Transcription
Sorry for the English. I'm French; that's a disclaimer. Hmm, how can a man that has not grown up with the confidence and trusting male role models and mentors—sort of anti-Uncle Jake person's—only intellectual—I'm saying this without disrespect to these people—how can they become a confident man and develop the necessary "man skills"?
Okay, it's interesting you can say "man skills" in quotes. Yeah, and I think we pretty much know what that means, right? Yes, like what that means. So, so how do you do that you don't have any positive role model around you that's like an Uncle Jake? Which, by the way, most people don't have an Uncle Jake.
Yeah, right. That's not normal to have an Uncle Jake. Most people, you got what you got, and in this case, he's saying he's got like the intellectuals. So you know, "Oh, my parents were college professors, and they don't have any of these skills, and they sit around and talk about philosophy." Right. Now I ended up—I can talk about philosophy well, but I can't fix my car. Yeah, or I can't defend myself, yeah, in a combat scenario in the streets. So what are you gonna do?
Okay, this is real simple: Go do things. Mmm, go do things. Lift; start lifting weights. Learn how to deadlift, learn how to squat. That's that's part about being a man, right? Sure, physically. Yeah, physically strong. Learn some jujitsu. I recommend that. Probably could have guessed that one. Yeah, learning how to fight, learning how to defend yourself. I just got asked this the other day. A kid came up to me; he's like, "What should I do if I get intimidated by other people, and I or I don't know how to react when people like get in my face?" I said, "Do you train jujitsu?" "No." "Start training in jiu-jitsu." Mm-hmm. "But then what? I'm gonna fight everyone?" "No, no, you don't have to, because you already know you can beat them up, right? Now, if they attack you, yeah, you can beat them up. But if they are just getting in your face and trying to punk you, and you look at them and go, 'Hey, if you want to do this, let's do this,' but I don't care. Yeah, I know you can come to my gym. I'll talk you out; train some jujitsu." So we got that one.
Run, hike, sprint, climb, build things. Start building things, rewire things, do some plumbing. These things are not—they're not impossible to do. Now it's gonna take you longer, right? Like I've rewired parts of my house. I've replumbed parts of my house. We've done all the plumbing in parts of my house. Now, if you watch a skilled electrician do what I'm doing, it would literally take him 1/8 of the time, maybe 1/4 of the time, because—or like the drywall you're talking about earlier—a good drywaller, they are like masters. A good electrician, masters. A good plumber, they're smooth. Me, it's gonna take a while. Sure. So, but but what I'm saying is it's not impossible. Yeah, it's not impossible to do. Mmm, and it'll take you more time, but you're learning how to do it, and that gives you—what does that give you? It gives you the self-reliance. Right? "Hey, I can fix my electrical outlet if I need to." Yeah, so those are good things. Work on your car, change your oil, whatever. Do those things. And and again, those things—like I—so I took electricity class in high school. Sure, where we learned how to wire rooms and everything. Is that what it's called? Elec—it was called electricity class. I took electricity with Scotty. Was the teacher's name. Sure. Wait, you called him Scott? Everyone called him Scotty. He was an older guy; his name was Scotty. We all call him Scotty. So Scotty, but we we learned how to wire houses and all that. Well, I didn't remember any of that when I was—now 20 years later or 15 years later, I'm rewiring my kitchen, which I ripped out of my house. Okay, so what did I do? You know what I did? Went down to Home Depot. Mmm, I bought a book called Electrical Wiring, and I read through it, and I followed the directions. Same thing with plumbing. Go down, buy a book called How to Do Plumbing, and you do it. And the good thing about this stuff is it's very satisfying to do that kind of work. Yeah, it's very satisfying to do it, and you can over-engineer things. You make things super solid in your own house, secure. Yeah, super. Yeah, you can just kind of go the extra distance because it's your own—your own house. So that's cool. So those are all physical things and some kind of knowledge things that you can start working on.
