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Speaker A: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Colman Ruiz. Coleman Ruiz is a former tier one Navy SEAL special operator. I thi... |
Speaker B: Thank you. Very excited to see you. |
Speaker A: It's great to have you here. I'm guessing most people are probably not familiar with Coleman Ruiz. So let's start at the beginning. Where were you born? What was the context of your home life? And maybe let's get up to maybe elementary school, middle school, and whatever top contour or deep details you want ... |
Speaker B: Okay, I'll bring us up to 7th grade, because I would say that was probably the first big inflection point in my life. I grew up in, I was born in New Orleans, in a suburb called New Orleans east, we call it, and have an older sister, two younger brothers. My dad was a welder. My mom was a dental assistant. A... |
Speaker A: Were you the instigator of those fights? |
Speaker B: Probably some. I definitely fell in with the wrong crowd initially in that 6th and 7th grade years, and I wouldn't say it was so extreme that, like, it was complete mayhem. But I was definitely on, you know, problem situation number whatever, when my parents were called in, and it was kind of the last straw ... |
Speaker A: Can I just pause you for a second? So, on the violence part, I have a little bit of experience with this, but violence can come from trying to protect others, instigating it can come from the wildness. Just trying to see what it feels like, experimentation and any number of other things, all the way to pure ... |
Speaker B: I think it was the wildness thing, Andrew. Honestly, it wasn't. I mean, I believe I don't have a malicious bone in my body. Like, we all have that in us. Obviously, my profession later in the military, you know, I was able to activate that, and I feel like I still can. And I was certainly able to in sports, ... |
Speaker A: Sure. Were you the Affleck or the renner? Affleck. Excuse me? Or Renner in that I was. |
Speaker B: I feel like I was mostly the renner. Put it this way. If you have some good idea this afternoon, like, let's go fucking try this. I'm good. I'm ready. And I think it's just exciting, you know, I hate rules. I hate being told what to do. It's one of the things that was so frustrating about the military. The r... |
Speaker A: Before we talk about wrestling and why it was so meaningful as a channel for you, a little bit of neurobiology, or else I wouldn't be Andrew Huberman. There's a really interesting phenomenon that one observes in both animals and humans, which is that somewhere around adolescence when the hormone surge begins... |
Speaker B: I mean, Andrew, in many ways, like I said, that was the first inflection point. It was like immediate, I mean, immediate uptake. Within a week, I knew this was my thing, maybe the first practice. |
Speaker A: What do you think it was? |
Speaker B: So when I was younger, my aunt and uncle, when I was like seven years old, they started taking me to road races, and I'm sure just running races, 1 mile and five k races when I was really small kid, for you to run, to run with them. They were into the road racing thing back in the day when it was brand new, ... |
Speaker A: T is physical. |
Speaker B: Yeah, physical training. |
Speaker A: Physical training. |
Speaker B: And so I won, like, the whatever when I was young and boy scouts or something, and then it just snowballed. Then I was just like, the physical activity still today is. I mean, if someone said, what are you really in love with? It's. It's that. And so when I walked into the wrestling room, it was so extreme c... |
Speaker A: Tell me more about that. |
Speaker B: You just don't have. There are some, of course, like, you can see guys hyping it up and doing their thing in UFC these days, and that's totally fine. But for the most part, if you have fighters of any type, like in a setting when they don't have to do, you know, the stuff for tv and whatnot, they respect eac... |
Speaker A: I think it was Sam Sheridan who wrote a fighter's heart, an excellent book. And for anyone, male or female, any age, who's interested in the human spirit, I recommend a fighter's heart because it's about the different fight sports, but it's really about the path of self discovery that occurs in various marti... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's true. You know, school, my grades immediately went up, Andrew. It was like, oh, my gosh, the discipline of all of it. My grades were always better in wrestling season than out of wrestling season. |
Speaker A: Interesting. |
Speaker B: Like, when I was cut loose out of the structure, then it wasn't good. And, you know, between 7th and 8th grade and all that, I didn't have any crazy shenanigans going on. I wasn't gonna get kicked out of school, whatever. I was doing normal stuff for the age. |
Speaker A: So the fight stopped. |
Speaker B: Totally. Totally. Cause I could put it into. I could put it into the wrestling space, you know? And I think I grew up, obviously, in New Orleans, and I think, you know, down there, it's baseball, football, basketball. Wrestling is not. I mean, I was lucky to wrestle in college at all because it wasn't like I... |
Speaker A: Define abuse. |
Speaker B: In all the legal, normal wrestling ways. Like, there's the wrestling gets broken up, obviously, by weights. You got the heavyweights on one end of the room, the lightweights on the other end of the room, and the young kids stay with the young kids for the most part. And a few of these guys would drag me down... |
Speaker A: So you wrestled all through high school? |
Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Yep. |
