Transcript
A (0:00)
This is Jocko, podcast number 539 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
B (0:05)
Good evening.
A (0:05)
So Leonardo da Vinci, he said there are three classes of people. Those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see. I want to talk to you about something that we brought up on the underground podcast I coined. I called it on the, on the podcast Gray slope, gray slop, Gray matter. Like, you know, your brain is gray. Gray slop. This is, has to do with detachment, which is another thing. You know, I've been talking about detachment for years. Detach from the chaos, detach from the mayhem, detach from your ego, detach from your emotions. That's gonna make your life so much better if you can do that. But lately I've been looking around and I'm realizing how truly difficult that can be for people and at the same time seeing how important it is and how much it really fouls and jams people up. And when you look at someone, you know, like you and I've talked about, you see someone that's drinking too much and it's kind of bringing down their life and you can see it so clear, but they don't, they don't get it, or they're involved in a relationship that's a disaster and you explain to them, but they're like, no, no, no, no, like this time, or I can save her or whatever, whatever. The thing is, right? Those are all emotional decisions. Those are just being all. You're, you're all in your own gray slop. Your gray matter, your. Your, your core. So what is that? You know, this gray matter actually has. The gray matter that I'm talking about is called the limbic system. And we'll get into this some more later. But the, the limbic system is kind of the part of your brain with the animal instincts. The, the raw emotion. It's got the fear in there, it's got the rage in there, it's got the, the fight or flight things. It's very fast, it's very impulsive, it's very irrational. That's your limbic system. And then the other side, of course, you have the prefrontal cortex. This is the rational brain. This is the logic brain. Brain. This is what has, this is what gives you impulse control. This is what allows you to execute long term planning, which I know you like. Strategic thinking. Strategic is in your prefrontal cortex moderating your behavior so you don't go nuts. Is in your prefrontal cortex. And there's People been talking about this for a long time. You know, this is nothing new. When I talk about detachment, I'm not the first person to come up with this, right? No, dude, people have been talking about this. Plato, Plato had the chariot allegory and you had these two horses. One was the animal minded, the other one was the spirit and the, and the moral impulse. And, and the driver is reason that's supposed to guide those forces, right? So this is not, this is nothing new. Descartes had the, the machine versus the soul and the animal. The animal is just instinct and humans have the ability to override those instincts. You're supposed to have that ability in more modern times, like nowadays. Daniel Kahneman, he wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. He breaks it down to these two systems. You know, system one is the fast, the automatic, the emotional, the intuitive. And then system two is the slow, deliberate, the analytical one. Jonathan Haight describes the elephant and the rider and his point in the elephant. The elephant's big and strong. Kind of like if your emotions are big and strong, they can override the writer. It's going to do what it wants. So that's a good, good analogy. We can take something away from that. Steve Peters, he wrote a book in 2012 called the Chimp Paradox, and then he wrote a children's book called My Hidden Chimp. And then he wrote a guidebook to go along with that in 2018, and he wrote a book called the Path through the Jungle. And he runs a consultancy which is called Chimp Management, because your inner chimp, when he calls the inner chimp, that's the thing that's going on emotion and going on animal instincts. And the frontal cortex is the human thing. So you got to manage that chimp in your head. So again, these are a bunch of. These are centuries worth of people that have talked about this and written about it, and clearly people understand it and they've been putting the word out forever. And yet it's very, very difficult for people to implement it, this detachment. And I don't think people. One thing I don't think people realize is how much influence that animal brain, that gray slop that's in your head, how much it really influences your logic and your rationality. I don't think people see that. It's not actually each of these examples, they talk about it as two separate things, but there's all kinds of little wires going between the two. And I don't sometimes don't think people recognize how much they feel like they're being Logical, but they're not. They feel like they're using their. Their human elevated, enlightened brain, but they're not. They're using the chimp brain. So we do things and we think. We kind of think that the animal instinct is kind of good because, you know, if you get. Something happens, you're afraid you can you get extra strength. You were just talking about before you hit record. You know, you see fighters that they're. They're exhausted, but then they knock the guy out, and all of a sudden they have all this.