The Daily Stoic - Navy SEAL Brandon Webb on Autonomy and Radicalization in America

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

Today’s episode is a partial interview with combat-decorated Navy SEAL sniper Brandon Webb. Ryan and Brandon talk about his new thriller series Steel Fear which follows the US navy’s first serial killer, the idea of autonomy over making a certain amount of money or reaching a certain level of success, and the radicalization of the American nation and how it is viewed from a military perspective.Brandon Webb is a combat–decorated Navy SEAL sniper turned entrepreneur who has built two brands (SOFREP Media and Crate Club), into an eight–figure business. As a U.S. Navy Chief he was head instructor at the Navy SEAL sniper school, which produced some of America’s most legendary snipers.This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout.Streak is a fully embedded workflow and productivity software in Gmail that lets you manage all your work right in your inbox. Streak gives you tools for email tracking, mail merges, and snippets to save time and scale up your email efficiency. Sign up for Streak today at Streak.com/stoic and get 20% off your first year of their Pro Plan.Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Brandon Webb: Homepage: https://brandontylerwebb.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrandonTWebb Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandontwebb/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage Justice temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied

to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars.

And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. It's something that keeps podcasters up at night. It keeps me up at night whenever I'm interviewing someone for a book, you know, I've got my little recorder in front of me.

You're just petrified of technical difficulties and you can have backups. You can double and triple check everything, but as the Stoic say, it is inevitable that stuff will go wrong. I've been so far mostly spared by this, but we had an episode go wrong recently. I was lucky enough to have the Navy SEAL brand in web on the podcast. He's a great veteran, an entrepreneur, an interesting

thinker. I met him when I gave a talk to to to YPO remotely in New York City, which he is one of the heads of. And I was really excited. He's a combat decorated Navy SEAL sniper. He's built two huge media brands and eight figure businesses. And as a US Navy chief, he was the head instructor at the Navy SEAL sniper school. So, you know, he trained like Chris Kyle, the American sniper,

for example. So, there was so much stuff that we wanted to talk about and we were talking right after that freak freeze storm power outage disaster that blindsided Texas in February. So I suppose it was inevitable that with everything going wrong even more would go wrong on top of it, but the result was a bunch of our conversation got cut off. So it wasn't long enough to be a Wednesday or a Saturday episode, but I wasn't going to throw it away.

So I wanted to give you the parts that I could salvage from this conversation. And I want to tell you about Brandon's new book. He has a new thriller series called Steel Fear, which follows the US Navy's first serial killer. Like I said, Brandon does like a little bit of everything. He's a fascinating guy. You can follow Brandon on Instagram at at brandintweb. That's web with two bees. You can go to his website brandintilareweb.com.

You can check out softwrap, which is his website that's S-O-F-R-E-P, and Brandon has written a ton of books, The Red Circle Steel Fear Among Heroes, Mastering Fear, Total Focus, The Killing School, and The Making of a Navy Seal. Like I said, he does a little bit of everything. It's a great dude. I'm sorry, Brandon, that this didn't get recorded perfectly. That is life, as a stoic say. Pre-metatacheum, I know a certain percentage of these are gonna go wrong.

It sucks that it happened to this episode, but I think what's here is still really good, and I can't wait for you to hear my chat with the one and only Brandon Web. Hey, man. Yeah, I don't know what happened there. I was showing like I had a good connection, but anyway, we're back. No, wait.

No, no sweat. You were saying you started thinking about fiction. Yeah. So I, I had this idea about writing a novel about a serial killer on an aircraft carrier. But before I was a seal, I was a search and rescue swimmer in a helicopter squagger called HS6. And we had deployed on the big aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, like a 6,000 person floating city, like three Empire State

buildings stacked next to each other. We had a sexual predator on the boat because he just integrated women onto the ship and this guy was like molesting six or seven women, never caught him. And I always thought, imagine if it was a serial killer because the Navy is just not structured to deal with complex crime like that. But the point is to your to your earlier point about how being a writer is so tough. Like, I got good at writing nonfiction from my blog. And, but writing fiction totally kicked my ass. And I had this concept 12 years ago.

