Modern Wisdom - #481 - Tim Kennedy - Lessons Learned Through Pain

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Tim Kennedy is a Green Beret, Special Forces Sniper, Army Ranger and Professional MMA Fighter. Tim has spent most of his life fighting. Whether that's been against kids in kindergarten, Special Forces selection officers, UFC champions, enemy combatants, ISIS, or his own compulsion to make a mess of his life. He's seen his fair share of pain and discovered a lot of insights through it. Expect to learn whether Tim has ever used BJJ in a combat situation, what motivates him to put himself through the discomfort he's endured, why he refused pain killers throughout his entire MMA career, why he swam a mile out to sea after getting two women pregnant and thinking he had AIDS and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get £250 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Scars & Stripes - https://amzn.to/3z1bons Follow Tim on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/timkennedymma/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tim Kennedy. He's a Green Beret, Special Forces sniper, Army Ranger and a professional MMA fighter. Tim has spent most of his life fighting, whether that's been against kids in kindergarten, Special Forces selection officers, UFC champions, enemy combatants, ISIS or his own compulsion to make a mess of his life. He's seen his fair share of pain and discovered a lot of insights through it.

Expect to learn whether Tim has ever used Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in a combat situation, what motivates him to put through the discomfort he's endured, why he refused painkillers throughout his entire MMA career, why he swam a mile out to sea after getting two women pregnant and thinking he had AIDS, and much more. Tim does seem to me like the sort of person that is moving at a million miles an hour. The kind of person that I think is a very, very good example that can kind of be sent out as a scout to work out what it's like to live a very specific type of life and then come back and tell the rest of us. Although you might not want to live the life that he's lived, I think it's like to live a very specific type of life and then come back and tell the rest of us. Although you might not want to live the life that he's lived, I think it's difficult to deny that there are interesting lessons

that you can take from someone that's been to the extremes of, of pretty much everything that there is to do. I do appreciate him. I've spent a good bit of time with him since I've been out here in Austin and every time that I'm with him, I learn something new. So I really hope that you enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, I did make it. I'm pumped. Thank you. What's happening? Just busy be as ever. Get ready for this book and expanding freedom, preserving, protecting human life. Man, just like the purpose of man, I guess.

And you've done a lot and then reading the book. It feels like you've lived maybe between four and five lifetimes to fit everything in. Yeah, my mom is absolutely positive that if like reincarnations a real thing, I'm a cat and that I have died nine times already and that I've broken the cat nine life rule because clearly I should have been dead more than nine times already and I've lived at least nine lives. Yes, talk to me about what's driving you through childhood to get to where you are now, the sort of person

that's in front of me. Yeah, the, I'm dumb, that's a big, a big, a That's a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big,

big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big idea and like it didn't matter as a young man without a fully developed frontal lobe, you know, like making lots of bad decisions. I still kept moving, right? Even almost drowning when I was, I don't know, trying to kill myself or not, but swimming out into the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles, just trying to like get another chance at life. I just kept swimming, you know, getting blown up in Afghanistan, just kept moving. You know, like pissing off my teammates in Iraq, being a young, ignorant, narcissist, I just kept moving.

So, you know, just kind of this adventure that is life that's fulfill your and lots of struggles in my life, I just kept moving. Do you know what that comes from? Is that something that's just in you. Do you know what that comes from? Is that something that's just in you that you feel like that's herited? I think a little nature and a little nurture, you know, my family, I'm surrounded by greatness.

You know, my grandpa came from the greatest generation, you know, World War II hero, you know, literally drop bombs on Nazis type guy and survived the Great Depression, you know, the patriarch of our family and setting everything up and then my dad, the heroic book undercover narcotics officer, big brother, all my uncles, Vietnam War, like I'm surrounded by great. From strong genetics, I'm not that. Yeah, just like some strong stuff. And then in the environment that I grew up in, ordinary was just not accepted.

Like plain average was just not ever an allowed state of being. You know, it was a high achievers and everywhere I looked and Doing anything else besides the best that you could do was just not enough Did you always know that you wanted to be in the army? Yes, yeah, yeah, I was at North County Christian School the same school that This jerk made fun of Laura LaCarrie because she had a new haircut that looked kind of boyish and she had him on her mom for putting that bowl on her head and then cutting her hair, but that's what happened.

