Choose the Hard Way

Michele Wucker founded Gray Rhino & Company to help leaders, organizations, and communities to identify and strategize responses to "gray rhino" risks: the term she coined to urge people to face up to challenges that are obvious and probable yet which we are all too likely –but not condemned– to neglect despite, and often because of, their size. The gray rhino metaphor has moved markets, shaped financial policies, inspired lyrics of a global K-pop hit song, made headlines around the world in more than 50 countries and over 30 languages, and shaped high-level debates from Davos to NATO to the Munich Security Conference to the Drucker Forum. What does risk mean to you? How do you manage it? Is your relationship to risk something you can transform? On this episode we discuss those questions and more with Michele Wucker, the author of four books including The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore. Her new book is You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World. Michele is a Guggenheim Fellow and former President of the World Policy Institute. Our conversation covers risk anticipation, management and mitigation strategies for individuals and organizations and much more. You can follow Michele on Twitter @wucker and learn more about her books and business at https://www.wucker.com and thegrayrhino.com.

Breath, Sleep, Stress, Recovery and High Performance. Does mouth taping during sleep improve recovery? How can you use breath to down-regulate stress throughout the day? What is HRV and why does it matter? Kristen Holmes is the Vice President of Performance Science at WHOOP. She works with top researchers and hundreds of the best tactical, pro and collegiate athletes and teams in the world to optimize training, recovery and sleep. Kristen was a 3x All American and 2x Big 10 Athlete of the year at the University of Iowa competing in both Field Hockey and Basketball. She was a 7-year member of the U.S. National Field Hockey Team and one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history, having won 12 league titles in 13 seasons and a National Championship at Princeton University.Kristen is a leading mind in the fields of high performance and recovery. I've learned a great deal from her work and the conversations we've had, so I'm excited to finally have her on the show and to share this interview with you. The best place to follow Kristen is on LinkedIn.

Dr. Samir Puri is a defense policy and counterterrorism expert. He has worked in government and in academia, including as assistant head of research at the British Ministry of Defense's think tank. Samir was raised in 1980s London in a family that had traversed three continents in three generations, from Asia to Africa to Europe. He later completed a PhD at Cambridge University in International Relations, worked at RAND, and then the Foreign Office, where his assignments covered counter terrorism, and a year in east Ukraine monitoring the onset of war in 2014. After government service, Dr. Puri became a lecturer in War Studies at King's College London, and also taught at Cambridge and Johns Hopkins. He has since left academia and in 2020 was appointed Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. His previous books include: Pakistan's War on Terrorism and Fighting and Negotiating with Armed Groups. His latest book is Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World. In this interview we cover a wide variety of topics including hybrid warfare, theories of conflict, violence, human nature, creativity, sport and Metallica. Go to www.samirpuri.com to learn more and follow him on Twitter @purisamir1. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and give us a five-star rating in the iTunes store. If you'd like to suggest a guest or send feedback about something new or different you'd like to hear on the show, please email me at choosethehardway@gmail.com and you can also catch me on Instagram @hardwaypod. There aren't shortcuts or hacks on the road to becoming the best. You are what you overcome. Choose the Hard Way.

National Geographic Explorer Grace C. Young is an aquanaut, sailor, diver and ocean engineer. Currently, she's a lead scientist at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory where her team is creating radical new technologies to protect the ocean while feeding humanity sustainably. Grace is a former ballerina and studied Mechanical & Ocean Engineering at MIT and did her PhD at Oxford as a Marshal Scholar. In 2014, she lived underwater for 15 days as part of Fabian Cousteau's Mission 31. You can learn more about Grace at www.graceunderthesea.com and follow her on Instagram @gracecalvertyoung and twitter @grace_h20. A special thank you to my friend Brian Ferguson from Arena Labs and the Liminal Collective for first introducing me to Grace. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and give us a five-star rating in the iTunes store. If you'd like to suggest a guest or send feedback about something new or different you'd like to hear on the show, please email me at choosethehardway@gmail.com and you can also catch me on Instagram @hardwaypod. You are what you overcome. 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.