The Joe Rogan Experience - #1247 - Andy Stumpf

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Andy Stumpf is a retired Navy SEAL and is also currently a wingsuit world record holder. He hosts his own podcast called “Cleared Hot" available on Spotify.

four three two hello andy what's up what's going on buddy we're here drinking cbd water i've never had cbd water gt's kombucha sent us some cbd water my first sip was a few seconds ago and uh i didn't read that it said cucumber basil so i was shocked by the taste but i like it yeah that's a weird combo right yeah cucumber and it's called dream catcher which makes me think of like a white trash lady living in a trailer park one of them things hanging over her bed partially broken on the inside mullet weird cats if you have a dream catcher most likely you have cats right i think you have to have one it's part of the program yeah it's a package deal it's like you know what i saw um yesterday that is

really rare i saw a dude who was dressed up like a native american who was not in fact a native american that's a risky move in this day and age yeah i'm not gonna go there when we were kids you could be an indian like if you could play cowboys we were kids you could be an indian like if you could play cowboys and indians you could be an indian and it'd be like oh okay yeah no problem he's he's he's the indian this guy's the cowboy normal shit today they will fucking come for you that day's gone it's the day's over yeah what happened i'm not smart enough to answer that question but you are significant margin but some things have taken place i mean during the time that you were serving from 2001 to 2019 where we're at today i mean there has been a significant change in outrage culture in this country

in in entitlement like things that people think that they can get offended by and not offended by, things that are important and not important. So, we're in the strangest time. The beauty of that is most of the time I was serving, so I paid zero attention to any of it. Right. The disaster part of that is when you come off the off-ramp, you know, out of service. Yeah. And you go, what happened? Yeah.

What happened to the environment that i left but i mean i went from santa cruz california where i grew up where it could well be the origin of outrage culture and social justice warriors to the military to back out of the military so i had very uh very different uh optics when it comes to perspective where i started and then what i was seeing when I came out. Well, that's the take that I always see from people that are in the military or have been in the military, is their understanding of what's important and not important is so much different because it's truly life and death. Not all the time, but I think if you are exposed to that environment enough it'll recalibrate uh your perspective of what's important what's not yeah did you ever um read any sebastian younger i did

did you try this great book yes i read that off your recommendation actually did it speak to you like in terms of like your own personal experience it made complete uh sense i probably would have used different terms in different places throughout but the concept that he was talking about absolutely made sense. I mean, so the SEAL team is one of the, whether or not people live up to this, an argument could be made, but one of the key tenets is the brotherhood, which is just another way of talking about a tribe. Yeah, yeah.

I just felt like it was really interesting to me, like that book, the most moving part of it was how connected these people are when they're together and when they're at war and what that brotherhood that camaraderie means to them and how they feel disconnected when they're back in regular civilization and they get depressed it's like their life had been led at such a such a high vibration, intensity, so much on the line. It means so much. Everything means so much.

There's so much dedication, so much commitment. And then to go back to the regular life is very, very difficult for a lot of people. Yeah, I don't think it would be unfair to say that some of the people that I serve with, I probably have closer relationships than I do with my biological family. Even probably I've shared, I don't know. It's not that the things that we shared were important, but the value and our connection was so tight that honestly tighter than my

definitely biological family and potentially even my wife as well, too, and my own kids. And that's how I think she understands it she gets it you're gonna get in trouble bro that's well i only get in trouble for my wife on days that end in y so nothing's gonna be new about that but but i think she also understands that because i i certainly have struggled i struggled quite a bit but about the first 18 months i got out of the military and i look back on it now and i think uh two pieces of it.

One, I went from seeing those people that I share those experiences with on a daily basis. So there's that everything you have in common. We talk about stuff the same. I mean, I just know the ins and outs of those people. And then I became detached from them. And then I had, I used to have what I thought was a job that had an immense amount of purpose. And then that was gone, too. So I lost a little bit of my identity and a little bit of the purpose.

And at that same time, like I said, I come off that off-ramp of being in the military and I'm looking at the world. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. People are arguing about things and talking about how they're oppressed while they're standing in a Starbucks line paying for a coffee that costs more per ounce than a gallon of gasoline, you know, stuff that probably couldn't be, you know, you could couch it in terms other than oppression. And none of it made sense.

And you just, it's rough when you get detached from that environment. Well, especially in your situation, you were wounded and you, you know, although you wanted to continue serving, you physically weren't able to anymore. I was for a while so i got hurt in february of 2005 the 14 year 15 year no 14 year anniversary was earlier this month and it took me about two years to work my way back to where i would become operational again and i did one more deployment after i got hurt and then at the tail end of that deployment that was just the end of it my body wouldn't tolerate it anymore And this is because of the metal fragments or

what is it totally? There was a nerve damage. It was the, so I got medically retired, which is not based off of any one instant, hopefully. I mean, people who have, they get an IED strike and they'll become a quad amputee or a triple amputee that's one incident that they're going to get retired for for me it was more the culmination of a lot of things so the gunshot wound obviously didn't help and then the operational history of exposure to explosive blasts the concussive forces all of those things just kind of added up i went through a 30-day protocol where they baselined me and took a bunch of tests and basically came to the you know they write out a massive document of all the things they were able to at least document like for me i can't get an mri because i still have metal in my body from ferrous metal from the round that clipped a piece

of rebar on its way to me oh wow and it clipped my sciatic nerve on the way in and they're concerned that if they image me or what i've been told by the doctors if they image me it might react again with my sciatic nerve just pull a piece of metal by it and i'll be right back where i was i'll have i had drop foot for about six months and drop foot is when your foot just stops working totally hangs i could always push down but i couldn't lift it up that's a thing that's happening now in MMA quite a bit. It's happened several times where guys get low calf kicked, and there's something about chopping at the nerves behind the leg that a guy's legs are just, their foot's going limp.

It happened to Michael Chandler. It happened to Henry Cejudo. Are they recovering from it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's in the middle of the fight. So they get kicked, and then the leg just stops working, and they can't stand on it. Their foot just literally doesn't react anymore.

So frustrating. So for me, I got shot in the hip high up on my left-hand side. But by the time I made it to the hospital, my single complaint was my ankle. I was telling her, like, I didn't remember falling on my ankle. I didn't remember hitting my ankle. But it felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and just beat it into powder and so they were very careful and then you know they cut my shoes off of me they cut my pants off me and they the first thing they did was take an x-ray of my ankle and they're like dude you're

totally fine but it felt like it was destroyed because it was the nerve that got interacted with high up it short-circuited all the way down to the terminal point of the nerve. And for me, it never came back. I'm hoping that, obviously, for the fighters, it eventually comes back. Because I had dropped foot for six months to a year. I eventually was able to start dorsiflexing my foot again. But I still can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down on the sciatic side. The far left-hand side and as it wraps over the top of my foot is completely numb and is this because of um the actual damage

to the nerve or something touching the nerve they don't know that was an interesting part of being hurt as well is talking to people who have decades of medical experience and having them look at you and go i don't know fuck especially without an mri right because they can't they can't and they're because they're worried about it being pulled out same thing why the concussion history that i have it's an estimate based off of operational history because they can't throw me in that same machine and image my brain oh whoa because it's spitting magnets and right i mean it and there's metal all over uh the left hand side of my pelvis and i don't know how much it would have to move, but if it just clipped that nerve again – I mean, it was probably one of the more difficult times in my life.

My leg felt like it was on fire 24 hours a day, which I could ignore during the daytime, but where it got me was at nighttime. I would lay down in bed, and it just felt like I had dipped my leg in gas and put a lighter onto it. And it just felt like I had dipped my leg in gas and just put a lighter onto it. So I was on high dosages of like gabapentin and Neurotin, which are central nervous system suppressors. So I started feeling the cognitive effect of that. So I backed myself off of that. Wasn't in a great phase of my life. So I was, of course, washing those down with massive amounts of alcohol.

Taking three to four Ambien, staying awake because my tolerance to all that stuff was so high. And the last thing I ever want to do is go through that again. So I'm going to stay away from the spinning magnets. Because I mean, it might be a quarter of an inch and I'd be exactly right back where I was before. And there's no way they can go in and pull those fragments out. So I'm laying in the hospital in Bagh baghdad and the night that i got hurt uh many other people got hurt eight people got hurt on that particular target i was one of the least injured there were people who immediately flown into surgery a guy almost lost his arm um a guy took a he was right next to an explosive blast that literally peeled back the layers of his ballistic helmet. He was conscious but blind.

He'd taken such a shot to his head. He got ejected out the backside of a building. There was some other gunshot wounds. So I'm laying in the hospital bed. I hadn't taken any morphine because I had watched too many movies. And I thought if I had, I had auto injector syrettes on me at all times, but I thought if I had jabbed myself, I was going to start drooling. No experience with it whatsoever.

And the doctors finally start working on me, and he says, all right, we're going to take a look at this. I'm going to basically stick my finger in the hole. And I was like, let's take a pause here, sir. Can I have some pain medication? So he comes out and just juices me with Morphine. First time I've ever had it was I wish I would have taken it in the field. It did almost nothing. And they played around a little bit with the holes and then slipped me into an x-ray machine and said, do you want us to try to take this out? And I said, well, what does that can entail? And he

said, well, because we can tell that there's ferrous metal in here, what we would do is we would knock you out, put a tube down your throat, lay you on your stomach, and hold up a two-dimensional x-ray and basically just start slicing and pulling apart, slicing and pulling apart, looking and searching for these metal pieces and pulling them out of your body one at a time. And I said, is there another option? He's like, oh, yeah, totally. The body will encapsulate it in calcium, and as long as it's not touching a bone, you're probably going to be fine. What the fuck, man? Why didn't you lead with that option? Right.

Well, did they think they were going to be able to get them all out, though, if they did go in there and start slicing away? I don't know. And I don't know what benefit it would have had. I suspect it would have caused more damage than the actual injury itself. My hip is fine. I still have never had a surgery. I've still never broken a bone the only thing they ever did was put a gauze pad on my leg and when the scab fell off i could start

taking a bath again if i wanted to wow yep they just left everything in there jesus that's crazy it's all bizarre wow so if you do have an injury now it's is it a lot of guesswork like if something's wrong with your leg, do they have to like go in there with a scope? Like, since you can't get an MRI, like what if you blew your knee out? They would have to rely on imagery technology that doesn't revolve around magnets.

Wow. So most likely, I'm not too, I think they gave me a CAT scan in the hospital, so that I don't think is magnet-based, and then two-dimensional x-ray. Well, it's interesting, too, because some of the therapies they're using on people for TBI is magnets. Yeah. But I don't think they're as powerful as an MRI.

I mean, you can't even wear earrings in those rooms. Well, yeah, with an MRI. I had heard about some kid who accidentally died because he had an oxygen tank in the room, and they turned the the machine on and the tanks slammed into them and crushed them. Yeah, I've heard about the TBI magnets. That I think I would be fine with because I don't think it has the power that the huge machines do. Right, right. Yeah, it's like a low-frequency magnetic pulse.

It's like Kat Zingano, who's a UFC fighter, she essentially had been hurt really bad in a fight with amanda nunez and she got hypothyroid uh condition from that fight her thyroid wasn't functioning correctly she was gaining weight like crazy she was her motor skills were all fucked up and they fixed her with that and that was from the brain injury yeah for a fight she won which is crazy i mean she was hurt really bad in the first round, stopped her in the third round. She won the fight.

She beat Amanda Nunes and, you know, really suffered some significant brain trauma from that fight. There is a, I don't want to say there's a rash of suicides in the SEAL team specifically. Obviously, the number 22 is thrown out a lot when it comes to veteran suicides, but that's- What is it, 22%? 22 veterans a day commit suicide.

The number that is often touted, I'm hesitant to say that number is accurate because if you look at how it was derived, it wasn't- They could have done a better job of getting that number. They could have done a better job of getting that number. And I don't want to say inside of the SEAL teams that there's a suicide issue, even though I do know a few people that have committed suicide, and they were the ones that I would least expect it from. But they were also the ones who had quite a bit of high operational tempo. And the one thing that I don't think, especially in the military medicine world, they understand well is traumatic brain injury and the impact it has long-term and how easy it can be.

Because you know this, I've heard you talk about it before. You don't have to get knocked out to get a brain injury. Right. And I know countless times where I either did something dumb or was just standing in the wrong place or had a hard parachute opening and I cracked my head against the metal risers and your head hurts for the rest of the day. Yeah. And I've seen the change in behavior in some people,

and I know the stuff that's tied to it as well, the low hormones, all of that stuff. That is happening, I think, at the highest levels in the military, probably military-wide, but specifically those people who are kind of more on the front-leading edge of combat operations. And I think as a country, we're in a total unknown area because we're in a sustained period of war longer than we've ever been as a nation. And nobody knows the outcome of that. And people who I would have never guessed would make the decision to take their own life. I'll get a text and, hey, you know,

so-and-so just went out into the woods. And no other external injury, no other marker than obviously something happened in the geometry between their ears that caused them to make that decision. And I suspect it's from the repeated exposure to the brain injury. Yeah, it's something that people are just starting to understand over the last couple of decades i mean obviously uh there was a focus that concussion movie and you know i don't know if you saw that bob costas was actually pulled from football uh and they had told him that he'd crossed the line the announcer they pulled him they pulled him from doing uh what what event was it was it from the super bowl because uh he was talking about traumatic brain injury and the realities of it and they said you

crossed the line he's like i crossed the line by talking about reality in an honest and open person yeah that's not cool i mean that's what he does i mean that is bob costas's entire hook but i mean he's he's a brilliant guy but this But this problem was so poorly understood just two decades ago. So everyone's just sort of coming to this realization that, I mean, according to Dr. Mark Gordon, who I've had on, who works with the Warrior Angel Foundation, Andrew Marr's setup, where they're helping all these veterans that have traumatic brain injuries. And I've had Mr. Gordon on several times. He says that you can get traumatic brain injuries from things that don't even remotely knock you out. He's like, people get them from doing moguls when they ski. They get them from-

From your brain just rattling. They get them from jet skis, bouncing around on jet skis. I mean, you can get it from a minor car accident. You can have a traumatic brain injury. And for guys like me that got hit in the head for years, who knows what the fuck is going on in there. And for professional fighters, it's almost inevitable. For football players, it's even worse. For football players, they did some crazy study, and I know we quoted it, and I don't remember what the numbers was but it's some insane number like in the high 80 of people from high school on through college and into the professionals um have tbi or cte or

the some signs of uh traumatic brain injury i'd be surprised if they didn't given they're fucking crazy it gets it is interesting to like i was saying so when i got medically retired they sent me to a medical facility called nico, which is attached to Walter Reed. And it's the best care that I ever received because it's a civilian facility. It's called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. We did a lot of work with them back in the day for the UFC. The UFC raised a bunch of money for that. Really? Yeah.

Well, the money was well spent because I went there and I probably would not have been medically retired had I not because I left with literally a 150-page dossier. But it's interesting tying it back to TBI because I spent a lot of time as a requirement talking to psychologists and psychiatrists. And the TBI PTS in the military gets interesting because it seems like they're treated as different issues. And I'm probably misquoting the number a little bit. I think there's 13 recognized symptoms of both, but there's an overlay of like 11. So I can't remember any of the symptoms off the top of my head, but you could describe one and it could apply both to TBI and to post-traumatic stress. So it gets even more muddled on how are you treating somebody for a brain injury are you treating somebody for a post-traumatic stress

are you lumping everybody together it's just because i see a lot of people and specifically a lot of veterans getting stuck in that world where they've it's a lot of focus on pts but the reality is it could just be from the trauma received over a career or you know nearly two decades for most people to make it to retirement it's really hard to tell well apparently blasts are a big one right like blowing down doors and things like that even even if you just step away and you brace yourself the impact of just the air the concussive force of it is just devastating for your brain the human brain apparently is just so much more delicate and sensitive than anyone could have ever guessed well and concussive blasts

are a tough one because they travel so if you're internally in a building and you find a door that's at the end of a hallway even if you go all the way down to the end of the hallway and around the corner the blasts can still get you because it will come down off the door, reflect off of the hallway, and still rock you. Jesus. Yeah. I thought I had a good hiding spot more than once and did not have a good hiding spot. You're sitting there just like, oh, that hurt. More than one occasion.