And he made fun of her and I followed him up onto the play scape and I punched him his mouth and I pushed him off which broke his arm and I got paddled in the... How old are you? That was four. Yeah, and, but in the same time period, we journaled, like, and I still have this journal today. It's like this little tiny, you know, like, it has wallpaper glued on the outside of it. I'm not sure if all kindergarteners,

or kindergarten made their kindergarteners do this, but inside of it, it's like, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And like, who is your family? What does your house look like? And you draw all these things. And what do I wanna be when I grow up? Is a picture of a camouflage guy jumping out of an airplane.

And a dude wearing a martial art key, doing karate. You're kidding me. I'm dead serious. So, there's a couple of things that are happening here. One, I very, very early on, new, right and wrong. And then I was going to stand up to Bollies and two, I kind of knew what I wanted to become. And the journey to become that was long, arduous meandering. Yeah.

That's right. I got distracted. Lots of liven. Yeah. Before I finally, but I got penalized every time I went astray. You know, I knew, like, thinking I had AIDS, that's a good example of it, knocking up a bunch of women, another great example of it. That was prior to the swim out to the ocean, right?

That's right, that's right. You know, wrecking my motorcycle, I'm not saying that my grandpa died of empathy and my choice is, but it felt like it. You know, like every time that I wasn't doing what I was put on this planet to do, I was the consequences of those bad decisions, like had serious repercussions. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. So radical responsibility, you know, Jocco's put this forward, taking complete responsibility for the things that you do. I do sometimes wonder if such a thing

is too much responsibility, where you take responsibility for things that you don't have responsibility for. And it sounds like maybe that creeps in. Yeah, there might be a little creep, but you're absolutely in the extreme ownership jaco approach to this. If you look at all of the things

that were going wrong in my life, almost all of them were my doing. Like there're my choices and the repercussions from those. I go to an orgy with a bunch of girls after a fight, and one of the girls has HIV, and she walks into the gym, like, hey, I have HIV is cool. This is on me. There's no other blame there, right? Yes. Wasn't somebody else's penis? No, 100%. My penis. My penis. You're like putting babies in a few different women at the same time, like there's nobody else, nobody else's penis in there, like that's mine.

And you know, like a failure at work, like indecisive nips in school, like all of those things were, those are my decisions. And then compounded by, you know, as we deal with stress, like external stressors, you have coping mechanisms and those things are how you deal with all of these different struggles. Well, the really important ones to me at the time,

one of them, my grandpa was dying in front of me. Every breath was just slightly less than the prior breath. So, you know, my motorcycle, like, that was mine. It was me that crashed that, you know, like, I'm was mine. It was me that crashed that. You know, like, I'm going down 90 miles now on Highway 46. You know, that's a, that's a me choice when that meth, sure that meth head pulled out,

you know, like, had I been going 55, I could have been able to stop. Instead, I, you know, did not. So, I definitely hear you, but I'm gonna go ahead and accept ownership for the vast majority of the problems in that specific time period. Okay.

So then when you do decide to get into the armed forces, you do decide to join special forces, is that the beginning of a pathway you begin to take a little bit more responsibility? I love how you're like putting in a lot of the adjectives and pronouns in there because I was not yet like beginning to absolutely. I was beginning now starting. And this was like definitely not a turn that in the hero movie, this is not like that moment where there's like hero music. Not the call to adventure yet.

Yeah. It's like, oh, I mean, he's going to do the right thing now. That's not happening. No, he's going to continue to fuck up the ages, ages, episode five. Yeah. Like season 10 how he's going to continue to fuck up for ages. Ages. Episode five. Yeah. Like season 10, he might start to get things a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, that's how that journey was. So lots of really shameful, regretful moments with lots of humbling experiences. Okay, so I've heard you talk about this a good bit. I've heard you talk about the fact that sort of shame and reflecting on deficiencies, situations where you didn't know enough, do enough, have the capacity that that's one of the driving forces for you.

But for a lot of people when they have that shame, it causes inertia, right? It doesn't cause movement. Yeah, that's dumb. But you understand why that might happen. No, it's dumb. Talk to me about that. So if understand why that might happen. No, it's dumb. Talk to me about that. So if I like step on a grill and the grill is, I don't know, let's just say, how

much the temperature of a grill? 400 degrees, 500 degrees, two hot. Okay, it's hot, right? And I'm standing on that grill and I'm burning. Why would I stay there? Like there, there is a beautiful purpose to pain and a pain is a thing that moves us. Emotional pain, like you get cheated on by your girlfriend and you're like, oh, that really, really hurt. I'm gonna go ahead and break up with this relationship and I'm gonna look for different characteristics in the next partner. Cool, got it?

