Show Notes:

David Goggins
A game changing realization. “I was the one holding me back. I was the one looking for the scapegoat. I was the one looking for all these ways to tell myself it was going to be okay. I was hoping my dad was going to give me that confirmation and he was a loser himself. But at the end of the day when I left my home, I realized, ‘Well sh*t man, this is all me. I’m the loser. My dad’s f*cked up. My mom’s f*cked up. The people around me are f*cked up. They’re not going to save me.’ I needed to save myself. So that’s when all that reality hit me. When I went to Buffalo to see my dad, the entire drive home I told myself that the rest of my life is going to suck. There’s no way around it. But it’s not going to suck because of me being a loser, but because of me finally being a winner. And winning is not easy, my friend.”

A grandfather’s wisdom. “You have to continue to live your life, or you can choose to be doomed and become another statistic. A lot of young people fall back on their childhood when their childhood wasn’t good. That’s what Sergeant Jack, my grandfather who was in the military for over 30 years, told me — but the difference was that he never actually said any of this. He told me through his actions, and not feeling sorry for me when he worked me like a dog. That’s when it came to me that this is what life is.”

David’s alter ego: Goggins. “David Goggins didn’t know about the kind of commitment I knew I needed. I knew how to wash a car. I knew how to clean a house. I knew how to do all these manual labor jobs. But when it came down to true suffering — to the highest of suffering — I didn’t have that next level of, ‘Alright motherf*cker, we have to take this next level.’ David Goggins wasn’t enough. So I went into my mental lab and realized I wanted to be great, but I didn’t have greatness in me. I had to create a motherf*cker that was great. In my mind, I’m really big on visualization. People may think it’s all kinds of bullsh*t. Believe what the f*ck you want. I don’t give a sh*t.”

Cliff Bleszinski
A lack of equality. “The majority of people I’ve worked with in the gaming industry are men. When it came to interviewing people, I quickly started realizing that there weren’t many non-white dude applicants, and I’m not sure why that is. I think one of the main reasons for there not being many women in the industry is a lack of encouragement. It also seems to go back to gender roles you see when you go to Target and look at the little boys’ and girls’ shirts. Why do the boys’ say ‘Future CEO’ and the girls’ say ‘Let’s go shopping’? The gaming industry isn’t really that much different. It has a long way to go before I believe it can be considered equal.”

Behind the scenes of making a video game. “The type of people who wants to sit behind their computer screens for 14 or 16 hours a day typically aren’t the best communicators, and when they get together to create a video game, they’ve got to know how to communicate. They’re so focused on creating beautiful art and characters that collaborating and interacting with other people can be intimidating or even scary to them. I’ve been in a room where two programmers are sitting back to back and emailing each other back and forth instead of turning around and discussing the problem. When you add the behind-the-scenes issues to the frontend issues, it’s a miracle that games ever make it out into the world.

The downside of crunching. “You need to make sure you have a positive working environment and that your team members feel like they have a voice. I tried being the CEO at my own company for three and a half years at my studio, and I was average at best as a CEO. I believe a good CEO has to be a sociopath to some extent. So when it comes to crunching to get a video game out the door, I believe that can often have an adverse effect on your team’s mental health, physical health, and their anxiety. It’s one of those things that the industry needs to take a long, hard look at and mitigate it whenever possible.”

Rex Elliott
Building a brand around a sensitive subject. “I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t a big question. I’m a white guy from this privileged community in Columbus. How am I possibly going to understand what families of color go through? My response to that is, you’re right. I don’t know firsthand what happens in those communities. But what I can tell you is this: There are too many police shootings disproportionately affecting people of color — typically young African American men. What happens when that occurs is that largely the Black community gets up in arms. The point I’m making is that it is time for all of us to get angry and to get on TV and say enough is enough. No, I’m not a Black man; I’m a white man, but it should be just as outrageous for white men and white women as it is for Black men and Black women.”

It’s time to put an end to hazing. “The way I look at hazing cases, there are a number of different participants in hazing. There’s the 18- to 22-year-old kids, the national fraternity and sorority organizations, and then there’s the universities — and I frankly think that we’ve spent way too much time talking about the 18- to 22-year-old kids. All they’re doing is living within a system that was created for them by adults. We need to focus on the national organizations and the universities to put a stop to this. If we are going to start putting in the hands of 18- to 22-year-old kids to stop hazing in this country, it’s never going to happen. We have had a hazing death on a college campus in this country every single year since 1959, and it’s become my mission to do everything I can to end hazing altogether.”

Down with the Greek system. “I’ve called for an end to pledge programs across the country. They’re antiquated, they’re archaic, and there’s absolutely no purpose for a pledge program anymore. That’s where all these deaths and injuries are occurring because there’s an imbalance of power. The active members have something the pledges want, so the pledges go through a process. At some point they become invested and they’re so far down the path, there’s no turning back. Think about it for a second. These 18- and 19-year-old kids are on a college campus. They’re living independently for the first time in their lives. The last thing they’d want to do is quit something, and I think we need to eliminate pledge programs in general. One more death on a college campus in this country is too much.”

Bill Perkins
Memory dividends. “Your fulfillment is not only something that you got to experience as an event, but it also becomes what I call a memory dividend. Every time you recall it and think about it or discuss it makes you experience it all over again. Think of it this way: When you go out to dinner with new people, what do you talk about? Sure, you talk about ideas and concepts that haven’t happened, but a lot of times you talk about things that have happened and then you both share in that moment together, and that creates a new moment that you can look back on down the road.”

Everyone is different. “For each person on the planet, every unique activity will have an optimal time period for it to be done and done right. So when I say that something is better in your 40s than in your 20s and 30s, I’m speaking from my own personal lens. For somebody else, it might be different — but the point is to figure out what works best for you and to get off autopilot. You want to really think about when you’ll get the most fulfillment from each experience you undergo.”

Why Bill doesn’t watch television. “I don’t watch television unless my wife forces me to watch something with her. When people ask me why, I tell them I don’t get much value out of watching TV — I don’t even watch the news; I get it from other sources — because most of the things don’t pertain to me or interest me. But the main reason is that there will be a time when all I do is watch TV. I can’t wait to watch some of these shows that people say are so amazing, but they’re reserved for another time bucket down the road. Until then, I’m going to use my time to get outside and travel.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Episode 141 — David Goggins — Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within
Episode 145 — Cliff Bleszinski — Control Freak: Relentless Obsession in Video Games and Success
Episode 146 — Rex Elliott — Committed to Impact: Transforming Adversities into Opportunities
Episode 151 — Bill Perkins — Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life