Or you're working with a bunch of assholes who take all the good hiding spots. God damn it. Just turn around and just ball up. And there's not really much you can do about that right i mean if you have to blow down that door someone has to be there to detonate you have to be close enough for it to activate right uh how are they doing it wirelessly they might be doing it wirelessly now when i was in uh it was called no no um and it basically it's a or a shock. So you put a charge wherever, a gate, a door, a wall, and you basically have to attach an initiator to it

because the charge isn't going to go off by itself. So you need a highly reactive charge to set off an explosive that is less reactive. You keep them separate, obviously, for safety, except for the main breacher. He probably has at least one hooked up so he can be really fast but then you just extend that flash tube and it's they come in long reels i mean that you can get 30 40 50 feet and each charge mathematically we do math on it to determine the minimum safe distance of every charge and it's written on the charge so you know how far you can get away but sometimes you're in a situation where

like i said you think you got an awesome hiding spot and the guy lays out the flash tube and he's getting ready to fire it off and you realize that you're staring directly at the charge and you have nowhere to hide oh jesus and they're not going to wait on you so it's turn around cover up into a ball and eat it oh is there a best way to eat it uh open your mouth and cover your ears i mean really yeah open your mouth yeah allow it's instead of overloading uh like your sinus cavities and your uh your ear canal so you can cover your ears and open your mouth it helps if something's going to go off really close to you open your mouth and cover your ears yep what what what's the difference between opening and closing the mouth?

The effect of the wave, my understanding, that contain pressure inside of your body as opposed to giving it an avenue to escape. Jesus Christ. One of the things they're realizing apparently about concussions is that even just getting hit in the chest can give you a concussion. From the head? Yeah, because you get hit in the chest and you're like, I didn't even get hit from the head because you're you know you get hit in the in the chest and you're like i didn't even get hit in the head but just getting hit in the chest makes your head snap and it makes your brain swoosh around inside your head and that's what gives you an injury i just remember earlier on i mean like in the mid 2000s it wasn't the only question was does your head hurt like that was the beginning of whether or not you might have sustained a

concussion and then obviously learning much more now and where we're at, it's like, yeah, you may not have even had any sensation in your head. But, you know. It's kind of crazy when you think about how long people have been studying the human body. And this is just something they've really got a real understanding of in the last couple of decades. I don't even know if I would characterize it as a real understanding. I think they're farther along than they were two two decades ago but i think the amount we know versus the amount that we don't know is much more weighted on the amount we don't know yeah i went to a high school football game recently uh because my daughter was doing this cheerleading thing and i watched these kids

collide with each other and i'm like oh me a fucking fight commentator you know and i'm watching this i'm like get out of there stop doing it yeah it's just to me it's i don't know it's i guess people i i get that people enjoy the game i understand it i mean i think there's a lot of things in life i mean i'm talking to you the world record squirrel suit flying jump man when i talk about risk and reward maybe you're the wrong person to discuss this with but you know my risk versus reward well it's worked out for you so far you're here today yeah i mean you're jumping off fucking mountains with a flying squirrel suit if you're here you've obviously got it nailed i'm on pause for the base jumping for the time being did uh mrs stump step in and put the kibosh on it for the first time she asked

me to stop in uh june of last year but of course it was tied to a very close friend who uh did a jump didn't go the way he wanted it to go or anybody would she happened to know him and it really was the it was the first time that I seriously considered giving it up. I haven't touched a wingsuit since my buddy Alex died. And he was my main base jumping partner overseas on most of the trips that I'd done. And I'm not going to say I shepherded him into the sport, but I was there with him on his first jump off of a cliff in Italy, the first time he put a wingsuit on. And that one stung a bit so it's on pause potentially forever as far as base jumping goes i'll still skydive but it's a

it's a question mark on the base jump inside the house you do such risky shit the skydive is like yeah skydiving that's no big deal skydive i'll jump out of a fucking plane that i would do with my eyes closed every day that's the high risk ratio on that one is we're all set. What is the risk ratio on skydiving? Like what percentage of those things go wrong? It's incredibly low. So you have a main parachute and a reserve parachute. I don't think there has been a true double failure, meaning your main parachute malfunctions,

double failure, meaning your main parachute malfunctions, you cut it away properly, and deploy your reserve parachute and have that also fail in 20 some years. People die skydiving all the time. Well, not all the time, because I guess it, you know, the population of people that do it is not huge. But I would say the vast majority of people who die skydiving, they, they kill themselves, they make a poor decision. And most people who die skydiving they they kill themselves they make a poor decision and most people who die skydiving die under perfectly functioning equipment really so the the canopy size the main canopy that you're flying the wing over your head the smaller it is the faster it goes the faster it descends but also quite frankly the more fun it is but with fun there's consequence so there are canopies that you can initiate a turn and if you initiate the turn too low you cannot pull the canopy out of the turn you will impact the ground at a high rate of speed regardless of what you do and if you get under that canopy with

not enough experience obviously your odds of making a bad decision are going to go through the roof so most injuries and fatalities at least from the stuff I have seen, is from people making poor decisions under good equipment or choosing to execute an emergency procedure, which would be cutting away your main parachute and deploying a reserve, either out of sequence or doing it too low where the reserve parachute doesn't have time to open. To me, that's not a failure of the parachute system. That's the failure of the individual who is driving that parachute system so if you have a main parachute and you

jump out and you hit the main parachute and there's a malfunction how do you cut it off to put to get the other one so there's two pillows one on each side the right hand side you literally need to do this in the correct order even though people have killed themselves by going backwards so you pull to full arm extension you it's literally just a pillow with velcro that has two cables and the cables are what's actually holding the parachute on your shoulders if you pull that out a three ring release system which is basically just a load reduction system unwinds itself and your parachute's gone and you're going back into free fall and you just pull the other pillow it sounds worse than it is and. And before I had my first cutaway, it was terrifying. And then after you have four or five, you're like, okay, I got this.

You had four or five main parachutes fail? I think I'm at about seven right now. Jesus Christ, Andy. Well, I've been jumping for 20 years. I don't want to hear that, man. I started jumping in 99. Statistically, I'm actually i think under uh i think it's like one in every 888 jumps you'll have a malfunction or a gear failure it's honestly like it's your first one is an emotional experience i would imagine you're saying what was the first one uh deploying

a parachute and just sitting there looking at it as it's because they want to open and you can i can tell now within an instant of trying to deploy my parachute whether or not it's going to open or not just by looking at the shape by sometimes listening to it and just seeing how it opens sometimes i mean so packing a parachute people think is really difficult if you can fold a t-shirt you can pack a parachute sometimes Sometimes, though, you just get off of a jump and you only have 10 minutes to make the next jump. So you skip a few steps or you rush through a few steps. Is that what happened with you? Potentially. I may have skipped all of the non-essential steps and a few of the essential steps to get the parachute.

Really? I was just rushing, and I didn't have a lot of experience, so I was stuffing the thing in there. And when I tried to deploy the parachute, it was asymmetrical. So sometimes it'll open, and it'll start spinning, and then you're flying with your back. That would be considered an exciting moment, I would say. So what happened with you? What exactly went wrong? It just came out asymmetrically.

The parachute wasn't opening. And were you spinning? No, I wasn't. I actually was able to recognize just by it should come out it looks like a rectangle more than anything but if you look like a rectangle that's twisted there's no way to fix that no way so just get rid of it and that's what i did i looked up and i said okay that's not going to work reach pull reach pull and your reserve opened so fast like by the time i felt like by the time i had pulled the reserve handle because i had a handle that point by the time i had moved my arm to three quarters of extension

it had fired off wow yeah dude but the difference and you're asking the difference like why is risk skydiving lower it's because you have time thousands of feet whereas base jumping you might have hundreds or if you're really pushing the envelope, you might have sub-10 feet because you're flying close to the ground as fast as you can go. Did your friend Alex, who died, did he die base jumping? He died wingsuit base jumping, something that I was – I mean, he was my main base jumping partner. What is the difference between wingsuit base jumping and regular base jumping?

Regular base jumping, you just have a quick-deploy parachute, parachute right so you have one parachute system when you base jump instead of two because there is not time for a reserve to open so that is just taken out of the system right so you pack your primary or only parachute very similar to a reserve it's designed to open rapidly it's designed to take a lot of load uh but so base jumping is just jumping off of a static object uh base stands for building antenna span or earth so four types of object the addition of the wingsuit is really the only difference which allows you to like for myself personally i'm not a huge fan of jumping off buildings and cliffs without a wingsuit because i don't like being from me to that flag when a parachute opens because if it doesn't open exactly in the direction you want it to you better be Johnny

on the spot or you're gonna have a fucking problem so it's to me if you have enough altitude you put a wingsuit on in two or three seconds the suit is mocking forward so then you're hundreds if not thousands of feet away from the object then your parachute can open up however you want it to have they made any improvements in the technology of this stuff since you first started jumping huge improvements i mean the first wing suits were literally just fabric that had like the little thumb loops you'll find on like cold weather long sleeve shirts sometimes seriously like patrick that's how you kept it on that's how they kept it on i didn't jump any of those goddamn things but i mean i think patrick day garden is how you say his name he was one of the first and they would just sit there and just they would just jam their appendages and lock them out and use their entire musculature to sail this fabric as far out as they could get

fuck and then the suits now are unbelievable so each wing like the wing between your legs and the wing between each of your arms so there's three of them they're totally independent they have a ram air opening so the air rushes into that and makes the wing semi-rigid so it reduces the stress on your body and they their flight characteristics are insane you can go you can get the suit flying faster you can fly it flatter you can float everything about it is improved except for the decision making process of the monkey who's actually jumping it that's the original one jamie oh that guy's dead for sure it says uh manis mickey morgan wearing a batwing suit is that ridiculous well who was the first fucking psycho that thought that this was something that they should try it could potentially

oh my god this guy's like he looks like he's living in the 1800s when did they invent these fucking things i don't know i know one of these guys died Going off the Eiffel Tower In an exhibition This is 1900 right here 1900? What in the fuck? Look at that guy Strong You know what man?

If you were living in 1900 You'd probably be like Listen Let's just get this over with Fuck living in 1900 Everyone has syphilis Fucking Whiskey's illegal

I'm just jumping off Look at that That is crazy When you see that Yeah I mean Honestly I'm just jumping off Look at that That is crazy When you see that Yeah I mean That's I mean honestly I'm not gonna lie

I would probably jump that Out of an airplane 1895 Yeah Oh he's the inventor Earl Stein He died in the first attempt Oh Jesus Christ

He died in the first attempt Honor to a modern hero Alright settle down But here's the thing Joe There's like 60 some people Who are associated with The modern day wingsuit in the first attempt honor to a modern hero all right settle down but here's the thing joe there's like 60 some people who are associated with uh the modern day wingsuit and testing and evaluating to get it to this point they're all dead all of them are dead every one of them but that suit like i mean that suit and the difference between that and where we are now, it's night and day. But everyone involved in the creation of these wingsuits died in a wingsuit.

Yep. Fuck, man. Yep. That is not good. There wouldn't be a whole lot of black belts in jiu-jitsu if everyone who got to a certain point died. You know what I'm saying? It's hard to justify or rationalize the behavior for sure. I'll be the first person to admit that.

What is it? What is it about? Oh, jumping his dog that's dean potter jumping with his dog oh the poor dog so the dog the dog's fault the dog i believe is that looks like switzerland crazy asshole fucking owner so dean was insane right he was a world-class uh rock climber he's also dead from jumping a wingsuit he died in yosemite um it's like i said the technology advances uh i am not i was not there the day that dean died i've talked to people who have looked at it uh as to the conditions that led up to it and uh one thing people generally don't want to do is place the responsibility on the individual making the choice. But from everything that I have seen, he made a choice to jump at a time when he should not have been jumping due to visual conditions. So even though the suits are amazing, really the only thing that doesn't seem to be evolving is the person that's jumping it.

Most of the time, just like skydiving, it's just a human being making a very poor choice to include Alex. just a human being making a very poor choice to include alex what is it about people and i mean particularly people like yourself that love these thrills like what are you getting out of that what are you getting out of that other than this mad adrenaline rush i mean what is it like what motivates you to keep doing that uh so i look back at it objectively i think when i initially started pushing hard down that path i was trying to replicate a headspace or a feeling or a sensation that i had in my old job so if you want to talk about clarity of thought and i think you know we might have talked about this the very first time that we sat down stripping away all ancillary bullshit that has absolutely no meaning but for me at least spends i spend 99 of my time worrying about things that have no impact whatsoever right so you're

sitting on a helicopter pick the battle space that you're in and you get a five minute warning and you really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage and then you get a three minute warning and then you kind really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage. And then you get a three-minute warning. And then you kind of stop worrying about whether or not you just had an argument with your wife or you just sent off some snarky email. Then you get a one-minute warning and a 30-second warning. And the closer and closer and closer you get, everything is gone. And it is still to this day, the sensation and state that I have been in that is by far – I had no question about my purpose and I had the utmost clarity that I've ever experienced in my life. And you get used to operating in that headspace of just being in the moment, the first one to three seconds in front of you. Nothing else matters.

I'm going to solve this problem and move on to the next one, this problem and move on to the next one. Well, then I lost that ability to do that. And it sucked because I liked operating in that headspace because it helped me deal with all the other bullshit in my life because it reset for me my what matters and what doesn't matter ratio. I was able to get rid of like I would describe it as just the white noise in my head. Or another way I'll describe it is like Jamie's got a bunch of levers that he can push up i think in this i'm included in this i think most people are pegged out at a 10 almost all the time they're fucking white knuckling through life but if you can get into that state where you have that clarity of purpose clarity of focus i felt like it pulled everything back to a three.

And so that state helped me in things that had nothing to do with that activity, and it lasted for a long time. So when you're base jumping and you're standing on a cliff and you're scared out of your mind and you can't talk because your mouth is so dry and you have a P-ring on your suit, which is why you always get dark suits so people can't see your P-ring, and every alarm bell in your body is telling you don't jump. And I had the same experience.

I wasn't worried about the checking count. I wasn't worried about what was going on in life. I was just living in that moment. And it helped me be a better dad. It helped me be a better husband. It helped me be better at any business decision that i need to make because it allowed me to pull all of those stereo levers back down so it's less for me and i can only speak for me it's less about uh thrill seeking because i get that all the time like

you're an adrenaline junk i'm like ah i enjoy i'm an adrenaline enthusiast i certainly enjoy that but i actually like what i get from the activity more than the activity itself what do you think is going on where people are pegged at 10 all the time with nonsense and that's something that's life-threatening can bring it back to a three and offer clarity i mean there has to be something that you've discussed or thought about in depth i just think it helps you control alt delete your hard drive a little bit. It helps by not having like when I'm standing on a cliff right before I get ready to jump. There is absolutely nothing that I am thinking about other than where I want to be in the next three seconds. And by being able to focus on something so singular and maybe I don't meditate, but I've heard people talking about it. By being able to clear your mind, it helps them deal with everything else.