Took me like a little over four years ago. I said, okay, I'm gonna start writing it. I had to go back to school and take these classes on creative writing and read Stephen King's book on writing, which is amazing book. Finished it with the hell. I finished half and then brought in my friend John and we finished it together. But sold it to Random House last year. It's going to be a series on peacock called Steel Fear. But 12 years, man, to publish that thing, and I would have just jam it through.

My editor at St. Martin's, and I can't, it sounds like a good idea, but you're not a fiction writer, you're not fiction. It takes a lot of work. Yeah, so it can't be as simple as, if you're not having fun, you quit, right? Because like clearly 12 years, there must have been a lot of moments where you're not having fun, you quit, right? Cause like clearly 12 years,

there must have been a lot of moments where you're like, I can't do this, this isn't working, this isn't worth it, but you kept going. So maybe it's a question that no one can answer, but it is this tricky thing. How do you know when to stick and to stick it out? And then how do you know when you walk away

so you could fight another day? That's a great question. And I think, again, that's where you have to have. Sometimes that network comes in and says, look, because I've had my close friend, John Tishler, who was my attorney on my first startup business. I got out of the military and thought I'm going to build a race track in California having zero business experience, no development experience, but I'm

like, yeah, I'm going to do it. We bought 1,000 acres. We raised about $4 million, got everything through the entitlement process, which was super tumultuous because we were black water was trying to build a facility and you know my friend Jeremy scale just came out with that black water book and everyone was just you know going anti-black water and we got painted with that same brush. It was it was gnarly and I got through the entitlement process. Black water pulled out and then the 2009 financial crisis hit. The county approved my project and got sued the next day by the Sierra Club chapter in San Diego, which was very much an activist chapter going after Blackwater. They sued the county and I didn't want to let it go.

I'm John, I was an investor and a partner at Shepard Mall. And he's like, he's like Brandon. Sometimes you got to let it go. And I was like, you know what, you're right. And it was a huge way off my shoulders. But with my novel, I believed in it so much like the story, because every time I told it to storytellers, to screenwriters, to my friend Todd

who's a Hollywood director, he's like, dude, that is an amazing storyline. And so I think that kind of support and belief that I had something special, it kept me going in that case. No, I just went through that with the sort of fable or the kids book that I did, which is my sort of first, it's not really fiction,

but it's the first real non-fiction thing that I've done. I had this idea for I was really excited, and then you bump straight into the realities of, I publisher wanted it I had this idea for I was really excited. And then you bump straight into the realities of, I publisher wanted it to be this way and then they wanted this online and then, and then, and then to do it myself, it was going to cost, you know, cost almost a hundred thousand dollars to the whole package. You know, it's, so you, you, I think, I think what we're really talking about is you have to have some sort of sense of purpose, right? Like if you're, if you're, if you're gutting it out for the sake of

gutting it out, that's probably not good. If you're gutting it out to like stick it to someone, you know, the like, I'm going to prove them all wrong. That's a bad, that's a bad reason to stick it out. If you're, if you're sticking it out, because you've already spent so much money or time, that's a bad reason. But if you're sticking it out because you you've already spent so much money or time, that's a bad reason. But if you're sticking it out because you're like, no, no, no, this is like what I was put on this earth to do. To me, that's a good, not only is that a good reason to do it, but even if you fail,

like, you know, as you obviously had to train sales to do, so sometimes you gotta stand and die, right? And business that's metaphorical But you have to go like hey look there's a certain amount of failures that are inevitable in life I'd feel good trying and failing on this one Better than I would quitting it and succeeding on something else. That's easier that I don't actually give a shit about Yeah, yeah, I would agree and and out, I'm sharing the numbers with the listeners. Like John and I got half a million from random house.