Speaker A: At that point, were you discovering relationships, girls? Were you partying? Were you a drinker? Used drugs? |
Speaker B: No drugs. I mean, it's New Orleans, right? It's like one of the things that was tough. I'm glad I got out of the city, frankly, because it was party time outside the season. Yeah. Girls, girlfriends, normal stuff in that regard. Lots of drinking, lots of rat in the streets, you know, in those days, in the ni... |
Speaker A: Inside the lane line, so it sounds like no drunk driving, no arrest, a. |
Speaker B: Little bit of that, but not. Nothing crazy in that regard. I think I understood the consequences, and I really cared about my career. I really wanted to wrestle in college. My grades were excellent, my SAT scores not so much. But I started winning really fast. And, you know, my last two years in high school,... |
Speaker A: Your sons. |
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And when 8th grade, I made varsity, and it was like, 8th grade? Yeah. And I lost, like 75% of the matches, you know, but you just grind it out, and it's how I got into naval academy, which is a whole nother story, but I. |
Speaker A: So let's talk about that. So you finished high school. |
Speaker B: Mm hmm. |
Speaker A: You head to the naval academy. Why the naval Academy? |
Speaker B: There's actually a crazy story behind this, which maybe we'll circle back to. But the summer. Gosh, I had forgotten that this started in 7th grade, too. The summer between my 7th and 8th grade year. My grandfather was too young to join the navy, and he wanted to go to the naval academy during world war two. ... |
Speaker A: And you don't like authority? No, I've not been in the military, but I've done some work with y'all, and there's a lot of hierarchy and authority. |
Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. The truth, Andrew, is like. It was just. It just seemed exciting. I wasn't really thinking about the implications as 18 year olds, you know, it looked very exciting to me. And having gotten some professional help in the intervening years, what I really think was a big part of it was my par... |
Speaker A: Were you a part of that? Obviously, you were part of the family that got divorced. Was it chaotic? Was it controlled? You and I are the exact same age. We're both 48, born in 75. Back then, it was a lot less common for people being. They called them broken homes back then. Nowadays, I don't think they call t... |
Speaker B: No, it was a shock to me. It wasn't a shock to my older sister. I just remember this was the thought at the time, this is, like, seared in my brain. This has nothing to do with me. That wasn't, like, some sophisticated view. It was mostly, fuck this. I'm not dealing with this. I have my own life. They're gon... |
Speaker A: Not a bad mindset for a kid at that stage. If it had been four years younger that might not be the best mindset but as you're heading off to college that's a reasonably healthy mindset as opposed to getting enmeshed in the what happened and this and that. Can I ask you at that stage you're 1718 years old at ... |
Speaker B: And Andrew it's a the word superficial and I carried this forward for years which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a second. Those binary focus areas like I was literally just going after them at full steam stronger, faster, more intensity with zero introspection. No excavation of the psychology of anything... |
Speaker A: No meditation, no breath work zero. |
Speaker B: Which was not adaptive in the long run. |
Speaker A: We'll get to how that played out in the long run. But nonetheless you got into the naval Academy didn't first. |
Speaker B: So I applied. I get, you know, my uncle's doing all this stuff. Anyway I applied and I didn't. I still have the letter, the thanks but no thanks, you know you're not qualified. |
Speaker A: How'd that hit you? |
Speaker B: At the time it hit me kind of like everything I did when that age when it didn't work out admittedly Andrew it was like there's gotta be a way around this like shit has to work out but it feels terrible, right? Like you have a moment of what do we do? And my kids have heard the story a million times. My wife... |
Speaker A: What's a blue chip? |
Speaker B: I mean my understanding of blue chip is like you are at the very top of the list and the coaches put you straight into the admission cycle saying nobody else gets in until this person does. |
Speaker A: So they wanted her, they didn't want you. |
Speaker B: Not only was she a blue chip and I was. And I got the no, I guess. Well the wrestling coach called me a couple of weeks after my no which is now in May. I'm about to graduate from high school. |
Speaker A: I'm not accepted anywhere you only applied one place. |
Speaker B: Actually two, which you may bust out laughing when I tell you what the other one is, because no Internet. I got a mailer in a pamphlet from Stanford, the wrestling coach. I didn't know what Stanford was. I had no idea that the college was even prestigious. I didn't know they had a wrestling team. I filled ou... |
Speaker A: Well, for those that follow wrestling, nothing. |
Speaker B: Get into either, right? |
Speaker A: That's a great story. And I'll just briefly mention that a few years ago, there almost wasn't a wrestling team at Stanford. They had plans to cut the wrestling team despite having a NCAA champion at Stanford. But the power of people gathering and petitioning works. Wrestling and a few other sports that were ... |
Speaker B: It's amazing. |
Speaker A: Or rescued. |
Speaker B: So happy to see that. |
Speaker A: Yeah, so that. So it. Stanford does have a wrestling team. |
