stations and do things, whatever.

That's fine.

That's, but that's not what we're settled for.

So he, he said he wanted to quit.

He didn't want to be a deputy more.

He wanted to be a ranger because he had more to offer this world.

And I was thinking, was that me who fucked up and said this at being just having a regular job was somehow failing.

And I just had so many regrets.

And I was just like, I told him he's getting ready to go to basic training.

And I'm like,

I said, Tanner, I'm like,

there's nothing wrong with having a regular job,

being a family man.

And I said, there's nothing,

I was wrong.

I was wrong to say what I said, raise new kids.

And

because I was thinking about what if he got deployed and was killed.

And it's just like

because of shit I said, trying to make my boys tough.

And this is a result.

So, yeah, I was like,

yeah.

I definitely have had regrets over how hard I pushed them.

Yeah.

I think.

It's such a delicate balance

to

give your kids the life that you never had and the life that you worked so hard to be able to afford them with,

whilst also knowing where most of the important realizations that made you into the sort of person who could provide came about due to restriction and difficulty and tough times and toil

and a little bit of maybe a bit of resentment and a little bit of

unfairness in childhood that galvanized you to sort of do something great with your life.

Every single, look, dude, every single parent that I know,

and even more, tell you what, be fucking grateful that you had your kids in your 20s because if you'd had them now, imagine how much of a differential your lifestyle is materially, in terms of resources, in terms of status and notoriety and opportunity and all of this stuff.

You would be like

floating out in space.

You know, you would have no idea.

The total frame of reference would be out of the window.

There's not a single dad that I know who has sort of crawled out from the place that they were as a kid and made something of themselves who doesn't have that exact concern about their children.

I think it is one of the most common worries.

Ben Francis, he's the guy that founded Gymshark.

Gymshark's completely bootstrapped.

He still owns 70% of it.

Gymshark's worth over, it's nearly $3 billion, £3 billion company.

This guy's like, worth like £2 billion, like $3 billion.

And he's 31.

He's got twin boys, but he grew up like as rough as they come in Birmingham with a granddad that made him go and work in like a clay mine or a pottery barn or something like that.

And I've asked him this question.

I'm like, how do you intend on navigating this one?

How do you intend on teaching your kids the lessons that you learned from a very working class grandfather, their great-grandfather,

whilst also not throwing away the entire reason for working as hard as you did which was to be able to afford your fucking family yeah the life that you never had right so you know first off i think you did the best that you could so you need to give yourself some grace with that and

look

if this was so if 50 was like the middle of the bell curve of how much toughness versus easiness you could give kids, I would guess most kids and most parents are too far on the easy side.

I think snowplow parenting, helicopter parenting, gentle parenting, whilst

noble in its intentions, is usually kind of over-pattern-matched and results in soft-entitled adults,

narcissistic, soft-entitled adults

when they grow up.

Given the choice between the two, sort of being pushed a little bit further on the other side

is a very strange kind of gift.

I think

what would be interesting would be to know

how much of that is actually because of the way that you raised them and how much of that is just your genes.

The more that I learn about behavioral genetics, heritability of different traits and so on and so forth.

Like,

this should be comforting.

As far as I can see,

there is no such thing as really getting parenting right.

There is only getting it wrong.

And getting it wrong,

kids are pretty fucking resilient.

Like they're really, really tough.

And

you see perfectly balanced adults that grew up in horrendous childhood environments.

And I think as long as there's no really extreme, well, maybe you would say some of the climbs with the rock were slightly extreme um

my point is

i get the sense that if they're made out of the same stuff that you're made out of

they didn't really have a choice whether you made them go up the mountain or not i think that there is a lot more built into you you know you're talking about consistently running for four decades and thinking about

framing that up against what that meant in your childhood and you know the sort of relentlessness that you approach like even the pod when you started that i think that was episode three, two, three, four, something like that.

It's now like, what, 160, some shit?

Like even with that, that's, that's not, that's a level of work rate that most people don't hold up.

It's just a minor little area then in the hunting and then in the lifting and then in the bow stuff and then in the running and then in the so you know

maybe

there is maybe it's contributed, but what I would, if I could sort of bet a couple of chips on the the roulette wheel of a couple of other universes in which you'd approached your kids differently

I think they'd be

probably

90% 80 or 90% of the way there just with less experience about how to deal with it yeah and one of the best things you can do for your kids I think as a fucking look at me spouting nonsense as a non-father the internet loves when I do this

One of the best things that you can do is set a good example.

You know, you can read all of the books about healthy attachment and child education and socialization and all the rest of it, but they will learn more from the way that you and your wife show up for each other around the dinner table than every lesson that you try and force into them.

Like you can top down try and tell them how they're supposed to behave.

This is how you're supposed to treat girls.

You don't hit girls and you don't do this and you must toll the door and you got to be this way and be blah blah blah.

It's like, all right.

But then when you're around the dinner table, you're a prick.

You look at your phone instead of looking at your wife.

Yeah.

Or you ignore her or you don't laugh at her jokes or you guys don't relate well or they never see you be physically affectionate to each other, or whatever it is.

It's not for me to say that you need to force a relationship, but the point is, I think that kids learn by seeing a lot more than they get learned by being told.

And that's what you're doing.

Even if you hadn't made them go up the mountain, you were like, I'm off to go up the mountain.

They'll be like, well, dad's going up the mountain.

Like, can I come up the mountain?

You know, so.

Yeah, it's uh, and I was thinking also, too, it's not just like what you do, but when you have that mindset about life is competition,

hard work is the key, whatever,

that is impacting how you talk and how you carry yourself.

Because everybody

says the right thing.

They tell their kids what you're supposed to tell your kids.

It's like, as you said, no, you hold the door for women.

You be respectful.

Everybody says the right stuff, but how you carry yourself.

And then

how you talk, not when you're delivering some ultimatum or some direction, but just how how you, what's your mindset?

And that's when it's not controlled, when it's not, you're not thinking about it.

So

my mindset was always,

let's do more, perform more, push harder.

I guess to your point, that even if I wasn't, they were seeing that.

Of course.

It's,

yeah, it's,

you know, you talked about Truitt, you know, originally, but even for him, it reminded, your story sort of reminded me of his.

Like people see him now and they're like, I mean, he's easy to, he gets hate too, because he's easy to hate, definitely.

He's got a lot going for him, and that's, that will

build some resentment over with some guys.

But for him, he lost for years.

He, he didn't miss a day lifting weights for like

14 years.

Still hasn't.

I started them lifting when they were 14, both him and Tanner.

And since that time, he hasn't missed more than a day.

So

it was loss after loss after loss.

He's like tiny, not getting big.

He, and he mentioned this.

We did this.

We're doing this video on his pull-ups that, you know, he broke the world record.

And he's just like, he goes, I don't think, he goes, I didn't realize that

Tanner was kicking my ass every day as his older brother.

Anytime we'd compete, me against him, I would never let the kids win.

It was always like, it was always a battle, always

crying.

I mean, kicking the basketball down the street because they're so mad.

Go get it.

Tanner,

I was throwing like football as hard as I could, making him catch it because he's a receiver, drops it, punches the ground, breaks his hand.

So there's like, All these losses, essentially.

So Truitt said, I didn't know that, yeah, I was getting beat by my older brother.

I was getting beat by you every day.

He goes, I didn't realize Tanner was the biggest beast, one of the biggest beasts he's ever met.

And he goes, and I didn't know you were who you were.

I thought, he said, I just thought I was weak and a loser.

I didn't know that I was going against these

people that were making me.

So people see him now.

And I'm like, if you could see him back when it's 14 years old, and when he's in high school, get, he was five foot, like 90 pounds, got cut from the basketball team, even though he was really good and most skilled because he was too small.

They don't see all that.

They see now and they're just like, oh, what is he on?

Steroids?

And it's just like, no, this is, this is a kid who hasn't missed a day in the gym for 14 years.

and trains for hours every day and doesn't drink, doesn't do anything but get enough rest to perform every single day.

This is what you get when you're that dedicated.

But people, they want to ignore that part.

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There's a very special type of distaste and envy that the internet has toward

certain types of successful men.

I still haven't kind of fully worked out what it is.

It's kind of like the inverse of pretty privilege that

girls have.

Yeah, that girls get.

But, you know, dude, chicks do not have it easy

around other women.

Like, if you're an attractive woman, you better watch your back because holy fuck, they're coming for you.

Yeah.

Like, they are coming for you hard.

