Building the Elite Podcast

Todd Bumgardner is a human performance coach at a tier one special operations unit. He works with operators during their qualification course. To do this well, he must balance their immediate physical training needs with the demands of their qual course, and ensure that he keeps them at a high level of performance without impairing their readiness for crucial work-related tasks and tests like CQB training. On this call, we discuss how he does that. If you'd like to stalk Todd, you can do so here:Instagram - @todd_bumgardnerInstagram - @humanpredatorpackmuleInstagram - @beyondstrengthOnlyFans - (classified)Email - todd@beyondstrengthperformance.com

18-Delta, the Special Forces medic qualification course, and SOCM, the Special Operations Combat Medic course, are among the most difficult schools in the US Special Operations pipeline. The people who attend these courses are special operators who have already been through their selection programs, and in some cases have already gone through several work-ups and deployments with their units. They’re smart, motivated, and highly-capable people. And yet, only about half of them will make it through a given course. It’s just that hard. On this call, we talk with two different graduates of this course. A former Green Beret and 18D medic named Jack, and a former Navy SWCC and SOCM medic named Chase.We discuss what this school is like, what to expect if you’re a student on your way there, and some of the best practices for successfully completing the course. Some of the resources we discussed on this call: Complete Anatomy Study AppMental Skill: SegmentingMental Skill: Compartmentalization Khan Academy free online courses, such as this one on calculating units and dosages.  Supermemo and Anki spaced repetition flashcard programs

Special operations selection teaches you to rethink your relationship with pain. The discomfort of doing something with a painful but partial effort isn't meaningfully different from the pain of giving it everything you have. One is just slower, and when it's over you wouldn't really remember the difference.For the world of SOF selection to become your home, and to eventually succeed in it, you have to think of pain not as something to be avoided as often as possible, but as a component of a strategy. There is productive pain that helps you get something done, and there is useless pain.You can hurt fast, or you can hurt slow. When it's over it's all just a blur of suffering and the subtle distinctions won't have mattered. What will matter is what you accomplished with that pain.

Eustress training is a way of training your body to do more work, easily by raising the baseline of movement or exercise that you can do without stressing your body out or making a significant demand on your recovery capacity.This means that you can eventually train harder, recover faster, and when you want to really push things in the gym or in your sport, you have a higher output potential. Since you’ve trained to make heavy workouts feel easy, you’ll be able to do even more before it feels really difficult.Eustress training also has several other benefits. For instance, It helps to build a high degree of control into your perception of sustained effort, teaching you how to make hard things easy. It allows you to refine and dial in techniques and mental strategies.It reduces recovery time - allowing you to shift emphasis to other physiological demands and training inputsIt increases specific work capacity in the movements trained. It helps to develop a better sense of interoception, or the ability to sense what is happening within your body and predict how future events will feelIt also helps to develop a general skill of self-regulation, or the ability to manage your stress response under difficult conditions. If you prefer reading or want to refer back to something mentioned in this article, click here. 

Over our lifetimes, as years of experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t really something that you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice. You have to know it, not just know the words for it. As this settles in, it begins to alter both stages of the stress appraisal process. You’re more likely to accurately understand the scope of what is happening, and you’ll know that no matter how it plays out, you’ll have the capacity to handle it, even if things go badly.This shifts your sense of control away from needing external events to occur in a certain way to knowing that regardless of how those events go you can still dictate your own response to them. Once you know that even the worst-case scenario is manageable, you gain freedom.By letting go of your need for things to happen in a particular way, you gain the ability to accept and work with them as they are. You’ll know that it doesn’t matter what the world throws at you because you’ve got what it takes to handle it, even if it hurts. 

