Modern Wisdom - #753 - Tim Kennedy - What Went Wrong With America?

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Tim Kennedy is a Special Forces master sergeant, former professional UFC fighter, and an author. There's a lot of doomerism in the world. Assumptions that things are terrible and they're never going to get better. I don't agree, and neither does Tim. Expect to learn how we can fix the American military’s recruitment problem, Tim’s first hand experience of what’s really going on at the southern border, the wild stories of unknown military heroes that we should know more about, how Tim plans to fix the current education system, the state of veteran mental health, the best preparation routine every tourist needs to know before travelling abroad and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 30% off your first subscription order at https://HVMN.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on all supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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, a special forces master sergeant, former professional UFC fighter and an author. There is a lot of doomerism in the world, assumptions that things are terrible and they're never going to get better. I don't agree. And neither does Tim. Expect to learn how we can fix the American military's recruitment problem, Tim's first

hand experience of what's really going on at the southern border, the wild stories of unknown military heroes that we should know more about, how Tim plans to fix the current education system, the state of veteran mental health, the best preparation routine every tourist needs to know before travelling, and much more. Tim is a very particular type of tool. He is a very blunt object and a very sharp object and even though you don't necessarily need to agree with his methods, I do think that it is important to have people like that who can tell us about what war zones are actually like. I think it's very important for us to have people like that on our side because there are definitely

individuals like that on the opposition side. So yes, lots of interesting insights today. Great stories. And I appreciate Tim. I do appreciate his sacrifices and his efforts and his honesty. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Kennedy. 77% of US 17-24 year olds could not join the military. The American Department of Defense recently did an analysis of 17 to 24 year olds could not join the military. The American Department of Defense recently did an analysis of 17 to 24 year olds and found that 77% were unqualified to serve in the military

due mostly to obesity, drug abuse, physical health or mental health, almost half were disqualified for more than one of those reasons. Yeah. This is, when we talk about strategic level issues like national security problems, anybody looking at that number from the SEAL teams to the Green Berets to Ranger, those all select their populations from a larger general population from combat arms. Combat arms gets their people from this larger population of people. So like, as the, as the, the arrowhead gets a little bit more narrow, the availability of people to fund these small groups to these middle sized groups to these potentially larger groups are just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. This is

we're going to lose to everybody if this trend continues. We just can't win wars with the bodies that we have. Because the catchment area of the normal people feeds into the catchment area of the normal soldiers, feeds into the catchment area of the semi-elite, into the absolute elite, and if the bottom rung of the ladder, which is population, is bad, that trickles all the way up to the very top. Yeah, and the Department of Defense is always a parallel, it's just a reflection of what society is at a large, right? When you look at society at large right now, they are just that, they're very large,

that they're obese, they're gelatinous blobs of broken minds. They don't know if they're a boy or a girl, they definitely have never jumped out of a tree before. So when they go to airborne school and they land on a static line jump and they break both their legs, it's because they've never done it before.

You know, you and I grew up chasing kids and like smacking each other with sticks, you know? And this generation has done that. So they're just weaker in every form of the word. I know every generation says this, but right now, statistically, we've never had a data point to point to to show like that it has ever been this bad.

So now I know like the World War II guys were like, ah, those Vietnam guys are a bunch of pussies, you know? And the Vietnam guys are like, oh man, those GWAT guys are a bunch of pussies. And the GWAT guys are like, man, all these millennials and Gen Zs are a bunch of like, but they really are. But this is a real big problem and we don't know how to fix it.

How much do you lay at the feet of the population with this? Because lots of people probably would like to be fitter if they knew what that would feel like. They would like to have better mental health if they knew what that would feel like they would, but they weren't aware, they weren't given the tools, there are distractions and environmental issues, technology, screen, social media, porn, video games, all of these things are relatively new inventions

that didn't have to be contended with by World War II or Vietnam or even early millennials. So how do you think about it sort of individual agency versus environmental stimulus and restrictions and stuff. Yeah, I think it's a combination of both, right? I don't think it's a point to a specific thing and be like, this is the thing that's causing the biggest problem. From social media to pornography to, iPad, screen time, diet.

Like the food that we're eating right now is poison. Literally, the things that are in our food is illegal in most other countries, but it's legal here. They're not allowed to export it. You know, if you go to Japan or you go to Italy, a bunch of American foods aren't even allowed to be imported there because they know the things that are in them are so disgusting. There's a hilarious video meme of these Italian moms comparing American pasta to the pasta that they make, and they could not be more dissimilar They're like this is not pasta like we don't know what these ingredients are

But this is not like we use flour and a little bit of salt You know and we throw some eggs in there and and we and we and then here's the process of us making pasta like this is poison so it's I think it's a combination of a whole bunch of things. And then the society culture problem is another gigantic piece. We have the culture of being an American has changed in the past 30 years in a really negative way, you know, where it used to be family first, you know, like the nuclear family was the cornerstone of American society. And like there was the motivating, the motivations for a male figure in the household.

Like he's gonna be a provider, he's gonna be a protector, he's gonna preserve his family, you know, like he's obviously gonna be sex driven. So he's like trying to be a masculine person in the household on the opposite end of that spectrum. The woman would embrace being feminine. You know, the kids respected the parents.

If you look at pop culture right now, like Chris, could you point to a single television show that paints a parent in a positive light? I mean, think of every single show on Netflix, Disney, Amazon, the longest running show currently. It's all flawed. Even the heroes in superhero movies are, it's a suicide squad, right? It's a Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds. No one can just be, I mean, the closest thing that we got was Top Gun, I guess. Yeah. That was it. And he's broken, but that's definitely an anomaly. Like that's on the outside of the average.

That's the outliers. You look at Homer, like the longest running cartoon TV series right now. When you go into his brain, he's motivated by three things. Beer, donuts, and concluelessness. You know, he's the idiot in the whole entire family. And, you know, from modern family to- Omni guy. Yeah, every single one of them.

The parent figure is the most disgusting, despicable person there. So of course that's gonna naturally be eroding the view of this generational passing of information. That generational gap from grandparents to children used to be very commonplace, right? Like I learned how to magnetize a screwdriver. I learned how to charge a battery.

I learned like the tricks and the trades of like how to hold a hammer and how one hammer was different than a different hammer and that hammer was specific to a job. And, you know, while my dad could have taught me that, it was actually my grandpa that did that. And I was able to receive that easier for my grandpa than it was my own father. And that's how it has been for hundreds of years until now. Now you see no kind of cross-pollination of ideas from one generation to two generations ago,

from like the grandparents to the grandchild. And That's tragic. There's a huge loss of information there. Well, the desire for people to move out at age 16 or 18 or 20 and be in a different country, I mean, I say this as someone who is in a different country, but pan-generational living in some commune-style small village would have been the way that everything was done. Do you know what the grandmother hypothesis is? It's one of the reasons or the evolutionary justifications for why women go through menopause.

No. Right. So there's a question to be asked. Most animals aren't able to continue to reproduce while they are, their reproduction doesn't stop while they're still alive. Their capacity to reproduce doesn't, it ceases at the same time that they die, typically. Whereas for humans, you have this weird period, you know, 40s for women, 40s to 50s, where they're still about.

So you'd think, well, they're a drain on resources and they're no longer contributing any more kin. So what are they here for? And the argument is that human child rearing is so complex and allo-parenting needs to be done, which is the shared parenting of kids from mothers to grandmothers to aunties and close friends that what you actually need is a grandmother in that sort of matriarch head of the household. Position who is able to deal with the interpersonal political backbiting of you know 10 women below her that are part of her family and telling them what to do and helping to raise the children and coordinating stuff like that. So that's a very important role whilst not still continuing to produce children. So it's like, it's so important to the way that humans develop that it's literally built

into female biology. That's how important it is. You see it culturally, if you go to Native Native American tribes when a girl is having her first period the the grandmother would take that child away and Teach her all of like, okay, this is how you take care of yourself This is during this period of you know, five to seven days You're gonna be drinking extra water, you know, like this is this is how you clean yourself And you go down to South America a bunch of cultures down there

They're actually like traditional tribal periods where that granddaughter would go to the grandmother and she would spend a week or two weeks with this grandmother learning all of the birds and bees of life. And, um, the, that transfer of knowledge about how to raise a child, about how to take care of their body, about what this cycle looks like, Like what is going on in America where now we look at this, the prior generation as these old, broken idiots that you can just walk up to on the street in New York and slam in the face, which we see all the time. It's been an erosion of respect of these other generations. There's an interesting trend. I found this article about conscription for Gen Z and some of the feedback that Gen Z gave about that.

I'm going to war for Rishi Sunak. Give your head a wobble. I've got things to do, said 23 year old TikToker Charlie Malau in a widely shared video she posted on a platform over the weekend. I'm gay, she continued. I'm northern and I will play those cards. 26 year old content creator, Iyame A.P. uploaded a similar video. I'm sitting here I will play those cards 26 year old content creator I am a pee uploaded a similar video

I'm sitting here naked eating a bowl of yogurt. She begins reading about how we might have to go to war They want to send me a little girl to the front line The army is simply no longer seen as a moral endeavor as a 24 year old the last war in my living memory was not a Barnstorming defeat of the Nazis But rather a series of wars and invasions in the Middle East Exposed as failures and widely thought to be based on lies. The belief held by older generations that the British army is solely a force for good in the world does not stand up anymore.

As Gen Z would put it, the military propaganda is not propaganda-ing. Yeah. The one, what an entitled little pricks. How sad is that? There should be a yearning to serve. I found nothing more meaningful in my life than finding opportunities to do good to somebody or for something that is bigger or better than myself. And I've, as an individual, have found growth in those times more so than anything else in life. But a whole bunch of people right now don't want to serve anyone but themselves. They want to build a brand, you know, they want food delivered to their door.

It's just so short-sighted and realizing that sometimes it takes time to develop who you are as a person. And that development comes from struggle and failure and service. On the military front, you don't think that those young men and women coming out of the Great Depression had things to do when they learned that Nazis were flooding across the borders throughout Europe.

You know, you don't think that during the Korean War, as America has the largest economic boom in history, in the history of our species that those that Americans didn't have something to do besides fight communism in a land that most people had never even heard of before. You know, go to Vietnam, you know, the ones that were then conscripted, though the draft occurs and hundreds of thousands of people had no choice but to go serve their country. You don't think they had better things to do as like the great awakening of cultures happening in the 60s and 70s.

You know, we're fighting for civil rights, we're fighting for the rights of women, and we're fighting for transparency within the government. You know, we lose one of the greatest presidents our country's ever had. Like all of this is in real tough times, but I get that you wanna sit there naked and eat your yogurt.

But you think that that's more important than what was happening previously. Like they didn't have other things to do. It's so pathetic and childish. I just look at it like a petulant child. How would you fix, or how do you think about fixing the culture and the populace's perspective

of the armed forces and service? Yeah, I think it's a communication problem on Department of Defense side. I think we've failed to clearly show what we do. You know, like people look at my resume and they're like, man, that guy, all he's done is adult life has gone overseas and killed. That's the furthest thing from the truth.

There have been periods where I had to do that to create stability and security within a nation, but why? Why were we doing that? It was to give that place an opportunity to exist, where democracy could have a foothold, where a hook could be set, and that place had a chance to live.

The better, the more secure and the more stable a world has, a country like ours that is built off capitalism has more countries to do commerce with. But on the human right side of it, with stability and security comes opportunity, opportunity for young girls to learn how to read, for young men to find occupations besides working it within terrorism or slinging some form of human suffering. And we have to communicate to that gay girl eating yogurt naked on her couch.

What does it look like to serve? And I think they'd be blown away to realize that we go to the some of the most downtrodden cultures on the planet and give them a chance. We give them opportunity. We create something that they've never had in their, like, if you're born in America, you won the lottery. You know, like you're, you're in the safest richest planet, place on the planet to have ever existed. Like you look one continent to our east, slightly south, and you can't go to a country that doesn't have, when I say like third world

poor, I'm not talking like favelas in Brazil. I'm talking like they're one meal away from starving to death. And starving to death, when we say, man, I'm so hungry, I'm starving. Starving to death means like you are so malnourished that if you even eat a meal, it might kill you because your body can't process the calories that are in it. Um, they've never seen suffering and, and human desperation like we see all over the world and we get to go to that place and give them a chance. It's like, how do you tell a girl that's sitting there on TikTok? I don't know. I think the presumption, what it sounds like the presumption is, is this is, you know, colonial powers. It's something to do with oil. This is, you this is the military industrial complex trying to take over some country.

It doesn't sound like aid. It doesn't sound like liberation. It doesn't sound like assistance or medicine or healthcare or any of those things. What it sounds like is just more colonialism going on, white people invading brown people. That's what war is. Yeah. Colonialism has existed for forever. And some of the greatest things to happen to some countries were them being conquered and then settled and then commerce occurs. And then for the first time, that country isn't tribally just killing each other. It's really easy to like label any form of expansion of a country or an idea or a culture negatively. There are cultures that are better than other cultures.

I know we're supposed to be like super inclusive. I could list a couple dozen cultures that are so disgusting and so evil where, you know, a 67 year old man can have five, ten wives. And guess what? Those wives are little girls. As soon as they have their first period, they're eligible to be sold and married to this dude. You please tell me that it would not be better for Britain or for America or for Mexico to go over and settle that country. It would be 100% better and the people there would be better off for it. But like, oh, we have to appreciate all these cultures. We definitely don't need to like assume any of these. No, there are better cultures. And the world would be better off. It would be a more peaceful place. Not everybody has to be Westernized. That's not what

I'm saying. But there are evil ideas and there are evil religions and there are evil cultures. And, uh, man, I just wish that. But they're also shared values. You know, there are norms that are beautiful, that transcend cultures and transcend countries and transcend borders and those ideals like murder is wrong. Rape is wrong. Those ideas are not wrong in some cultures. Well, those cultures are evil.

Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what needs to happen from a messaging perspective. It certainly needs to maybe highlight at least two things that I can think of. One being the honor in making a bad place better. And the second one being the sort of heroism and sense of purpose and meaning that people who do that get. Because it seems strange that an entire culture, an entire generation can talk about meaninglessness,

purposelessness, hopelessness, 60% of teenage girls say that they have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness. I think 30% of girls in that same age bracket have seriously considered taking their own lives. If that's the case, surely one of the things that a lot of people in the armed forces say is the most meaningful thing, probably maybe except family, that they do. Well, that seems like a pretty good antidote to me. But I guess what it sounds like, what it looks like to people who haven't had the messaging put across in the right way is, oh, this is just hard things for bad ends.

Yeah. I don't think there's anything more dangerous than a young man or woman without purpose. There's nothing that will destroy and erode that person's future than their lack of purpose. There's also nothing more beautiful, and I'll just talk to young men specifically, than a young man with purpose. During the Holocaust, when those rumors started coming across the Atlantic, that Jews were being put on trains and taken to no one knows where, but nobody sees them again. But we see towers of smoke coming out of these places like Auschwitz and young men are like, no, fuck no. Yeah, I'll storm beaches, I'll climb cliffs, I'll jump out of airplanes for the first time behind enemy lines

with equipment that's never been used before in a form of warfare that's never been tried because this is my purpose is to do good. Where is that? We see on the opposite end of that spectrum, young men without purpose that then get angry and get bitter and they start having resentment against specific groups and people, whether it's the color of their skin or their religion. And then they walk into a school or a church or a movie theater and they start hurting people. That's a broken young man without purpose.

