Digital Social Hour - I Lived the 'Golden Days' - They Weren't as GOOD as You Think! | Tucker Max DSH #618

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

🎥 I Lived the 'Golden Days' - They Weren't as GOOD as You Think! 🚨   Think the 'Golden Days' were perfect? Think again! Join us on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly as we dive deep into a candid conversation with Tucker Max, straight off Tucker Carlson's show. From the myths of the 'golden days' to modern parenting hacks, this episode is packed with valuable insights you can't afford to miss. 🤯   Tucker Max shares his personal journey—four home births, living holistically on a ranch, and raising kids away from the toxic influence of screens and processed foods. 🌿🏡 We challenge the status quo on healthcare, education, and the "experts" we once trusted. 🏥📚   Don't miss out on this eye-opening episode that questions everything you thought you knew! 🚀 Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 💬✨   Join the conversation and let us know your thoughts. Are the 'golden days' as great as people remember, or is it all just a myth? Share your opinions below! 👇   #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #Podcast #TuckerMax #GoldenDays #HolisticLiving #Parenting #Health #InsiderSecrets #WatchNow #Subscribe   #RawMilkBenefits #ImportanceOfPlay #ScreenTimeKids #ConflictResolutionChildren #ModernParenting   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:39 - Tucker’s Home Births 02:45 - Being Holistic 09:17 - Starting a School 13:18 - Changes in Education 17:40 - News as Propaganda 20:00 - Benefits of Limiting Screen Time 21:36 - Spiritual Awakening 25:07 - Ethically Sourced Food 28:40 - Toxicity of Team Sports 32:50 - Teaching Self-Defense and Hunting 37:43 - Value of Children 42:50 - Trauma and Success 47:10 - Media Messages of Inadequacy 48:40 - Elon Musk Insights 50:20 - Tucker’s Upcoming Book 50:30 - Memoir Coaching Program 52:40 - Outro   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Tucker Max https://www.instagram.com/realtuckermax https://www.tuckermax.com/launching-the-tell-your-story-memoir-mastermind/   SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I can make both cases. Like what people think are the golden days. I lived through a lot of it. And I don't think it was as good as people remember. There are way more people who are awake to screwed up shit. Just pick your topic. Now a lot of people are like, oh, wait a minute. All these people I thought knew what they were talking about.

I thought had my best interests in mind. Don't. All right, guys, we're here in austin texas here with tucker max coming off tucker carlson show thanks for coming on man thank you for getting blown up right now so yeah of course and uh we're talking out there about some interesting things so let's uh let's talk about it so you had four home births yes i have four kids all four were home births and that is very uh unique because back then that wasn't as common right i mean my kids are nine to two like my kids are young so it wasn't like that long ago um but no i mean my wife's a doctor too she's a an np but whatever same thing and so she uh i remember she when when she got pregnant then she's like you know we're we're going to do a home birth.

And I was, I was actually the one confused. I'm like, what do you mean? Of course, we go to a hospital to do have a baby. And she's like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. I used to work in hospitals. I'm never going into a hospital unless like if I can avoid it at all. And then she actually made me watch this documentary by Ricky Lake, of all people. It was a great doc though.

It was called The Business of Being Born. documentary by ricky lake of all people it was a great doc though it's called uh the business of being born and then i was like oh wow i had no idea about any of this um and then you know met the midwife that she had she'd already picked right and uh and i was like this woman's amazing and then it was like the first experience was the best and then each one was better it was it was amazing it was beautiful i'm actually leaning towards either that or a wellness center for my kids uh oh yeah of course like a like a birthing center yeah like those are basically the same thing yeah like uh yeah for sure i try to be as holistic as possible because even with the epidural and stuff like who knows what if that's affecting my wife all four births were totally natural like i don't think she did or took anything the first

one maybe a little bit of castor oil because like uh like their water broke and he wasn't coming fast enough but like that's it nothing else yeah and you were saying out there she would only go to a hospital if she was dying that's what my wife said i mean there's listen you can be having a home birth and there can be uh you know reasons to to go to a hospital, like, I don't know, Clampsia or whatever. Like, I'm not the expert on any of that. And my midwife and her wife talked about that. Like they knew, okay, here's the things that might happen. They knew, okay, if these happen, here's the steps we go through. If we get to this step, we go to the hospital. And so, but we never even, at least with our births, never got close to any issues.

Nice. So are you fully holistic right now? I mean, it depends what you mean by holistic. My wife and I are very, we moved out to a ranch three years ago for a reason, right? And it wasn't just like to get away from the danger of a city, right? Although that was part of it, but it was far more about being in nature, being, raising as much of our own food as possible, and then, or buying from neighbors, right? Essentially shortening the, both the supply chain, but also being able to know the integrity

of what's going in our body, water right uh food uh milk you know like we get raw milk from literally three ranches down like from cows that we know right and they ban that for everyone else yeah for real like in texas it's like a little bit of a pain to get raw milk that's ironically california is one of the most free states you can buy like raw milk at stores yeah right but um uh so we're very very health conscious but like health conscious 10 years ago meant like kind of nonsense right now i think people understand that i think like uh go go to any grocery store and like find a packaged product that doesn't have a seed oil in it. It's almost impossible. Like 80, 80 to 95% of products in a package, depending on the grocery store, have seed oils,