We got Anz fire and her boss who did the Game of Thrones books. Like, and as a first time novelist, that's a pretty fucking good deal for. Yeah, fantastic. And then right away, it went, it got a bidding war for series and we ended up going with Peacock because we think that they're gonna make it because I didn't want it. I didn't want it being just optioned

and sitting on the shelf. But, you know, 12 years of toiling. Right, no $5,000 over 12 years, suddenly in the opportunity cost of it. right, the math, the math. And I think that's like a lot of these things, whether it's, you know, like obviously entrepreneurship can be lucrative, writing books can be lucrative, having a podcast can be lucrative, whatever. But I think what people don't realize is that

one, there was all the risks involved, and actually, there are plenty of other easier things to do with less risk, but proportionally actually higher rewards. So you have to do these things because you can't not do them. Do you know what I mean? Like, there were other projects you could have done than the novel. That it that it that it since worked out that has to be like this sort of extra on top. But that's not what gets you through year seven or the project. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I got a good day job as well. but that was something that was important to me

and it's super fulfilling once you do. I'm aside from the money, which is nice, but just the fact that, okay, this idea that I toiled over and finally finished is being like accepted in the marketplace, which is nice. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

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Follow Spellcaster, wherever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Yeah, I'm excited on this, this fable, it's called The Boy Who Would Be King. And it's a fable about Marcus Aurelius who's who would be king. And it's a, it's like a, a, a fable about Marcus Aurelius who's chosen to be king.

It's the only time really in history that someone is chosen to be emperor like as a kid. And it works out, right? So, but, but for me, like the pandemic for us started, like, I think March 9th, I got home from a trip and I was like, oh shit, this is, this is real. We're not going anywhere. But, but so I started just sort of talking to my son

about the ideas and then I ended up telling him the story and then it came the book and how to do all the work and stuff, but it's gonna come out like exactly much shorter than a 12 year lifespan. It's coming out exactly a year. It's gonna come out on March 9th of this year, which is one of the benefits of self-publishing. But I think you get to a place where, like for you,

yeah, sure, I'm sure the day you cash the check, it's nice, but the day that that book lands, and it exists, 12 years from the moment you first thought about it, that's the reward. And whether it sells 10 million copies or 10 copies that you got it, that you got through, just I'm sure that the graduation ceremony for the SEALs was fantastic, but it was really surviving that you did the thing you set out to do. Yeah, 100% 100%.

So what's what's next for you? So you do the novel and then you have another novel coming with what's the plan for you? Yeah. So writing for me is is a great creative outlet. So it's why I keep doing it. But I have a Digital media business that I run it's software up calm and it's kind of like a military My vision is to turn it into the military version of what Marvel did with superheroes and comics because we

We you know, we publish we're an indie publisher of military Books we have videos. We've self-produced like interviews with you know, we publish, we're an indie publisher of military books, we have videos, we've self-produced, like interviews with, you know, Dick Marcinto, the guy that founded to Team Six, and then we do like an economist kind of, we try and keep it really apolitical on the foreign policy domestic security reporting, so we have like a news component. That's my day job. It's incredibly fulfilling to do that work. But I'm at a point, like I had an exit. I don't, you know, I wouldn't say I'm at my number yet, but I'm pretty comfortable. Do you have a number? Is there is there an idea of what you need or? Yes, I come from.

So I took a course on business when I got out of the military and one of the guys that Skytobi used to work with the G leadership school put on this, you know, it was like one of those expensive weekend seminars, right? So I go there and we do this exercise like how much is enough? And you had to write down like over a hundred of us had to write down what our perfect kind of lifestyle dream if we had a magic wand without access. So you can't like say, I want a super yacht and a G5. But what you want to home is you want to go out so many times in each, you want to take so many vacations, and so you budget out what a year looks like. And out of the 100-ish of us,

we got to about 400,000, like everybody was within $10,000 of each other. And you realize that And you realize that time is finite, money is finite. But realizing that 400,000 of income is a pretty damn good life. And look, people can say, well, I can get by with half that, which is possible. But then you back into, okay, what do I have to have invested for say in the stock market to produce that kind of passive income? It's about $10 million. And so once you realize that, you're like,

oh, shit, like I need to be thinking about things differently. Like, how do I produce opportunities that could create that kind of liquidity event, and that got me thinking about business. And then also looking at, you know, the top wealth earners in this country, generally, the majority are business owners. You know, there, and that's how I got to the number. Is that number?