But in the same way,

men, masculine men,

guys that certainly seem like competent, especially if you're young.

If you're a bit older,

I think guys are a tiny little bit less threatened.

I think a lot of this, you know, from both sides just comes down to mating.

That

if you're a hot woman, then you, with your hand in your boyfriend's hand, thinks you better not be fucking looking at her, bitch.

Like, what's she wearing a skirt that short for?

Yeah.

And the same thing in reverse.

And here's an interesting stat: the only

one of the most predictive

traits around enhancing attractiveness is masculinity measured by muscularity.

So, if you're a guy and you are a five out of ten and you get yourself in the gym for a decade, you're probably going to be like a six or a seven, you know, assuming that you don't fuck your face up in the process by dropping weights on it.

Basically, there was this fascinating study done by a guy called David Putz, and

he got

women to rate the attractiveness of men, these images of men, and

got men to rate the same men as how likely do you think it is that you would beat this man in a fight?

Okay.

So you have a female rating of attractiveness and male rating of formidability.

Right.

And then 12 months later, they brought the men that were the photos

into the study.

And they said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last 12 months?

The female rating of attractiveness had zero predictive power.

The male rating of formidability almost exactly predicted their most the

level of like sexual partners.

Really?

So what it seems is

formidability,

especially as sort of

shown by that typically masculine, and this isn't the only way to get into a woman's pants or whatever.

It's not the only thing in the cool, artsy, heroin-looking fucking guitar player.

It can be hot too.

But there's exceptions

typically this seems to be one of those things and i wonder whether if you look at someone like a truet who is a young kid who's full of energy kind of doesn't give a fuck who is only going to get better

like in some ways it's inspiring but it's only inspiring if you're remotely close to his level right because

if you're looking at someone who

doesn't have anything special about them.

Not in the same way that you same bolt has something special about, like, he's godly, right?

And he's in a sport that feels a bit untouchable.

Yeah.

Everybody's tried to do a pull-up.

Everybody's thought about running a marathon slowly in jeans.

Maybe, maybe not.

I wonder whether the closeness that people feel and the fact that there's nothing ostensibly special there,

it throws into very harsh contrast.

Well, why is that not me?

Why can he do that and not me?

And

the easiest place to go to would be privileged upbringing, silver spoon,

unfair assistance, enhanced genetics, enhanced hormones,

cheating with form,

whatever.

I don't know what the criticisms are.

But it helps people to close the gap between somebody they would want to be like and themselves.

Yeah, they reckon with it.

Yeah.

It's a, you know, that's, it's kind of a double-edged sword because you, nobody can identify or relate to Usain Bolt because he's got that God-given talent.

But and it's, it's kind of been what I've used also is like, you can come from

nothing, a regular job and had success.

So then it kind of, it puts a pressure on other regular guys.

He's got no excuse.

Yeah.

And so both Truitt and I have benefited from that.

It's just like he looks like a regular guy running in jeans, but he's doing these incredible things.

And then, so it does allow him, because if you look at his followers, it resonates more with regular people because it gives them hope that, oh, maybe I can be better

than like an elite Olympic athlete doesn't have near the followers Truitt, who is like a run fluencer is what, you know, they, some of these elites say, this new craze of marathon excitement and these run groups and all this.

It's just like, they don't deserve it because

they're not elite like I am.

But because they can relate to the average person, that's where they get the power.

So yes, you get criticized by the regular people who feel threatened.

Like, okay, now, so I'm expected to do shit like this too.

But you also benefit from it because.

Well, just to sit on that for a little bit longer, I think it's a really, really good point that

this sort of narcissism of small differences, the fact that you don't, you haven't come from a different place, you're not in a sport that's untouchable or unreachable.

And there's two ways to respond to that.

One is, holy fuck, this normal person did something extraordinary, that means I can too.

The other one is, this normal person did something extraordinary, that means that I am expected to too.

And the expected to thing

shows you all of the places that you're falling behind because you know that if not for my discipline and my consistency, there could have gone I, right?

That could have been me in principle, but it's not.

Why?

And when you get to the why question,

you have to face the facts that, well, because I didn't not miss a training session for more than two days in a row.

Like the why.

Yeah, it's an ugly realization because the realization is boring.

Yeah.

And the realization points the finger at you.

And I see this in myself, dude.

I see, you know, especially when I was a bit younger, this fucking bitterness that used to come out in me.

And it still does now.

Sometimes in my more juvenile, less equanimous moments, if I've not been fucking meditating enough, I'm like,

fuck that guy.

Like, he had this thing or this was unfair.

That's not it.

And it's just ego.

It's just, it's just you trying to protect yourself from this weird status game because previously we knew we were in 30 people pods in a 150 person tribe and you knew the best hunter and the best everything else and you were probably not that bad at a couple of things yeah which meant that you had some value compared to the small little group exactly whereas now we're

even though we know that we're not friends with truer haines uh

we don't know that we're not supposed to compare ourselves to him

so our

like status mapping ability has just spread out across the entire planet which is why so many people feel inferior yeah um and you can take it as inspiration or you can take it as a threat And

I see why people take it as a threat.

And then if you've got fuck you energy and you're doing it in glasses, like, you know what I mean?

If you're going to twist the knife a little bit, people are going to say, go fuck yourself.

Yeah, it's,

yeah, it's been crazy to see.

I mean, and it's not like nobody's immune to being criticized or nobody's immune to the effect of being criticized.

You know, nobody likes to read the shit people say.

So, and he's no different.

But I just would, I would just encourage people to take a look and think about it.

It's like, I mean, because I can think when I first started training and I I was bow hunting and having success and I was running marathons.

And I remember the old guard or the gatekeepers would say,

oh, yeah, so you have to, now you have to run a marathon to kill an elk.

And I'm like,

nobody ever said that.

I'm just, I'm just showing you what I do.

You know, you can do whatever you want, but it like put this expectation there.

And, you know, and now when people look at Truitt, I just want, I want to remind people that there was a time when he I could help him up on the pull-up bar.

He was not getting getting a pull-up done.

He had new skinny fat.

You've heard that term?

You couldn't get any more skinny fat than my boys were.

They were just skinny, regular young boys, skinny arms, two bodies.

It's just like nothing special, but that's where it starts.

That's where everybody starts.

I've just realized that the

World Marathon record for wearing crocs just got broken this weekend.

Yep.

Fourth Times a Charm.

That was the UK's Tommy Trees mindset as he made his fourth attempt to put his name in the Guinness Book of World Records and finally he came out successful.

Sunday's London Marathon Trees put his Crocs into sport mode and clocked a 248.48.

Pretty fast.

Surpassing the previous record for the fastest marathon wearing foam Crocs.

41 new world records.

Over the past year, the record for the fastest marathon in Crocs was broken four times.

So this is really heating up.

The London race marked Trees' 12th marathon and followed three failed attempts to break the fastest marathon dressed as Santa Claus, which stands at 233.23.

And he's also got a 229.41 when he's not in Crocs.

So he pivoted from dressing as Santa to doing it in Crocs.

So I think Crocs and Jeans is that's the perfect blend.

What's happening with his jeans, the marathon thing?

What's he doing next?

Next, oh, he's doing a last man standing race here in Austin.

Okay, that's Knicks place.

Knicks race, yeah.

Yeah, so that's that's a 4.2-mile loop every hour for as long as you can do it.

Yep.

So that's, but Guinness won't approve a jeans marathon.

Why?

I have no idea.

Because Truitt tried to do that too.

And I tried to do like, I was going to run a marathon with a bow.

Okay.

Like, just run with it.

Yep.

They wouldn't approve that either.

And so I don't know why, but they'll approve dressed as Santa, wearing Crocs.

A guy just, this other guy in Boston, Jordan Madox, he ran in dressed as a banana, set the world record.

Okay, as a fruit.

Okay.

So, but they won't approve.

Oh, he broke the banana and the fruit world records.

Like, he could be the quickest banana, but an orange beat you.

I don't know.

Actually, I don't know.

You break this down by

fruit type.

I don't know if it's banana, fruit, or something.

I think the banana, as far as fruits go, the banana is probably pretty aerodynamic.

Yeah.

You know, you want to be pretty, you know, slicing through the

don't want to be a pear.

This is real slowing you down.

No.

Or a watermelon.

No, also bad.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's, it's fascinating, dude, watching this thing unfolding.