But a man with purpose, man, he's gonna figure out that you can fly a plane off this little tiny island in North Carolina. You know, he's gonna figure out that he can step off this ladder and jump into almost weightlessness on a surface of a moon that nobody stepped on before. Like that's purpose. What was the purpose? We're in an arms race against the Russians. The space race was an arms race, but that was purpose. It was an idea that we can do something significant to improve America. Fill yourself with something more important than yourself and pour everything that you are into it in the,

and that's purpose. And with that, like, I'm filled with purpose and I'm filled with joy and I'm filled with hope and I'm filled with joy and I'm filled with hope and I'm filled with love and I'm filled with grace. But all of that is a byproduct of purpose. Like, you can't be sitting there and be like, I'm depressed, I'm thinking about suicide, you know, like I'm feeling hopeless.

I could give, I could write a thousand different ideas that you could, that you could dedicate your life to and it would be a life worth living. Like go, go and do great things. A lot of that's from service, it seems. Exactly. But the point is that in the modern culture. Try this thing.

Get that thing inside of you, go on. Okay. Put it in you. Are you sure you want this? Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go on. I know I'm always like hard already and they're like, do you want me to do it?

I'm like, give this guy a little bit of caffeine. I didn't say you're hard already. That's a, I mean. I had like figuratively, I'm like, but already. And they're like, do what I'm going to do? I'm like, give this guy a little bit of a happy. I didn't say you're hard already. That's a, I mean, I had like figuratively, I'm like, also literally. That's good. That'll do. Yeah. That's what we want.

You'll be dialed in now. Oh yeah. Feel that coursing through your veins. Um, so we have a culture which is very individuated, very individualized. Um, people are atomized from their family, from their culture, from their history, and from each other as well. If you're living in, if you're fucking citizen number 233,000 living in your pod, bleeping away, that shared sense of purpose, it doesn't surprise me that that's not the case, but

you look to other cultures that are competitors. You know this, Gwendo Bogle, one of my friends wrote an amazing article about TikTok and the spinach talk equivalent that they have in China is showing people being proud of their country and people doing cool science stuff and people building technology and young people. Protrography bad, sleep good, family good. Well, video games, you've seen when they can play video games in China. Yeah, it's between, I think, 7pm and 9pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And four days a week, two hours a day.

Yeah, that's it. And it's outside of those times, it's just not on. It's like you can't, you know, it's like the fucking someone's unplugged the power. It's like the ultimate parent. It's wild. And thinking, okay, is this, is what we have now with the degrees of freedom? You're someone that very much wants people to have freedom and has fought for it a lot.

I like that freedom stuff. But that multiplicity of options and lack of constraint just causes people to sort of race to the bottom of the pleasure stem, right? So there's a bit of a paradox going on here that some of the authoritarian dictatorial tendencies are actually enabling the population in some ways to be better. Yeah. I will never say that the government is a solution for anything. If we think that it would be a better idea, solution to give the government authority to go into households and say how much time

they should be on screens or who they should call. Like that goes against every ounce of what I believe and what I think it means to be an American. For, and then the preamble of the Constitution, we the people, like the people really were badasses. They carved their existence out of the wilderness, you know, they fought bears and they fought Indians. And then they were told that they're going to be taxed a certain amount. And they're like, no, and then we'll throw this tea in the harbor. And they're like, okay, well, we're going to have this little problem in Boston

and an American is going to get shot. Now you pissed us off. We're going to kill all of you and we're going to kick you off the continent. Like we, the people were a bunch of badasses. There was individual responsibility for those people. They're well read. They're well traveled for you to vote. You had to be a landowner.

You, you had to shoot a gun. You were required to own a gun and to train with that gun. You were required to own a gun. Required to own a gun. If you were a voting member, you had to own a gun and you had to train with it. And there was a dedicated day off for the entire country. Every single person had a dedicated day to go out and train. And there were some inherent responsibilities to being a citizen, to go out and train. And there, there were some inherent responsibilities

to being a citizen, to being we the people. Now we're just like, every somebody's going to do it for me. Somebody's going to take care of this problem. Somebody's going to solve this world problem. Somebody's going to tell me how much I'm supposed to eat or what I'm supposed to eat. That responsibility, we've just been handing over bit by bit for the past 40 years. And now we don't know how to take it back. And responsibility is where freedom comes from. You can't be free unless you are self-sufficient.

You cannot be free unless you're individually responsible. You can't be free from the government being able to tell you how you're supposed to be healthy unless you're healthy. Like I can look at somebody saying, hey, you need to put this in your body. And I'd be like, no, I don't. I'm freaking jacked and I'm going to live and tell them 100. Hey, you need to put this in your kids bodies. I'm like, my kid has a six pack, can speak a couple of languages and plays five sports. Like he doesn't need what you're giving him, man.

Like he eats free range chicken elk bison. He like, he, I promise you, whatever you're trying to give him, he doesn't want. And, but we can do that because we're in a position of authority as with sovereignty. And then take that into any other category, whether it's intellectual or education, and the K you have to be educated in this way. No, the way that you're educating those kids is dumb. All of the kids that we educate are way smarter than your dumb kids. I don't want what you're trying to sell us because we do it better.

But that's sovereignty. And that is us taking back those freedoms and taking back and taking back that authority and be like, you don't get that. You did. You can't tell me what to do because I do it better. This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. 60% of Tour de France riders use Ketone IQ to help them with their energy and mental clarity. And that's why I use it as my pre-workout. I don't want to have caffeine upon waking, but I still want to have energy to make sure that I have a good session, which is why I use this. Gives me really clean energy, there's no jitters, there's no crash afterward and it massively helps with mental clarity. Ketones are the brain and body's preferred fuel source but

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by going to the link in the description below or heading to hvmn.com slash modernwisdom. That's hvmn.com slash modernwisdom's HVMN.com slash modern wisdom. One of my favorite books has just been turned into, God, you like it? You don't need to turn it around each night. It's looking at you, it can stare at you. Yeah, it's Moorish.

So one of my favorite books has just been turned into a movie. Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. You know this? I do know it. So have you seen the trailer for this? So do you know who Alan Richer is? He's the guy that played... Yeah. So Jacked out of his mind. Henry Cavill is in it. It's directed by Guy Ritchie. Also Jacked out of his mind. Directed by Guy Ritchie. So it's going to be sexy. It's going to be cool. And I can't wait.

But as you know... True story. You've read the book. Yeah, of course. This is what I, this is like this sort of renegade spirit is so cool. So the beginning of World War II, the British being the prim and proper gentlemen. I mean, a mackerel and a bow tie, go out to take a tea with everyone, they're crumpets. Exactly. You know, spinning a cane. At the beginning of World War II, Winston Churchill realized that the only way that we could beat the Nazis was to play dirty.

And there's a quote from one of the other high ranking officials in the British government that said, if this is what it takes to win, then I am prepared to lose. That was what he said, that there was a degree of... Hanging that guy. I don't know who that is, but they should hang him in the street. Well, so I think, you know, this was really the inception of guerrilla warfare being used at scale for a advanced military. And that's the beginning of Special Forces. Yes, correct. Yeah, that's, yes.

And for both the US and the UK, all of them separately. And the Canadians. Yes. Like this is the beginning of it all. So I'm very, very familiar of. But just thinking about that, thinking about, okay, so there was like the British sensibility of doing things right was so powerful it was such a compulsion that the guys in power would have rather lot there is a tendency a leaning toward this is so unethical it's to them it was like fucking siren gas or fucking mustard gas or something.

It's like, we're blowing up bridges. We're using, they created the limpid mine in that book as well. And they're doing it with aniseed balls wrapped in condoms. And it's just, it's fucking great. I can't wait for this movie to come out. We're going through this right now though, Chris. 100%.

So, history always repeats itself. There's a great book called The New Rules of War. And currently, America does not have the appetite to do what it takes to win the wars that we have to win. But we can't even call them wars, right? So we're currently fighting cartels, syndicated criminal groups, we're fighting wars via proxy against terrorist organizations in proxy nations. So not direct state on state conflicts, but rather like state versus this group of people that are living in this area of this other country, there'd be finance by one of our enemies. That's war, though. Like if that, if our enemy is financing a bunch of different groups and militias to fight us in these really inhumane ways, we're at war with that country.

But America can't recognize that. And the things that we would have to do to win this war in this new kind of way, we're not capable of doing. The drone warfare, the AI that we're having to use to be successful in Ukraine, Americans are, wait a second, so that drone is going to go kill a human and it's making its decision on its own? Yeah, it has to, because once it leaves this point of departure, it can't receive any signal from us because it's been blocked and it has to be able to be making those decisions by itself. Similarly, like if you go down to the Mexican border, we're not just fighting immigrants.

That's not what this is. We are, we are, you're an immigrant. I'm an immigrant. Literally every single white person in this whole entire country is an immigrant. With that said, there was an immigration process for us to come here. We are fighting cartels that are not just smuggling people, smuggling terrorists, smuggling drugs and smuggling guns. They're smuggling in ideas. And we're at war on that border.

That that's for a country to be a real country, it has to have a sovereign border. There's literally an amendment in the constitution saying that we have the right to defend ourselves and our borders, but we're not and we're being invaded. What's happening on the US-Mexico border at the moment? We'll spend some time down there. Give me the, I think was it in December,

300,000 potential immigrants were stopped. That was the number that would stop? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but the getaways is the number that nobody talks about. So 300,000 people were stopped and then let in. How many weren't stopped? How many just got in?

Is it more than 300,000? What do you think? Oh yeah, 100% no, it's more than 300,000. So like the number of people that we caught is gonna be a small fraction of the number of people that made it across without being stopped. When you look at the vastness of that border and where the wall is, where our ports of entry are, where the river is, it is porous beyond belief. You can, I've crossed that border like 25 times in a week,

both sides, like, you know, like I'm in Mexico, you know, like my phone says, welcome to Mexico, like it's going to cost you $10 a day to be here. Welcome to the international program via Verizon. And I come back and it's like, hey, welcome back to the United States. I'm like, they can do this all day long. So the ones that we're catching, the ones that we catch compared to the ones that make it through is a very, very small fraction. The ones that really don't want to be caught, the way the cartel will push a bunch of people that they know are going to get caught. Because if you just think of the, the

okay, I'm the commander, I have X number of resources, I have 100 troops at my disposal. Of course, I want to do counter interdiction. So I want to stop drugs, I want to stop human traffickers, I want to stop sex enslavement, I want to stop weapons smuggling as I'm at the river in Del Rio. And I have a thousand immigrants cross at one time. How many of my hundred soldiers do I need to use to deal with those thousand people? All right, so I've one guy receiving right, I'm gonna put them in the lines. I make some choke points. I funnel them into a specific area. I use some concertina wire to make sure like I have an orderly way.

50 guys, 75 guys, right? So now I have 50 to 25 guys left for me to use. And I have this entire area that I have to be covering. But the moment that those people start coming across the river, there's the same time that five guys jump into the river with bundles on their back. And then another five miles up the river, two boats get pushed across with a bunch of

Middle Eastern and Eastern European guys that are being smuggled and trafficked across. And then five miles down the river, there's a bunch of young girls, there are 11 or 12, they're going back into Mexico that they kidnapped in El Paso. Okay, with? The whole thing's coordinated. Tell me how to distribute my lat remaining 25 guys. Also, the thousand that start coming across, the cartel dudes are just going to grab a couple of little girls and throw them in the river.

They're going to grab a baby and drop it in the drink. They're going to take a dad just trip him with a kid on his shoulders and they're all drowning. Do you want my soldiers to jump in with body armor to start swimming after them? This is the reality every single day across the whole entire river and it is the largest border in the world. In the world is our border on our southern border. Canada, Canada to the north, gigantic border,

Mexico border to the south. We need to stop those Canadians coming in. That's the important thing that no one's talking about. Those guys. I got hopes for their next election now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So, can you explain, you know, for the people who haven't been down to the Mexico border, what is the... Is it all demarked in some form or another? Is there some type of... Or are there elements where it's literally just this is a piece of land and you can wander across? a lot. Texas has mostly private land. So that the border is on somebody's ranch.

Right. Fantastic. Yeah. Hey guys, welcome in. In some cases, but I mean those ranchers, the cartel charges, we'll say like a ticket. So if you want yourself and your family to come across your Ecuador right now, kind of spicy cartels took the whole entire thing over. I'm sure if you saw two weeks ago, they're like, they were killing news hosts in the news station while they were on the street killing a bunch of people in the street and targeting government officials

and judges. And it was happening like in real time, live on the news. So you have legitimate asylum seekers that are on the run from cartels. They move through Central America and they come up to the Mexico border. They pay the cartels to allow them to cross or they pay them extra to facilitate them coming across. This is an endless cycle of revenue for the cartels. Like it costs them nothing to produce. They don't have to smuggle in drugs. They don't have to kidnap anybody. People are just

walking to them and they on the south side have created barriers where you can't cross without permission. And if you don't pay them, they'll kill you. So there's in some cases physical barriers and in some cases psychological barriers where you know if you point this point of departure, you'll be executed without a wristband like your ticket. I could show you what those wristbands look like. Those wristbands color coordinated kind of tell you, I got a round trip, I have multi-trip, I have single direction, I'm allowed to go through this area.

Super sophisticated. Super sophisticated. Super sophisticated. All color coordinated and across this on the southern side, all agreed between this cartel that's working with this group, with this cartel, with these traffickers. And it's, it's unstoppable the way that we're currently trying to fight it, fighting it. It's just, we're not going to win. What is a way that we're currently trying to fight it fighting it. It's just we're not gonna win What is a way that would make it stoppable? So when the Chinese built the Great Wall They recognized that any barricade without

Observation isn't a barricade so I can build a wall, but if there's not something there observing that thing, it's not really a barricade because I can do whatever I need to do to get over that barricade and there's nothing to stop me. So there's like all problems, there's not a single solution, unfortunately. The wall creates choke points. It forces people to go through specific areas.

In those specific areas, we can set up to interdict those people. Now, there's a misconception that there is this barrier stopping people from crossing. There's not. Additionally, there are ports of entry. There are legal places where anybody to include people like Mexicans can just walk across the border. They can walk up and say, hey, I'm going to be working. Here's my visa or I'm going to be working at this ranch.

My mom lives across the street. And, you know, some of those borders, when they were set, some families lived on this side, some families lived on this side, and they've been going back and forth all the time. But there are so many hundreds of thousands of people that have flooded these areas that it creates a humanitarian crisis and it creates this logistical problem of how as we, the United States government

and Department of State, how do we process this number of people? We can't, which is what exactly what the cartel wants. And the surges that happen from the executive level, so the White House right now, they changed some policies and the word gets out that it's open borders. Everybody comes and everybody's coming. What was the word that got out that made it seem like it was open borders? You get money when you cross. We'll give you a couple thousand dollars.

We'll give you a bus ticket to the inland. We'll throw you on a plane and bring you to the city that you want to go to. Instead of you, if you're an asylum seeker, when during the Trump era, for example, if you came in and you were caught, an asylum seeker that just crosses, they'll then just on the inland be like, hey, I'm looking for residency here. If they're stopped on the border, they'll claim that they're asylum seekers. Well, we would make that person wait either at the country of their crossing or the country of their origin for their case, for their asylum case to be heard. Now they get a date, come back in like

six months or 12 months to your court hearing for you to learn about the process of your asylum case. So there's, there's only motivation for everyone to come here to the border and then they get an automatic pass in. Because there's no penalty. That's right. It's like universal asylum. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006. And two of the supplements I used throughout that were Fidogeoregressus and Toncat Alley. I first heard Andrew Huberman talk about the really impressive effects that these have

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off everything site-wide, including all of the products I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's live, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom. What's happening with these detention centers? That was a big news story a couple of years ago.