What is that? I'm always curious, because I'm not a person who has a number. What is it that that number would allow you to do that you can't do now? So that and that's a great question right. So I have complete autonomy. Right now I can get out of bed in the morning and do whatever I want to the most most part. What that number gives me is is a greater sense of security for my family. Like I know that and it's shitty that in America a poor kid would

die sooner than a wealthy kid if diagnosed with a certain disease. I think that's totally fucked up But it gives me that sense of security that my family is okay and that I have passive income to deal with those kind of life situations which come up like they should hit you out of the blue I found out a close family member has ALS and it totally took me, you know, or it caught me off guard and it just shows you how short and precious life is but that's what that number gives me.

Look, I have, you know, I'm a little over halfway there. But it just gives me security. And I'm in a point in my life also where I'm minimalizing. I have an own a car in six years. I do, I love aviation, I own an airplane. Yeah, I was going to say, don't you own a plane? I do. But I'm just trying, I had two homes. I'm now I'm consolidating I'm just trying, I had two homes. I'm now I'm consolidating into one home in Miami. I'm joining the rest of the refugees that are from New York and Los Angeles.

I'm going to Texas and Florida. But I'm trying to simplify. So I have, I'm doing this experiment to take my personal, my personal burn rate near to zero. So I recently I bought, I'm like, I'm gonna move my, Miami, I was thinking about buying a place cash, but I ended up buying a apartment building, and I'll live in one of the units and run out the rest,

and I'm in a cash flow. So like, I have income coming in, and I have virtually no, like very, very minimal expenses, like probably $1,500 a month, which I think is pretty good. So, I'm trying this experiment to just see, just to minimalize and focus on spending more time with, to get more time back to spend with my kids, my friends and family, people want to be around and I love the travel. So that's what I'm up to.

No, no, I know that place very well where you want to be, like to me, I think what's interesting, you brought up the idea of autonomy, which I actually tend to find is not what you hear people who have a number really thinking about, right? So to me, like, it doesn't matter. Let's say the number is 50 million, but if the number is 50 million and you have a life that's scheduled down to the minute and you have to be certain places and do certain things, then you're, in my eyes, you're actually not wealthy because you don't have any freedom. The whole point of wealth or success, to me, is to have freedom to live your relatively limited life in a way that's as up to you as much as possible.

It's still that we have obligations to each other and to society, of course, but, you know, how free are you day to day? To me, that's the indication of success or failure. Yeah, I share the same philosophy and I have so many friends that, like my friend who's a neurosurgeon, that he's like, I'm just an overpaid brick layer. If I don't lay like a form surgery, lay brick, I don't get paid. And in my friend, I have a friend in law that is loves what he does. Like he couldn't imagine doing anything else. But most the people I find who are successful lawyers realize that they have to sell all their time.

And they have no freedom to kind of take a trip at the family or just be like, you know what, it's snowed in Jackson Hole. I'm out of here. I'm going to go catch some fresh powder. They just can't do that. And I don't want to ever give that up. Well, no, even a lot of authors I know are in the same boat, right? So they might get large deals, like book deals, but which would seem like a lot of money to any, you know, bystander. But because their books don't actually sell, and because they have a very expensive lifestyle, they're just an overpaid brick layer,

but every brick is a book, right? They have to write two books a year, you know, a book every three years. It has to sell it for a certain amount, then they have to go on the road, a certain amount to pitch it. But at the end of the day, if they stop, the machine grinds to a halt, right?

And so again, to me, success is, hey, if I decide not to do something, it doesn't grind to a halt. And I think that's where the sort of entrepreneurship and your point about business and wealth. If you have a business that can operate independently of you or operate with some level of passive income, then you have freedom. If you're someone who has to chase, deal to deal project to project, you're in a bad place. Yeah, 100%. All right. Last question for you. you chase deal to deal project to project, you're in a bad place.