What's the hardest thing to overcome here is like a level of embarrassment. Yeah, right. How so? Like, "I don't know anything about wiring." Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, "I don't know; I'm embarrassed to say I don't know anything about wiring." Yeah, and so people don't want to say anything, so they'd rather just say, "Hey, let's get an electrician in here to figure this one out." Yeah, or, "Hey, I was good." Yeah, so they're too embarrassed. But if you have time, do it yourself. Yeah, and don't be embarrassed about it. Be like, "Hey, I'm rewiring my kitchen; I have no idea what I'm doing." Yeah, "Give me this book. Yeah, what do I need to get? Oh, give me some tools." It's good to have good tools. Yeah, also. So that's—that's like I said, those are things that you can do. You know, um, learn to shoot. You know, learn to shoot; that's a good—good skill to have. Also, read; write. Read about history, read about survival, read about the world, read about human beings under duress. Read—read books, good books about good stuff, about challenges. It's—and then just like Mark, and we're the warrior kid; he doesn't know his times tables. Yes, to learn them, you have to go learn all this stuff. And talk about—you have to go learn. And with—with time, your confidence is gonna grow, and from humility, you'll grow into being more confident. Now you also say you don't have any mentors or role models around you. That's okay, because those mental mentors and role models are in books, and you can find them. You can—I just talked about David Hackworth; good mentor to have met. And you can have a guy—a guy wrote you a 1000-page book on how to lead, and it's for you. That's pretty awesome. Beyond Band of Brothers, my Dick Winters. Mm-hmm. Guess what? Here's a guy that was that in charge of the Band of Brothers in Normandy, and he wrote a book for you to learn how to lead. So those are some examples. And like I said, most of the books that we've covered on this—many of the books that we cover on this podcast give you a mentor better than anyone could possibly hope for. Yeah, so you can get it there. But—and we mostly cover war books, but there's books about all kinds of people that can be virtual mentors. So read, study, do. Do. That's my advice on that one. Yeah, that physically strong thing is a—in my opinion—a big deal, because especially what with, you know, intellectual types in that kind of environment. Yeah, since that's not really a priority a lot of the time, you tend to—you know how like you're not into something, so you kind of shun it, you know? And I've seen this—I'm not saying all the time, but you know, sometimes the inner—"I don't like takedowns, so I'm not gonna do it." Yeah, and then you think of all the reasons why you don't need to do it. And how guys—focus true, you know, or whatever. So in an intellectual circle will say—"Yeah, those meatheads," or whatever. You know, they just don't shun it. Or you say about that issue—"No, yeah, but they'll do that." Yeah, and then there'll be these physically frail people, but since they—they're in their mind smarter than everyone, I feel like they have the one-up in their kind of—there's an element of satisfaction there. Yeah, but at the end of the day, you're physically weak. There comes down—and I think most of the time—I think I don't know, but it seems like most of the time they'll have these feelings like this guy asked right here—like, "Yeah, man, how can I develop, because I feel it." Yeah, yeah, unless they just want to be in denial, right? That's what exactly—a ban. And also, he'll—and by the way, the same thing happens in the reverse, right? Yeah, guys, it's just a meathead; he shuns and and disrespects or disregards the intellectual side of this, and that is—that is equally as bad, because they're not—they don't know what's going on; they're not knowledgeable; they're not learning; they don't understand the world in a clear way. So find the balance between those two things. Yeah, what's great is those things are not mutually exclusive; like you don't have to just be a meathead, or just have to be a bookworm, right? You can do both. There's plenty of time in the day to do both. Leigha, a smart-ass guy with a big deadlift; that's a good thing. I'm trying to be that guy. Yeah, not there yet, but I'm working on it. Yeah. And then that one level up, which is the jujitsu part of it. You do think—you are thinking about jujitsu combines the intellectual piece with the physical piece. Yeah, and in a way, you can connect—I'm not