Julian Dorey Podcast - #369 - “Sickening!” - Navy SEAL on Military Corruption, Charlie Kirk & Religion | Mike Ritland

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

WATCH MY PREVIOUS PODCAST w/ MIKE: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DwbyHh13igCPVSx3Aa5uV?si=nceziBn2RWCsBAKLlqF6Ig (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Mike Ritland is a former 12-year Navy SEAL Team 3 member, world-renowned dog trainer, NYT-Award-Winning Author, & YouTuber. Ritland saw significant action in Iraq and later became one of the Navy SEAL’s first dog trainers. MIKE's LINKS - YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@MikeRitland - IG: https://www.instagram.com/mritland/?hl=en - X: https://x.com/MRitland - MIKE WEBSITE: ​​https://mikeritland.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Intro 01:23 – YouTube Titles, Algorithm, Culture, Populism, Zohran 10:04 – Trump Comparisons, Distraction, Comfort, Service 20:13 – Military Life, Purpose, Discipline, Balance 30:06 – Complacency, Self-Governance, Stoicism, Gratitude 40:42 – Stoicism, Meditations, Entrepreneurship, Mindset 51:35 – Human Nature, Morality, If Religion Disappeared 01:01:45 – Iraq War, Power, Money, Military-Industrial Complex 01:11:42 – Politics, Corruption, Accountability, Protests 01:22:02 – Rule of Law, Government Failure, Founding Principles 01:31:42 – Extremism, Authority, Israel–Palestine 01:34:29 – Emotion, Judgment, Roman Empire, Movies 01:43:43 – Christopher Nolan, Interstellar, Storytelling 01:50:55 – China, Social Collapse, Nuclear Family 02:02:09 – Hardship, Comfort, Discipline 02:10:55 – Charlie Kirk 02:23:31 – Polarization, 2016 Election, Charlie Kirk Symbolism 02:40:47 – Mike's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 369 - Mike Ritland Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Searchlight Pictures comes, Is This Thing On? Directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Canada's own Will Arnett. Is This Thing On is the story of a man's unconventional journey to find himself, seeking new purpose in the New York stand-up comedy scene while navigating his impending divorce. Is This Thing On is a raw, authentic, and hilarious story about discovery, reinvention, and second chances in life. See Is This Thing On, now playing in select theaters everywhere January 9th. Throughout your Navy SEAL career, you at different points fought against literal

time. You and I can both agree that they were evil people, right? Yeah. If I could pinpoint an essence of the SEAL team, don't tell me how to be a good team guy, fucking show me how to be one. But when I look back at Iraq as an example, 17, 18 years of Afghanistan, I think a lot of it was a state. Fast forward, now you have Israel, Palestine, Ukraine. It's like, what role are we actually actively playing in creating this problem. So we're talking about huge GDPs, obviously the largest of which is China. Communist Party leadership that rules with an iron fist, place that does mass surveillance on us. If you were pointing at your number one list of concerns over the next 10 to 15 years,

is China still at the top of that list? Maybe. Maybe. I'm more worried about. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Anyway, it is great to have you back, Mike. We did episode 2.15 together. And then I was just down in Texas recording with you.

So I'm looking forward to hopefully not sounding like an idiot when that comes out. I really enjoyed our conversation, you know. And I'll reiterate the sentiment of. you know you're you have such a unique i think both background and perspective contrasted with all the people that you've had on your show and it makes for to me one of the most well-rounded perspectives out there really because yeah i mean uh and so to me it's it's it's always nice to you know one talk to fellow uh i don't know show hosts i guess that have had a lot of the same people on and you know and kind of deal with some of the same headaches and

struggles or hurdles that, you know, doing a podcast full-time can come with, that not to make it sound like overly dramatic, but that, you know, people who don't do that aren't going to be able to relate to you, you know. But that coupled with just your experience of having so many people on with such broad-ranging perspectives, I think it gives you a really, really unique view on so many things that for me is fascinating to talk to you about. So I appreciated it. Well, that's always cool to hear, but it's cool to hear from people that, also get what we do you know and from someone i've seen for so long doing so much shit i really last time you were here you know we got to go through like your whole personal story and everything you did

with the navy seals and and also like basically like launching a lot of k9 program there and then continuing that after your career as well so people can definitely go check that out i know we did some some discussions about like some of your actual dog training tactics on patreon back then so maybe we can get to some of that today as well. But I think the thing that really blew Alessie and I away last time, a lessee was in studio with me last time with you, was how much you were such a common sense kind of like breakdown guy. What I mean by that is there was basically an hour of that podcast before we were talking about your backstory where we were just going through some basic different policy points, a little bit of geopolitical stuff. And like your knowledge of

everything is amazing, which that part didn't surprise me. But like, your no nonsense approach had us looking at each other. Like, you should run for office. Like, I might actually vote for you. Yeah. Are you still thinking about maybe doing that? I don't know that I was ever thinking about it. You know, well, not seriously anyway. I mean, I've had, you know, I guess first off, I appreciate the kind words. I, you know, to me, the almost frustrating part about it is that, like, I don't think that my perspective is all that unique or, um, you know, outside the box, really. I mean, to me, like, similar to you, you know, we talk to a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life all over the country. And, you know, I find that about

90% of the things we, we tend to agree on, you know, maybe even closer to 100. Now, I think where most people disagree and where you see a lot of these like crazy, whether it's left wing or right wing, because there's plenty of crazy right wing theories or approaches to fixing problems. Also, I don't think there's as many but but but it's in the approach you know it's like the the outcome is is generally fairly heavily agreed upon by almost everybody I mean I wouldn't even say it's the 80 20 you know maybe it's 80 in the middle and 10 on either side but you know most people just you know they want to live somewhere safe you know if they want to have a family which I think most people do obviously not everybody if they do they want their kids to go to a good school get a good

education, be able to afford a lifestyle that's at least comfortable and, you know, they can get Christmas presents or whatever, take a vacation, you know, once or twice a year and live a relatively normal American lifestyle, you know. To me, there's nothing in that that's extreme or that's, you know, not understood and fairly heavily agreed on by most people. It's in the approach. And that's where I think the over-influence of the Internet, and social media play such a huge role in influencing people to think in very extreme ways that are in kind of vacuums contrasted to the way most people think, you know, if you get off your phone or off social media and you go talk to people, again, there's very little disagreement

in most categories, I think, you know. So to me, that's kind of the most frustrating part about, you know, like the book on Fuck America and the discussion we had and reading some of the comments is like as flattering as that may be to hear that stuff to me it's frustrating frankly that most people don't just have that same kind of approach of looking at it from a pretty simple you know no no nonsense kind of no bullshit way but but they do well it's one thing as to expressing what you want it's another thing of them putting that into practice you know from policy perspective and that's what was impressive because like some of the ideas you had about well hypothetically we could do something like this like a lot of

it made sense to Alessie and I, and that was cool. But, you know, there's an election, when we're recording today, there's an election going on in New York here where Mondani, unless I'm shocked and somehow he doesn't win. Like, he's going to win. And this is a guy who, frankly, has full-blown socialist policies. They've been tried a million times. They don't work. It's not your prototypical Democrat versus Republican election. It's something different here with him. That said, what is very interesting about him when you're looking. at this from a political how does this happen perspective it's that all those things that you just talked about like on a general level that everyone wants he at least went out to people and expressed

that he wanted that for them too now whether his policies work or not unfortunately it's a separate conversation that's probably not true but there's something to be said for for the fact that you're talking about a guy here who went and spoke to people in new york who had turned and like voted for Trump in the last election and didn't excoriate them and instead asked them why and they said you know the economy was was better certain other things were better and he said okay what if I you know did some things to actually make that happen for you would you vote for me and now you know just speaking to them on that level he's probably going to get those votes yeah yeah and I think it it reminds me of or or kind of highlights the polar opposite that happened to the Democrats and the presidential

election is that it's not even so much that everybody is in love with candidate a it's it's that they drop the ball so bad with you know between Biden staying in way too long and then tripping over himself in the in the debate and making it abundantly clear that he did not have the mental capacity to keep going having no primary you know just handing the torch to Kamala the way that they did and you know whether she had enough time or not you know there's people that would that would argue either way it doesn't even matter i mean the fact is is that they just really dropped the ball and did not prepare well and did not execute their the run-up and campaign to the election and that's why they lost and i think both on the republican and independent side you could even argue on

the democratic side because there's plenty of far superior alternate candidates to mom dani that they just didn't didn't do it you know and that baffles me um i do think there's maybe and i don't understand why there's such an emphasis on a on a mayoral campaign in the united states like in the in the grand scheme of things no matter how fucked up the mayor of new york is is that going to swing the needle you know necessarily one way maybe maybe not but it is fascinating i think the the reflection that one mayoral race has in one city and granted it's you know america city basically but but it's still it's just uh i think there's a lot of lessons to be learned a lot of very obvious errors that were made And what I would hope is that both sides can at least learn from a day like today and not make those same mistakes.

But it seems like they continue to do it over and over. Yeah, that's what's frustrating. I mean, there was, whatever it was, like eight years at Bill de Blasio here not long ago. And then obviously he was in charge during the whole front end of COVID, which doubled the disaster of him. And you would think people might remember something like that and be like, well, maybe, you know, we shouldn't vote for the guy he's endorsed. deep's over here laughing he remembers the chaos yeah i think i think americans are just uh most americans are short-sighted that way where you know adams comes in and kind of hits the reset button and gets things to where now people are comfortable and to me like that that comfortability piece

you know whether you're a stoic or a common sense person whatever is like that that is the the catalyst that kills everything you know when people are comfortable they they get complacent bottom line yes and it is striking that it only took four years, you know, for people to, to forget that de Blasio completely turned the city upside down and screwed it over. I don't know how you fix that. Isn't it amazing how short memories are? Yeah. I mean, in this in the same vein, I mean, can you imagine in October of 2001 that what would be happening here in this city would be happening? Like with the sentiment of, of not just where the country was at, but especially New York City with the World Trade Center,

are still smoking that, you know, 20 plus years later that we would be in this position where the overwhelming leading candidate is a guy like Mom Donnie. I mean, like, there's no bingo card that would have ever been on, and yet here we are. Yeah, I think the thing that offended me a lot was like the dude was out campaigning with people who had said America deserved 9-11 and stuff like that. That's where you draw a line. For sure. You know, that's different.

Yeah. I love that New York has a lot of everything. I love the culture of it, but there's a line between like common sense and just being an asshole about stuff and a lot of people that that live in the city right now were alive and living there you know, 24, 25 years ago seeing that and it is amazing that something like that could be ignored including in some cases by some of those same people for sure by the way. I mean some people that will vote for him are people that were standing there that day and I'm not saying that to like shred them maybe they're upset about other things but you know i was even having a

conversation with someone the other day about the israel palestine thing and this person was someone who was on the pro-israel side and we were talking about obviously the mistakes that have been made here in especially over the last couple years and i said you know what's crazy what will be crazy to see is that i'm rooting for this peace deal i obviously i i hope this this this stands. I can't say I have a ton of optimism on that because of what's going on, but hopefully it does. That said, it'll be interesting to see where this is five, ten years from now, or more importantly, where it would be if like Israel would change a couple things. Would people forget some of the stuff they did? And I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, but I actually

thought the possibility was maybe because society has proven over and over again. It's like, we have the thing. And then the thing's gone and they go, now we have a new thing. And they just move on yeah i mean uh distraction is a real a real bitch i think in today's day and age because you know again when when people are are comfortable um it's very easy to sway them in whatever direction you want them to be swayed for a period of time until the new shiny object shows up but the reality is like unless a certain issue is is impacting your life negatively to a point to which you're you're angry about it you know not just maybe a little uncomfortable or distracted or whatever like the the length of the cause or the

dedication to your your cause is very very limited and has a pretty short shelf life you know and because you see it with whether it's BLM or antifa stuff or trans rights or Israel Palestine Ukraine it's like pick a thing yeah and i think the the interesting thing about all of all of what i just said is that if you take it back to, and I think we spoke a little bit about this the last time I was on, is that, you know, human beings are designed and meant to suffer and struggle and they need things to overcome. So when we live in a day in an age and in a society where there's very little of that from a kind of an external standpoint, you know, say 200 years ago where 90% of the population in the United States were farmers. I think Philadelphia, I think, was the biggest city with 40,

thousand people. It's a very different idea and understanding of, A, how the world works, what your day to day is, what things that you're worried about, et cetera. Fast forward 200 plus years later. And now you have a society that doesn't know where their food comes from, is not responsible for sourcing any of it. You know, doesn't have to, you know, maintain any of the things utility-wise in their house, most people. And so there's this disconnect. And so now people don't have the struggle of survival in a day-to-day capacity to ever have to worry about. And so they default to whatever cause that resonates with them the most that they feel like, well, let me get behind this because I'm passionate about it and I care and whatever

until it fizzles out or something else pops up that maybe I care more about or whatever. And so I think that's why you see such a reliance and a quick initiative on so many Americans parts to get so almost not almost violently involved in some causes that aren't even taking place here in the United States because they just don't have any other problems to worry about yeah you were asking me I forget what the exact question was when I was on your show but you were you were asking me about like young men and and military service and whether or not you know it would be a benefit if we were required to have it like in the old days with a draft and I think there's certainly something to be said for that. But assuming like we didn't have a draft

and don't have a war to go fight, which I hope we don't, you know, you are looking at a generation now that's coming up where there is a sentiment of, let's say, I don't want to say hopeless at all. That's overstating it. But there's less like hope and inspiration, I guess you could say, than in previous generations and particularly with young men right in the vein you were just talking about, it's almost like they don't have a big war to struggle for. That should be a positive, but they also maybe don't feel like they have the same opportunities that their dads had or their grandfathers had in this country. You know, as someone who is a self-made guy and went and did a really hard thing, being in the Navy SEALs, did that very well for a long time, also sacrificed

some of your health to do that. Like, what do you say to a 14-year-old, 15-year-old kid who's trying to find his way in life doesn't know what he wants to do yet but you know wants to be able to feel like he's a man a decade from now to me the the easy answer and the one that i i would say always fall back on is if you don't have purpose right and this is at any age not just 14 but since your question was a 14 year old if if you don't have purpose you don't know what it is that you want to do go serve some something else until you figure that out you know because to me it's a win-win in in in the two ways where, number one, is that now at least you're a productive, net positive member of society. You're doing something that's benefiting our society. But what you're also doing

is you're figuring out the things that you like, that you don't like, that you're passionate about, that you're not passionate about, things that give you that purpose. And it may take half of your adult life to figure that out, but that's okay because you're not on food stamps playing video games in your parents' basement. You're in the Peace Corps, the military, boys and girls club soup kitchens i mean volunteering helping building homeless homeless people houses me whatever like if you just go do that there's there's also a huge component i think to feeling purposeful when when you're serving somebody else even if that isn't your thing the fact that you know that you're helping our society you're helping other people like that makes you feel good

even if you don't think you want to do that i mean there's a million studies uh that that you know approve the helping of other people and what that does to, you know, just your mental process and ultimately how you look at things. It makes you more grateful for what you have. I mean, there's a million benefits to it. And so to me, like, that's such a simple thing. And, you know, to the mandatory service thing, you know, the military isn't for everybody. I'd say it's not even for most people. I don't think mandatory military service is necessarily a good idea. I do think a two or three year, you know, if you're not going to go to college or a trade school and maybe the argument could be made even if or especially if you're going to do that that you do

two years first in say a list of 10 different things you know again whether it's you know peace corps or the red cross or the military boys and girls club me whatever is that it makes you serve something bigger than yourself before you enter the real world and i think that one thing could make an enormous shift in making everybody understand a how the world works to be more appreciative of what they have and realize that there is a lot of opportunity. You just have to actually go find it. It's not going to just be thrown in your lap. Yeah.