They've always been there. Like there were more detention centers and larger detention centers during Obama than there were Trump. That's kind of a play of numbers though, because so few people tried to cross during Trump because they knew that they're going to be kicked back to their country of origin. You know, just a couple of days ago in New York, did you see the video of the immigrants that were attacking the NYPD officers? Oh, this is horrific. The police were trying to deal with

a small problem with involving a bunch of immigrants and the immigrants attacked the two police officers. The two police officers end up grappling on the ground against a couple of them. And then the whole entire crowd came up and started soccer kicking the police officers. And it turns into like this, I mean,

it's a hard video to watch. I'm actually about to post it today because I wanted to get some more context as to like, what was the initial call? Why were they there? Like they were there doing the right thing. There were actually crimes being committed and they were there to like try and keep the peace as good police officers.

And then it was escalated not on their end, but on the illegals end. And then they ended up getting like skull stomped. This is foreshadowing of what's gonna be coming. Like this is just a tiny little taste. Like those are just immigrants. So those weren't even bad actors that were trained and are hoping for an opportunity to do America damage because tens of thousands of them came into this country

over the past couple of years. Did you see that video of a bunch of people on a plane refusing to sit down because someone was being deported. Yeah. And it turned out that that person had been involved in gangland shootouts and all manner of fuckery. Yeah. 10 days ago, live news near Eagle Pass, another common... Texas. Yeah. Another common smuggling point. Uh, this news host is talking about all the immigrants coming across and this guy in, in pretty decent English walks up behind.

He goes, you don't know who I am, but you're going to know my name. And you're like, what is going on here? Facial recognition ties this guy to 82% that he is a multi-time terrorist that was in Gitmo. And he just walked across the border. He's live on television as this terrorist just walks into America and is bragging that everybody's going to know his name. That was almost two and a half, two weeks ago, a week and a half ago. What would you do? What would you do to try and fix this problem?

You've mentioned that you need to have presumably more staffing, more funding to be able to train people up to be able to do this. Yeah. So this isn't a border state problem. This is a national problem, right? So the governor of Texas is using state resources. He approved Operation Lone Star, which is using Texas National Guard soldiers to protect the border. So he is using Texas National Guard soldiers to protect the border. So he is using tons of tech of state funding to protect the Texas border. It's not just the Texas border. This is America's border. But a whole bunch of, you know, most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, are bearing the burden of this immigration humanitarian

crisis. But the other 36 states are kind of, or the other 46 states are just kind of like hanging back and being like, huh, sucks to be you guys. But then we, we bust a couple of bus loads up to them. They're like, Oh my God, we're like being overwhelmed. I'm like, we sent you 500 of them. Do you know what it's like when you have 300,000 that just came across your border that are in your country? What would I do? I would finish the wall. I would make certain areas impassable. That's Constantine and wire that is armed guards that is men on horseback. That epic photo of those Border Patrol guys that he was actually using his leads and they thought it was a whip because people are idiots and they actually don't know how to ride

a horse. Sensors, drones. We have the solutions. This is a fixable thing. We just don't have yet again the appetite to do what it takes to close that border. Once the border is closed, we open the ports of entry, Department of State funds and Department of State is doing the best they can with the very restricted resources they have. So imagine like the White House is telling the Department of State, hey, you have to

be to be doing this. Department of State is like, we don't have the resources and we don't have the means to facilitate this number of people, then the White House is like, hey, everybody come over here. And department states like we can't. So these ports of entry have to be opened and the systems have to be fixed

for us to be able to process more people in a more strategic way. Didn't someone rip down a turn of razor wire? Wasn't that a big deal like last week, two weeks ago? So the federal government is, there's like competing efforts at the border right now. So Texas is saying the border's closed and the federal government saying, no, the border's open.

So the federal government is coming down to the barricades and the barriers that Texas has put up and said, we, you can't have those that goes against federal law. And Texas is saying, no, you can't do that. Like this is Texas land and we're closing the borders. So if you're not going to close the American borders, we're going to close the Texas border. Um, yeah, they're literally like federal law enforcement is coming in and doing the opposite of what the Texas law enforcement is doing, wild. Yeah, that's conflict.

Brian Callan told me that he tried to trick you into believing that he was asleep and you stood over him and said, do you know how many people have tried to pretend that they're asleep as I've stood over them? Yeah. I love that guy. But he did get up and he did go to the water with me.

And then he did wrestle with me on the southern coast of France in the sand. Yeah. Yeah. And I started like leg riding him from behind and put his face down in the sand. And while he was like trying to and ineffectively trying to get away from me, I was like drawing hearts in the sand and while he was like trying to and ineffectively trying to get away from me, I was like drawing hearts in the sand and his face is like this and I'm like, I'm drawing hearts in the sand. It was awesome.

What a great, what a gem of a human. For the people who haven't, almost no one really that's listening will have been in any kind of kinetic armed encounter. What's it actually like to be in a firefight? What's the sense of that? Like what, just like describe what's going on? Fear, chaos, anarchy. I mean, it's like, it is so not like the movies, you know, it's like John Wick's

just like doing like some cool artistic violent ballet and it's, it's, um, cool artistic violent ballet and it smells like shit. You know, the smell of human flesh being burnt, whether it's a bullet going in it or an explosion from an IED or an RPG, you know, the diesel from a Humvee or RG 33, the smell of gunpowder from a 50 cal machine gun. Those are all hard smells. And then when there's over pressure from a machine gun or a bomb or a grenade or an AT4, it of course kicks up the dirt. But it's the fine dirt. It's not like the heavy good soil like on farmland. It's like the gross moon dust dirt. Human skin.

Yeah. And so you get these really weird not natural smells mixed with very earthy smells. earthy smells. And smells are a trigger for a lot of people's memories. And that earthy with mechanical, with burning thing are like really overwhelming sensations. That's the smell portion. And then there's like what you're seeing. And the fog of war could not like fail to express how hard it is to see what you're seeing. You know, you've heard that expression, the fog of war and people trying to remember back to battles and they have a really hard time explaining what they're seeing. It's because I don't think your brain can process what you're seeing. You know, your brain can't process like your friend just got blown up and he's burnt over here and there's a guy up there that's shooting a bullet at you that's from a machine gun position that's going to kill you.

You know, and like the vehicle that or you're just in is like shredded with a bunch of wait, those holes in the front of this vehicle weren't there a few seconds ago. And that's what that sound was. And but your brain's trying to process this all the time, all the while, like adrenaline, adrenaline cortisol is just exploding through your body. It's war as hell and the fog of war are apt expressions to try to, in a succinct way, say it's fucking chaos. So it's not, yeah, chaos is the right word that there's no degree of pause or control in what you've just described, but presumably that's what tactics and preparation are for. Yeah.

It's to allow you to be able to wrangle what's going on and actually have some sort of process that you guys are moving through. Yeah. I mean, that's why we do tens of thousands of reps of an emergency reload of my rifle, right? The bolt locks to the rear. I feel the bolt. I feel my magazine giving light as I'm shooting. Then I literally feel against my chin, the bolt lock to the rear, and I feel the little catch stop that bolt from traveling back forward because the follower is pushed up by or pushed up the bolt lock by the follower of the magazine. So I know my gun's empty. I drop the magazine, I insert a new magazine, I drop the bolt lock by the follower of the magazine. So I know my gun's empty. I drop the magazine, I insert a new magazine, I drop the bolt, I re-grip the gun, I find my sight, and I press the trigger. And all that happens in less than a second. My brain shouldn't can't do that.

Like I can't cognitively think about doing that process. But I've practiced it, you know, tens of thousands of times that it just happens. And when we start maneuvering and we have a group laying down suppressive fire while another group is flanking, or we have one group move up to an oversight position to start laying down suppressive fire while another element goes, like these are all rehearsed responses to known problems. And, uh, and that's why the most elite units on the planet have so much time to train and so many resources to facilitate them training. Go ambush Delta Force. You know, like, go give that a whirl. You know, like, real bad plan.

You're all going to die. Send as many people as you want and just know that you're not going to get any of them back. You know, like, cool. Go deal with SEAL Team 6 on the water. That's a good idea. You know, or like, go kidnap an American and drag her into the desert and then use a cell phone and see how that works out for you. You know, these these these are all stories of SEAL Team 6, like dropping into North Africa and going and rescuing this beautiful blonde NGO worker and killing literally everybody on the ground.

True stories. And it's because they've done it thousands of times, thousands of reps, thousands of jumps, thousands of time rounds on down on the range. So when that chaos happens and you're scared and you're full of fear, you're just doing the thing that you've always practiced to do. And if you do it, you'll live, if you don't, you're gonna die. So I understand the moving things that you have to do from system two, deliberate thinking

into system one, automatic thinking. It's what you did in the UFC, right? Someone throws a punch, you don't think, oh, that's a left jab, I'm gonna like slip. Yeah, I I'm going to move a little bit. I'm going to move. I'm going to move. It just happens. But presumably in a firefight, it's not just reaction and response. There's this sort of system one thinking where you're just doing the things, reloading the weapon. But then there's also the, you need to use some cognition too. So what about that pulling in and pulling out thing? How do you utilize a little bit more of the analytical brain if you've just caught us all in adrenaline?

And well, those systems and those processes are built within the military combat unit. You know, so while you have the fighters, you also have the, you know, we'll just use a special forces ODA, you know, you have operational detachment alphites, it's like the 12 man A team. Within that team, you have two guys per job. There's four main jobs, which are the eight men that do the body of the work. The other four guys are leaders in some form or fashion and each of them take a certain piece of the pie on the leadership role. Like- Is that one for each two? No. So the team sergeant, he's kind of running the eight guys. He's the E8 that is like the battle hardened. He's the most senior NCO on the ground. And he's feeding the information to the

18 Bravo, the weapons guy, to the communication guy, to the engineer who's going to be launching mortars and rockets. And to the medic who's making sure like all the team and their foreign fighters are all working in use. And then you have, you know, the, the intel guy who's kind of feeding information and helping the team sergeant, but he's also feeding information to the team leader, the team leaders on the phone talking to command, getting maybe some air support. He wants some fixed wing fast movers or he's looking for some rotary wing support or he called an AC 130. So they're all reacting, but they're reacting in their piece of the pie and some of those

reactions are that team leader the the captain if he picks up the 240 machine gun and hops up on top of the back of the Humvee and he's like I'm the war hero, you know like Sir, you're fired. That is not your job. Your job is to go get on that radio and to call higher and get a support. Similarly, if that team sergeant isn't directing and coordinating the men to respond to, you know, the threat or the ambush in the right way that they've rehearsed in the plant, then like he's not doing his job. So each one of these awesome jobs has an awesome role and the individual responsibility of that person to understand that role and then to be able to execute that role in this hell that is war during the fog of war is so freaking badass. And that's why you, it's

one of the many reasons why I, you know, Marcus Luttrells and the Andy Stumps and the Jocos and the Evan Haifers and you see them be like incredibly successful in business. They're like, of course they will. Because look at what they did beforehand in all of these different roles as they moved up the military ladder and filled every single one of the roles on the way up where they'll go run a Fortune 500 company or they'll go start a brand new one and then bring it public and solve it for you a few hundred million dollars. And here's my face of surprise, you know, like they can do anything.

What do each of the full pairs of people do? So you have the 18 Bravo, he is a weapon sergeant and he's kind of responsible for base security. The initial, he's like the warrior. He's, I was an 18 bravo. So I'm being slightly biased here. They're the best. And so then the 18 Charlie, he's the engineer.

So there's two of each of these. There's two of, there's a senior and a junior. So the guy that's been on the team longer and then the team gets the junior guy and he's the mentor to him. He's shown him all the things that he needs to know and preparing that replacement. And the senior of each of those jobs

is also looking at the four other roles like the 18 Fox, the warrant on the team and the team sergeant. And they're all kind of being positioned and trained to then fill the next role above them. The engineer is the explosives, the building is the bridge good to cross, is this building stable for us to fight from? If I'm going to be setting up the camp, here's how I'm doing like the logistic resource of refits and refuels. 18 Echo is the communication guy,

so satellite communication, line of sight communication, FM, all of the things that we need to do, shoot, move, communicate, medicate. Then leads us to the 18 Delta, which is the special forces medic, and there's two of them. They're like a PA, like slash paramedic. That's really, really good at trauma.

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or heading to drinkag1.com slash wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash wisdom. I was reading about some rumors of the number of soldiers that had been deployed. Perhaps it was in World War II, but it could have been in one of the later wars who didn't fire their rifle or purposefully fired their rifle over the heads of the enemy. Well, how much truth's in that?

There's truth to that. With, with this wild phenomenon called non-shoot snipers. So guys in a combat arms, he goes to the only casualty producing school within the military sniper school where they're actually just teaching a person how to kill another person. Only casualty producing, right? Because the only role that you have, or the primary role that you have, you get spotting as well. It's like in drew movements and shit.

Yeah, observing, feeding back information, but ultimately we're also teaching a dude how to take crosshairs, figure out how to take a bullet and put it into somebody and make a hole. You have lots of military schools. I'm about to go to one that's like six months long. And that is not a casualty producing school. That's a leadership school. It's like lots Ranger school,

not a casualty producing school. That's a leadership school. Sephardek, that is not a casualty producing school, even though you learn a ton about how to shoot, move, communicate, medicate, that is how to rescue somebody that is a hostage. You go to Sephauix Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat. That is how do I do war in a combat area or in an urban area? It's like each of them building necessary skills within that special operations unit. But sniper school teaching somebody how to make a hole in somebody far, far away. The no shoot sniper comes from combat arms, goes to sniper school, goes to war, and can't pull the trigger. And it's not common, but it does, it happens. And this is just my personal opinion. I think it is, for a couple of reasons. One is the equipment that we use, just like I can see you here,

very, very close, you know, like, I can see your skin, I can see your just like I can see you here, very, very close, you know, like I can see your skin, I can see your pores, I can see the vents on your neck. You're like, that's how intimate it is when you're looking through a 20 power optic. So it humanizes the target. Yeah. And I'm watching them breathe, and I know I'm going to have a bullet flight of two to three seconds. So I actually have to be watching how you're moving.

So I need to know where you're going to be in two to three seconds from now. So I'm like learning so much about you and how you move. And it really connects me to you, which is one problem. And then the other part is the the thing that we've known throughout all war, which is some people just can't do it. It's not for everybody. Have you hacksawacksaw Ridge, have you ever seen this movie, read this book, Medal of Honor recipient. He was a conscientious objector. He would not hold a weapon. This is during World War II. He would not hold a gun. He said he wouldn't do it. It was against his faith. it was against his faith. And during one of the island invasions in the Pacific, he rescued like hundreds of Americans and get shot, get stabbed, gets blown up. And he just keeps

going up this cliff and grabbing these Americans. And everybody at the base of the cliff has no idea who keeps lowering down these Americans. And they find out that it was this guy that they've been trying to kick out of the unit because he wouldn't fight. And not everybody needs to fight. There's a, there's a beautiful poem written about the warrior. There's a hundred men that go to war. 80 of them shouldn't even be there. You know, like,

they're just bags of blood, they're going to be running forward to die. 10 of them are going to like, they're the men that are going to carry the war, like they're the ones that are going to go out and fight. You know, and then there's the remaining 10 and men, they're incredible. They're brave, they're courageous, they're leaders, but then there's the one, right? There's the one that's going to bring all the men home. And that's the, that's the Marcus Luttrell's. That's the Dakota Myers. That's the, that's the extraordinary, that's the Andy Stumps. You know, like, you know, some of these guys. I texted Andy this morning. Yeah, great human. This is Andy's. It's nice. Orige? Yeah, yeah. I stole it from him. Oh, great human. This is Andy's. It's nice, origin.

