Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #315 Artificial Intelligence to Innate Inteligence w/ Zachary Hanson

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Zach was an AI professional by trade, who got the itch to learn more about where his food and clothes came from four years ago -- Leading him down an interesting path where he learned to hunt, trap, and live off grid in the back country of Idaho.   We obviously get into his backstory, life growing up, learning to overcome adversity through wrestling in highschool and the effort that requires. His grandfather really fostered his self-education by promising him any book he wanted in pursuit of further education. He’s currently an all around outdoorsman who also writes incredible books. Please go check out his works, "Turning Feral", and "The Bone Scraper Series".     ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Zach: Website: zacharyhanson.me - Substack: Let Me Die Learning - theoutfitter.guide  Instagram: @letmedielearning - @theoutfitter.guide    Show Notes: KKP #314 Dr Mike DeBord Spotify  Apple Get the bands! KYLE.B3sciences.com Living 4D w/ Paul Chek #250 Lucifer-Christ-Ahriman Spotify Apple  The Creepy Line(doc) "The Machine Stops" - EM Forster     Sponsors: Caldera Lab is the best in men’s skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off PaleoValley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

First thing in the morning on a Tuesday. Feels like Monday. I don't know what today is. Well, it's Wednesday if you're listening to this right as it comes out. So, I successfully predicted this will come out tomorrow. Unless you're listening to it on a future Wednesday. Or any other day of the week. And of course, all this is babble, but that's okay.

I like to start the show off with a little babble, especially when it's first thing in the morning on a Tuesday and it actually feels like Monday. And that's okay. Don't worry, I don't babble on the podcast. This was done at an appropriate hour where I had full function of my brain and felt great. And I got to interview a guy that I've had on my radar for some time. His name is Zach Hansen. I actually have a short list of people from a group that I'm in of awesome people that all come from different walks of life that have all decided to study and entertain the

idea of homesteading and survival skills and different things of that nature. You've got to be careful with the words you use these days. If you follow Mike Glover, who wrote the book Prepared, he became on the FBI's watch list for teaching Americans how to defend themselves and teaching them how to can food and other activities like that. So you want to be mindful of the folks that are, you know, red flagging shit, the AI that's red flagging shit. There's plenty of that still. Don't think because you can talk about COVID-19 on Twitter that that has gone to the wayside via the massive

stream of MSM, which is now, you know, and has been YouTube mainstream media, Google mainstream media, all that shit. So I have no doubt that there are certain topics you could say on a podcast that would have somebody showing up at your door. So anyway, Zach Hansen, great guy. Somebody I've looked up to. He was a tech nerd. And I mean that in the fucking highest regard. It's funny because as a former jock, I actually had a lot of nerd friends. I went to Monta Vista High School, 70% Asian and Indian population there. When I was there, it's like 90 now.

We didn't do too well in football. That's not a joke. That's actually true. Now, you might be able to do the math on that and say, yeah, 70% Asian and Indian. You weren't going to do well at football, but we didn't do well at football. We were 0-10 my freshman year. We did very well scholastically, and believe it or not, national champions in badminton, like fucking 10 years straight.

So if you go to Montevista High School, you look in the rafters. Badminton, we got it on lock. Football, not so much. But as I stated earlier about nerds, I had a lot of highly intelligent people that I would consider nerds that I was close to. And I always looked about nerds, I had a lot of highly intelligent people that I would consider nerds that I was close to, and I always looked up to them. I admired them even as a jock, and of course, they admired me as a jock, but I admired them because they were book smart. They could handle the shit that I couldn't. They could see through the pages of the things that I was like, what the fuck is this? Why are we doing this? They got it. And Zach was very successful in tech. He did a lot of cool shit and slowly began to peel back the layers of,

I'm not sure this is for me. I'm not sure this is what I'm destined to do. I'm not sure this is the right move. Since then, he's become an author. He's done a whole host of cool shit. He actually went one step further than me. I mean, I'm homesteading down in Lockhart, 30 minutes from Austin. I'm not that far off the beaten path. And he moved way out in the cuts in Idaho. Found his wife on his second leg, all sorts of cool shit. He has a fantastic story. He's a dad.

He's homesteading. More importantly than that, he's doing a lot of cool shit that I think everyone here will be into. We had a very similar trajectory when it came to getting into hunting, I think right around the same time that Rogan and was having meat eater guys and all the homies on the podcast, John Dudley, that kind of stuff. So it's been cool to get to catch up with him, with Zach and get to know him better. He's a fantastic dude. He'll be back on this podcast again. And the reason I mentioned that group is because there are some fucking awesome people in there. I'm not going to name them all by name. Some have already been on the podcast and some more will be coming on in the future. I just did a podcast with Dr.

Bart on his podcast. I'll release that here in the show notes when it comes out. But you can expect him, he's going to be on this podcast as well. Just a fucking awesome dude out of Florida doing some really cool shit. So I'm excited that I have a little, it's like a, it's like a side revenue stream. You know, I don't think of the podcast as revenue, but I think of the content is the content stream, right? I got a fucking really good little side piece here. That's going to deliver me some awesome fucking people that not too many people know about. So stoked for that. You guys are going to love this podcast. There are many ways you can support the show. First and foremost, share it with a friend who's into this shit. If you, if you know anybody that's talking about

homesteading or hunting or somebody that's in tech and they're like, I don't fucking want to stay here. What do I do? The options are limitless. Like you can do anything you fucking want. Doesn't matter if you're 40, 50 or 60, you carve your own path. And that stays the same way at every fucking stage of the game. Will it be harder if you're 60 years old? Maybe. Depends what you want to do. But you always have that option. Don't fucking kid yourself.

You're always holding the steering wheel. And Zach did that. And it's really cool to see it. So support the show by sending it to a friend who's interested in it. First and foremost, word of mouth gets the message spread quickly. Secondly, leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life. And your Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook handle. Sorry, it's just the big boys, the big mainstream media boys and girls. Leave us your handle there. That way my team can reach out

to you and Organifi all year long. Organifi.com will be hooking you up with my favorite product. They pick one winner per month and there's not a shit ton of entries still even at this point fucking half a year into this we've been talking about it more than half a year because they did it at the end of last year um your chances of winning are very high so let me just say that you might be up against four or five other people who might not have as many great reasons they like this podcast and yours might be the best so might get some product there. And it really does help me for no other reason, you know, outside of free product. It does help the show a ton with getting more listeners. And that helps in the end, spread the word. It also helps with sponsors. That's the final and easiest piece to help the show stay prosperous and alive and well.

Support our sponsors. I've hand-selected every one of these. If I didn't hand-select it myself, my team brought it to me and under very strict fucking guidelines, I tried it on for size. If it was worth a shit, most of it gets shut off at the door. I got to tell you, I think I mentioned this before in the podcast

and it's kind of fucked up, but well, let's just say there's been some supplements and different things that have been delivered to my house that had artificial ingredients and I was like, I just got to give these away. I can't fucking, I can't keep them. Uh, no punchline there. I don't want to, I think it would be fucked up to

talk shit about the company and the name of the company and all that other stuff. So I'm just not going to do that. I'm not going to bad mouth them, but I do do that more than more often than not. Unfortunately, even with a team that knows what I like, there's still some shit that gets through the cracks. And I say, no. So everything you hear on this podcast has been said yes to and not just said yes to. I've tried it on for size. I've been doing it for months. First one here, Caldera and Lab. They've got the regimen and a whole host of awesome products that are really about men's skincare.

This is something I would scoff at in my 30s. Like I have fucking perfect skin growing up, didn't have a lot of acne. I know, fuck you, Kyle, whatever. Football changed that. You know, I was wearing pads that I never washed. So I got boils on my back and nasty shit. And yeah, it was nasty. But face was always good.