Yeah, 100%. All right, last question for you. This is somewhat of a political one, but I'd be curious, given the site you run. Just because I hear from a number of these people, and then I sort of watch them, and this is kind of what my first book was about, what does your take on sort of people in military police,

this sort of radicalization that we're seeing, where you look at the events of January 6th, sort of unfortunately, or tragically, sort of veterans or people in police or fire departments seem to be overrepresented in that population. What is operating on the brains of these people who are, I think, hardworking, have good hearts, have some sense of patriotism or duty, or they wouldn't have done the original

job they did. But there seems to be something that's either being exploited or something that's flipped and gone sort of toxic that is kind of radicalizing, I guess members of our armed forces community, but also members just of our country. Yeah, so great question. And I actually really enjoy talking about this stuff and sharing from experience because look, I think first and foremost the Republican Party is kind of

just what's the right word I'm looking for essentially just taken over the militaries as their own right? So it's, and I think the sad thing is generally, I would guess that in a city like New York or Los Angeles, most people would automatically associate a military veteran with being conservative and Republican leaning, and that's just false. Like that's a false way, that's a false bias, but the bias exists. And I think it's because the conservatives have adopted certain things, and military being one of them, and it's created this bias. When I moved to New York City, I applied for a apartment in the West Village, showed

all my financials, which New York and co-ops are like the last form of legal discrimination in my opinion. The broker call me and says, hey, I don't think they're going to rent to you. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Well, they found out you're in Navy Seal and half the building is, has gay tenants. And I said, look, you just gotta let me talk to this president of the co-op board. So I ended up going, have a five minute conversation and the guy's like, oh, you're cool. He's like, man, we were just nervous.

Like we thought you were gonna be hanging the, freaking Trump. Don't tread on me for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all that crazy shit. From my prior, from my cold dead fingers. And that's a sad thing. It was the first time I had ever experienced that kind of bias.

And I get it all the time. And so I think it's sad that we live, and I think that the people that you're seeing like these crazy, you know, radical live and and and I think that the people that you're seeing like these crazy You know, radicals that are they've got the don't tread on me. Sure, and then you know, all this crazy shit It's like a very small element of the military. I have most of veterans that I associate with Think think that we need better gun control They're very moderate. They know we they're very anti-war because they've seen us like

totally destabilize the Middle East, at least the Northern part, like create the refugee crisis in Europe, which Europe was trending towards open border now everyone's putting up fences. We've caused so much problems in the world with not thinking about the long game and how our kind of very schizophrenic foreign policy has kind of played out over the last 20 years. And most of the veterans I talked to, like, they know that they're like extremely anti-war. And I think that would surprise a lot of people. Unfortunately, those people aren't on Fox News, you know, with the freaking guns and the freaking mega hats, you know, and that's.

And it's just sucks because it just kind of carries on that bias that exists, but look at, look at, I had dinner with him a few years ago with Jeremy scaleatele, the guy that the director of Platoon, what's his name? Pretty like left-leaning Hollywood director. All of her stone? All of her stone. All of her stone is a veteran man. He's a vet, but he's like a wildly liberal, he's like, yeah, military won't cooperate with me because I'm, you know, because I'm telling it how it is. People probably would be shocked to find out all of us down as a military veteran. But anyway, that to, and to answer the part about why this exists, I think we see ourselves at a time in America where we have this massive in this country where it's very hard to have a civil debate and discussion around major issues because we have big problems in America that need to be solved and they are not going to be solved.

A government is going to take a lot of smart people in industry coming together to do more and look, a social cause that a company to donate some money to a charity isn't going to cut it. We have to really think about how to solve like education, healthcare, the income gap. And these are big problems. And look, I'll share my personal views on Trump. I, in the beginning, liked the fact that Trump was a political hand grenade in the room of Washington, because I was so fed up seeing through two administrations, and I voted for Obama, I was just sick and tired of it. Like, I'm like, we've created a mess in the world.

