I just spent a few hours listening to DJ Shipley talk with Andrew Huberman, and I’m sitting here trying to process the weight of it. It wasn’t just another “hustle culture” interview about waking up early to crush the competition. It was a raw, deeply uncomfortable look at what it actually takes to stay human when your life has been designed to make you a weapon. Shipley spent seventeen years as a Tier 1 Navy SEAL, but the most harrowing part of his story isn’t the gunfights in Iraq—it’s the twelve minutes he spends in his truck every evening before walking through his front door.
The Twelve-Minute Rehearsal
Shipley calls his approach to life “dials, not switches”. He realized that you can’t just flip a switch to turn off the “commando” and turn on the “dad.” If you try, you end up dragging the stress, the hyper-vigilance, and the ghosts of your workday into the living room.
Every day, he slams his truck into park and puts his phone on “do not disturb”. He listens to Chris Stapleton to calm his nervous system and literally pre-rehearses his entrance into the house. He visualizes making a 90-degree turn into the kitchen, picking up his high-energy seven-year-old, and checking in with his wife to see if she needs him to start dinner or fold towels. He admitted that even if he’s exhausted or feeling like a “victim of circumstance,” he will fake a positive attitude for those three hours before his kids go to bed because those are the only moments he has to create memories that aren’t colored by his trauma.
The 5:00 AM Anchor
To have the strength to be that present for his family, Shipley starts his day with a rigid architecture of “micro-wins“. He wakes up at 5:00 AM regardless of how much sleep he got—even after a red-eye flight that got him home at 2:30 AM. By the time he makes his first cup of coffee, he has completed twenty-five small tasks within his total control.
There is something strangely beautiful in the specificity of his routine: left sock, right sock, right shoe. He even puts his bracelets on in a specific order; if he messes up, he takes them all off and starts over. It sounds obsessive, but for him, it’s about ensuring he is never “frantic”. By winning the morning, he builds a “mental posture” that allows him to carry the “jacket” of the world’s stress without collapsing. He argues that you must be selfish with your time from 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM so that you can be truly selfless for your “tribe” for the rest of the day.
The Mystery of the Broken Vessel
One story that stopped me in my tracks was his near-death experience on Father’s Day in 2019. He was burning designs into a skateboard with a microwave transformer and accidentally completed a circuit with his own body. The charge was so violent that his collarbone and shoulder blade shattered from the sheer force of his own muscles flexing. He described “levitating” and being launched twenty feet, exhaling smoke as if his soul were trying to exit.
Doctors called him a “medical mystery” because his muscles didn’t liquefy—a condition called rhabdomyolysis—simply because he was in such peak physical condition at the time. But the real takeaway was his recovery. He didn’t come back with a heroic feat; he came back with a two-pound blue dumbbell. His coach, Vernon Griffith, walked in and asked if he could make a fist or move his wrist. That was the starting line. Shipley learned to distinguish between being “hurt”—something you can work through—and being “injured,” which requires a pause. It’s a level of body awareness that most of us completely ignore until we’re broken.
The Reckoning and the Ego Death
The most vulnerable part of the conversation was about his treatment with Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. After years of being “death warmed over” on sixty pharmaceutical pills a day, Shipley went to Mexico for a medical reset.
Ibogaine didn’t show him war; it showed him his childhood and the moments he had been a “monster” to his family. He relived arguments from his daughter’s perspective, feeling the terror she felt when he was unapproachable. Then came the 5-MeO-DMT—the total “ego death”. He described it as his soul leaving his body and returning with a sense of “complete bliss and love”.
He came home a different man. He walked into his house, his wife pulled off his sunglasses, looked into his eyes, and saw that he was finally “back” after fifteen years of being “gone”. He immediately quit a seventeen-year nicotine habit and walked away from his medications.
Re-earning the Seat
What inspired me most wasn’t the elite soldiering; it was the accountability. Shipley realized that his medals didn’t give him a permanent right to his family’s love. He has to “re-earn his seat at the table every single day”. He does this through a nightly twenty-minute walk with his wife—ten minutes for her to vent, ten minutes for him—which he credits with saving his marriage.
It’s a reminder that we are all “context-dependent” ball bearings. If we don’t build the trenches of routine and intentionality, we’ll just roll wherever the wind of the world blows us. I’m starting my own “driveway rehearsal” tonight. I want to make sure that the person who walks through my door is the person my family actually needs, not just the one who survived the day.
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