which are horribly toxic for humans. Right. And so like, and that's just like that. Forget like processed grains, you know, with glyphosate and all the other nonsense. So just avoid like, we spend a lot of time and effort to both avoid those negative things. But then also, like, like the chicken we eat is chicken that we raise on our ranch is slaughtered on our ranch, like we do it, we do all the process. Wow, kill it, de-feather it uh you know pack it everything process gut it everything and it the taste is amazing it's not like one of those things it tastes better because i did it no i can do it and it sucks like it's not like just me doing it does not make it taste good yeah but uh you know it eats our grass i know exactly what goes in its body and it um it

tastes amazing and then i don't have to worry about anything right it's like and you can see my kids are all super happy and healthy and they're not like you know uh sugar zombie uh zombie kids like you see all over the place and yeah we spend a lot of time uh that sort of stuff and then like things like screen health you, like my kids don't have not only they don't have phones or iPads, like we have a TV because I'm not going to go that extreme because sometimes I got to watch football or whatever. But like they get to watch like a movie a week or something. Right. Like they love Harry Potter. So we'll put a Harry Potter on Saturday night if they've listened well all week that's it they don't have like binging aloud oh dude that not in a million years would i give them access unfettered access to the poison that comes through screens right like um not i mean they'll get an age where like of course that becomes appropriate but i can't imagine it's pre-16 you know like uh no way man you see i i didn't even realize because like my kids go to a waldorf school which are

very anti-screen and so most of their friends are waldorf and it's like when i'll hang out with a friend of mine who's not you know who has kids but isn't in that school circle and sometimes i'll meet their kids i'm like oh my god like i didn't like i just didn't know what like because it's not like i hang out with a lot of kids other than mine and their friends right and so i don't meet a lot of kids who are you know zooted out on sugar and on screens all day and it's crazy how zombified i don't know a better word for it right so like if you mean holistic in that sense oh yeah that was a long answer i love it yes yeah kids are getting ipads in like first grade now dude it's unthinkable to me that you would do that like i'm not gonna sit here and say there's no

defensible use for a screen or whatever i get it like but man it the the the the negatives to me really outweigh the positives at least until they're 10 you know yeah like uh and then i'm not unfettered access no way but like my son is about to turn 10 and so like letting him watch you know like if he's super into okay he just he got super into the battle of thermopylae right and so i let him watch, you know, like if he's super into, okay, he just, he got super into the battle of Thermopylae. Right. And so I let him watch some YouTube videos about that. They're like history channel type things. Loved it. It was awesome for him. It was great. Helped him contextualize, understand what's going on in situations like that. I get it. Right. But bro, there's been times where like, he'll'll he'll get a hold of my phone and go down

the youtube rabbit hole and then he's you know who knows what videos coming up right like he's watching videos on how to like you know burn down forests or something like what the hell yeah you know at best forget anything else so no no no unfettered access to screens is for children toxic i wonder if there's a correlation with screen time and all these learning disabilities with these kids. 100%. There is. There's tons of studies about this. No one wants to talk about it because I think a lot of people use screens as babysitters. Yeah, to distract.

It's easy to just throw them on an iPad. It is. It's an amazing tool for sedating your child, in effect, right? And it's like, and I get it, man. I have four kids. I understand it can be overwhelming to deal with a lot of kid stuff at once, right? It can be. And I'm a patient and a great father. And still,

there are times where I'm like, Oh, man, this is too much. So I understand the urge, and what parents feel like is a necessity at times. And I'm not trying to sit in judgment of that. I'm just like, in my life, the way my wife and I have organized our life is that we don't have we don't ever want to have to use screens as babysitters. It's so seductive, man. It's like eating fast food. It's cheap. It's easy.

It tastes good. There's a price you pay for it, though, right? You become fat and sick. Same with screens. Absolutely. How tough was it finding a school for your kids? It was so hard. We had to start our own.

Wow. You started it? Yeah, we started it. That's what Elon Musk did, right? Yeah. He started a whole different type of school. So we were in Austin-Waldorf. There's a lot of different educational systems like Montessori or Acton or whatever.

I think Waldorf is the best by far. It really nurtures the emotional side of children as well as like physical and intellectual in a way that that no other system does and so uh the austin waldorf is like a famous waldorf it's one of the best in the country and then in 2020 like a lot of institutions it went lunatic woke and uh mainly just the administration like uh you know my son was in kindergarten there and the teacher he had was like amazing she was like a saint on earth like she she was the type of woman, she's like 65. And I'm like, man, I wish my mom was like this. This woman is incredible.

And so I was super happy with that. And then the school went woke and like, we're going to teach, you know, six-year-olds that they're racist. I'm like, get out of here. And so us and about 50 families broke off and started like our own Waldorf. And then the school kind of transformed a little and iterated. But we were part of the group that started the Waldorf out in Dripping Springs. Wow. Yeah.

Like it's – if you – I think where society is in almost every category is if you want to be healthy, you have to basically do, you have to ignore the conventional wisdom and often do the opposite. Wow. Right? Like, think about it. Like, if you listen to the experts in nutrition, you'll end up fat and sick. If you listen to the experts in medicine, you'll end up probably dead, but at a minimum ill if you listen to the experts in education your kids are going to be neurotic yeah yeah neurotic at best um uh you go down the list do you let experts in finance you're going to be poor experts in and uh in work you're going to be you know miserable like no like it's if 2020 and 2021 taught anything, it's that the institutions are captured by. At its core, what I think James Lunsley is right by a deeply communist ideology, right, which manifests and looks like a lot of different things, but it's I should say a deeply anti-human capitalist, right?