Obviously, after getting to hang at you with you and kids at your house and get to meet everybody and sort of watching the last two years, it's been kind of unsurprising, you know, to be honest.

It's unsurprising or surprising?

Unsurprising.

Oh, totally unsurprising.

It's like the least surprising thing that could have happened.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to see it.

I mean,

yeah, True's doing good as far as like he's selling his sponsorships and he's doing like Road to Sub 230 or Diatrine.

So, you know, it's like a weekly video series.

So, yeah, he's, I love to see it.

What was watching him do that, the most recent pull-up record?

Like,

um,

yeah, I mean, it's,

I just remember it's a big, it's a big ask: 10,000 pull-ups.

You got two contact points, basically, your hands.

That's a lot of pressure, a lot of reps, a lot of little stuff that can go wrong, ligaments, tendons.

You know, Goggins tried it a few times before he got it.

And one time, I think live on Good Morning American got injured.

So did it alive some other time and got injured.

So there's no guarantee you're going to make it unscathed through a challenge, 24 hours of pull-ups.

But for Truitt, I mean, he's so dedicated and obsessed.

He had trained so hard.

And it's like, and when he got it, I just, you know, that night, I just remember saying,

you know, good job.

Not surprised.

This is,

this is what you're supposed to do.

This is,

if, if you weren't doing shit like this, then I'd be like, what the fuck's going on?

So this is what, this is what I expected.

This is, this is the

expectation that's always been there.

I told the boys and my daughter too, for that matter, but you guys aren't normal.

I'm not normal, isn't okay.

Average isn't okay.

You're supposed to be doing stuff like this.

That's why we're here.

So it's like, I said, good job, but yeah, not surprised.

Expected job in some ways.

That was it.

He did what he's supposed to do.

Like I said, dude, it was not, it was, it was like the least surprising thing

that could have happened.

I think it's cool that it's something that no human has ever done.

He did 10,000, no human's ever been to 10,000 in 24 hours on pull-ups.

So it's, and as you mentioned earlier, anybody who's tried to do a pull-up,

fucking five pull-ups is hard.

Five pull-ups is hard for me.

It's like 10,000?

Crazy.

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You've said, I've seen you say that you think love is the most powerful form of motivation.

What's the role of love and passion in this?

A lot of what we're talking about so far is...

It's like aggression, it's gripping, some resentment in there, there's, you know, sort of wanting to prove people wrong.

And then you talk about love and passion.

Where's that come from?

Yeah, I don't know.

I think

I might say passion.

Love.

Sometimes the saying I have with love is like,

love makes me strong.

Hate makes me unstoppable.

So I still lean,

for whatever reason, I am motivated by hate.

by people talking shit, by people not believing in me.

If somebody supports you,

I mean,

that's great.

I don't want to say I don't give a fuck, but

hate is what pushes me.

Hate and people discounting what I've done or my effort or my goals, that.

That's what drives me.

I don't know why.

But love is great.

Support, I appreciate support.

But I just think that, you know,

I will, you said love and passion.

So passion, yes, because

in in my book, I talk about outliers and, you know, you're one of them.

But what, what makes somebody an outlier in my mind is this passion for this thing.

What's this thing?

What's this thing they do?

For you, it's just, you know, thought-provoking intellectual discussions, like peeling back the onions, figuring out, you know, modern wisdom.

And you're the best at it, right?

So whatever you had this passion to learn, to learn more about human behavior and the brain and the body and sexual attractiveness and different things like that,

passion drove that, right?

So I think passion is what sets people apart.

Love and hate, that can go either way.

It's interesting thinking about how hate is a better motivator or a bigger motivator for you,

because it puts anybody that wants to bring you down in a very awkward position that they have to compliment you in order to not drive you further.

They have to say something nice if they want to slow you down.

Yeah, I mean, but when somebody says, you know, how many people say, yeah, you know, love you, it's just like,

is that real?

But hate

hates.

That's usually pretty real.

It's real.

Yeah.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

People are flippant with their love, but they're not that flippant with their hate.

If they hate you, that means something.

That's deep.

That's why it's like, I think that's why that drives me.

That's fascinating.

Yeah.

I've never, I've never considered that

maybe because it's sort of

socially desirable to sort of say that you love something typically, you don't want to be seen as a hater all that much.

Yeah.

That there is maybe more emotional activation in someone's hatred than there is in someone's love.

And you're like, holy fuck, like I, I got to this person.

Yeah.

I did got to this person.

Yeah.

I, so that's where I get, I'm more fueled by that.

Well, I, I, this is one of the things that I, one of many things that I learned spending a couple of days with you,

having

Must Be Nice written in the gym and POSER written on the rock.

And I've mentioned this on the show a bunch of times.

Like, huh,

like, why, like, why poser?

And I asked you about this and you explained that.

72 pounds is 72 pounds and there's nothing you can do about it.

And you can say what you want, but come and carry this fucking rock up the hill and see if you think that it's, you know, all for show after that.

Um, I didn't realize until now that that's because you were

fueled way more by people's distaste than people's support.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

It's a that if somebody's telling you how good you are all the time, for one, you can start to believe it.

And then you, to me, if I'm hearing that, I'm losing my edge.

I'm like, I don't want to hear that shit.

That's, I appreciate it, but I want it, I want an edge.

I want to know why you don't think I'm.

So that's what poser, that's why it's so powerful to me.

I like when people say, oh yeah, fucking Cam, poser.

Yeah.

I've been thinking about this for a while.

I haven't written it out yet, so I'm going to try and play with this idea live with you.

There's a quote from Victor Frankl that says, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Right.

And his point is, I think, that if your life is bereft of a higher purpose, you

look at hedonism and short-term gratification and stuff like that.

I think there's an inverse, and I think that you and maybe me as well are good examples of the inverse.

That when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

And that if your day-to-day experience of life,

I don't know, just sort of joy and like play and ease and fun and lightness, if that's just not

what you grew up being taught, or that's not sort of your psychological set point or disposition, or it just doesn't come as easily to you as it does maybe to other people.

I think I see in a lot of the people that are like overachievers

in the

winning the marshmallow test of life, just permanently delaying gratification.

I think I see that as quite a common

archetype that, oh, how easily do you switch off Smokeweed and play Xbox?

It's like fucking impossibly.

Like it doesn't happen.

And

how much sort of play and ease and grace and joy, you know, how easy does sort of enjoyment and lightness come?

It's like, oh, you know, sometimes things are kind of heavy and I apply pressure to myself or even when it's not needed.

And sometimes I struggle to give myself a break and so on and so forth.

So I think that, yeah, that

when a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

You know, instead of just having a fun Saturday morning with the kids, it's like we're taking a big rock and a couple of small rocks and we're going up that fucking hill again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, when you, when you were saying that, I was thinking about,

yeah, I don't know.

It's, I'm, I'm happiest when I'm suffering.

So I've heard people say, like,

they said this mostly about Goggins.

I don't know you've talked to him too, but it's just like asking him, it's like, are you ever happy?

It's just like,

for him, he's happy when he's miserable.

So it's like, well, whose definition of happy are you talking about?

Is you're happy eating fucking donuts, watching TV?

That sounds miserable to me.

So it's like, people get these words and they're like, are you happy?

Are you enjoying yourself?

Or do you ever have fun?

It's like,

running up that mountain is fun.

That's what I like.

So, yeah, it's when you talk about pleasure and passion, I was trying to weigh that out there on what is, what is happiness for people?

You know, and also another thing,

I see you put up like

3 million subscribers.

So it's like, is that what type of, does that do anything for you?

Is that,

I mean, because you'll never let off.

You're like, okay, I made it.

I'm good.

I got 3 million.

That was my goal.

But you put that up like sometimes people will put up like,

like, I made it.

Like, this is my,

I'm here, but I've arrived.

To you, that's just, what is that?

Just a benchmark.

Just another little destination, I suppose.

What is the goal?

Do you have a goal?

Not in terms of sort of money or follower count or anything like that.

I think I did originally, even though I didn't have a number in mind,

I think I wanted to be,

I wanted to become really proficient at something.

I wanted to be able to say that I was

like, I'd reach something close to mastery or competence.

Like I was competent at this thing and people respected that and recognized that, especially people that I respected and that I admired.

How do you is that a measurable that tells you that?

Nope.

Because some people like look at, I haven't looked at where your podcast is on the charts today.

Okay.

You know, so I'm, I like measurables.

Like I like, I need to do this many miles this fast at this pace.

I want, you know, this many

downloads to the pod.