No, I think there's certainly an argument to be made for that. But you also like, when you do something like serve as long as you did and you're at the tip of the spear in your case, you're into special forces. And then you, for people who haven't heard your story, you were essentially like kind of forced into retirement because your lung capacity went down to what like 60% something like that so you've done it for a while and then you get out did you like have a human moment where you're like what the fuck do i do with my life at that point or were you right in it like let's go yeah i was right in it i mean i had already made the shift to being interested in in working canines broadly speaking um and so for me it was

okay this specific door that i wanted to go down is now closed but there's two dozen other ones that are very similar to that that are now open and i get to pick you know i mean to me that's one of the most rewarding uh exciting and also stressful parts of going away from a nine to five or working for somebody else and doing your own thing is well yes all of the responsibility and accountability falls on your shoulders you also get to do whatever you want however you want to do it you know and so i i never ever struggled with that transition period out like there there was never a point even for a day where i was like man what am i going to do or how am i going to make this all work you know to me it was more of uh you know i don't even know that i'd

say it's a glass half full or half empty thing it's like that that cup is refillable and you get to refill it however you want with whatever drink you want you know is that i get to now pick like yeah i wanted to stay in and do this but now i can do a million other things in that same vein and I get to run the show, like, this is awesome. Unfortunately, a lot of veterans and especially combat veterans, I think, I'm not going to say they don't look at it that way, but they don't find themselves in that same position. I do feel very fortunate in that this was something I was already interested in, and there's a lot of, you know, avenues or lanes that you can pick in that industry to continue to do the

same types of things that I wanted to do in the military. But to me, that's really the secret. I mean, the oldest question on earth is what's the meaning of life, right? And to me, to me, it's a very simple, it's purpose. Doesn't matter what the purpose is. Like if every day when you wake up, the thing that you're doing makes you want to get out of bed and do that thing, you're never going to be miserable. You will always, you know, enjoy what you're doing and be part of that struggle and that struggle and the hurdles that you have to overcome are going to give you. you a sense of fulfillment that I don't think you find anywhere else. It sounds like your, your mentality is like less than like a pure Goggins, like,

you just got to get up and do it, man, that's shit. Versus it's like you have to be able to find that passion. And then once you do, yeah, there's going to be stuff you always don't like with anything you're building. But you can at least enjoy yourself and work. Yeah, because then there's a, there's a why behind it. You know, there's a reason why the struggle makes sense. You know, it's kind of like getting in good shape or, I mean, pick anything.

You know, if there's a goal and a light at the end of the tunnel or, you know, to me, there's a parallel between dog training, frankly, and most things in life that I find myself kind of coming back to. But, you know, wherever you're at with your dog is point A, wherever you want to get is point B. You know, and so you plan out what A to B looks like and then you execute it. that's true with everything you know you want to get the girl you want to get the black belt you want to become a five-star Michelin chef you want to run a business that makes 10 million a year I mean whatever it is understanding what that is first and then developing a plan and executing

it is is the key to success you know so because everybody needs that that struggle and something to overcome I mean you see it again not to beat the dead horse but in in so many of especially the Gen Z and maybe younger millennials, when there isn't that, human nature will find something to attach itself to in that way, you know, and the phone will guide you into that thing if you let it, and most people do, you know, so, yeah, I mean, again, it's just, it's a really simple principle of find out whatever it is. Now, with the Goggins thing, like, hats off to them. Like, I don't know the guy personally. I've never even met him. But obviously, like, he's as dedicated as they come oh yeah but even with that like there's still a why or a purpose

you know and his purpose is very specific to to the struggle it's seeking struggle and he does that all day every day yep for me i like a little bit more of a happy medium approach like there's there's enough scientific data that says seeking out hard things and forcing yourself to do them set you up for success in every other aspect of your life and i think that's important and i do that on a regular basis. For me, personally, doing it all day, every day is not what I find fulfilling. You know, to me, there has to be a balance. I want to be able to celebrate the victories to enjoy the fruits of labor, to, you know, take vacations, have time off, buy things that I don't need because I enjoy whatever that thing is. To me, that's the happy medium. You do have to be

careful with it. If that consumes you, I think quickly you'll become miserable. And you see a lot of people that at a certain level of net worth aren't particularly happy, you know. And so I think you've got to be careful with it on both ends because I think, you know, again, I don't know the guy. To me, there does seem to be, you know, a level of obsession there that maybe isn't particularly balanced. But on the same token, like, that's just for me. Like, you know, if he can look at himself in the mirror and say, dude, I'm living my best life. This shit makes me the happiest I've ever been, awesome, you know. And if that's what works for him, fantastic. And I mean, I'm proud of him. He's built a hell of a dynasty, frankly, in the struggle department. And he's inspired a ton of

people, and he's got an amazing story. So I think, you know, it's great to see all the things that he's done. Yeah. And I'm certainly one of those people that's very inspired by the guy. And I agree with you 100%. I think it's what works for you. Yeah. You know, and that's the thing. I'll listen to episode 1080 the first one he did when Joe Rogan that's one I'll listen to it if not every year every other year I've probably listened that podcast about six seven times before and you know he he's a guy now who has been around in the ethersphere for the past seven eight nine years and so people have gotten to see the quote-unquote okay does he walk the talk over time and the thing about that dude is he's the same guy today

as he was all those years ago and without name and names it's it's always tough when you see people who really blew up and maybe for a lot of good reasons too and did a lot of good shit who over the years you start to see the luster wear off and you start to see that you know maybe it's even not just oh they're they're just a man too like they have their flaws sometimes it's like the flaws end up outweighing the positives on and maybe that's the limelight does it to them and it changes them or whatever but But, you know, I watched a video of David Goggins, like, limping across some fucking finish line at night. This is like two months ago or something.

His knees are like buckling and falling apart. And I'm like, you know what? Say what you want, this motherfucker is about it. Yeah. And when the cameras are off, too, you know, not just when his phone's out or somebody else's phone's out or there's a documentary crew with him. You know, he's that day and day out. Jocco is very much that same way.

You know Jocko, right? I do, yeah. I've been on his show twice. he's been on mine once and uh and i knew him you know way back in the day too not well but um but yeah i mean he's that same kind of guy where you know i think most people when you see a persona or a certain brand online it's very you know manufactured it's very polished it's very you know intentional to a very specific angle and then you meet him in person and again it's kind of that don't meet your heroes thing like you can pretty quickly see like there's two sides to this coin you know

And I get why, I think, you know, to the comfortability piece or, you know, luxury kind of wears people out or changes them a little bit. I mean, I think Connor McGregor is as good of an example as that. Especially in the fight game because it is quite literal fighting. And when you're hungry, you know, when you're, it's like Rocky 4, you know, it's like Rocky 3, he had to hit the Rocky 4 reset button and go back to old school and be hungry and cold and tired and all that again to kind of revisit that mentality. And, you know, so I think it's mostly that is that, you know, if you grew up your entire life struggling and you work, most of your adult life, you get to your, you know, middle ages, 40, 50, 60 years old and now you don't have

to worry about money. I mean, there is a certain element of complacency that I think is just going to over time weave itself into your personality a little bit. I think the key is identifying, you know, when you start to stop doing the hard things, enough to remember what they're like, then you have to self-regulate and self-govern and make sure that your gut-checking yourself often enough to take a piece of humble pie. But, you know, back to the, that question of purpose and, you know, whatever works for certain people, I want to reiterate, like, you know, finding that should be your purpose in life. And if, if you can't find that or you don't know what that is, serve something bigger than you until you figure out what that

is if you go your entire life never finding out what that is then your purpose was to just always find somewhere where you can help out you know yeah and i think the the entire world and especially this country would be far better off if everybody just took that that mentality yeah i think a huge part of that is also it forces you to build relationships and in today's world where everyone's their own little cell no pun intended yeah and separated from a lot of people and social skills are down as a result, the post-COVID opposite of a boom, whatever you want to call it, happen with people and their personalities, particularly anyone who was a kid, but I would say it certainly implies to adults too, where, you know, we don't interact as much. When you get out

there and, you know, the also selfish part about it is you're doing a nice thing for other people, which makes you feel good. You know, you're doing it with a group. It gives you that exact purpose that you're talking about. I couldn't agree more. And I will say, one of the the things my my parents always like really were about giving back and doing things in the community so I grew up doing it but one of the things about applying to college that as I was going through it pissed me off was the whole box checking part that would include what kind of community service do you do because people would do community service just to do community service and I remember like when I was in I guess sophomore junior year where you have to be doing

it. I'm like, okay, well, what one am I really going to focus on right now? And I was like, all right, let's do the Boys and Girls Club. I got that in, quote unquote, but loved it. And so even after, you know, I was in college, I had applied and everything was all good, I kept doing it. Yeah. Because it was like the greatest feeling ever. You were working with these excited, you know, five to nine year old kids every day. It was right around the corner from my high school. They lit up every time you saw them. You got to play. I mean, you're like playing with them after school. It's like you, you get to go play too. It's the coolest thing. And wish more people would have actually treated like that part of their life where you got to check

the box as like really going full force into it because I got way more out of it than those kids did. Yeah. Well, so when you say it pissed you off or frustrated you or whatever, what would be your solution to that? I should say this. I think it's great that there is an aspect of college that wants to see that people are at least forcing themselves to get involved in the community. But I I think a lot of, when you talk solutions, I think a lot of it starts at home. I think I was really lucky to have, first of all, two parents at home, which was a huge advantage. My parents had a great, have a great marriage, which, like, count my lucky stars for that. And secondly, like, what values do they instill? And one of those values, I think, should be that. It should be like, we're, first of all,

we won the lottery being born in this country. Let's start there, you know? So there's a, I think there's a responsibility that comes back with that because also not everyone in this country has the greatest situation so how can we help pull other people up and not just pull them up but inspire other people to you know make change and and do great things themselves which is still possible in this country i know it's a little harder with the american dream but it's still possible and that's not possible in a lot of places yeah and well and even with that i mean you know to to say that it's harder I think it's there is some, it's relative that can be applied to that and that I don't know that I would say that it's necessarily harder opportunity-wise in this country.

I just think it's different, you know, because there were certainly challenges in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s that we don't have now, you know, whether it's technology helping or, you know, life being easier because there's you know standard of living is higher i mean that there are there are things that are easier now than there were back then even in terms of applying opportunity i'm i'm certainly not naive to the fact that a 20 year old or a 25 year old right this minute you know their ability to buy a home to have you know a marriage where the wife stays at home and and the you know the father is the only one working and they have you know a nice house and enough money again to to celebrate Christmas, whatever, is harder now statistically.

There's no two ways about it, inflation, et cetera. But there's actually more opportunity to do whatever it is that you want. It's just you have to maybe dig a little harder to find it, you know. So to me, I think it's impossible to say like, you know, hey, 2025 technically or statistically is more difficult for X, Y, and Z than it was in 1950. Like you can pick any metric and say that it's harder financially, X, Y, Y, Y and Z on that same token, you can say, well, it's also easier in 2025 to do A, B, and C. You know, so more than anything, I think just looking at that kind of principle that, well,

it's harder to do this, like sets you up for failure because you're focusing on the negative. Like, so instead of saying, like, we don't have the same opportunity that our grandparents had, it's like, let's just say that you're right. Okay. like we can argue about the stats all day long let's just say okay you know what you win you're right it's harder what are you going to do about it like what difference does it make that it's harder like the reality is it is it is what it is right now and you can either focus all of your energy on finding opportunity making opportunity creating it going after it you know figuring out a way

to uh to make enough money to be happy if that's your thing or i mean whatever it is that you want to do like every ounce of energy and mental bandwidth that you're focus on how much harder it is than your grandpa had it or, you know, whatever struggle is or, you know, the Internet's fucking my kids up. Or, I mean, again, you can focus on the negative or you can spend that time focusing on the positive, you know, because at the end of the day, like, that's what's going to get you where you want to be. You gave me this coin. Amen. And that buckle.

And that buckle right there. Yeah. You're like owning the headphones pad right here. You're in Al Pacino. But you gave me this coin when I was down there in September with your mic drop logo on it, but it's got some Marcus Aurelius written on it. On one side of the coin, it says, when you rise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive. And on the other side, it says, if it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it. Particularly on the first side, though, rising and thinking about what a privilege it is to be alive. I have the meditations out there on a board that sits outside my room, and I do read them each morning.