I am going to pick up this paper the wrong way and it gave me a paper cut. Oh, that really hurt, right? Like I'm gonna pick a paper differently to know the not to get a paper cut the next time. I'm not gonna slide my finger on the long edge of the paper. Like, so, pain has this really, really important purpose. And I don't know why people dull it.

People like intentionally avoid it. People deny that it ever happened. They ignore these mistakes and they ignore these failures. They ignore these struggles and they disc, and then like 30 years later, they're paying a few hundred thousand dollars to talk to a counselor to like work through these experiences or or just hear me out. Acknowledge that they're real and that everybody has them and move and things get better. You don't burn alive on that grill, You don't cut your hand on paper.

You don't get cheated on in the next relationship. And you slowly start having this improved life over just acknowledging that pain serves a purpose. And instead of doing it with whatever pills you're popping or whatever you're drinking, or whatever yoga class you're doing, and there are all different ways to do it, just be real and be present.

And it's a shame in 2022 where we curate and editorialize everything about our lives and we hide our failures and we use a new filter to disguise our blemishes on our face or the scars and lines around my eyes. You know, like, there's a lot of living here. I want to know it. When I was fighting the UFC and in strike force, I would never let the doctor ever use any painkiller anytime he had to stitch me closed.

Didn't you get stitched closed by some dude with a cigarette in your face, a twine, a slush. Yeah, that was that story. UFC, yeah, I think it was fishing line. Yeah, I think it was fishing line. I'm pretty sure it was fishing line. He had a bone necklace hanging from his neck. That was at an Indian reservation long before I was on the floor and bits of rope around the bar and stuff. But like this at Strike Force, IFL, WC UFC, you know, like that proper doctors and stitching us up. And, as a matter of fact, the, I think it's hashtags like UFC doc.

And he's, he's shows up everybody. And he tweets often about how uncomfortable he was stitching me up. Cause I would sit there with my eyes open as he's, as he's closing my cheek. And he's like, no, I'm gonna give you a local. I'm like, you give me a local, I'm just gonna walk out and I'm gonna be the way that I am. Or you can stitch me up. And, and he's like, I never knew what gonna give you a local, I'm like, you give me a local, I'm just gonna walk out and I'm gonna be the way that I am,

or you can stitch me up. And he's like, I never knew what to do with this dude, but then I just sit there and Tim went and moved and I'd sew his face closed because I wanted to feel that pain because I made a mistake in there in the octagon and I didn't want to dull the pain because there should be a consequence of that pain.

And I wanted to remember that pain in the future. Talk to me about the difference between your first and your second deployment when you went away because the first one you were a part of a team and the second one you were very much alone. On your own. Give me a sense there because there's kind of this romantic lone wolf like no fox, no support needed,

kind of thing, right? That can be put over the top of a character like you. Yeah. What's it like that first time? What's the genesis of that? And the reason I ask this is there are a bunch of people listening who think, fucking yes, like I want this. I want to be a sovereign individual with agency who goes after it and gets after stuff in his life. But the first time that you go, that first beginning of the rock moving up the hill can be pretty uncomfortable. I want you to hear your sort of sensation around that. And it's supposed to be uncomfortable.

The Special Forces ODA, the Operational Detachment Alpha, which is like the 12-man A team, right? Like the TV show, the A team. Like it's the collective of all of the best and the brightest put into a team. The motherfuckers of the motherfuckers. That's right. And dude, and they are hammers.