It's like, I love measurables.

And I think that my boys have kind of taken on that.

I love that too.

I think it's a good way to bring some control into a messy world.

I, I have just tried to sort of put a bit of a speed limiter on how much I rely on it because

at least for me, it is not the most important metric.

The most important metric is something that's pretty intangible, which is how much did I connect with the guest?

How much did it impact the people that were listening?

And a lot of the time, the episodes that do sometimes the episodes that do the most plays are the ones that are the most impactful.

And they certainly reach the most people, right?

But I don't know how, you know, deeply that really changes people.

And

I'm at the stage now, at least with this particular art form, where I'm trying to really, really connect with the person I'm sitting opposite.

And I'm really, really trying to understand why they are the way they are or what it is that people should understand or learn about them.

And none of that is going to appear on a YouTube analytics spreadsheet.

It simply doesn't.

And

the measurement stuff is good and it ensures that you're at least keeping an eye on one or a few things.

I'm the sort of person, I think, that would become very obsessed by it.

Yeah.

And I need to be aware of that and I need to account for that because it's not all that matters.

You know,

it would be something else.

A lot of people trade intensity.

In the very beginning, they use intensity, but the thing that keeps you going is your longevity, right?

That's what we said, the consistency thing.

And they trade longevity for intensity.

And if you're just chase, chase, chase, chasing the numbers,

you're able to see the immediate effect of your work.

This is the same with power lifters, let's say.

So you're a powerlifter in the gym and you're pushing yourself RPE 9, RPE 9.5, RPE 10 over and over again.

You're not periodizing.

You're not taking weeks off.

And you're going, dude, my numbers are going up.

I'm fucking crushing it.

I'm crushing it.

I'm crushing it.

Snap.

Yeah.

You go, okay, well, what was the goal?

What really what was the goal?

The goal was to get the numbers to go up, but the goal is to get the numbers to go up steadily over 10 years.

And all that you can see is such a short amount amount of time in front of you.

And I think that you should be careful about trading longevity for intensity

because,

and

at least with the show, for me,

the more fired up I am when I wake up on a morning, and I think this is just the best judgment of sort of where your life's at at the moment and how much joy you're getting out of life.

When you wake up, when your alarm goes off on a morning, how excited are you to get out of bed?

I think that's a pretty good rubric for how's life going right now.

It's not going to be like that forever.

You know, it's going to be better and worse, and sometimes really worse, and sometimes really better.

And if I wake up on a morning and I go, fuck yeah, like I get to speak to Cam today, like that's really exciting.

Tomorrow I've got Will Store, like science of storytelling, fucking awesome author.

He did the status game.

I'm fucking fired.

I can't wait.

And then, you know, there were periods in the show where I wake up and I'm like, oh, who am I talking to today?

Oh, yeah, that'll be all right.

You know, maybe the episode would be great.

Maybe it would even be a really great performance, but if it did speak to me,

so very much in that sort of

i don't know

post-growth thing

uh where

i've already got at least with regards to the show so much further than i ever thought i was going to yeah fucking moved continents

and came over to this this new country and made all of these friends and you know have lifted myself out of a

area of the UK that's it was literally only famous for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK and then it lost that so it didn't even have that anymore

I

I've already won I've already won so trying to find ease grace joy and just seeing how that works I mean for a little bit because I've very much applied the sort of Cam Haynes Goggins yeah mindset for a while and I can totally see me turning around in six months or two years or whatever and being like, all right, time to really fucking grip the bar again.

I'm just seeing, okay, what happens if I try and have a little bit more play with this?

And then what happens if I go back in the other direction?

Yeah, I was curious about that just because we're so inundated with these measurables every day with the follower count, the likes, the, you know, when you start getting into podcasts, then it is a downloads because then that affects what you can ask for advertisers.

And that's all they give a fuck about.

They don't care about what type of connection you had with your guests.

They're like, okay, cool.

How many downloads was it?

You know, so it's like we get kind of roped into this, to this trap of everything is measurable.

And it's like, you're not successful unless you're here.

And then when you're here, you better be here.

So I was just kind of curious how you, how you navigated that, just because it is, it's life now.

It is.

And it's, and it's easy.

It's an easy like

everybody loves like, how do I compare?

So it's an easy comparison.

That's why you look at the lists on like whose podcast is highest rated, right?

But

I think Joe's done a really good job of this too.

It's like, and I want to kind of adopt, well, your mindset is very similar now.

That's why he can have on somebody like me

who when I first went on there, nobody, nobody knew who I was, but he, Joe doesn't care.

He's just like, am I interested in this person?

Most podcasts are like, let's go with the biggest guest.

That's going to give me the biggest.

Dude,

I really think that you can look back on a body of work that was

like disembodied, disconnected successes.

Or you can look back on something and be like, yeah, that was me.

Like, that was really me.

I put myself out there.

And there's some people, let's say that you're in a sport, right?

Let's say that you're a powerlifter or something like that.

You want to be the best in the world.

You want to be the best in the world.

It's not about

manifesting your fucking artistic expression on the lifting platform.

Pick the fucking weight up.

You know what I mean?

Can you pick it up or not?

Can you pick it up or not?

And the goal is to pick the fucking weight up.

And however you get there is how you do it.

Now, you may feel transcendent.

You may feel like this is you really sort of actualizing your potential and doing it in the world.

But

my goal is to look back on this period of life and look back on, you know, the library of work that I do and go, yeah, like that was really me.

That was exactly where I was.

I really tried to be open and honest with myself.

It's a selfish project.

And I think that the best ones are, and not everyone can do this.

Not everyone can be selfish with what it is that they get to do for art.

Because if you're a trader,

oh, please tell me about how your artistic fucking expression helped you lose money on that USD JPY trade.

No, you have a very, very tightly defined outcome.

But

in some other writing books and stuff like that, you could write a book that would sell tons and tons of copies, but you weren't connected to, and you'd get loads of success.

How do you feel after that?

And for some people, they may take a ton of well-being and satisfaction satisfaction and joy and all the rest of this stuff meaning from it just being successful.

They just wanted the success.

And I get the sense that maybe the first few books or the first few projects or the first few businesses or the first few years of the podcast or whatever might be you playing that game.

But then after a while, you go, okay, well, kind of satiated my desire for status and

maybe money or being recognized by all of these people.

I had this, I made this joke with regards to the show that I kind of had the five infinity stones from Anos's Glove.

I had Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Alanda Boton from the School of Life, Naval Ravikant and Joe Rogan as like the five people that I wanted.

And I've got four of them.

And Joe texted after the last episode and was like, don't forget we need to do an episode on Modern Wisdom.

So I'm like, right, okay, well, once I do that, if all it was was about

being, I've got a cold medalist syndrome.

Where do you go from that?

And that's a genuine question.

And that's still something.

That's true.

Every time that you complete a a new goal,

you have to ask yourself, okay, well, what is my life now that I've completed this thing that I was working toward for a long time?

And that's the danger of goals, right?

You know, James Clear got this right in Atomic Habits, where he said,

you don't rise to the level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems.

So you just need to iterate and keep going and keep going.

And it helps with longevity.

But there is no growth without goals because you need a goal to give you a fucking direction to move in, or else you're just like growing outwardly, but not moving toward a particular thing.

It's not great for the way that motivation works dope mean positive reinforcement all that stuff so again it's this tension it's this balance between the two but I get the sense and it'll be interesting you know in a year's time couple of years time when we chat and you're episode 300

for me to go okay and what's driving you now like how how do you feel about the show and I would guess that you're going to say you know what it is like

actually I'm I'm kind of taking my eye off the ball with regards to the metrics a little bit.

I'm really interested in

having

conversations with underground.

I'm really platforming people that, you know, no one knows about, or I've really enjoyed delving into this area of whatever.

And

I think that is a realization that lots of people come to.

I think they come to it maybe with even raising kids that you think, I'm going to get the kid into the

Harvard, the Ivy League University.

I'm going to get them to be the captain of the this team, or they're going to be the top in this particular pursuit or whatever.

And then after a while, you go, I just kind of want them to have fun.

I just want them to be happy.

Yeah.

And I thought that I could get them there through that.

But you kind of need to,

it's far easier to achieve it than it is to get rid of it.

Yeah.

Because if you haven't achieved it, it's always in the back of your mind as, wow, you know, that might have been the answer.

Right.

So you need to do it to see that it isn't it.

Like Naval says, the reason to win the game is to be rid of the game.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a, it's a tough one.