And I try to memorize some, but I find myself having to read them again. But the very first one on there is that you have the power to control your mind, not outside events, realize this, and you will find peace. When you combine that with one of the other meditations, which is the one when you rise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, you are immediately realizing that we can keep the things in our control that happen up here in our head. and that is literally half the battle right there because we are living on a beautiful place that we had such a small chance, one in four trillion chance of even being here in the first place. So it takes all the perspectives of all the things that are happening to us, at least I'm speaking for myself here, that are out of my control and, you know, feel like, you know, it's struggle and stress and whatever. And instead, when I start my day and I read that, I realize I have a lot

more good going for me than anything else even if i'm not where i want to be and there is something very very powerful to be said that almost 2 000 years later the particularly the 15 main meditations that guy marcus had are as relevant today as they were back then for sure and and what i love about meditations and you know epictetus and i mean there's there's a number of philosophers from that era that have such timeless wisdom which to me tells us that human nature is human nature you know 2,000 years later, plus we struggle with the same things, we're distracted by the same things, we're motivated by the same things, our purpose is necessary in all the same ways. You know, and that kind of appreciative mentality I think highlights exactly what I'm trying

to highlight in nowhere near as eloquent fashion as he did, but it's just, you know, focus on what you have, you know, being or affirming things, being grateful for things. it just sets the tone for for the day and and to me it's you can see reflections of that in in all aspects of life you know something is as simple as let's say professional football you know if the eagles fumble right and the entire team is sitting there pissed and frustrated because they fumbled the ball and that's what they're worried about is how they just fucked that up and not worried about okay well let's make them fumble or okay well let's get a stop and march down the the field and score a touchdown like you know or pick anything jujitsu there's a million examples of

where you get in a bad spot like don't focus on being in the bad spot focus on getting out of it you know pick anything in life where you find yourself at a at a crossroads of of being you know frustrated defeated something didn't go your way one of the the quotes from uh i believe it's from meditations also is you know the way to navigate things so few things are under your under your actual control is that if you find yourself in a bad spot, there's one way to look at it. Do you have control over this thing? If it's yes, act. Do you have control over this thing? No, let it go. It's that simple, you know. Real quick, Mike, I want you to continue this point. I've got to go tell the construction guys to chill. One second. We'll be right back. Did you dress up for Halloween?

You know, I didn't. I usually, we're back on air now. Mike was just asking me if I dress up for I mean, I usually come dressed as Julian Dory when it's costume parties, so I did that the other night. But then my one friend was like he wanted to shed the bulletproof vest. So technically I was like an agent of the law at one point. So it was something. It was drunk effort, I guess. Do people know it's Julian Dory when you show up dressed as him? You know, it's your guess is as good as mine.

I'd like to think so, but probably not. Yeah. They're like, who was that guy? Who was this guy? But anyway, you were just riffing on some great points there. talking about meditation, so I do want to stay on this. When did you first read meditations and find that? I mean, when I first, I guess, was exposed to it, which sounds kind of naughty, as I mentioned it. I mean, it was back as a late teens, early 20s, I guess was made aware of it or

became conscious of it. Very, very elementary in terms of really digging into it, looking at it, whatever. What I did find is, you know, spending from 18 to 30 in the military in the SEAL teams, you know, looking back on it. I mean, at the time, I for sure didn't realize it. But so much of the way most of the men in that realm conduct themselves is very stoic and very meditations-like. Not entirely. I mean, there's certainly some elements of, I mean, our society, not just the military that doesn't but you know to to be in a group of people especially at that age surrounded by guys that are you know 10 15 20 years older than you that have been all over the world that have you know done some pretty dangerous stuff and and and you know have

proven themselves day in day out is such a unique and and just amazing breeding ground to grow up and come into manhood being surrounded by 200 guys like that absolutely So, you know, in a in a roundabout or maybe less formal way, the principles, a lot of the principles of meditations, you know, I kind of grew up under, you know, in that aspect of the military. But then, you know, when I got out at 30, started all the different businesses and for, you know, about a 10-year period, it was pretty singularly focused on just doing that. You know, I wasn't working out as hard. I mean, pretty much everything took the backburn. I mean, I still worked out and did some of the things that I enjoyed doing or whatever. I had, you know, a young family at the time, and that obviously takes a lot of bandwidth. But I didn't do a lot of kind of self-improvement, you know, from a philosophy standpoint or, you know,

meditation standpoint or mental health standpoint. I mean, even, you know, eating habits, physicality. I mean, it was kind of just checking the box, doing the bare minimum. because I was so overly focused on entrepreneurship. And then as that got to a point where I wouldn't say it became easy, but it was kind of over starting to get over that crest of difficulty that when you're in those first several years of entrepreneurship, it's just like looking straight up Mount Everest.

You know, once you get to where it's like, okay, now I can see the top. Around 40 is when I started to kind of delve further into, you know, philosophy and just, I would say generally speaking, trying to broaden my perspective on the human mind and condition and experience. And over the last probably three or four years have gotten way more into it and done a lot more reading in that regard.

That's interesting that you got really into it after you did all the hard things. After I needed to get into it? Yeah. Like a lot of people, they develop that foundation to try to help them climb Mount Everest. You're like, I already did that shit, bitch. But now I'm interested in it. Let's go. Well, yeah, I think, again, what it does more than anything is really highlights how amazing the SEAL teams. And, I mean, the military, generally speaking, but I think the harder the job, just like

the harder of anything in life, the more impactful it's going to be, especially as a young adult. And, you know, so many of the principles are very, very much similar and very paralleled. And so I feel like I got an on-the-job training, 12-year apprenticeship with a lot of that kind of stuff first and I would credit you know pretty much all all or almost all of the successes I've had in entrepreneurship you know are piggybacked off of the lessons I learned you know in the military and I think applied them without realizing I was even applying them I know you when when you went to war and had to do the operations you did like that's what you train for

and we talked about that last time like it's there's an exciting aspect to it as well because That's what you live for. Like you work so hard to be able to get to that point where you can put your skills to play. It's very nerve-wracking highest stakes, but it's where you feel like you belong, where you belong. That said, you know, you're in for a long time. You're in all these different theaters. When you would wake up some days, I got to imagine, you're like, oh, shit, or we got to deal with this thing or that thing. Yet if you had that mentality throughout the day, you wouldn't be able to do your job well.

So did you have like a way of getting your mindset into, all right, game time, let's go, we're going to handle business? Or was it more just kind of falling into line with all the other guys there who had that expectation of themselves? It was far more of the latter. I mean, I will say, you know, credit where it's due, my experience in high school and even, you know, my parents, I would say, laid a really good foundation for, you know, just kind of putting the work in, not complaining about things, you know, doing what needs to be done. they weren't like super hard asses about it i think they did a really i would say masterful job frankly and they would never even agree to that if you know they heard me saying that but um enough support to feel loved and nurtured and supported but not coddled you know like they did a really good job at kind of walking that fence line of of doing both you know um and then you know joining the

military especially the seal teams at 18 is not particularly common either it's still you know, 18 to 25, brain-wise, you're still developing. And so to be in that position and learn and just see guys leading by example, you know, one of my most favorite quotes, I think it's from Emerson, maybe Thoreau, what you do speak so loud, I can't hear what you say. One of my favorite quotes of all time. That's great. Yeah. And to me, like, if I could pinpoint in essence of the SEAL teams it's that it's like dude like don't tell me how to be a good team guy fucking show me how to be one and that's what they did you know like so as an 18 20 22 25 year old you see guys in their 30s and 40s that aren't complaining about a single thing no matter how big of a shit sandwich they're

asked to take a monstrous bite out of roger that we got it like hey boys this you know whatever this is canceled we got to do this now you know to me like you're kind of inherent going to adopt that mentality when you're surrounded by it. And these are the guys that, you know, reverence, I don't even think, really fully captures the feeling that you have towards your instructor cadre in seal training. And then the season guys, when you check into a seal team, like, those guys are like Apollo and Zeus. I mean, like, you just look at them like they're gods, you know, because they conduct themselves in a way that makes you feel that way about them. You know, they don't have to tell you I'm in charge or you're going to respect me

what they do makes you want to do those things and so just being surrounded by that for over a decade it's like that that's i think world's the world's greatest teacher which you know is one of the reflections i have in the unfuck america book is that you know a lot of people find themselves kind of lost you know wondering like i'm one person you know voting doesn't seem to matter like what can what can joe schmo me the you know the guy picking up garbage in new york do to to to fix new york city or whatever it's like you can start with you yes if everybody says you know what i'm going to be the example that i want everybody else to be i'm going to hold myself at least to the same standard that i expect everybody else to hold themselves to like rising tide raises

all boats kind of thing is that be be that example i know it's you know thrown out there a lot and it's maybe corny or cliched but but it's true you know um and so i think just by doing the thing like don't talk about it, be about it, you know, kind of thing. And, and I learned that day in, day out in the SEAL teams over and over and over. You ever see my buddy Tommy G's YouTube channel? He does documentaries on YouTube. All right. You got to look at that. He's awesome. He does all kinds of different stories, covers it around the country, and he's focusing on doing some stuff around the world now, too, which is really cool. But he's one of my really close friends, and he's got this amazing quote where he's like,

I can't boil the ocean, but I can boil my pot. Yeah. And that's, to me, what you just said is exactly that. It's like control the things that are around you, leave the world that is around you a better place than how you found it. And then if you can lead by example, maybe enough people do the same, and it's just a math game at that point, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's viral in a sense that way, you know? Is it, uh, I mean, you see it in names. neighborhoods, right? Whether it's like something as dumb or as simple as like HOA things, you know, or just subcultures within a housing development, you know, it's like, well, I see so-and-so taking his trash back up, you know, right away. So fuck, everybody else did it. Well, I guess I'm going to do it. Yeah. The shopping cart at Target's like everybody else is doing it. I'm not going to be the one turd in the punch bowl that leaves, you know, there's still people that are going to

do that. You know, but the more people that set that example, like, yeah, you know, people see that. And it's like, hey, this guy's doing the right thing, even though he doesn't need to, I should probably do that same thing. I think most people have an inherent kind of human nature aspect to, you know, when they see things that they can clearly identify like, hey, this is the right thing to do. I'm going to do it. You know, and I think, yeah, it just, I love that quote. I mean, because I think it more simply encapsulates, you know, be the example. It's a more tangible way to kind of get your arms around it. Yeah, I agree 100%.

Do you think most people are inherently good? I do. I really do. I mean, but there is a caveat, though, and that, and it's hard to kind of dissect because I think, you know, kids, as a parent, you know, you see kids when they become, you know, three, four, five years old, there's this very fascinating look into human psychology because it's far more genetic at that point than it is a learned behavior. Not entirely because even at 18 months, like they're absorbing things that the parents do and don't do and how you talk

to each other and, you know, kids seeing their parents doing the right thing versus not or whatever is certainly going to influence that. But there is, you know, a window into that kind of selfish human psychological component with toys, with food, with, you know, narking their siblings out or you know blaming somebody else me whatever that i think you know if it's if it's allowed to just run away it it can you know so where it becomes kind of a chicken or the egg thing is you know even at a super young age how much influence are they getting from their parents i think it's more than most people realize but there's still an inherited genetic component to it but on the same token it's like well human nature generally speaking i think is mostly good you know there's

of bad people but where would that come from if it wasn't hardwired you know like what what would what would have started initially with the first civilizations on the planet you know passing that on for millennia to where most people live by a certain code even if you want to say hey it's a religious thing okay but that still came from somewhere if if you're religious and you say god handed that down well according to the bible we're all children of god made in his image so that would explain that if you subscribe to faith from a Judeo-Christian standpoint. Even if you don't, like, well, where did that come from? You know, it came from somewhere. I saw a really, really interesting interview. I think it was with Ben Shapiro on Bill Maher. And, you know,

because Bill is very atheistic. You know, Ben Shapiro is obviously a very staunch believer in Judaism. You know, Bill was talking about, like, I don't need religion to tell me how to be a good person. You know, and I'm not even going to try to quote. It's, you know, summarizing, paraphrasing, what have you. But, you know, Ben was basically like, well, you were kind of born on fucking third base. So stop taking credit for being a good guy when, like, our entire society for hundreds of years has been shaped, influenced and directed by large influences of Christianity and Judaism. You can argue, you know, religion until you're blue in the face, but the fact is, is that those principles come from somewhere, right? There's really no element of that that you see in the animal kingdom with very, very rare exceptions.

We've all seen the viral TikToks of, you know, the bear helping the deer or whatever, but those are anomaly outliers like the AI ones. Well, maybe, maybe they're not. You got to watch these days, well. Maybe I'm the old guy that doesn't know he's being duped. But there are. I mean, there are some examples even, you know, prior to AI where there's things in the animal kingdom that are a little counterintuitive to survival or kind of genetic and ingrained behavior. Human beings are a very unique part of the planet in that way. And so, again, like this isn't about religion is right or it's wrong or not.

It's the fact is that you can look at human beings as a species on planet Earth in 2025. and pretty clearly identify irrespective of region, of religion, of cultural influences, that there are a lot of things that are generally accepted as okay and not okay. Of course, there's wide variance country to country or society to society, but there's still a core belief in certain things. Murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. You know, like those transcend all of those things.

And so I think the question is, where do those come from? you know and you know so to me coming full circle the long tail on the kite of your question is are they inherently good i think so to a certain extent you know i think it has to be there or you wouldn't see um you know such a heavy reliance on on living a certain way at this point right the religion point is really interesting because i think there's a even potentially another layer to that like if you look just for example let's say the Ten Commandments and read those. They make a lot of sense. It's like that seems like this is a good way to treat the world around you and the people in it. And that obviously

subscribes to a couple different organized religions there, Christianity, Judaism. But let's live in a world, for example, where we found out, you know, we die and we find out every organized religion is wrong. The story actually wasn't exactly quite what it said, some other, whatever the hell is going on up here, it's something else. That said, even if that were the case, the ancient teachings found within some of these organized religions beyond the stories they use to frame it, actually speak to our literal human nature in a lot of ways. So if you build society with some of those good principles, regardless of the truth or falsity of the story, not mine to judge, I think that that is an incredible actual aspect of the influence of religion.

I'm always talking about the things that are negative about organized religion, things that happen around the world. And obviously, that needs to be discussed. But I think it's important to also give light to what you're saying, which is where it can actually be a long-term, like, cultural positive. And I don't know if I ever really thought about it in that light, but you just made me think of that. Yeah, I mean, it's got to come from somewhere, right? I mean, because even if you predate Abraham, you know, society is still operated on a certain level of code. Right. You know, and that doesn't just come from nowhere, you know, or it has to be explained somehow because it's not possessed anywhere else on the planet by any other species.