And then when I moved to Texas, the sun started kicking my ass. And I realized, you know, studying Weston A. Price and Paul Cech and a lot of the different people who had studied Weston A. Price and really taking a deep dive into that, the genetic lineage matters if you go pretty far away from it, right? Like it's not that big of a deal if you're born in Sweden and you move to Austria, probably not that big of a change. It's going to be a change, but it's probably not

that big of a change. Your, you know, distant relatives were in Southern Spain and you moved to Northern California, probably not going gonna fuck you up that bad. But when I saw, and I have mentioned this before on the podcast, when I saw how far San Diego is, and then I looked at Austin and I was like, oh wait, we're like a whole state further down. Like we're into Baja, California.

If we were to look just across the hemisphere, we'd be right, we'd be in Baja, California. There's no part of California other than the Mexican part and it was all Mexico at one point but there's no part where Austin reaches back to it that's that's even remotely close to San Diego and I was not born there I was born way north of that and my ancestors were north of that they were from northern Europe so the sun does kick my ass here and the truth is it has given me some wrinkles. It's given me a lot of fucking redness under the eyes. It's made them a little puffier because I'm always squinting when

I'm outside and I'm outside a lot. Homesteading. I don't wear sunblock. I wear a nice cowboy hat and that seems to help a little bit. But truthfully, taking care of my skin has been the only thing that's actually changed that. And I know I eat clean. I go to bed on time. I do fucking everything else right. I can assure you of that. And I can stand by that wholeheartedly. Lie detector test. I'm in bed at fucking 8.30, 9.30 at the latest every night of the week, unless I'm at a fit for service event. And even then I'm bitching and bellyaching that I have to stay up later than 9.30. Ask any one of the other coaches, they'll attest to that. We go to Arcadia in Vegas. I'll be there till 4 a.m. That's what I'm working till.

But outside of that, 8.30, 9.30, that's the deal. Day in and day out. So I know I take care of myself. Sometimes taking care of yourself and doing everything right isn't enough when it comes to men's skincare. And if you're over 40, that's going to be the case. You don't have to wait till you're over 40 till shit goes sour. If you start young, then you keep it, right? If you don't use it, you lose it. So it's better to

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have a sleep breakthrough product. they do a lot of cool shit at Bioptimizers and they have been a very long sponsor and an amazing company so check them all out and without further ado my brother Zach Hansen got our audio check, Zach Hansen how are you brother? Good man, I'm feeling good

this morning, I actually just came out of a coaching session which is something relatively new for me. I have an ex-Coinbase executive, ex-LinkedIn executive who's doing professional coaching now. I met him in Nicaragua actually earlier this year. And we've been working together and he's kind of getting me out of some of the funk that I've been in around the mentality I grew up with, which is suffer well, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But kind of starting to get through that acceptance plateau of where I'm at now, being good with that and recognizing that I don't have to suffer to achieve good things necessarily. So feeling good coming out of that,

doing a lot of meditation the last hour. That's awesome. Well, you're probably beaming then. When I first got into meditation, it actually was plant medicines that continued to kind of gently push me in that direction and then not so gently like, hey, we're not going to give you anything else, anything new until you actually start the practice. But it was still years before I really got it. I was kind of like hit and miss and I'd get into meditation and I'd kind of get it every now and then, but I had no real recipe for how do I enter into that space again and again and again. And then I met a lady named Emily Fetcher who i've had on the podcast and she has a phenomenal um course called ziva meditation which is one of the vedic teachings from 6 000 years ago and

and uh just fucking brilliant man it's a mantra based and like since i've gotten a hold of that it's like it's it's a mandatory part of every day because it works it's my reset it's a it's a way to zero out and just clear the cobwebs. So that's really cool. You met this guy in Nicaragua? What were you doing out there? Ironically, it was a bachelor party. So I'm actually officiating my best friend for a long time. I met him in jiu-jitsu 15 years ago.

And we've been best friends ever since, business partners a whole lot. And he's getting married and he's asked me to officiate the wedding, which is going to happen a little later this year. But he had a bachelor party and we surfed together all the time back in the day. So we went down to Nicaragua and he is friends with this guy.

So this bachelor party, I liken it more to like a Tony Robbins seminar. It's all a bunch of athletes so it's like we were all just surfing on the beach not a whole lot of drinking it was just more of like this uh you know building each other up and challenging each other you know saying man you're not doing that right you're not doing this hard enough in your life so it came out really good but i met him there um is the answer to your question that That's super cool. Yeah. I haven't had a bachelor party like that yet. It's mostly like a lot of my old homies I grew up with are

still playing fantasy football and getting hammered each weekend or old ASU football buddies that are still doing some of the not so beneficial drugs and mind-altering substances. So yeah, I still have a great time with him every time I get to hang out, but it's a little different these days for sure on my end. Let's talk about life growing up. I normally start with what made you into the person you are today. Talk about life growing up. You have a pretty dope bio, and I know we'll dive into how we know each other now, but, um, I love, I love seeing this trajectory, you know, cause I think so many of us are on this path where it's like, I mean, I started homesteading two years ago and it was like, you know, we got, we're going to, yeah, they got a few guys working together. Does anybody have farm experience?

My wife did. That's it. She's the only fucking one of us that had any farm experience prior. So it's, it's cool to see people that are digging a deep dive into stuff that maybe came from a totally different trajectory talk about that trajectory and uh and just life in general and what kind of led you to this path yeah it's roundabout as best as i can describe it, meaning I grew up very much middle-class USA in Georgia. We lived in a suburban area and my family weren't hunters, farmers. I just didn't come from that lineage at all. It was very much where I grew up in the era of kind of bucking any sort of trade education. It was like, hey, no matter what you do, you're going to go to college, you're going to get an education, doctor, lawyer, whatever the case may be. And I was kind of on that path a little bit, but the great point was, is I was a pussy as a kid. I just was not a very strong or outgoing child. Anything kind of scared me.

I was afraid of thunderstorms for the longest time, you know, like a lot of kids are. So I wasn't really pushed a lot. And ultimately I got to high school and started getting bullied, things like that. And I was like, man, this really sucks. Like, I'm not like a small guy per se. I'm definitely not a huge guy,

but I was like, how do I fix this? And that point in my life where I got beat up over some chick and the guy who beat me up was a wrestler and he just double legged me and hit me a few times and I was just kind of covered up. I'm like, this sucks. Like, yeah, I wasn't crying. I wasn't in a lot of pain, but I was like, that is the worst feeling in the world. And I ended up befriending the guy and I was like, well, where did you learn all this? He's like, just come wrestle, dude. So I started wrestling. And I kind of put that as a real trajectory switch in my life was just

learning grit and resilience and doing that in a wrestling room for a long time. And then eventually jujitsu and everything else like that. But, you know, that put me on a path where I eventually married a woman who was an FBI special agent. She was a world champion in jujitsu and master's class. And we were just doing jujitsu all the time. And eventually that got to the point where we were just optimizing everything in our life to make the long story short. And eventually it got to food. And obviously we were buying beef at the store, doing everything else. And,. And obviously we were buying beef at the store, doing everything else. And, you know, we were looking for an edge everywhere. And I was like, well, what about hunting? It was about the time a lot of the influencers in the space were really

getting into bow hunting. And that was really kind of the trigger point for me to make a very long story very short. That's so rad though. And I and i mean yeah that's so super resonant i had you know i was pushed in football and so i kind of ironed out like uh my head coach used to call call us puppies he'd be like oh he's still a puppy you know if he had any pussy in him he was just a puppy like he'll grow out of that but he's a puppy and um and that even though it pissed me off when he'd say it like i totally get that now having kids, like, oh, he's just a puppy. Don't worry, he'll grow out of that on his own.