It's like,

you know, you want to be successful.

You want, I, I like,

I think when I was,

you were kind of explaining that the best feedback is when somebody says they really enjoyed whatever discussion you had or,

um,

and they're not talking about how many people listened to it.

You know, it's just how it impacted them.

And it's like, I'm not, I'm not great at, quote, podcasting, which is why I do the lift run shoot with my guests to make, to, because I can connect on that.

And then that hopefully helps the conversation.

But yeah, it's a, it's tough.

It's tough sitting down and really,

yeah, I don't know.

I mean, maybe it's not tough.

Maybe it's just we don't do this.

Maybe we, how often do you sit down and just talk to somebody?

I never do it.

Like, not like this.

So maybe it's like.

Maybe you can learn a lot just by having a discussion.

And maybe a podcast is an excuse that we never, we wouldn't, we wouldn't do this normally.

Because I'm not going to be like, call up one of my buddies and say, hey, you want to go talk for a couple hours?

It's like,

nobody would say, sure.

It sounds like you're saying that you find sort of doing the podcast is one of the more or most difficult things that it is that you do.

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So what are the most difficult things that you've done physically?

You've got this long, illustrious career of doing fucking stupid things to yourself.

Yeah.

What rank in the

top few?

Oh, it's the long race.

You know, the

well, this race I have coming up is 250 miles.

I've done 240 miles.

I've been 200 miles.

100 miles is hard.

Marathons are hard when you're pushing a lot of hard hunts where you're just miserable, you know, in the snow, long hunt, Kodiak Island for 12 days.

So it's

though, but those are

those, they're not predictable, but you know what you're getting into.

You know what I mean?

It's like, yeah, you know, it's going to be terrible and it's going to, you're going to be miserable probably for a while, but that's part of the deal.

That's just like, that's why you sign up is that test.

I'm trying to test myself.

I want to see if I'm tough enough to do this.

So those, when I think of hard, it's those.

Are there any in particular that come to mind from the hunts or the races perspective?

Um,

yeah, I mean,

yeah, I've been on, oh, I don't know, a lot of hard hunts in the mounds, just being soaking, soaking wet.

I mean, one time me and Roy were sheep hunting.

Roy's my friend who fell, but before, obviously before he fell, we were sheep hunting.

Miserable weather conditions, super steep.

We were blood trailing this ram and it wasn't a good shot.

So it's like

it was going to be a long, hard blood trail to kind of decipher and get this animal.

And it got dark and then a grizzly was kind of circling the tents.

And

I was just like, I don't give a fuck.

I'm going to to bed.

I'm not even, I don't care about this bear.

I don't know what's going to,

whatever.

So tired, just went to bed.

So that's, that's being miserable.

On Kodiak, you know, you get dropped off.

And I remember in my book, Backcountry Bow Hunting, the pilot like wrote down the day he was supposed to come back and pick us up on his jeans with a pin.

So it's like, hopefully he doesn't wash those jeans.

So he's going to come back in, what, 12 days, two weeks to get us.

And this is first week in November, so it's pouring down rain every day.

Kodiak is just south of the mainland there.

And

it's just miserable.

Every day you're wet.

It's just miserable.

So

yeah, then if you talk about the races, you're going the long races.

So in Moab 240, I think I slept for about,

I don't know, I can't remember now.

It's been a a few years, but two to four hours, and it took me 79 hours to finish a race.

So over three days and slept, you know, maybe four hours total.

So that, when

you know what it feels like to get a good night's rest, it's just like nothing feels better, it seems like.

So on the opposite of that, when all you want to do is sleep, but you have to keep pushing for 240 miles,

it's that seems overwhelming.

So to just to build a muster up the strength to still take another step where every step is an effort.

And so

if you think

when I go running,

every mile is 2,000 steps.

So if I'm doing 200, you know, so it's 500,000 steps, 500,000 steps roughly, and every one is an effort.

It's tough.

That hurts.

So those, those experiences stand stand out.

The first guy I ever had on the podcast, episode one, that people should not go back and listen to,

but it's an interesting episode.

It's a guy called Stu Morton who was training to row the Atlantic solo.

So this is the Talaska whiskey race.

It's a pretty common

thing,

but it's very extreme.

You go from, I think, the coast of Portugal.

to kind of the Caribbean.

And

the interesting thing with that is that

people that do it in groups of two or three or four are really no quicker than the person that does it on their own.

Because for every additional person, you need a bigger boat and more supplies and another person, which is more drag.

So everybody kind of nets out at the same pace.

You can go at, now, obviously, I guess physically, it must be a little

easier.

But

yeah, I remember speaking to him and

he was like, something like 14 million ore strokes or something he needed to do to get him.

So it's just 14 million.

Yeah.

Across that thing.

It's so funny when you break down races like 200 miles into five, like it's 500,000 steps.

Yeah.

You got to take 500,000 steps.

Yeah.

And it's so hilarious when that happens.

You know, because most people are like, their goal is 10,000 steps a day.

And that's a good day.

Okay.

500,000.

Yeah.

I love the

idea of these backyard ultras.

It was the dude from

the Barclay marathon that invented it, right?

Yeah, Laz.

Yeah.

And

just his insight that he hated the fact that sometimes people won.

Yeah.

He wanted a race where no one won.

Yeah.

Like everybody loses.

Everybody loses at this race.

There's some people that lose less than others.

Yeah.

Barkley, there's no finishers sometimes, but the backyards, there's always going to be one person who outlasts the other.

So that also called last man standing is kind of what they're called.

But yeah, it's.

They still don't beat the race, though.

No, I mean, the race is still there.

It's just you needed somebody else to go with you to go to the next level.

Yeah.

So the race never loses.

You never, never really win the race.

You just outlast less than the last, the next guy.

You outlast the other man or woman.

But

yeah, those fascinating, isn't it?

That

how long can you run four miles an hour?

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Now

there's guys who have went 400 miles.

Do you know this?

No.

450 miles.

That's the current record for this thing.

Wow.

Yeah.

So,

God, what would that, so that'd have to be 100 and some hours.

How many days is that?

That's over four or

over four days with never getting more than, so if you finish and say,

50 minutes, you get 10 minutes before you have to be on the start line.

So never getting more than

10 minutes of rest

at any one time.

What's the sort of pace that people are doing?

Because you could do eight miles an hour, right?

You could move at eight miles an hour and get done in half an hour.

Yeah, you could,

but for how long?

You know, so the thing with these is the more you break your body down, the less distance you're going to be able to go.

If you run fast, you're stretching intensity, longevity,

your muscles out, you're which stretching muscles out is essentially breaking them down over time.

So yeah, it's like finding that sweet spot.

I think Courtney, she's won one of those before.

And I think she was doing her laps in about

50 or 52 minutes.

So just got, if you get eight minutes, get a little food in, sit down for a sec, then back on the line.

I'm Truitt's going to do one of these.

Yeah.

Eugene?

Ah, shit.

I don't know.

I told him, I'm like,

I mean, he needs a win.

Like, if you had,

he hasn't won a race.

So it's like he's, yes, he's went viral in Boston and Austin, Marathon, Eugene.

He just, you know, a lot of news stories.

And he does have the world record in the pull-ups.

That's all great.

I said, but you need a win.

You need to be, come across, break that tape because

you haven't had a win yet.

So you show me a win.

That's the goal.

What's your

perspective on

genetics, pedigree,

talent, and hard work, and how all of these things fit together?

Yeah, I mean, we always would joke that True would always joke he got shitty genetics.

That's why he had to overcome his genetics because really, I mean,

I don't have, I have never thought I've, I've had great genetics.

If I had great genetics, I would have been able to play college football for a while.

And

so I've, I always said, you know, I've just

either you're average or obsessed has kind of been my thing.

It's just like, I had, if I didn't want to be average, I had to be obsessed.

So I just put it, tied it all into hard work.

When I see the boys, I do see

they have some genetic advantage for sure.

But what do genetic advantages give you if you don't capitalize on them?

Not much, right?

So they've just both done a good job of capitalizing on whatever gifts they've had.

And then

Truid is definitely maximizing on them.

Yeah,

it's weird with, I guess,

talent,

something like motivation or enthusiasm and consistency or discipline, because

at the very beginning, you're

no matter how talented you are, you haven't spent enough time and attention to unlock that talent.

Now, sure, you begin the race a little bit further ahead than the other guy that's also starting, but you're the most virtuoso keyboard pianist ever, right?