So I think, you know, it's it would be very difficult. And by all means, like if somebody can say, hey, like if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm happy to change my opinion. It's like prove me wrong, you know, the Charlie Kirk thing, you know, it's like where did it come from then? Like if you can, you know, legitimately explain and show some sort of ability to prove that it, that it, you know, was influenced by something or came from somewhere, you know, I'm happy to say, yeah, that makes sense and I'll believe that.

But, you know, again, it's almost kind of if you can't say where it came, from or whatever it's it's hard to argue that it's not human nature again whether it's influenced by by god handing a set of rules down or not is that we abide by them overwhelmingly so i think that's the proof by itself throughout your navy seal career you at different points fought against literal terrorists so i think it's fair to say you and i can both agree that they were were evil people, right? Yeah. I'm always careful how I ask this because I don't want this to be twisted.

But did you ever find yourself thinking, you know, after eliminating some of these guys or even before you go to do it? Did you ever find yourself thinking, yes, these people are evil? But man, I wonder how they got that way. And what, you know, they were a kid once who may be. wasn't evil, wasn't born evil. They were born into an environment. They didn't choose and a lot of things happened to them. And maybe some of those things were avoidable. Did, did you ever think about that? Absolutely. Yeah. And still due to this day, I would say more so now than I did when I was actually

on active duty because there's, there is a certain kind of simple principle when you're, when you're in the thick of it that I think prevents you from introspection or even just thinking of, about it from that standpoint, or frankly, any standpoint other than I'm trying to get me and all these guys that I'm here with and no love and trust home. And so it's pretty singularly focused on, hey, this is the mission that we were handed. There are times even where we may say, hey,

does this make sense? Does this seem like the right thing to do? And one of the amazing things I think about special operations, or at least my experience with it, I know there's been other guys that I never worked with that had similar ones, is having kind of the free thinking autonomy to question what we're doing, how we're doing it, you know, does this make sense? Is it worth doing, you know, and being able to have those discussions with our leadership

at a pretty high level and in an organic way where they would actually sit there and listen to you? It doesn't mean that we wouldn't end up going and doing it anyway necessarily, but sometimes we wouldn't you know there were certainly times where where we would bring concerns up the chain of command and it would either shift what we did shift how we did it or make us not do it entirely i would say more more times we would end up going and doing it anyway than not but being able to to voice those concerns i think is important and healthy and valuable but there's also an element of hey you volunteered to do a job your country said this is the job you're going to do now it's time for you to go do it that has to to kind of be the backbone of military service for it to work, you know. So what I find interesting about your question and I would even kind of expand on it is, or I would say not only did I find myself thinking, you know, how did this person get here, but also what role are we actually actively playing in creating this problem? That's something I found myself thinking of both while we're doing it and also even more so well after the fact so like this morning when you were having a

moment of silence for dick cheney you were thinking about that i didn't um but yeah i i mean i don't hate the guy uh certainly don't don't love the guy that makes one of us yeah um i i will say i mean uh i don't like the guy you know um and and it would be impossible and disingenuous to argue some of the positive things I've seen, you know, written about him today. I think he was, it would be easy to argue the point that he was the largest orchestrator of a lot of the things that I think were mistakes during the entire eight-year Bush presidency. But irrespective of that, you know, when I look back at Iraq as an example and about 17, 18 years of Afghanistan, I think a lot of it was a mistake. I think Iraq was an entire

mistake, you know, and it's easy for me to to arrive at that conclusion where I'm at in my life now. And I don't say that to, you know, take away any of the nobleness with which a number of our countrymen gave their lives to support that cause. Because again, I think, you know, anybody that says, hey, I'm going to, you know, dedicate and give up to and including my life for this country, like, that's a noble cause. No matter what our government, you know, does or says or what they send them to do, what have you, is that I think it's a very noble thing for somebody to say, I'm willing to sacrifice that on behalf of our country. But, but, But what it also further highlights is the importance of putting the people in office who are going to take that responsibility serious enough to not make mistakes.

You know, nobody's perfect. But, you know, to me, you know, sending American troops overseas should be an absolute last ditch effort where everything else has failed. And if we don't do it, there's an existential threat on the way of life here in the United States. And I cannot see an argument that's realistically made in Iraq for that. I would also argue that, or point out rather, you know, that if you look at the region as a whole and you go back to 2003 before we went into Iraq and where it's at now, I don't know how you could possibly argue that that region is better off now than it was before we went there. You know, as much of a bastard as Saddam was, he kept Iran business.

enough to where they weren't supplying Hezbollah and Hamas. I don't think you would see the Israel-Gaza-Palestine mess that you see now if Iraq hadn't kept Iran busy by being its neighbor and the threat of going to war again like they did in the early 80s and how catastrophic that was for both countries. If that wasn't a threat that I don't think you'd see near the same level of emboldenedment that you've seen out of that regime. for two decades yeah i i agree with you and i think i agree with you on all of it and i want to come back to something with like soldiers who are training for war but before we go there just stay on the point you were just making you know i look at a place like iran i look at the things they fund i look at the things that their leadership stands for i look at the fact that eight or nine out of ten iranians righteously so stands against you know supporting the regime they they don't like it and And I think it's wrong, and I think the world would be a better place if those guys weren't in charge. But I also recognize that sometimes as hard as it is, especially when you're dealing with a country that doesn't exactly have a top three GDP, if you know what I mean, you know, you have to let the people within that country handle their business.

Agreed. And, you know, that does suck. I'm not going to sit here and say, I love that. but the repercussions of putting 100,000 soldiers on the ground and calling in, you know, NATO forces or something like that to start some war in the middle of a region that has a lot of oil and a lot of cultures from, let's say, a collegi faction who aren't going to like that, you know, if we haven't learned that lesson from Iraq, I almost can't help people at this point. I'm like, you know, what else do you need to see?

Because it's also extremely important what you said. the guys who are over there fighting it you guys are told to go over there and do it it's not your call you know it's a bunch of suits in dc doing that so you better hope the guys in dc actually know what the fuck they're doing and the last time around they didn't and i would hope enough of them learn that lesson but sometimes i really do worry about that same here and i think you know one of the biggest problems or elements that makes those mistakes continue to repeat themselves are the incestuous relationship between higher-up military officials, big government contracting companies, and the Boeing's and McDonnell Douglases and Raytheons and Halliburton's.

And, you know, that whole, you know, you throw lobbying in and, you know, interests where people who are saying, hey, if we go to war with country X, my net worth is going to skyrocket. by 20-fold in six months like if that's not a conflict of interest in negatively influencing decision-making at the highest level possible i don't know what is you know because you see it over and over and over dick cheney being as good of an example of that as possible is that you know it's you know you can give the correlation does an equal causation but i think you can just as easily say like you can't ignore the fact that you know dick cheney's net worth did what it did from going into iraq to 10 years after the fact and not say that's at least worth

looking at you know and to question that is not un-american you know i would say it's the opposite to not question it is un-american um that should be the basis of of all of our concerns are that you know the the beauty of the constitution is that that that is America's Bible that you should base your entire decision-making process off of and why there isn't a more staunch constitutionalist approach in policymaking and especially in foreign policy decision-making is beyond me. I'm baffled at why we don't just look to that document more than we do other than there's money involved. That's what always comes back to is the money. Now, you have friends that you served with or that, you know, from the military and the communities who, plenty of friends who didn't do this, but then certainly friends who took jobs, and I'm not excoriating this, but took jobs at Lockheed Martin or North of Grumman and some of these other places, you know, I, when people look at like the evil of some of that stuff, I tend to think, you know, it's more there's always a handful of individuals who probably are evil there.

And then a lot of people who are there, it's more the conformity of the group think of the organization, trying to get their quarterly report done. And that leads to bad outcomes. But have you had discussions, you know, offline with some of your friends who work in some of these places and, you know, maybe make money off of wars like Ukraine or, you know, funding wars in the Middle East about that conflict of interest? And if so, you know, what are those conversations like? I don't know anybody on a personal enough level to where I feel like if I had that conversation with me one they would level with me two if they didn't I'd be able to sniff it out that are in positions to legitimately benefit like what we're talking about like I don't know people like I know people who have gone and worked for the booze Allen's the Halliburton's the Raytheons etc but nowhere near at that kind of level you know to me you would need to sit down with you know, somebody who's been, you know, a three or four star for a while in, frankly, any branch of the military has spent time at the Pentagon, has spent time, you know, and knows joint chiefs of staff and that kind of level of, excuse me, connection and power, again, well enough to know and trust the conversation you're having with them because, again, just nobody I know has ever been at that level. To me, the tricky part is I understand the benefit of having people who have spent 30 or 40 years in the military at the highest levels advising and even sitting on boards at companies who are making products for the U.S. military because that's an easy thing to understand why that's beneficial is that if private sector companies are creating products and technology for the warfighter, of course you want.

warfighters who have spent their entire adult lives there to be able to help advise them. So it is kind of a tricky, how do you audit that or keep it honest and make it to where it's not now influenced by, hey, if you come on the board of Raytheon and, you know, if you can talk with, you know, the sec deaf, sec war, the joint chief, whatever, and get this thing to pop off. And, you know, you're sitting on 20,000 shares of our company and we'll give you a 10,000, and share bonus if you you know get this thing to to be passed or this allocation of funding for you know the new f 40 fighter project me whatever like i don't know how you um circumvent that or how you kind of clean house in that way because there there is a necessity for us to be an

effective war fighting capable country to lean on the experience of military commanders and people with that experience so um that that's a tough fix. I wish I had an answer and I don't know what the right answer is. Yeah. Is it even realistic to say, you know, the thing we all think of, which is like, oh, just get the money out of politics? Like, is that even? I think it's possible. Or it's relatively possible or mostly possible maybe. You know, I think we actually talked about this a little bit the last time I was on. But I think, you know, where, where and when you can have super PACs and large sums of money being infused into political campaigns, there's no way it's not going to be corrupt, you know, because the bigger the donor, the bigger the ask. I mean, plain and simple.

And when it takes, you know, upwards of a billion dollars to become president, there's no way to not have a candidate. who once they get into that position is beholden. Even with a guy like Trump, you know, he certainly didn't use all of his own money. And there's also, you know, even more money for him and his entire family to be made, you know, by continuing to do some of the things. I mean, you're seeing some of it with crypto of, you know, pardoning people that he doesn't, you know, I don't know if you saw this, I saw this clip just yesterday or maybe the day before where I think the guy is. CZ.

CZ, you know, gets, gets pardoned and a reporter asked Trump, like, what's the deal with pardoning CZ? He's like, who? He was like, I don't even know who the guy is. It's like, dude, like, help me out here. Yeah. Like, you can't say that you pardon somebody and you don't know who they are. At least, I'll give him this. At least he's honest about it.

Holy shit. I mean, my God. I mean, to me, like, they're both equally unacceptable. Yeah, it's not great. If you truly don't know who he is, then you shouldn't be pardoning him. If you do know who he is and you don't want the optics of. of pardoning him and what that looks like you can't lie about it you know like they're both equally terrible you know um i can't believe that's right that is real yeah he says he has no idea no idea

who that is it's like okay well then given biden a rationa shit for auto penning people like that that's really no different if you're pardoning people that you have no idea who they are like help me understand that then um you know and to me like you've you've got a whole whole everybody to that level of accountability, including the people you voted for, including the people who you're a fan of. You know, you can't give passes to the guy that's on your team when he does something that the guy on and when the other side does, you lose your mind and throw a fit about it. So like seeing stuff like that doesn't give me a lot of hope. Back to your question on the, you know, finance and money and politics. I mean, one of the things that I talked about was

using kind of the the grand jury method of selecting politicians because then there's no money in that, right, is that if you're sending out a census style survey to every region and says, hey, you know, in this county and this region, you know, however, you know, the districts are broken down is that, let's say, District A, everybody who's been a resident for 10 years, you know, is up to date on their taxes, not a foul. And, you know, there's a handful of kind of boxes that need to be checked that says, hey, like, this guy is on paper, at least mostly or largely trustworthy. Who do you think should be your congressman? You know, and then whoever gets voted into that wins, you know.

And just like with jury duty, like you have to submit it. I think that that's a good way to start. Now, that's, of course, not going to work for president. But to me, the, if you want to call it the beauty, I think the important. aspect of doing it that way with the House of Representatives, Congress men and women in particular, is that that is the primary check and balance or gatekeeper of the entire three branches of government in terms of policy decision making, funding, you know, legislation being passed, veto power, you know, raising and lowering debt ceilings. I mean, there are so many things that have to

go through that branch of of government that if you have people who in most cases don't even want to be there but enough people in their district say this is the guy i want representing us again then then he doesn't owe anybody anything it's not something he sought out to do and when he's in that position you know his moral his character the way he conducts himself his reputation amongst his community is is at the highest level of anybody in that community like what better person to represent that community than somebody like that and so if you don't have people who you know want to do it in the first place and then once they get in there three weeks later their only objective is to now stay in power and get reelected and you know i mean to me

like you're never going to have an honest system when that's the reality of 97% of all congressmen and women that get elected so um i'm not saying it's a perfect fix but i think you know shy have a full-blown fucking revolution which i don't want um right i think that that's a good way to to start and and by that then you can you know term limits aren't nearly the problem that they are now um i think you could make it a single source you know from a funding standpoint any type of foreign aid is a standalone bill right and it has to be voted on and approved one at a time and i don't like to me it's like well it's too big of a pain in the ass you have to wrap it into all these other bills, no, like it's your fucking job. And if you're going to give our money away from a

taxpayer standpoint to other countries, you should have to answer for that. You know, you should have to be able to be called to the carpet and stand in front of the people who nominated you to be in that position and answer why you gave $40 billion to Ukraine this quarter. Yes. I think that, you know, to pick one thing to focus on that's going to give you the most bang for your that I think, you know, while not easy or without its hurdles, the most doable from in terms of actually implementing it into our government process, to me that seems like the most doable because then that can keep the Senate, the executive branch, and in some cases even the judicial branch if they have to be nominated through that, you know. But to me, the accountability piece

just isn't there. And I don't know of another way to implement it without doing something as drastic as something like that. Yeah. And I love that idea, too. But you know, you're also raising the point. It's like you have to call things both ways. And there were obviously a lot of things in the last administration to be incredibly disappointed in, whether it was censorship of things or taking powers that the government's not supposed to take or prosecuting political enemies, I think when you start to do those same things out of spite, you know, in this case now the opposite side got in, you're giving them exactly what they want, the people you hated because now they have the narrative to be like, look at this. And, you know, they can go do