But wrestling specifically is something that will apply enough pressure to where you don't have a choice, but to push yourself beyond whatever glass ceiling you have there, you're going to break through that over and over again. And I think it's a real gift for kids. It's kind of a bummer now that we're in Texas.

There's not a huge draw for wrestling here. So thankfully, you know, I got the kids in jujitsu and they have some great coaches and they practice different wrestling elements. I was talking with Daniel Cormier, he runs summer camps. And I'm like, look, I want to bring like half of our gym out next year. We'll get an Airbnb out in Gilroy and just attend the whole thing, you know, and just shift them, you know, so that they get at least like a, an intensive with that. But that's so cool. And it is, it is, you know, like for all the, the, the shit talking around bullying and fighting and things like that, like, yeah, if it's,

if it's some pest online, that's just constantly taking you down. That's one thing, but to actually have a physical altercation, which oftentimes does bring you guys together, right? In a weird fucking way, you know, that guy becomes a buddy. It's, I don't know if you've read, you probably have read these, but if you haven't, they're great when your kids get old enough

for the Way of the Warrior Kids series by Jocko Willink. Yeah. They're awesome. And it covers bullying. It covers all sorts of shit, you know? And it covers like, what is, how does that other kid grow up? You know, all sorts of things that most people don't think about, but yeah, there's so much good stuff there. And that's, that's super cool that you,

you know, get into jujitsu. Where are you at now with, with jujitsu? Well, jujitsu, it's been a lifelong passion. So I'm actually, we're lucky. So there's a little bit of foreshadowing, but we live in a cabin at the end of an 80 mile dirt road in Atlanta, Idaho which is the most rural place in the lower 48 that's accessible by road so training is a little more hit and miss like I'm actually

in Boise at the moment we have a home in Boise now too that we have some kids and you know we have to have a place we can go to if we need to get to doctors appointments and stuff and we have a great gym there's can go to if we need to get to doctors, appointments and stuff. And we have a great gym. There's actually an Alliance affiliate with Gigi Pavia, who is one of the co-founders of Alliance with Jacques Barre here in Boise of all places.

So we have great team here. So when I'm actually after this podcast, I'll be going to the gym. So, you know. That's awesome. Yeah, it's great to be able to train and get that in. But since our full kind of off-grid lifestyle that happened about four years ago, you know, training has taken a backseat, which is a bummer, but it was kind of one of those necessary evils. However,

I've gotten two other jujitsu guys to buy property up there. So, we're going to probably buy a ConX or something similar to you, throw some mats in it so we can be a little bit more regular. Yeah, that's all you need. I mean, we're building out a house right now on the land and it just, I mean, we were talking about, we got like a, you know, my garage in our house right now, I just overstacked. There's an ice bath, there's a sauna, there's overhead storage, there's fucking, there's a heavy bag, there's all the concept two gear like you can't fucking walk through there there's like one little strip where you could do kettlebell swings you know but it's just way too much so the next one

i'm like nothing's going in there we'll have one row overhead where i'll hang a couple heavy bags but the whole thing is going to get you know the pro job from fuji where you got the springboards you know the whole deal just like the olympic training center so you're throwing it around without worrying about them breaking their neck then, right? Exactly. Exactly. Toss their ass around. But I'm so looking forward to that because the kids are into it and there's other homeschooled kids that are all at the same gym, you know? So there's like a small group of kids that are all around the same age. They're getting that place to lock hard as well. And then all the adults as well, like as long as you got people to get on the mat with that's awesome because even teaching like i'm teaching the um the kids classes like teaching is such a refresher to ingrain the

fundamentals and the basics it's such an awesome component you know the sport and i think that as long as you've got a touch point where you can at least get on the mats with a few people like there's a lot to be gained in those experiences for sure. Yeah. And we're, we're kind of a little bit behind you guys. Like our kids are two and it'll be a year next week. So we have a two-year-old and a one-year-old. So, you know, my daughter is now just in that phase where she sees mommy and daddy working out every day and she'll come over and hang from the rings or do her squats or, you know, say, mom, dad, can we go work out now? So the next phase will be, she starts by drag her to jujitsu with me when I'm here and getting her curious. But

we're excited about that phase coming along as we start to really think about schooling and how we want to handle that. And I'm looking up to you and other folks that you and I both know, trying to figure out what that might actually look like in such a rural environment. Yeah. Well, I mean, Dr. Thomas Cowan was a massive influence on me for years, actually. He's one of the best. He wrote one of the best natural remedy books for childhood illnesses with Sally Fallon Murrell, the head of the Weston A. Price Institute, the Nourishing Traditions head of the Weston A. Price Institute, the Nourishing Traditions Book of Child and Baby Care. So I've been following him for years, had him on the podcast, and he talked about Ivan Illich in the book, Deschooling Society,

which was just like mind blower. Now unschooling is the thing, not even homeschooling, but really unschooling. He kept correcting me on that. So much to be gained from allowing our kids the space and freedom to do what they want. And then when they really start tracking what it is they're interested in, they'll accelerate beyond their peers. He had a N equals four experiment where a Waldorf teacher had left. She started schooling for four kids between the ages of 10 and 12. None of them could read or write at 10 and 12, completely unschooled. And they all had a deep desire at this point to learn. Within two years, they were taking college level courses

in the things they had an interest in and could read and write fluently. Every other minimum, they had surpassed their peers as well. So I find that to be incredibly interesting. And it's one small piece, but just coming from my background where I never really had a huge draw. I did school because I had to. There was nothing that excited me about it. And then only in the secondary career of fighting did I actually start to appreciate

education where I needed to learn things and I could apply them where I was like, damn, this is cool. Learning's cool. Never thought that growing up, never thought in college. So I think just giving them that gift and obviously, you know, we speak so much in that group about the gift of learning

how to think for yourself, you know, and not what to think, but how to think. I think those are super critical as well, but you got time. That's what I'm getting at. You got plenty of time to figure it out and see what's going to be right for you guys and there's pros and cons to all of it but um it is nice being able to take off the this is what we're supposed to do type shit you know with anything there is you know i think that's

one thing that covid really just burst the bubble of all like, this is what you do in society. It's like, oh, this shit is fickle. Like this could end in a heartbeat. Like, let's do what we want to do and just try it out and experiment. So that's super cool. Yeah, you know, we're up, bro. And like you said, there's a lot of time, but time goes by pretty damn quickly. But it is interesting.

And we'll talk about this in a bit, I'm sure. But where we're at, even with our two-year-old, the joke about her being feral is fun with my wife and I, but we can't keep her indoors, right? She wants to be outside with a stick more than a doll and fixing trees or chasing squirrels or looking at a moose or an elk or something outside. I ask her every morning, and this could just be her repeating things that I say, but I'm like, what did you dream about? And she's like, oh, I dreamt about deer last night. It's always an animal. And I'm like, what'd you do with the deer? She said, well, there was a mama deer, a baby deer. And that might be me projecting some of the things that I want her to take on, but it's just interesting. Because then when we come to the city, I ask her the same things

that it's different. She's not dreaming about animals the more when we're out in the woods. And I find that interesting. I don't know if there's any real meaning to that or not, but I'm excited to see and give the kids an opportunity to really explore, like you said, things that they enjoy or at least naturally drawn to. And for the kids, like my daughter would rather play in a mud puddle than anything else. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that either. Well, talk a little bit about, you know, you're an author, entrepreneur, talk about your business career, you know,

and that as well, just kind of leading you back out, out of the common, you know, common machine and into the wild. I think this is awesome. Yeah, I was a cog, man. I was a cog. I talk about that idea of suffering well. You know, I grew up, like I said, bucking trades, which I'm trying to make up for later in life, like, you know, relearning the well, do these different things that matter, especially where we're at, kind of homesteading a little bit more. But it was go to college, do this and succeed. It was, I was a nineties baby.