The first time that they sat down at a piano, they fucking sucked.

So, even if they had all of the raw materials to learn very, very quickly, this insight that you kind of unlock your own potential, you unlock your own talent through the only thing that matters, which is the consistency.

Now, I will say, do you know who Craig Jones is?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's a.

Craig may be the most,

he may be the biggest outlier, I think, in the entire world of sort of elite sports

in that

he doesn't train consistently.

He doesn't have a strength and conditioning routine.

He doesn't care about his body or what he puts in it.

He sometimes cares about what he puts his body in.

And he,

as far as I I can see, is a professional partier

who still is probably top five grapplers on the planet.

Yeah.

And, you know, Nikki Rodd, who trains here at B team in Austin, will

eat, sleep, lift, train, recover,

study tape, do all of the things.

And Craig will roll back in from a session with a cigarette in his hand and still give him a, like, as good of a run for his money as anyone and oftentimes oftentimes win yeah

and that

in some ways is just like really fucking cool but in other ways must just be so disheartening if you're in that if you're in that yeah no for sure i when i hear that story what i think about is how how great could he have could he be being dedicated put the cocaine down yeah yeah i mean

the

because he's comparing himself to yes they're they're elites but could he be the a legend yeah could he be the best yeah he's a legend in certain disciplines disciplines.

They're just not Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

But could he be the best ever?

You know what I mean?

Like,

I mean, I don't know.

Because Gordon Ryan,

does he live pretty, I think he, does he live pretty clean?

I think, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pretty, pretty, pretty much, apart from when he's injured.

But even with that, like, there's a degree of commitment during your injury.

Yeah.

Right.

If your stomach's upset and you kind of got to focus on yourself.

But yeah, I think for a lot of people, what they end up realizing is

it doesn't really matter how talented I am.

The consistency and the hard work really is the only

solution.

It's the only pathway I have to sort of capitalize on this stuff.

And I think that's one of the reasons, again, why somebody who largely is pretty untalented is such a trigger for a lot of people because

there's two ways you could look at it.

And you could say, holy fuck, like there's nothing special about them.

Why did they get that?

Holy fuck, there's nothing special about them.

There's nothing special about me either.

That means that I too can do it.

Make it, yeah.

Yeah, because what people want, I think, a lot of the time, is

what is the

super secret squirrel technique, or what was the unique combination cocktail of upbringing and genetics and whatever it was that this person had in order to be able to get them to this place.

And the more boring

the answer, the less satisfactory it is.

And I think part of the reason that it's not very satisfactory is that it actually doesn't take it further away from you.

Right.

It brings it closer to you.

Because if you say, well, what's the reason that you say, bots, the fastest man on the planet?

And someone explains about how his fast Twitch type A muscle fibers have a particular like ATP output and his lactate threshold and his limb length and the way that his biomechanics and spinal flexion and all of this stuff.

And you go, well, that's beautiful.

Like, what a romantic, what a gorgeous distillation of the fastest man on the planet ever.

How the fuck am I supposed to replicate that?

You say, well,

I just sort of, I just trained for a decade and a half and I didn't stop.

You go, yeah, that's fucking lame, dude.

Like, that's, but it's also enlivening because you say it's at your feet too.

Yeah, it's uh, yeah, because when I think about, you know, if I think, I don't know, if you think Truitt,

you're like, I hear people say all the time, well, if I was in this situation, or if,

or they've even said, like, if, if I, you know, if they were raised, like True was raised type thing, or, you know, people had the privilege of being made to suffer as a seven-year-old.

Yeah, God.

Yeah.

Well, oh, that's another thing that I get worried about is some of the dads watching what he's doing and then thinking, you know, I'm going to have a child that does a 10,000 one point.

Yes.

And I feel bad for those kids because it was like the perfect storm for my boys.

And they were built for it.

So, you know, people say, I'm built for this, whatever, I don't, whatever the case.

But they did eventually

flourish.

A lot of kids aren't going to.

It's going to be a disaster.

It's going to be a disaster.

And the dad is probably not going to be like living that example every day like I was.

So it's like, then it's just like, you don't do this.

Why am I doing it?

It's going to be tough.

It comes back to authenticity.

Yeah.

For sure.

So it was a natural outgrowth.

And I think this is where you can hopefully give yourself a break, even though I know you're terrible at doing that.

a finger.

You

did

probably what comes most naturally to you, which was your way of showing love, which is the world's tough.

You need to be tougher than it is, at least, and ideally about between five and ten times tougher than it is.

And this is the way that I'm going to show you that I love you because I'm going to prepare you for the world.

And I'm going to make sure that nothing can hurt you and that you're going to be resilient and that you're going to have, you know, this is my, this is my, my showing of love.

And

if that is not

how you actually want to show up, sooner or later, there's going to be cracks in things.

You can't force stuff long enough.

It's, you know, the trite old thing about the man who loves to walk will walk further than the man who has to.

Because

eventually, over a long enough time horizon, people end up just regressing to the mean.

They just go back to what their patterns are.

And now maybe you can change change your patterns over a very, very, very long time.

But how many people do you know that have really made changes in their life?

It's so few.

People lose five pounds.

You know, they'll go from one company to another.

They'll, you know, read a book about arguments and change their communication style.

But how many people do you know that have lost a hundred pounds or moved, changed their career at 40

or gone to a new country, right?

Or got out of that abusive relationship and entered a new one that was flourishing and taken all of the things that they learned.

Like that's alchemy.

It's like taking something that was awful and useless and pointless in your life and turning it into something that's beautiful and valuable.

And it's so fucking rare.

Yeah.

It just doesn't happen all that much.

And again, to kind of bring this back down, one of my favorite realizations and one I think that you share as well is,

well,

in some ways, that's kind of terrifying because, oh my God, look at how many people don't end up.

actualizing everything that they could.

And it's not that the only thing to do in life that's great is to actualize your potential.

A lot of it can just be flourishing and living it fully, fully and

maximizing your time on this planet in experience and present and all that sort of stuff.

But most people don't get that.

Fuck, that's terrifying.

Or most people don't get that.

Holy shit, how low is the bar?

Yeah.

Like the average American is obese, divorced, and with less than 1K in the bank.

That's the average American.

That are nuts.

How low is the bar?

And with more opportunity than anywhere else in the world.

And that's that's the average American.

That's what's crazy.

I was, I'm, I was curious about what you think about this because I've heard people say that, you know, I couldn't have done it without whatever, their wife or their, their whatever.

It's like, um,

and as, you know, my wife has been supportive.

Truitt's wife is very supportive.

But to me, it's just like,

I, so I don't know, I'm curious.

That's why I want to hear what you think because, yes, I think.

So, if, say, True is saying, oh, I'm going to go, I need to go train.

And his wife was saying, again,

but so I could see where that would be an issue.

But to me, it's just like,

maybe it goes back to the point you started to make this whole time about like parenting or whatever.

It's like, I don't know, I don't want to say if it's fate, but to me, it's like, yeah, support is nice.

I fucking don't need anything.

I do the same shit, whether you love me, hate me, support me, or don't.

Nothing's going to stop me.

I wonder if,

so can people

say, well, I didn't have that environment or the support you had.

That's why I didn't achieve this.

Or are there people who are like, and I think of Goggins, I think he,

I don't care who the fuck was in his life.

He was going to be who he is no matter what.

There's a difference between doing something because and doing something in spite, right?

I achieved this in spite of the way that my wife hates that I go out for a run at 5:30 in the morning.

Okay, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I did this because my wife encourages me to go and do it.

Right.

Okay.

And I think this is a good point to talk about.

That I do worry about the romanticization of suffering too much on men, especially that

there is a certain type of personality.

I certainly have this.

Maybe you do too.

I definitely get the sense that Goggins has this.

That is someone who,

like,

like the priests Hoeing

seeks out suffering beyond its utility, right?

It's like, I've taken everything that I can from this

and I'm making it harder than it needs to be.

So, a great cue that one of my friends gives in the gym is, what would this be like if it was easier?

So, you're carrying the rock, right?

There's a perfect example.

You've got to carry your 72-pound poser rock up a hill.

There are a variety of different ways.

I learned all of them with you.

You can have it in freaking bear hugging, the shoulders, you can have it in the center of the back, you can have it there.

Why not carry it on the top of your head?

Genuine question.

Why not carry it on the top of your head?

Because that would be harder.

That would make the 72-pound rock harder.

