Choose the Hard Way

How do you cultivate stress inoculation, resilience and an internal locus of control? Are they learnable skills? Are they situationally dependent? I explore these questions and more on this episode with Craig Weller. Craig made many mistakes on a bumpy path into the special operations community, but he made it and worked as a SWCC and in high-threat protection and diplomatic security. Since then, Craig spent the past decade studying and teaching peak performance. With Jonathan Pope, he’s the co-author of Building the Elite: The Complete Guide to Building Resilient Special Operators. Their students have gone on to become Navy SEALs, Green Berets, SWCCs and members of the SAS and numerous other elite special operations units around the globe.  If you dig this episode, please share it with a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. Go to www.choosethehardway.com to sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.

David Brinton is an Olympian, World Champion, Hollywood stuntman, black belt, former pro cyclist, cycling coach and expert witness. The bicycle has taken David to some amazing and unlikely places as a human and professional. He has stunt doubled Mario Lopez, won national and world championships as a masters cyclist and could probably break an oak tree in half with a roundhouse kick. We talk about gut instincts, coming up from nothing and the power of why not. You are what you overcome. Choose the hard way.

You may have caught Randy on How I Built This with Guy Raz. In this interview, we take a different direction and dig into the early experiences that laid the foundation for Randy’s future success. Randy is the founder and CEO of TRX, the human performance and training company. After rowing at USC where he studied history and martial arts, he had a 14-year career in the Navy as an officer, SEAL Operator and Squadron Commander of the SEALs Special Missions Unit. Following that, he got his MBA at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business where he invented the TRX Suspension Trainer.  I met Randy in the mid 2000s and wrote about him and the TRX suspension trainer for Outside magazine. It struck me as a revolutionary way to train and a hell of a good idea. I ended up leaving journalism to go work for Randy and had a front-row seat as the company skyrocketed from a startup to a global business with over $50 million in annual revenue. TRX gear and training programs are widely used in the military, in gyms, and by pretty much every pro sports team on the planet. If you dig this episode, please share it with a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. Go to www.choosethehardway.com to sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.

Dean Kuipers' latest book is Deer Camp: a Memoir of a Father, a Family and the Land that Healed Them. It’s the story of how he and his brothers reconnected with their estranged father through a plot of land in rural Michigan where Dean grew up.  Dean is a journalist, author and editor who has had a long and interesting career writing about three big areas: ecology, politics and the arts.  As a former editor at Spin and Raygun magazines, Dean wrote extensively on radical movements and rock’n’roll, with cover stories on artists including David Bowie, Neil Young, Iggy Pop, Smashing Pumpkins, Cypress Hill, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson and many others.  At the LA Times he was the editor of the Nightlife section and Greenspace blog and his journalism has also appeared in Outside, Playboy, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly and many other publications.Dean is also the author of three nonfiction books and co-wrote a fourth with the artist Doug Aitken.  I first met Dean when he was the Nightlife editor at the LA Times and he asked me to profile Mekhi Pfifer during his turn as Future in 8 Mile. Dean and I have crossed paths a few times since then and I really enjoyed reconnecting this conversation. It made me look at the world differently, and I think you’ll really enjoy it, too. You can learn more about Dean at deankuipersonline.com.  If you dig this episode, please pass it on to a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. Go to www.choosethehardway.com to sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.

Tony Blauer is an entrepreneur and world-renowned personal defense and combatives expert. He’s started hugely successful businesses--but he’s also had the unfortunate experience of trusting the wrong people and having one of his businesses implode at its peak. He has created truly world-changing technologies and ideas, but his inventions have had challenging births and the world didn’t always understand what he was doing.  Tony is the founder and CEO of Blauer Tactical Systems, the host of the Know Fear podcast and the creator of the SPEAR system, a personal defense system rooted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience that leverages our innate, instinctive response to being surprised.  For the past 40 years, Tony has taught his system to everyone from youth and soccer moms and dads to law enforcement officers and tier-one operators in the world’s most elite special operations units. He also taught his system to me in 2009 as part of a story I wrote based on my experiences living in an area with a gang problem in Los Angeles. What I learned from Tony during a short period of time a decade ago transformed how I thought about violence, personal safety and situational awareness. One of the reasons I started this podcast was because of the experience I often had as a journalist where the best, most interesting I learned while researching stories often didn’t belong in the stories I was writing. So I’m happy to share this in-depth interview with Tony about some of those things including the harsh and unexpected bumps he has hit along the way during his career as an innovator and entrepreneur.  You can follow Tony on Instagram and Twitter @tonyblauer. Find his company at https://blauerspear.com/start and check out his Know Fear podcast. If you dig this episode, please pass it on to a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. This show is about more than me, my guests and an idea. It’s about the community that you all have created around it, and I love to hear from you. Drop me a line at choosethehardway@gmail.com or @hardwaypod on Twitter or Insta. Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.