So, I mean, I was born in the eighties, really grew up in the nineties and it was, you know, an era of wealth and, you know, excess for the most part. So it was, if you go to college, you'll come out, you'll make a six figure job, you'll get your white picket fence, everything else like that.

So I followed that path with a little bit of deviation. And ultimately I got out of college, didn't know what I wanted to do. So I went overseas. I worked partly for the department of state and partly just for NGOs and teaching English all over the world. So I lived in Russia, Kyrgyzstan,

the Republic of Georgia, getting my ass kicked by wrestlers all along the way, which I can attest that being the sole American in a Russian or USSR wrestling gym is like the worst thing in the world. You're just ultimate punching bag. Ultimately, Vienna and then Saudi Arabia. So just really ran the gamut on

experience there. But I got the bug while traveling that I actually wanted to make money. And I didn't know what I wanted money for at the time. I was like, oh, cool. I'd love to be able to have the white picket fence, big house, all of that. So I followed that path hard. I started a company that failed and then after that company failed in the technology space I went into industry into technology

so I ended up going to IBM and ultimately weaseled my way somehow into working in IBM Watson kind of at its inception with machine learning and AI and then since then I've just been on a

really decades-long trajectory of working in some capacity or the other in artificial intelligence. Had some large companies, banking institutions, some of the biggest video streaming companies in the world, just building algorithms

that draw your attention to a screen, which is, there's a little bit of guilt there too, because it's a little bit, don't get high on your own supply, but I've been building all these things that garner attention. Like how do you build and monetize ads on a video network better? How do I get Kyle Kingsbury who's watching some streaming show to click on this ad and then convert. So it's all about data and those kinds of things. And it's a real dichotomy because as I started to get more curious and off-grid curious, I really started to see the detrimental effects of a lot of the stuff that we had been building over the last 10, 12 years. And it was almost more of the real push to say,

I need to find a balance. And the only way I can find a balance when I'm working with some of this technology every single day is to be so far off grid that when I close my laptop, I have no cells. So that was the trajectory of it. Yeah, that's damn incredible. I think that for people that don't necessarily have

access you know you think about that there there was i remember when i was at on it and i've told this story a number of times on this podcast but it is it is it does fucking crack me up because this is this is how modern the modern world is there was a study in japan uh i think they called it reforesting where where they studied depression. And if you went for a 30-minute walk three times a week in nature, that had like a 60% drop in all-cause depression. Whereas if you did it in the city, it had a much lesser effect, but it still had a positive effect because you're going for a walk and you're outside and you know they're talking about um plant pheromones and all this and how the way nature's intelligence speaks to us and interacts with our bodies the immune system all this stuff but it's just like that's how far removed we are that you gotta reforest or earthling grounding you take your fucking shoes off in the

grass and it's like yeah what of course of course um but it is such a it's like, yeah, what? Of course, of course. But it's such a phenomenal remedy. And I find even walking around, like our house right now is in the suburbs in Austin. Even just walking around here, there's all these new trees. Every house got planted with two oaks and a couple of them, there's crape myrtles and different flowering trees

that some people threw the curve ball and planted those. We've got a cotton one in front of our house that's massive. And like year after year, we've been here for three years. Like you watch these things grow. It's like watching kids grow, you know, but it was long before we started putting trees in the ground at the homestead. You know, this was like a way to track and watch nature and see the different birds coming through and things like that.

That is such a positive effect on me. Even if I'm doing 10 minute walks, 15, 20, 30 minute walks, like it's just like a, ah, there we go.

That's what I need. And to move in it, you know, to move in nature and then sit in nature, you know? So I, I totally get that. It speaks volumes.

Talking about, you know, your, your first book on AI, you know, the, the fake it till you make it style, really helping.

We got a lot of millennial listeners and I know that was geared towards millennials. Talk a bit about the premise of that and really what you expand on in that book. Hindsight's always an interesting thing. That was the first book I ever wrote and it was kind of on a whim. I knew I'd always wanted to write. I've always enjoyed journaling. Every time I was overseas, I always journaled. So I just have

stacks of journals. And as a kid, I always loved books. And growing up, I loved books. And my grandfather, again, not a hunter, not a outdoorsman per se, but relatively successful guy from a career perspective. And growing up, he's like, Zach, if you ever want to learn anything, get a book. And he made me a promise then, which was, if you ever want a book that is to further your education in any capacity, you know, it could be about holistic plant medicine or anything, he would buy it for me. And he stuck to that and I took full advantage of it. So I had one button that I could press essentially with my grandfather to get a book.

So whether it was wrestling tactics, which I took advantage of, buying those old books from Dan Gable books, things like that, all the way to the other end of the spectrum of Buddhism. I'd buy it and I'd read them. So I always had this love affair with books. I was like, you know what?

I'm in my mid twenties. I thought I knew everything. I'd had like a relatively successful beginning of my career. I still hadn't been into hunting. I still hadn't thought about living off the land, but I was achieving the things that I was told I was supposed to achieve. Have a white picket fence, get a house,

get a car payment, all that stuff. And I was like, well, this that stuff. And I was like, well, this is success. And I have a lot of friends who still haven't achieved that. So I kind of want to write a book. And it was all about mentorship, grit, resilience, all the kind of normal tropes. So it's not something, if you go back as a millennial, you can read it and hopefully glean something from it. But looking back, it was a little bit premature, right? It was one of those things where I hadn't really started to be tested. I thought I had been, and maybe I had comparatively, but it was a book that was more of ego-driven of just, hey, I need to write a book. I wanted to write a book. I know I have the capacity to

and get it out the door. The follow-on books are the ones where I feel like I've had a lot more lessons and information to give that is more valuable. But that's where that one originated from was just that I achieved all these things everybody was telling me to achieve. Here's a formula to follow if you want to do the same thing. And it was only later that I realized I never really wanted that in the first place. That's probably the most fucking honest answer I've ever heard an author on his own book review ever.

Like not just on my podcast, but period. So I appreciate that. Talk about how life started to shift and you get into hunting. I think the same thing happened to me. I was listening to Rogan's and obviously was a fan of his from from my mma career but he's such a great podcast you know and you see like the meat eater guys and uh john dudley was sponsored by on it you know when i was there running the on it podcast i'm like let's get

fly fucking dudley in and he's always coming to houston for a a charity event for hurricane harvey and then he's going to be in austin atery Country, this really cool archery spot down in Austin. And I was like, fuck yeah, man. I want to meet him. And I podcasted with him and he ended up building me my first bow and giving it to me. It happened to be my birthday. And that was like, that's like fucking Lance Armstrong building you a bike and handing it over to over to you I was just like damn dude so that got me into archery and it's funny really that was probably in 20 that was 2018 and um really took bow hunting seriously practiced a lot and then when 2020 happened I kind of did the opposite most people get so good with the with the rifle they're like this is boring let me go to the bow and i loved the bow but but seeing 2020 and all

the shit in the world was like it's gotta be i i kind of like the idea of uh being able to shoot something at a mile i kind of like the idea of just having a little bit more uh protection up my sleeve you know for for for anything that may arise in the world so that's what really you know was the transition for me in that direction but But yeah, the influence of that, the, the really the, the bringing up, you know, the rekindling of the hunting space, my, all my relatives hunted. My dad's the oldest of five. He's got two brothers. I'd go with them on hunting trips when I was a kid and then football and then fighting and just never had time for it. So really got, got into it in the last like five years. And it is something like the moment you get into it, you realize there's

something here and there's something here that's been missing that it can't get anywhere else. You know, like Aubrey's talked with me a lot about fighting. Like there's something I can't get doing anything. You see this with, you know, guys like Andy Stump and different high level military folks when they come out, you know, they can't get the thing they had. So they're looking for something else that's kind of close. and i feel like hunting is one of those primal things where like you only get it there you know and and there's a benefit to you know shooting arrows at a target and just getting in the zen moment but it's still you know like when you've got an animal in front of you it's a whole different fucking thing yeah uh well it sounds like you and I started about the same time right. It's almost like that grounding.