Yeah, yeah. But I stole it from him. Oh, right. You actually took it off his bag. No, no. He laid down and set it down and I took it and I put it in my bag and then I left with it. Right.

So if Andy's looking at you thinking, that's a familiar looking. Yeah. I was just sure if it was his or Denver's, but I'm like 90% sure that I was his. Okay. So like 90% that I stole this. That it's nice.

It is nice. Is there anyone, you've mentioned Marcus LaTrell, Dakota Meyer, is there anyone that you have heard about or you served with that you wish their story would be better known? Is there someone, are there incidents that you wish that you could sort of bring to public light more? Yeah. Give me some.

Roy Benavidez. All right, you're not gonna believe this one. Okay, Roy Benavidez, he's in Vietnam, he's a Texan, and he's sitting on a Ford base, and he listens to a Special Forces ODA, he's a green beret, getting a gunfight. He's like, whoop, this sounds bad. Helicopter goes in to try to get some dudes,

he gets scuffed up, comes back with a bunch of bullet holes and Roy runs up to the helicopter and he's like, hey, I'm gonna go with you, take me back in there. He throws a bunch of guns and ammo in there. The helicopter takes off. On his own. On his own. Flies him back to where the ODA has almost all been

massacred. He goes, starts leading the ODA has almost all been massacred He goes starts leading the remaining men that are all busted up all of them are wounded Most of them are dead he gets them to start fighting back the Viet Cong and starts pushing them back He gets all the men together and they start Surviving for a little bit helicopters are trying to come get them out through the course of that I think he gets like 70 80 or 90 bullet wounds through the course of it. I think he gets like 70, 80, or 90 bullet wounds, fragmentation from grenades, and bayonet wounds. He kills a dude with a rock, kills a dude with a bayonet. There's a portion where one of the helicopters is trying to take off, but it has so much, they overload it with the wounded and dead. He's running along side of it with a machine gun, providing support with his body and a

machine gun laying down supporting fire as this helicopter is trying to take off. Helicopter comes back again. He gets the last remaining bits of equipment. He gets the last few men back onto the helicopter. He's the last guy to come. He gets jumped, gets stabbed with the bayonet, takes the bayonet out, kills the dude, kills a couple more dudes, hops in the helicopter and falls over. They, the helicopter lands.

He's covered in blood. He's covered in mud. And they're like lands. He's covered in blood. He's covered in mud. And they're like this dude's dead. They throw him in a dead body bag so they can throw him in the morgue. And as they're zipping the thing up, he goes and he spits in the doctor's face. He couldn't talk. He'd been so wounded. There's nothing that he could do besides spit on this dude to let him know they are still alive. He's like, Oh, my God, Roy Benevites is still alive. That's a good one my God, Roy Benavidez is still alive. That's a good one.

You know, Shugart and Gordon, Black Hawk down. No. Oh, okay. I'm going to do this without crying. Okay. Good luck. Good luck. You're familiar with the Black Hawk down battle of Mogadishu.

They're in there to get this, um, terrorist leader. And, um, the plan was for Delta force to come in on top of this building. The Rangers come up to create a perimeter security perimeter around this building. While they find the bad guy inside, move him to the vehicles and they all drive out together. That was the plan. Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face. Guys get in, they get the bad guy, Rangers arrive, helicopter gets struck by an RPG in the tail, helicopter crashes.

Um, this then begins this horrific battle against a bunch of different terrorist organizations, all trying to kill the Rangers and Delta Force that are now trapped in Mogadishu. And it's a, I mean, this is a fight. 30, 40 to 1 odds and ratio between terrorists to American operators. Shugart and Gordon are two special forces snipers that are in a helicopter providing overwatch. One of the helicopters that gets shot and crashes is getting overrun by all of these insurgent militia terrorists. They see on the ground that this helicopter that some of the people inside of it survived the crash. And they see small arms fire. They

see flashes from these guys trying to protect themselves. They get on the radio and they're like, General, we'd like permission to go in and protect these guys. If we don't get down there, they're going to get overrun. We can see everything. The general is like, negative, you do not have permission. You cannot be put on the ground. And they're like, understood. Why did they not give permission? So they call again five minutes later. They're like, if we don't get on the ground right now, everybody in that helicopter is going to die. The general's like, no, denied, you cannot go down there. You see better than we can that there is no way for us to get you out. If you go on the

ground, it's just going to add to the problem. It's two more people. They get a third time, sir. With your permission, please allow us to get on the ground. We will fight to the helicopter. We will create a perimeter, a security perimeter around these guys, and we will protect them until we get a time to get these guys out. The general's like, I don't know when that's going to be. If you go on the ground, I can't send the Rangers to you. I have no more helicopters to send to you. I have no resources to go and rescue the people in that helicopter. And Durant, an amazing book,

the pilot that was in the helicopter, he tells in his book, the most dangerous time to be taken captive is like the first few minutes. There's like this bloodlust, this like rampage rage. So the helicopter crashes, right? And like think like you're an insurgent, you're a terrorist on the ground.

We got him. We got him, right? Like you're rushing in, you're just killing everything. So like there has to be this lull if anybody has a chance to survive. So Shugart and Gordon talk the general after three efforts into putting them on the ground. These two Delta Force special forces snipers

from my from like the school that I went to, it's the best sniper school on the planet. These dudes fight from their infall point to the helicopter and they kill literally everybody. Like if there was anybody within 200 meters that was holding a gun, they went on the ground 200 meters that was holding a gun. They went on the ground leaky of blood and dead. They get to the helicopter. And this is all explained in Durant's book because he was the one that survived. He was the one that they went to rescue. He was the one that they ultimately gave their life to save.

And they did just that. They grab him, they drag him out of the, out of the helicopter. They bring him into the building. And then they go back out to the helicopter. They give him into the building and then they go back out to the helicopter They give him an MP5 and they say anybody that comes in behind us stop them because we're gonna fight to slow because like this big huge surge like this Like you've seen like where riots kind of start giving that energy and like people start pulsing fever Yeah, so that fever is there and they're just trying to keep it at bay and they run out of rifle ammo

They run out of they start acquiring weapons off the ground and they run out of that ammo and they end up with pistols and they're like Bare-knuckle fighting these guys and shooting the remaining pistol rounds as they have before ultimately they're both killed and They save his life and Shoe Garden Gordon both killed and they save his life. And um, Shugart and Gordon knew and I, that's the, this is the, this is the hard one. They knew they were going to die. Like there's not a, there's not a way that you're sitting in a helicopter like that and you're like, we'll survive this. When that question is, there's no greater thing than to lay your life down for another service, right? Here we are full circle. They knew that they're going to die for the chance to save a dude. I've asked myself this question a thousand times, like, what would I do? And I don't know.

Shugarton Gordon. Pretty rad, men. I could go on for hours telling these stories because if there's a part of you that is lacking purpose, sometimes you can find inspiration from somebody else's purpose. And there's been times where I'm like, looking at Israel, like, do I have to go over there? Is this where I really need to go?

And those questions of like, should I be there? Am I just another pawn to these large strategic influences? Should I be at the Mexico border? Should I be in Ukraine? Should I be in Afghanistan? But maybe that purpose is just to be part of something that's bigger and better than yourself. And then the answer is yes. Here I am. Send me like an IZS68. Well, get back to talking to Tim in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning.

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it for any reason, they'll give you your money back, and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Head to the link in the description below to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box or go to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. There's a story that you had when you run out of ammo as well. I seem to remember hearing that from you. Yeah, that's not a great plan. If you're in the military, as best you can, never being a gunfight and run out of ammo. That's a, yeah, that was an Urz gone Valley,

Afghanistan in 2008. We got blown up and we've, they couldn't get ammo resupplies into us. The gunfight was so intense. We have RG33s, we had HMVs, we had supporting special forces commandos that were with us. We ran out of ammo. Like that's wild. That's a gunfight. How long was that firefight?

Three days in a couple of days out, so maybe five days cumulatively of gunfighting. What you mean in and out? So we were moving a group of Czech special operations into this firebase called Firebase Anaconda. And we had to go through this valley to get to Firebase Anaconda. And the topography was really advantageous for the Taliban.

And like everything was kind of stacked against us, but we had to get this unit in there because Firebase Anaconda had been isolated. If you Google Firebase Anaconda, they have, I think, two or three times been overrun by the Taliban, like climbing over walls and they're fighting for their lives. Who the fuck chose to put this thing there?

That's a great question. That's a stupid idea to put it in this like. They're also surrounded, they're close enough where foreign fighters are easily, easily that area is easily accessible to foreign fighters. It's just like the perfect storm and the worst place to be. ODA 782.

Little shout out to you guys because they held that base, um, better than anybody ever has throughout the whole entire GWAT. And it's my, my two best friends in the world, their old ODA. But we were trying to get the Czech special forces to Firebase Anaconda. And you had to pass through this valley. And that's where we got blown up and attacked and ambushed. And then we had to fight for a while. And then once we got to Firebase Anaconda, you know, we through this valley and that's where we got blown up and attacked and ambushed And then we had to fight for a while and then once we got to fire base Anaconda You know we had scuffed up you know We killed like three four hundred foreign fighters and Taliban on our way in like that really like we kicked a hornet's nest

So then all of the other organizations were sending all of their people because then they knew that we had to leave Because our job was to bring those guys in We left I put this in my book and I can't remember it off the top of my head now. We left with a couple hundred trucks and we arrived with like a couple dozen. That was crappy. So if you're in a situation like that where you need to be fighting for five days straight, like you can't be awake and functioning well

for all of that time. So you're trying to grab 30 minutes of rest whenever you can. I don't remember trying to get rest. I remember being underneath a Humvee and I woke up and I don't know how I got underneath that Humvee and I don't know how long I've been underneath that Humvee and I heard like, so there's somebody like shooting towards you, which is like, and then there's somebody shooting at you, which is like, the snap. And then there's why is the snap? The snap is is the bullet

like coming past you. And right, it pushes the yeah. Yeah. And then there's bang. And that's like the bullet is so close. You hear the bang of the rifle. You hear the pop of the supersonic and then you hear the literally the hundred and fifteen grain or 250 grain thing going past your face and I'm laying there and I hear as it like goes past this

Humvee and hits something metal in my vicinity and I wake up and then I was like, and I had over pressure sickness. So I was like, shitting my pants. What's over pressure sickness? Something where it's like being concussed. And it's not being concussed. It is being concussed. Okay. So like a bunch of small concussions from explosions and IEDs and RPGs and 50 cals and

84s, like all the things that we're shooting at them and all the things that they're shooting at us, all of those things go with air and that's happening around your head. So that sucks. And then we're at altitude and then I'm sleeping underneath a Humvee, which is probably not a great place. While shitting yourself. Yeah, while you're shitting yourself.

I smelled, I bet. That was pretty stank. Anyway, so yeah, I don't know when I slept. I just like occasionally would wake up and when I was writing that scars and stripes and I went back and I talked to a whole bunch of people that were there with me. One of my friends, Mike, he died in 2019, Afghanistan. He was with me. He saved my life that day. Mike Goble, I walk up to a door. I don't know how he knew this. Because I woke up, I walk up and I'm about to push the door open. And as soon as I touch the handle of the door, and it's a push door, he shoves me. And he and I always like, we're kind of physical, like we're all almost always going to fight over something stupid. I got mad at him because he was carrying a pistol through a village and he wanted a pistol

kill. And I was like, you're sitting on a machine gun. Why would he be holding a pistol? Put your pistol away. And we ended up fist fighting the team sergeant came over and separated. It's like, we're always like really rough. So he shoves me and I like fall back. And I'm like getting ready, like we're in the middle of a gunfight. And I'm about to like start a fist fight with him because he shoves me and the whole door starts getting shredded by machine gunfire. There's a PKM on the other side side and I don't know if he like heard the bolt drop. I don't know if he heard the selector switch, the safety getting pulled. I don't know if he just had like an intuition if there's a sixth sense divine intervention. He shoves and the whole

door just starts getting shredded. Mike Goble and uh, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to read it. Mike Goble. And, uh, hero, I wish everybody learned about him. There's another multiple tours, you know, countless lives he saved, more people he rescued like hero. Mike English, I can't even say his last name because he's still in. But the Fog of War,

when I went back and talked to all these guys, they remembered a whole bunch of things that I didn't remember and we, in some cases, the things that we remembered were in conflict of each other. I thought it happened this way. No, it didn't happen that way. That's right. Like, there were a bunch of women and kids that got hurt after that door got shredded, because when that door got pushed open, I saw a machine gun barrel sticking out of this tiny little window. And I take a grenade, a frag grenade, and I throw it through that window, the grenade goes off. And a few seconds later, I hear a bunch of women and children screaming.

Now, a few seconds later can be anything in the brain in war, right? That might have been 10 minutes. But I remember it being like very shortly after, like it was a response to my grenade. On the outside of the building, my friend Mike Kay was on a big heavy machine gun pounding this, this compound where there he saw a bunch of insurgents fighting out of it, specifically that room where those women and children were. So for 10 years, I lived with like, I'm the one that hurt these, these, these people that had been used as body shields by the terrorists. And he, for 10

years, had assumed that he was the one that had hurt everybody. And he was living with that for 10 years. We both did, right? Like, it's war. That's, how do you think about that? That's certainly one of the things, you know, when people hear stories like that, especially if they're not familiar with collateral damage and the imprecision that happens, especially when you're going house to house, especially if the terrorists are using civilians as body shields or if

you're just going door to door with things as families and people in that. How do you think about collateral damage in that way? The fact that there's someone who didn't do anything wrong that is in the midst of two people trying to kill each other. Yeah. Obviously, America wants no collateral damage. You go back to World War II, you launched a surprise attack against us and Pearl Harbor, and we fight you all the way back to mainland and take every single island that you used to own and then make it ours. And then we tell you to surrender and you don't, we drop a nuclear bomb on you. Then we tell you to surrender and you don't, and we drop another nuclear bomb on you.

And we tell you to surrender. And if you don't, we're going to drop another nuclear bomb on you. Like that's winning a war. That's that's winning a war in a way that we can't, we don't have the appetite to win wars anymore. The moral equivalency of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Taliban and al-Qaeda and ISIS, they intentionally use civilians as shields. They intentionally use hostages as shields, they intentionally manipulate the battlefield for the moral consequence of the fighting force that has to fight against it. They want to hurt our souls. They want to hurt the civilians because if the civilians get hurt by us as we're trying to be strategic and targeting the bad guys, not that not,

we don't want any collateral damage at all. We want zero, but they make it so that it's impossible for us to be successful without any form of collateral damage. And that's exactly what they want because that continues, it's another spoke in the wheel of their propaganda machine. So then they say like, look, all these women and children were hurt because the Americans or the Israelis came in here. No, no, you did that on purpose. You were hiding a rocket launcher at a hospital. You were hiding a bunch of arms in a school, and then you put all the kids in the school and you wanted us to target it. And then you leaked out information that those weapons were in the school. And that, and then you also leaked out information that high level leaders were there at the specific time.

So of course, we targeted that time to get the high-level leaders and the weapons, but then you put kids in there. Anybody that tries to conflate this moral covenancy between like the Hamas and Israel's response, you can just separate them this one specific idea. One group of them are hiding behind civilians and they use that as leverage and opportunity to create more propaganda. The other group is doing everything in their power to limit civilian casualties and any form of collateral damage. And the line of departure between those two could not be more clear. Anybody that says anything else is ignorant and totally doesn't understand it or is so in

confirmation bias trying to support this set of beliefs that are not based on fact. They cannot be more dissimilar. And shame on anybody that conflates those too. I was speaking about the Nagasaki bomb blast. Do you know the Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Erkhardt? No. Dude, I'll get this book for you. It's my favorite non-, sort of real life story.