recommending this at all; in fact, I'm against this, but this is the nature of jujitsu—you don't have to be that—like you don't have to have a big deadlift to dominate in GG first; you don't have to do any of that. So you can essentially overcome the physical part of it, even though jujitsu is physical, but it's a—you don't have to—you know, overcome a physical part of it to a point. Yeah, yeah. In everyday life, I mean, you—you're trying to—you're trying to be the guy—like if someone's better than you at jujitsu in the training room, it really bothers you. Are you talking about everyone or no—me? You—doesn't bother me. Well, let's say it motivates—I don't know, you know, like—like it doesn't bother me. Right, right, right. I mean, like, for instance, I trained with Dean Lester all the time. Yeah, he's better than me in jujitsu. Right? I everyday wanna train with him, right? So it doesn't bother—it's not bother—but like what I know compels you—impels—like—no, no, maybe it does. Like, I hate it—it depends on what you mean by bother. I hate it; I do—I hate it, and I love it. And we were just joking about the other day because we got into a little scrap yesterday, you know, kind of into training, and all of a sudden things got escalated, and there was some shouting going on. Shouting, shouting. Yeah, yeah. You know, he was saying what he says, and I was saying what I say, and but we had a—you know, we had a mutual truce at the end. We—I think he didn't really want anymore; I didn't really want anymore, so we just kind of—"Let's—let's laugh and call it good." Because you're rolling the dice when I'm alone with Dean; there's a dice roll happening, because if he ends up in a good position on me, there's gonna be pain. There's gonna be pain. If I end up in a good position on him, there's gonna be pain. So I think both of us—we got away a little bit unscathed; neither one of us got a really good position, and we—I got back up to my feet, and I—and then we both kind of just had a mutual agreement, an unspoken agreement. Yeah, we were done for the day. But the point there being is in almost—like in this weird way, you know how like intellectually you can excel, so you can kind of find it justifiable to avoid the physical part of it. It's almost like you could almost say the same thing about jujitsu. You could still be effective in defending yourself without being physically strong, necessarily. But—but my point is that there's a limitation to that. Oh, yeah. Ultimately, if you—you can be—you can be unbelievable at jujitsu, but if you're really, really weak, and you go against someone that's really good at jujitsu, but there are a hell of a lot stronger than you, yeah, you're gonna have some issues. Right, yeah, yeah. Ideally—and that's ultimately the main point—is just like how intellectually you can be, you know, a black belt, and you can sort of—in a way—get away with not necessarily being—and vice versa. And then jujitsu is like that third element; you don't sort of get away with not being super strong but still be effective in jujitsu. You know, I mean, so yeah, ideally—just like someone in the middle—yeah, get that balance here. But being able to defend yourself is a whole nother thing than being physically strong. You know, seems obvious, but when you go through life, I think it's not, because you get these like big jacked guys, and it's like, "No one wants to mess with him." Well, bro, this medium-to-small guy who knows jujitsu or knows this—you know, for real fighting stuff—is way more of a—I was like dangerous—but yes, ultimately, way more dangerous than this big jacked guy who can lift a lot. For sure. So it's that third element that's kind of weird when you roll with somebody that's super jacked and they don't know jujitsu. Yes, and it's amazing; it's like amazing. Yeah, you just think yourself—"How is this happening?" Yeah, this is the magical power. Yeah, because you look at a big jacked guy, your human instincts tell you—"Look out! Yeah, he's gonna—that person is stronger than you; you know, watch out." But when you know jujitsu, yeah, you don't—and eventually you realize you don't even have that anymore. Yeah, you know, everyone you're looking at thinking—"Wait, you don't have—whoa, you don't have—no keen—that is a fear"—instinct of fear. Although you're still—you—you—you know, my first thought when I look at someone's like—"Do they train or not?" Yeah, "Do they train or not?" If they train, we may have issues; this could be a problem. If they don't train, no factor. Yeah, no train, no