Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL, Part II of II: Sleep, fasting, raising kids, discipline, taking ownership, and the impact of war artwork

Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL, Part II of II: Sleep, fasting, raising kids, discipline, taking ownership, and the impact of war

The Peter Attia Drive

June 3, 2019

In the second installment of this 2 part series, Jocko shares his sleep routine and attitude towards sleep, we talk about his meals (and occasional indulgences), his experience with fasting, and touch briefly on his workout routine.
Speakers: Peter Attia, Jocko Willink, Olivia Attia
**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So, all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you can trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber support model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member and support us at whatever level works for you. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon, such as the downloadable transcripts for each episode. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you. Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Jocko. Like Madonna, Sting or Cher, he's one of those rare individuals that only needs to go by one name. For those not familiar with Jocko, he spent 20 years in the SEAL Teams where he was a commander of SEAL Team 3's Task Unit Bruiser, I believe, which led the Battle of Ramadi, becoming one of the more decorated special operations units of the Iraq War. Jocko returned from the Iraq War, served as an officer in charge of training SEALs on the West Coast. And ultimately when he stepped down from that role, he co-founded Echelon Front, a leadership consulting company. Along the way, he's become a New York Times bestselling author on leadership and has also written a number of, frankly, fantastic kids books, which my kids adore. He hosts the Jocko Podcast, which is an amazing podcast and of all the podcasts I've ever been on, that episode that I did with Jocko is certainly one of my favorites. He's a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu and the co-founder of Victory MMA in San Diego. I met Jocko maybe four years ago through another mutual friend, Kirk Parsley himself, a seal. This podcast was a ton of fun. It also took a while. We sort of lost track of time and before you knew it, I realized this was gonna have to be released over two weeks and not just one. In this second installment, Jocko and I discuss 9-11 and the war in Iraq, the future of machines in war, as well as medicine, raising kids. We talk about one thing that I get pinged about constantly to talk about with Jocko, which is sleep. We talk about giving up. We talk about free will mindset. We talk about his indulgences, fasting, and we end up with a quick guest Q&A with my daughter, Olivia, who was waiting all day to meet Jocko and couldn't wait to poke her head in when she got home from school. So without further delay, please enjoy the second installment of my discussion with Jocko.

95 more minutes of transcript below

Feed this to your agent

Try it now — copy, paste, done:

curl -H "x-api-key: pt_demo" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000651996090

Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any agent that makes HTTP calls.

From $0.10 per transcript. No subscription. Credits never expire.

Using your own key:

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000440450355