Like I walk down halls of heroes. I mean, these guys are giants to my left and to my right, both emotionally, physically, mentally, like the just the most incredible humans on the planet. And I'm the weakest link. You know, I am the newest, I am the weakest, I'm the slowest, I'm the fastest to judgment, I'm the quickest to anger, I'm all of the things that I shouldn't be and the refiner's process, you know, on my war table up there, if we started playing with all

of the instruments of violence, all of them were forged in a really similar way, in a really violent way. They took a clump of something, they heated it and they pounded the impurities out of it. And that's what a team does. I showed up as a lump of uselessness, and through time, through grace, through forgiveness, through suffering, through, I mean, I guess now they call it hazing, but like that's part

of the process that shape expedited learning. Yeah. And it is so important, so important. So that first team, that first deployment, I'm surrounded by the best and the brightest, and I'm learning painfully what it means to be a team member. Thank God for that, because I would be dead in Afghanistan many times over. So many times had they just not shaped who I was, how I'd respond, how I would think,

how I would speak, not just keep ability and lethality, but also survivability, durability. And then you go off on your own. Yeah. Yeah. Not by design, I was supposed to go over as a sniper team, but my teammate, my sniper teammate had a... So, in the military, there's this like ever existing joke about the girl that she's on the guy while he's deployed. And we actually have a name for her.

And so that's what happened to him. He deployed and his what's the name, Jody. Oh, I've heard that in movies. Yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty. It's pretty there. So like every time Joby or Jody or Joby, every time that soldier goes away, she's looking for the next convenient guy. And that, you know, it was all pretty strategic for him and for her. So when he left, she drained his bank account and followed for divorce and sold all of his stuff.

So, you know, he's in war and in crisis mode and thank God, special forces for once. They never do this, like, actually cared about the soldier and they're like, there's no way he could have been combat effective, right? Like, World War II, it's like, sorry, bro, you're already in Europe, like, enjoy the beach. Hopefully you can make it up it or you're dead. This was really cool of the army to bring them back and let them recover his life a little bit. So it wasn't so catastrophic.

Yeah, but for you, yeah, but you. Yeah, so for me, it left me with nobody. Dick and hunt. Yeah, just looking with a big smile and be like, what can I get myself into? What kind of trouble can I find? And I don't know if the stars had aligned if fate is real, but I ended up being assigned to the coalition, which is this group of special operations. And I was put directly under one sergeant major who is like

kind of directly in charge of me and he was the liaison for all of these special operations units. So every time like the British or the cansof or the Australian soft any time those guys would be stepping out the door you know there's a use to sock level one special forces sniper that was happily ready to be both a liaison or reconnaissance or a sniper asset for those teams. Joe's like, my wet dream, totally coming true, I got to go work with the coolest international forces on the planet and it's like me. It's just me. It was cool until it's not cool.

When you know, it's cool when everything's going right and you're kicking ass. And then it's super not cool. When you don't really have a team, the bomb goes off, ID explodes, vehicle in front of you, just vaporizes, killing almost everybody inside of it and ending up on top of your hood

And this is like the beginning of a multi-day gunfight, you know, and I'm I mean, I'm with some Americans But I'm mostly with the Czech special forces and and like I don't have my own team, you know like Like nobody put me in for a purple heart because there's nobody to write a reward for me like I don't have a captain You know, there's nobody to put me in for anything because like, there was no team. There's nobody, like, thank God I had friends and brotherhood because Mike Keller saved my life, Mike Irish saved my life. In this particular battle.

Yeah, Mike Goldblow saved my life. I've won instance. I have like divine interventions. This way you run out of ammo. You know that, that happens. That's scary. You run out of ammo within The only way out that happens. That's scary. You run out of ammo within like 20 minutes or so. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Like you, when you think that like a special forces detachment could run out of, like how is this possible? Like be surrounded by 400 Iranian freedom fighters, foreign fighters, and they're not fighting for freedom. They're fighting for enslavement. I don't mean that word freedom. People call them freedom fighters

But they're really like what's the opposite of freedom? I don't know that's the type of fighters. They are okay, so insert that word. Yeah, the antithesis of freedom. Yes, pricks Anyways, so they're kicking our ass. I'm like crawling on the ground eventually trying to find ammo, but Mike Keller when the vehicle in front of me explodes, and like, you know, pink mist everywhere, Humvee lands on top of my Humvee. My Humvee starts backing out to get away from this Humvee as like RPGs are scooping off of my hood. And rounds are like,

ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, and the side of this Humvee is P.K. M. Rounds, they're just like, tt, tt, tt, tt. Mike Keller gets up to the side of this hill, Mike Irish, who is driving, he's like, oh my God, those guys are still alive. So he like hops out of the vehicle and he's like, Mike, where are you going?