factor. Yeah, if they train, may have a factor. That's why I gotta work out hard so I never be strong. Yeah, yeah. You know, you know, 'cause they might be coming to take my lunch money, maybe, right? Don't want that. No. How's this—last night, literally last night, I didn't train last night. I did not train last night. We're a real-world experience. So you know the five-gallon jugs of water, you know, those things you put in the water cooler or whatever? So this like a little refilling thing that I went to—I've told this story before—no, there's another—this happened last night. So hazardous duty—I know—water refilling of the joints. Yeah, I do that. Okay, last night when I was doing—now is refilling the jugs, you know, I go in store, I'm coming out, walking to my truck to get the empty jugs to go to the little thing. As I'm walking to my truck, a car pulls up right next to the water-filling thing. Mm-hmm. There's a—what's called a red box. You know what—yeah. So car pulls up, a kid, maybe 12 years old, jumps out of the car; he starts—like it was a yoked dude—no, normal kid, whatever. And from in the car, this thing—male, probably is dad, someone, maybe stepdad—really—and immediately the dad starts yelling at him. Mmm, "Just put it in the thing," and just—to the point where I thought it was kind of joking—where 'cause all joking, my daughter like that, you kind of like—hell, you'll do sometimes. Yeah, yeah, you'll get up, but in—it sounded like a joke. Mmm, when I was like—"Wow, this guy's serious." And the kid is like—you could tell he was kind of used to it. No, he was like—"I am—I'm doing—I'm trying," you know, whatever, whatever. And they—look, on the whole parking lot, could hear ya. And this is at nighttime—secure setting. So I'm walking to my truck; I'm like—"Bro, if I get to this place and this guy's still there, not even yell—arms in there, I'm gonna have to say something. Not be a dick; I'll be like, 'Hey, don't talk to him like that.' I'm gonna try to solve this problem; be like a—this kitten," you know, whatever. I had this little thing before I knew jujitsu or anything like that; I wouldn't have messed with it. I would even—beam like big or whatever—in strong, I would have been like—"Oh, man, that's—"Yeah, you know, but man, I was like—"Man, I'm gonna do this." So I grabbed a—and they left, so I didn't get the opportunity, but I'm just saying these are things that can happen on varying levels every day. Yeah, and if you're in intellectual tech-9—and I'm not saying if you're an intellectual, but if you don't have these elements of—whether it be skill or knowledge or whatever—like those things mess with you. You know, I can't. Yeah. And when I figured out what jujitsu was—when Master Chief Steve Bailey choked me—and he was—he was an old man at the time, probably three years younger than I am—and I was thinking myself—"This—how'd this guy just do this to me? That's insane; that's completely insane. I need to learn whatever he knows. You teach to me whatever you know, because I don't want to feel that way ever again." And then you're training it—like let's say you train for five years—for five years you're training not against people who don't know—you're training against people who do know—dangerous people who do know like how to defend your shit. And then you go in the real world, yeah, you have this guy has no idea how much control you have over an internship. Yeah, I see. Yeah, that's—it's totally—so yeah, this—this whole thing—were—I mean—year—and that your thing about some guy was the guy was—his problem was like—when people get in his face or whatever—his problem wasn't getting beat up; it was when people get in your face and how you react in the right feeling, right? Off Brad; that feeling gone. Yeah, because you're right; your numbers are right, because he said he wasn't scared of fighting; he was saying like—"I might get in trouble Hughes"—he didn't like how he felt. I felt like he should do something, and he felt like a lamp. Basically, when you know that you can destroy someone, then it doesn't matter; you just think they're an idiot. Yeah, you beat them; you get the strength and the skills, and you actually beat them on an intellectual level. So it's like a—yeah, yeah. If you can get those three—intellectual, psychological, whatever—mental, physical, and skill-wise defending yourself—that's the lit—the three right there; it's good stuff. Not just—just how hard you want to hit it, really. You want to hit it hard? I think so too. You know, it's very beneficial to hit it hard.