Money's the main priority no i mean no it's not capitalist or necessarily capitalism is not inherently anti-human like industrialism consumerism or capitalism is just that's like kind of a trick that that communists use um uh to make a free market they use they try and use free market and capitalism as synonymous for each other. They're not. Free markets mean individuals are interacting without sort of force with each other, right? That's a free society.

Capitalism is just an economic, like the way that you think about organizing who owns what, not about a free market. So that's, most philosophies that most institutions are implicitly or explicitly run by are anti-human. Wow. Right. They just are. And no one who's super pro-LGBTQ or whatever, they don't think they're anti-human. In fact, they think they're, you know, supporting people and they might be supporting certain types of people in certain ways, sure. But the expression of those values in almost every institution, like look where, like,

do you go shop at normal aisles in the grocery store? Do you send your kids to public school? Do you listen to what the government tells you? I don't because it doesn't work. It's horrible and toxic and poisonous, man. I mean, it's just a fact of where it is now. It's pretty crazy. Growing up, I really respected and trusted doctors, teachers, dentists, and everyone. But now as I'm getting older, I don't.

As a group, man, as a group man as a group i don't listen to to i wouldn't in any way uh listen to any of them there are other individual doctors who have their shit together of course man like uh it's not uh but yeah no i you know what's funny is i don't know i to me it's an open question did things get worse or did we just wake up to how bad things are that's deep you know yeah i think it's a little bit of both right but like everyone thinks things were better when they were younger although i'm actually not one of those man i think most of the things in the world were not better at least for me i'm 48 when i was like 24, man, I think most things are way better now. Oh, you think things are better now?

In certain ways, yeah. Like I think things were actually pretty bad then in a lot of ways, but we just didn't realize it, you know? I'm too young to remember. How old are you? I'm 27. Yeah, 27. Yeah, right.

You're a different generation. So, yeah yeah you don't when i was your age like it was that was the 90s you know and that was a whole different it's a whole different world i was actually right past the 90s but it was same it felt more innocent especially with the cartoons because i watch the cartoons these days and the movies and the disney stuff and it's like what the hell they're like programming people now yeah you know what but hold on so yeah the the problem with the programming now is that it's so obvious and so ham-fisted, right? And it's so ideologically, clearly ideological.

It's not obvious to me there was less programming then. I think it was far more implicit and it was far better. Okay. I mean, like, what old cartoons are you talking about because you're talking about gi joe like that's about as like that's extreme programming dude like do what you're saying it was programmed for people to want to join the military uh it just it was pro-american exceptionalism right um which like okay you can argue whether that's good or bad but the point is it was still

propaganda right and and yeah okay some propaganda better or worse maybe yeah um but um it's not obvious to me that things were better than i just think i don't know we'll say i you can make the i can make both cases. Okay. I think things were a lot worse. Like what people think of the golden days. I lived through a lot of it. And I don't think it was as good as people remember.

I think it was in a lot of ways even worse because one of the benefits, bro, of the last five years is that there are way more people who are awake to screwed up shit right whereas like in 2019 i mean how many conversations could you even have with people about just pick your topic you know like uh vaccines or food additives or uh home birth versus hospital birth or whatever like just like there were most people weren't even aware they're like what do you mean this is just the way right and then this happens and it's like now a lot of people like oh wait a minute all these people i thought knew what they were talking about and I thought had my best interests in mind don't. Right? Which is like, it's sort of like, you know, like you kind of have to sometimes go through the pain before you come out the other side.

I think that's kind of where we are as a society is waking up and realize. Because, bro, I thought I was super awake in 2019. And then I realized, man, things are way worse than I thought. Like, I thought they were here bad. They're actually here bad. Wow. So it was an awakening for me, too. Like, it's not like I was like, oh, yeah, I knew all of this.

No, dude, I, there were definitely a lot of times I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah. You know, I stopped watching the news that year. Oh, dude, I haven't watched the news. Think about how crazy that is. Why would we call it the news that year. Dude, I haven't watched the news. Think about how crazy that is. Why would we call it the news? None of it's news.

None of it. It's all propaganda. Regardless, I don't care whether you're talking about the right or the left. It's still propaganda. It's still. So, I mean, that's a huge part of why i've changed my entire life because it's like all right i'm not going to be involved in the that drama yeah that's their drama but it's a very engaging drama like i will admit if like if like if like the if the biden trump drama were a movie it'd be like a compelling movie dude i can't deny that at all.

You know, like Trump the other day challenged Biden to a, God, if they actually have a golf match. That'd be legendary. I mean, like, do you want to talk about pulling attention? Like, how could anyone resist that, even if you hate them and hate the system? It is so compelling. I just have to, as a storyteller, that's super compelling.

