The extra gear: why hard childhoods so often drive high achievers

The Short Version

A hard childhood is not a requirement for great achievement, and both Walter Isaacson and Ginni Rometty say so directly [1][3]. But all four of these conversations describe the same pattern: a child who is beaten, blamed, abandoned or bereaved often grows into an adult with a source of drive that people from gentle homes don't have, which Joe Rogan calls "an extra gear" and Isaacson calls harnessed demons [1][2]. What the early years install differs by person: a need to prove a father wrong, a comfort with chaos, a floor under fear, or a vow never to be helpless again [1][2][3][4]. The cost is described just as consistently: dark moods, cruelty that repeats the parent's, burnout that goes unnoticed, and success that never satisfies, which coach Peter Crone sums up as "You can never get enough of something that almost works" [1][2][4]. Where they part ways is on what to do about it: Isaacson says to harness the demons, Crone says to dissolve the identity that produces them, and Rometty's story shows a third route in which adversity becomes self-reliance without becoming a wound that has to be avenged [1][3][4].

Table of contents

What They Said

Walter Isaacson: fewer demons, fewer drives

Lex Fridman opens his conversation with Isaacson by asking whether a difficult childhood is a requirement for greatness, a catalyst, or a coincidence [1]. Isaacson's answer sets the terms for everything else in this article. It is not a requirement, he says, because some people with happy childhoods do quite well, but "a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood" [1]. He backs it with a line he recalls from Barack Obama's memoirs: that every successful man is either trying to live up to his father's expectations or trying to make up for his father's failings [1].

Elon Musk is his prime example, and Isaacson, who shadowed Musk at close range for two years, gives the details [1]. Musk was bullied on a South African playground, pushed down concrete steps and beaten so badly that his brother Kimbal said, "I couldn't really recognize him" [1]. He spent almost a week in the hospital [1]. Then came the part Isaacson treats as worse than the beating: when Musk came home, he had to stand in front of his father, Errol, who berated him for more than an hour, called him stupid, and took the side of the boy who had beaten him [1]. There was also a paramilitary wilderness camp, and a scene in which Elon and Kimbal stepped off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid concert and into the blood of a man with a knife in his head [1]. Isaacson says such things cause "scars that last the rest of your life" [1].

Isaacson describes Errol Musk as a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: a great engineering mind, especially in materials science, who would go into dark periods and become psychologically abusive [1]. Errol's favourite insult was that something was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and he told his son he would never amount to anything [1]. Isaacson reports two verdicts from the people closest to Musk. His mother, Maye, who divorced Errol early, told Isaacson that "the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father" [1]. His second wife, Talulah Riley, told him that deep inside the man is still a child standing in front of his father, and that for Musk love and family are associated with psychological torment [1].

What does the childhood produce in the adult? Isaacson's claim is specific: "He's got those demons dancing around in his head," and harnessing them is part of the reason Musk does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than Isaacson himself ever would [1]. He calls Musk addicted to risk and addicted to adventure, a man who dislikes coasting: in early 2022, as the richest person on earth, he wanted to put his chips back on the table, which is how the Twitter purchase began [1]. The same childhood shows up in what Isaacson calls demon mode, one of several Musk modes alongside engineering mode, silly mode and visionary mode; Musk goes dark and quiet, and his partner Grimes told Isaacson she can see it coming a minute or two ahead [1]. Isaacson stresses that Musk is self-aware about this and will talk about the demons himself [1].

Isaacson then applies the pattern to his other subjects. Leonardo da Vinci, he says, was "totally torn by demons": born illegitimate, never legitimized by his father, gay, left-handed and easily distracted, he wandered off to Florence and became the greatest artist and engineer of his part of the Renaissance [1]. Einstein grew up Jewish in Germany, was slow to talk, was rejected by the Zurich Polytechnic and turned down by about 14 high schools before taking a job as a third-class patent examiner, and then wrote the 1905 papers that transformed science [1]. Jennifer Doudna "grew up feeling like a misfit" as the only white child in a Polynesian village in Hawaii, "trying to live up to a father who pushed her," and was told by a guidance counselor that girls don't do science [1]. Steve Jobs explained his own harshness to Isaacson in class terms: people like Isaacson love wearing velvet gloves, but as a working-class kid he didn't have that luxury, and "If something sucks, I got to tell people it sucks or I got a team of B players" [1].