It's almost, when you get into it, it's like, duh, this was here this whole time. Why was I not taking advantage of it? What was the blockers to keep me from understanding that this is just kind of a natural space and natural tendency to be into? And once you open Pandora's box on that, it's really hard to pull back, right? It's this natural thing, like you might've got into it from influencers just like I did. And you might be like, okay, this will be like a fun little hobby. But second you pull that string back or, you know, you start to, you know, use your

six by cream more and you put a round in the chamber and close it and you look down that scope, 500 yards downrange, you hear the clinking of that steel. There's something deeper to it than just the surface, hey, I want to go kill an animal, right? And that's what that journey really starts to open up. And I don't think many people come back out of it, right? It's still, like you said, fighting.

15 years on, I'm still dragging myself to the gym and it's something primal about either being choked or getting to choke somebody. And it taps into something primal, I think. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I've had longer stretches than I wanted after getting my black belt where I wasn't training often. I'd get hurt with an inside heel hook, doing no-gi and fucking take me out for eight months or a year with stem cells, just a fucking shit injury. And I'm kicking myself in the ass for the injury, that kind of thing. And so I'd take more time off but we finally got a good jiu-jitsu gym and we found a really good boxing gym well black sheet boxing where we'll head in just for once a week and

we'll do a lot of drills a lot of tabata stuff john hackleman taught me chuck goodell's old coach and then and then we'll spar light but like seeing he's seeing a fist come out your fucking face like there's nothing you get at 24-hour fitness that remotely compares to that there's no trail run trail runs dope yeah there's no trail run where you have a fist flying in your face or where someone's trying to rip your arm off. Those are categories that can only be reached in and of themselves. You can't get that anywhere else.

And I think that is, if you boil it down, it's consequences. Right? And for me, I was always fabricating consequences, maybe subconsciously. Like, I was always fabricating consequences, maybe subconsciously. Like I sought out wrestling and then it was jujitsu.

And I'm surprised we didn't overlap because I was at the 10th Planet Gym there when the old Onnit or the old Onnit Gym for quite a while before they moved across the street. I don't know where they're at now, but this was like 2015 or something. Right across the street. That was two years before I got here. I got here in 2017.

Okay. So I was there right before you, but we were there for quite a while. But it was always manufactured. I'd go on these long ultra endurance runs. It was like, there was some need inside of me to constantly suffer well. Getting back to that point, I always felt like I had to suffer to get some type of good. And then as the hunting space came up and just to paint a little more color is my ex-wife and I, we had the white picket fence. We had a luxury home. We had all the bills covered. It's great to a certain degree. But I started getting just turned off to all of that as I started getting more into hunting. And part of it too was also my ex-wife's job. She was an FBI special agent. She worked violent crimes against kids. So it was like this weird intersection of dinner parties where we had to hear about the worst things you could ever imagine happening to kids everywhere.

And also just this pull for me to be out in the woods and like starting to realize that this, you know, white picket fence lifestyle, it just wasn't for me. And those two things coming to a head and then ultimately, you know, she and I ended up getting divorced, you know, led me down this path of just, hey, all in, I can't take this anymore. I'm going to keep my high-tech job and move out to the woods. Yeah, that's a big, big catalyst. Yeah. So talk about how the,

I mean, you've been alluding to it, but talk a little bit about how the writing shifted and the things that you're into now. You've got Turning Feral. You've got a couple of novels here. Bone Scraper series. Break those down, brother. Yeah. Yeah. No. So Turning Feral is all about me doing exactly that. So after those first few years that I started to dabble in hunting, learning how to bow hunt, my ex-wife and I, we got a divorce and we had no kids. So I was at a crossroads. I had been to Idaho once in

an off chance trip and I'd seen every game animal that I ever thought I could want to hunt, meaning elk, antelope, deer, wolf, bear, a whole lot. And so when that happened, I pointed the car north and I just drove to Boise and I got a month to month-month rental and I started looking at properties all over the state. Tried to close on one, that was where Lewis and Clark first unfurled the flag west of the Rockies, but that fell through. And I ended up in a little town called Atlanta, Idaho. It is, like I said, the most remote town in lower 48.

We're at the end of a 70 mile dirt road that's either usually in the winter avalanched in or rocks slid in in the summer. There's no grocery store, no gas station. We have natural hot springs, a river that runs through town. And my back door of our cabin opens up to 3000 acres of public land where I began to cut my teeth on learning how the hell to live off grid, failing miserably every single corner and learning to hunt and trap. So it was just this natural evolution after that catalytic event of divorce. And then things just kind of snowballed from there, literally and figuratively.

And what timeline, paint the picture of the timeline because 2020 was like a massive one, no matter what, jabbed or not jabbed, no matter where you sit, it was a fucking, it was a rollercoaster ride for everyone on the entire planet. I think collectively, the most important point in our lives, but certainly in recorded history, potentially. 2019. So I was right before the pandemic so it was you know everything was hunky-dory in the u.s um where we were living things were going great um the unexpected divorce happened and then i went north and i had about eight months before the pandemic hit so i had really just closed on the cabin maybe two or

three months before the pandemic hit. And thankfully, I was starting to date my now wife and mother of my children and had convinced her to drive four hours with no cell phone signal to check out this cabin in the middle of nowhere. And she obviously has very terrible judgment, but I don't hold that against her. And, you know, really, it was such an interesting time to try to go off grid because, you know, up in Atlanta, where we were at, you would never have known the pandemic happened. You know, there were 38 people, you know, meeting aid was a little higher. So, you know, at some point you see a mask or two, but overall it was just nothingness. And then we had this really sharp contrast of going back into Boise, which is the nearest large town. And, you know, we'd come out after a couple months into the pandemic and, you know, we're like, all right, shit's going sideways. People are fighting over toilet paper. Let's make a grocery run. And you go in and it's just chaos. So it was a really interesting place to be right as the pandemic kicked off. But it was also one of the best places to be because largely we were unaffected and we rode it out the whole time up there. So it was a time in the woods with nobody. People

weren't really traveling up there that much and it was just emptiness. And it was a great place for me to heal and start to grow a new family during that time period. But it was interesting because I did not have the same experience that most people had during the pandemic. Yeah, that sounds like the perfect place to be in.

Did that spawn a lot of writing having that much time to yourself in nature of course yeah so you know what happened with the turning pharaoh book is you know i learned everything the hard way so i was out trapping hard which has kind of become my favorite thing you know even above hunting which is trapping prefer because we were trying to a get meat through hunting and trapping, but also learn how to build our own furs and clothing if we ever needed to. Not that we actively build buckskin jackets for our kids. We're not that crazy, I guess you could say. But knowing how to and how to turn things into leather for other items we might want to use around our little homestead. But the ability to

focus all in on that aspect and learning those trades, especially you kind of just on the periphery where we're seeing the world go to shit, you're like, well, this is the best time to learn how to be really self-sufficient, right? Like, you know, doesn't matter that I'm learning it the hard way that I'm getting my hand caught in traps that I'm letting animals go or, you know, missing deer and elk and everything else. I felt like I had such a long runway because it looked like things

were never going to turn back around. So again, perfect place to just learn. And I had two years without much interference of anybody else to come in and, you know, just learn. And I had two years without much interference of anybody else to come in and just learn the hard way, which is something I do very well. That's awesome. And so you got this nice chunk of time, obviously, I think I was in the same boat. I don't remember who I was talking to about the fear. Fear was a big catalyst for me to want to homestead and do these things, having kids.