So he runs back down to where we just got blown up. So I hop out of the vehicle very begrudgingly. I did not want to go with him and I was really mad that he was being heroic and he runs down there and we get down there. I'm carrying my sniper rifle at this time. I have an SR-25 sniper rifle. It's a suppressor on the end of it.

And we're trying to pull these bodies out from underneath this overturned hum V when the assault line of the Taliban run across the ambush zone, which we call the X, like the kill zone. And all this Taliban, they're like 10 feet from me, 10 feet. And I'm trying to move my sniper rifle as I'm holding this half cut off body that's dripping bile and crap and blood all over me. And then I'm sure I'm concussed at this moment. But the thing that really gives me the real concussion is Mike Keller in the 50-calm-2 machine gun turret position. This is God. Like, I don't care what you believe.

There's only one way that you can describe how Mike was able to use a machine gun with a 50-calb of a machine gun and shoot rounds around Mike and I and vaporize this assault line. They just, like, there were people there. This isn't like movie, like Rambo and they're like, you see guts flung through there. It was like, there were people there. This isn't like movie, like Rambo, and they're like, you see guts flung through there.

It was like, there were people right here, and then there were no more people. Like, they just disappeared. Not like, pink mist and like an HBO movie or like a sniper takes a shot. I mean, they were just like there, and then they weren't. That was Mike shooting 50 cow rounds, like zipping them up and around.

Just weaving them between his teammates. Yes. Wild. Wild. So we drag these soon to be dead bodies up and we try to save them for a while. They'll immediately die. We get a few ammo resupplies.

We have AC 130 gunships, F15s, F18s, F16s, Apache helicopters. When you actually, I think they made a movie called Broken Arrow. It did, right? Yeah. Like Broken Arrow is a term where if you are a ground force commander and you say Broken Arrow, this like goes all the way back to the,

like the Colonel Custard days, where he got surrounded. And if you don't sell and send every single resource that you have available right now, we're all gonna die. That's what that term means. Okay, that's the Hail Mary Cole of all Hail Mary. That is like, if there is a plane in the air, it comes to me. If there's a helicopter that has enough gas

to come here and has one bullet left, it will fly here. Does it guy with the hammer bring him? Yes. Cool, you got a screwdriver? I'll take you. You're Cool. You got a screwdriver? I'll take you. You're on.

Yeah. That is what this call means. So when they call broken arrow, it's like we're all going to die. Every single one of us is not going to make it out of this valley. And so then like it changed slowly from all of us, dying, probably dying, to everyone around us dying, and us still thinking we're going to die. Which leads me to then might gobble.

I'm walking up to a door, where I think we're three days into this gunfight. I still haven't slept. I still have a concussion. I have like, I have hours of this gunfight that I don't remember. I have moments where like we press a hill and I find the support camp for the Taliban.

And there's like a bunch of Taliban in front of us. I'm now somehow in a Czech vehicle. Like I'm with the Czech Special Forces. Like I left the Americans. This kind of sounds a little bit to me, like some of the after parties that I've been back to. Like this is the same discordant story. And then before I knew it, I'm in this villa,

and then I'm on a golf course. I have no idea how I got here. And I have no clue. Yeah, okay. The brain's wild. Yes, yes, yes. Especially when it's like damaged. Yes, you know.

And I'm walking up to a door, and we just got shot at from this compound. And Mike Goeble. It felt like he hit me. He shoved me so hard. Both hands like a rugby slam, double leg, John Jones takedown, you're like insert the most athletic movement you can, most violent. He shoves me in front of this door and we kind of split apart as his energy pushes me back The energy of him pushing me back pushes him back and then the door disintegrates as machine gun rions just Trace through here and splinter this door

I never heard a bolt drop. I never heard a weapon go from safe to fire. There's no way that he heard it heard a weapon go from safe to fire. There's no way that he heard it. Because when we finally get in this door, we find the machine gun nest. It's about 20 meters back inside this compound. So there's no explanation to how Mike knew that this door was about to get disintegrated. Did you ask him? He's dead now. Did you get to ask him before he was dead? No, we fought. We got a fist fight like two days later. Best of friends. Best of friends. All right, so these sort of situations, does that make stepping into the octagon to punch somebody else in the face under a relatively now restrictive rule set?