The most revealing evidence Isaacson offers is himself, as the control case. He grew up in what he calls a magical place in New Orleans with a father who was an electrical engineer and "always kind" [1]. The result, in his words: "Perhaps I'm not quite as driven or as crazed. I don't have to prove things" [1]. He generalizes it into the sentence that names this whole pattern: those lucky enough to have a gentle, sweet childhood "grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives" [1]. They end up, he says, as Boswell and not Dr. Johnson: "We end up being the observer, not being the doer" [1]. He is plain about the difference in outcomes: "I've never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars," never stayed up all night on a factory floor, and when he sees something risky he stops to calculate the upside and downside [1]. He found the limit of his temperament when he ran CNN. The network needed to be shaken up and he didn't do it, because, he says, "I cared a little bit too much that people didn't get annoyed at me or mad at me" [1].

Isaacson does not romanticize any of this. Asked what he would tell people with difficult childhoods, he says everyone has demons, even people with sweet parents, and the rule is to "harness your demons": know whether you are ambitious, lazy, or a procrastinator, as Leonardo knew he was, and put that knowledge to use [1]. The second half of the advice is to know what you are good at [1]. His books, he says, are not how-to guides but a way to walk alongside someone, because "the question is not, how do you avoid getting scarred? It's, you know, how do you deal with it?" [1]

Joe Rogan and John McPhee: the extra gear

The phrase in this article's title comes from Rogan. McPhee, a retired Army special operations sergeant major, had described his childhood on another show, including living in a brothel at 12, and Rogan says the story was so intense that he stayed in the sauna past his usual 20 minutes because it felt wrong to stop listening [2]. McPhee's first response is that he is not unusual. Where he served, he says, was "full of guys just like that" [2]. Rogan extends it to fighters he knows, and then states the theory: "I think it gives you an extra gear" [2]. If you can get through a childhood like that, he says, "you got an extra place that you can go to" that other men can't reach, and "in your line of work that comes in very handy" [2].

McPhee says he had never heard it called an extra gear and offers his own account of the mechanism. "You know you're gonna get a beating and it's coming at five o'clock," after dinner, when the adults are drunk and another argument starts [2]. "It's a pattern," and the child knows it [2]. The child takes the beating and then puts on church clothes and goes to church as if nothing happened [2]. He describes a mother who convinced him and his brother that they were bad kids, something they only later understood was false, since young children are rarely truly bad [2]. Rogan adds that many people are made to feel worthless for life by parents who blamed them [2].

Two things came out of that childhood, in McPhee's telling. The first is a tolerance for consequences. Even as a little kid, he says, he would make the smart remark knowing it would earn more of a beating, because he had said his piece [2]. The second, and the one he credits most, is ease in disorder: "I think a lot of it just goes back to my childhood and being able to manage the chaos," where one minute the family is fighting and the next someone is at the front door and a child is sent to answer it [2]. Elsewhere he puts it in a phrase: "chaos is my jam" [2]. That is the man who later hitchhiked alone into the Tora Bora region in a decorated truck, filmed a target house with a hidden camera, bluffed his way through a checkpoint, and went on to hundreds of solo missions in Iraq [2]. He says he loved working alone because he could depend on himself [2].

Rogan frames this from the recruiter's side. If you run any branch of the military and ask a great deal of people, he says, you need to "Find someone who doesn't just accept this but thrives on it," and you can't manufacture that person: "try recreating that in a lab" [2]. McPhee also describes who shows up. He calls many special forces soldiers "the fatherless," men whose fathers were absent or worked so much they were never around, and he says Ranger Battalion was the first place he felt he fit in, among people like him [2]. Rogan compares that to fighters who only feel normal in a gym full of others like them [2].

Rogan's version of the claim is stronger than Isaacson's. He says he has never met a world-champion fighter with a happy childhood, and his example is Mike Tyson [2]. He describes a boy who at 13 had no family and was taken in by a man who was a hypnotist and a great boxing coach, who made him an elite fighter [2]. Rogan's reading is that nobody becomes that fighter without unspeakable tragedy in childhood: "you wouldn't have that kind of focus without that" [2]. And then the line that states the theory most starkly: "that monster has to grow because it needs to be there" [2]. He also notes how often the best fighters are younger brothers who fought older siblings their whole lives [2]. McPhee agrees about the proportions. By his rough count only one in every hundred, or every three hundred, of the men he served with was the high school quarterback who married the prom queen, which he calls "very rare," and he thinks he knew only one [2]. Rogan suspects that even in those cases, if you dig, you would find a father, mother or brother who was a little abusive [2].