I think there might be some connection there. But I just think that the removal of the noise that bombards everybody all day long, even for a little bit, helps you. all day long even for a little bit helps you it's uh you know you have uh ipod or not iphone and headphones for sure right you ever notice like when you're listening to it you listen at the same volume level but then it just doesn't seem to be as loud so what do you do you click it up a notch right and then you get used to that volume level and then you click it up a notch and then you get used to that volume level you know receptor downgrade phenomenon your body gets used to it so it adapts to it but if you pull that stimulus out and leave it at that high volume but listen to it like two weeks later it's going to blow your ears out it'll seem loud it's not gonna blow your ears out but it's gonna seem much louder than it would

if you slowly just incrementally started adding that volume so it's there's something in there that is allowing me and i'm not recommending that anybody pursue therapy via the directions that i do but there's something in there that's allowing me to instead of add and add and add and add that activity allows me to detach and then when i come back to it i realize you know it just it just feels different for me that's i don't know if that's a good description of the mechanism but that's the best that i can probably describe it well i know a lot of veterans come back and really get involved in martial arts martial arts apparently is is good for along the same lines the same sort of uh noise reduction yep uh especially jujitsu

when someone's trying to strangle you and you're fighting for your life and they're mounting you and trying to lapel i'm familiar with this now i'm six months in yeah i don't know what you're talking about being strangled or choked or having a huge person lay on your chest and just try to breathe oh my god he's lying about being 220 he could have said 219 i'm not even sure he's lying there's no i'm 200 pounds he's fucking 18 feet taller than me there's no way yeah this just doesn't even make sense well i i don't have enough experience with jujitsu to to truly speak about um the long-term benefit but what i can say is this if i stop base jumping what i will replace that activity with is more jujitsu because what you just described when somebody is literally when you're simulating murder yes right in your

pajamas and somebody is trying to choke you to death yeah you are not thinking about anything else about anything else you know one thing that i do do that's weird is i i have songs playing in my head well you also probably have a few more reps than most people, so you can have that capacity for songs in your head. But they're weird songs, like Christina Aguilera, I Am Beautiful. Sometimes that'll be playing if I'm rolling. But the song, it's almost like it sounds strange. I never talked about this before, but it's almost like a mantra.

I'll play certain parts of the song over and over again in my head so that i can think about that instead of the the actual the actual training and the actual strangling but you also have i don't want to use the term mastered because i don't know if you could master it but where you are you are at a like when you roll with somebody i was talking with somebody about this not too long ago when i roll with a black belt the outcome is preordained right unless they bought their black belt at macy's and are pretending in which case i don't know i still don't know enough it might be preordained but the difference in what i'm thinking about versus what would happen if you and I rolled and what you are thinking about are is going to be massive so I don't have the hard drive space to sing Christina Aguilera

yeah and you probably don't even remember half of the things that you do when you roll or how you think about it because you have experienced it so many times the weirdest thing about jiu-jitsu and training and you know you could say this about striking as well, is sometimes things happen and you didn't even think about doing them. You just did it. Those are the weirdest moments. There's sometimes where you'll kick somebody. Someone will move and you'll move. And then before you know it, you're like, wow, I didn't even think about throwing that.

And it lands. It's like your brain recognizes, oh, I know what happens here. You step to the left and throw that left kick and it lands it's like your your your brain recognizes oh i know what happens here you know you step to the left and throw that left kick and it just lands you just know where to go and then the same thing happens with jiu-jitsu like sometimes there's a scramble and in the scramble all of a sudden you're choking somebody it's like this this movement happens and your body just falls into place i'll let you know if i ever experienced that particularly well it doesn't happen all the time. There's moments where

particularly if you do a lot of drilling, which I don't know how much drilling you're doing, but it's one of the things that I, it made me way better. When I first started training with Eddie Bravo, one of the things that we did a lot from white belt to blue belt time was a lot of drills. A lot of drills. Just constant

drilling. And drilling is overlooked and underappreciated because sparring is so fun. So, like, if you and Jamie were both learning together, you would do a few drills. Okay, here's how you do the arm bar. You're going to secure the arm. You're going to swivel the hips, throw the leg over, and tap. Good. Okay, now your turn.

And you do it over and over again. That's fun. That's fun. Okay, now spar. You're like, all right. But take it easy, guys. Work on the technique yeah exactly take it easy guys work on the technique but um if you can spend more time drilling and less time rolling you'll be way better at rolling the whole idea is to just carve these paths in your mind you know and then you when you see someone who like hits a perfect Imanari roll, that is not the first time they've done that. There's so many super, super high-level guys now that you could watch on YouTube, and you can watch them execute these techniques.

And the thing that you're seeing more than anything is how fluid everything is and how easily everything flows. Because there's so much efficiency in their movement because they've done it over and over and over and but drilling is everything and it's the thing that people do the least of so i go when i'm home i'd go five days a week and i uh i go to the so you met travis today awesome he's the owner of uh or the owner of sbg calispell which is where i train i mean i couldn't have planned it better it's like four miles from my house that's amazing in the middle of well not the middle the northwest corner of montana to have that there is unbelievable how far are you from

bozeman uh as the crow flies maybe 200 and some miles but the drive there is like an l it's not straight it's about six mountains grizzly bears yeah swerve past any grizzly since you've been moved there no no but they're fucking everywhere they're waiting for you i don't need my house i just i don't like to you know i just hang out with myself have conversations and go to jiu-jitsu but i'll do i do an hour and a lot of it is just drill base for that hour and then there's an open mat afterwards oh okay so i'm getting i mean i feel like i'm getting a good a mix of both and for me i'm at the phase like i'm such in the alphabet phase i'm like a uh b but like we'll put letters together into words later and when i roll i just tell myself

you know maybe just focus on the fundamentals you don't need to create new techniques right and overrule that's true and i try to relax and use zero strength because i am bigger than most people that are there and i don't i've heard enough times that if you rely on your attributes early on what's going to end up happening is you'll have success early and then you're going to nose dive because yes and so i'm just trying to go the other route just be as calm as possible use as little as strength as possible and just tap early and tap off it's my favorite move yeah another good thing to do is work off your back because you're a big guy that's where i started i actually asked i said can you just teach me the worst position ever and i'll try to build up from there and i don't care about offense

i'd rather learn defense that's that's very intelligent of you that's something a lot of people don't do and i certainly didn't do i was just trying to choke people quick like what could i what could i do you know i don't have much success choking people. But if you can get really comfortable with your defense, it's the most important thing. Like, Hickson Gracie, he's always said that. He's like, the most important thing is to be safe. He's like, I'm always safe.

He goes, no matter where I'm at. He would have, Hickson would have real, like, high-level black belts start on his back with a fully locked in rear naked choke really and then he would defend and then he would always tap them i mean honestly to me that's like holding a 45 pound plate out letting go and it just hovers i mean i just it's beyond my understanding how they're able to do that well there's levels you know there's levels to everything i mean it's eye opening when i started i'm like oh yeah dude this is gonna be i got this i know right like this is obviously a simple recipe go to gym tap people out there's nothing in between i got this and

then after like my first 20 minutes i'm like oh shit it's humbling man but i think that's one of the best parts about it like i love so my body tells me like i know who i'm gonna have a really really tough role with and they're probably gonna beat me and i can feel it bouncing against my ego but you know if i just go roll with that guy over there i bet you'll be successful and i feel that inherently and i'll just go roll with the person i know who's probably gonna beat me because i love that choice one something that protects your ego and something that keeps it in check yeah because it is it is humbling and I've been a dumbass. I should have tapped earlier before, and I'm sitting there.

They completely have me locked in. But I'm going to try to muscle my way out of this. And then my arms sore for three weeks. Well, it's actually important to do both, believe it or not. It's important to be humbled, for sure. It's important to have a realistic perspective of your abilities. But it's also important to tap people. a realistic perspective of your abilities but it's also important to tap people and so uh you know i always tell people that like one of the best ways to get really good is to strangle blue belts

get people that have like a little bit a little bit of technique and then they have a little bit of understanding what's going on and just put the choke to them and but also drilling but then you know you have to roll with people that are legitimately far better than you just for a perspective enhancer, to understand how quickly someone can close the distance, how quickly someone can take advantage of an opportunity. And then also the feeling of being set up two, three steps in a row. One of the things, like when I roll with John Jock Manchato,

he's a multiple multiple time world champion and you'll see like especially over time the many many many times of training with him you'll see he's setting you up several steps ahead if he's sweeping you to to the left right he's sweeping you this way he's expecting you to base and when you base he's gonna adjust and when you adjust to him adjusting he's gonna grab your leg and then boom you're on your back you're like fuck yeah it's like he already saw the path and you're just all you're thinking of oh don't let him sweep me yeah but he's sort of trying to sweep you i mean if you just give in like a bitch he'll sweep you but he's really wanting you to base yeah and then when you go to defend the base then he's going to trap you and then when you go to try to adjust for the trap

whoops he's got your leg and you're on your back and then his knees on your belly you're like motherfucker yeah and he saw the whole thing so many steps ahead i mean it's it's a beautiful art form it really is because you know i always say like about uh the guys that i know that are like some of the best guys in the world they're so different than what you'd expect they're really like nerd assassins yeah because they're really smart because you're thinking almost like it's it's like kinetic chess you're thinking about all these moves it's just that you can get your chess pieces to move better than other people's chess pieces can it's like chess but you can make your chess if you do a lot of box jumps and plyos and you know you you do heavy duty strength and conditioning routines you can get your chest pieces to move

better you can get everything to you can give your chest pieces more endurance you can you know you can prolong your your ability to train and roll it's been great and like i said it you know in those moments where you're getting choked or i can't breathe like it's the same type of focus it is the singular goal in your life to not get murdered yeah and i feel for me it's been crazy healthy i can't speak to the larger veteran community but i can absolutely say for me it's beneficial i think it's beneficial for a lot of veterans i i talked to a lot of them that train and they said that you know and a lot of them get super addicted yeah you know they're they're there five six days a week and you know wrapping up

their elbows and their wrists and taping up their fingers and they don't give a fuck they just want to keep going they'll literally roll like this with one arm because their shoulders blown out yeah i'm like you're not gonna take time off off? I'm just going to work around it. Work around it. Which is not always good because eventually, I know a lot of guys who've reached a point where they maybe could have rehabbed something and now they have to have surgery because they've kind of blown it out to the point where it by choice? Yeah. I've had some significant injuries. I really backed off a couple years ago because I had some bulging discs that were impacting my nerves, and they were making my hands hurt and my elbows hurt. My neck had some bulging discs that were pressing against my nerves, and I got Regenikine on that. I did some spinal decompression and i relieved all that then i tore some meniscus and i had some shoulder injuries the shoulder injuries yeah the shoulder injuries were really bothersome because it was also fucking with archery and i

was really worried about not being able to don't fuck with archery yeah i love it too much and so i rehabbed those almost 100 my left one's still a little wonky but i'm ready to roll i'm gonna i'm gonna train with john jock either this week or next week and we're gonna do a podcast so i'll get back into it once once that happens so with you when did you start jujitsu 96 okay so substantial period of time with that amount of time off that you essentially had to take what impact would that have for you it'll have a little bit of impact on my timing but luckily during this entire time i've worked out very hard okay so my body's physically in very good shape like today um i ran the mountains for the first time in like six weeks since my meniscus injury and it seems to be

100 i mean maybe not 100 but no pain at all um and i ran a good steep course where it's you know like heavy duty running in the hills and i was getting cysts like recurring cysts because the where the meniscus tear was there was some you know it was loose and so like as i'm pounding the blood would pool up and then it would you know swell up and i had get it drained, and they'd stick this fucking fat needle in there and suck all this pus out. It was nasty. So I got exosomes and platelet-rich plasma six weeks ago. So from then, I waited the six weeks. But during that time period, I mostly did that echo bike, that rogue echo bike because it's not impactful

so it doesn't put the pounding on the knee that was causing the cyst but fuck man does that thing build your cardio up oh it's designed by satan it's amazing yeah tabatas 20 20 sprint yeah 20 second sprint 10 second rest fuck those are incredible that bike will give you everything that you are willing to take yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It really will. So I'm really pleased with myself that I didn't allow myself to get out of shape. Because when I ran today, I was like, fuck, it's been six weeks. This is going to be brutal.

It wasn't brutal. It was normal. Because I've been doing the Echo bike. So it's maintained my cardiovascular level, which was always my weakest point. And so your knowledge and experience base in jiu-jitsu, and I ask because, like I said, I've been at this for six months. I'll take a week off for travel, and I'll go back to a class, and I feel like I have a massive disconnect between knowledge

and getting my body to work. And I suspect it's because I'm thinking too much. Right. Whereas, like I was saying, you have the ability to listen to Miley Cyrus in your head or whatever her name, Christina Aguilera. I like Miley Cyrus too. people are into weird shit I'm not gonna put a value judgment on that whereas I don't so for me if I take time off it's I I really really struggle with it because I I can't connect the dots so well it's definitely there's a difference though the pathways get

sharper when I train more like the last time I was doing like serious training was over a year ago. And when I was doing it like after a few sessions, the pathways sharpen. And like, you know, you clinch up. There's less hesitation. There's more of an understanding of what's got to take place. There's more of like a familiarity with training. But, you know, as you get older, you know, I'm 51 now. with training yeah but you know as you get older you know i'm 51 now the thing that happens is your fucking joints and your your body does not want to hold up to this continued stress so you

have to really be careful about when to train and how hard you train like uh my friend eddie bravo is going through that right now he has a fake disc now in his lower back he had to have his uh disc replaced with a titanium articulating disc he had knee surgery he had shoulder surgery and he now he needs wrist surgery you know this is all within like you know a couple years and he's a couple years younger than me so his body is hitting that that point where this years and years and years of strain and pull and choke and resist and base and push. Your body just doesn't want to do that all the time. So you have to be smart in terms of how much stress and how much recovery you put on. I think you also have to be really smart about working on your flexibility and working on your recovery,

whether it's through cryotherapy or sauna use or massage, but rest too. You can't train like a fucking wild demon six days a week when you're 50. You just can't. You might get a couple of days in hard, but you also have to understand like flow rolls. Flow rolls are giant. It's the same thing with flow sparring. I remember some of the best gains that I made as a kickboxer with training with guys who i knew i could trust to not fucking brain me like that we would tap

each other and so then you're carving pathways but you're not taking the kind of abuse that you take if you're just going into because sometimes sparring it's not really sparring you're fighting you're fighting people in the gym you just get together and you're lacing up your gloves. You're tapping gloves. They say go. The bell goes off. And you're fucking full blasting each other. And it's more common than not, especially in the early days.

I kind of find that to be the case with two white belts going off sand. Because you got to do the blood circle to make sure nobody's going to get hurt by the freaking momentum bouncing around the gym. It's like, hey, buddy, you want to just work on that technique? And they look at you and go, uh-huh. I'm like, oh, fuck. Yeah. They're just trying to kill. Yeah, they're trying to kill you. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of that. It's really uncomfortable when someone does that to you, too. You're like, goddammit, do I have to do this with you? Sometimes you could choke them quick, and they'll calm down and sometimes it just makes them more amped up you know depending on the human i feel like i need to focus on my

chokes no it's not my strength now are you uh mostly going gi are you going no gi as well i do more gi than no gi only because it happens to work with my schedule so mondays and friday i love doing uh or i have loved doing the no gi stuff that I have because it's so quick. Yeah. And I find that it rotates through a lot of the different positions, and I find myself working out of other problems more than I would in like a normal five-minute just open roll. And I realize how limited my offense is because I like holding on to the pajamas and basically hold on to a freaking doorknob on somebody's collar it makes sense to me now when i've heard you talk before like yeah go ahead and wear that sweatshirt now i'm like oh i don't i don't want to wear someone wearing a tie someone

wearing a tie i'm like i'll kill you with that tie i get a hold of that tie you're a dead man even a noose around your neck a zip up hoodie oh yeah i'm like oh man first obviously i'd rub that zipper across your neck but then you're getting choked with it well how about a leather jacket if you're fucking with someone in those in the street and that someone's a judo player someone who knows judo and you got like a thick ass winter coat and they can grab that shit and brain you with the world yeah just drive your fucking head into the concrete it's been cool man i wish i i wish i had found it earlier and i wish i hadn't been so hesitant to try it earlier and the reason i was a hundred percent reason i was is because my own ego yeah but the thing is it doesn't matter like when i wish i had done it earlier fuck all that

you're doing it now like that's what's important like it doesn't matter when you start the the thing about jujitsu is once you're on a path just enjoy the path path. Don't think, God, I should have started when I was eight. Well, you can't unless you have a fucking time machine. And if you did, God damn it, I would not want to go back and be eight years old and know everything I know now. It'd be like watching a movie for the 100th time. You'd be bored out of your mind. Well, I'd fuck it up. I'd probably wind up homeless.