I was like, well, shit, man, grocery stores could close. They may tell us if you don't have a fucking digital ID and a VaxPass, you can't come into the grocery store. All these timelines are available to us. And a lot of them I was looking at, I didn't like, you know, and so it, it, it did work out incredibly well, um, for us to, to be on the property that we're on and be surrounded by the people in the team that we have. I mean, it's, it's, it couldn't have gone better. Yeah. But, uh, here, you know, I really, I really can thank fear for that, which is an odd thing to say, you know, like it's an odd thing to look back and be like, yeah, man, fear lit a fire into my ass and that was a good thing. Yeah. And to the writing

point, you know, I worked with Tucker on my book, Turning Feral, and we sat together and we were talking about personas and who are you writing to? So in this space where I'm up there trapping full-time, hunting full-time and thinking about who am I writing this book for? And it was for my former self. And it was that reflection of now that I had kids, if I looked back on the Zach that was, the white picket fence, I thought I was tough, doing jujitsu, ultra running, all these different things.

But if you peeled back all the bullshit and you said, if everything shut down, the grid, grocery stores were shut, that person that I was writing to would have to admit to themselves that their kids would die. And that was a really hard thing for me to come to terms because I realized that for myself, even if I hit a deer with my car, I wanted to know how to turn that into real food for my kids. I'd throw it on a fire and hope I could salvage something that would be edible for them and provide nutrients. But I didn't know how to garden. I didn't know anything. I was so reliant on everything, this whole

ecosystem that has been built up in the US, which as amazing as it is, it has bred this idea of reliance. And there's so many people I know, so many people that have either read the book or have reached out curious about it. They're like, I felt the same way. And that is now, you know, hopefully in a lot of cases, given people the nudge to say, like, it's going to suck to learn, but you can go learn little bits and bobs. You can go to your local butcher or a local farm and see what the process is like to actually take an animal's life and turn it into food. But that was the exercise overall in that space. I had time to write and I wanted to write to other

people who were just like me and let them know, like, you can learn. Like YouTube, everything else, there are resources out there that can make it easier than the way I learned, which was just, you know, hardheadedness in the woods, but it's available to you. And your kids don't have to die if everything shuts down, if you take a little bit of a proactive stance. Yeah, I think one of the big nudges for me

was just that, like, how can I, what's the minimum effective dose for me to do to where I can sleep a little easier at night, especially regarding the kids, you know? And as it turns out, you know, Tucker said this, he's like, we could be completely wrong. All this shit could go smooth going forward. We may never have another world war.

It may be just fucking turn out to be some type of weird utopia. And we're completely wrong. And he like but would i would i have any regrets about starting a biodynamic farm or teaching my kids survival skills getting them outdoors more he's like fuck no absolutely not you know and i feel the same way the benefit though is in the act itself you know like you i spend time doing jujitsu and i still go in spa and boxing not with the thought that i'm going to get into a fight on the street that's a that's i think i'm covered there with the fighting career but but it's not for that it's because there's there's something in the act itself that is fulfilling right i think anything we when we

talk about survival skills homesteading learning learning how to clean, clean and kill your own animal, how do you preserve that animal? Do you know how to make pemmican? What are your recipes? Any of these things, all of that, there's something in that experience in itself that makes it awesome right now. And then also, it's a nice, if shit is the fan, then it's going to be really important to know as well. Yeah. And it's weird because it was always viewed as the prepper community, right? And it was always taboo. And it's been awesome to see a little bit of that tabooness lifted from it. And it's just practicality. We're all going back to the dirt at some point and realizing that and realizing that if you can work with what's available naturally, you could probably survive if everything else goes to shit, like you said. And so many people's eyes are open to that now. And like you said, even just the act of it,

the act of learning that never say die mentality of like, I'm never going to know it all, but I want to just continue to learn. And there's so much, like it is the ultimate overwhelming experience when you start to lift the rug around self-sustainability. It makes you appreciate everything that our country has built over the last hundred plus years. Like it's amazing what all is available that you can go five minutes from your house to an HEB and you can get roasted green chilies and salsa and anything else you want ready-made. But like you said, that might not always be there.

And that mentality has been shown to the whole world with the pandemic. And many people have already forgotten it, which is amazing to me. It is. mentality has been shown to the whole world with the pandemic. And many people have already forgotten it, which is amazing to me. It is total amnesia in a lot of regards, but I think a lot of people have really glommed on to the fact that, oh yeah, that was like a year ago that people were getting in fistfights over toilet paper. Yeah, I'm going to be a little bit more forward thinking in how I move forward with my family.

And that's where we're at. Not full on prepper, but man, we are trying to learn every little bit and bob to be self-sufficient as we can be. And it's a test every day. And one that I fail more times than not. Well, I'm curious, you know, with with so much and that's kind of the same boat i was in even just from a farm standpoint i was like you got rudolph steiner's biodynamics

you've got all the greats you know in regenerative agriculture from savory and these different guys of animal rotation and plant animal husbandry and then you've got you know seth sepholter and these different folks richard perkins you know big in the permaculture space it's like there's you could it's a phd in each one of these little avenues and there is some some overlay between them that was like holy shit i've got so much to learn so fucking quick you know and then and it really was just letting my own north star you know where does my desire bring me to? What do I want to learn next? Who am I going to learn it from? Can I share this with other people in the process?

And I think that's really been the only way that I've had a direction in any of this because you can go in all directions. Talk a bit about when you finally got your place in Northern Idaho, was it just that? Was it desire or was it like, oh, there's a community here that's into beaver pelts. Maybe I should learn that. Talk a little bit about your process and figuring out what to do first. Yeah, it was circumstance, definitely. When I came to Idaho post-divorce, as most men going through that can probably relate, I was going out with the mentality of, fuck everything, I'm gonna be Jeremiah Johnson.

I'm gonna be a mountain man. I wasn't looking for the next relationship. I had no kids, I had no ties. It was just, I'm gonna go live in the woods. How quickly that unraveled is amazing. Mostly by just the sheer fact that to live somewhere where we live, so remote, like there does, there has to be a community aspect. And I quickly found that out in our little town of 38

people. And I talk a bit about it in the book, but I didn't even know how to keep a fire going in my wood-burning stove. I didn't grow up with wood-burning stoves. So I didn't realize the flu on my little wood-burning fireplace was shut. So I kept trying to build these fires and it's like negative 14 degrees out. Fire kept dying in the middle of the night and I'd be so frustrated. I'd be jackhammering the floor cold with a blanket trying to figure out how to keep a fire going all night,

tending it. I'm like, well, this sucks. How the hell did people used to do this, trying to sit up and blow on a fire all night? Lo and behold, it was a simple fix, but it took that kind of stripping away of my ego to eventually go ask a neighbor who came over and haughtily laughed at me for a little while, say, hey, dumbass, I have a flu, fire needs oxygen, right? So that gives any, created to the level I was working at, it was brand new.