Well, the guy in there whose job it is to make sure that if anything close to serious happens, that everything stops. Does that make that seem a bit like, and not silly or farcical, but kind of... I mean, you had to say, yes and no, like I would walk into the octagon overly relaxed. And do you think that that was contributed to

by your time in service? Yes, yeah. Like, Leo Korolinsky, when I was fighting for the IFL, I remember the first time that he ever saw me fight, he's like, what is wrong with you? Like you need to be excited. Many things. Yeah, you need to be excited or like nervous.

Like what are you doing? I was like, Leo, it's fine bro, just like, go sit down, I'm gonna go fight in a minute. He's like, you are gonna go fight in a minute. Can you like recognize that you're about to go fight? Is it, yeah, yeah. I go out and knock the guy out in the first round He's like, you are gonna go fight in a minute. Can you like recognize that you're about to go fight? Is it yeah? Yeah, yeah. I go out and knock the guy out in the first round. Leo, can you be cool now? So it took like 10 fights for Leo to realize that like,

but everything's even in fighting. You know, so while it walk in so relaxed, you know, not stressed, the weight class is very specific. You know, your opponent is picked so that you guys have a competitive fight because nobody wants to watch, you know, like,

Mike Tyson fight a, you know, a prime Mike Tyson fight a 43 year old fat white dude that came off the couch. Like, that's not interesting. They wanna see like two apex predator peak athletes go head to head, you know, gorilla versus bear, you know, lion versus polar bear. Like that's what we're looking for. So, you know, even the referee,

like his purpose yet there is to make sure that we not just are safe, but that we also fight under the constrictions and the limitations that are the rule set, which makes it very competitive, especially when you start getting up to title fights and, you know, like I spent the last 10 years of my career ranked top 10 in the world. So like, I'm only fighting top 10 guys, you know, like the Michael Bizzbings and the Robbie Lawlers and the Jacques Arrays.

And that's, you know, that's hard. Like there's no, that's hard. What's the difference between training for fighting and training for violence, training for combat violence? No difference. No, there, training is training. I mean, if you used BJJ in a combat situation, training is training. I mean, if you used BJJ in a combat situation. Yeah. Yeah, in Iraq, kind of humiliating stories. I'm like, I'm telling all of it. I'll just give you the high points. We do a call-outs. We go to a bond maker's house and we tell everybody come out. This is not in the book. And almost everybody comes out. But one guy stays in there and we ask the family, who is this and why is he in there? And they're like, he's crazy. The language barrier, it was difficult to determine if he was like, G-Hod crazy or if he was like, special needs crazy.

We later find out that he was the latter. And so when I go in there with my team and we do a direct action like hard knock assault, like flashbangs, like this guy, as I turn the corner on the number two guy, number one guy goes right, I went left as a center-fed room. And this guy was like, and he like came, a butt stroke him,

breaking every bone in his face. And then like grabs onto me as he's falling. A butt stroke him, breaking every bone in his face. And then like grabs onto me as he's falling. And in my mind, he's like grabbing all of my stuff on my kit, right? Like I got a knife here, I got my pistol here, I have some flash bangs, I got my grenades back here. So I come here, I grab his arm, I grab his wrist, I reach over his arm, I come here,

and I break every bone in his shoulder, his arm. Like everything is like turned up dust and powder. But the Kamora is a jujitsu move. And I just did it in violent war settings. And I get it's a very great technique to do in competition. But like it works just fine. Kamora is also the best technique for weapon retention. Like we use goose necks and finger flexes to wrist locks

to get weapons and knives out of people's hands. We use the Americana when we're in mount position. We use Neon Belly to give me a chance to look around to make sure, so like, yeah, it's a lot of similarities. In the brain and the body are shaped in the same way. Like training's training. And the reason that you see so many high level athletes and special operations that are coming from really, really violent type sports. You see

lots of wrestlers, you see lots of water, um, water polo players, you see lots of rugby, lots of football. They're coming from environments that training like this is really normal. So when they go to a special forces selection or they go to the Q-course they're like, yeah, this is cool. I've been here before. Everyone else is like, what is going on? Well, my feet have never felt like this. And I did two days in Texas during football camp. This isn't anything. You're spending a lot of plates. You headmaster of a school now, sheep dog response. Headmistress, don't pronoun me wrong. Sorry, I used to identify, now I identify as it's headmistress. Yeah, the headmistress of the school.