No, your stock portfolio would be amazing because of all the knowledge. Maybe, right? It'd be like Apple. These fuckers are gonna figure it out buy apple at three let's get some amazon stock going like you'd kill it on that i know people be like what a book thing an online book thing trust me don't worry about it put it all in there put all your money on facebook what's facebook fuck are you talking you know david David Cho, he painted Facebook. He did like murals for Facebook in their studio and they paid him in stock. Oh, wow. And he got fucking hundreds, hundreds of millions from that.

And he's just balling all over the world on his Facebook stock. They don't seem to be doing too well these days, though. Facebook stock? No, not the stock necessarily. The company. I keep seeing them in the news for the wrong reasons. Yes. That's a really interesting point, right? I've been focusing a lot on what these people are doing in terms of social media

and in terms of what impact this has on our elections, on our culture, how they're being influenced. There's a woman, do we, we, uh, privacy. Yeah. We booked that woman, right? Renee. What is her last name again? She's got a phenomenal podcast with Sam Harris called the war of information.

And, um, it's either the information war, the war of information. Diresta. Diresta. Renee Diresta. And she studied this um she studied these these russian troll farms and the impact they have in these fake accounts online and what they'll do is like for instance they set up two rallies across the street from each other one was a texas pride rally and one was a muslim rally it's classic pairing and they do it across the street from each other one was a texas pride rally and one was a muslim rally it's classic

pairing and they do it across the street from each other on purpose so that they'll interact with each other so that people get there there's no one organizing it because no there's no real person on the ground because they're doing everything from russia and this is just one example they do a lot of things with um with uh black lives matter and blue lives matter they were having a lot of these. They were pairing them against each other. They were also, they had black pages that were supporting anyone but Hillary. This was their message.

Anyone but Hillary. Hillary Clinton does not support the black community. We should vote for Bernie Sanders. We should vote for Jill Stein. We should vote for anybody but Hillary. And what they were basically trying to do was weaken the support that the Democrats traditionally have from the black community. And they were doing this through these pages. And there was not that many pages when you find out there's like 80 pages or 100 pages they were running. But then you find out

the amount of interactions that they had with them. There's millions and millions and millions of interactions. So comments, likes, shares, and then people are, this message that they think is coming from people from us fight against each other about everything so that it fucks up democracy. I would say that they've achieved that goal, whether or not they're responsible for it or not, but it certainly seems like we're trending in that direction. It does. I can't remember a time where there's more conflict and more outrage and more people willing to like jump into the fray, regardless of whether or not they're informed. What do you think about the people who keep calling for violence? It drives me crazy because it's people who don't understand violence. I was going to say the same thing. I see the people who most often doing it are the ones that are the least experienced or familiar with what violence actually looks like.

Well, there was a lot of that from Russia as well. There's a lot of fake Antifa pages. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of that where they were telling people that the only way to get people to understand is through violence and that you must be willing to do whatever you can by any means necessary. And violence is good if it achieves the desired result of peace and prosperity and making sure that progressive ideas get pushed forth. It's fucking crazy because people who don't know what violence is, it's like here's one that people say. They'll say to a martial arts person, like they'll see someone like John Jones, like if I was John Jones, I'd just fucking kick everybody's ass. Like, no, you wouldn't.

No, you wouldn't. Okay. You know, and all the problems that John Jones has been in, one thing you should notice is never been in a fight. There's no street fights out there with Jon Jones. I would bet he is the least likely person to engage in that activity. I bet you're right. Yeah, exactly. Because he doesn't want to do it because he knows exactly the consequences, let alone the legal consequences of doing it outside of a cage.

Exactly. But when you look at it from someone who has zero understanding, they're like, oh was that guy i'd be kicking everybody's ass but no you wouldn't because like violence people don't just accept violence you don't just hit someone to get away with it they think about that shit forever and they try to get you back and either they hire someone to get you back or they get you back on their own or they wait for you to not remember it and then they they come around the corner and fucking brain you with a baseball bat. This is what people do. People don't like getting fucked up.

If you kick someone's ass, they're going to remember it. And this idea that you're going to be able to suppress people by attacking them and hitting them with bike locks and not letting them speak at universities that you're protesting at, it's madness. And it's so confusing because it's not's madness and it's it's it's so confusing because it's not indicative of what i always thought of when i thought about left-wing people i thought they were peace-loving people or well-educated and instead you're getting these people that are from their fucking computer they're calling for violence like you don't know

what violence is well the thing is too from what i've seen it didn't start with the bike locks right it started with you, shout this person down. Yes. And then it's like fist fights. And then they're throwing rocks. And then it's bike locks. And now I hear people, you know, get your guns. And it starts to rise to that level.

I'm like, okay. Yeah. You people need to calm down. Because the theory of, we need a revolution in this country. You're like, let's pump the brakes, homeboy. Yeah. Well, first of all, here's of we need a revolution in this country like let's pump the brakes homeboy right yeah well first of all here's what we need we need camaraderie we need to be nice this is more important than anything we need to be calm with each other you know this this idea that yelling people down stops anything you're just going to make people yell louder on the other side that that shit does not work that's not how human beings operate when if you want human beings to appreciate your perspective find the things that you agree on

and and work towards like a better humanity work towards a better more loving way of interacting with each other this is possible while disagreeing and this is one of the most important things i think that we could ever express in terms of how to communicate with each other you don't have to shout people down like the the best way to do it is to try to figure out the points that you can agree on find out what you disagree on and find out why you disagree on it and you're always going to get bad actors right you're always going to get people that are in there that they don't care. They're not reasonable. They just want to win. But there's a giant problem with that kind of communicating because it's so absolute. It's my way or the highway.

Like that's where violence comes from. That's where real physical conflicts, that's where they come from when there's no way to negotiate. There's no way to communicate outside of that. I just think it's – I don't know. Bizarre is not the right word i think it's sad that the vast majority from again my opinion what i see is people who are identifying with shit you can see on a street sign yeah like left or right like you're telling me that as a species that's as nuanced as we can get you want to completely define yourself and

your ideology and your beliefs by something literally you can see just driving your car turn left turn right it's just i don't understand it i don't um it's the exact opposite world to go back to you know getting out of the military and just kind of entering into the world like what's going on it makes no sense to me it makes me extremely uncomfortable i hate hearing people calling for violence. I know, and especially calling for violence when it's not necessary against the Americans. What you had to deal with in the military has to be the most intense form of conflict that's available on planet Earth.

The most intense form of conflict is war. That's the real conflict. That's real consequences. You've suffered them physically. You've seen countless friends suffer them physically. That's the real conflict that's real consequences you've suffered them physically you've seen countless friends suffer them physically that's the real shit so when you're seeing people from universities from these coddled environments and these these these people with it really an completely ignorant perspective as the as to what the actual consequences of violence are calling for it it's just bananas on one hand i'm glad that they haven't experienced it because i can tell that they haven't just by the way that

they're acting and i'm glad that they didn't have to do that but on the other one it's a tough pill to swallow because it i just don't understand war war is a – it's about as high consequence as you can get for sure. Like I said, it resets your perspective. And the last thing that I would ever want to see is that here on the streets of the U.S. Like I just – I can't even imagine how destructive – well, it would destroy our country for sure. But I also don't – I can't figure out the route out of where we are. So people are calling for violence, right? You've got other countries trying to incite, get groups together.

What's the navigable route out of that? Mushrooms. Okay, I hadn't considered that route. It's the only way. I honestly don't know. I'm hoping that things don't have to come to a head. I honestly don't know. I'm hoping that things don't have to come to a head.

I'm hoping that we don't have a Kent State or some horrible event in this country where, you know, protesters and the people that oppose them get into some horrible, deadly, violent encounter. Because so far, other than Charlottesville, that time that guy ran over that woman in the car, we're seeing most of this violence being at least somewhat contained to fisticuffs, right? And the professor hit that guy with a bike lock, and there's a few other instances of people getting knocked out and punched and hit with sticks. We haven't seen mass shootings and murder, but God damn it, that shit's close. It's close. Especially when they're doing rallies and people are like, you know, let's do an open carry rally. And everybody show up in their operator chic apparel.

I look at the pictures of that. I'm like, okay, you have a lot of stuff. First off, that's on fucking backwards. I'm like, okay, you have all the tools, but you obviously don't practice with them. But the danger of just, you know, what's the next step? First, we're just going gonna wear all of our stuff all right well if it started at fist and then went bike locks and then went show up with your civil war gear right what's the next step after that shooting yeah yeah i mean i don't know i don't want to get involved in that i mean i

well you you picked a good spot where you're at in Montana. Where I live does not suck. Yeah. Hang out there and move in once the first few rounds have been fired and the dust starts to settle. The problem is I would want to come off the bench. Of course. The problem is if that happens, and I guarantee you I'm not the only one that feels like that. I'm going to get involved and it's going to be a serious problem for those individuals because uh i'd give my military career c across the board average there's absolutely nothing uh spectacular about my career i've done more than some way less

than others but i've sacrificed enough that i'm not going to allow those people to tear us apart but it's the last thing on earth that i want to do but if they put me in that position i know that myself and many other people are in that same boat are going to get those people to tear us apart. But it's the last thing on earth that I want to do. But if they put me in that position, I know that myself and many other people who are in that same boat are going to get involved. And I don't know if that's going to help the problem, but it's going to get ugly pretty fast. I just don't remember a time where the country's been so divided in terms of,

I mean, I don't know whether it's because of social media and because of the Russian influence on social media compounded with having trump as a president compounded with i mean people that feel like they're disenfranchised and they they don't feel like they're like you know you hear about this all the time in regards to uh income inequality people feel disenfranchised they feel like the system has failed them and that's why so many young kids are favoring socialism and why so many young kids are moving towards that. They think that anything has got to be better than watching these fat, rich cats with all this money controlling the world and that the only way to get out of that is revolution. But damn, there's a lot of people that are not those fat, rich cats you're positioning yourself against that They're just normal regular Americans who happen to be conservative. You know, and conservative does not always have to equal racist.

It doesn't always have to equal white supremacy. It doesn't always have to equal all the negative connotations, you know, religious fanaticism and all these different things that people always attach towards conservatism. It doesn't have to mean that. It could just mean people who are prudent with their finances who are you know they're they're cautious with the way they think they're they're more conservative in their values and their ideals this is this that's not a bad thing necessarily but we've got it lumped into these two groups left versus right and there's a very little gray area it's the tyranny

of or yeah yeah it's like it's as if there's only two choices yeah you're either left or right yeah like where's the and whereas you trend to the left and you also have some values that are associated with the right yeah or you trend it's uh i think we need to evolve you know i think we need to evolve the way we communicate with each other First off I think there's so much yelling On social media That people engage in on a daily basis

I mean I jump into these little social media spats And watch these people going back and forth with each other I'm like how do you live your life That has got to be so stressful You've got to be fucking freaking out Every time you check your phone Who's calling you a cuck and who's you know who's giving out your home address and who's you know what kind of crazy shit are people doing it's so nuts right now i'm glad i'm late to the

game on that stuff i'm like so late if i just so i have uh two teenage boys and a 10 year old girl and we've had some social media issues with them if If I grew up with the tools that they have, I would not be sitting here with you today. If I had had, when I was 15, the ability to broadcast my idiotic thoughts to the world, I would be like, I can't,

it would, I tell my kids too, my, you guys are growing up in a time, in my opinion, it is so much more difficult than the time I grew up in. if i had a problem with you be like joe i would talk shit to your face yeah or i'd have to find out what your phone number is or mail you a letter which would and then by the time it showed up i wouldn't be pissed at you anymore so it would

defeat the purpose i mean i've seen it firsthand, you know, responding to stuff. People, they're just watching and then they dive in and, you know, and like screen grabs. Next thing you know, I'm at school. Like, hello, Mr. Stumpf. How are you? Would you like to show you this? I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. But I get it at the same time.

And I recognize the language that they're using. I'm like, oh, yeah, that was me, but i was just talking to you right right i don't know how to it's a very difficult for me you got to come in i mean because i think your daughters are younger than uh yeah my sons it's rough yeah it is rough and it's something that no one has done before here's the thing like if you're in your 40s or in your 50s or whatever and you have a kid today you haven't done that you didn't grow up with the internet the internet didn't even exist until i was a grown man you know i mean i didn't get online until i was in my late 20s that's when that's when it existed and these kids that are 10 and 11 they have phones already and they have snapchat accounts and they're you know and then there's you know one of the craziest ones

is kids taking naked pictures of each other because this girl got arrested for child pornography because she was taking pictures of her hoo-ha and sending it to boys and she was 15 and so they were they were arresting her for distribution of child pornography and i'm like hey hey hey stop with the fucking word of the law you assholes do you really think this girl's a child pornographer she's no she's a slut this is we grew up with kids like this sorry i don't mean to slut shame but i mean for lack of a better term yeah you know for comedic intent i had to use that word she's just a young girl was probably misguided but the point is we all knew girls like that and for whatever reason had this desperate

need for male attention. They just didn't have a platform. Yeah. They would just flash you their tits in the hallway or something like that. I mean, there was always girls that would do that. I never had that happen. You never had that happen? No.

I knew girls that would do that. It was always like- You're an East Coast guy, though. I was a West Coast guy. They're different over there? I would have to assume so, given we don't have the same shared experience. I think they're more savage on the East Coast. Because they're the children of immigrants, you know, or the grandchildren of immigrants.

And this is my theory on, this is my take on America in terms of immigration, right? It's like the people that moved here from somewhere else they moved here from europe and they were wild fuckers who was like you know what i don't have a picture of this place there's no youtube video for me to watch but i'm going to take a chance and i'm going to get in a fucking boat with my family i'm going to travel across a goddamn ocean for weeks yeah and then i'm going to get to the other side and they're all these weird communities of people like you know my grandfather would always talk about how racist people were against Italians. And then there was a lot of that against Irish and all these like immigrant communities on the East Coast.

And then what happens is they would get in their car and they would go, fuck this place. Let's go West. And they would keep going until they got to California. And I think that's why California is like one of the most progressive places because it's the furthest away from where people landed so the people that wanted to get the fuck away from them they got as far away as they could and the even smarter ones came to montana and then there's some people in the middle that went why are we why are we traveling let's just stop right here especially like you go to places like i mean there's a lot of places that are fucking amazing

That are like in the middle Flyover states yeah I mean you know You call it flyover states But I mean There's a lot of great spots In Texas Yeah

You know you go to Austin You go okay Why are we moving Yeah Why don't we just stay right here Like this is fucking great Like do we really need to go To Santa Monica

No You can stay right here San Antonio is pretty cool too I was down there with Dudley Twice in the last month And it it's a pretty cool town. I've never been. Well, I shouldn't say town. I think it's the eighth largest city in the United States.

Is it really? San Antonio is? I'm pretty sure, yeah. Wow. That's crazy. I did not know that. You think about it. You don't know about that?

Jamie's not buying that. Damn it. I was told that it was the eighth largest. By San Antonio president and mayor? No, actually Evan from Black Rifle. Oh, there you go. Head of tourism for San Antonio. I think San Antonio is like the fourth in Texas.

So it's like Dallas is number one, Houston, Austin, San Antonio. So fourth in Texas. That doesn't really make sense that it would be eighth in the country. I think it might be with actual size. Oh, like land. So fourth in Texas. That doesn't really make sense that it would be eighth in the country. I think it might be with like actual size. Oh, like land. Miles or something like that. That's exactly what I meant. Oh, I get it.