So, you know, it was that community building aspect that started to kind of decide where my interests went. And for us up in central Idaho, you know, we have a lot of fur bearing animals that are causing destruction. And a lot of the old time trappers that used to live in Atlanta, you know, were no longer trapping. So there was no balance to it. So they're like, Hey Zach, like, I know you're into hunting. You're trying to learn all this mountain man stuff. What about trapping? I'm like, well, it was kind of in the back of my head, but not an interest. And mentors pulled me out and said, let me take you out. And they really seeded that to say, beaver, which is my favorite thing to trap and hunt in the world is,

A, you can use the pelts for all sorts of really cool stuff. The meat is great. You know, the glands you can sell for a profit and, you know, beavers, what the West was founded on, right? For the felt hats, for the glands and perfumes and food additives. I mean, beaver castrum oil was used in vanilla extract up until like 10 years ago, right? So it was just this ultimate resource, which interested me just from an academic perspective. And then it just spread from there. And now it's starting to take the path where you're at, where we've done the hunting, we've done the trapping, I'm into the long range shooting now. But where we're at, it's like, okay,

well, what about gardening and animal husbandry? And I'm just now kind of starting to scratch the surface of that. But it was community that led me on my path of, you know, touching on these different PhD areas and seeing what worked for me and what didn't work for me. And, you know, now we're knocking on the door of the whole other echelon of just craziness and complicatedness that just makes you feel like you're drowning at all points. But hopefully you come up with some sort of plant you can eat at the end of the day or leverage. Yeah. Some stuff will do really well and some stuff's not going to do it. And that's just the nature of the beast. We did a whole, we had Chad Johnson, who was a Sepp Holzer understudy out and really figured out our food forest he was the soul behind it and uh we did our first permaculture

course with him and we got totally screwed on soil we bought a bunch of compost you know and most guys will say like if you squeeze the compost it should form like a cat turd and just it just stay right there as a cat turd like it doesn't it doesn't change you know and um we built out this whole you know small market garden, but we got, I think, 10 rows of food that we put in and nothing was growing. We're like, what the hell is going on? We went back to this extra stash we had of this really good compost we just bought, and it was fucking dirt.

We were squeezing it, and it was not clumping. It was falling through our hands like sand. I was like, damn, dude, damn. It was falling through our hands like sand. And I was like, damn, dude, damn. That whole year's garden is shit. So we started relocating stuff into our berms where the food forest is. And thankfully we've had tomatoes and squashes take off because that is really good, healthy soil. But yeah, it's funny. There's something like that or one of our sprinklers goes down, a row of sprinklers goes down.

We lost 50 trees our first year out of 400, just because a row went down and we didn't, we caught it too late in the summer and they were gone. Um, so there's, there's shit like that. You know, we, we brought all our sheep out, probably the only people in Texas that, that put a food source in the land without protection. It's like, Oh, we got game fence, you know, and lose six in one night to coyotes. We're like, Oh no, oh no. All right. So it is hit the ground running and you learn the hard way, but it is pretty cool. I mean, it's one of the most rewarding things on planet earth.

The only way I can compare it is to actually having kids. Like you have kids, like you're the food forest and even the animals require so much attention when they're new and they're young. And at a certain point, they're like teenagers. They're like, fuck you, dad. I got this. I'm cool now. I don't really need your help anymore and assistance.

But getting to that point is like having a newborn and a toddler and all these different phases that he goes through. So and then, yeah, incredibly rewarding. We had our first, this year, we had our first peach that was ripened on the tree. Like all any fruit you'd ever eat in a grocery store, it doesn't matter how organic, biodynamic, no matter what it is, it's always pulled early so it can ripen in the bag. So like letting it vine ripe and letting it literally get ripe on the tree

is going to have the most nutrition content. It also tastes a lot different. It was the first time I had to experience that at 41 years old. I was like, holy shit shit there's something to this you know isn't that such an eye-opening experience you know i like you got into stuff later in life and um you know my now wife's family she's russian so they're emigres they came over here you know right after the fall of the Soviet Union. And they grew up with farms.

And they have a little place out in Nampa, Idaho. And they have fruit trees and everything else like that. For our daughter to go and pick those things, buy and ripen. And she'll, at two years old, will call out the difference. She's like, this tastes better than the peach we bought at the grocery store. And I'm the same as you. Like I grew up on store-bought food. So like those, you don't know what you didn't miss. And then, you know, you're 41, I'm 36.

It's, you think, what have I missed my whole life? And you almost feel like you have to play catch up a little bit to kind of get these things and make sure you at least give it to your kids. But it does make you curious. Like, what have we done? Like all this great infrastructure we built, like what the hell have we done? Yeah. There's a big, there's a, I mean, we're disconnected in so many ways. I think, you know, that just from, from the screen game, one thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, is that I've had, you know,

James Schmachtenberger on his brothers with Daniel Schmachtenberger. They're a part of some pretty big think tanks that really focus on existential risk, you they're kind of a jack of all trades and weighing the scales of different things and maybe not necessarily an ace in any one particular thing. Having spent as much time in AI as you have, where do you see that potentially? I mean, I read Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence, and he talks about a thousand different ways this can go awry. But I think with somebody like yourself who spent so much time in the game, where do you see real threads that are a little bit, maybe not as far out there as a,

what was it, a paperclip machine that ruins the world to make paperclips because it has no end function? Maybe not that far-fetched, but just in learning what you know about the machine learning and the algorithms and how ads are set up and different things like that, the influence that it has on us, where do you see this as a problem in the near future and maybe the far future? Yeah, my kind of normal joke about this

is there's a reason I live in a cabin at the end of an 80-mile road. You know, being a little too much, I guess. I'm not as bullish as a lot of people, to be honest, right? Like, it is, the math for artificial intelligence has been around since the 50s. We're just at an inflection point where the compute power, right, the actual physical hardware able to run large data sets

through algorithms that have been thought of for years is coming to fruition. That's why you have things like ChatGPT. Really booming the last year, you have the company NVIDIA who went from a $1 billion market cap company to $3 trillion or something like that in the last year because they build the chips and everything that power you know the ability to run these algorithms so it's not like it's new things right it's just the application of them um i am more bullish that there will always be human interaction and intervention in a lot of these things which will keep a little bit of the nefarious purposes away but at the same time there are people at the helm and some of those people, you know, want nefarious things. Like you see the ability and where I get concerned, right? The ability to

target ads or, you know, news articles at vulnerable individuals who might not be able to discern what is or isn't either a real piece of information or they just don't understand the concept of targeting and are able to kind of let it go. I have experience there. So I know when I'm getting certain ads for certain reasons, people think, oh yeah, I was talking about such and such yesterday and all of a sudden I got an ad for it today. It's not that things are listening to you. It's like your actual behavior across all your devices, everything you're interacting with is being fed into some model somewhere for a company to be able to take an action and give you that well of a targeted ad. And that's scary. I'm more worried about the kids

and my kids and their interaction and limiting how their digital footprint is being used. And that's where, and I don't have an answer for this, to really answer. I'm just kind of opining here a little bit. It's these generations that are

coming up where their digital footprint is being tracked constantly, whether your kid's on YouTube Kids or wherever, there is a pattern being built there that some company that is funding that can use to then target them in a meaningful way for them, not necessarily for your kids. And you and I, we probably got a DSL connection in our 20s or something, right? And the world was open and it was great, but even companies back then didn't know how to handle the data that was being produced. So we largely don't have a big digital footprint, but now you have companies who are from you know, from the jump now know how to handle data, how to annotate it and hold it in a way that can actually feed into a machine learning algorithm meaningfully. And that's going to be detrimental for our kids. And figuring out a way

to limit that is vital. And I don't know how that happens. I don't know if it does happen. And that's what's scariest to me is the impact on the youth and how everything is just going to be a materialistic push for consumerism that is not necessary or meaningful. Have you studied much on Steiner and Lucifer and Armand? So I'm about two and a half hours into that podcast. So let's go. Paul Chex podcast. I'll link to that in the show notes.

Yeah, it's funny. I don't know if you've had a chance to read that short story I sent back to. If you do get a chance. I was like one page in and then had the kids come in on me while I was on the shitter. But I do want to pick it up. It looks really good. Well, it's interesting because the whole idea like Ehrman and the technology aspect is, it seems so, again, you hear these things and you've, you know, I grew up in a traditional Christian household. I kind of bucked the system. I went and studied Buddhism overseas. I studied

Islam when I lived in Saudi Arabia, you know, trying to find my own path and kind of bucked the system. I went and studied Buddhism overseas. I studied Islam when I lived in Saudi Arabia, trying to find my own path and kind of circled back to Christianity and some of the elements and principles that are just aligned there fundamentally. practices and everything else I hadn't heard of that so it's interesting to see the alignment with some of these consumerism technology related roles that fit so well that line with that Lucifer and how you know the kind of guiding Christ principle underneath can help pull some of that back but um two and a half hours in it's a little mind-blowing so I don't have an opinion it's one of those things that I, I looked at my wife the other day, I went on a walk in the morning and was listening to it.