protests like the No Kings protest or whatever, which, you know, protests seem to be very cringe in the modern age, but like they can point to a couple things. And even if they're taking some of it out of context, it's like there's enough things that they can say, hey, see, we told you they were going to do this this and that and they did yeah i mean to me the the no king's thing um to me seems a little silly and that you know it the fact that it can take place uh i think kind of disproves the the the tyranny approach you know but i mean that is what it is but you know to me the the precedents being set that that we're talking about in terms of you know going after political opponents with, if you want to call it, you know, law fair, I think is the term I've

heard used. I agree. I mean, you did see that, you know, in the Biden administration on a number of cases. And then now you're seeing some of those same examples. And the bitch of it is on the left, it's the C we told you so. On the right, it's, well, they did it. Right. It's like that doesn't just set a precedence by doing the thing that you were bitching about four years ago. It solidifies it. And now that becomes the norm, you know. And so now you can probably just expect that every new administration is going to go after the previous one. And that is a horrible place for our society to be in. Yeah, I don't understand the unforced errors. It's one thing to make mistakes. It's another thing, you know, to do dumb shit that you just end up tripping over your own dick on and making the

problem worse. And I do see a number of examples of that. that happening. I mean, it's frustrating. There's no two ways about it. It's a strange place to be because on the one hand, you want to be able to say things where it's really, where it's actually relevant and true of like no one's above the law. But as much as you want to stick it to someone or get an individual that you think is doing things that are wrong, I think the bigger question here is how do we keep not the not the system in place the system has a lot of problems but how do we keep like american principles in place and i don't want to be on on in a tough slippery slope here but once in a while that does mean that maybe someone who probably should

get some justice doesn't because it's better for the whole it's not to say like oh you know they're bigger than the system themselves and they prove the point that you can do it. No, it's more like, let's not suddenly have something like what you said, setting in every administration lawfare precedent, where people, including people who, whether you like them or not, probably shouldn't be prosecuted or getting prosecuted. Yeah, I think, you know, a fairly recent and clear-cut example of that

is that Letitia James. You know, I think that that's a good example of what she did, I think, is, is very clearly wrong. Now, to go after her for something like mortgage fraud after the fact in that way, I think is, I'm not going to say it's as wrong or not. It doesn't even matter. Like I also think that it's just dumb because it does solidify that precedence. You know, to me, I could understand saying, hey, if you run on a campaign where you're saying,

I'm going to go after the president and then you do and there's trumped up charges. And whether you think they're trumped up or not or whatever, to me, it's pretty obvious there was a very clear-cut political angle to, you know, what she did when she was in office. But there's also just as clearly identified political angle of going after her now the way that's being done. I don't like the lady. I think she's, you know, a terrible example for that position of authority and should be disbarred from that. but to me that would solve it you know it's like hey what you did was wrong so you can't do that anymore not okay let's use the law against her and try to put her in prison over it and yeah you know it i think the most frustrating part for me is that you know it it seems so incredibly childish

what you see within the entire house of representatives i mean really all three judicial or all three executive geez i'm going to fuck it up twice uh all three branches of government um is that you have uh people acting like they're five years old on a playground arguing over dumb shit that ultimately is making the country weaker i mean the shutdown being in in what it's fifth or six week at this point um do you know how long the constitution took to draft a while right so i'm going to take that as a no yeah that's four months it's definitely a no but four it took four months if you think about that right our government for rapidly approaching half that amount of time can't even get the government back to being

not shut down. Wait, that only took four months. Four months. I thought it was longer than that. I mean, I think most people would assume it took way longer than that. Yeah, I thought it was a couple years. If you think about the scope, the brilliance, the authority that that document has had for as long as it's had and how well it's worked, how quickly they were able to draft that,

agree on it enough to approve it and declare it. I mean, to me, it's embarrassing that our government is in a position now where something like healthcare is keeping the government from being able to even function properly. I mean, it's pathetic. Or a bill, to your point, that's over one thing has fucking 80 poison pills over totally separate things plugged into it at 12 o'clock when the boat's at 1 o'clock. yeah and half the guys don't show up to even vote yep uh yeah no i i you know i studied the shit out of the revolutionary war i love that stuff and it's actually crazy look at this skyline right here they were this was one of the ground zeros of of fighting that thing and and all the history there that happened but you know those guys were so ahead of their time and had fucking elephant balls

yeah to do what they did but to you know i do try to think about what would they, if you just took 10 to 20 of like the main leaders of that revolution and brought them to today and took them on a bus down to Washington, D.C. and just let them walk outside for two hours, what they would think. I think they'd throw up. I think they'd be like this is everything that we did not set this up to be. And you've taken the freedoms that we allowed for the government to be able to make decisions where the people are represented to be used in bastardized ways so that the people can think they're represented and really just have a bunch of other things that they didn't vote for be voted on and go through. Yeah. To me, one of the most

fascinating things about that group of people is they were like your age or younger. I think that there's parts of it that they would be amazed by in terms of how far it's come kind of I would say utilitarian wise like the different aspects of how much the government has grown and then they would quickly become violently ill seeing at where it's gone you know it reminds me of like the dad conversation I'm not mad I'm disappointed I think that's what you get from that's probably what Ben Franklin would say I think so you know yeah I mean to me the the most important thing about that group of people, at least, you know, looking back at them, obviously none of us know any of them. But the results speak for themselves is that, you know,

it wasn't any less messy then. Like they argued, disagreed, fought, insulted each other just as much as takes place today. But the big thing that they did very differently again, and this isn't up for debate. I mean, you can see the historical record of they figured out ways. to compromise and and get down the road and move on and and we don't seem to do that and you know it's like they were they were mature enough to be able to see the forest for the trees and and and move on and figure out how to negotiate in a way where it's a net positive impact on on society generally speaking i think part of the problem today and it's not the whole problem but it's a piece of it, is that politicians are so beholden to people behind keyboards at all

times, meaning if they do the right thing, and by right thing, I mean compromise on something that's better for the bigger picture, they get excoriated online, including by people who aren't real sometimes and, you know, campaigns that are run against them to, you know, try to remove them from power or whatever such that they always cower to the madness of the crowds it's where democracy actually works against itself and what it's supposed to be and that's one thing i'm not saying those guys back then didn't have to deal with that but they didn't deal with it anywhere near the scale or instantaneous scale that that we deal with it today no and especially from a foreign influence standpoint if you think about even just 30 years ago for any state actor to actively engage

and influence any policy in the United States was incredibly difficult from a propaganda standpoint, right? Because at that time, let's say 1990 or even 2000, really, you know, for any other country to express an opinion, to influence a generation, you had to either be on the news in some sort of publication, whether it's a book, a magazine, a newspaper, et cetera, or on the radio. that's not very easy to do you know when there's editorial gatekeeping and you know human beings in a place of being able to look at this and say who is this where is this from no we're not we're not publishing that none of that is the case anymore you know and so now you can have you know bot farms of thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands potentially millions of fake accounts that

don't seem fake, you know, that are blasting propaganda just nonstop. And you combine that with, you know, now two generations, millennials and Gen Z, of kids who have grown up where the majority of their political and governmental influence comes from their phone. Yes. You know, or from social media. So the entire planet, in a very nefarious way, has direct access to every single American citizen all of the time you know that's never been the case ever before now it works both ways I mean we have access to to them also even in places like North Korea or Iran where oh yeah we do it too yeah yeah but I think you know that's why you see such um such a breeding ground for fanatical you know type of positions and you know distrust and and then it feeds into

the government machine that exists now where, I think to your point, you know, when you have sitting congressmen who are more worried about how their TikTok reel is doing, you know, and how many followers they have on Instagram or X, you know, it turns into a very rock starish, you know, A-list celebrity type of mentality, you know, where it's like they're, it's like, don't, don't forget you work for us, right? It's not the other way around. Like, you don't tell us how things are going to be. We're supposed to tell you.

And, you know, it seems like most of them. get in this position where now they have this big following and everything they post, they're watching and how people are reacting and are those people even real? And, you know, so you have this very skewed perception of reality on both ends of the spectrum. I think you're giving it too much credit. I think it forget like, you know, Hollywood actors and whatever. I think it's below that. I think it's like high school. I think it's like a high school popularity contest with these people and you're a thousand percent right. They're worried about the things that are just going to keep them in power you know and it's a separate conversation we don't need to go into it but an obvious point

seeing as your system that's preferred is not set up right now is that the people who are in there sometimes are in there forever there's no term limits they're fucking dying literally dying of Alzheimer's on the floor yeah you know and yet representing the people just because they're that politically entrenched it's it's crazy and you know I don't you talk about the influence and the ability for that to happen more than ever these days Of course, you're correct. I don't think there's a funnier or really sadder example, though, of when you talk to people who are either very pro-Israel or very anti-Israel, who both will tell you to your face that their side doesn't have an aspect of that. I'm like, are you kidding me?

Every one of you has fucking 11,000 likes one minute into a tweet. I know that's not real. I know that both sides of these issues are propagandizing. I'm not making a commentary on who's right and who's wrong here. I'm just saying in general. that's the world world we're living in click click money money view view yeah and it's sad well yeah and it's compounded by you know the joke you made about my uh lion rescuing the deer is that how much of that is even real you know because i've had i'm sure you have too i've had very pro israel

folks on the show and very pro uh Palestinian folks on the show and and and when there's this just incessant you know this is a fact this is a fact this is a fact this is a fact this is a fact it's like wait a minute you know like can we try to real time fact check some of this stuff you know and it's like it gets to the point where it's like I don't know who to believe you know so many of the things that are being said you know have been proven to be false and there's examples on both sides of that and so very quickly it's like I'm not sure that I believe anything like I don't know what to believe. And now, like, I can't even believe my own eyes or ears because technology has gotten to the point where it makes it impossible to discern something's, whether something is

actually real or not, you know, which to me, I think, kind of puts the nail in the coffin as far as the technology and propaganda influences that you almost have to just kind of tune it out entirely. And then it defeats the whole purpose of even having that as a technological capability. um you know but i've i've found myself doing that where it's like i i rarely watch you know news or or follow accounts where um you know there's very clear cut slanted agendas being pushed on it and you know i find myself just kind of ignoring all of it because i i don't even know what to believe anymore it actually goes back to another meditation of marcus aurelius ironically where he's like what's what one person sees is not the truth it's a perspective yeah you know you can take the

you can take the image and go like this and see something but if you could go like this you see something entirely different and i try to remind myself that all the time but it gets hard because to your point the the war that we saw in gaza and the war that we're still seeing in ukraine are i would have in the past actually I think been wrong to call them the first like iPhone wars which on a major scale they are the better way to put it though unfortunately is they're the first wars that of of a distortion of reality because you do have an aspect of misinfo videos that include AI or straight up acting and propaganda and that goes for every side on on both of these issues on on both of those wars and it makes it really fucking depressing because i do my best here just like you do to have

the different size represented and everyone makes their case and let everyone else out there decide it for themselves once in a while my opinions come in as well but like people want these answers to be perfectly black or white and they're just not yeah you know you can sit here i would actually argue in both of those wars you look at the leadership on both sides who are different, right? There's not really a lot of good right now. There are not a lot of good men in those positions. I would argue probably none. And so you may have a situation like, oh, you don't like that Russia attacked Ukraine. Hey, I agree with you. There may also be some diplomatic decisions that were made on the buildup to that that weren't right that also

forced a little bit of that. Say what you want about Putin. I certainly don't like them. But then that also doesn't mean that like that means the leadership in Ukraine is like the second coming of Jesus. I got news for you. They're not, you know? But people, it like melts their brain if you bring nuance into it and talk to someone who has an opinion in either direction on any of those matters. And that makes me really sad because, you know, it ends up being these Twitter finger wars with, you know, bots saying 33,000 likes, 104,000 likes, whatever, this number of comments. And while we're counting all those likes and comments, 10 people are dying, 20 people are dying, someone's son is gone. You know what I mean?

And it's just like it feels like we're totally desensitized to it. I agree 100%. I do think it's important to point out that I think the history of warfare and how it's covered, how that story is told from a historical and even when it's, happening a current event standpoint has always been slanted yes um you know you look at state run media which was largely largely the case in every country up until around vietnam i would say vietnam i think was at least it seems like kind of the first test bed for real-time war correspondence where you got kronkine up oh yeah you know you were seeing footage that's relevant you know you go back to korea world war two everything prior to that um and and especially world war one and before

it's newspapers that you know it's so it's it's so incredibly delayed um that you know every country has an ability to tell the exact story that they want told so it's not that it's necessarily any different to me it's a scale issue you know it's it's a scale and reach issue is that now you have individuals who can do it and basically every individual you know and so i think when you couple that with western societies who largely lack struggle like we were talking about at the very start and they need something to get behind it makes it even easier for them to be manipulated into saying this is my cause this is my my thing this is what i want to get behind this is what i'm passionate And so it's just by orders of magnitude, it's it's highlighting and kind of putting that

Here's the the agenda or the slant on the story that we want told it's it's magnifying it and just blowing it completely out of the water and in all of those same ways just way worse Yeah now you I you actually did a recent podcast that I didn't watch I appreciate one part of it was part of it was because because I wanted I knew you were coming on and I kind of wanted to see like where you were at with things. But it was a few weeks ago, you put one out with, I believe, an ex-special forces guy talking about the Israel-Palestine thing. And this was an issue where he had been pro-Israel and now he's pro-Palestine. And so you were getting, I think it was like four hours long too. So you were really getting that perspective on it.

But now that we do have this, you know, tentative, I'll call it, peace deal where, you know, you know, know it's not the continuing barrage at least at the moment how how do you view this thing do you have any hope not even necessarily for like sustained peace in a two-state solution in the middle east but for like some form of i even dare to say this like normalcy yeah i i mean the short answer is i don't fucking know like i don't even know what being hopeful looks like almost because It's been so distorted for a long enough time to where, again, it's so hard to believe what anyone who's hyper passionate on either side, it's hard to believe them. One of my litmuses, I would say, and I don't know if you find yourself subscribing to the same kind of methodology when you talk to people about deep things that they're passionate about is that the more emotional somebody typically gets about something, I find myself the less likely it is that I start to believe them.