There's someone listening to this that thinks, this sounds fucking dope. Like, I'm motivated, I want to be this person, I want to have control over my life. I'm going to set my alarm for 6am, I'm going to find a BJJJ post to me. I'm going to do all of this 530, sorry, 430 if you jokko. Yeah. That's too early. Yeah, he's got it wrong. That's just too much.

There's someone that's thinking that's what they want to do. But when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, they're going to hit snooze. What is it that's causing you to not hit snooze? You can't relegate it to a single decision like that. You know, I've made like millions of decisions leading up to like, I went to bed on time. You know, like, I had an amazing intimate night with my wife.

You know, like, she fell over sweaty and smiling. I went hopped in the shower, came back in bed and like, I'm gonna sleep hard, right? Like, not like, figuratively, not literally. Yes. You know, like, perfect. Long day of work, had two great workouts, super productive, got to spend time with my family, had a fantastic meal. All of those little decisions led to that alarm going off

at 5.30 and me popping up and be like, nice. And just playing, let's see, this morning was, life on Mars. That was my alarm this morning. And it's rad, you know? It's like boom, and I'm up. Love this song. Ready to go after the day, but I wasn't ready

for that alarm by it going off. I was ready by like thousands of other things that I did before that. So like you can't narrow it to a single moment, you have to look at the millions of other opportunities that you had to make the right decisions, and that trend, all of those collectively, will start making a difference. We'll start mattering. It's about speeding up and slowing down, I think, that if momentum is taking you toward

a suboptimal place, a bad place. Maybe all of your efforts simply needs to go into slowing that momentum down for a little while. And it would be great if you could go and hit every workout and do all of these things. But you've probably got some bad habits that you could do with deprogramming first before you try to add some of the new good ones in. And that's gonna happen step by step, by step.

Well, this goes back to what we're talking about at the very beginning of the, like how do you know that those bad habits are putting you in trajectory negative? Because you reflect and it hurts. Yeah. If you feel the pain, you can fuck this, but, really, that's right. Because you remember the pain. Well, they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could

have been. Yeah. That would be terrible. You feel the delta between where that person is and where you are. So something that I've considered, you've got this very heroic story, the book's fantastic. Lots of different things that you've done and achieved. And you know, during the 15 minutes that I was late here, you've built a new gun and and and fucking organized a bunch of other stuff for your school and other things like that. What I'm always interested in is the price that people pay to be themselves,

especially high achievers. What's the price that you pay to beat him Kennedy? Bad knees, I'm money or trashed. The emotional baggage, you know, like I watch like a, I was watching the movie The Searchers with John Wayne. Not saying no to you, you need to watch this movie. Good. Yeah, it's old. It's old in its raw and its primal. Story, John Wayne, frontier, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona type, and their home stethers, building their existence, carving

in Comanche, Apache land, and they see a fire in a smoke trail and in a nearby, kind of near about a day's ride. And so they had to check it out. And it was a lure to bring John Wayne away from his brother's house, where his nephew, his niece, and his sister-in-law were all there. The Indians come in, they kill everybody,

they kill his brother, they kill his wife, they kill his nephew, and they steal this little girl. And John Wayne comes back to find their raped bodies and burnt male bodies. And this is early, this is 60s in his missing niece. So the movie The Searchers, is he then goes, this whole entire movie, it's about 20 years of this movie goes on where he's searching for this, that's about 15 years, this little girl. And he is a racist, violent man. He fought

for the Confederate army. Now, like every engine, red blood, half breed, you can, like you can just see the chip on his shoulder. And you don't know by the end of this movie, what he's going to actually do when he finds this little girl, like, is he going to kill her? Like she is now an Indian. She's been with them for 15 years. And as he's like running down, or he's on this horseback chasing this little girl as she's running away from him at a fear of this white man, as he's trying to rescue this little girl,

I am bawling my eyes out and like relating to so many things, like having been to so many places and having so many cultural questions, like what is right, what is wrong, like what is right for him? Should he have killed all these people after they killed his family? Like, is that right?

Is that justice? Is that vigilante justice? Is this, like where's the justice here? And like, what is supposed to happen to this girl? And all these questions, so the prices, bad knees, so scars and stripes, and they name the book. There's lots of scars on the outside, clearly, as you look at my face, my ears,

and my orbital sockets, my hands, my knees. Then there's scars on the inside, there's plenty of them. And stripes in the military are symbols of you having experienced things. Like your number of deployments, your time overseas, how long you've been in the military, like what rank you are. All of those things are our testaments to who you are.