What is the link between heavy metal and heavy innovation? How far-out is too far? How do you go from idea to market at scale? Let’s find out. You read the CV’s of some people and you think, is this a human being? Could one person really do this much in one life? My guest today is Krisztina Z Holly. She is one of those people and I can confirm that while she has done an inhuman amount of cool things, she is indeed a human being. Z is a legendary innovator, entrepreneur, advisor and talent amplifier. She launched and curated the first-ever TEDx event, founded innovation centers at MIT and USC and started up multiple companies. She was the entrepreneur in residence for the city of Los Angeles under Mayor Garcetti and she’s been an advisor to the World Economic Forum and the Obama administration. Z says her superpower is identifying and amplifying hidden talent and has advised and nurtured dozens of entrepreneurs. When she isn’t innovating, advising and changing the world through technology, Z is shredding on her mountain bike, skydiving, scuba diving, backcountry skiing and generally living life like a Mountain Dew commercial. If all you know about tech in LA is Silicon Beach, this episode is going to blow your mind. Find Z on Twitter and Instagram @krisztinaholly and at http://www.krisztinaholly.com. If you dig this episode, please pass it on to a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. This show is about more than me, my guests and an idea. It’s about the community that you all have created around it, and I love to hear from you. Drop me a line at choosethehardway@gmail.com or @hardwaypod on Twitter or Insta. Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.More about Z:Z was Vice Provost for Innovation at USC and Founding Executive Director of MIT's Deshpande Center and USC's Stevens Institute of Innovation, investing >$5M in early stage ideas, launching 39 venture-backed startups from university research, expanding Boston and LA startup ecosystems and raising $7M for 3 pre-seed funds. Z has deep technical roots and operating experience as co-founder or key member of Stylus Innovation (acq by Artisoft), Direct Hit (acq by Ask Jeeves) and Jeeves Solutions (acq by Kanisa). She worked for the Space Shuttle Main Engine advanced manufacturing team and MIT Media Lab. She helps Fortune 500 CTOs identify tech trends as a TTI/Vanguard advisor. Z’s unique network spans industries and continents. Several pioneering programs she sparked continue to scale, 40,000+ events and two decades later. As EIR for LA Mayor Garcetti, Z launched a non-profit supporting local manufacturing. She’s been advisor and board member to two dozen organizations globally, including the Obama Administration and World Economic Forum. Storytelling is core to Z’s impact. She’s host of The Art of Manufacturing podcast and a Forbes contributor. She's coached hundreds of speakers (>14M views) and helped produce documentary series for NSF, HBR, Smithsonian. Her work appears in BusinessWeek, Economist, CNN.com, strategy+business, HuffPo, Big Think, Science Progress, NASA Ask. Z has a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from MIT. A member of YPO and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, licensed skydiver and SCUBA instructor, backcountry skier, adventure traveler, former quartermaster of the Black Rock City airport, Z lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.

Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter for updates on new episodes + a curated selection of things worth watching, listening to and reading, all with a Hard Way twist. What is a hazy IPA? How does a hops volcano happen? And what makes it so hard to start a small business outside of tech in the Bay Area? In this episode, I put my almost total lack of beer knowledge on full display in a conversation with my good friend, Regan Long. Regan is the co-founder, CEO and brewmaster of Local Brewing Co., a brewery and beer bar in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood not far from the ballpark. They’ve brewed award winning beers, built a thriving business and have made videos of remote controlled monster trucks driving through beer can obstacles courses.  The Bay Area is known as a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship. And it is. But a little known fact is that San Francisco can also be one of the most challenging places in America to start up a small business. During this interview, I reference a 2012 New York Times story about the two years of red tape, hurdles, NIMBYism and obstacles the founders of the Cole Valley Ice Cream Bar faced to open their business. When you’re ready to have bureaucracy totally melt your brain, go read it here. Since that story dropped in 2012, with tech booming and with rising rents making it more and more difficult to staff service industry jobs, it has only gotten harder to start and operate a small business in San Francisco.  In 2015, Regan and her partner Sarah Fenson opened Local Brewing Co., a brewery and beer bar in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood not far from the ballpark. If you guessed it wasn’t easy, you would be correct. It takes more than passion and a good idea to build a business that lasts. In this episode, we explore Regan’s experience of walking away from an awesome job working for Mercedes Benz R&D as an intrapreneuer to start-up Local Brewing Co. and much more.  Regan holds degrees in physics and oceanography and a brewing certificate through Seibel Institute of Technology World Brewing Academy. Learn more about Local at localbrewingco.com, follow them on instagram @localbrewingco and if you get a chance, stop by to grab a beer at 69 Bluxome Street in the heart of SOMA.  If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a pal and take a second to subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or wherever you listen. Thanks to everyone out there who has dropped me a line and you can get in touch with me @hardwaypod on insta and twitter or via email at choosethehardway@gmail.com. You are what you overcome. Choose the Hard Way.