So this guy is a Scottish dude who goes to Singapore in World War Two. Japan enters the war. He gets captured by the Japanese. And for the next four years goes through more than I think pretty much anyone that I've ever read about. So this guy is put in forced labor for the best part of two and a half years he's made to help build the bridge over the River Kwai. He's basically permanently got every tropical disease including dysentery for all of this time. He's being mistreated. Then one of the camp guards tries to rape him.

So instead of allowing him to do that, he kicks him in the nuts and runs away. He then gets locked in a tin box in the middle of the sun to basically just cook to death. Doesn't die. Then after that gets put onto one of these Japanese hell ships, which doesn't have the Swiss cross on the side. That gets torpedoed by an American submarine. Doesn't die, finds a small piece of flotsam and floats in it, has to fight a Japanese soldier in the water, one in like a little bucket and the other on this piece of flotsam, doesn't die, lands ashore and is free briefly but then gets recaptured, put back to work, gets knocked off

his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki, still doesn't die, and then for 50 years keeps quiet by order of the British government and finally writes this memoir to bring the Japanese to account for the atrocities that they went through because we had the Nuremberg trials, we had this sort of call to arms for what Germany had done, but the equivalent thing didn't seem to happen in the same way for the Japanese. The book is outrageously good. It's called the Forgotten Highlander. Outrageous. I mean, yeah.

It's really good. Other thing as well, I remember, there's this great, is it? World War II, the front lines, it's on Netflix at the moment. So they used AI to colorize. Oh, I heard about this. And make 4K, all of this sort of archive footage, which is very strange because you're not used to seeing old and timey war in a more vibrant sort of real way. It's always archive footage has this, it gives you a sense of distance by it not being as sharp, right? You were talking about the sniper is able to see the face, the expressions of the person

and it humanizes them. This really humanizes the story. I person, and it humanizes them. This really humanizes the story. I'm not sure I can handle this. It's pretty rough, but it's also fascinating because it's so much more immersive. If the Japanese hadn't decided they were going to surrender, the US was basically preparing the largest land invasion in history. And they were, I think they were still unsure

about whether or not Japan was actually going to surrender because it was like, we will fight to the last man, woman and child. The Emperor said that behind every single blade of grass would be a Japanese soldier or a civilian with a sword behind every blade of grass in Japan and the mainland. So America, when we looked like, why would we drop two nuclear bombs?

That would have cost fewer lives than what? It would have been millions. That's right. So like, wait, dropping two nuclear bombs saved millions of lives? Yes, it did. Try to explain that, you know? Welcome to 2024. What's it like to be shot?, you know, welcome to 2024.

What's it like to be shot? Have you been shot? I have. Okay, what's it feel like? Yeah. So I've never actually been shot in war. And for me protecting, it's a really weird thing, seeing a barrel pointed at you and then seeing the flash.

I was obviously in body armor and I was being really particular so I like rolled my shoulders back and I was standing like this and I pulled my chin back because I didn't want any like slag or things coming up into my neck or into my shoulders or my arms. I have seen friends get shot in war and I have obviously shot people on like the receiving end of in a gunfight. So one of my friends had a round go through like his groin and it missed his like for more artery but his like ball started like swelling up. So like a little bit of slag, like a little bit of, I think, shrapnel, like went up into his nut sacs.

So they started like bleeding in there and like started getting real, we had air, we had air vac him out. But he didn't realize that he'd even been hurt or hit until like he had a gigantic set of balls. You know, he was still like... That wasn't like that. Yeah, like what is going on down here? And they're in Band of Brothers, there's this amazing scene where this guy, this grenade goes off and he looks down and he sees that he's bleeding below the waist and the medic runs over and he's like, actually, and he like cuts him up, cuts his trousers open.

He's like, Hey bro, you're good. Like, Hey, your, your dick and balls are still good. Stay with me. You got the will to fight now. You're like, it was like this essence of when you think about warriors, like they're warriors in every sense and their manliness and that masculinity are very much entwined with their psyche. Don't get your dick blown off if that's possible.

Yeah. But to the bullet question, like mostly they're like, did I get, I got hit, you know, like, what the fuck? Did you see this? You know, like they didn't even recognize that there's a bolt hole in their arm. Or like, I'm trying to use my arm. It's not working. Well, I guess you've got this cascade of hormones that caught us all the adrenaline and all the rest of it. So it's just like, I don't know.

That's why I was so interested to work out how much pain versus how much surprise there is. I have this sort of idea, I snap my Achilles, which is the most traumatic injury that I've had, pretty nasty injury. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the first thing that I felt wasn't pain,

it was surprise. I was like, why is my leg not? And I thought to myself, I wonder how many people, we think about your final moments on this planet, being you, thinking of your loved ones, or you in pain, or you in fear, or you in whatever. I think surprise will be up there

as one of the leading emotions that people pass away with. Did I just get fucking? I hope so. That's a great way to go. You know, when I'm hunting, I try to be a really ethical hunter. And, you know, I even try to be on the left side of surprise. You know, like the animals just sitting there eating grass.

Dead before it has chance to be surprised. Yeah, just like, what, what was that? Oh no, there's nothing. You can't even figure out what it was because it's just blackness now. I don't know. I can't think of a time where I was hurt in, I mean, even in the fights in the UFC, you know, cut wide open, like this was Robbie Lawler.

This was Yohal Romero. This was, uh, Jacare Sousa, you know, like I got one from Luke Rockhold right here. And in after the fights, the UFC fight doc, he'd come to stitch me closed and he'd walk in with like a local and be like, I don't want that. He's like, yeah, I'm serious. So my face closed. And I'd never let him give me any form of painkiller.

I wanted to feel it, but I didn't really feel it. And then in the cage, I definitely didn't feel it. So it sounds like a really hard thing to do, but your body is just producing so much. Yeah. And also, I mean, there's a bit of me that wanted to feel it. Like I made this mistake. I wanna remember this mistake,

like the purpose of pain. I'm writing a book right now called The Purpose of Pain. And the lessons that we learn from pain are I think the most important lessons, emotional pain, you're like, I bat out of my league, I'm like, hey, that crazy Latino girl, that's like an 11. I'm totally going to be with this one. And then she tries to stab you at night.

Um, you're like, maybe you bat it out of your league, bro. Like go with the seven. Um, and similarly, like I, I touch a stove and I burn my hand. I know that not to touch the stove again, you know, like I think back to all the mistakes and the humiliation and the shame that I made as a young man. And now as I'm hoping to be an improved man,

I'm like, I don't want to do that again. I remember what that embarrassment felt like. You've worked quite hard to try and, you know, we've spent a good bit of time together since I've been. Not enough, by the way. Yeah, I know. That's your fault. It is my fault. But I passed my driving test finally because there's no license equivalency, but that means I can drive up and see you up north. Okay. Um, you spend an awful lot of time trying to do everything the way that

you want to do anything. Um, whether it's with alcohol, with training, we did a session. He came up to me in Roka. I hadn't done any cardio work in quite a while, and it was a pair's workout that was going to last maybe 30 minutes or something in four stations, three stations. He came up to me and he pointed your finger in my face, and he said, there's one thing that we're not going to be, and that's last.

That was quite motivating. My point being, do you think that you're a good man now because you have this backdrop of? Not believing that you were a good man When you think about you Who do you see? Do you see the old Tim? Are you still paying reparations? How do you how do you think about that? I mean, what is it? We'll get philosophical. Like, what is a good man? I think a man should always be judged by his actions. And obviously, if you look back to periods of my life, my actions were not in support of being a good man. I mean, even some of the motivations of

when I was going overseas, like all these idealistic things about, hey, you can go and make a place a more stable and sovereign nation, you can give them democracy. Like those are really great ideas, but there was also a 25 year old version of Tim that was like, I wanna go and get in a fight. You know, like I want you to say something so I can knock your teeth in.

Like I'm happy to be a bouncer at the door for the opportunity to do violence. All of those obviously are not great characteristics. And so even though I was doing good things, I was looking for an opportunity to do bad things. Now, if we are what we do, what are the things like if anybody were to take a step back and look at their life, and you're spending step back and look at their life and you're spending eight, 10 hours a day working at a job that you don't love to go back to a woman that you don't appreciate to be around kids that you don't want to feed and nurture and be intentional with.

Are you a good person? I don't think so. But you could have that exact same situation where you're working eight to 10 hours a day to be the best provider you possibly can for the woman that you love that you know she needs to, that you want to be able to support and provide for and put good food on the table for the kids that you love to support them going to club, score sports or to a private school or to get them out of this crappy public education that they're in.

Like the only thing that changed there was the action still the same, but the purpose was different. And so now for me, my purpose and my actions are in alignment and they didn't used to be. And now I very much try to have those things be complimentary. It sounds like you led with action and then allowed the intention to kind of catch up to that. Yeah, the wheels were always spinning,

but the car wasn't always pointed in the right direction. Yeah. I think that's an easiest way to do it. One of my friends, Alex, talks about, I felt much better about myself when I started judging myself on my actions, not on the thoughts that I had. And I think that that's a really good first step, especially if someone is unsure about how virtuous they might actually be

deep down, where maybe they're cowardly or maybe they're untrustworthy or maybe they don't fulfill their potential or maybe they shy away from hard things or whatever it might be. The first place to start, I think the easiest place to start is to just change the things that you do and then allow intention to catch up after that. Because, dude, it's so hard. It's so hard to change our sense of self. How long have you worked at it? To try and basically pay recompense this kind of life of flagellation, like self-flagellation in service of something to be like, and finally, maybe I'm a good man. But I think it's way easier to start with action than it is to be like, I think I'm a good man and then this is going to go

ahead because you're always not going to know. Yeah. I could not agree with you more when people are asking and I get asked all the time, man, what should I do? I'm like, do anything, just start. You know, like, cool, you wanna be a police officer? Well, start developing the characteristics that make you a good one. Start learning grace and different cultures, join jiu-jitsu, start shooting, learn what it means to be like somebody

that wants to protect somebody and sacrifice a portion of themselves at the expense of themselves for the benefit of another. Like these are things that we have to have in somebody that is a servant, who you want to go into the military, learn another language. You're like, if you are not planning your future, somebody else is going to be planning your future for you.

So if you don't know what your purpose is, sometimes you can just start doing things that will make you a better person and those things will give you purpose. And that's okay. Sometimes the car is before the horse. And that's okay. You know, like I didn't know as a firefighter EMT first, then I went to the police academy to become a police officer, you know, to go and hunt down serial killers. And then 9-11 happened. And I enlisted in special forces. And then from there, I went to other specialty schools to go to special units. And then from there, you know, like I started these

gigantic NGOs that go and rescue people over the planet. And now I'm working within the military in a military capacity, like my official role to like save soldiers and help with recruiting and to talk about messaging and clearly communicate how great of an organization it is and how wonderful it is to be part of this organization and to do something impactful that means more than yourself. If you take a step back, you're like, I mean, he's always kind of been going in this direction. The wheels were always spinning.

It was spinning perfect. And now that there is momentum and a little bit of experience and plenty of failure, now we're starting to see positive impact. But man, it took 25 years. Yeah. It's a slow, you know, to chip away at whatever sense itself and to adjust the course. It is like moving a freighter.

You know, it's one half degree every single year. And you're like, right, okay, and finally I can actually get this thing to swing around. Are there any, you mentioned that memory before of, I thought it was the grenade and he thought it was the machine gun. That's obviously something that's played on your mind. Are there any other memories that sort of, are common recurrences for you?

Or someone who got away, someone who didn't? Yeah. Oh man, we could go, we could spend hours talking about this, Chris. The, there's a squirter out of a house in Iraq. What's that mean? So you go to this building and you like attack this building and it was a bomb maker, this like this IED bomb maker's house. And I was myself and this other colleague of mine were on

one side of the house and we see this guy running down this road. Now we were fairly confident that that guy came from this building. And if he came from that building, he's a military age man outside during curfew and came from a target house. Um, does he fall within our engagement rules? Yeah, he does. This is like peak war. This is like, we're 100% ROI able to shoot that guy. We didn't. We go to a follow on target and we get in a pretty good fight. Clearly

that guy, and this is an assumption. I don't know this, but I think this guy went and told them that we were coming and they got ready for us to come. That weighs on you. Like that was my fault. Like why didn't I just press the trigger and shoot this guy in the back at night? I see your eye twitching. It's a hard question. And it's not a question that I wish my son is ever asked, but like that's the question that I was asked. I mean, you go back another 10 years, a 19 year old firefighter EMT, there's a school van, this missionary van that's driving on the 101 and just north of San Luis Bisco, California, just south of a task, Giderot, California, the driver falls asleep, maybe 70, 80 miles an hour, and the car spins and tumbles out of control.

And these women and children in this 15-pack van are just launched out of every single window. And when my fire truck arrives on scene in the middle of the night, you know, I grew up in this area where it very kind of agricultural. When we roll up, the dust was still settling. And through the emergency lights and the headlights, it created like a horror film kind of aura, you know, like the dust, you can't see everything. But man, I can still smell the fall dry grass. And I can still smell the, the no moisture in the, in the soil that was like hanging in the particulates in the air. And I can still hear, you know, we shut off the siren as we roll up on the scene. And I don't know how we didn't run over people because bodies were everywhere. And

thank God we didn't. We, uh, we get out and I can hear, I see what we call walking wounded. There's people wandering around holding their arms that are like dislocated and broke. And you see these compound fracture, this guy like holding his leg. And but then we hear like the moans of a child, not the screams of a child that is hurt, but the pain is so serious they can't even cry anymore. That's a different sound entirely. And that truck, we just go to work. I'm a young firefighter EMT. I don't know anything. You know, like, I graduated from EMT school in the fire academy six months ago. And I

had this really senior paramedic, an engineer, his name was Tom Way. And we start working on all these people. And, you know, we're trying to stabilize these people and we're trying to triage who's going to be evacuated first. I remember I hear Tom on get on the radio and he calls to station number one because there's two fire stations in a task at arrow. He's literally like just send everyone. You're like, if they can get on a truck, if they can get on an ambulance, get them here, every volunteer, every paid cold firefighter send everyone. You got 15 people. Let's just say it takes four or five people per body.

You know, you need a lot of firefighters and paramedics and EMTs. So I start working on this little girl. Um, she's 11 maybe. And everything on her was, was hurt. You know, like I couldn't see a inch of her body that wasn't broken and I'm strong, you know, I was a professional athlete at this point already and I can't remember I Remember telling myself like how do you touch this girl without hurting her? Like how do you help her without causing more damage? Like She's not breathing right. It was like this raspy inhalation touch this girl without hurting her? Like, how do you help her without causing more damage? Like,

she's not breathing right. It was like this raspy inhalation with broken ribs. And Tom Way comes over and Tom goes, I have this, Tim. Go find someone else. And he just pushes me. And it like launches me and I go and I start helping, I start helping triage and separating and segregating the people that are going to be immediately transported in the ones that have to be like evacuated directly to the hospital. And I thought that that girl died my whole entire life until four years ago. And I thought Tom in his wisdom was trying to save a young man from the failure of saving this little girl's life. The last sentence of this chapter in my book, when I found in the research of this book that that girl survived, was fucking Tom way. That guy not just saved me, but he saved that little girl. And, um, I play back had I stayed there, had I been that stubborn boy that I knew that, that I was and I tried to save that girl, I would have killed her,

but fucking Tom way he comes in, he saves this 11 year old broken girl. And I go off and I do the thing that you'd expect an 18, 19 year old guy to do, which is like, you know, grab people and carry them to ambulances, you know, I'm like harry and that's right. Yeah. And maybe I lived with that for 25 years of I killed that little girl. I get home that night. I'm covered in blood, you know, and I walk in the front door and I remember my dad, he comes to the door and he's like, Keith Agasson, who was the captain at the time. He had called my dad and said,

hey, Tim had a real tough call tonight. Just make sure he's okay. And I walk in the front door and I was like, hey dad, I'm gonna go take a shower or I'm gonna go to bed and my dad's like, why don't you go take a shower before your mom sees you? And I'm like, no, I'm fine. I'm just gonna go crash.

