John Dudley: The beauty in archery, the love of practice, and a model system for life

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is John Dudley. Before I tell you a little bit about who John is, because I suspect many of you won't recognize his name, maybe a little reminder about one of my obsessions being Archery. Probably talked about it quite a bit on the podcast to get a better sense of why I love Archery so much and why I think it's kind of an amazing model system for life. I think you'll enjoy this podcast. Now, John is someone who, from the day I got involved in Archery, I was very fortunate to be introduced to in terms of his work. Would be another couple of years before I would meet him. He is a professional archer. He's the host of what I consider hands down, no ifs, ands, or buts, the absolute best content on all of Archery, including podcasting, TV, et cetera. So the knock on TV station on YouTube, the knock on podcast. His ability to teach Archery and do Archery, provide the rarest and smallest eclipse I've ever seen in performance, which is to say, it's very rare that someone who is the top 0.01% of a performance is also at the top 0.01% of the ability to teach, distill and communicate that. And somehow John manages to do that. Now, I could pour you to tears with all of his accolades. He represented the US Archery team for many years. He's won more medals than I can count representing Team USA. He was the Rookie of the Year as a professional national champion, multiple time national champion, European Grand Prix gold medalist, British national indoor champion, et cetera. Honestly, it's just, I'll turn most of you off by reading this because this introduction will be even longer than it probably is already slated to be.
I was introduced to John through Joe Rogan. When I was on Joe Rogan's podcast a couple of years ago, I let Joe know just how much of a huge fan I was, and Joe was just kind enough to introduce us.
And I had the real privilege of getting to spend a bunch of time in person with John. So in this episode, we don't go too deep into how I got started in archery and how I fell in love with it, and how even though when I started, I had absolutely zero intention of hunting and how over time that changed. And now I view hunting and archery as the two beautiful bookends of this incredible continuum.
John had already interviewed me for his podcast, and so we'll simply link to some of the highlights from his podcast interviewing me where I get into a lot of that stuff. Obviously, I wanted to focus on John and his story. And so in this episode, we talk a lot about John and his athletic background and how he made what can only be described as one of the craziest decisions in the history of a collegiate athlete, which is to turn down a Division I football scholarship one week into school and go and work at an archery store for $4.10 an hour building arrows, and that's exactly what he did. We talk a lot about life in a sense as well, because a lot of John's personality comes across in this, and you get a sense of sort of his philosophy on life, which frankly I just find wonderful. I love being around John and his family, and we can go back and forth between talking about these things in life, and then talking about these things in archery, and how amazingly they seem to converge. So what it is that we're talking about in terms of technically improving something seems to then converge on what the application is in life. So the last thing I'll say is we asked John to help us curate a list of content from his unbelievable curriculum, such that if any of you listen to this and come away thinking, you know, gosh, to listen to these two coconuts talking about archery for so long, I at least want to give this thing a try. You will get all you need from John's content, but we thought we'd simplify it a little bit by curating a step-by-step set of videos that he's put together that will make it easier than trying to probably navigate from all of his content. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with John Dudley.