And I came back, she's like, you look funny. I'm like, my head hurts. In all the positive ways, right? But it was, yeah, I don't have a good answer for that. Well, no, that's just why, I mean, it is mind-blowing. The level of what Steiner knew 100 years ahead of time is utterly fucking mind-blowing. Like, it's kind of like, is that real? Like, holy shit. Like, this guy had this, it was that dialed in.

I mean, he created Waldorf education. He created biodynamic farming. He didn't create biodynamic farming, but he brought it into the consciousness. That was going on before, and he was able to really display, you know, these are the principles and practices that make something biodynamic, our relationship with nature. I mean, 118, he wrote on a hundred, lectured on 118 different topics and he had over 300, you know, books made from his lectures. I mean, it's just remarkable.

Yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes. It's five hours long. It's mind blowing, but it is, it's, it's completely in yeah we'll link to that in the show notes it's five hours long it's mind-blowing but it is it's it's completely in alignment you know with with some of the fears of what we would have you know and i share those fears um did you ever see the creepy line it's a documentary on google no it's on it's on amazon prime oddly enough but it's a very good documentary and it really just shows like, like Google from the inside out. And there's a lot of shit, you know, we know, um, from tracking and stuff like that. And there's a lot of stuff that will blow people's minds. Um, but it does kind of flow into that. You know, you hear like the heads of these companies basically saying like, we want to know you

better than you so we can deliver you the best product. And it seems cool on paper, you know? And then you're like, well, imagine growing up in that, what discernment would you have if things are like, I mean, they're already easier to get, you know, like I want to teach, teach my kid how to hunt. I want to teach him how to, how to, he's with me. He sat on my lap, Bear sat on my lap when he was four at a bison harvest at Rome Ranch. And that was a powerful moment for him. And we got to pray over the animal and thank the animal. And, and every time we ate that animal, he knew exactly where it came from and he knew what it took to bring that animal to us.

But that's a disconnect. There's so many things that we get disconnected from, you know, and so you think about that, like then when it's just handed to us, like you're talking hand pans or whatever the thing is, you know, and it shows them like, oh, that's cool. This thing coincidentally just showed up in my feed.

You know, I've really been thinking about it a lot lately. So I bought one. I hope that they have the discernment that's necessary to be able to know when they can unplug, when they can't. I think that's a part of our job as parents is to make sure that they have balance in that, right? The Christ principle, the middle way, they have balance to disconnect and the softness to meditate just to let everything clear and come to a stillness point so that they can have more intelligence, more of their innate ability to intuit what's happening. And are they being influenced in different directions? If so, how? And what does that middle path actually look like? Yeah, I think finding that out is so vital because otherwise it goes the other direction. And spoiler alert for that depiction of the future, where we're at today,

but everybody is retreated underground. Everybody is provided for by the machine. Everybody has their own room. You give birth, your kid gets another room somewhere else on earth where it's allotted for them. And all they do is higher education. So all they do is lectures and philosophy. They don't touch the earth. They're fed through tubes and they think and have been taught now that the earth above them, that's for the wild man. Nobody wants that. And naturally, a son starts to talk to his mother and he starts to have these questioning thoughts and the mother starts to get concerned. And she gets so frustrated that she has to fly from her pod,

which is somewhere like New Delhi, all the way over to wherever he's at, which would be like present day Argentina. And she's flying in this earth ship. So he like predicted air travel. And they've been FaceTiming through like their screens, predicted that but she's flying and the whole story is about her looking down at like the Himalayas and the earth

and she's just like that's so disgusting like why you know why would anybody ever want that goes and see her their son and her son's like mom there's more to this like I want to go to the surface and she's like crazy whatever lets him go The rest of the story is the sun kind of getting to the surface and, you know, being taught that, you know, air is bad, but, you know, the system under the earth starts to shake and, you know, people start dying in their pods and this guy gets up and realizes there's other people who had escaped and, you know, we're living back in an Eden of sorts

of saying, like, we're back to earth. Like, that was all a lie. It was all a facade to satiate people and just have a machine run. And it's pretty amazing and telling between him and Steiner. And we're living it now, which is what's scary.

And I think having that wherewithal, it's so easy to look and say, okay, I'm being a little bit overdramatic. Look at everything we have. It's so easy to be satiated and just fall back on those old habits. But again, building those little skills along the way, I think will go so far

because we're living that reality now between Lucifer, Eremon, the Christ principle and everything else that tech is pushing on us. It's hard to not need to go and learn these different aspects that you're learning, I'm learning, other people in our social groups are learning. And wish for the best. Yeah. Yeah, brother.

Well, I think, you know, it is where I've gone back and forth the last three years between pure panic to hope and somewhere in between. And the thing that's given me more hope is actually having skills. It's actually doing these things and reconnecting to the earth, opening up the channels to listen to nature and to opening up the channels of spirit to guide me. I think we're at a pivotal point. Most people would recognize that, especially listening to the podcast. We're at a pivotal point, but we do have full agency in determining where we go. That's an important piece not to let go of. We have full agency in determining where this goes.

And it's really our choice. I don't think it's that I had Robert Forte on the podcast and he said, it didn't turn out to be 1984. It turned out to be more like Brave New World, right? Because we're drawn in, we're allured into the trap and even in that though they still have the savages who live out in nature outside of the big cities and so i'm even in in that you know a dystopian future that he wrote about there were still people that lived amongst the land you know that they just considered savages and they had their weird superstitions and shit like that he kind of shits on them he shits on everybody in his own way, if you read it. But that gives me hope

too, because it's like, even in the worst possible outcome, there's still people that are saying, no, we're going to do it differently. And they're still allowed to. Yeah. That's the goal. And I think you're on that path. I'm on that path. I think so many more Americans and people worldwide are on that path and it was something to be celebrated in my mind. Of course, the circles we run into or run in, right? Savagery has always been like the, yeah, get it. But there's something to it. So, you know, as people start to explore these things, my only advice would be try these things, you know, whatever it is you're interested in, whether it's small garden in your backyard,

if you live in an apartment, do something on your balcony. If it's wanting to be closer to your food source, do a hunting camp if you have the means to do it where you can go and learn and be guided. Just start to pick up those skills. Like you said, it's skills. It's skills that give you the confidence.

I have a very small subset of those and I'm building on them. But even with that small subset of self-sufficiency skills, you know, I can honestly say that I'm not that persona I was when I wrote the book. Like if shit hits the fan, my kids aren't going to die. You know, we're going to be able to figure it out. I can feed my family.

And that gives me the most confidence to tackle any other thing that I'm doing. It's the basics are covered and we'll be okay for extended period of time, you know, say for nuclear fallout or, you know, step out of my control. Hell yeah, brother. Well, it's been, it's been great having you on the podcast. We'll definitely do it again. We'll link to your books in the show notes. And what's your website? Where can people follow you online? Yeah. So Instagram at let me die learning.

It's kind of a new thing for me. I finally jumped back into the water there, sadly. Um, but it's been a good, good venue for kind of books and showing some of the stuff we're doing off the land. Other than that, uh, my website's Zachary Hanson dot me follow me there as well. So those are kind of the two main sources. Beautiful brother. Well, I, so I is ZacharyHanson.me. Follow me there as well. So those are kind of the two main sources. Beautiful, brother. Well, I appreciate your time, Zach. This will be up in a couple of weeks. Much appreciated, brother. Thank you.