I lost my best friend, Ben Gazi Libya, who was one of the seals protecting it. I'm best receiving. I'm like, what are we doing in the like in the world? And I like the fact that Trump initially upset the apple cart. And to this day, I think the benefits of him being an agitator far outweigh if Hillary got elected and I somebody told me about this alternative reality series where it shows Hillary winning the election and Harvey Weinstein getting like this presidential award. So I think, but it's an interesting thought experiment,

because Trump fucking agitated people so much that they woke up a young generation. My son voted, you know, when he was 18, recently in the selection, people care, like women's equality has been pushed forward much further, I think, under Trump than, not the key in the selfless. Right, yeah, not intentionally. has been pushed forward much further, I think, under Trump than not that he not intentionally, right? Yeah, not intentionally. But it's like the Chinese

Zing and Yang, right? Like you have the swings that occur. He was such a freaking jerk that people are just like all this other like as a byproduct of him. Like all this good stuff happened. And then look, I took a sigh of relief when he got the hell out of there. I was like done with it like a year in. I'm like, okay, this is just too much for me. No, I think I think what you're bringing up is really important. And when I'm asking the question, I'm not sort of saying, like, why are people in the military

Republican? Because I don't think there's anything wrong with being a Democrat or Republican. What alarms me is the sort of radicalization, the QAnon shit and the 3% are sort of extreme groups. But I think what that is is the opposite of what you're just talking about, which is you're saying like, like, all these things have happened

and they're complicated. And they're gonna require complicated solutions. And I think it's really tempting to think that there's these sort of simple solutions to them. It's really tempting to sort of retreat into a fantasy world, into your media bubble, where you only hear things that you like

and fall into the embrace of the sort of conservative media machine or the blogs that you like or the podcast you like. And I think that's very tempting to go for a circle. If you come from a community, a tight knit community that gives you purpose and meaning and makes you part of a thing, and then you enter the regular world where there isn't any of that and you're on your own

and it's complicated and Everyone sucks. It can be really tempting and seductive to get to get drawn back into that in the form of you know conspiracy theories or you know proud boy like gangs it can it can it can It's it's a prays on people. I think that's what these groups are really doing. Yeah, and I would agree with you and also just comment. It's a, you know, it's a minority of these military veterans that are out there. And I think a lot of them have, are suffering from post-traumatic stress.

And to my point earlier, going back to Victor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning, like people need purpose. And when somebody, a man or woman, get out of the motor. Yeah, they get back from the deployment to Afghanistan. they lost friends, maybe they're injured themselves, they killed somebody, they go, they realize that there's no purpose behind it, and I can tell you having spoke to congressman senators, defense industry executives, there is nobody that can give me a straight answer of why we are in Afghanistan 20 years. And when you come back and you realize, how can I rationalize all this bad shit I just didn't saw? And there's a lack of purpose.

It creates a lot of psychological issues. And so now you're having this big transition of veterans to civilian workforce. And a few of them that are suffering from a lot of mental health issues, find these fringe groups to your point. And they're lightened to torches and joining up at the crazies. And that's unfortunately, it's a minority, but those guys are the ones making the news, right? No, that's very well said, right? It's like, no one is adjoining these groups

because they think it's crazy. It seems like it makes sense. It is drawing on something emotionally, mentally, usually because you're in some kind of impaired state or you're coming from a place of pain. That's right. That is a good reminder. You should think about what has happened to this person. Look, it was Ashley Babet, the one who was killed, the Air Force veteran,

Quartz, still killed Storming the Capitol. What has to break in a person's brain to find yourself doing that. It's not a malicious place. It's a victim who in turn is victimizing other people. And unfortunately, that's where a lot of evil stuff in the world comes from. Yeah, 100%. Brandon, this was amazing. I'm so glad we met. I'm really glad we did this. And let's see each other in person soon.

Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoke. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads at this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then of course, click subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening and that that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in. So thanks again for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast.

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