It was the first debate I've ever watched. I didn't watch it. I didn't watch it. I didn't watch it because I knew what was going to happen. Because anyone who saw anything about Biden for the last three years understands he's got dementia. Like, ask any doctor who knows anything about dementia. Like, it's not. The New York Times just released this. I don't know if you saw it, but he's been getting visits from a Parkinson's doctor. Dude, they stole that from Alex Berensonarrinson man i follow him on uh substack and he has been writing about that for two weeks or

whatever it is and then they like the i listened to the the quote unquote news which i everyone i listen to are independent journalists and they're all people who have agendas and admit them which is like okay i can court if you tell me what you believe and why I can course correct for what the information you tell me and understand a probability to give to it. Right. But if you're fooling yourself, I could probably still course correct, but it's like, there's no reason for me to listen to. Berenson is one of the ones I listened to. Um, and he used to be a New York times reporter and he actually woke up and kind of realized how screwed up everything was. Yeah. Yeah, he wrote about that weeks ago. Wow.

Like that's, like that's, and it's funny, like this info was out there. Yeah. Did you say, oh, I can't, you don't suck me down this hole. No, that's how, it's like I'm resoundingly against being involved in any of that drama i know it's not my drama but it's still like it's hard to resist i'm following this jordan peterson drama right now it's tempting well what drama you didn't see this no jordan's a friend of mine like oh so him and michaela's daughter right i know huge twitter beef right now with nick fuentes do you know nick oh he's that like lunatic uh dude who's like like not even right

He's like like Nazis, right or something something like actual like not like not like against Jews. Yeah, okay, right So he's anti-semitic. So they're going out of really hard and now people are picking sides. It's a big deal But it's tempting to like get sucked up in that it is it's Really hard to resist. Yeah people like drama innately That's why these news outlets love reporting negative things because it's just drama it is it's hard it's really hard to resist yeah people like drama innately that's why these news outlets love reporting negative things because it's just drama it is because it adrenalizes and then you get addicted to that and like that's how they i forget who it was man uh one of the spiritual people i was listening to a few years ago on some i forget what i was i was at a conference and they were telling me that what their point was that um screens suck our life force out through our attention and i remember thinking okay that's like a cool you know like i saw like the golden or i read the golden compass

like that's a that's the the theme of the book it's a great theme but i'm like come on dude like like let's live in the world the the the world like the materialist physical world we live or at least the world has a materialist physical plane right explain this to me on that plane and like the you know they would they weren't that type of person right but then like that frame has stuck with me and like even if it's not literally true it's definitely one of those things that's uh very truthful right like there's a lot of things that that aren't true but if you act as if they are true they make your life better and that's one of those things that um if you act as is true your life's way better like if probably 80 of my attention in 2019 at least

was caught in the normal sort of dramas of western modernity now i would say it's 20 wow yeah and bro that's been all the difference like that's been a man i mean it was a very conscious like it was a conscious decision to do that like um i mean i i got just as adrenalized as anyone early covid and into mid-covid and that's when i really started to wake up and i'm like hold on this is fucked dude it's not working right and then that's a big part of why my wife and i moved out on land and you know bought a ranch and and then started helps our school out there and and all that and why we don't let our we don't have screens for our kids and and the next step for for me and her is like enforced like anti-screen time like putting phones in like a faraday box for like three hours a day or whatever it is like uh like because i i think i'm at that point now where it's like i'm not going to go

any deeper until i start like making myself you know like like i'm super excited i didn't know about that jordan peterson uh like that's a good sign no i love jordan and michaela i wish them the best but i'm super glad i didn't know about that drama my goal um probably the next step for me in terms of health and consciousness is where like if i hang out with someone like you and like i don't know hardly any of the dramas you're talking about right just because like i'm focused all my attention on the things that matter to me which are uh not uh you know two senior citizens arguing about who's got a better golf game. That's never going to matter to me. Yeah. You know, I love that. I love the spiritual aspect you incorporate in your life too. Yeah. Oh dude. It's been, that was, I was, I was like an atheist

for my whole life. I never believed in God because to me it seemed transparently obvious. Like you can't reason your way to God, right? Like I know Thomas Aquinas. No, you cannot go from a world of empiricism and reason and logic to God. You cannot. And as a kid, I was like, this doesn't make sense. There's no proof of this. Why would I believe this?

And so it was just like I wasn't like angry about it i wasn't like a sam harris nitwit who's like you know thinking all christians are stupid or whatever i mean i did think all right you're kind of stupid to believe this i don't there's no evidence for it but i i wasn't like judgmental judgy that judgy about it and then um about four years ago, I did some psychedelic medicine. I mixed LSD and MDMA. And, bro, I had the most profound spiritual experience. And I realized, without going too crazy deep into it, I realized that I'm right. You don't logic or reason your way to God. God is, the spiritual aspect of that is beyond reason, right?

And that you can experience it, though. And once you have the experience of God, then it's like, oh, yeah, right? Which is what I had the experience, like what religious would call an ecstatic experience, right? And I remember I'm really good friends with this uh mormon guy he's like very devout he's the type of christian like if you you meet him you're like if all christians were like you i'd be christian like he's like the type of guy he's mormon he's mormon and very like those guys are extreme though usually yeah i mean it depends some are some arts right some are you know like the magic underwear and all that shit he's like a normal dude but like he really does try to live by the words of of uh and the teachings of christ not just say it right and he does like he's just a great dude to be around and i called him and i'm

like buddy i didn't understand when you say you have a relationship with god you really mean that literally it's a feeling you have he goes yeah dude i've been trying to tell you this for 10 years and i'm like i thought you were fucking stupid like i literally no i did because like i thought he was like listening to the preacher or reading the book of mormon and just believing it yeah which is fucking transparent nonsense no not at all like he and so once i had that experience i'm like okay i'm not religious i don't need a dogma i don't need a container for my experience which is what a religion is it is a external container for the ecstatic experience but then after that i'm like

okay yeah this is real like i don't know i'm not gonna pretend to be some expert on god or the universe or spirituality but whatever it is is, I had that experience. I felt it. That's legit. I get it now. And I went instantaneously from being – because it's like one of those things like, you know, you're a virgin, then you have sex. And it's like watch all the porn you want, read all the books about it.