I'm covered in blood and mud and I was gonna go fall down in my bed. And I didn't realize I couldn't walk, I couldn't breathe and I was crying. I actually never said anything to my dad. I was just trying to move past him to go to my bed. You know, talk about like emotional and mental overload and my dad recounting this to me, he's like,

you never said anything to me that night. I just tried to move you to the shower to get you cleaned up and then lay you down. And this was the first time that I ever personally experienced you know, post-traumatic stress. And in my family, we'd experienced lots of different forms of death and trauma, but this was something that was like very me.

And I remember like they said I had to go to, you know, a group trauma class. I was like, I don't need to go to that. And my dad's like, bro, you're gonna go to that Yeah, you've been working with a lot of veterans at the moment on this stuff. What's the current state of Veteran mental health. What are you seeing in them and what about yourself as well? Yeah, the

It's been really hard. After 20 years at war, there's a failure of, I think there's a feeling of failure. So G-WAT, global war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa, now we're standing on the backside of it. And we're the reason that we're there is questionable. The actions that we took, why we're there is questionable. And then- The support of the people that you were fighting

on behalf of is questionable. Yeah, the people coming home that should be receiving us as servants to this country are looking at us like abominations, you know, like we're broken. That was the same in Vietnam to some degree as well, right? Yeah, yeah,, like we're broken things. That was the same in Vietnam to some degree as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Very, very, very similar. I was just talking to a Vietnam vet about it. He's like, man, I'm, it's like I'm right.

Right that with you. Yeah. I'm living through all this again. That's what he said exactly. Almost verbatim. He said, man, I know what you're feeling. And so there's regrets and yeah, they're struggling. Active duty is struggling. Young men first coming back from deployments are struggling and then men that want to go on deployments but then missed it because timing is really hard. Like a unit will deploy and you arrive to the unit

and your unit has already gone. That unit then gets, has some casualties and returns. The guy that didn't go has a ton of survivors guilt. Even though they didn't survive, they missed, they missed, misses guilt. Yeah. But I mean, that it's, it's the same thing. And those guys are also dealing with a bunch of, like they didn't actually experience any trauma, but they didn't even get to contribute.

That's right. And it just eats and a root it just eats at their soul. And it poisons the vessel. Just to interject that, have you got any idea why survivor guilt would exist? Like, adaptively, evolutionarily, what is that there for? Is it that you've seen other people pay a price that you should have paid and you're concerned about not carrying your weight within the tribe? Do you think that's what it is?

Yeah, I mean, evolutionarily, if we look, I should have been stronger, I should have been better, I should have been more equipped, I should have been more capable. All of those things are responses to survivor's guilt. And if you weaponize that, then in a tribe, if the tribe's warrior goes to a battle and he comes back, they do okay, or maybe they could have done better, and he comes back and he has like, I wasn't fast enough. I wasn't strong enough. I didn't I couldn't throw my arrow or I couldn't throw my spear far enough. I couldn't shoot my arrow far enough. All those things forces him and motivates him to come to become a better person. So like, I think there's some elements of that.

Mm-hmm. So survival guilt? Yeah, lot of it. And And we've done a really terrible thing in America, which is told people that there's easy fixes to hard problems where you can take a pill and you're going to be better. You can take a pill and you're going to be less fat. You can pick up your phone and you can have food delivered. It's just a lie. And when it comes to mental health and physical health, those things seriously overlap. When people look at me, I think often is I'm a crazy person, because I work, you know, how you do anything is how you do everything. Well, I do everything this way,

so I can deal with all of the stuff that I've seen and I've done, you know, like I work out every single day because I need to stay healthy. I eat seen and I'm done. You know, like I work out every single day because I need to stay healthy. I eat clean, I sleep well. I'm all like the litany of all these millions of little things that I do to make sure I'm a healthy version of myself is so I'm also a mentally healthy version of myself.

One of my friends that I was just visiting a couple of days ago, you know, he starts going through divorce, he stops eating well, he stops exercising, starts drinking a little bit. Like you see the, the writing is on the wall and every single one of those steps, it's just one decision. And he, one of those things is okay. But when there's 10, 12, 14, 16 of them, then they're all compounding, creating

more depression and more instability on the mental health side. He can't cope with it any longer. And then he's like fantasizing about suicide and this easy exit, and he's trying to make, you know, a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And we see it time and time and time again. The only way that you can stay on this side of right is being faithful and intentional

in all of these little tiny things. So yeah, I'm spending a ton of time on in this area, trying to encourage, man, go outside, you know, go ride motorcycles, go be with your kids, you know, go grab your wife, take her on a great date, and, you know, like have a great night with her and then have a great night's sleep and then wake up with a smile on your face a great night with her and then have a great night sleep and then wake up with a smile on your face and go to the gym and then go hop in the sauna and then go hop in a blue cube and do like some legit cold water immersion. And every single one of those things just makes you, you know, your coat of armor gets a little bit thicker and a little bit stronger. And of course, there's chinks in my armor. Like I have days that I struggle. But like,

I also watch these arrows just like, like, pussy. Try to launch another one. And I try to give this armor to other people because it's a really great feeling when you're not living your life in fear and you're not struggling with depression and you're not, you know, it's so freeing to be sovereign. What are the US Armed Forces getting right or wrong with their post-operation treatment and care for veterans? Yeah, they're realizing it's a total human optimization, right? Like, it's not, hey, I'm gonna put this guy in counseling. That sure absolutely helps, but I'm also getting them,

giving them access to great gyms. I'm gonna give them access to dietitians. I'm going to, like, we're gonna be revamping the whole entire CZ Colón, the former SEAC, the senior list advisor, the joint chief of staff. He just recently retired. He has this great program where he's going to go across all of the Department of Defense and he's a freak athlete, special operations guy, tier one level dude. He's going to all of the different departments and changing how they view food. So like if you walk into a chow hall or food. So like if you walk into a chow hall or the Air Force calls it a dining facility,

you know, like there's not a fast food aisle where you can walk up and I want, you know, a cheeseburger with fries. That's not an option. That's not an option anymore. It is right now. You know, you can get like spaghetti and meatballs. No, like go get a chicken and a salad fatty. Like go get a chicken and a salad fatty. And like the soda pops got to go. All the sugary sides, the desserts got to go. All that fried stuff got to go. Like there's going to be some pouty faces about it. But like that's what you have to do. That's so they're doing a lot, a lot of things right.

The military gives a ton of really great tools to a person. They teach them leadership. They teach them communication. They give them grit. Military gives a ton of really great tools to a person. They teach them leadership, they teach them communication, they give them grit, you know, they give them the tools to make quick critical decisions. We also now recognize that we give them bad habits, you know, we give them addiction to caffeine, we give them addiction to nicotine, we give them bad sleep habits.

We put them in places just like Native Americans when we put them in the worst plot of land on the planet and hope that they do okay. Like you take a soldier and you drop a soldier into a not hospitable place. That soldier is going to climatize. And compensate. Yeah, in a place that he's in.

Like, have you ever been to clean? It'd be a fun experiment for you. So if you drive one hour north to Fort Hood, Yeah, in the place that he's in, like, have you ever been to Colleen? It's gonna be a fun experiment for you. So if you drive one hour north to Fort Hood, now Fort Kovahos, it's a gigantic army base. That's one hour north of Austin. The city that's just adjacent to it is called Colleen. It is the most depressing place on the planet. There's car dealerships that target soldiers with 25% interest rates for their 2019 Mustangs.

There's trip clubs, there's storage facilities that the soldier's about to go on deployment. He has to put his stuff in storage and they're like, oh, but you don't have good credit, that's okay. It's a parasitic industry that's built up around the base. Yeah, to take advantage of young men that don't have experience or a fully developed brain. Yeah.

It's wild, man. That's rough. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I was talking to, uh, Michael, punky Higgs. Do you know Michael? No, I know that name though. So he was master chief wherever, wherever they, a master sergeant, whatever.

Those are two very different things. One's in the Navy and one's in the Army. One's amazing. One sucks. Okay. I can't remember which one it is. Uh, I feel like one of them, is that not the guy from Halo as well? Anyway, um, he has been doing a psychedelic treatment, but he just sort of took me

through a bunch of different, uh, challenges. And there was a lady that I'm friends with and her husband's been struggling PTSD post as a veteran. And Ibegain is the particular substance that they were using. And she and her husband have been battling alcoholism on his side for a long time. He's been trying to cope and back and forth 12 step program, all the rest of it. And they heard this episode. This is maybe three years ago now. And she said, would you be able to put me in touch with Michael? And sure enough, we did. And the husband went and did this treatment. And as far as I'm aware,

this is like a rough psychedelic. It's 24 hour, incredibly deep, very existentially painful. And it does resets to the brain that are more powerful than most other pretty much anything. And now he's back and he's flourishing and all the rest of this stuff. But it's like, it's not a one-stop shop for everyone. And I would just throw loads of drugs at them and they'll fix it, change the diet, change the friends that they've got with them. It's this global omni approach. Yeah. The army or the DoD as a whole is allowing psychedelics, which is wild. You know, we're so slow to get there.

I have a bunch of friends. I've never personally experienced any drug, but I have a ton of friends that have traveled outside of the United States because it wasn't allowed here in the United States and deal with some really serious trauma via psychedelics and they came back transformed humans. I mean they were like broken depressed

suicidal Alcoholics woman womanizing like broken men in every way shape and form and they come back. I'm like Easy, you know, like I literally want to be around you all the time reset All the time. Completely. And now they're like back to the amazing young man that I remember 20 years ago. What do you wish if there's someone listening that has served or just someone that's suffering with sort of trauma in their past, would you wish that more people would hear or realize?

You're not alone. Everybody that has served in some former fashion, especially in a war is carrying baggage, emotional trauma. And you're not alone, not just that other people experiences, but other people care about you. I think that's a big thing that everybody needs to know is like, you feel so alone and isolated when you're in these really low moments. It's just not true. You know, like if you go, if you're gone, Michelle Young, this stunning, beautiful staff, Sergeant and Army, just committed suicide a couple of weeks ago.

She's supposed to be in Las Vegas with us a week. She's been in this community. She's a fitness influencer. She's like blonde and just like bikini supermodel. She committed suicide two weeks ago. And her daughter had her 12th year birthday. Says, she's a single mom. Honey, I'm so proud of you. I love 12th year birthday. Says she's a single mom. Honey, I'm so proud of you. I love you.

Happy birthday. A couple of days later, she commit suicide. What was she going through that she felt so alone? You know, and she had to have, right? Unbeknownst to her, there were there are thousands of people that know her and support her and wanted to be there for her, but she felt alone and it's just not true. So everybody listening, like the thing that I want them to know is they're not alone. The other big part is that individual responsibility part. Like we're saying, sometimes

you can just start doing little things and tiny little steps that happen consistently over time. When you're in that moment of crisis, you put a little bit of time and space between you and a bad decision, just a little bit. And you wake up in the morning and you walk outside where we've been here in the rain, you know, like, I want to go outside and run in that rain so bad, you know, and I want to see the sun come up tomorrow. And I can't wait to go see my four-year-old tonight on the ice. And I can't wait to go home because I'm making pulled pork sandwiches for the family. And it's going to be dynamite. I can't wait to get weird with my wife and all of the things that I can't wait for are because of a bunch of little decisions

making me look forward to tomorrow. And even if I go home and I pull a cork tonight and I pull a couple of drinks and I start thinking about the mistakes that I made, the friends that I've lost, even that one, that bad decision or a few of those bad decisions can't hold up to all of the other things that I've done right. There's momentum. That's right. And I want to carry that momentum into life and into hope and into another day.

The problem is that the momentum goes in both directions. Right. It doesn't just go when things are going well, it also continues when things are going poorly. And that's the escalating spiral that people find themselves in. And I say there's no easy solution, but if you are really in crisis, like 911,

there's a phone number, 988 now. You just pick up the phone, hit 988. And it's like the 911 for you being in a bad, unhealthy place. It risks to yourself. That's right. You pick up that phone. If you're a veteran, you literally just press the number one and it takes you to a veteran that specifically wants to know you and know about you

and is trained to talk to you specifically. Wild, we've never had this before, ever. Like this just happened this year. Pick up the phone, hit 988, and it goes to a mental health hotline. And if you're a veteran, you press one, and it goes to a veteran to talk to you. Wild. Sick.

Speaking about bad decisions, what was that story of ISIS making a credible threat against you? Yeah, what are a bunch of cowards though? So This is like Pete Caliphate, you know Isis is taken over northern Iraq and they're starting to gain ground and they're capturing people and art and American arms and they're selling it on the black market and like a a bunch of land that we had fought for, we were losing to ISIS. They were also trying, you know, they had radicalized a whole bunch of mosques in the United States.

And I get a call from the FBI saying that ISIS was trying to recruit somebody locally to find me and my family and where we lived to come and kill us. And I was like, can you say that again? And they're like, yeah, they're trying to find somebody locally to kill you and your family. I was like, that's fucking sick. That's such great news, dude. I've been traveling all over the world. What you're telling me is that these idiots are going to come to my house in Texas. So I call my friend that works for Fox News, like, hey, man, can you put me on live? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, all right, check it out. So my address, so I get live on

Fox News and I say my address live on Fox television. I was like, you can send absolutely anybody that you want to my house to try and kill me and my family. Just know that you're never going to get them back. I'm going to kill them all. How did this go down with your wife? She was so mad at me. Yeah, she like, she's like, I'm out.

I see like pop smoke just for like a day. But then she came right back because, you know. I got the goods and no, not really. She was really mad. But, um, not. it wasn't surprising that they, of course, they're so tough when there's like 20 of them and they're attacking a village that's unarmed with a bunch of little girls. They wouldn't, they wouldn't even like deal with one man that would like stand up. When I say like, be that somebody. Um, in every situation, it always only takes one person. Fear is

contagious. But so is courage. You know, when one person stands up and is like, no, this is wrong. And then somebody else is like, yeah, there's something off about this. I agree with that guy. And then it just like a tidal wave of courage, just spontaneously combusts amongst all these people. and they're like, fuck no, you can't do this. You know, I had hundreds of people being like, we'll sit up on your street all night long, you know, we're setting up rotating guards.

And I was like, I don't want that, man. I need a conus kill. Like what do I gotta do? What's a conus kill? Oh yeah, so when you go out. Remember you're speaking to a muggle. Yeah, when you go outside of the continental US and fight abroad, you are O'Connis.

Right. So like getting, fighting and killing a terrorist in Afghanistan. Right. That's just like a war. O'Connis. Yeah, O'Connis. But if you're in the United States

and let's say you were in Covina at your Christmas party and this terrorist that has been radicalized walks into this Christmas party and plans to kill everybody because they think Christmas is bad because it has to do with Jesus, you know, and they're like, oh, you're like, bow. Kona's kill. Right. Sick. Have you got one? No. No, ruined it.

