#1080 - David Goggins

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Five, four, three, two, one.

Boom, and we're live. Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it.

David Goggins (0:10)

Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate that.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

You're the only guy I've ever had in the studio where when I showed up, you were working out.

David Goggins (0:16)

That's what I do, man. That's my life. That's my life.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

That's pretty crazy, though. I mean, how much time did you have when you got here?

David Goggins (0:22)

I got here about an hour early.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Oh, okay. Yeah, okay.

David Goggins (0:25)

We got a little early.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

So I got here shirt off, doing chin ups.

I didn't get my camera out in time before you saw me. I wanted to take some pictures.

David Goggins (0:31)

Well, maybe next time.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

Next time. Well, I'll catch you after the show.

You are a guy that, for a lot of people, you sort of embody the idea of hardening your mind and figuring out a way to do things that most people think are impossible. You've sort of become that guy over your life, and you've become that guy for a lot of people, including me, online. We've talked about you on the podcast a ton of times, so having you in here has been very exciting to me.

David Goggins (1:05)

I appreciate that, thank you.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

How'd you become that guy?

David Goggins (1:09)

You know what? I grew up not that guy. So a lot of people put a title on me. They want to, they see me now.

They see me now as the guy that, with his shirt off, who can do 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours, who can run 205 miles in 39 hours, who can do all this crazy shit. But what they don't understand is they don't understand the journey that it took me to get to this point. And what got me to this point was I was just the opposite of what I am today. I was that guy who ran away from absolutely everything that got in front of me. But not many people knew that. I had two people.

Like the real me was like this very scared, insecure, stuttering, got beat up by his dad, all this kind of stuff. And then I built this fake person that walked around like my shit didn't stink. Yeah, so that's kinda how I did it. And through process of time, I realized that I was lying to myself and lying to people.

Joe Rogan (2:10)

But it's a fascinating journey though, because you are that guy now. I mean, you genuinely are a legit badass. And at one point in time, you were a legit terrified person.

So what was the process? Like, how did you step forth?

David Goggins (2:27)

Well, it's a long process.

My dad beat the shit out of me when I was growing up. I was the first black baby born in this hospital called Miller Fillmore in Buffalo, New York. My dad owns skating rinks. He owned bars. He ran prostitutes from Canada to Buffalo, New York. My dad was a big time pimp, big time. Anything bad about a person, big time hustler, he was American, you know, I'm with him, Daniel Washington. He was that, but not that bad. He wasn't that big, but that's what he reminds me of. He was that kind of guy. And beat the shit out of me, the shit out of my mom. There was an incident one time when my mom got knocked out on top of the stairs, and he was juggled down the stairs by her hair. And at six years old, I'll never forget this.

In my mind, I was always afraid. My whole life, I was afraid, but I had this fucking voice, this conscience, that would always be battling me, saying, hey, you gotta get up and do something. I didn't want to do shit.

I was just afraid, but that voice would force me to get up, and my dad, I try to beat him up, whatever, at six, and I get my ass kicked. So this went on for several years, and I have a big-time learning disability. My dad didn't believe in us going to school. So my dad, it was about the business, the skating rink and the bar. So the skating rink opened about 7 o'clock at night, and this is the time I was able to walk. So about four, five, six years old, eight, nine.

And I go to the skating rink at 7 o'clock at night, and I worked the skating rink until 10 at night. And then we would scrape the gum off the floors, and we cleaned the whole skating rink up. And then my dad had an office, and my brother and myself would sleep in the office, and my mama would go upstairs and work the bar until 3 o'clock in the morning. And then they cleaned the bar up. So after all that shit was done with, going to school rarely happened. So when I went to school, I was all kind of, you know, my learning disability, I had social anxiety. I was just a jacked up kid from living in this tortured home. From the outside looking in, we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and then we would travel to the ghetto of Buffalo, New York, where the skating rink was at. So we worked around mostly blacks, and I lived around mostly whites, but no one knew what was going on in that house on 201 Paradise Road. It's crazy. But my mom got courage to finally leave him when I was about eight years old. We moved to a small town in Brazil, Indiana, and that's when the real war started for me. And Brazil, Indiana is a small town, great people, a lot of great people, and I say that because a lot of people get offended, and I'm going to get to the point where they get offended. There was about maybe 10 black families at about 10,000 people in the town.