You've got to have sex to understand it, right? I think same thing for believing in God. I think if you don't have the experience, I guess you can just tell yourself, right? There are definitely people who believe it because everyone else around them does and whatever. But I'm not one of those. I can feel it these days, dude, because I love how you source your own meat. Because when I eat poor quality meat, I can feel it. Yeah, in your body, for sure. I only eat grass-fed grass finish now yes i need to and

it has to be ethically sourced uh there's a company you live vegas right yeah there's a company out here that's really good yeah what do you you find you can find that around there locally yeah force of nature meats oh yeah the taylor's over yeah yeah it's at whole foods yeah no like the i know the people who started that they're in fredericksburg yeah yeah they're great they're fantastic yeah they ethically source everything oh yeah no they do they're legit they're for real legit big difference dude yeah i know it costs way more but it's worth it my opinion because the food i mean they're injecting stuff and the poor quality meats oh dude it's i mean like it was bad in the 80s, like with hormones and antibiotics. Now it's like, I wouldn't.

Man, my wife and I are total foodies. And it's hard for us to go out to restaurants anymore because it's like you can't. Even at the best three Michelin star restaurants, they're doing their best to source. It's like you just just can't you can't get everything and get it high quality like i mean like in terms of ethically clean you know uh it's impossible yeah and a lot of them use seed oils even the nice restaurants canola oil for sure yes i went to stk in vegas and i asked them what they use canola oil of course they do crazy well first off most people don't realize how poisonous that is they don't realize it's literally machine engine lubricant it is like it was made for i think submarine engines or something crazy like that

it was developed as a fucking engine lubricant it is so horrible it's the worst the story i always tell people like the who like argue with that i'm like listen go research kate shanahan yeah and and and look she was the doctor she's like a pretty famous she wrote a book called deep nutrition which is amazing but um she she was the the nutritionist and doctor team doctor for the lakers uh literally cut seed oil from everything the team fed the players and like the team uh was demonstrably better like to the game that they cut that wow to the point where like 15 other nba teams like hired her as a consultant nutrition consultant and all that stuff and i'm like lebron james doesn't eat seed oils anymore that he's oh really i'm like i wonder what lakers here that

was if that was that was the first time Dwight Howard was there. Oh, that was great. So remember when Dwight Howard was cooked and he came back, like everyone thought he was done. Yeah. Came back to the Lakers and all of a sudden had this one amazing season. It's because he was eating the way she told him to. Wow.

And then he left. He signed a big free agent deal off of that and went somewhere else and was cooked the next year because he started eating all the crap he normally would eat. He got cut the next year after winning a championship. I always wondered how that made sense. I wish they kept that team, man. I'm a Lakers fan. Yeah. You follow sports?

I probably not because you got to ask questions. Yeah, of course, man. I grew up in that era. Like, it's – I think we're talking about out here with kid like i i don't my kids aren't in any team sports like my son's super into brazilian jiu-jitsu he's really good at it like he's which is amazing uh but um team sports is another thing i grew up playing my wife played division one college basketball like she got a full ride i know right um but like as much as i and i still love it i like i can't deny that i still love watching football and basketball whatever um i

i feel like team sports are in a lot of ways toxic especially at the kid level yeah um because they teach everyone's gonna talk about the good things they teach you i can't deny there aren't good things right for sports just overall movement now that's of course that's great right but team sports the problem with team sports to me is that it teaches the child to sublimate himself to a group i want to teach my children how to be solid and so if you want to teach your kids how to be a cog in a wheel that's cool good for you go put them in team sports i'm not going to do that when my son goes to do stuff he he his effort uh uh rewards him and his failures he pays for right you know and uh like he understands like like jujitsu has been an amazing tennis

probably like this almost any individual sport i'm sure i mean to the extent golf is a sport whatever but like uh jujitsu has been so uh so great for him because it's highly competitive and it's like he's on a team he's got other kids he trains with yeah but like when you're on the mat it's just you you know and he has learned so much about so many lessons that took me decades to learn um i mean part of it is i'm like helping him like understand and contextualize this stuff but like it's so awesome to watch him really grasp these things and understand like what I get from jiu-jitsu is what I put in you know and that you know if I lose first off it's totally fine like you know with the same jiu-jitsu there's only there's no losing there's only winning and learning. And he gets that.

And like, but more importantly, like the results I'm getting is a result of what I'm putting in. Right. And to see him connect those dots and then turn up the practice. Right. And then get serious. Like he actually, like he used to only go to one school and he's like, daddy, I'm not getting pushed enough. Because like, wow, he was like the best kid at the school and change schools that's a killer even at the new school he there's kids there who can who can roll with him but he's like they play a very

specific game he's like dad i i need to train with kids who play this other sort of game and so like i sort of take him in addition to his school to other places. Wow. I know, right? It's amazing. I'm not saying he's only a nine-year-old like that. But to get there as a nine-year-old. That's incredible. But it's not. And it's so cool because he's not neurotic about winning. I mean, of course, I told him, I don't care if you win or lose.