Yeah. Loser. And was there any, was there ever any more comeuppance about that? No, the FBI was pissed at me for a little while. The news was pissed, my wife was pissed. But you were excited. I was well armed.

I was hopeful. Yeah. You immediately went on whatever it is, like bigguns.com and got more. No, I didn't need any more. Yeah, hope's not a plan. It just didn't pan out to be anything. Super funny story.

I was in the USADA, the United States anti-doping pool because I was a professional athlete and I was driving home during this period and I see this car and I kind of lived in this area that there's not a lot of through traffic. So I see this car, you know, following them, makes a turn, makes a turn, makes a turn. Like five turns later, they're on my street

and they slow down as I turn in my driveway. And he pulls up in front of my house. And by the time, you know, he puts his vehicle into park, he has a gun in his face. Right. You would have shot the Usada guy. That's right. I imagine there's a little- I'm Usada! And he's like, all right, let's go get my piss. I imagine that there's a lot of athletes that would have probably quite liked to have shot the Usada guy. Yeah, they were- Pretty sure John Jones would have probably been able to shoot the

Usada guy. That would have been a solution for him. I don't think he needs any more drama. What a talented athlete though. Biofire. Have you heard of this? So it's a smart gun that was invented by a guy who started working on it after the Aurora Theater shooting. Uh, fingerprint and facial recognition. Lame. And it only fires if the right persons. What do you think of smart guns?

Lame. Why? I don't know. They're stupid. I don't want that. Um, so can my wife shoot my gun? You add users to the profile. Yeah.

Uh, who controls that profile? You supposed to. Just you? Like safes that I'm only supposed to? Just you? Like safes that I'm only supposed to access unless the FBI calls the manufacturer and gets permission to gain access to my safe without a subpoena or warrant.

That happened this year. Probably not as secure as that. You got subpoenaed to- No, I didn't. This was something that happened this year. I'm just giving an example of if anybody else has. So this second amendment thing, nobody gives me authority to this inherent right for me to protect myself and my family. The government is not saying

that I get to protect me and my family. This is my God given right to protect me and my family. This is not somebody has access to a program to give me the tool to protect my family. I just have this right and I have, should have access to any tools that I deem necessary to protect myself, my family, my property, and even more by extension, freedom. So against the tyrannical government, but over government overreach, you know, it's not just like hunting sports

and me and my family, this is hunting sports, me and my family. And if the government gets too big and gets too nosy into my life, this is what happened in 1776. Like we were pretty cool until we weren't cool. And then you guys started asking too much of us. And then we said, no, and then we killed all of you. That's it.

I know this is a hard thing. It's a very difficult day for me. I've survived two July 4th since I've been here. I actually wore a T-shirt that said, Happy Trees in Day, Ungrateful Colonials. I wore that on July 4th last year. Yeah. It's a hard thing to wrap yourself around unless this is what pumps in America, should be pumping in Americans blood. It's like, we are rebels. We have always been rebels. You cannot tell me what to do. There's nothing that you can say to me every single one of those beautiful amendments in that fantastic one of the best

Pieces of words ever put together in history is the Constitution and It says That those are our God-given rights and nobody has a right to control those and freedom freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, like overreach to you coming to my home, like due process, the right to bear arms, all of those things are my rights. So like, no, I don't want a system, I don't want a fingerprint, I don't want facial recognition, I want a cannon,

and I want a Gatling gun, mini gun attached to my motorcycle, and I want a tank, and gun, mini gun attached to my motorcycle. And I want a tank and I should be able to have it. I'm pretty sure the Black Rifle guys have got a mini gun attached to a Tesla. We did that. Is that you? Yeah, I mean, no, no, that was Matt and Jared. Right, but you've played around with...

Yeah. Right, okay. We were trying to talk Elon Musk into building a trebuchet that would launch a Tesla at what? At anything. An enemy. Oh my god, that's so nice. They're shooting Teslas. Yeah. That'd be awesome.

I mean, any electric vehicle should just be launched into the stratosphere, except Teslas because they're pretty fast. They're pretty cool. Yeah. Talk to me about the state of the American education system. This is something you're spending a lot of time thinking about and assessing at the moment. We'll go to the genesis of it, which is as an employer and as a senior non-commissioned officer, me looking at the people coming to work for me in either one of these occupations

and looking at this population of this generation and being like, you're dumb. Like you literally are an idiot. You have, you can barely read. You have no way to collaborate. You have no creativity in you. Like there's not even a speck of genius in there. And there's no grit. There's not even a speck of genius in there. And there's no grit. There's no teamwork.

There's you've, you've, you've been taught how to be a consumer. You've been taught how to sit there as a lemming and go through some systems and processes of like sit here, use this pencil, use this paper, write this way, do this thing, you get this grade to take this test to then say that you've passed that level. What how is that applicable to real life? How can somebody go through public education and then think that they're going to be usable in the real world as a creator, a designer, a teammate in any

form or fashion in any industry, they're not, they've not been taught anything useful. They don't have to balance a checkbookbook. They don't know how to change a car tire. They don't know how to fill up a car. They don't know how to, like, they know nothing about the world. They don't know how to do a spreadsheet for a profit and loss statement. Like, the second graders in our school take a product, they design the product, they take the product to market, they market the product, and then they go back to the school and they give a presentation about the performance of that product in the market.

So we had this adorable little girl take a bunch of mason jars. She went and bought kinetic sand, and then she went and bought toys that were themed. She took a loan from her parents for a couple hundred dollars and she built a bunch of these mason jars. Some had astronauts and like space things in them. Some of them had like mermaids and fish in them and she used blue sand. Some of them were like green sand and brown sand with dinosaurs and she sold them for $25 at the farmer's market. She made a couple thousand dollars. She paid her parents back the few hundred dollars that she took a loan from. And that went falling. Yeah. And then she went back and briefed her P&L on the performance of her products. Is she? She's nine, right? And do what I would do for a 20-year-old that could do that?

She's a nine year old. And I argue that the presentation from that nine year old is a thousand times better than any resume that's come across my desk in the past five years. Nine year old. In that same timeframe in this project, we had a kid that went to his parents ranch and he would spend hours in the afternoon collecting antlers and horns from all the different wild exotic animals that they have on the property and he was building furniture with them.

So he made like a lamp and he cut them and put screws on them so you could use them as hardware for like dressers. Right. I was thinking that you were going to say that a nine year old had tried to construct a construct a chair. That might be a high-risk thing to sit on. I'm not sure how. Yeah. Really, like really cute, usable things. And of course his dad helped him. And he took this and sold those things, launched an e-commerce market, and was selling them online on Facebook Marketplace. He was selling them on, he had like three or four different online ways for him to sell it and made a few thousand dollars. And then we had this other kid that went and took sticks and he

thought that that stick looked like a gun. And then he tried to sell that stick as a gun and he sold no sticks. And he went back and he saw his two classmates that made thousands of dollars that put effort into their products. And then he sat there embarrassed and his parents were mad. And it's perfect because that kid just learned the best lesson he could possibly learn, which is failure and what it looks like to have effort and discipline and intentionality and somebody that actually practices the process of what we were teaching them about how to launch a product. And in his embarrassment, then motivated him to go and do better on the next release.

But he learned that less than at 9. I learned that less than at 35. So Socratic and Project Driven Learning. Socratic, this is not new Socrates, this idea that this learner driven environment, you take a bunch of young people and you allow them to lead the education process. So they're making millions of decisions in a day. What chair they're gonna sit on, what pencil or pen they're gonna use,

what kind of paper they're gonna be using, if they're gonna be using an iPad to be taking their notes. Ultimately, like they have to perform. Like, here's the things that you have to do. If you want to go outside and play, okay, show me your work. You didn't do your work. You actually have to sit back down and do your work.

They're pissed, right? Well, you're over there in the corner, bouncing on that little bozu ball, not doing your work, but Johnny is over there. And he sat down, he put on his headphone, started listening to work music and he knocked out his work and he's already outside playing. So in a day, they're making all these, you know, hundreds, if not millions of little decisions on their own. They're not being told where to sit. They're not being told how to do the work. They're getting they're given the tools they're guided. So we don't have teachers in the studios. We have guides in the studios. And just like Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, all of them were guides, they're literally like mentors to these young learners trying to learn how to critically think. And three years ago, we opened school number one. Last year, we opened our online mentorship program when we recognize that this is working, we just need to give

the keys of the castle to as many people as possible. Then from the my partner, Matt Boudreau, just a dynamite hard worker, like everything that you'd want in an educator, realizing from the online mentorship program that the benefits of the brick and mortar environment that is conducive to learning, how do we give not just intellectually everything that they need, but then also physically like, hey, here's a space for you and your family. And family is a key word here because we really do believe that the nuclear family is the strength behind a young person learning. Like, if you think that you could take your kid and just drop him off and you're going to be given back the product that you want without you putting some form of effort and if you don't have skin in the game, if you send your children to Caesar, you will be given back Romans. I don't want a Roman, right? I want to be

intimately involved in what my children become. And nobody cares about them more than me. So as the online mentorship program exploded, this year will open 50 new appagies in the United States. And then I promise next year we're gonna open 200 more and then the next year we'll open 500 more and I will defund and abolish the Department of Education in the next five years. Like it's gonna happen. What's the problem with what they're doing?

They're not doing anything. And what are, what is the last time that you've seen in American school? The kids are not learning how to read. They are failing math. Are as Vab scores? I hate that I have as Vab. It's the military entrance exam.

It's, it's like your SAT when you graduate to see how you stand against all of the other kids at your grade level on an equal playing field to get acceptance into college, except that those acceptance levels are different per gender and per skin color. That's idiotic. But that's the way it is not merit based. That's a completely different conversation I'd love to have. But it's not the one that we're talking about right now. The test for kids going to the military, we were talking about how fat they were and how mentally unhealthy they are. And also like their substance

abuse and some criminal history. They're also dumb. The ASVAB scores have been dropping every year for the past 25 years. So the kids are getting dumber. You have a litmus test, you have a yardstick and measured against the same thing. Yeah. That changes. But the difference. And it looks like this.

And presumably the ASVAB is being fucked with less than entrance exams for universities because those are more malli- This is just a standardized testing that's given, the exact same test has been given to, you know, millions of kids at this point across this nation for the past, yeah, for decades. So you've always got this barometer

that you can measure this generation versus 20 years ago. Yeah, so like as- Not good. Not good. This is a problem. And then, you know, when you look even here in Austin and Texas, Florida, they really are, and I really hope that Texas does push through

the school voucher program. Arkansas already did it, Florida's gonna be doing it. The school voucher program is so you, if you own land here, you pay property taxes. That property taxes pays for the school that is in your zip code. Yep. If your kids don't go to that school, it doesn't matter. You still have to pay for that school that you don't use. But what if you have kids and then you pay for those kids not to go to that school, you pay extra and then you pay the same amount as everybody else in that zip code for that school to exist that your kids don't use. So you're being, you're paying twice

for education even though you're only using half of it. The school vote, school voucher program is only using half of it. The school voucher program is there's money allocated per child, and that money is a tax credit that's given back to the parent so they can use the money how they best want to for their child. Maybe it's to send them to public school. Maybe it's to send them to a specific kind of school because that kid needs a specific kind of education. Some of it, like whether it's going to be Montessori or it's's gonna be Socratic or it's gonna be like, whatever the form is gonna be, it's gonna be tailored to that child and the money's gonna follow the child.

It's been brought up in Texas multiple times and it's almost passed multiple times. So the Apigee program, Apigee Strong Online, apigeestrong.com, our school here, Apigee Cedar Park. So we're a North Austin school. And we have, anybody can apply, like literally, app. App. App. App. App. App.

App. App. App. App. App. App. App. App. Like there's giggles, there's laughter, there's joy, there's Harry Potter, there's comic books, you know, there's drawings on the walls,

there's engineering schematics, there's new designed tanks. How well, at what age should you take them up to? I mean, college. Right. And how well are the, I don't know whether you've done this yet because of how short amount of time you've been around.

We outperform everybody in every metric of measurement. Including college applications? Oh yeah. Yeah. Our kids dunk on everybody. Literally make everyone else look silly. So when you're at the university and you're in reviewing all of the applications. And you have, okay, this is SAT score. This kid

is coming from this school, you know, he was he or she graduated with this GPA, they were involved in these extracurricular activities. Cool. And you're comparing that against all other kids in that same format. And then you get a packet. And this kid has been working, started his own business. He is apprenticed in this very specialized program. He has letters of recommendation

from these Fortune 500 companies that he has been working for and advising and consulting. He also has higher scores than everybody over here and he has the same GPA as everybody over here. But for some reason, his essay is so dissimilar to everybody else over here because it's real in life experience. So it's the standardized testing that I think people have skepticism around whether it be... First of all, those should not exist. Standardized tests. How does that help you?

It is the equivalent of the ASVAB that you need a barometer up against you can measure everybody else in a way which is standardized. Or else it's like, okay, well, this person wrote an essay and this person did a piece of art. How many pieces of art is this essay worth? It's the reason we have currency. We have currency to make ease of exchange in comparison. But if the whole entire point of this entire organization is to prepare this population for the test compared to this group of people that is preparing the entire population to be constructive, contributing members of society,

but then still perform the same on the test. Which group of this, these two comparable groups, which one would you like to, to select from? A or B? Well, yeah, obviously that one. Obviously, right? If you can achieve the same, you still need the test at the top to be able to. It's the easiest thing.

And they perform at the same on the standardized testing. And I'm even arguing that they so surpass all other better, all the ways that you can measure their performance, they end up being not even comparable. It's like apples and oranges. It's like these useless kids and these like extraordinary anomalies and these unicorns that like you can't hire and accept fast enough. That's currently what we're experiencing. So, and there's data because we're not the first school to do this. This has been an act in here in Austin and started it.

Act in Academy, Montessori. Yep. Jeff Sandefur. Yep. You know, there is lots of heritage data, legacy data to support this. So it's not like I'm creating anything new. I did not create anything. Doing it in a different way. I literally just like, I took a lot of the best of a bunch of different forms of education

and then I made sure that family was the center and the nucleus of everything. Hmm. So like, we go after the parents. Like if you think that you're gonna be part of the Apigee family and you're not a hardworking fit intentional father, like you're joking yourself. We had thousands of people apply to open schools. And we literally just like opened an Instagram or Facebook

and we see a fat, fat, body soft dude that's sitting there pulling a bud light next, you know. Imagine your kid not getting into school because of you. As it should be. That's interesting. It's interesting to think that when you go to, when your child goes to school, you go to school again as well. Yeah.

When your child goes to school, you go to school again as well. Yeah. At least care, at least like want to be. Yesterday, I laced up my skates, grabbed my hockey gear and hopped on the ice with my four-year-old and my eight-year-old. Do you know how long I've been on the ice? Yeah. For as long as they've been on the ice with my four year old and my eight year old. Do you know how long I've been on the ice? First, long as they've been on the ice. Right. Do you suck?

I suck. Yeah. I'm terrible. Okay. But man, I can, I can, that's not true. I'm literally better than every single dad there. Every single one of them. Because they're not on the ice.

Because they're not on the ice. I was playing tag with my four're not on the ice. Because they're not on the ice. I was playing tag with my four-year-old on the ice yesterday. And of course I'm like, I watched a bunch of YouTube things and there were specific drills I was trying to do while I was playing tag with my four-year-old, like how to, I don't know, I'm skating forward to turn left and then skate backwards and then turn right

and skate backwards. Like those were all specific drills that I had looked up. So I went on to ice with intentionality, not just to play with my daughter, which I wanted to do, but also develop as a person and as a skater. So I can in some way, she perform at least show my, my kids that I want to be involved with them. And I was, I was wearing half lacrosse gear, you know, I own lacrosse gear. Because you fall over a lot?