In the second half of our conversation with Dr. Andy Morgan, we cover topics including:⁠⁠- Advice for people seeking careers in the intelligence community⁠- Andy’s work as an expert witness testifying at the International Criminal Court⁠- The effects of trauma on memory, and why an inconsistent story of a traumatic event does not indicate lying⁠- How people can be given false memories, and how he did so in his research⁠- The science and myths of human lie detection⁠- When polygraphs are BS and when they're not⁠- The appeal of "corporate horoscopes", aka made-up personality tests sold to corporations⁠- Methods for rapidly learning or memorizing information. ⁠If you haven’t done so already, please check out the first episode of this talk (Episode 21), where Dr. Morgan discusses the psychology and biology of performance under stress in special operators, the characteristics of effective special operators, and what it is that the operational psychs are looking for at selection and assessment courses. Timestamps:Part 2:00:00:51 How to Join the Intelligence Community00:05:19 Testifying at the Hague00:20:54 Detecting Deception00:23:56 Polygraphs00:29:15 Magic and Tarot00:33:24 The Yale Harold Fiasco00:35:51 Memory Castles00:41:34 Association00:45:35 Yohimbe and Norepinephrine

Dr. Andy Morgan is a Yale-educated former CIA medical intelligence officer, and one of the world's foremost experts on performance under stress in special operations personnel. In this episode we cover:- "The Warfighter's Stress Response" - What are the mental and physical differences between SOF candidates who perform well under stress, and those who don't?- SOF selection criteria - What are the differences in the profiles of ideal SOF candidates from one program to another? - The psych interview at SOF selection - What are the operational psychs and cadre looking for, and what is the best advice for candidates going into these interviews? This is part one of a two-part episode. Part two will follow soon after, and will cover many other topics ranging from the science of detecting deception (Are polygraphs BS?) to navigating a career in the clandestine intelligence community and how to rapidly learn and remember lots of novel information. Timestamps:Part 1:00:02:23 The War Fighters Stress Response00:16:07 SOF Selection Criteria00:36:29 The Psych Interview at Selection

Self-herding is when you refer to your past actions for subconscious guidance rather than mirroring what others around you are doing. This effect can persist a lot longer than the situation that produced the action. By taking advantage of self-herding, we can use temporary circumstances to shape persistent, long-term behavior. A common method for doing this used by successful SOF candidates is to "quit tomorrow." No matter how much what you're doing right now hurts, you can tell yourself that you'll finish out today and quit tomorrow. This takes away the daunting prospect of future suffering while focusing you on pushing through today's challenge. Most of the time, people do this in reverse. They take the easy way out today and tell themselves that they'll do the hard thing tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. Each day they make a new excuse, skip the hard work, and put the burden of their ambitions onto their future selves. Present-day actions never match future goals. Quitting tomorrow helps you do the hard work today, by mentally promising yourself that you can take a break tomorrow. In the same way, tomorrow never comes. Each new day becomes just one more today in a long string of them in which you suffer through one last time. Just as making an excuse and avoiding discomfort becomes a reflex for many people, quitting tomorrow makes a habit of perseverance. 

In SOF selection, you'll often hear instructors say "Don't set yourself up for failure." From your viewpoint in the pushup position with wet sand abrading every inch of your body, this might seem like yet another form of casual derision. But it's an important reminder. Many of the little tests in selection are assessing for conscientiousness and long-term planning, or the ability to account for second and third-order effects in our behaviors. In other words, the ability to process "If I do X now, then Y will happen as a result, and then Z will happen like this." How well we do this determines where our actions fall on a scale between setting ourselves up for success or setting ourselves up for failure. Think of a drop of water. You want it to get from point A to point B. You’re not going to expect the water to get there because that’s what’s good for it. You expect it to get there because that’s where gravity will take it, and if that environment were to change, so would the path of the water.We’re not as different from that drop of water as we may like to think. Our control over our future actions is limited. What we can control, however, is what we do right now to shape our future environment so that the path of least resistance is the one we want ourselves to take. This episode is about this concept - that if we change the upstream drivers that affect our behavior, we'll be better able to do the right thing in the future when doing the right thing is hard. 

Metacognition is a fancy word for “thinking about thinking”.⁠⁠To borrow definitions from research with Olympic athletes, metacognition can be broken into 3 forms:⁠⁠- being aware of goals and how those goals relate to specific situations;⁠- using specific psychological strategies (such as goal-setting, imagery, self-talk, relaxation, and activation) to manage and control your thoughts and visualizations;⁠and⁠- being aware of how past experience might shape your present perspective and future predictions.⁠⁠We learn by making and correcting mistakes at the edge of our ability. This means that metacognition is an essential tool for recognizing our errors, rapidly correcting them, and continuously improving during training. ⁠⁠In this episode, we discuss how that works, and one method for doing so that you can use today. ⁠