What matters when we go to competitions is you have fun, you grow and improve. If you focus on, if I said, buddy, if you are getting those two things, you can lose every competition you go to. I don't care. In no way, shape or form. Does that matter? Wow. Yeah. Like gold medals are cool.

Like if you get it, put it on your wall. That's not the point. Right. And he gets that. And so it's like, he's not trying to improve because he's neurotic about winning he's trying to improve because like he's a young boy who wants to develop value and and mastery of a skill and and he's so confident now and it's so awesome to watch him click all in i'm not saying you can't get this from team sports but

team sports it's like you got to worry about everyone else you know and like what are they thinking what are they feeling but you don't have to deal with any of that garbage right it's just you a lot of politics involved in team sports too oh my gosh i know like i have friends who are like there's kids especially some of them are good they They're like, oh, the travel teams and I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do it. I don't just love my family. I like my family. So every decision I make,

the first question is, does this take time for my family? And if the answer is yes, then it better be off the charts important or valuable. Yeah.

And if it's not, no way. One thing that caught my eye about you also as you're teaching your kids self-defense at a very young age oh yeah of course oh for sure my kid both my seven-year-old daughter and my nine-year-old son i brought in a um a army special forces guy who's like a badass teach them shooting right like i'm a pretty good shooter but like i don't know get get the real experts so and they're like they're great shots now they love shooting my nine-year-old got his first deer this year damn i know my daughter loves shooting she really wants to get a deer seven

she's seven and you have full trust in that i mean i'm not sitting around by herself yeah she's going with me she's like a little girl in the woods with a gun no no like but yeah of course i mean like you know my nine-year-old we went out hunting and and uh yeah i mean like if you teach my children at least and and plenty of other kids i've met if if you teach them how to be responsible even with things that are potentially dangerous um then they will be like if they understand how serious things are they'll be they'll be serious, you know, like, of course they don't have the guns in the room. Like when they're not using them, I have a gun safe. It's like the obvious things are obviously in care and they're not shooting ever by themselves. I'm always there with them or someone like,

you know, the, the guy who was the, you know, the serious instructor, but, um, but, oh yeah, this year I'll totally take her hunting wow and and you know she'll probably get a deer that's amazing i know which will be think about that man and seven she'll probably be eight maybe i think by the time she gets a deer an eight-year-old girl goes first up i mean like you want to talk about important like one of the most important relationships in the girl's life is with her dad right most important is mom second most important is dad so she i mean um she one of my most important jobs is dad right keep your daughter off the pole if you pay attention to your daughter she's not gonna do shit like that right so this is a great way for me to to not just pay attention to her but to do something she likes and she's excited about um that is

bonding for us but then also talk about confidence man i mean that little girl already knows she can shoot and in a year two at max she's gonna know she can feed herself like she can stalk and take down a deer she can already skin it and got it yeah like like uh i'll show you pictures yeah for sure dude wow it's not that hard you just have to show them how no i'm just surprised these girls think stuff like that is gross normally you know not mine like my daughter loves it man like she loves cooking she loves preparing me like uh cleaning gutting animals really part of cooking like in the history of humanity processing animals has almost always been uh uh the work of whoever's cooking right

which in most cultures women not always but but often and she loves that she because what it is is she's a child who now has a skill right and no one can take that from her right right no one can can deny that and the next step for her is to and bro my nine-year-old man when the first time so you know the the main the prime cut on a deer is what's called the back strap right so like what would be like the ribeye section of the cow yeah is that it's much smaller on a deer of course right so it's like about you know this big like a beef tenderloin is what it looks like um but it's the other side and so the first time we sat down the deer he killed and we ate the tenderloin from the deer he killed dude i've never seen a child so proud wow no because think about it, man. Nine years old, everyone in your family is eating what you put on the table.

That's not a small deal. Like my son is very, very confident and has great self-possession because he does things like that. Of course, I helped him, blah, blah, blah. But he took the shot. Like if he hadn't hit that, the deer would have ran off, right? So like it was an amazing not just proud moment for him but a confidence building right yeah i mean i can't wait for that for my daughter to have the same thing and and you want to talk about like then my daughter doesn't have

to at that point my daughter knows okay i can do things myself i'm not especially for girls it's very important for them to understand yes of course i can have relationships with men rely on them but i can also do shit myself if i have to right if it comes down to it yeah that's important for women i feel like i mean it's important for everybody but dudes i think we kind of implicitly understand if we don't produce value no one one cares about us, right? Like you could be a woman and have a different orientation to life. But my daughter wants to be able to do stuff. And so, fuck yeah, I'm going to help her do it.

That's cool, man. Sounds like those moments are what brings you joy too. It is, bro. Kids are a paradox. They are a huge pain in the ass in a lot of ways. Like people, anyone who tells you that they're not, it doesn't have kids or is lying. But at the same time, they're worth it 10x. Like they're, you know, everyone says you'll hear, do you have kids?

I want kids. Not yet. Okay. You're in no rush. You're a dude. So it'll be fine. But like people will tell you kids are your best teacher. Like I remember hearing that.