Speaker B: So the coach. The coach back to like, how I ended up getting in, I appreciated my college. Coach called and he said, I'm recruiting. I have one more spot at the prep school, which is in Newport, Rhode island. I'm recruiting another kid from Pennsylvania. If he takes that spot, then I don't have anything left... |
Speaker A: So Newport, Rhode island? |
Speaker B: Yeah, in Newport for a year. |
Speaker A: It's a nice place. |
Speaker B: That's great. |
Speaker A: Yeah. |
Speaker B: And so you wrestle for. I mean, you do school, you know, you're ahead. You're in. West Point has a prep school and Colorado Springs has a prep school. And so we joked that my wife was first person in our class, accepted, and I was last, which is highly possible, actually. |
Speaker A: I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, ag one. By now, most of you have heard me tell my story about how I've been taking ag one once or twice a day, every day since 2012. And indeed that's true. I started taking ag one and I still take ag one once or twice a day because it gives me vita... |
Speaker B: Yeah, if you graduate prep school, you're straight into the naval Academy. Like, they fully expect you to be there the next year. |
Speaker A: When junior year rolled around and senior year rolled around of high school, didn't anyone pull you aside and say, hey, you might want to, like, apply to a few other places. You might want to consider what you do if this doesn't work out, what did they assume you were going to do? They just head into the cit... |
Speaker B: Zero guidance. Andrew really, like, from my high school, and I think the ecosystem I was in, like, people just didn't really know how to do that, you know, how to apply to schools. I mean, my parents obviously helped when I applied to the naval academy. But when I look at the system that kids go through now ... |
Speaker A: There's something magical to that. I can relate to that. So you're in Newport and describe what a day was like. Is it all wrestling? You're taking general education classes like one does in the first two years of university? |
Speaker B: Yep. So the way the prep school is set up for the naval academy is they're basically teaching you the first semester of the naval academy. So you take calculus, physics, chemistry, I think you take an english class, etcetera, and you go through, like, a pretty hellacious first couple of weeks because you're ... |
Speaker A: So you're in the military, technically, if. |
Speaker B: You go to this, you're actually enlisted in the navy. |
Speaker A: Okay. So they own you to some extent. |
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do. And then you do. |
Speaker A: You're wearing uniforms, you jogging in the morning, you're doing salutes and marching. |
Speaker B: Yep. |
Speaker A: You're bugling. They're doing taps in the evening. |
Speaker B: All of it. |
Speaker A: Got it? |
Speaker B: Yep. And you live. There's 300 people at the prep school. It's distributed basically amongst folks coming from the fleet. So guys who did four or five years in the military somewhere, and they're coming into the naval academy from the fleet, and then athletes and then sort of a mixture of other folks who nee... |
Speaker A: Always been curious about these military schools and the people that go to them and what happens to people there. Did you have any sense of patriotism prior to arriving at this prep school? And did that sense of patriotism. I'm talking like, love of country, understanding the history of our country and its p... |
Speaker B: No, no. The feeding of. And I really appreciated this. The feeding of those concepts starts when you get there. But I was deer in the headlights, and, like, I didn't think about my life in this way at all when I was headed there. I mean, what you get very early because the school very quickly starts to bring... |
Speaker A: One of the reasons I asked this is that various times throughout my life, I've had this experience of, like, seeing people close to me doing incredible work. You know, like, when I was a postdoc at Stanford, I had Nobel Prize was given that one week to the guy next door to me. |
Speaker B: Yeah. |
Speaker A: So you see him in the morning and you're hearing it on the radio. And obviously, I didn't have that kind of stature or talent in science. I think I'm a good scientist, but good enough to. You'll get tenure at Stanford. But then there are levels within the game. But there is something very special to the expe... |
Speaker B: No, I actually came at it from the opposite way, and this has been a hard thing for me my whole life, and I have to watch out for this perspective is, I felt like every day I had to wake up and earn my place there. I was never good enough for myself, ever. So next day up is a restart to prove myself again on... |
Speaker A: Did you ever recall falling asleep at night and thinking like, well, like, I. |
Speaker B: Had a good day. |
Speaker A: I had a good day, or I'm scared, you know, they're gonna discover I can't keep up, or I can't keep up all the time. So a lot of fear. I mean, yeah, a lot of fear all the time. |
Speaker B: And some of it I do. I genuinely know and believe now, Andrew, that it was well intentioned. Like, I wanted to do a good job for the group, whatever group I was in, my platoon, my squad, in the case of the prep school, you know, that first experience. I mean, I was talking about this with. With my wife the o... |
Speaker A: But there was a I need to get to their level statement in there. It wasn't. I can't keep up. I better find a different path. |
Speaker B: No, no, no. I knew I could. I knew I could get to their level with enough work, you know? |
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