You know, and it's not to say that automatically if somebody's emotional about something that they're lying, the reason I bring that up is that, you know, if there's one thing I've learned, again, a lot of it stems from dog training, a lot of what I've learned about people is actually from training dogs and training dogs for people, training people how to handle the dogs that I've trained for them. Like, you learn an incessant amount about human psychology and canine psychology, the parallels, et cetera. The reason I bring that up is that there's a very kind of poignant adage that I always remind myself, especially in dog training and interviewing people, is that when emotion runs high, logic runs low every single fucking time.

And so, kind of naturally, like the more emotional somebody gets the less. logic and reason you see infused into that perspective because it's clouded. When do we make our worst decisions? When we're emotional? When do we make the most mistakes? When do we panic? You know, when are we the most impulsive? When are we the most mean? When we're emotional? You know, on the flip side, when are we the most calculated and the most logic-driven? You know, it's when you're not emotional when you're using logic and reason to sift through and sort through different components of whatever issue you're talking about and you know again like entrepreneurship if you're pissed because somebody didn't show up on the show fuck that guy is not coming

you know because you're mad about it's like okay take a step back for a second think about the big picture of the show does it make sense to do whatever you know direction you want to take the show or whatever how much of that is an emotional decision versus a rational one and like show me a time where the emotional decision is the right one. Like it generally doesn't happen, you know, and so again, just like when I see people, you know, mudslinging and name calling and raising their voice and sitting on the edge of their seed and, you know, everything about their body language says, I'm angry about this. I'm emotional. Like I'm not able to even control my own physical response to the question that you just asked me. Like that tells me a lot about what

the fuck you're saying. Like how you're saying is. it all of the different nuances nonverbally that you're communicating tells me more than than what you're actually saying you know and so those are the parallels that I see you know when there's these issues that that people get really really heated about it's like that that immediately puts me in this position of of being even more skeptical than I was before and so you know in terms of where my position is it's like I in a lot of ways don't really have one or almost have a fatigue with the entire issue in itself because of that is because it's so toxic and so nasty on both sides where it's like if you can't and again it goes back to the politics side of it

like if you can't hold your own side to the same level account like if if either side is going to say we've done nothing wrong we are the victim here in every single instance like that's not accurate it's a non-store yeah it's like how are we going to have a conversation when you start with saying something that is frankly impossible. Right. You know, so, yeah, it's really, the whole thing has worn me out to where like I'm, I'm kind of over talking about it for those reasons. Yeah, I was actually, we were talking about doing a debate in here.

This is like towards the end of the summer, beginning of the fall, between two people on very opposite sides of the issue. And then when we were going to go schedule, it is right when the peace deal happened and one of them I actually still have to call next week or this week and talk to him about it but the other one I got to talk to the other day and I said you know I like you I'm fatigued with this and secondly the idea of having the debate was also because it's an ongoing complete like immediate conflict at the moment and now like I'd like to see the temperature go down a little bit that would be good for all I'm not saying it solves all

the issues or anything like that, but it does feel like the bots have won. And I don't mean any bots on either side. I mean just in general, it feels like the bots have successfully made this the issue that is at the center of everything, no matter how you look at it. And that is just not the case. It is a big deal. It is horrible. What's going on? It is consequential to the world. I don't want to like undercut it. But when you can't talk about a single thing going on in society without mentioning Israel, Gaza, you're probably looking at it not quite the right way. And when you say people get emotional about it, the thing that keeps coming in my head is that I have not talked with a single person who is hardcore on one side of the issue, like either one, who is not

extremely emotional about it, which tells me, guess what? The overall answer across 75 to 100 years is somewhere here. Right. Imagine that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I try to conduct myself that way all the time for that exact reason is that I know for me, like the more emotional somebody gets, the less I listen to them. You know, it turns into the Charlie Brown teacher, you know, where you're just drowning it out and not even paying attention. But I think more importantly is that, again, it's just a reflection of where their heads at and it's not in an appropriate head space to actually have a reasonable discussion with somebody on anything. I was reading this the other day back when the ancient Roman Empire was at its peak and there were all kinds of military campaigns, literally the way the generals would make a decision was when they would be faced with something that was extremely difficult or high stress or the essence of time certainly was not on their side. they would step back and ask themselves as a rule, what would I wish upon my worst enemy right now

if they were in my position? What decision would I want them to make? And it was why they were able to be so successful for so long because they implemented this rule in that it took, it would literally take the emotion out of the situation because the answer was always something that was highly emotional, reactionary, and anger driven rather than tactical and strategic driven. And that is something we could all take a lesson from in society today. Yeah. And again, you can see that in all walks of life, you know, even things that are not nearly as serious, you know, whether it's playing a game, business relationships, what have you, you know, personal relationships, you know, when you're, when you're upset with somebody, you know, is that the time to talk about serious

life-changing decisions? No, it's not because you're going to say things you either don't mean or that are overblown you know you're going to make irrational decisions that are based on emotion and not logic and um yeah i just i think it's a mistake and and you know to me the the way somebody acts when they're angry with somebody also tells you a lot you know um i think again just as much in personal relationships not to turn this into a doctor phil episode but uh you know one thing um kind of in that same vein that i remember hearing that i really liked is listen to people when they tell you things when they're mad yeah because it's something they've been wanting to tell you for a long time you know it's been something they've been thinking about

and wanted to tell you for a long time and so to me there's an element in that and that you know it's like people when they're discussing these things are are having those moments of lashing out and and and being mean about things and overblowing things but i love that um that roman empire aspect of of strategy looking at it that way, which I think sounds like it in a large way goes in line with Sun Tzu and knowing your enemy in that same same way, but maybe in a roundabout way. But yeah, like to me the dumbest part about all of this is that these are lessons that we as human beings have known for millennia and we still fuck them up. Well, we forgot about de Blasio four years ago.

You think we're going to forget about a fucking lesson from 2000? Yeah. you know what i mean yeah sadly you know what that rule does though that what the roman generals would do is it made them look at themselves from outside their body as if they were watching themselves in their own documentary yeah you know if it's a hard thing to think about so sometimes i i do try to think about that i remember joe rogan used to talk about that all the time where he's like imagine every day there's a movie being filmed of you and what you're doing is being captured how would you act and what would you do it's one thing to think that concept would be like oh of course it's It's another thing then to live throughout the day, especially when you're alone, and actually, like, put that visual into place and not do these things and maybe not sit here and scroll on your phone for 15 minutes and wonder what that would look like. But when you are in a group of people like that in a high stress situation and you can do a literal exercise that forces you to do that, it's amazing that good decisions often get made. And by amazing, I mean, not amazing at all. Boring, calculated, not exciting. Yeah, I mean, it's a brilliant way to look at it, you know.

If there's one way to kind of keyhole or force yourself to do the right thing when nobody's looking is view it that way. You know, imagine everybody can see what you're doing right now. Are you still going to do that thing? Yep. The answer is no, then there's a reason for that, you know, which I love. Is that coin providing some solace, some comfort for you right now? Absolutely. Because you're kind of molesting it.

It's kind of hot. I'm one of these people that like you're probably. put some in my hand. I'm going to use it as a problem. Oh, yeah. It's just how I am. Like yesterday we had this guy Gus Gonzalez in here. He's a cave diver around the world, does crazy shit. And he gave me like this cave line at the beginning. And I realized the whole time I was going like this and that. So if it's not this or something else, I just, I don't know. It like helps me think. So the coin's giving me a little inspo today because I got a fellow Marcus Aurelius fan in here. I actually think the if it's don't true, you know,

don't say it. If it's not right, don't do it. I think that's Epic Titus, actually. I don't know if I couldn't look that up. Did we get that wrong? Did I get that wrong? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm here singing your praises as to what you got on the coin. It might not be the right guy. Well, no, Marcus. The front side is right. It's not true to say it. No, it's Marcus Aeroon.

Okay. I was going to say. I feel like I heard him say that. You heard him. I read, read him say that. I read heard him say that. I audiobook heard him say it well i watched that movie i mean maybe you know oh yeah have you watched the second one may you know i actually did recently yeah what you think um gladiator we're talking about yeah i'm almost embarrassed to admit this because it's stupid right that i would be so distracted by something so trivial yet i found myself you probably know what i'm going to say denzil's accent in in the movie is so fucking out of left field I was distracted by it.

It's like, he's one of the best actors of our time. How did you not do a better job at sounding like everybody else? Here's the thing. He was amazing in the movie. Yeah. But if you go, and I'm like the biggest Denzel fan ever, if you go watch his entire career, I think Denzel made a decision very early on.

This is me. That this is how I talk. So no matter what the role is, the one thing that will not change is, I'm from Mount Vernon and this is how I sound. Yeah. And I want to clear something up before the comment section explodes, which it probably already will before they hear me say this.

It's not a race thing. I wasn't. It really went there. No. No, the reason I bring that up because I found myself, did you watch Napoleon? I did not. I heard it was terrible.

For the exact same reason, it's equally terrible. Like there's an element of the accent that just, just does not fit so bad to where it like, at least for me, I mean, maybe my simple mind is, is that, like, I just found myself distracted by it. Like, and again, it's almost embarrassing to say, like, can't you look past that? It was distracting. It was that distracting. Um, overall, though, I actually did really like the movie. I, you know, I'm not happy they made it because they made a perfect film the first time. Every frame of that is totally, in the most beautiful perfect visually appealing way possible but they did make it and for all the

shit that it got I found myself disliking it a lot less I think visually it was incredibly done some of the storytelling was a little bit stale and a little bit repeated you know Pascal was put in not the best spot to almost try to be like a repeat like son of Russell Crow you know what I mean, but it was not like I was entertained by it and I thought it was good and I do like anything like ancient Rome. So I wasn't like really pissed about it. But, you know. Do you think they could have done a better job casting wise for Pascal? Could they have had a more physically dominant presence-wise guy play that role and it would have been a better fit? I think so. I mean, he looked pretty good. I see what you're saying. It wasn't quite like Russell Crow looking like he was

Pete going to go fight someone on the street of Australia like back in the day. But I think he was like a little limited by the script of the character. I think he kind of had to play to that. It's kind of like what Brad Pitt thought about Troy, which I actually think is a underrated, misunderstood movie. Everyone who was in that movie hated it. Really? Every single person. Peter Toole said he walked out 15 minutes in and that was a disgrace. Brad Pitt said it was the biggest mistake of his career. Orlando Bloom can't even watch it because he hated the whole thing and hated the scene where he had to crawl back to his brother. Really? But like, you know, it's actually, especially if you watch the director's cut, it's a really solid movie. It doesn't

have like the mystery and stuff like that like Brad Pitt was saying, but it's well done. And Brad Pitt was a guy who didn't necessarily go all the way with the accent. But it was just enough that, like, he wasn't trying too hard, and he kind of nailed the stoic Achilles. Yeah. I thought. Yeah, I thought it was a great movie. I had no idea that the entire cast hated it.

Yeah. Maybe part of it was, like, it's like such a well-known story that they were like, well, we got to put some spin on it to keep the audience in suspense. But, I don't know. I literally re-watched it, like, a month ago. The director's cut. Yeah. It's, it's, I'm not

going to sit here and say it's the godfather, Like, it's really fucking good. Yeah. You know, it's going to be interesting to see how Nolan does The Odyssey, though. Yeah. Because that's the sequel. Yeah, and I can't imagine him fucking anything up. No.

So, yeah, I'm excited for that one. I would watch anything Christopher Nolan does. Yeah. He's so, like, even, like, Inception is a movie that's so hard to follow, and I only ever watched it once. But, like, even that one, everything else has done so well that at the end, at the end you're like I'm not really sure what happened but that was a good two and a half hours do you have a favorite of his dark night yeah dark night is a perfect film start to finish and like

nolan shot that beautifully and of course like i could name every film like interstellar obviously is unbelievable you know i think dark night rises is an unbelievable movie that was that was misunderstood at the time it came out but dark night the thing that does have to be said is like this is not hindsight 2020 of like oh heath ledger died so we're going to say nice things about him heath ledger in every frame of that movie is perfect there is not a thing he does with his body that's wrong there is not a tick of his face that moves in the wrong direction there is not one fucking tone or motion of the voice that's off every single thing is so perfect that he took the most cartoonish super villain like ever.

And even though you know this is a superhero movie where things are literally supposed to not be real, you were suspended in belief that like this is a hundred percent fucking real. This guy exists. He was like he's amazing. And Nolan obviously captured that great. But yeah, I've, that's a top five or six movie all time for me. Yeah.