I'm like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What is a two-year-old going to teach me? And of course, I was being like ridiculous. I was thinking of it literally. They were right, but not in the way they were explaining. People said that. Kids are great teachers because they're a mirror, right? Like they are going to reflect you back at you. were explaining people said that kids are great teachers because they're a mirror right like uh they are going to reflect you back at you and you're going to see who you are either because

they're acting just like you or they're reacting to you and in that way so like uh probably my kids have been one of the biggest catalysts for growth in me in my whole life, for sure. Uh, no doubt, man. Like they've been, and then I'm going to tell you, dude, I really, most of the cultural narrative around dads, I think again, most of it I found to be false, right? Like, look, there's some dads, the first time they see their baby when it's little, they freak out and they're in love. Okay, cool. No judgment on that.

I did not have that experience. Like, I did not love it. But to me, a relationship is something you have to form over time with someone else who's contributing in the relationship. And babies are sociopathic little locusts. They don't contribute anything, right? When they're little, and it's fine. That's what a baby's supposed to be, right? They're not doing anything wrong.

But, like, you know, my wife's like wife's like oh look he's looking at me i'm like he doesn't have vision until three months like it doesn't even make so like uh whatever it's great that my wife and mother-in-law were all cooing and thought that they had deep love for the baby when it was little that was important for me my relationship with each of my kids has grown as they've grown. I love it. And so my nine-year-old is now like getting to be real serious boyhood. And we can talk about complicated kind of sophisticated things and he gets it. Right? And it's so awesome.

My seven-year-old girl is starting to get there too. And so it's like someone very wise once told me like, listen, you're honestly, as long as your wife's an amazing mom, you're not that. Your only job until they get to be 10 to 12, depending on the kid, is to play with them. And I'm like, really? They were being a little bit extreme. It's not your only job. But it was more right than I realized. Wow. Like my primary job with my kids is to play with them and they love playing with that when they want to be

nurtured it's mommy like they'll tolerate me if mommy's not there but it's mommy but when they want to play mommy's not fun daddy's fun right and so we have the best time but now they're getting my two oldest especially getting to the age where it's like they're they're becoming human you know like full humans and i can see how like i can have such a an impact but it's not like do this do this it's much more like with my son i'm very socratic with it why why this why that what do you think you know as much as possible i try and help him form his own conclusions to understand the questions form his own conclusions and then like instead of telling him well here's what you have to do i'll be like all right well here's what i do here's how i see it wow but you can see it a different way i like that style because i grew up disciplinary which i

feel like most kids do and there was a lot of conflict but with your style it's more open-ended right we still have conflict at times for sure well that's inevitable but yeah but um but no yeah it's not conflict because i'm oppressive or pushing down on them right and a lot of kids face that with whether school grades or sports or whatever a lot of parents put pressure dude one of the main things we've done to teach to head off conflict with our kids is we teach them, ask for what you want. Right? And we always say, no guarantee you're going to get it. But if you can learn to identify yourself what you want and then ask for it, at a minimum, mommy and daddy will always do our best to help you try and get what you want.

Right? Yeah. Or help you figure out how to get it and so our two oldest especially really starting to understand that like i said like when i told you my son like he was very frustrated that the first jiu-jitsu school he's going to wasn't very good but like he asked for what he wanted went to a better school and even at the better school wanted more than okay great then we'll add this and you know i know a place it's got some really good young kids you can cross train and this and that and so like he's like because i taught him too i'm like buddy you create your reality with your thoughts like you're like uh and he gets that now and so that's one of the main

ways we've learned to kind of head off like conflict is most of the time, in my experience, conflict with our kids is they they're having an emotion they don't know how to express, especially the younger. And for that, it's mainly just emotional connection, holding space, helping them modulate off of you. Right. But as they get older and start thinking as well as feeling, it's much more about, about all right helping them learn to think through problem solving right um instead of either solving the problem or just dictating an answer right you know like because those are two extremes like the authoritarian parents talk about which i can't stand i we weren't we aren't like but bro helicopter parents are just as abusive in a different way yeah you know that that's what entitlement is. Entitlement is when a child is frustrated and you rush in to meet their needs for them. And if you do that consistently, that's how they develop like entitlement.

And you see a lot of, you know, rich parents with their kids and I'm kind of messed up, right? I'm sure your friends, you're dealing with that in your circle. Oh, yeah. No, I definitely have. It is probably the number one worry and concern and issue with friends of mine who have a lot of money the way they think about those how do i how do i make sure my kid has drive and i'm like well are you sure

like like because most of my entrepreneurial friends and i got i was in this space for a long time the ones who have money have money because they were very driven but the drive comes from a wounded place right and i'm like you sure you want your kids to be wounded you know like i don't want my kids to be wounded you know um so i'm not trying to recreate me with my kids like the ideal situation is there's enough shit you have to deal with on earth i don't want to add to it you know like i want to put them in a spot as much as possible where they're having to deal with the least amount of stuff that me or my wife dumped on them right you know just the trauma of life as it is without any family shit is enough

a lot of successful people have trauma though now. Now that you said that. 100%. Yeah, it got me thinking. Almost all of them. Yeah, there's definitely a relation there. It's tough to find a counterexample of someone who is very successful in the way we would define it in modernity, whose primary driver isn't some feeling of, I'm not good enough. Wow. That's what causes success then, trauma.