Yeah. Because my kids play lacrosse. Right. Like I've never played lacrosse. I've never played hockey, but I'm gonna do it because they're interested in it. You know, like if my daughter, please don't start, but wants to learn how to play the cello. I'm gonna fucking learn how to play the cello.

What are the principles for raising kids that you've discovered that you think most parents don't realize? Time, they don't care about their stuff. They don't care about how clean your house is. They don't care how the rest of the world views them. They care about how you view them. They care about the time you give them.

They care about what meal you cook for them. They care about what games you were sitting there cheering for. The first, takes about 20, 30 minutes to get dressed to play hockey. So my wife will leave first with whichever kid is gonna be playing, get them ready, get on the ice. And I show up with the other kid 20, 30 minutes later.

The first time that the kid that's playing scores a goal, the very first thing that they do is look up into the stands to see if dad is there. You know, my big girls, the first time that they went on stage for whatever their performance were, and they looked out in the audience and I wasn't there because I was overseas. Do you know what kind of like damage I did to those girls? You know, the A-B test here of like me being here

for every single one of them and me being absent for every single one of them. Like thank God their moms are amazing and they're like those girls are just incredible and their resilience is astounding. But. Swimming upstream without dad, though. That's right.

Yeah, I remember I did a, I was a swimmer in school and I've got like this memory seared into my mind when I won the backstroke at the end of this big competition and I looked up and dad was there. Crazy. Yeah. So fulfilling. Yeah. There was an idea I came up with after I sat down next to Tucka Max at dinner

about nine months ago or something. Oh, that guy. So he's a good guy. He's cut from the same cloth as you. So I'm going to take you through this now. So it's called the fuck you family. Okay. Fuck you money is a meme, but it's also a truth. There is an amount of wealth that you can achieve where typical restrictions and conventions no longer apply to you. You don't need to suck up to the gatekeepers. You don't need to do things that you don't want to do in extreme situations. you don't even really need to follow the law. Similarly, fuck you, freedom is kind of downstream from fuck you money, but also can be achieved through

cultivating a lack of resilience on other groups. There are no restrictions on where you can travel to and when and for how long. You don't need to show up to work on time or work at all. If you're sufficiently well structured, you don't even need to care about the state of the economy or the power grid or the wider world. But I've recently learned about another type of fuck you liberation, one which is significantly cheaper, more accessible, more common, and maybe even more powerful. The fuck you family. Many fathers I've spoken to have told me about how their priorities were completely changed

upon starting a family. All the previous status games they played seemed petty. The admiration and gamesmanship they used to play in an attempt to impress people in power or those with status seemed juvenile and shallow. Much of their anxiety around whether people liked them or thought they were cool evaporated. The only people they needed to care about impressing were now asleep in their house. To their kids, they were the coolest, richest, strongest, most heroic person on the planet. And that gave them a very powerful type of liberation. It seems to me that much of what young men get up to are surrogate activities until they finally find a family. This isn't to say that all fathers become placid, soyboy hippies, or that

having kids neuters your ambition, but it definitely seems to open up a new realm where they care far less about the flotsam and jetsam that used to occupy their lives. less about the flotsam and jetsam that used to occupy their lives. Bro, that's it, man. That's it. But that's also the definition of sovereignty though. You know, I was like, I keep hammering this idea of sovereignty. Like I am, there's nothing external that can touch anything internal. And internal is me and my family.

The nuclear. There's, there's no government body. There's no government body, there's no medical organization, there's nothing that can affect my family. And I love the, I mean, it's profane, but like this fuck you idea, it is, it's so to the point, and it's so on the nose, and it's so correct. And there's nothing else that more important. I totally agree. Once you recognize this, that guy driving the fancy car that gets out, that's like, you know, he seems so pathetic.

And the guy that's like, hey, I just got this new raise at work. You know, I just got this promotion. I'm like, I pity you. Like, I feel sorry for you. You know, the guy that's like trying to build a brand and like, it's so good online. You know, know, to social media, he has, you know, a couple hundred thousand followers right now.

And I'm just like, I want you to experience that because that is indescribable. That I can't, like that is a drug that can never, um, you can't have enough of. Like you'll never be satiated from the thing that you get from giving back to your family. What would you say if there's fathers listening who don't think they have that, they haven't been fulfilled, how can they reconnect with their kids and that sort of sense of purpose for their family?

Yeah, I mean, there's little bits, like it's not, there's not a handle that you pull and all of a sudden, you know, like, how many practices do you go to a week? How many games do you go to a week? How many games do you go to in a month? How many afternoons while they're doing homework? Have you sat there at the kitchen table with patience and grace and tried to help them? And I'm like, what

do you mean you don't know what five plus five is or five times five is, you know, like, every one of those opportunities as an opportunity either hit or missed. And when you take a step and look at it, there's thousands of them in a month. And just start hitting more of them, 1% more and then 2% more. And fortunately, like if you've been a bad dad, all you can do is go up. Like all you can do is get better. The boss at quite low. Yeah.

Like I, I, I try really hard to be a good dad. And I go to my wife like last night as we're having like pillow talk time, it's like how can I do this better? You know, how can I be better? And you know, she's like more time. You know, everybody wants you to do something for them. You know, but we want that too.

And how you allocate that time, I realized that you can't be you without doing these other things. You know, if the Bahamas kick off with this terrorist group that's taken advantage of the Bahamas. Yeah. Like anywhere that there's money in tourism, there is criminal organizations that are looking for opportunities to get advantage of them. Okay. Okay. You know, Venezuela could pop off Central America, you know, even Peru with Ecuador and Venezuela and Brazil. Honduras, all right. I'm going there next week. Yeah, it's fine. Fantastic. Thank you. You got my number though. You said the terrorist weather report came back negative for Honduras this week.

I would like to tell you that your predictions were incorrect. I do enrolled, oh, yeah. So there's a program called Steps, which is the state something, what does it stand for? It is the Department of States tracking of you as a tourist traveling abroad. So you get notifications from Department of State.

You told me about this before. It's literally like a weather report for like how dangerous is the place. It's an important thing to do, but that's before you leave. But then once you're overseas, they know that you're there. So they ask for like your travel dates, like what day do you arrive? So then a person like me, when I go to Department of State

and I say, okay, how many Americans are currently in Israel that aren't, that are tourists that need to get, because if you go to October 7th, and we didn't know if this was going to go high and right, like, is Hezbollah going to be coming in? Yeah, you said that you predicted it being more kinetic than it was, which it's still very kinetic, but you thought it was going to be where it was. which it's still very kinetic, but you thought it was going to be way worse. I, Israel, man, I know people get so mad at it. Israel has done a really good job keeping this not going full regional warfare. Hezbollah wants an excuse to come in. The Houthis wants an excuse to come in.

You know, like every single one of the pro Hamas, Iran, Taliban, Al Qaeda, every single one of those organizations has been looking for an opportunity and enough popular support for them to come in. Israel is doing the best that they can to target specific terrorist sets in Gaza that conducted the most heinous sets of rapes and murders and tortures and current, by, I mean, it's probably since the Holocaust. This is the worst thing that we've seen happen to the Jews since Hitler was gassing them. And so Israel is doing the best that they can with the really difficult situation that they're in. But I thought that the North border was going to kick off. I thought that the West Bank was going to kick off. I thought that Egypt would gotten a little bit spiced

on the South border. I thought Jordan would have gotten a little bit more. So I, the reason that we were there, of course, was to get Americans out. But like, had it gone a different direction, which is this slow grinding war, Hamas wanted this to go kinetic. That's what they wanted. That's why they did it the way that they went. The reason they went out and raped everybody they could and tortured everybody that they could is because they wanted a overwhelming and overbearing response by the Israelis. With an overbearing, overwhelming response by the Israelis,

it would have given them a ton of propaganda to then go to all of the other nations and be like, look what Israel is doing, these disgusting murders, they've killed tens of thousands of us poor Palestinians trapped in here. Wait, you're the one that did this. But that's what they wanted. And now that it didn't happen, now they're kind of like crap.

What were your thoughts after spending time with Vivek? You got to catch up with him recently? Dude, I love that guy. Why? Because everybody has their beliefs. I have my beliefs. And I think I know why I believe what I believe. He can articulate why I got a bunch of time with him and he can explain not just the reason that he has those beliefs, but then he can also articulate what he thinks the solution is to the problem. That is a very different thing than what's currently happening in politics, right?

Somebody goes up there, like Trump gets up there and he's like blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Blighting gets up there and he's like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, they're spouting all this rhetoric, but who is walking up and be like, this is what I believe, this is why I believe it. This is the solution to the problem.

And I'm gonna articulate the steps for us to be able to accomplish it. I'm blown away by the depth of his understanding in a world that he's never worked in, which is the American government. It's crazy. Yeah, he verbally is incredibly fluent, like very, very canny communicator.

I like some of the stuff I've seen on Twitter where he does his debate prep videos, have you seen this? And it's him topless doing like four-hand smashes on the tennis court or doing burpees in his house. He calls it debate prep. And it's, you know, a counter signal against the fact that he is taking care of himself physically, which I don't think he can save much of the rest of the presidential race. Or Kennedy, Kennedy looks good. Kennedy's jacked, we had dinner with him.

Yeah, and yeah, he's a big boy. Yeah, there are some rumors that Trump was looking to Kennedy as a running mate. And I was like, what would that look like? as a running mate. And I was like, what would that look like? I'm just so frustrated with American politics right now. But it's about to get more intense the next whatever nine months.

Yeah. Why? Why are you so frustrated? We're... After Pearl Harbor, After Pearl Harbor, the leading general of the Japanese military is quoted in saying, we have made the worst mistake possible. We have awakened the sleeping giant, which is the American people, and we gave them unity. the American people and we gave them unity. And America United is like an insurmountable force.

Nothing in history has ever experienced or seen what we can do and we're together, you know, from World War I to World War II. And then you see what happens when we're broken and divided and fractured. And when the Vietnam and G Watt and our current economy and mental health and obesity and the broken family, and both sides, like the Republicans and the Democrats, are just fighting for portions of a pie and not even portions of a pie. They're fighting on these outlying groups of these radical ideas and playing into these fringe beliefs, but not even paying attention to like the core ideas that are

America. And I would really like a united America. And I think we're way more united. There's like 5% on either end that are pretty radical. Like, no, you should not be cutting body parts off of prepubescent children because they think that they're a thing that they're not and they're born the wrong thing. And similarly, like you should not go and kidnap a governor because she doesn't align with your political beliefs. Like, because she doesn't align with your political beliefs. Like from the far right to the far left, these are fairly obsolete groups. The other 90% are like, man, I want to live my life. I want other people to live their life, you know, like, cool, you want to marry a dude, that's fine, you know, like, don't tell me what to do with my kids and don't tell me what to call you,

because like, that's my choice. And that's my belief. So as long as your beliefs don't extend into my beliefs, we're good. As long as your freedoms and you can have any freedoms that you want don't extend into my freedoms because I should be able to have any freedoms that we want. I think most Americans are like that. But right now we're just being segregated and divided by ideas and these identity politics is just so petty um, identity politics is just so petty and so pathetic and so divisive. If it's not, the thing I keep on asking is like how, how much of this is coming internally and how much of this is being motivated by out of country actors? Yeah. At the very least, they're stood on the sidelines cheering. Oh, no, no, not the like they're they're they're paying, you know, millions of bought accounts that fuel

the algorithms, social media companies are also seriously to blame for this tech companies, Google, Facebook, Meta, Instagram is wild that we could be like, well Twitter's kinda doing okay, but besides them, YouTube, all of them, the way that the algorithms work is they want conflict. They want people to stay and to comment and to like and to share and to get enraged and get pissed and be like, no, you're stupid, you know, and then they say that these community guidelines,

but the truth is they want people to stay on there and use that medium longer. So of course our enemies are sitting there pumping funds and pumping resources and pumping fake accounts into those conversations to sway the idea one way or another while the tech companies are wanting that to be chaos and anarchy, because they benefit from it, because they get more money on the marketing dollar side.

And all the while, the only people that are being hurt by it are the people. So that sucks. And internally in terms of the politics, it's just small land grabs and backbiting. I found out I had a Dean Phillips on, he was the guy that founded, he discovered Belvedere of Odka and then built it and sold it with his family and then did

Talenti Gelato as well and built it and sold it. Two massive exits and he's now running for the Democratic nomination up against Biden. And I spoke to him and he was telling me that current Congress people spend more time raising funds, like 25 hours a week, just raising funds because it's an expensive game to be able to play, that they spend more time doing that than they spend doing anything else. Yeah, our political system is broken. And the funds that they're raising are coming from packs and super packs and they're coming from coming from PACs and super PACs, and they're coming from lobbyists. Like, yeah, I'll donate if you do this thing.

So scratch back, scratch back. Yeah, that all has to go away. Elected officials being able to be in the stark market, nope. Elected officials with multiple, more than two terms in office, nope. You know, the Pelosi's that have never had a real job in their entire adult life, elected officials with multiple, more than two terms in office, nope. The Pelosi's that have never had a real job in their entire adult life and they came in, they make $120,000 a year, but they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, there's a problem. And the problem is our American political system. It's like, all of that has to go away. And if it doesn't happen, we're our beautiful Republic,

I think is at Jeopardy. And if it doesn't happen, you know, we're our beautiful Republic. I think is that Jeopardy? Yeah, it's scary. It's crazy as well because obviously I moved over here and I have loved my time in America. It's so good I the culture is fantastic the people that I found a fantastic. I love Austin as a city and it seems like that is swimming upstream against structurally What's happening in education? I don't know anyone who looks at the American education system, even the most ardent like supporter of the current thing and goes, yeah, we're really doing this right. No one thinks that it's happening well at the moment. And then the same thing goes when you look at politics, no one, no matter which side of

the fence goes, apart from maybe the people that are invested in continuing to keep that going the same way, looks at it and goes, yeah, this seems like a really good way to position a super powerful free nation. Yeah, exactly. Put that in my pocket. Exactly. Yeah. So it really does seem like putting all of the difficulties in the way of something that's supposed to be really great and just curtailing it and nerfing it and neutering it and shaving off the edges over and over and over and over again, but there's only so long that that can keep happening. Yeah, I'm more of like what I wanna do with the tax code,

which is take the whole entire thing, douse it in diesel and then burn it. And then from the ashes, we can build something new. That's what I wanna do with kind of the education system, the political organization and American politics. One step at a time. Yeah, I mean, one fireball at a time. Yeah, I don't think like the gradual steps of change are going to work right now. Of course, there's big things. If you added term limits, if you added age limits, if you removed lobbyists, if you removed super PACs,

if you removed corporations being able to contribute, if you removed the quid pro quo behind the scene deals. Is that something you see in your future? Would you want to make a, you don't want to make a step into politics? That's not Senator fucking Tim Kennedy. No, no, there's like a period of my life that I don't think could be understood by most Americans.

You know, there's leaving active duty. And when I was fighting professionally, also working as a contractor for government contracting, those are hard things to explain. It will come public, you know, and then, that's interesting. Tim, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming through.

Appreciate you. Thanks for being flexible for weird times. We're busy dudes. Always. Work you, man. Thank you for coming through. Appreciate you. Thanks for being flexible for weird times. We're busy dudes. Always. Workout, boxing, swimming, and some electric motorcycling. All of that sounds great. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff you do.

The Constitution. Just reference that first. And then Tim Kennedy, anything with a verified thing, anything else besides that is not me. All right, so that's it. I appreciate you, thank you, man. Take care.