Well, you know,

I'm calcifying the top of my skull in an attempt to, like, this is real suffering.

You go, well, you don't do that.

So we're always making a kind of value value judgment around how hard should the hard thing be.

Right.

Yep.

And I just get the sense that a supportive wife or, you know,

if you really want your kids to know what suffering is, break up with your wife when they're one-year-old.

You know what I mean?

Leave them.

Don't pay the alimony.

Leave them in a broken home.

See if you can leave some needles around.

It's just for you.

Yeah, exactly.

A nice systemic infection will really toughen them up.

So we understand, but we just make value judgments.

Like all of this is like, I feel like this is about the right amount.

But you didn't make the kids do the mountain three times.

Right.

Okay.

So why one?

Why not one in a bit?

Why not three?

Why not five?

So

with that, I just get the sense that if you have the choice of flying with the wind behind you, giving you a little bit of a push, being like, huh, the thing that I want to do that's really fucking hard is made easier by my partner.

So I can run, let's say you can run 100 miles on a day.

If I have a partner that's a total arsehole, I can get to like 95.

If I have partner that's a total hero, I can get to 105.

I'm the partner that gets me to 105.

That doesn't mean that the thing is less virtuous or

any easier, but that my capacity gets unlocked because I'm not wasting it carrying a rock on my head.

Right.

I'm carrying a rock on my shoulder.

Right.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

That's why I knew I, there's a reason I brought it up because you could distill it down perfectly.

But yeah, I was just curious about it.

I've never really thought about it past like just the basics like that.

So thank you for

if Drew was in a relationship and his wife was permanently saying, fuck, I wish that you could do any exercise, but polyps.

Like, I just hate them.

Like, I'm mortally offended by polyps.

You'd be like, hey, darling, come here.

Let me have a, let's,

let's have a little chat about this.

Like, can we just fucking ickne with the with the polyp with the polypo?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, he's trying to do break a world record here.

So I do think that's important.

And as well, the

learning when to actually just go, I'm going to enjoy this.

I'm going to fucking enjoy the end of the race, right?

Like you've run the marathon,

you've run the ultra, you've run the 250.

It's like, well, if you went

3% faster at the very, very end, then you'd shave four seconds off your time.

It's like, okay, but why did you do this?

Did you do this to get the fastest time possible?

You didn't win.

Someone else fucking won.

Right.

You didn't win.

Or did you do it so that you can take a tiny little bit off the top and be like yes yeah i crossed the finish line i felt that that's positive reinforcement that's why i'm here i'm here to experience it and maybe this is why i'll never be a turbo billionaire or you know like the absolute world champion at some super difficult pursuit uh because i i just sort of value other things and this is not natural so it's very much me like dictating it to me not expressing it out of me if that makes sense i'm like

saying what I want to be true and how I want to show up, not how I show up.

It's still very much just like a fucking Japanese torture chamber inside of my head, me telling me that I'm not good enough and that could have been better and I shouldn't have done that thing and so on and so forth.

Is that like, is that mostly a man thing?

Like

being

judged on performance and worth and

do you think it's like more certainly contributes, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, because it's like I heard somebody say the other day,

because I, and now I'm thinking, thinking about like what it means to be a man and a provider type thing.

Um,

yeah, I think that

I don't know, it's hard, it's hard.

I just know the pressure I felt as being a dad and a husband, and like making sure everybody was taking care of the bills were paid and all this.

I just know,

yeah, I don't know.

I think men get roped into this trap of

worth sometimes.

And it's just, that's fine because that's how it works.

You know,

not many women are out there saying, I need to work harder because I need to get my husband a bigger house in a nicer car.

I mean,

yeah, that's funny.

I don't

hear that.

No, no, no, I don't, I don't know that much.

The biggest house in Austin that was ever sold, actually, is owned by a friend, and that was built by the founder of Bumble, who was

a woman and i do i don't know what her uh partner does or whatever but like you didn't build a fucking 40 million dollar house i know that unless you were i know also like a total freak yeah business person but there is a little bit of me that goes like uh

i wonder what it's like to be with someone who uh

outwardly is that high achieving.

Yeah.

You know, and that's not to say that's the only way to achieve.

Yeah.

There's many, many other things that are more valuable than how much money you bring.

But definitely.

The dynamic typically is, you know, protect a provider and then helping.

And even if that's not the way that the dynamic needs to be, or even like structurally quite is, even if you've got two breadwinners in the household, there's still this sort of expectation that the guy's going to

show up in that way.

But

one of the saddest things to me is to see somebody who's won the game and is still playing it.

Like, what's an example?

A 70s-year-old businessman who is now a grandfather, high-powered, you know, CEO of a company, founded a bunch, built and sold, and still going to the expos and still walking around hustling and grinding and giving out their card and, you know, staying up late and scrutinizing all the stuff.

It's like, dude, you've got a legacy that is so fucking far beyond this business thing that you did.

Now, maybe in a minority of cases, it's your passion.

It's just adore

printer ink or whatever, turnip farming, whatever the fuck it is that you're great at.

For the most part, what I see is people that just want to be validated by the world around them and they just need that, that

and

I would say I've got a lot more grace for the people who haven't yet achieved it and are still chasing it.

You know, if it's, I want to become, but this is the problem with not having milestones and with the game being infinite, that you can get to a situation where you never feel like you've arrived.

And I think this is exactly what these people are struggling with.

They're like, no, no, no, no, it's when I get to 10 million subscribers on YouTube.

No, no, no.

It's when the business hits, I sell it for 3 billion because the first one that was at 1 billion, that just wasn't quite enough.

I need to repeat it twice.

It's not just doing it once because that could have been a fluke.

I need to do it twice.

Or no, three times because I timed the market because of COVID.

Like, you know, there's always a excuse, excuse, excuse.

Yeah.

And after a while, you need to kind of admit to yourself that this is just an addiction to wanting to be validated by the world and it's never going to be enough and you're trying to fill a hole internally with accolades and love externally and that's for the most part not the way that it works but in slight part is if you never run a fucking hundred mile race you'd be like come on like i've got to do it i've got to do this thing yeah you've looked you did 240 what's the next one yeah it'll be 250.

i know it has to where is that Arizona.

Okay, what's the we're in

it's gonna be the first of May soon.

So it's what like the 5th of May or something?

Yeah, yeah, it's uh from Jackson or is it

is it Jackson City or no, no, what uh shit now I can't remember.

Oh no, Black

Fuck now I can't remember Black Canyon City.

I don't know to to uh

flagstaff

What's the temperature like in Arizona at this time of the year?

Uh it'll I mean it'll be hot during the day, of course, but it's it's kind of high desert, so it'll be could be cold at night.

Brilliant.

Yeah, like when I did Moab, for example, it was maybe 90 during the day.

And then one night it got down to nine in the mountains.

Quite a swing.

Holy fuck.

Yeah.

So it's a, it's a tough one.

But

yeah, it'll be good.

But yeah, it's always like finding that limit, essentially, because,

you know, when you're saying that, I was thinking back to like, I mean, when I grew up, I didn't even know people actually paid off cars.

I I thought you just had a car payment.

Like, you know, it was like, I didn't know, or

I thought like that little mobile home I showed you, I thought I'd lived there.

And I didn't actually know people paid off their houses.

I thought you just paid rent or your house payment forever.

And I was just like, so now, now it's just like, I have to readjust, you know, my house is paid off.

And I'm just like,

okay.

I now I don't really know what to do.

Don't really know what the goal is supposed to be.

Yeah.

I mean, that's gold medalist syndrome.

Yeah.

Right.

In a small, small regard.

I know my mom and dad felt the same.

One of my dad's proudest things is, you know, I was mortgage-free.

Yeah.

And I didn't know that happened.

Yeah.

Well, I remember you showing me when we were driving around Eugene.

It wasn't like a trailer park.

It was like a barn, a mobile home, like a single small thing.

And you were saying, you know, when I grew up, I thought, wow,

you know, one of those in a truck, like, holy shit.

Yeah, that was, that was awesome.

That was the dream.

Yeah.

Those are called manufactured homes.

Do they not have those here?

Uh, yeah, they will do.

I just don't know what name would be.

It's like an old trailer, they used to have a trailer park where it was like they're made out of metal, and now they look more like houses, but they're still sort of they still come in on wheels internally.

It's still the same, it gets set down, still the same, yeah.

But for you know, for out there, like where I showed you where we drove, it was just like shit, that's awesome.