Well, sort of. Financial success. Sort of. Sort of because you can find a whole bunch of traumatized people who are poor as fuck. That's true. So it doesn't necessarily – that can be – success can be a coping – it can be a byproduct of a coping mechanism for the feeling of shame and lack and whatever but it's not not necessarily you can just easily become a drug addict there's lots of other

uh coping mechanisms that aren't as productive yeah success is probably one of the rarer ones actually and i mean a lot of cases yeah yeah. Yeah. That's what happened to you, though? You had some stuff and then... I mean, bro, I... I don't... Yeah, of course. Like, I had a ton. But no... It's 2024. You're 27.

I'll bet you no more than 20 years, probably 10 years, you're going to look back, like a lot of people, not just you, but just you're going to look back, and most people are starting to wake up to the fact that our society collectively is insanely traumatized, right? And that we live in a sea of trauma. Like what I just talked about about the feeling of i'm not good enough when you leave here go look at every media message you get and ask yourself how many

of those messages at their core are a message of you aren't enough wow every single ad, without fucking exception, every single ad at its core, if it's, okay, you could probably show me a couple that are like funny and there's nothing in there, but you aren't enough. Okay, fine. Virtually every ad at its core is you aren't enough. Like every ad to women is. There might be a couple to men that are just funny but that's it but uh and but then uh most media messages not just ads but in media

you need this course you need this supplement you aren't enough all of it is you aren't enough wow that's true though. Yeah. For women, it's about looks. Oh, dude. For women, it's horrible. Bro, it's so toxic. It's so bad for women, man.

Like, it's a huge part of why I don't want my daughter on the screens. My daughter, especially. Because I don't want her filling her head with the horrible ideas and thoughts of these women who think that their only job is to be pretty and to consume. That's a lot of, there's a lot more to life than that. Yeah. Yeah. That's a shallow way of living. I think just off your looks. Not how I want to be. I mean mean i'm not good looking enough for it right yeah i'm not either but i feel like the purpose isn't there yeah with that lifestyle you know what i mean i listen i i you can make a really good argument that the same thing's true for economic financial achievement

right um the counter argument is uh but you know i'm doing something for other people yeah maybe maybe not right like i mean a a really good uh iconic example everyone celebrates most people celebrate how much elon musk has achieved right and take nothing away from that the dude has done quite a bit of stuff and and a lot of it's like cool rockets are cool i'm not denying anything what's the price he's paid for that well he has a lot what do you know about his kids yeah he's not in their lives right one of them disowned him i think i saw. Yeah. And took a different last name. I saw that.

I'm not willing to sacrifice my children on the altar of my achievement. Not knocking Elon. I'm just telling you there's a price to pay for that. I don't see what Elon is doing is fundamentally different than what kim kardashian is doing from an emotional standpoint okay if you want to say he's producing more stuff that's good for civilization you can probably make that argument you're probably right okay fine whatever but uh the core emotional drivers of the two are the same wow i never even thought of comparing them but when you put it that way i can see it i can see that she's

also a sharp businesswoman now oh yeah for sure not knocking kim or her family or whatever no no like i picked her because she's she's also very smart very accomplished like she's done i mean if makeup is valued valuable to you and appearance and all that kind of stuff if that's a primary value and those women are the elon musk of that world you know yeah absolutely not my thing but whatever yeah talker it's been really cool man i can't wait to do a part two with you and see the feedback on this one anything you want to close off with or promote no man you got a book or anything coming out i uh no oh actually that's that's a great segue i i'm working on my next memoir it's kicking my ass right now it's really hard um the only thing i have it's not even to promote but i um what i do now is i help people write their their memoirs and so it's like a like i have like a sort

of basically a memoir coaching uh program uh in a month, like August 7th and 8th, our third cohort launches, like our third workshop, onboarding workshop. And what's cool, one of the cool things, I mean, like, listen, I'm great at writing memoirs. I'm one of the best. I helped Goggins write his and Tiffany Haddish and mine all sold a bunch and blah, blah, blah.

But like, I'm actually writing mine with, I'm going through the program with the group, right? And a big part of the program is sharing our writing and whatever. Everyone else can share if they want or not. I make all my stuff available to the group. So when I've not even finished a rough draft, like I'm showing them my raw drafts, right? Which like when I first started them, like, okay, they'll just see, you know, whatever. And then I didn't realize I was going to hit like a a real real bumpy patch and so but it's been very hard for me it's ended up being

amazing for the people in the group because i think a lot of them have the idea that oh like these fancy memoirists or you know do this stuff i could never do and instead they're seeing like my dumpster fire drafts like oh yeah i can write shit better than that that's terrible right and they realize oh he's not there's no magic to what he's doing like it's he's struggling like i struggle he's starting where i'm starting which i tell them but they don't believe me right like because i'm sure like some kid who's like wants to be a big podcaster youtube star like looks at you and like you're like it's not magic and like oh i can never have what you have yeah you can it's just work yeah right and and and so it's ended up being amazing and really helped that group so um uh i don't think anyone's ever done that before any

like really accomplished memoirists took a bunch of people through their memoirs since they were writing his he was writing his and then shared it so So I think I'm the first person to do that. Maybe not. But I've got that going. It's an expensive program, but it's been amazing for even for me, but for the other people on it too.

That's going. Yeah, we'll link them below and link your socials. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, man. Thank you, man. Yeah. Thanks for watching, guys,

as always. See you tomorrow.