What about you? What's your favorite, Nolan? Interstellar all day long. That's my favorite movie of all time. So, um, like hands down. It's absolutely my favorite, you know. So good. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, uh, yeah, just everything about it. I, I love movies like that also. I'm not really a sci-fi guy, generally speaking. Um, but that movie like has enough, I could see that happening in it to where it doesn't feel like it's not real, you know. Um, and yeah, just the, the story. And to me, there's a special part of it where, the relationship between

Matthew McConaughey, I can't remember his, is it Coop? Cooper. Yeah. It's my favorite movie of all time, clearly. Between him and his daughter that just really resonates with me, you know, being a father of two of them. There's that part of the story for me,

I think, is what seals the deal for it, I think. What's the line? Love is the one thing that doesn't bend to time and space allegedly yeah i i think but to your point like you say sci-fi there's you know they had kip thorne the legendary physicists work on that film and there are a lot of physicists they're never going to say it's perfect but that have talked about it and said like hey that actually there's a lot that they got right there and the way that it was portrayed and then later i think when we got the first imagery of a real black hole probably like five years after the movie came out or something like that people were like holy shit nolan kind of nailed it

ahead of time so yeah i mean it's a it's a perfect yeah perfect film and it does make you think about a lot of stuff one of the things about christopher nolan with his films is that looking back on it now hindsight 2020 he's a guy who seems to quietly like i've never heard him talk about society and stuff like that but in his films he guys he has he has a his finger right on the pulse of where things are. I noticed when I watched Dark Night Rises again recently, which was filmed in 2011 and came out in 2012, I was like, oh, shit. Like, there's a lot about, it's a superhero movie, has some crazy plots, but like, there's a lot about society, like elites versus everyone, you know, the pain that comes

after chaos that I'm looking at today and I'm going, ooh. Yeah. he knew what was going on interstellar's another one that has some themes about you know us being able to be on this planet that as the years go by you're like huh yeah maybe that's not outside the realm of possibility yeah and then yeah deep s yelling at me over here of course ampenheimer and everything who was a guy ahead of his time for multiple different reasons yeah you know he told that story really well yeah yeah i can't think of anything he's done that i wasn't impressed with you know yeah but an amazing dude no doubt about it for sure so we'll see what he does with the odyssey but back to some of the stuff we were talking about we're starting to work our way

around the world and things going on i always like to get your opinions on these things but one of the things that i feel like has gone really under the radar while everyone's so distracted fighting on twitter over fucking israel and palestine is that you still have other major countries around the world making moves and doing things that matter at scale because we're talking about huge GDPs and obviously the largest of which is China. You know, you're talking about a billion people, a place that's run by a Communist Party leadership that rules with an iron fist, a place where all of their innovation that is capitalized is still owned by the government. So it's one in one with them, a place that does mass surveillance on us. And obviously we just had a TikTok deal.

go through to stop that part of it, but there's a bunch of people that we don't know where they are or how they got in, basically, who have come through the border and set up shop around our military bases and farmland here. We have a reverse opium war going on with them. They've bought up influence around the world with ports and economic development in places that can never pay back the debt, whether it be in Africa or Europe or South America, and their GDP continues to be almost hand in hand with ours. So do you, you know, we had talked about. We had talked about about this a bit last time, and I'd love to see where we're at now, like a year and a half later, is this still, like, if you were pointing at your number one list of concerns over the

next 10 to 15 years, is China still at the top of that list? Hmm. Maybe. Maybe. I would say it's a tie between them and ourselves. You know, I'm more worried about, just like in the Roman Empire, the collapse within more so than I'm worried about them being able to defeat us in a more overt way. Now, I think it's impossible to argue that they don't have a heavy influence in our collapsing of ourselves within our own country. but yeah I think like if we can't manage to get along better than we do that there is no hope for the country in the long term you know it just to me there there's no scenario that exists where things continue to go the way that they're going and we have an ability to crawl out of the hole we found ourselves in and get back to the top the way we were 30 years ago how how How do we maybe start acting normal around each other again? What's the pathway of that? To me, it starts with each individual, you know, setting the example and being the example that, you know, if everybody lived their life, like Joe Rogan said, on, like somebody's following around with the camera and it's being broadcasted.

I think until people do that, you really can't do it because. You know, you can't expect other people to do things you're not willing to do. You know, if you're not willing to hold yourself accountable and do the things that you expect everybody else to do, then nobody's going to do them. Right. And so it starts with that. There's a host of other things, which I'm happy to kind of go down list-wise. I think the nuclear family needs to be brought back to the forefront of being the predominant dynamic in the overwhelming majority of America. households. There's too much data that says the positive benefits that are gained by

having a nuclear household in a traditional American fashion that are positive and got us to that point. Because when that's broken down and kids are now learning from classmates and from the internet and school and the bigger influences outside the home, then the forming of them as human beings and members of society are incredibly easy to manipulate. They're super malleable and then they're there for the taking by whoever wants it. I think we've seen over the last decade plus that there are a lot of nefarious people that want our country to collapse that have taken a high vested interest in doing that and have been overwhelmingly successful in doing so fixing the government from again from the influence standpoint and term limits and having having a government that actually represents the people it is a necessity for that to happen and to get more kind of in the weeds I think to me it's pretty obvious that manufacturing needs to go back to the 1990 and before

level of like before TPP kind of yeah yeah um there there are too many scenarios that exist where when it's not the case doesn't matter what we think doesn't matter what we want doesn't matter what we do if you don't have the ability to make most of the things that your society uses depends on um everybody else who does make those things have you by the balls, you know, there's no way around that. And we've outsourced so many things, not just to China, but outside the U.S. to where if the entire collective world wanted to just completely destroy us, I think they could through economic means. It wouldn't have to do any, even cyber warfare. I mean, they could just say, we're not selling you guys anything. I think the only reason that

that they haven't is because their economies rely too heavily on us for now. But I do think that that sooner than later there will come a point where um they can handle uh not relying on us buying so many things from them and and ultimately will and i think you know when you combine all those things together it's a recipe for failure uh so i think we need to fix all of those things all right i want to come back to the cyber warfare aspect so we'll put a pin in that but you had a few points there. The first one being the nuclear family, when that idea was formed, if we're just looking at this on a level, you know, people's life expectancies were lower, right? And there were, the populations were smaller and things like that. And that's not like

excusing how people look at it today. But now, you know, for some people I talk to, they're like, okay, you marry a girl at 28. You might live to 120. You don't know how you're going to feel at 50. And people, people do get divorced. I believe, and I can cut this if you don't want to talk about this, but like you got divorced once as well, right? Yeah. So you're speaking at this from both angles of it as well. Like maybe the way I should start this is like, do you look back on your situation and obviously like you seem to have handled it well and have a close relationship with your kids and everything seems to be fine? But do you look at how that could have gone wrong because you know you and your wife didn't end up being together and you're like i see how the

percentages play out where a lot of kids do get fucked up from this is that kind of how you look at it that's for sure part of it um i think it it kind of boils down to uh i would say statistics really in a way and that to say that you know having a nuclear family is a recipe for success and there's no no way for that to go wrong i'm not saying that i'm also not saying that you know you can't get divorced and still co-parent and raise, you know, healthy, productive, positive, mentally healthy children. What I think, you know, looking at the broad spectrum is that in your percentage chance, your highest percentage chance for producing productive members of society is to have

the overwhelming majority nuclear families. It's not a guarantee. It's not a guarantee that if you are, they're going to be great. It's not a guarantee if you're not, that they're not going to be great. But the stats don't lie that, you know, there are fewer nuclear families. And I think that from an influence standpoint, your kids, especially when they're really young, need that. To your point, agreed, like when you're 20 and 80, you're going to be very different. You're going to be very different when you're 30 than you are when you're 20.

Right. Every 10 years, you know, I think you change, most people change quite a bit. I think the key window of opportunity is that childbirth to, you know, teen years where, you know, when that window is closed, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter nearly as much. You know, so kids coming from, you know, when, especially in that first five or six years before they go to school and now they're spending more time with other people than they are their actual immediate family, that window in particular is crucial. You know, and I think, to pinpoint a mechanism that says, hey, statistically, when there are more families that are having kids and when those kids are in their formidable years, their family is together, that's going to set us up for success more than the opposite of that. Yeah, and I think you're also pointing out it's more, when you say nuclear family, it's more than just like, oh, are your parents together and whatever.

It's like, what are they doing too? Right. What kind of example are they setting? For sure. when you're at the dinner table, if you are even at the dinner table together, is everyone like this or are people actually talking? Is there, are their principles in the household? How do they parent? What's the relationship between parent and child? You've mentioned throughout this conversation today about like the coddling of society and things like that. And you are

pointing to a societal wide, obviously not everyone, but a larger percentage-wise problem of like coddling that goes on in the parent-child relationship as well. For sure. You know, and again, I'll i'll credit my parents in to me setting a really really good example of how to how to kind of walk that fine line of supportive but not coddling right um they were hard when they needed to be hard uh they were nurturing when they needed to be nurturing supportive when they needed to be and uh you know at the end of the day like we all always knew that they that they loved us and supportive us and they set a really good example um do you have to be married for that to happen no And maybe the better term is not necessarily a nuclear family or redefining the dynamic is having two involved parents that are playing those specific roles in their children's lives for the entirety of their childhood.

You know, do you have to be married for that to happen? No, does it make it easier? Absolutely it does. Are there fucked up families where their parents are still together? Yes. are there great families where their parents never even got married also yes but again to paint it with kind of a broad a broad stroke and again maybe the nuance or the important thing to highlight is that when kids are growing up they have the masculine and feminine roles in their lives in an

appropriate way where they're setting the tone in both of those arenas and they're they're contrasting and contributing to each other kind of the way nature i think intended Yeah, I agree completely. And you're talking about, again, like the percentage play on society, which is then what you see play out overall. And you're 100% right. So I hope that in this era, you know, is a part of like turning some things around. That is something people focus on more because I think when you look at the last 20 years with all the wars, the economic downturn, the broken homes as a result of that, the lack of hope, that's how you have. young kids turn to like hardcore wokeism or stuff like that and now if there's a positive right now I think there's been a little bit of a reset on that where people are like right wait a minute what the fuck we're talking about here and hopefully one of the downstream effects is that some of these like actual civilizational wide values like a nuclear family actually take precedent again yeah and I want to I guess highlight one other aspect is that you know within the

kind of the realm of that nuclear family when you have you know kids that are growing up and and they're influenced by uh you know two parents that you know are again setting that example of a typical argument you hear and you kind of brought this up early on in the discussion was the lack of opportunity you know i'd say one of the first counter arguments you'll hear to what i just said is dude you know you can't live nowadays right where both parents aren't working again that there's comparisons that people will make to the way things are now the way you know compared to the way things were say let's say in the 1950s where it was kind of peak nuclear family in this country from an american culture standpoint

i do think it's also important to look at the standard of living you know is that look at the standard of living of people in the 1950s you know and it's like a lot of lot of families, most families, the husband went to work, the wife stayed home with the kids. They also didn't have five TVs and four cars in a 4,500 square foot house and an expectation to door dash 90% of their food, to Amazon and to Netflix, you know, there's a lot of things that we take for granted and assume that from a standard of living standpoint are the necessities that absolutely are not. You know, that back then, they had none of those. things you know and so you know when when kids grow up again being spoiled and

coddled and given everything and now they enter you know they're 20 years old living on their own and they still expect to drive a 70,000 dollar car and live in a nice house and have the latest smartphone and be able to you know stream whatever they want and have the latest laptop and have their own vehicle you know all of these things it's like well yeah you you can't live the way your parents had lifestyle wise while you were growing up the second you enter the real world if you have that as an expectation no that's that's never going to exist that didn't exist back then you know in terms of as soon as

you left the house that that you're now living to the same standard of living that your parents did so i do think you know a little bit of reframing the perspective on what's necessity versus not is also a crucial part of that argument even entertaining the possibility of of of having, you know, the predominant dynamic in American households be, be the nuclear family. For sure. Yeah, there's a lot there to unpack. First off, the point about, you know, the commonality being both parents having full-time jobs now to be able to get by is something we got to work on in society as well. And, you know, for my future wife, whoever she's going to be, I want her to do what she wants to do. God bless her. Right. Yeah, I know. That poor woman.

they call that a life sentence but you know i i want i'm going to want her to do what she wants to do if she wants to have a career i want her to be able to do that but like i also want to have a bunch of kids and i'm going to have to get someone on board who who wants that too and i would also like her to have i work so hard now because i would like her to be able to have the opportunity to be home with those kids that's something i was very lucky on my mom had a great job and left it behind to raise me because that's what she wanted okay so you understand that's what that's what that's you wanted. And I think that turned out amazing for me and not everyone in this country. A lot of people in this country don't have that opportunity. Their parents don't have that opportunity to do

that. And I'd like to create that. But also to the point of, you know, like success and how you pass that down, it's also interesting here. And you talk about it because you're a very successful guy and you have kids. And obviously, like, you've raised them well and they're going out in the world and going to start doing their thing at some point. And you've had this at the top of mind. But in my old career on Wall Street. Not to say every example I saw was bad. I saw some good examples too, but I saw many examples of people who would be clients who, you know, are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and their kids are dead. They're dead. They're never had a shot because they grew up with, like you said, four cars, whatever they wanted and just had this built-in entitlement

as to how the world works. And then even worse, they all had these fucking trust funds, which I think or I think it's like dripping poison into a kid so that, you know, when they got out there and they were fucking around doing whatever, well, they always had this to fall back on and go spend their money and pretend it was theirs that, you know, they were putting everyone else on and really they're just miserable because they lack that purpose and they know it's not theirs. And I actually felt bad for that. And that's something like I'm in a career where if I end up getting a lot of success here and I plan to, yeah, a lot of money will come with that at some point. And even as someone who's not a father right now, that is something I already actively

think about because I don't want my kids thinking about any of that. I don't want them assuming they're going to get any of it. I don't intend to set up fucking trust funds for them and shit. Like, I want my kids to fucking go make their own way and make something of themselves in the world. And part of that also is like, I'm going to have to find a woman who's okay with this. I have zero interest in fucking 15 room. mansions and shit like that. It's not to say like, I don't like a nice thing once in a while. I like having a nice laptop and shit like that. But like, I'm not going to sit here and go spend on this, this and that. And I damn want all on my kids having that expectation around them.

Because I think what they see is what they expect in the world. And if you're growing up, you know, in fucking silk pajamas and some mansion with a maid, it's like, well, how can you ever expect that person to go out and do something? You even use the example earlier of like Rocky four where you had to put himself back in the cold. You know, to be able to do it. There's the old Hagler quote prize fighter where he's like, it's really hard to get up and train for a fight at 4 a.m. When you're sleeping in silk pajamas.

Yeah. That is something you got, I think you have to think about, especially if you're like coming into success about how you're going to instill the right values in their kids so they can, you know, actually selfishly for them, go make their own way, you know? Yeah, I mean, to me, the answer is really simple. It's not easy. you know most parents especially if they didn't come from a lot now find themselves successful

they've got young families you hear you hear this a lot i want what i want for my kids what i didn't have um that's a dangerous proposition most of the time um it's not to say that you want you know the same level of struggle especially you know some super successful people came from just god awful childhoods uh it's not to say that that you want to put that you want to put that on them to me that the simple answer and not easy one is that you use the same level of meticulous intentionality and strategic planning that you did to get to where you are professionally with raising your children in a way where they're not going to turn into that entitled asshole it's not an easy thing to do but what that means and what that looks like or or translates

to is thinking about things before they get them saying hey you can have this but not that you're going to have to work for this. If you break it or lose it, you don't get another one. You know, and you're you're constantly navigating those decisions, having to evolve your perspective as they get older, and you're going to fuck up. I mean, realize like you're going to make some of the wrong decisions. The key is, is identify when you, when you made the wrong decision and do your damnedest not to make that mistake again. But you have to put the same level of effort into ensuring that that doesn't happen as you did making sure and ensuring that it did happen for you and to me that that's the way you get around it or where you navigate it's a great way to put it

i think it's also one of those things like you have to do it and experience it to kind of for sure what it is there's parts i can mentally prepare myself but like i'm not going to know until a minute yeah and and you'll get thrown curveballs you know because that's where emotion comes in you know as a father especially you have daughters who bat their eyelashes and uh know how to pull your strings and and what have you um you know it can be tough sometimes to to dish out a little bit of tough love and and um lesson learning you know right um you need to go slap slap your guy around again we're we're doing all right let let's take a quick break we're we're going to let them drill for a minute we'll be right back all right we're back yeah actually i i saw

Can you move a little this way? Sorry. I saw what's it called Chris Cuomo in action doing that behind the scenes when I was over visiting my friend Nishon at News Nation. And that skill of like, oh, you come back from a commercial break and you go, oh, so, and you just rattle off like. It's a skill. That's what I'm saying.