So like what is the cost to be me? Like there is a lot of pain. Talking about scars and stripes, what's your favorite scar or what's your favorite stripe? Favorite scar, it's probably this one right here, Robbie Lawler, and he threw an uppercut. He's a South paw. My head was on the center, as I was doing a double-a against the cage. We drilled in training, my head position probably a hundred times. And in the fight, I thought I was faster, I thought I was better. And he blasted me with this upper cut, just like we knew he would, in the exact same way that we had game planed him to do it. And so I carried that scar and

I prepared properly, I trained correctly, I had all the knowledge and resources to be able to not have this scar. But then I went on to brutalize him for 15 minutes and ultimately I win a pretty big, big fight over UFC Walter White champion. But like, so I wear this chunky scar on my nose with pride. And then I think a lot of people would talk about their rank or they'd talk about their combat stripes and special operations where,

when you go through that book, when we went through the legal review, most of the names in this book are dead now. And most of my friends, like literally most of my friends, my sniper partner, sniper school, dead, sniper department deployment, dead, mic, gobble, dead. Like you, when you go through that legal review, the woman that did it, the lawyer was like, she started crying about 10, 10 names in. I was like, just wait till Memorial Day, like imagine how I feel, you know. So the stripes of me still just being here,

of which are your, your, your, your's in service. I'm proud of those because like, like the song Rooster, you know, you can't kill me yet. What's it feel like to reflect on the fact that so many people that you would mind so much that helped you become the person that you are know aren't here to see the person that you wanna. And ironically, the ones that are here are the ones that just wanna see me fail, so it's kind of wild.

But, um... And that's strange, isn't it? I wonder if that's selection somehow. I wonder if the ones, what is it? I think the hero will live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Yeah, I think about it all the time. It's like, why is it? I think the hero will live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Yeah, think about it all the time. It's like, why is this one?

Like that one. That one, why is that one still alive? And that one's dead. You know, like, that's wild. You go down that why, if what if why question man, that is a dark hole. Yeah, be at the bottom of the bottle on that one. But that's one of the motivations for you, right? You say you don't want to feel helpless.

You don't want to feel like you don't know. There's that story about I think you're an EMT when you were 18 or something. And you would try to fix some girl. And then the guy came over that knew what he was supposed to do and said, you need to find somebody else. Yeah, I got this. Yeah, I got this.

Tom Wei, Tom Wei, I love you. So you still about? He's still about.. Yeah, I got this. Yeah, I got this. Yeah, Tom Wei. Tom Wei, I love you. So you still about? He's still about. Good man. Yeah. We got one. Yeah, there's more. He gets one.

Um, and uh, yeah, that, that, that frustration of not knowing what to do in that helplessness is something that like, like that is a pain that like you'll carry forever and that is a shame. That is a humiliation of like standing there like, I don't know what to do. Like, had I trained, had I prepared, had I made more of those right decisions, I wouldn't be standing here. I would already be taking action and saving somebody's life. But instead out of whatever selfish decisions I made prior, I don't know what to do. And now this person might die.

So yeah, it's a big motivator. What can you tell us about what you're doing next? That's tricky. What does this podcast come up? When do you want it to come up? Well, if we're doing like two weeks, then I can say that I'm going to Eastern Europe tomorrow and that I will be going to work with Saver Allies in a humanitarian assistance type role

to help- Is this part of your NGO? Mm-hmm, yep, yep. Yeah, Saver Allies is a nonprofit, non-government organization that goes to contested areas to- Are you lily-potting these people out? Yep, cool. Some of them, yeah, I don't know if like Finland, Romania, Poland and Hungary count as lily-pudding these people out? Yep. Cool. Some of them. Yeah.

I don't know if like Finland, Romania, Poland, and Hungary count as lily pads because they're kind of just neighbors. Yeah. Yeah, but it works. Cool man. Tim Kennedy, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love what you do. I'm very, very happy that I'm in the same city as you. I'm looking forward to connecting, hopefully, after this as well.

For sure. Good luck, man. Stay safe. I think we need more people like you. Thanks for picture chat.