McPhee is also a witness to the cost. By the end of his career, he says, "I didn't know I was burned out" [2]. He was short with everyone who came to his office, he hated what he calls army management, and he says of the role, "I'm not a leader. I'm not a follower. I'm not a soldier" [2]. He was miserable and did not recognize it at the time [2]. One day it struck him: "I think I used to be funny" [2]. The gear that made him exceptional alone in the field did nothing for him behind a desk.

Ginni Rometty: a bar for bad

Rometty, who ran IBM as chairman, president and CEO from 2011 to 2020, comes at the question from a different kind of hardship [3]. Her father left her mother, who had never worked outside the home, with four children, no money and no food [3]. Her mother climbed out through education, and while she went back to school and to work, Rometty went to teacher meetings for her younger siblings, who still call her Mama Bear [3]. Fridman reads her memory of the end of her freshman year at college, when she had 25 cents left and stared at the quarter in a plastic box [3].

She traces what she became to a line of women who worked. Her Russian great-grandmother, who never spoke English, cleaned the Wrigley Building in Chicago and saved enough that Rometty's mother had a home and a car [3]. Her grandmother made lampshades seven days a week and taught Rometty to sew the clothes the family couldn't afford [3]. From them and from her mother she took a specific belief: "I associate hard work with how you are sure you can always take care of yourself" [3]. She calls that her plan B [3].

What her father did gave her something she describes in six words: "After this, nothing's bad" [3]. It set a bar for bad, and everything afterward was measured against it [3]. That is a different mechanism from Musk's. It is not a voice to be proven wrong; it is a floor under fear. You can see it at work in how she describes the biggest risk of her career, championing IBM's roughly $3.5 billion acquisition of PwC's consulting arm in 2002, when five similar attempts by other companies had failed [3]. She remembers telling someone, "this is going to kill me or catapult," and she took the job anyway [3].

Like Isaacson, Rometty refuses the strong version of the claim. She does not think tragedy is required for success [3]. What it teaches, she says, is that there is always a way forward and that it is in your control [3]. She is equally careful about hard work: she enjoys it, she does it "because I like it," and she doesn't want people watching her to conclude it is the only route [3]. A lesson she took from her mother, as Fridman puts it back to her, is to never let anyone else define you [3].

Her story also shows what the drive looked like before it matured. In engineering school in the 1970s she was the only woman among about 30 students, and felt that "whatever I say is going to be remembered in this class," good or bad [3]. So she over-prepared. Early on, she says, "it was a shield for confidence" [3]. Only later did preparation become something else, a way to be present, because if she was prepared she could really listen [3]. Her drive for perfection had a price for the people around her, which she admits in a passage Fridman reads from her book: she focused only on what needed to change, which could keep people from trusting themselves, and she had to learn to curb a tendency to micromanage [3].

She also found that the early lesson did not make her fearless. Mid-career, offered a very large global job, she told her boss she wasn't ready and went home to think [3]. Her husband asked, "do you think a man would have answered it that way?" and told her she would be bored in six months [3]. She took the job and took away the rule that "growth and comfort never coexist"; she now looks for chances to be uncomfortable [3]. On imposter syndrome, she says it is natural in a big job to look left and right and wonder what you're doing there, but "I can't say I have ever really dwelled on that feeling for long" [3].

Peter Crone: the same fear builds the success and spoils it

Crone coaches PGA Tour golfers, Major League Baseball players, executives and billionaires, and he was asked directly what created their success and what they struggle with most [4]. He says it is the same thing: fear [4]. Many of them, he says, are driven to prove wrong a parent or teacher who doubted them [4]. The drive works, in the sense that they succeed. But they end up with illness, multiple marriages, anxiety or medication, because external success can't fill an internal gap [4]. His line for it is "You can never get enough of something that almost works," and he calls the condition the hungry ghost [4].