Like he would be talking like with a producer, not about the show. Like shooting the shit on something. And then suddenly they were. wouldn't even do a countdown. It would just be like a silent three, two, one. Yeah, no, no, totally. Hi, welcome back to News Nation. I'm Chris Quint. And he would just go into this whole thing and he's not reading anything. I was like, wow. And a lot of repetition in that. Yeah. To me, there's a same level of skill with actors being able to do that. You know, like they'll be doing some really depressing or heavy emotional scene. And it's like it wraps. And then they finish telling some

stupid like joke to, you know, five of the cast members or whatever. whatever, and, you know, they're all laughing or whatever. And then it's like, all, do it again. And then they just, you know, and they're right back into, it's like, I mean, especially in that lane, I think it's almost like psychotic, you know, or like sociopathic that you can be that convincing to that disparity on polar opposite sides of the emotional spectrum and just fucking turn on a dime like that. Like, there's almost like, man, what's wrong with you to be able to do that?

Yeah. Yeah, I've heard both ends of that spectrum. there's that where you have i can't think of examples right now but there there are a lot of actors who are just like that and able to do that then there's the polar other end which is also like a form of like psychotic nature where you have like daniel day lewis who does not get out of character for like six months in a character well i heard that uh going back to a dark night that he ledger that that was a struggle of his is that he was like so into that character that he was like troubled by it you know it killed him yeah it killed him jack nicholson

And Dr. Nicholson warned him before he went to go do the role that, like, he knew he's processed. Heath was a method actor the whole bed. And he's like, that is a really dark character. I know this is like superhero and everything. But it's a total sociopathic individual who's larger than life in all the wrong ways. And you got to be careful with that. And, you know, he kept the famous diary where he basically locked himself in his room for weeks, months, and became this. person and obviously like you know it was hard for him to to turn that off and I think that you know

it was hard from he would sleep like an hour or night so then he had sleeping problems and that let them you know it's always sad to see that happening yeah but what one of the things I wanted to talk about with you Mike is something that happened a few days after you and I sat down down in Texas which was the whole Charlie Kirk assassination which was shocking on on every level for a near reasons, but we've been hitting the themes a lot today. You've been bringing them up about trends in society that aren't good of us turning on ourselves. And to me, when you see any political commentator, regardless of what their beliefs are or anything like that, especially someone like Charlie who, like him or not, went on to college campuses and had

an open dialogue with people, which I can appreciate very much. You know, when you see people like that gun down, it doesn't even matter how brutal it was, and this was in particularly brutal. Like, when you're attacked for political beliefs in exercising your First Amendment right in this country, I think the precedent of something like that is actually even way worse than the lawfare stuff we were talking about. What are your thoughts there? I agree 100%. You know, for me, the thing that I found myself thinking about as the days and even, you know, a couple weeks after that transpired was, number one, is that it rattled me more than I expected it to, not to say that I, if you had told me before

it happened, that how would you feel if that happened? Oh, that would suck. I was not prepared for, I think, the emotional, I don't know that I'd necessarily say toll, in a way a toll, but maybe roller coaster that transpired after that happened. And I found myself trying to figure out why it was having such an impact on me. And what I came to the conclusion of is, and what bothered me the most about it was the reflection of our society that I saw in, in the fact that, A, it happened. And more importantly, the response to it happening, where people are laughing and celebrating it and cheering. And that happened. And so, in my same fashion, I kind of always plinkgo game my emotions down to finding the root cause of,

you know, okay, well, this is what I'm feeling. It's because of this. Well, okay, but why? Because that, you know, I find myself kind of funneling it down to trying to come up with like the most basic premise of where that, that emotion's coming from. And what I kept realizing is that, you know, because you've had a number of the same guests that I've had on. that are combat veterans and i would ask you have there been stories where you know decorated combat veterans sitting in this chair have shared a story about um operations that were successful where they're taking enemy combatant lives and and they were kind of laughing and celebrating the fact that they did that did you ever i don't think i've ever encountered that no were they

celebrated no never um you know and i will say that not not in a way where like what I'd seen you know on social media where it's like a mockery of it but where it's it's being essentially celebrated as you know we did this we killed these four guys and you know and it's like fuck yeah we got them you know kind of like a victorious type of um walk down memory lane with it where it's like we're proud that we were victorious on the battlefield and there's like a celebration of that victory only time I've ever experienced that is when you're doing that with people who you consider your mortal enemy or people who are also trying to take your life where you're celebrating being the one to come out on top in that environment so what what I found is the most striking was that now there are pockets of our society who are acting in that same way which tells me again Plinko gaming it down to the kind of the root cause is that almost by deductive reasoning,

what that tells me is that there are a subset of our population that views political opponents as mortal enemies. And to me, that that was by far the most worrisome aspect of the whole thing, is that I, it made me realize as soon as you dehumanize people, there's really no lower form than that. And if we're at a point in our society where on both sides of the aisle and in a lot of ways, we're considering our political opponents, mortal enemies where we're cheering someone's death because of the things that they say that we disagree with, the reflection of our society that that has is catastrophic. And that's what made me worry the most about it. I'm with you.

I think the celebration was gross. And by the way, when you asked me about, you know, have I had the guys in here celebrating killing terrorists? Like, celebrates a strong word. And we saw that with the Charlie Kirk thing where there were people like, oh, I'm glad he's dead and saying it just like that. I really haven't had that. But do I have people sit in here in those situations who talk about like, yeah, we neutralized that guy? Fuck yeah. And it was awesome.

And like say in a very matter of fact, why, yeah. And I understand that. and I also completely agree that when you are starting to now see people make no distinction between that type of situation and one of their own citizens simply opening their mouth and saying things that maybe they disagree with, that's an issue. And I saw that right away on social media and that really pained me to see. And then also, I did see that formulate an anger on, you know, the Charlie Kirk side, like those people, to where then you had people going on social media

who would say something, and I'm paraphrasing here, for example, like, obviously no one should ever be killed. That's horrible. I'm very sad that happened for his family, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I agreed with any of his ideas. And then they would list off things they disagreed with. And you would have people on the right side, like trying to call up their employers to say, he disagree with Charlie Kirk, so fire him from his job. Like, two rights do not make a run, or two wrongs do not make it right here you know what i mean so we we have to people even in a situation like that which is highly charged and emotional and people saw it it was awful i mean as a combat veteran like you've seen stuff like that before the average person is lucky enough to

never have to see something like that people who fucking saw that from four different angles so it is more charged but i wish people could have been way more reasonable about it and i wish you know unfortunately it is just the nature of it he's a political commentator who was gunned down but i wish we didn't have a situation where it was someone like that because then it makes it takes the political aspect of it and exacerbates it and i understand this actually to a degree of 10 or a hundred and that's that is what we've seen and sometimes it feels like i don't know now we're seven weeks eight weeks past it whatever it is it feels like a lifetime ago which is crazy. And, you know, I'm like, no disrespect to him at all, but I'm like sick of the back and forth on it. It's like we need to have more constructive conversations here. I would like to see more people on the left and right make a priority out of going to debate themselves together civilly, especially on college campuses and stuff like that and lead by example rather than fucking tweeting at each other and hating each other. But I also think we, the audience, all of us,

we have incentivized the extreme people to say the things that rile us up based on our beliefs and hit the like button on that or comment on it if we dislike it which pushes all those people into the algorithm and less the people who are like hey let's cool it you know yeah i think again i mean not to always go back to social media being such a double-edged sword but i think this is a classic example because if you think about the magnitude in terms of the impact the the emotional impact that Charlie being shot had it seems reminiscent of JFK you know it's kind of a similar heaviness you know to it happening I'd be curious I don't know if there's a way to Google or chat GPT did you know was was there or did we see any celebratory media responses after JFK was was assassinated. Yeah, we could Google it. I don't, I can't think of. My guess is no. Yeah. Because I think you'd have seen replays of them over the years. And so to me, like that, that's the thing is that, you know, there were obviously people who didn't vote for him, who didn't

like the guy who disagreed with everything he stood for and thought he was taking the country in the wrong direction that's still fit. And see, that's why you don't fuck with stuff. You know, you can dislike somebody and disagree with everything. they stand for and think that they're harming the country even with the direction politically they're taking it taking it in and still feel very emotionally sorrowful for them for their lives being taken yes and i to me that's that that huge paradigm shift where it's like this dehumanization that yes that we've seen even you know for the last 10 years really i mean i would say leading up to the first trump presidency on both sides is where at least from my recollection is

where you really started to see that like you know Hillary saying the things that she did Trump saying the things that he did and followers of both parties falling in line with that and now doing the same thing and I think it further highlights the need for a very stoic very emotionally stable reserved and emotionally competent leader for the country like you need somebody who And one of my favorite pieces of advice for, and this is for parenting, I'll pass along for you and should or when that day comes is don't be the thermometer, be the thermostat in the room. Like you need a leader who is the thermostat, you know, not reflecting the temperature, who's fucking setting it, you know. And if you don't have that, this is why you have this ridiculous swing on both sides that just, you know, roller coasters or pendulums back and forth and it just keeps upping the anity.

Annie in getting worse and worse as every year transpires. 100%. That's great advice. And, you know, I've seen people come up to me. I used to talk about this wah-wah theory where I would go to the wah-wah and I'd see the dude in the nom hat have the door held for him by the girl with purple hair and a nose ring. And I know that if the two of them were on Twitter, they'd be fucking fighting each other.

But they smile and there's no weird look, no nothing, people getting along because they're touching grass and they're in the real world. And that does give me some hope sometimes when I look outside and I see the world is not Twitter. Remind myself that every day. It's not necessarily that. Twitter and things like that and what gets attention on social media does not help the collective conscience, but it does not have to be that far. Can you knock on that wall? Joe, right there. Just give it like four knocks so they know. Sorry people. We've been dealing with this construction over the past four or five weeks. It's been a little difficult. So just bear with me on that but you know seeing seeing that play out in the real world i did i did find myself we

were on air when when charlie got shot and it was uh you know it was it was very i mean it we were all shook and when we finished recording and and the guys left you know i stood at my window out there and i watch people during rush hour coming home from the train and these are all people who you know they represent every end of the political spectrum and ironically i didn't see anyone really even buried in their phone or anything like that i saw people walking along talking to each other and i was like you know what it can be like that out there it can it can be a little better than just everyone yelling at each other but i i do hope that something like this is certainly not a precedent in any way and and you know all

political violence should be condemned in the harshest of form not just political violence but any violence whatsoever against speaking including speaking that you hate and i'm thinking to some of the things that i hate in my head right now the other side of that is far worse i agree and it's interesting i was uh recording that day also and um you know being being in a show is a is a strange microcosm of silence that rarely exists outside of a recording studio i mean really the only other thing i can think of is either when you're asleep at night or if you're on a plane with no wi-fi and you're disconnected because we are so connected second by second day in day out of news flashes and you know alerts on your phone and people calling or texting saying dude this just

happened turn on the news or whatever right um and so the first break that we took um it was right after it happened. I mean, it was, it was like two minutes after it happened. So it was just he'd been shot. There's no other details where I was like, man, that's wild. I wonder what happened. And then we sit back down and went for like almost three hours before we took another break. And then by that time, of course, you know, the video was out. And it was just such a weird feeling. Getting it broken to us in two pieces or phases with several hours apart. And I had, you know, a guy, who'd been a undercover cop and a swat guy and you know decades of drug deals gone bad where he'd almost been killed and you know lots of things gone wrong in these undercover operations and lots of wild stories from and a guy who understands evil knows violence and has lived kind of by the sword for a long time it was really heavy yeah just like this unspoken like he and i weren't really saying anything we're just kind of looking at each other weirdly and it reminded me um of course not the same but there was a similar feel or vibe to the morning 9-11 happened when i was in at seal team three

and and we were all just kind of stunned and shocked and almost didn't know what to think there there was an element of that that same day which i was not expecting again and i think again it boils down to what it reflects and symbolizes and, you know, where he was shot and how and just all of the different kind of intangibles or parameters that complete the story to symbolize what the taking of his life actually meant with all of those things kind of woven into it that, you know, that were really, really earth-shattering. Yeah, it was definitely, I agree with you it was more heavy than I thought it would be. Just, you know, what I would add to that is, It's not even so much like, you know, those 9-11 and Charlie are two very different events

for with wildly different reasons. It's the fear of precedent setting. You know, when you're watching 9-11, you're like, someone did this. The whole world's about to change, right? When you watch something like this, which, you know, the case is a whole other thing. But, you know, this has now happened. The whole world, and particularly our country, could change now in a very wrong way if we're not careful. think that that fear is is something that's palpable yeah i think the the not knowing you know it's

the fear of of what's coming now because of this and and there being such an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty wrapped around it that uh yeah it was it was palpable for sure well mike this has been an awesome conversation they're getting ramped up with the fucking taking the walls down over there we've been talking for almost three hours so i think that's i think that's fine they've been pretty patient with our other recordings but it's always great talking with you it was awesome going on your show i guess that's coming out pretty soon so we'll make sure we get that to all our people so that they can watch that and hopefully not see me make an idiot of myself but you're an amazing amazing interviewer your show is great doing it a long time mic drop podcast we will have that

not only linked i'll probably collab this with with eric as well so people can literally hit it and subscribe right on the underneath the title of the video but i look forward to do doing this again sometime my friend likewise thank you much always uh always a pleasure being here all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links are in my description below