I get it. So Alaska is the biggest state in the country in terms of distance that you could travel. Have you been there much? Alaska, we go there, or the last time I was there, I had some interesting experiences actually the last time I was there. That's where we do our cold weather training. So the only times I've been there was for work, which I had fun,

but it was also not enjoyable at the same time. Those are real savages. Those people live around wild animals. Yes. There's only like a hundred of them. We would go to legit Kodiak Island. What, Jamie? Number seven as far as population.

Is it really? Yeah. Damn. Yes. 1,469,000. So it's actually bigger than you thought. Wow, it's bigger than Phoenix? It's bigger than San Diego, just under Phoenix.

Oh, Phoenix is six. I see. That's crazy. It's just under fucking, it's just past Philly. Philly's number five after Houston. That's nuts, man. There's not more than 1.5 million people in Philly, though. That doesn't seem right.

That doesn't seem right. This number for San Diego seemed very low as well. I thought it was in the threes. I don't know what they're counting, actually. I just Googled it. Assholes. Top largest city for assholes. New York is only 8 million?

What? Los Angeles? Okay, shut your fucking mouth. angeles three million nine hundred thousand los angeles has 20 million people and who knows how many mexican folks they don't have any idea how many people have snuck across the border they literally have no idea yeah it's just pure guesswork like like what who's doing these censuses and who are they talking to like what would they have traffic cameras that are judging based on the amount of cars that are driving past them every day they don't really know i think it's a guess it's a fucking guess

they probably have one place where they have a video camera up where they can capture a certain amount yeah multiply it by a magnitude and then extrapolate that over like i don't know actually it's probably scientists they're probably pretty good at guessing we're probably retarded i don't know on that i shouldn't use that word i think our our take on it though is is really essentially based on you know like like who's how many people are registered in this area how many people we absolutely know and then how many people are registered in this area? How many people we absolutely know. And then how many people have pushed into this area from other places? Like how,

what's up? It's the number 38 TV market somehow. So I don't know. San Antonio. Oh, so I don't know how it fits in that number that way. It's, it's very strange how they're counting.

They don't have TVs. They've moved past TVs. Maybe they're just reading books Maybe it's number one for book reading I'm going to go out on a limb And say that's not the case Well it's you know I don't know man

It's an interesting thing Like population Because when you fly over the country You look down You go wow look at all that spot That people could live in Like are we really overpopulated You know but then In certain areas And in others not so much Well in. Are we really overpopulated? In certain areas, and in others, not so much.

Well, in others, you just fly over and there's nothing there forever. I drove from Vegas to LA, and there's some spots where you drive from Vegas to LA where as you're driving, you go, okay, what the fuck is here? Who are these people that live in these weird little nevada towns that are off of the 15 not even the towns man so i used to fly a bunch from san diego out to prescott and then kind of do that loop uh havasu in like the vegas area miles from anything double wide trailer yeah just just dirt roads single but then at the same time you could because you're you know you're higher up you can see the geometric patterns like it's just chunks of squares and there's two double wides five miles away like i don't know sand people

yeah i saw one where this guy had this setup and they had a fence around his house and then he had a fucking antenna. Like one of them big ass ham radio antennas. Yeah, he's just talking to aliens. He's just communicating with the alien race. Or fellow alien researchers who are out there looking for. Yeah, I'd rather go into houses overseas than make entry into that man's house. Yeah, probably less pathogens. Less likely to get beamed up to the starship enterprise too that too right that too i just

wonder like how a person winds up in that double wide trailer miles away from barstow like how do you like what path you get from being a baby coming out of your mama's vagina to one day being holed up sniffing bath salts you know smelling your own farts thinking nailed it yeah counting how many bullets you have in case the aliens come to get you fortunately i find a lot of those people either have a lot of guns or a lot of bullets but not both at the same time you'd be surprised how many it's like wow you have a lot of guns where's your ammo i got a box of it over there i'm like okay cool it's so much to do like a trailer park tour of this country just like as for a documentary just what happened how'd you get here like what is it was your family from here

like this is not a good community we got to get you out of here yeah what's your escape plan what do you what's your escape plan you're 200 miles away from the nearest city you're surrounded by desert and you have a trailer out here like what's going on man i always think about where do you go for groceries and how often you eat rabbits that you find in your backyard sometimes probably like dude if you went to the grocery store you came back damn it i forgot the milk yeah yeah you went to the grocery store and you came back, damn it, I forgot the milk. Yeah. Yeah. You find a javelin and suck his dick. That is not a solid picture.

That's not a good option. Have you been to Alaska much? I've only been a few times. Where'd you go? Went to Anchorage. Me and Ari Shafir did some salmon fishing. Had a great time doing that. And then we did two shows up there.

And then I've been uh hunting uh on prince of wales uh we did some um sitka sitka deer hunting black tail barklow from sitka ran not when i went through but he ran the cold weather facility on kodiak island okay like 15 years kodiak can go fuck itself with those goddamn gigantic, huge, humongous bears. Oh, that's what I'm saying. We had some interesting experiences. That's where we did our cold weather training. Did you run into bears?

There are always bears around, but also having a machine gun helps with that. That does make you feel better. It makes you feel better, but not when you're sleeping at night. Ooh, we camped? We would do snowshoe, like just deep into the back. So we would go and do you had to do your cold weather training so getting your dry suits on and swimming through the surf at nighttime oh wonderful which is an ice cream headache over and over and over again as the

ocean breaks over your head it's pretty bad uh and the cold weather uh immersion test is there where you have to get into the water with just a pair of shorts on for five minutes and just then rewarm yourself so they get you to a point of hypothermia right to the edge? I think as many things are in my old job, there is an aspect of learning and there is an aspect of tough it out, and you combine the two. So it sucked, and there was a reason that they wanted it to suck,

but they were also trying to teach a lesson. But God forbid they just teach the lesson, so they make you suffer to ingrain it probably yeah so one day you wake up and on the board like a little whiteboard that has the list of gear you need it just says shorts running shoes and i'm like okay this is february in kodiak what are you talking about literally i said shorts running shoes get out in the ford econoline van so we all get out there and they drive to the beach where seawater is freezing at the edge and they say okay go out you have to completely submerge yourself neck deep water five minutes and the timer starts the timer starts when the last person

submerges their head oh god so you might be first you might be like you can rush out there and be all fired up And you're just going to get Seven and a half minutes Is what you're going to get So you go And you sit there And it's the cold

It hurts for a minute And then you're numb The worst thing about it Actually is rewarming It feels like you're just Getting pinpricked Over and over and over again Yes that's actually Barclow

Oh that is Barclow Look at him Standing up there On that rock Well Barclow has a great Rewarming drill That we actually played On the podcast before

For Sitka Where he takes their gear And jumps into a lake So that is the test That they're doing Yeah And then rewarms himself With basically

All Sitka's gear And figures out How to get your body back To What I thought was interesting That I never really considered Was that eating food Actually ramps up Your body heat Because you have to burn off the calories yep your body starts

processing the food actually is good for elevating body temperature eating food especially if you can get hot food of course yeah but just eating so the drill the drill he was doing actually had much more uh i would say educational benefit because they would make them they would take them there with all of their gear their gear list would say whatever they were wearing. Plus bring your tent, your sleeping bag and all your stuff because we're going to put you into the water and then you need to survive your way out of it. So they would,

they would have to erect a tent. They would have to get their sleeping bag out all after being in the water for five minutes, which is exactly what a survival situation is going to look like for us. We went in there, got back into the van and I sat in a hot tub and drank beer for the rest of the day so i got the understanding of what it feels like to be hypothermic and that just see they have to push their head underwater that guy right there is either screwing everybody or was the first person to complete it um now wim hof does so much

of this cold water submersion stuff and he he actually enjoys it and loves it yeah you know do you think that there's a way that you could use like his methods and get through that with less pain potentially even though you know all of the skills that i used in kodiak i i did not ever use a single one of them operationally i use his breathing method in the cryo tank that makes senseotherapy that makes sense but that are those arctic conditions i don't know at least in the modern theaters of war we're engaged and i don't know where the applicability would be so it might be a little bit of a benefit versus time expended to teach the guys that stuff you know because unless it's we're talking like

korea probably farther in the northern latitudes. I mean, the training was amazing. Like I said, I didn't use a single bit of it. Right. But it's something. Well, it's also building mental toughness and determination. And that's why I said there's an aspect of learning and there's an aspect of just this is going to suck. Hey, you guys, guess what?

You're going to do a 20-kilometer hike into the backcountry in snowshoes. There is no end state to this. There's no target You're going to do a 20-kilometer hike into the backcountry in snowshoes. There is no end state to this. There's no target you're going to do anything on. You're just going to go out there, and you're going to do it, and you're going to survive out there, and it's going to suck for three days, and then you're going to come back. You just embrace the suck. Or you learn how to pack your backpack better. Or you learn how to move better over that terrain, or you learn how to navigate in that environment. So there's always an essence of it, but it just happens to be that there's usually a pain component with it as

well yeah a lot of military training is like that there's the essence of pain compliance and then the actual learning technique as well yeah it's the learning technique i mean it is really you're you're learning a technique to manage your mind under sucky conditions. Correct. That is a technique as well, right? So I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this recently. I'm of the opinion that really the only thing that I learned how to do when I was a SEAL was to enhance my ability to learn other things. You're selecting for people. And to get to that point, you've got to maintain control of your emotions, whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're selecting for people and and to get to that point you got to maintain control your emotions whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're cold so there's that

that essence of self-control but then they require so many different skill sets and so many different things that the selection process is looking for and then at the end of it teaching people how to become better learners and then you just refine that over and over and over again over a career. The ability to learn is probably the biggest takeaway that I have from my time in the service. I think that's the best thing you could ever really learn is learning how to learn. Learning how to learn correctly, learning how to actually pay attention to what someone's teaching you and absorb it and follow the steps rather than fuck it up with your own ego and your own insecurities or whatever it is. It's going to trip you up.

If you can get good at something, you know, you can, you can apply that to almost anything if you really focus. Yeah. And, and then they would pair it with, we'll surround you by,

okay, we want to make you better at shooting. So we are going to go find world champion pistol carbine shooters, go apply your ability to learn with them and we would do it for weeks okay now you're going to specialize you're going to be a point man so you need to be able to navigate and climb so we're going to send you out to joshua tree for two weeks with world-class climbers go apply your ability to learn with them and then jumping and then diving and then tactics and then fill in the blank over a career

that's another thing that freaks me out is climbing. Did you do much climbing? I was a lead climber up until the point where I don't have a use of my ankle anymore because of the nerve injury. Oh. And it's funny. I'm actually – I don't like heights. Did you free solo at all?

As long as I wasn't more like than three feet off the ground, yes. I'm totally comfortable free soloing and moving laterally but not vertically away from the ground because i see oh my god i watched that movie three times in a row and here's the thing i know he's alive i know he was on your podcast i listened to it and in the final scenes i realized i was sitting there white knuckling my recliner like my hands were sweating i'm like i know he lives but it still freaked me the fuck out wow i mean that guy yeah he's something but you know what's interesting about climbing is you get uh the more exposure you have the less it bothers you like i uh so lead climbing is interesting especially if you are placing your protection as you go if it's

drilled and both saying league or lead lead like someone's in front of you you're on a rope as a lead climber you are probably setting the ropes at least in my old job you're setting the ropes for the people who are going to follow okay most of the time when you see people well it's not most of the time but one of the disciplines would be there's bolted routes that go up a rock so you can just bring you know carabiners and put the carabiner through that and you loop the rope through it and you're good to go another aspect would be is you don't use the bolted in stuff and you basically carry on your climbing harness a rack of gear so as you're holding on to the rocks you're trying to wedge a block or a stopper in

or a cam system that it rotates to be smaller and then as you release it opens up and if you pull against it it locks itself into the rock. Right. So you're setting your own protection. How much do you trust those things? That was the point that I was getting to. Sometimes you get to a place and you're like, this is the perfect piece of gear.

And of course, you're only like six feet off the ground when the perfect piece of gear. And then you'll get multi pitches up in the air. So you'll be 200, 300 feet up in the air. And you're a lead climber. So there's nobody above you and you're setting your own pro and you're starting to get emotionally involved in the situation that you're in and you set a piece of pro and it's it's rattling around a little bit so i don't know we don't know how good that one's going to be but we're going to keep climbing and then the next piece of pro you set not the most awesome piece because you're

worried about the one beneath you and you don't want to fall so you get it in there and then you just keep climbing so sometimes it's awesome and sometimes it's terrifying and then you got to think that if you do fall all that force if one pops and then the second one pops you've got a lot of distance well you got to think it's double the distance if you're 10 feet above the last piece of protection you put in you fall the 10 feet to the protection then the 10 feet past the protection clink clink clink and then it pulls on the on the pro so it's actually double the height that you are above it it's not i've been probably more scared out of my mind actually the scariest scares i've ever been there is a you lived in Boulder right

yeah there's a climb there called the Bastille crack it's in one of the national parks and I was there with a buddy and it was just me and him and a world-class climber and I was at the east coast command at the time so budget was no option option. I had the newest, shiniest stuff. I'm like taking plastic off of climbing gear to go climb this rock. This guy pulls up in a van with a Marlboro hanging out and, you know, tennis shoes that have laces probably on one of the, one of the shoes and a, and an old pair of pants. And he's climbed like every mountain ever. So it's me and my buddy, we're climbing our way up. I'm leading this pitch. So you switch, one switch one guy will climb he sets an anchor the other person comes up and they pick all the protection out so you can just switch and then the other person leads the way on the next one so i'm like halfway up this pitch and i can't move because i'm losing my shit i'm like 15 feet above the last piece of

protection that i just put in i'm convinced that I feel my feet slipping off of the rock I'm holding I have my hand jammed into the rock and then you make a fist to like, you know Prevent it from falling out. You can actually see Alex doing that in free solo as he's climbing up. They'll slide their hand in and then they'll manipulate the shape so it pulls And as I'm my world is collapsing on me and i'm just sitting there I've got full sewing machine leg, just sitting there, just shaking. I hear a voice just over my shoulder. He's like, hey, man, just put the piece of pro right there.

And I look over and this professional climber is right next to me with no rope in his fucking tennis shoes, smoking a cigarette, which is what he was using to point to where I should have placed the next piece of protection cool calm and collected and i almost fell off the rock because he scared me so bad i was so freaked out at what he was doing that i almost fell i'm like you need to get away from me immediately he's like yeah no problem just scurried up the rock in tennis shoes tennis shoes tennis shoes but you're not supposed to use tennis shoes, right? I don't think it mattered. I think the guy, like, he was a partial, complete monkey. He just, when you're around world-class climbers, I mean, they can hang on an edge that is like a couple pieces of paper. And the Bastille crack is not a difficult route, so I'm sure there was one right next to it.

And he just, as I'm freaking out, he's just sitting there just, hey, buddy. And I didn't know he was there i literally almost fell off because he talked to me smoking a cigarette yeah he was ashy he's like put a piece of pro right here get away from me that's a different kind of but i guess it's one of those things where it's like it's exposure better at it you just yeah after a week of climbing you will not feel bad about walking up to the edge and just standing there alex honnold was telling us a story about one time he was free soloing and he

was halfway up and he well he was in the middle of this journey up this fucking mountain he realized he didn't bring any powder so he didn't have any chalk with him so his hands are sweating and he's just climbing with no powder so he met a guy halfway up, these guys that were using ropes, and they were doing it the right way, and he's doing it with no ropes. And he goes, hey, man, can I borrow your chalk? And the guy gives him a chalk bag, and he goes, I'll leave it for you at the top of the mountain. So he takes the chalk bag, passes these guys, see ya,

and just keeps going and then leaves the bag for the guy at the top of the hill. I'm like, what in the fuck, man? How could you start something like that? And apparently he said that once you start climbing, you are committed to climbing. You're not climbing down and up. Fuck that. There's not enough money in the world

that would make me attempt the stuff that he does. And if I was a climber, if I was feeling like I'm kicking ass. Feel my hand. Sweaty? Feel my hand. Just talking talking about it i sweat like a pig i'm telling i was watching it white knuckling and if i was a climber and he passed me was like hey do you mind if i borrow your chuck chalk i would finish that climb and never climb again yeah because i would realize that i am a complete and utter bitch in comparison to what he is like if that's what's possible

yeah and i'm sitting here like struggle i'm like i'm out you're also built wrong for it you know that I am a complete and utter bitch in comparison to what he is. Like, if that's what's possible, and I'm sitting here, like, struggling, I'm like, I'm out. You're also built wrong for it. You know, I think the thin, wiry guys, that's the way to go. He also has, like, these thick-ass fingers, man. His fingers are just used to... Just grabbing.