Crone's larger framework explains why he thinks this happens. The personality, he says, is forged in childhood, when kids are told they are bad, wrong or not enough [4]. That facade becomes the thing a person spends their life trying to overcome, disprove, fix or improve; he calls it "the ultimate addiction" and says the greatest adversary anyone faces is their own identity [4]. He lists what he calls primal prisons, such as I'm not enough, I'm not loved, I'm not safe and I'm not worthy, and says they lead people to overcompensate [4]. An achiever running on "I'm not enough" is, in his terms, overcompensating on a grand scale [4].

He speaks from inside the pattern. He lost his mother at seven and his father at 17 [4]. The effect surfaced at 28, in his first serious relationship, when fear of losing his girlfriend turned him into the "perfect boyfriend," giving more and more to head off a loss that hadn't happened [4]. In hindsight he calls it attachment and codependency, not love, and says his fear helped bring about the breakup he dreaded [4]. The brain, he says, is designed to predict and protect, which is a great survival tool and a terrible way to live a free, creative life [4]. He describes his earlier life as one in which loss, fear and inadequacy were all present [4].

His favourite example of what happens when the fear is removed is a Diamondbacks player who had not hit a home run in about five months [4]. Sitting in the stadium parking lot, Crone asked whether he would be okay if he never hit another one [4]. Once the player reached that acceptance, Crone says, he hit a home run in his second at-bat that night, the easiest of his career [4]. Crone's formula for athletes is "fully committed totally unattached," and he cites Jack Nicklaus on the value of being okay with losing [4].

Crone is not against adversity. He says leadership means holding a commitment in the face of it, and jokes that handing a great athlete two one-pound dumbbells builds nothing: "it's really the adversity that creates the man," even though "a lot of men try to do everything they can to mitigate suffering or adversity" [4]. He describes the purpose of life as breaking free from the constraints we arrive with [4]. His objection is to living permanently inside the wound and calling it ambition.

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that the pattern is real. Isaacson sees it across Musk, Leonardo, Einstein, Doudna and Jobs [1]. McPhee says his part of the Army was full of men like him, and Rogan says the same of elite fighters [2]. Crone says the people he coaches at the top of sport and business are often trying to prove a doubting parent or teacher wrong [4]. Rometty ties her own work ethic and nerve to her father's leaving and the women who coped [3].

They agree it has a price. Isaacson names it for Musk: "Musk big failing is he can't savor the moment or success," along with demon mode and the risk his mother identified, that he becomes his father [1]. McPhee burned out without knowing it [2]. Crone lists illness, broken marriages, anxiety and medication [4]. Rometty's price was smaller, a perfectionism and micromanaging that undermined other people's confidence [3].

They disagree about whether hardship is necessary. Isaacson and Rometty both say no [1][3]. Rogan comes close to saying yes, at least for fighting: he has never met a world champion with a happy childhood, and he thinks the monster "needs to be there" [2]. The difference follows from what each is looking at. Rogan and McPhee are talking about combat, where the job is to walk toward violence and chaos, and a childhood spent managing violence and chaos is direct training [2]. Isaacson's subjects are scientists, artists and founders, where there are other roads in; he notes that Ben Franklin turned a desire to please, the same trait that made Isaacson a poor executive, into a superpower for bringing the founders together [1]. Rometty is talking about corporate leadership, and takes care to say her way is not the only one [3].

They disagree about what to do with the demons. This is the deepest split. Isaacson says harness them, and he doubts they can be separated from the achievement. Quoting Shakespeare's "even the best are molded out of faults," he wonders whether you can pull the crazy strand out of the fabric and still have it hold together [1]. Steve Wozniak made the same point about Jobs: he would have been nicer and run Apple like a family, but "if I had been running Apple, I don't think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone" [1]. Crone says the opposite. The fear-driven identity is the obstacle, not the engine, and his baseball player hit better the night he stopped needing to [4]. Each holds his view for a reason. Isaacson is a biographer explaining how extraordinary things got built, and he keeps finding the darkness woven into the genius [1]. Crone is a coach who meets these people after they have won, when the question is why winning didn't help [4]. Isaacson is measuring output. Crone is measuring peace. Neither source settles whether Musk without the demons would still be Musk, and Isaacson, who knows him best, leaves it as an open question [1].