You remember we went over that bridge that your sons used to jump off, and there was a logger that was pulled up by the side of the road.

Yeah, we had a little chat with him, yeah, yeah, so cool.

I know.

I'm interested in

how

you've navigated success or your relationship with success, warping sort of the original mission and not getting a

set of velvet handcuffs or a, you know, sort of champagne problem prison or whatever where

you want to keep your foot on the gas, you want to keep pushing hard, but you also, you know, materially have a very different life to the one that you were used to and that you expected and that you grew up with and that even your kids grew up with.

You know, you've sort of arced this across time.

Yeah.

How does success warp your relationship with the original mission in that way?

How have you found navigating that?

Yeah, I mean, I just,

well,

I lean into the hate.

So I'm, I'm always

any negative about me is being reinforced.

So I never feel like a success, so to speak, because I'm reading

these hateful things people say about me.

It's hard to feel successful when you're reading what a piece of shit you are, right?

So I get reminded of that daily.

But also, it's like,

you know, even when I had my regular job, I was a superintendent at the water and power company, I felt like I never deserved that job.

I'm like, no, they're going to figure out.

I'm not,

even though I was good at it, I was good, but I always felt like I'm supposed to just be a worker.

I'm, I'm a worker.

That's, that's my talent level.

That's my ability.

That's my intelligence is we need workers.

That's me.

And so I've never, that's always,

even though I, I retired from that job and now I'm doing the other thing, it's just like, I, I'm a worker.

That's, that's what I do.

So whether it's running miles, lifting weights, doing the podcast, 160 episodes or whatever it is, it's just like, yeah, it's just a different form of being in the ditch.

I thought that I was just going to be in a ditch, you know, putting waterline in the ground when I worked for the utility till I retired.

So it's just, it's the same.

It's just work.

It's just in a different form.

I get a question, and I don't quite know how to phrase it, but I want you to try and think about it quite deeply if you can.

What do you think?

How do you think you would feel

if

you believed that you were worthy of the things that you've achieved, or if you believed that you were good enough?

Um

if I felt like I deserved this

because this is part of it.

Um

man, I don't even I've never felt that way.

I've never

um how would I feel

Seems like it'd feel good.

Would it feel if wouldn't it?

I'm guessing.

I mean, wouldn't it feel good to feel like you're a success?

I think that'd feel good.

I've never felt that.

So I don't, um,

because even, even if somebody told me that, or if you, if you, if somebody says that right now, like,

I would just be like, I would just discount it.

I'd be like, no, no, they're fucking full of shit.

They're just saying that's what you're supposed to say to people.

I mean, I wouldn't believe it.

So I don't know.

I'm not, I don't know.

I'm not.

What if, let me give you another one.

What if the next mountain that you need to climb is to be able to feel resonance and connection with the things that you've achieved in life?

Man, I don't.

You need to like take a step back and say, wow, I made it.

Look at what I did.

Yeah.

I am good enough.

I raised some fucking kids.

I raised kids that are world record breakers and protect our country.

Um,

I felt like that's that I did what I was supposed to do.

So, if I didn't raise the kids to be that way, I failed

because they had it.

Obviously, they have it.

So, you have made it.

So, you were a success.

No, you're like a fucking, you're like the Gordon Ryan of taking compliments.

I just, I just, I'm not a sleep.

I just did what I was supposed to do.

I understand.

So you can only fail.

Right.

Oh, okay.

So it was an obligation.

Yes.

Right.

In some ways.

It was minimum accepted level of

to them because what if I what if I what if they weren't achieving these things that I failed because they had it in them

so as a parent aren't you supposed to get the most have your kids believe that they can achieve incredible things and and get them to do it

but i mean you know you could argue well why is it not two world records why wasn't he a seal and a ranger because you're not carrying it on your head yeah you've got to carry it on your head it's very important um no i look i um

i really

i'm very very impressed with everything that the fucking haines household does and i just wonder what I wonder what

I wonder whether you could fly with a little bit more breeze behind you, like internally with this stuff.

Go, fuck yeah, like, you know, just little glimmers, not all the time, right?

I don't think it's going to kill your edge.

But

I'd love,

and this is, again, me very much speaking to me, which is why, again, I'm saying it how I want it to be, not how it is for me.

Yeah, I'd just love for you and for Goggins as well, you know, these guys that are really, really driven, you know, hatred and a chip on your shoulder and this bitterness and the resentment and stuff like that.

Great fuel.

But I just wonder if there's, you know, can this be a hybrid car as opposed to just a diesel one?

And

I'd

maybe that's a maybe that's an interesting mountain for you to, or an interesting race for you to assess the difficulty of, because in the same way that

spending a day on the couch would be

incredibly uncomfortable in a manner that running 250 miles isn't for you.

I wonder, okay, well,

let's look inward.

What is there that I can do here with regards to this?

Like, how can I, oh, fuck,

congratulating myself?

No, dude,

give me 200 kilos to deadlift a few hundred times.

You know, like, that's that, that, that's what I want to do.

I, I, I, I understand that.

It's, uh, that's, that is really hard.

Um,

because I, when I think about even this race coming up, you know, I broke my foot, I've had all these injuries, and it's like, of course my wife people that care about me is like we can't do the race i'm like i have to do the race well what what it well because

speedland has his shoes coming out it's a big promotion about me doing this race with the coca dona 250 shoes got a road shoe and a what and like this what i have expectations the race let me in um

you know

to drive awareness and to drive interest.

It's like I got people

me relying on me I

not doing it is not an option well you're hurt doesn't matter so it's like

yeah I'm not quite there I'm not quite there yet to where I can be like

because normally it'd be like most people would probably be like I'm injured I was gonna do it but I broke my foot

and anybody would say oh

yeah that makes sense a good reason that's a good reason but I can't do it.

So I can't.

I wonder.

Have you got grandkids yet?

I'm going to have one here on the 12th, Tanner.

Congratulations, Tanner.

I wonder what granddad life is going to be like for you.

I mean,

if kids don't change it, do

great.

Run it back.

We'll do it again.

Fucking one generation down.

Look, dude,

that's one of the things that you would

typically hear about the maniacal

solo ranger guy that, you know, keeps working, ah, but he's suffering by kids.

And it's like, no, no, no, no.

His kids were a vehicle for it.

Like, you know, it went even harder.

But I don't know.

You, you,

it'll be fascinating.

Like, you're a fascinating guy.

And I, I'm going to be really, really interested to watch what happens over the next few years as presumably more the Haynes household grows more and more and

the grandkids thing.

And you go, fuck, like, I'm revisiting this

babying childhood thing and running this back hmm where was i at the last time this was the case and how do i want to show up this time for grandkid haines yeah you know i think it'll be different because as you said like even if i had kids now with where i am socially economically you know when they were born we didn't have anything you know so it was just like it was a grind

different now So yeah, I don't know.

Maybe it will be different.

Cam Haynes, ladies and gentlemen.

Cam, you're awesome, man.

I'm so glad that you got to come on.

Thank you.

And your drink is amazing.

Well, fantastic.

Tell people about your book, most importantly.

Can be dialed in.

Good, good, good, good.

That's what we need.

Undeniable, Chris Williamson is featured.

Modern wisdom because

Outlier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Undeniable.

It's available everywhere.

It ships on May 6th.

The goal was last time.

So you're in the middle of this fucking run when your book releases.

I know.

So your publisher wants to, will will be chasing you down that's why i'm doing this now to run away from the book yeah okay well i just said that the book you know a book release is usually pretty predictable you go and you do these appearances and that i said mine's gonna be a little different i'm gonna be doing a 250 mile race when the book comes out and that's To me, that means undeniable, you are undeniable if that's

yeah.

So it's like last time they had Endure, they got it up to number seven on New York Times, so I got screwed.

I was the best seller of those, but it's an editorial.

So just give me what I deserve.

I just want number one this time.

All right.

Okay.

Well,

I love it, dudes.

Not just because I'm plastered throughout it.

It's fucking awesome.

And I appreciate the fuck out of you.

Oh, thank you, Chris.

It's, I mean, it's, it's been.

Getting to know you has been amazing.

Getting to watch your growth and success is incredible.

You put the pressure on me to

thank and to be smart.

You let me run 11 miles.

Go fuck yourself.

So we, yeah, I guess it's reciprocal.

But thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity.

Big fan of you and modern wisdom.

So, thank you.

Appreciate you too, dude.

All right.