But he also said that he had gone through a series of injuries for the first time in his life, like, recently, over the last few years. Yeah, that was in the movie, actually. Like, a series of injuries for the first time in his life like recently over the last few years yeah that was in the the movie actually uh like a compression of his discs and then a really bad strain on his ankle and he was told to take six months off and so he just started climbing in a cast so it's a different kind of human i mean he also lives out of a van i mean he's a world famous guy who's living in a van traveling around just fucking climbing rocks did you have him on after he had completed that climb like they were yeah okay so he had been successful and they were just probably editing the project i had him on

earlier like years ago yeah and then i had him on again recently okay yeah it's uh the guy i would want to talk to is jimmy chin the the photographer who is capturing all that oh he's up there with him right that's and that's that's the thing i would want to talk well and he talks about it a little bit more so in the promos for the film but the how sketched out he was to actually be involved and sit there and film and how much of a burden he felt to like stay out of the periphery and not engage get engaged in the headspace and make alex do something different because the cameras were there that would of course cost him his life right i can't imagine the pressure of doing that or just i i wouldn't do it like if a buddy of mine

was like hey will you come film me uh you know, free... I would say no because I would be so afraid of just watching them peel off. Can you imagine if you were up there filming and you watched a guy fall? That would be rough. And they're, of course, good friends. And...

Look at that. Look at this guy. Yeah, this dude is a savage. Well, he's got his hands on the camera only. Well, he's got a bunch of stuff. So you see his foot, his left foot is in. A crack. Yeah, he's kind of secured down there.

He's got that carabiner. He's got one going to his harness. He's actually got two ropes going to his harness. So he's kind of angled in there. There's like a triangle. But he's a world-class climber in and of himself. Well, he also has a giant-ass camera bag. Look at that big-ass bag hanging from his hip.

Look at that position he's in, too. Oh, fuck all this, Jimmy. So that's how they get into position for a lot of it. He's Jumaring. Instead of climbing the rock, he's got basically ascenders that will allow you to push it up, and then they lock on the rope. So he's got one leg in there and one arm, and he's kind of Jumaring. We use those a lot of the times as well, but he's a world-class climber in and of himself i kind of

think you'd have to be right in order to to be able to capture that yeah yeah the team that i think they put together was like five to seven world-class guys but there's a movie of him called yeah no thanks what is that what is that guy doing? He is hanging probably 3,000 foot over nothing, focusing on capturing the shot. Oh, my God. I would be focusing on the urine streaming down my leg. Yeah. Oh, my God. Soaking your socks.

Oh, God. Like, I couldn't do that. But I could go to the edge of that cliff and zip up my suit, absolutely no problem, and send that off there. And I bet you he would want no piece of that. It's so bizarre. Yeah. If he's shooting Alex, who's shooting him?

Dude, good question. Is there a third person? There's another guy. Turn around like, hey, let me get one of you. Mikey shooting Jimmy. In the Free Solo movie, I think they had a team

of like five to seven people. They had, so they had long lens, they had people up there, they had remote cameras. I mean, it's a whole they obviously had drones flying around yeah well there was a a film that you know besides this film the recent documentary which i think is called solo right free solo free solo before that there

was also a late night one of those news shows like abc world news tonight or something like that they did a whole piece on him and they had this one guy who is a you know world-class climber and said it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when he falls every innovator in the wingsuit world yeah is dead yeah it's uh i mean but at the same i mean i say that i would totally agree with that but i also understand why he's doing it i mean the end state for all of us is predetermined. And I would suspect, having never talked to the guy, that he would rather meet his end like that than at 80 years old as a geriatric. Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah.

Maybe. But that does need the burden on the people around him. And that's the piece that was the toughest for me when it came to the wingsuit base. Look at him there. It's insane. What is wrong with that, man? But meanwhile, he's such a nice guy. that's the piece that was the toughest for me when it came to the Wingsview Bay Show. Look at him there. It's insane. What is wrong with that, man? But meanwhile, he's such a nice guy.

When you talk to Alex in real life, he's a sweetheart. You root for him to quit. Like, look, man, you already did it. Stop. I have yet to hear him express desire to do so, though. He's not quitting. You know, I mean, I don't know, man. Everybody's built different. That's the not quitting you know i mean i don't know man everybody's built different that's the thing you know yeah we're all not i mean i don't mean physically i mean the way your brain ticks everyone just has a different thing going on you know i mean what

leads you to what you do like what what is it about you sometimes you look at your path in life and look at where you are right now and you go, what the fuck led me to be in this spot where I'm 2,000 feet above the ground with my foot jammed into this wedge looking up and there's another 4,000 feet to go. And I got a chalk bag.

You got a chalk bag. You got a chalk bag and the sun goes down in four hours. Good luck. No, thank you. Not enough money in the actual world. Yeah, my hands sweat talking about it too. And like I said, I knew he was alive.

I knew the result, and it still freaked me out. I think that it's one of the more interesting things about all paths in life. It's like what is it that leads someone to decide to be a surgeon? What leads someone to decide to be fill in the blank, whatever the fuck you want to do? What leads someone to decide to be a surgeon? What leads someone to decide to be, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the fuck you want to do? What leads someone to decide to want to climb mountains? The way human beings vary and the way human beings find comfort in whatever path they choose, whether it's you doing wingsuit jumping or, like, some people, public speaking is so terrifying for them that the idea of doing stand-up is just horrific like i've had friends that come to see me at the comedy store and i'll be talking to them right before i go on stage and they're like do you have to prepare i'm like i'm all right

don't worry i've been doing this i can do it i do it all the time so i i do it because i've done it so often i could just go and do it whereas if they had to do it for the first, I mean, there's a thing, a look on a person's face when you see them go on stage and they, you know, they've never done it before. Like if you go to open mic night, you could see it, the sheer panic and terror in their face. But you're like, meanwhile, there's no consequences. What is going to happen? People are not going to like you.

They're not even going to remember you, man. Yeah. You get off that stage, you're fine. He might fall to his death from a fucking giant mountain that he didn't have to climb. Yeah. Like that's real consequences. But for him, I mean, for some people, the other, like the public speaking thing would be more terrifying than that.

I was going to say, put him in that environment. Like Alex, you're not going to climb today. You're going to do a five minute set at the comedy store. I think Alex would be fine doing it. Because he actually – I think he's doing a podcast now. Didn't he say he's doing a podcast? I think so. I'm pretty sure he said he's doing a podcast. Did you tell him he should start one?

Probably. Because I think you've spawned thousands of podcasts. Well, I spawned a bunch of good ones though. In a positive way. Yeah. In a positive – I say that like it's amazing to me the influence that you have it is unbelievable the number of people like i started this because i heard joe talk i'm like okay cool it's uncomfortable like i don't think about it because if i did think about it it freaked me out i mean there's i've

said so much stupid shit the fact that anybody would listen to me about anything there's thousands of hours of me talking out of my ass why did you decide to start one in the first place? Just for fun. Just for fun. And just to fuck around. I was a little disenchanted. Had to come back to LA from Colorado, and I didn't want to, but it was just one of those things. And when I was starting it, it was really just a goof.

I had always wanted to do something like that because my friend Anthony Cumia, he was from Opie and Anthony, he had a setup in his basement. And he would do this thing, he would call it live from the compound from his house. He had a green screen and he built a set in the basement. I was like, wow, if he could do that. I didn't have the money to do anything like that at the time. But I was like, but if he could do that, maybe I could figure out how to do something like that so i just started

off slow with webcams and shit like that and stumbled my way through it i personally believe that jerry number one should be put into a digital time capsule and saved forever it's one of my favorite things on youtube it's terrible it's what's amazing how bad it gives normal people like me hope you're're like, yes. Yeah. Well, you do, you get better at everything. Yeah. You know, you really do.

And I've gotten, I mean, just in the last few years, I've gotten so much better at listening to people and understanding what they're, and trying to see things from their perspective and trying to ask questions that get them to expand on their ideas better. It's given me an insane education in a bunch of ways, not just in terms of gathering information, but also in terms of how people react to that information and human psychology and how human beings react to controversial subjects or, you know, how they forgive people for mistakes too. That's an interesting one for me. There's some people that have such an unwillingness to forgive people

and they have no empathy or compassion. Those people are confusing to me because I'm like, look, I know you fucked up. I know somewhere, maybe it's not digitally recorded, like other people's fuck up so you think you're safe, but you fucked up. So you're being a hypocrite. You're wrong. Like, when someone gets busted, you know, it's really interesting. And when someone, like, there's just so much opportunity.

And one of the things that I was talking about with Jack Dorsey from Twitter. I was going to bring that up, actually. talking about with jack dorsey from um i was going to bring that up on twitter one of the things i was talking with him about was um how everything like literally from here forth will exist forever and you know we're gonna have to figure out a way to recognize that someone from you know 10 years ago when you were a 15 year old kid you made some made some crazy fucking tweet you're not that same person now and you can't just break like that didn't that happen with people with athletes recently they were giving them shit for stuff that they wrote when they're teenagers but it was some there was some big case right wasn't there something recently where a heisman

trophy winner what they were they're giving him a hard time for some of his past tweets yeah i was just saying it it comes up maybe once every other two weeks you know and they want to make it like the guy just said it yesterday you know i've already talked about there's no path to redemption for those people that's a real problem and i think there should be a path to redemption for virtually everyone who's not murdering or raping people you're not stealing you know like people make mistakes we are all all human. We're all super flawed. And to deny that seems like a real, it's going to be a real problem in terms of progress in the future. And I think that's one of the things that we were talking about earlier in terms of, you know, people disagreeing with on the left or the right.

And this, we've got to figure out a way to to communicate with each other more civilly and to like approach people like instead of approaching and approaching someone's actions and who they are like they're the enemy instead of that look at them with the most compassionate or forgiving view possible and look at your the things that you have in common rather than the things that are inexorably separating you i would like to think that most people actually do that i think that unfortunately extremism is winning in the country yeah and the vocal minority just has a much larger megaphone or microphone than the non-vocal majority i think most people do that but i don't think the people that do that

waste their time posting about it or taking up the – just filling the narrative so it looks like there's only two positions. That's a good point. I would love to see some return to moderation or just get – extremism in any shape. I feel very uncomfortable with people who go to any length like that. I think people are getting more and more upset at it. And I think as people recognize it's more and more preposterous, they're getting more and more, there's more and more pushback and resistance. like there's there's something like martina navratilova uh just got a bunch of shit from people calling her transphobic because she was saying that she didn't think that biological males should be competing with biological females and that there are people who identify as transgender who keep their penis and compete as a man and you know her her position was like that

or compete as a woman rather her position was like that listen that's not a that's not a woman that's a man and they have an advantage and she was citing all these instances and so she got all this shit from people so then she said i'm going to step back and i'm going to research this so she stepped back and researched it and then came back and said no i've looked at all the data now She probably came back harder She did come back harder And now they're attacking her and calling her transphobic Like listen this is not transphobia

This is a real thing that you're going to have to address When you're talking about physical activities When someone identifies Look if you want to identify as a woman Or identify as a male I think we should all support people doing whatever they want to do As long as it's not hurting anybody Totally agree

But when you're talking about competition and you're talking about someone identifying i don't care if you identify as a giraffe if you compete in an apple picking competition with a giraffe you're gonna fucking lose you're not a giraffe stupid right i mean this is just i mean this is an extreme version of it but that's nonsense that doesn't make any sense if you decide that you're a woman and you want to enter into a fucking weightlifting competition and you weigh 220 pounds and you're beating all the other women by like fucking insane numbers. Like there was a few world champion weightlifting winners that are women that are actually biologically male. So they're winning weightlifting competitions just like what the fuck are you talking about like this is great this is not a

matter of whether or not someone should identify with something but it's you're talking about making it fair for actual biological women like there's a reason why women don't compete with men it's because physically they're not as strong so and obviously there's some exceptions there's a reason why women don't compete with men it's because physically they're not as strong so and obviously there's some exceptions there's some weak men some strong women and there's some sort of a spectrum and you find yourself somewhere on it but if you're allowing biological males to compete with biological females and just say oh he identifies as a woman let him in yay we're all very progressive. And then you look at the results and you go, wait, he just broke all the world records first time in.

Like, what? And everyone's like, yes, amazing. What a wonderful woman. Girl power. Like, that's not girl power. You're monkeying with biology here. This is crazy. So what's the road out of that?

Like, what does that mean? People getting upset and time. Time being time, you know, of these instances, enough of these things happen, enough discussion, where enough of the actual reality of the facts and the data are shoved in everyone's face enough that the new generation comes to some sort of a rational understanding about what is and is not fair as opposed to where people are now where they're just no matter what they're scared to not push this progressive agenda and they're scared of the blowback of martina navatolova who is an lbgt hero right yes she's a fucking hero she was a lesbian woman who was a world champion tennis player and now they're the left are attacking her so they're they're eating their own in a spectacular fashion where you have these trans people who don't want

to look at reality and then people that support the trans people because they don't want to be considered in any way shape or form anything other than the most progressive of progressive and it's nonsense it's like i think you're right though in the generational fix to it i think that's true of a lot of the stuff that like one of the i get asked all the time school shootings right it's like the topic of the day yeah i don't have a solution for it but i know it's not going to be overnight it'll be generational in nature just like it crept in generational in nature i think a lot of these problems people look for a light switch solution where the solution in and of itself is the exact opposite of that yeah i think you're right um i don't see any solution to that either and i think there's a

lot of uh positions that people feel like they're supposed to take and if you're on the left the big position that you're supposed to take is gun control get rid of the guns the guns are the problem look at all these people shooting people with guns yeah guns guns guns and all the mass shootings what they have in common guns they all have guns in common and they want to take away guns and then there's the people on the right and like you're not i've never done anything wrong with my gun you're not taking my fucking gun and then there's this fucking in stop unstoppable battle between these two sides and that there's a lot of factors like what what happens to a human that leads them to get to this state of mind where they're able to go into a school and shoot it up like what is

that what what what what could possibly be going on how do we stop that from ever taking place these people have to be in some sort of insane pain there has to be something unbelievably wrong with their life that they're capable of doing this how do we stop that how do we look at that it's like if this is our our global community if this is our national community how do we stop this from happening in our national community i don't know what the answer to that is i think there's an answer to stopping school shootings and not to oversimplify anything there's i would say there's a couple key issues one of them is location the other one is motivation you can solve the location issue like if we as a

country were legitimately interested in stopping school shootings how many have ever occurred at a school where the president's children go zero why because it's defended, right? They actually take a proactive approach to it. They're going to have layers of security, defense in depth. They're probably going to have somebody looking out the front door or a system looking out the front door, controlled entry points, entry and exit points. You're going to have a metal detector. You're going to have security staff on site. Right.

So you can control the location aspect. on site. So you can control the location aspect. And I go to, every time I met my kid's school, or unfortunately, or fortunately, every building I've ever been in, I'm viewing it from a pseudo tactical perspective, at least. So I'll go walk around my kid's school. And there's issues that I see from a perspective of somebody who would want to exploit that from aggressor's perspective, but they could all be solved. But that doesn't solve the second aspect of that the motivation because i have absolutely no answer as to why a 17 year old kid would think that a solution of any kind would be to kill their classmates i don't understand that at all and although people it's funny like at every shooting surprisingly enough there's two things a gun and a shooter and vast majority of the time i hear people talking about the gun

yeah i think we got to balance that conversation and talk about the motivation yeah 100 and and also psych medications you know you gotta talk about that the rise in psych medications got to be correlated with the rise of school shootings i mean the amount of people that are on psych medication and i understand that correlation does not equal causation it's not necessarily that the medication is forcing them to do this but there's i don't know what study has been done on what is what is the effect and and is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication? Is there some sort of a connection between taking certain types of psych medication with certain biological makeup that allows you to have this diffusion of reality? Like this, this, this is some, some weird thing happens to them where they're capable of horrific things and horrific actions.