They differ on how adversity turns into drive. For Musk it is a father's voice to prove wrong [1]. For McPhee it is trained comfort with chaos [2]. For Rometty it is a lowered sense of how bad things can get, plus a vow to always be able to take care of herself [3]. For Crone's clients it is fear of not being enough [4]. These are not the same thing, and they do not carry the same cost. Rometty's version appears to have left her with the least damage, which may be because her model was not the parent who caused the harm but the women who answered it [3].

A smaller disagreement about the inner critic. When Rometty describes doubting her readiness as something she had to get past, Fridman pushes back: the self-critical voice isn't unique to women and shouldn't be silenced, since that anxiety drives growth, and the balance is a dance between self-criticism and confidence [3]. Rometty agrees [3]. Crone would go further and treat "I'm not enough" as a belief to be dissolved, not danced with [4].

Why It Works

The sources give several distinct mechanisms.

Something to prove. Isaacson's contrast between himself and his subjects is the cleanest statement: he had kind parents and so "I don't have to prove things" [1]. Musk stood in front of a father who called him stupid, and Riley says the child is still standing there [1]. Crone says the same of his clients, who are out to disprove a parent or teacher [4]. A debt of that kind does not get paid off by one success, which is why it keeps producing effort, and also why Musk can't savor a win [1][4].

A different relationship to risk. Isaacson says harnessed demons are part of why Musk does riskier, wilder things, and that this is why people like Musk get things done while people like Isaacson write about them [1]. Rometty's "After this, nothing's bad" is a gentler version of the same shift: once the worst has already happened to you at home, a career risk looks smaller [3].

Early training in chaos. McPhee learned as a child to take a beating he knew was coming and then function normally an hour later, and to switch in a moment from a family fight to answering the front door [2]. He says that is where his ability to manage chaos comes from [2]. Rogan's point is that a military can select for this but cannot build it [2].

A place to go under pressure. Rogan's extra gear is a reserve: somewhere a person who survived a brutal childhood can go that others can't [2]. He connects it to focus as well, saying a fighter wouldn't have that kind of focus without the early horror [2].

Belonging. McPhee's "fatherless" soldiers and Rogan's fighters find, in a unit or a gym, the first place they feel normal [2]. That gives hard institutions a hold on such people, and gives them a reason to give everything to the group.

Self-reliance as a rule of life. Rometty's lesson was not anger but a plan B: work is how you guarantee you can look after yourself [3]. McPhee's preference for solo missions, where he depended only on himself, has the same root [2].

Overcompensation. Crone's account is that a child told they are not enough builds a personality to disprove it, and the subconscious identity then drives thoughts, feelings, actions and results [4]. He says willpower "is an aspect of the ego based in survival," and that "you can use force to temporarily override habit but you can never violate identity" [4]. On this view the achiever's output is the identity expressing itself, which explains both the relentlessness and the emptiness [4].

Why the cost follows. Three mechanisms appear. First, the wound repeats: Errol Musk called things the stupidest he had ever heard, and Isaacson notes that his son, along with Jobs, Bezos and Gates, uses the same language on others [1]. Second, the engine has no off switch: Musk says vacations kill you and Isaacson thinks he would hate retirement, and McPhee kept running at full intensity until he was burned out [1][2]. Third, the reward doesn't land: Crone's hungry ghost, fed by something that almost works [4].

As for evidence, these are observations, not studies. Isaacson draws on about two years with Musk and 140 to 150 interviews, and on his other biographies [1]. McPhee and Rogan draw on decades among soldiers and fighters [2]. Crone draws on his coaching clients [4]. Rometty speaks for one life [3]. None of them cites research on the question, and the sources contain no count of the people whom the same childhoods simply broke.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies most strongly where the work resembles the childhood. Fighting and special operations reward comfort with violence, pain and disorder, and that is where Rogan and McPhee make the strongest claims [2]. It applies to founders who must take large risks and tell people hard truths, in Isaacson's account of Musk and Jobs [1].

It does not make a good manager. McPhee, superb alone in Tora Bora, was miserable and by his own account not very good as a sergeant major on staff [2]. Musk is, in Isaacson's words, less of a collaborator than a magnet for talent, and Isaacson thinks he probably overdid the Twitter cuts [1]. The trait that wins a fight is not the trait that runs a meeting.

It is not the only source of achievement. Isaacson says plainly that some people with happy childhoods do quite well, and that there are many successful people who are kinder [1]. Franklin's gift was getting along with people [1]. Rometty says tragedy is not required and hard work is not the only route [3]. Isaacson himself, the self-described observer, has produced a shelf of major biographies, which is worth setting against his modesty [1].

It is not an argument for hard childhoods. No one here recommends them. McPhee had to make a point of learning that he and his brother had not been bad kids [2]. Rogan notes how many people carry a parent's blame as lifelong worthlessness [2]. Isaacson's Doudna needed a book left on her bed to learn the guidance counselor was wrong [1]. The sources are describing people who came through; the pattern says nothing about odds.

It stops working as fuel at some point. Crone's clients have already succeeded when the bill arrives [4]. His baseball player is the case where the old drive had become the block [4]. Crone also cautions that how well a shift sticks depends on how deep the earlier suffering was, and that younger people change faster because they have less evidence stored up for the old identity [4].

It applies differently depending on what the adversity taught. Rometty's hardship taught capability, with living examples of women who coped [3]. Musk's taught that love and family mean torment [1]. The first travels well into a long marriage and a forty-year career at one company [3]. The second, by Riley's account, does not [1].

The effects of childhood abuse and loss are serious, and anyone still struggling with them should work with a qualified mental health professional.

What To Do With It

1. Find out what you are trying to prove, and to whom. Isaacson's first question about any subject is "what demons are jangling in their head and how do they harness them into drives" [1]. Crone says his driven clients are usually answering a parent or teacher who doubted them [4]. Name the person and the sentence.

2. Harness it knowingly. Isaacson's rule is to know your demons and use them: know whether you are ambitious, lazy or a procrastinator, as Leonardo knew he was [1]. Musk's advantage, in Isaacson's telling, is that he is self-aware about his [1].

3. Know your superpower, and what you are not built for. Isaacson learned at CNN that he was not a tough executive and decided to write about the people who are [1]. The engineers who thrive under Musk are the ones who know themselves, like the one who came back saying I'd rather be burned out than bored [1]. McPhee's gift was solo work, not staff work [2].

4. Watch for the moment you become the parent. Maye Musk's warning was that Elon could become his father, and Isaacson notes the father's insults reappearing in the son's vocabulary [1]. Listen for the phrases you were raised on coming out of your own mouth.

5. Check for burnout you can't feel. McPhee did not know he was burned out; the signs were contempt for everyone who walked into his office and the thought that he used to be funny [2]. If people around you have stopped enjoying you, treat it as data.

6. Run Crone's test on the belief underneath. Take a painful event, ask what it seems to mean about you, write the sentence down, trace it to its childhood source, and ask whether it is actually true: if someone cut you open, would they find a manufacturing label reading "not good enough" [4]? Then ask who you could be without it [4].

7. Ask the parking-lot question. Would you be okay if you never hit another home run [4]? Crone's standard is "fully committed totally unattached," and his player performed better the night he could honestly say yes [4].

8. Use your worst day as a measuring stick. Rometty's "After this, nothing's bad" turned a family disaster into a permanent sense of proportion [3]. When a risk frightens you, compare it with what you have already survived.

9. Choose discomfort on purpose. Rometty's rule is that "growth and comfort never coexist," and she now looks for situations that make her uncomfortable [3]. McPhee builds confidence the same way but gradually, through many skills learned at a high level, and warns that too hard a first experience can put a person off for good [2].

10. If you had a gentle childhood, don't envy the wound. Isaacson says everyone has demons, including people with sweet parents, and that the observer's role is a real one [1]. Read lives as he suggests, as people to walk alongside, and remember that Franklin built a nation's founding team out of a wish to be liked [1].

Sources

1. Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci and Ben Franklin: Demons, Drive and the Art of Biography · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. John McPhee on Joe Rogan: Solo Missions in Afghanistan, Hunting Saddam's Inner Circle, Jiu-Jitsu, and Shooting Myths · The Joe Rogan Experience
3. Ginni Rometty on Good Power, Leading IBM's Reinvention, Skills-First Hiring and Adversity · Lex Fridman Podcast
4. Peter Crone on Why Willpower Never Changes You: Identity, Subconscious Conditioning and Freedom · The School of Greatness