Like how much of that is monkeying with human neurochemistry i don't know that's why i think the location portion it's not that it's an easy solution but it's it is solvable but isn't the problem funding like there's no money for to pay for teachers they don't have money to like secure schools it depends on how serious we want to take it yeah if if we really wanted to stop, what I'm saying is there are ways that can stop it. I'm not saying those ways are easy. I'm not saying that those ways are cheap, but there are concrete things. Just looking at a structure from being vulnerable to an assault, there are things that could be done, but that doesn't solve the school shooting problem. It changes the

address because the individual that would want to go do that at a school if you make a target hard that doesn't remove the motivation that's what i'm saying there's location motivation and obviously a lot of other factors the location one if you solve that you still got to talk about the shooter right and i mean that's where i butt my head up again i don't i would actually like to see this country have a conversation instead of entrenched positions, either the left or the right. All guns should be bans. Come get them with my cold dead hands. Which I don't – again, I find myself in the middle of that.

I don't agree with either of those positions because it's more nuanced than just the gun and the shooter. It's the combination of all those things. But I don't even feel like we're having a conversation in this country. I feel like a lot of people are talking. I don't think anybody is listening. And I go to the schools in the neighborhood where my kids go to school. I don't see a single change that they have made. I think you're 100% correct in that there doesn't seem to be any real

there's no real plans to stop this stuff and i don't think anybody has a real answer and that's one of the reasons why it's so confusing to people because you could dwell on it and roll it over in your head all day long and there's nothing that stands out as obvious like hey there's a fire go pour water on it that's obvious there's no there's no solution like and the low-hanging fruit the metaphor for the school shootings would be there's a gun go pour water on that right right right but the more nuanced and complex problem is actually the human being behind it and i see people they just well that's too difficult so i'm going to throw my hands up and give up yeah i mean but also too i think it's important to point out that actually it's thankfully it's incredibly rare that

it actually happens and it's funny because you look at the stats and you start digging into where the stats come from and two groups of people and i'm sure you see this across a variety of topics will take the same study and derive two different sets of numbers. There's school shootings, and then there's shootings that happen at schools. And you can make one number look bigger and one number look smaller. Like if you wanted to include the number of people who commit suicide in a school parking lot, which at a national level is considered a school shooting because it occurred at a school, you can inflate and conflate the number of times and the frequency with which it happens. If you strip that information out, it gives you a much more accurate perspective of how

often it's happening. Same thing when you remove suicides from gun violence and the total number of deaths. But again, that takes a refined and nuanced person that's willing to actually look at it as opposed to just repeating what their bumper sticker says. Yeah, I saw that when Ted Nugent debated Pierce Morgan on television. He was talking to him about gun violence and the actual numbers, and he was saying, well, these are the real statistics, and this is why the numbers are so high. How many of these, when you're including gun violence, how many of these people are

like criminals who are being shot in the act by police officers? How many of them are people defending their home from a break-in? How many of them are suicides how many once you get through that you get to the end of it then you get to gang violence how many how many of them are uh responsible how many deaths are attributed to gang violence how many deaths are attributed to uh you know i mean there's there's there's a lot of different factors then you get to these mass shootings yep so the the mass shootings it's it it's a relatively small percentage but that doesn't give anybody any comfort for anybody that's suffered of course it does and again it's it doesn't excuse it it's just thankfully it happens infrequently i wish the number was zero we're not and i think the answer to getting

it to zero will be generational because it grew generationally yeah i think it will go away generationally but how does it go to what what fundamental changes have to happen in the way human beings exist that we stop any anything that right now we're all the different i, it would be a terrible world if we said, hey, we're just going to have to accept that people are never going to evolve socially, emotionally, whatever it is that's causing people to lash out the way they do. What, I mean, what a horrible world it would be if we say, no, people are just going to be like this forever. We're not just flawed, but flawed and ruthless and cruel and violent and awful, and that's just the way people are forever. I mean, I think there's improvements you can make on both sides, right? So there's a gun and there's a shooter.

There are – I couldn't be a more vehement supporter of the Second Amendment. Like, I completely and utterly support it, but I'm anti-irresponsibility yeah and there's a lot of things that we could do as a nation that would improve safety via responsibility i mean look at this the the stats on the percentage of american gun owners that don't own a safe it's over 50 yeah which is speaks to access and what sucks about any improvements that we make you'll never know about it because you're never going to know about the school shooting that you stopped really you know what i mean right because it doesn't make the news but that doesn't mean my default position is we can do better there's ways that we could i think that the reasonable gun legislation that already exists there's ways that we could improve communication interag agency. Like the Aurora shooter is a perfect example.

It took a pistol and killed five people the day he got fired and injured five police officers. He shouldn't have had the gun. He was a convicted felon. His felony did not show up when they had the background check for his job, but it did show up for the background check, I believe, for his concealed weapons permit. But oftentimes I see it where there's this disconnect between agencies not sharing information, very much like the civilian military infrastructure prior to 9-11. Agency didn't want to talk to the FBI and the NSA

because budget and relevancy and this is mine and that's yours and this is my rights, we'll get the fuck away from you, I don't want to share information. I think we could do better on the regulations that are in place. I'm not saying add any more, but maybe let's figure out a way where we could share information or at least make sure we're living up to the letter of the intent and the letter of the law on that side of the house. And then on the other side of the house, you had a pinned tweet for a long time, and I'm going to totally murder this when it comes to exactly what it was.

But something along the lines, we don't have a gun crisis. We have a mental health crisis i say we have a mental health crisis disguised as a gun crisis or a mental health problem decides the gun problem and just like we can do better on the firearm side of the house we can do better on the mental health side of the house and i just see people throwing their hands up and attacking the low-hanging fruit because i think the mental health side of the house is a more difficult issue than the firearm issue. I think it's the most difficult issue, you know, and I think everyone that I know, including myself, has had bad moments in their life and has struggled. And the struggle, especially mental health struggle, struggle with depression or being

unhappy or anger or any of the things that keep you off of a healthy baseline, those moments in life, they vary wildly in how people experience them, to what level people experience them, what impact they have on them, and whether or not they can recover from these things. And for some people, they feel like there is no recovery and the only way out is to just go out with a bang like literally and this is a lot of what you're seeing in these school shootings is suicide by cop yeah i mean this this is one of the things that people want they want to go out in a blaze of glory and what what the fuck is going on where we let people get to that point without stepping in

and and trying to help? And do they have anybody that even notices? Do they have anyone around them that knows that they're this fucked up and this far gone? We all like to think that that could never happen to us, that we could never get to a point where we're so despondent and filled with anger and hate and fear and self-loathing that we want to do something horrific but every person who does something horrific is a human being right and the difference between you and them might be genetic it might be environmental it might be life experience but they are a human being just like you and i and something horrifically went wrong in their life to the point where they are in this position where they show up at that school shooting in Illinois just a couple days ago.

Some guy got fired, went back to work, and just shot everybody up. Like, what the fuck? That guy worked there for 15 years. Like, what is it that gets, when someone gets to a point where this is what flashes in their mind as a solution? Go back with a gun. Make everybody pay. I felt it myself, that feeling. Overseas, when I'd lose close friends, the first absolute feeling you have is an anger

that I don't have the vocabulary to describe, and all you want to do is burn the world to the ground. But it was fleeting and i didn't do it and i just don't know how we provide the barrier for people if they can and when it comes to mental health i mean somebody with more horsepower between the ears than me is going to need to solve that problem because i don't understand it but i do understand that feeling but what i needed was time and i don't know how to provide that well you also had character and discipline and a lot of things that many people lack in your ability to mitigate

these horrific feelings and this severe depression and anger some people don't have those mental health tools they don't have those tools i mean you're already a seal right you're already a guy who's endured more than most human beings will ever in terms of physically and emotionally and how to get through that hump to become one of the elite operators in this country that just having that as a baseline like having that as a you you you have the tool set to endure more than most some people are just not capable of handling any real adversity anything bad that comes down the pipe for them they just fall apart and i think for many people there's a real extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life there's an extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life. There's an extreme feeling of a lack of

meaning, that nothing they do matters, that they don't matter, that no one cares about them, whether they're there or they're gone. People either mock them or disregard them altogether, and they want people to know who they are, and that's one of the reasons why they do these things. I can see that for sure but again if i'm being objectively honest about myself i did have those tools and probably the only thing that prevented me from acting out in that moment is that i didn't have access to the individuals that i wanted to act out against and i i mean it's like i said i understand it i don't have a solution for it at all but i understand it yeah well you would be able to understand it more than most in coming from

that place of having lost friends and being in that intense and also being in this environment where people are shooting and killing people on a regular basis and you're directly a part of that and directly connected to it it makes violence so much more tangible well i mean at the same time i don't want to paint a horrible picture uh there's a ton of misconceptions about what i used to do right and it comes from books and movies and tv shows because in 60 minutes all that happens is bullets whizzing by your head and shit blowing up the reality is you're not exposed to violence that often overseas you are over a long term i guess in the aggregate but it's not as bad as people it's not as bad as people i think often would maybe want to romanticize it as being bad

because then they can maybe excuse away behaviors that come from that does that bother you about movies when you see movies about you should if if my wife was here all you'd have to say is do you enjoy watching a war movie with your husband oh my god she just said get out of the room get out of the room because i can't do it like it's just it's it drives me nuts but it also sets bad expectations i mean i had some of the best times of my life overseas as well and it wasn't all about loss and it certainly wasn't all about loss of life there'd be whirlwind periods of time where that happened and there'd whirlwind periods of time where that happened. And there'd be other periods of time where we're just training people, you know, or we're going out and actually meeting leaders in the city and having meals with them. And then, yeah, that night you might get your stuff on and go banging for a night.

But at the same time, it's a mix of all of those things. I'm grateful for the experiences that I have from my military service. Probably the best day in my life was the day I got shot. It changed my perspective of who I thought I was. It forced me to lift my head up and think about the future more than just the job that I had because my ability to do my job was thrown into my face. I thought I was, well, one, once I realized I wasn't going to die, I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do my job was thrown into my face. I thought I was, well, one, once I realized I wasn't going to die, I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do the job I've always wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I started thinking about the future. Again, I wouldn't, I would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn't had been shot. And when it happened

in that moment, it was the worst day of my life. And I look back on it and it probably was the most, maybe it wasn't the best day of of my life but perhaps one of the most meaningful changes in direction for me as a human being so there is positive that comes out of that negative it's not all bad it's i think i got more positive more good than bad from 15 years at war that's it's interesting that that does happen right that some bad moment in your life could lead to a greater life overall yeah complete shift in perspective i had never thought about anything in my life except an insatiable desire to be a seal and then i became a seal i'm like this is awesome because it's pre-9-11 so we just uh worked out drank and then worked out and drank and then 9-11 happened and i my my world went from conceptual to practical and it was way different

than i thought it was going to be because i've watched the same movies right um and then you get over there you're like oh whoa this is this is substantially substantially different and it built and it was a lot of the things that i thought it wasn't going to be uh and even more than i thought it possibly could be in some of those directions but i don't know it people i think often paint uh war or the experiences associated with war is solely negative and i also just like when it comes to the conversations on being on the stream extremes i would love to pull that more back into the middle and actually have a conversation about it i think amazing changes can come from people in those environments what is it about war movies that drive you the most crazy the fact that almost

everything in them is inaccurate almost everything the biggest thing that drives me fucking crazy is when grenades create a fireball. Really? Well, yeah, because it happens in like every movie. They throw a grenade and a 55-gallon drum of gasoline explodes. Right. And people go flying backwards and cars flip over. If you throw a grenade, it goes pop and it puts some dust up in the air. And if you're waiting for the fireball, you're going to be there for the rest of your natural life.

It's just not going to work. And they're not that effective. Theyball, you're going to be there for the rest of your natural life. It's just not going. And they're not that effective. They're fun. Don't get me wrong, but they're not that effective. I did not know that they don't create a fireball. No, I've never seen a grenade go off.

Obviously. I'm sure Jamie can pull one up. It just goes, it's dust. I think I've seen one in a video. I'm sure for a moment, like the momentary explosion, there is a flash.

But other than that, it's literally just dust flying up in the air what what is the best military movie that's the most accurate or the most the least offensive navy seals starring charlie sheen really no not at all oh jesus christ i almost fell down that fucking guy probably fooled more people into coming into the seal teams than anybody else really oh my god really yeah i mean they've fallen through skylights with mp5s and handlebar mustaches you know there's snipers calling himself god i can't see anything i'm switching

to starlight blasting people through a concrete wall they're doing free fall jumps they're in submarines like that's an entire 30-year career to do all that shit in 60 minutes like you take that expectation you come to the team's like god i'm kind of bored right now so is that the where area is charlie sheen bang bang bang look at him i'm gonna run boys yep i want to make it and he's got the the the requisite scarf around the neck and first off one of those. So what kind of asshole wears a red scarf in an environment where there's no red? He's got green utilities on from Vietnam wearing a red chamal.

This is so hilarious. Especially when you know Charlie now, like such a fucking psychotic partier. So apparently they came to the the buds compound and did a little bit of training with the guys and i guess there was some bathroom breaks and they just like all right you guys ready for some more pt oh really that makes sense i'm obviously hearing that 18th hand but i want to believe it's true well you know who i hear trains diligently and really hard and like takes it super seriously and it's like one of the most humble guys you ever meet is keanu Reeves.

That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me either. But I heard some people that had interacted with him when he was training for... John Wick. Yeah, including my jiu-jitsu instructor, John Jock Machado, my friend Higa Machado, John Jock's brother, and a bunch of other... He worked out with a bunch of other Machados, in fact. I think Carlos as well.

But he really wanted to learn actual jiu- jujitsu so he really did train with them yeah he did real tactical courses and and so his uh his tactical proficiency shows in that movie and so to get back to stuff that bothers me it's the 72 round pistol magazine because i'm counting i'm like that's 15 oh 25 30 for the shotgun that has 48 rounds in so like i can't do it i'm like throwing stuff at the tv my wife just points she says get out like it's i can't do it like so sicario i love sicario there's a scene at the border that has one of the most blatant just errors in the movie. There's a guy pointing a gun. He's supposedly a CIA agent.

He's pointing a gun out the windshield, and you can see that the bolt to the rifle is locked to the rear. Oh, no. Which means the armor on set handed it to him, you know, clear and safe. And he just went, and they filmed it, and nobody caught it. And I saw that movie. I'm like, turn that shit off. I can't watch i can't watch it of course yeah it ruins it for me now why don't they fix stuff like that you would think that you're making a movie about military or about guns like yeah the real gun nuts are going to notice that they but they probably didn't catch it in the editing process it's so

fast it's probably up there for three seconds but if know, I mean, you look at a gun and like you just, if it was your primary tool for years, you're looking for certain things all the time. Yep, here we go. For someone who doesn't know, though, it looks super serious. Well, that's why they're still watching the movie and I left. Yep, bolt to the rear. See that? Walk to the rear. Yep. go ahead and pull the trigger there go ahead son obviously an empty magazine yeah hey silly yeah so nobody caught that in the editing

process is what it is they not see that no don't you think they digitally could have moved that forward they 100 could move because he didn't fire in that scene anyway yeah just push that bitch up you should up Photoshop that sucker I gotta get anxiety watch I mean they can use You get anger right It makes sense Hey man in a way less significant thing

I get crazy when I watch people play pool in movies That obviously can't play Oh I can imagine Drives me nuts Yes Drives me nuts Like if I see someone like Supposed to be some pool hustler

And I see they have a bullshit bridge And they're gripping the like you can see things in movies like uh my friends who smoke cigarettes say they can tell when someone doesn't smoke oh for sure yeah because when you smoke there's just a like a casual relaxed way that you're holding the cigarette and the way you're drawing it but when someone's like never smoked before and like yeah they're like, mm. Yeah. They've got this weird thing to do. And like, oh, that guy doesn't really smoke. I'm like, how the fuck can you tell? Because I smoke. It's like another thing that bugs me is you watch any tactical scene where they're like moving down a hallway.

And it's like, why is your gun pointed at your buddy's face? Like, that's not cool. Why are you aiming across? And then the way that they make entry into rooms, it's awesome. I like to play Russian roulette with my life as well. It just drives me absolutely mad. What about Zero Dark Thirty? That movie fucking sucks.

What sucks about it? You know what drove me crazy? How much time do we have? That redhead lady was yelling at all those train killers i was like i don't think they'd listen to her there are some creative liberties that are taken in that movie from soup to nuts i mean like was that person the lady who yelled at those guys the one the woman who's in charge was that a real human in real life it was based off of a real human for sure like uh a lot of the things in that movie were based on real events however if you're trying to get tickets to get people's seats you know their butts and seats

you get to glamorize stuff right so a lot of people because in that movie you know the um the source drives up in the vehicle and detonates himself that actually happened that killed a bunch of people in cast um if as long as you look at it as entertainment that movie is okay if you look at it with a refined eye like are they doing this correctly no they're all gonna die yeah i mean it's uh it just i we would need another four hours to literally go down the list of things but it's just things are compressed things that would never happen happen for the sake of creating an intoxicating or an emotional scene on camera and it's tough to watch because i'm sitting i'm like get out of the door get out of the door get out of the door i'm getting anxiety watching these damn movies because you don't hang out in front of open doors unless you want to get

shot now how many different things were fucked up about that movie um only the things that were after the opening scene that's a little movie's a disaster yeah it's just i don't want to talk about it dumbass like myself i'm like that's a good fucking movie seems pretty realistic well think about it from entertainment it's a great entertaining movie right you could ask the same question about the movie american sniper or lone survivor they're all based around certain things that have been enhanced to make it more entertaining yes and and i get it they're there to make money they're not there to tell historically accurate do you know marcus i do not know marcus well but i do know marcus i i know him i don't know how he felt i don't know if you'd ever say he was involved with

the making of the movie yeah but i mean i'm sure they only listened to him so much you know yeah uh given how i can again having not been there and i can only imagine how horrific that incident must be for him to deal with on a daily level i would bet he wasn't very involved i would almost rather them if that was me i think i would almost rather say you know what just make the movie that you want to make because i don't want to sit here and explain exactly what happened and recreate these scenes and talk about how this person died over here like i, just go to town. Is there any movie that you've ever seen about war where you go,

that makes sense? First 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is unbelievable. Oh, yeah. Not for accuracy, for capturing the essence of what it feels like and the switch between utter fear to excitement to joy to anger in the matter of a second. Another movie that does a good aspect or a good job of capturing some of those aspects, I would say, is also Black Hawk Down. Not for accuracy, but to capture the chaos of how a plan can come unraveled and just how chaotic it can be. can come unraveled and how just how chaotic it can be and that's how sometimes you can feel so helpless but your only solution is to drive into the problem instead of moving away from it

so those those capture the essence of it well from a technical perspective i honestly cannot think of a single movie that does it justice wow it would have to be like a 50 hour movie though because of course i mean blackhawk down i think was a multiple day incident in that movie's 90 minutes right so they get rid of all the the boring bs stuff that is actually what you do the vast majority of your job if i look at my career probably greater than 95 of my career I spent training and 5% I spent in combat. Really? Yeah. And that is average.

I would say there are people who are maybe a little bit higher and people who are a little bit lower. But you're not going to spend more than at most maybe 10% of your career in combat, even if your job is directly tied to combat. Because you've got to train. You've got to plan the missions. I mean, our normal planning cycle was 24 to 72 hours sitting in front of powerpoint considering whether or not i should hang myself or blow my brains out because we're arguing over the font that we're using to submit for mission approval really oh you're studying the weather you're studying the terrain i've had slides and mission briefs sent back not be approved because I didn't orient the helicopter the correct direction on the slide.

They're like, hey, you need to fix this and then resubmit it. Like if you wanted to shut down the average day military, it wouldn't be through a kinetic act. You would need to put some type of code into Microsoft Office and we're done because we operate on Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Office. We'd sit there and we'd plan and we would brief and we'd submit for approval that's three days then you'd go do an objective that would last for 10 hours whoa repeat repeat the cycle i'm too add for that it's well you break up the tasks so each the last thing you would want is one person creating the entire plan so somebody's doing the communication plan the med somebody is doing the communication plan, the medevac plan, the insertion plan, the route planning. We don't ever really brief what we're going to do inside of the objective because that's kind of the soup and nuts that you train for at all times. Like

that's everything is to get there and then, okay, that's actually our job. But we focus on all those other things. Then primary, secondary, tertiary plan for each one of those things, phase lines for each one of those things. None of that has ever shown up in any movie. What doesn't show up in any movies is vast majority of time the intelligence is bad and you hit what's called a dry hole. You go to a building. You approach the structure. You breach the door and it's just the intelligence is wrong. It's either empty or it's the wrong person.

That happens all the time. It's not exciting though. So we pay the people money. They fix their door and we go back and we try to find the person again. None of that shows up in any of the mediums because they're too compressed. With all your experience in the military and your knowledge of what the real world in these combat environments is like, what the real world in these combat environments is like. How do you feel when you hear people talk about defunding the military or decreasing the military or that we don't need it

or that we shouldn't have the kind of budget that we have right now? The people that don't understand the real threats that are out there. And that if you do not have a well-trained, well-funded, experienced military that really understands these things, you've got real danger at your door. I'm glad that they live in a place where they have enough space to develop those thoughts. Because they're not under pressure. Because the military is doing the job that they should be doing there are like i said so many misconceptions about what the military does uh what we do overseas how many countries we are in overseas how deep we are into some of these countries how forecast forecasted and how forward-looking the military is, looking for emerging threats as opposed to just responding.

And all of that creates space so people can exercise their right to voice their First Amendment, you know, right of saying those things. Does it frustrate you, though, that they don't have a real understanding? I'm grateful that they live in a place where they don't have that great understanding. Because like I said, they have the space to be confused. They're not pushed under a thumb. They're not being told you have to say this or it's going to be your fucking head in the square. Right.

I'm I it is frustrating for me at times, but I balance that with that's that's what this country is supposed to be about. You're supposed to be able to voice your dissent, right? And I believe that the system will correct, and it does correct for itself. There are people that believe that, but I think the majority of people, again, silent majority versus extreme minority. I think those people are in the extreme minority,

but they're very vocal. I think most people are incredibly appreciative of what the military does. But having said that, if you've never served in the extreme minority, but they're very vocal. I think most people are incredibly appreciative of what the military does. But having said that, if you've never served in the military, and you've never been in a combat occupation, and then you've never applied that occupation for real, there's going to be a gap, and there's going to be a gap in understanding. And that's okay. So it's frustrating, yes, but I'm glad that it exists and i'm glad that they are not in this country is not in a position where they are getting drafted and forced into that position i'm glad that it was me that did that and had to bear any weight or burden that

came with that to allow them to have whatever opinion they want that's a great perspective that's a very healthy way of looking at it um and i probably think it's probably the only manageable way of looking at it i think you'd go crazy otherwise because otherwise and then you what are you going to do go to a rally and hold up another like it's like what's i i mean i because it initially i have to fight back the the initial anger but eventually give me a little bit of time and the you know hopefully relatively sane head is going to prevail and i had you, you know, again, that night I got hurt, it changed the way that I thought about things. If I had never gotten hurt and I had never thought about my own mortality

and I had never thought about, like I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not what I did in the military has had any impact,.0001. I don't know if I would have thought about that if all I had ever done was just doing the occupation that I did. I needed that lifting of my head to have that perspective. I did. I don't think all people do, but I needed that. How long – sorry, keep going.

I was going to say I think that night in some ways helps me have the perspective I have now with those people. How long is the average career of someone who's a ceo well if you want to retire you got to do 20 years in a wake-up and they should change it's a wake-up wake up the next day you got to do 20 years you have to do 20 years to the day so wake up the day after your 20th but they need to change the term also retirement pay in the military should be in my opinion at least replaced with money that you are going to get paid until you find your second career because you're not going to retire on $3,000 a month. Right.

You know? But if you want to make it to retirement, you have to do 20 years. The only reason I get a retirement is because I was medically retired. So they basically, I don't know how it happens in the system, but they put me in that category

is essentially I've been made at 20 years. What happens with most guys when they hit 20 years do they retire it's hit or miss um on the enlisted side of the house they start throwing what at that phase of your life is going to be a lot of money at you they'll try to get you to re-enlist and i never took this money and so i'm not exactly sure but it's about five years of re-enlistment and it's about $150,000, which is a ton of money if you're in the military. And if you reenlist while you're overseas, every penny of that is tax-free because you're going to get it in increments per year. $150,000 per year? Total.

For the five years? Yeah. Damn, that's not a lot of money. It's not. Here's the deal. It's a lot of money if you're used to having your head down, and you're to making 90 a year and you're in your late 30s and you realize you know oh my god i could buy a house with that money right you'll take it right and uh and every year that you do over 20 they will add i believe one half of a percentage point to your military retirement so

if you do 20 years in the military you you will get 50% of your base pay, which doesn't include the dive pay, demo pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, all the difference in money that I made. I get the exact same retirement, which is totally fine. And I signed up for this as a person who was in front of a radar scope for 20 years. We get the exact same paycheck at the end. If you do 21 years, you get 50 and a half 22 years 51 so it keeps incrementally going up so some guys will go up to 30 most guys by the time they get to 20 and i will say this it depends on what's going on in the world when it was peak wartime 2007 2009 not a lot of guys were getting out most of the guys were re-upping because they wanted to strap the boots back on and go back overseas and they're like hey i'll re-enlist while I'm overseas.

Tax-free money. I get to go do what I want to do. It's a win-win. But most people, as the operational tempo has slowed, anecdotally, what I've seen is they are looking more towards the future, going to get out around 20. If not, they'll get out around 25 after they take that re-enlistment bonus. And if you're staying in to like your 30s, you're in for the long haul. They take that reenlistment bonus. And if you're staying in to like your 30s, you're in for the long haul.

When you look at the news, do you pay attention to potential conflicts internationally and the things that are going on? Yes and no. I'm not looking at them to inform my opinion. I'm just kind of curious as to what the news agencies are reporting, because having lived on the other side of that and doing things that will eventually make the news days, weeks, or months later, the news is generally behind on that cycle. And the military does do a good job and has continued to do a better job of kind of forecasting those things and spreading out as much as necessary. But do you see anything now like you know i know trump got a lot of criticism for saying they were going to pull troops out of syria yeah and when when you see you know the debate about that or actions possible actions against north korea and

all this kind of stuff like how do you do you view this i mean obviously you view this as a guy who has served and has been overseas but do you do you look at things like these are potential issues that are coming up and things you need to be concerned with the syria and well the syria one there are guys from the community over there they've been actively engaged iraq it's funny the news reported for a long time we've withdrawn from iraq all u.s troops are out of iraq no they weren't we've always had a presence there since we invaded in 2003 so and i can go tit for tat on a lot of issues where the news gets it wrong which is why i don't necessarily

look at it for me to inform my opinion uh syria certainly any area where we allow a place for and the only word i have for it is evil to grow it's going to happen the problem with the strategy that i see it is is that actually so we started in afghanistan and again this is my opinion not the military opinion i can only speak for myself we went into afghanistan we were incredibly. So we cut the head off of that snake, but it spawned two more. You go into Iraq, you can argue whether or not we were effective. But then all of a sudden, we started seeing foreign fighters coming in from all these different countries. And the tactics that we started seeing used in Iraq, like my first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003, no, 2002, it was not uncommon to drive around in vehicles that were not ballistic. They were not resistant to mines.

It was just a Tacoma, a thin-skinned Tacoma. The bolt would zip right through. Fast forward to Afghanistan in 2008, and they're starting to see vehicles being detonated by bombs that we first saw in Iraq that were coming across the border into Syria, where they had the ability to allow, again, for lack of a better term, that evil to grow, to learn, to come across the border, to engage American forces, then to flee into a sovereign nation we couldn't do anything about. Then we started seeing that in Afghanistan. But we got effective any time that these people would get together and have a large group, we'd get effective at either capturing them or killing them. So they realized they need to be disaggregate. So now we've spread this.

I think the last stat that I saw was ISIS is in 64 countries. And the problem that I see with the US militaryS. military is that we're very very good at going in and cutting the head off of the snake but we're not good at creating and holding infrastructure and the timeline required to hold that infrastructure is well beyond the palette I think of most Americans and the best example I can point to is South Korea we still have bases with an American presence in South Korea that war ended decades ago we still have bases in Germany we have bases with an American presence in South Korea. That war ended decades ago. We still have bases in Germany. We have bases in Italy.

Now, we're not necessarily using them for the same purposes, but if we really want to control that area, we have to be prepared to stay there for that long. And I don't think the U.S. military, one, has enough personnel to do that, and I don't think the american populace has the palate to allow that to happen do you think that that's necessary that in order to protect people from whether whether it's isis or whatever comes after isis i mean obviously isis is fairly recent right it went to al-qaeda to isis and they changed yeah to isil and all that and whatever could be next so you you feel like we have to maintain presence in that part of the world period i think we should use the military as a measure of last resort i think that war should be a measure of absolutely last resort and i would love to see us evolve to a point where we use it less and less and less. I describe it as you're standing at a dam and you can see a little spout

coming out. Do you put your finger in the spout knowing that it's not going to fix the problem, but it was going to buy you time to hopefully have somebody come and fix the dam, right? That's the option I would go for versus just leaving it as it is and allowing it to continue to weaken the dam or another sprout would come out my theory that the military is really well served to provide that space to put that finger in that sprout so yes i think if we find an area where these ideologies are thriving we have to do what is necessary to remove that ideology and hopefully destroy it not not resettle it somewhere else but actually destroy it so yes the short answer is absolutely if we find areas where we can squash this down we have to go but i just hope that there's people smarter than me that have a

much longer term strategy because all we're doing in my opinion is the finger in the dam and is there a longer-term strategy like when you see all the global conflicts i mean is there a time that we get i mean it's it's it sounds insane to say that there's never going to be a time where there's no war it sounds like an insane thing to say i don't know if there's ever been a time at least globally not that the u.s was involved but i don't know if there's ever been a time where there hasn't been a war i don't think there has i don't think there can be because, and I think we talked about this the first day I met you, there's X people and there's Y people. They're not going to get along. It doesn't matter what your belief is.

You have an axis somewhere that has another belief. And if you go to the extreme end of that belief, that individual may be willing to take action against you, violent action against you for your belief. And I don't think there's a way around that because humans are just too diverse. But is it possible that one day we'll move past this? I mean, is there any plans at all to try to facilitate some sort of a peaceful world civilization where, you know, all nations kind of get along in some sort of a mutually agreeable way? I mean, does anybody have some sort of hundred year plan? Isn't that hilarious that that's a funny thing to say i mean they didn't brief me on it if it exists

but isn't that fucked though i mean human beings are always going to shoot and kill each other we're always going to have war isn't that fucked since the inception of human beings it seems like at least at some level and thankfully it's microscopic in comparison to the overall total right but it's happening i think it's happened since man has been walking on earth and the only way that we feel today that we can protect ourselves is to have the more dominant more powerful military and to make sure that we're the ones that get to dictate whether or not evil flourishes yeah i mean that's i would want maybe a i want the the dominant ability of our military to continue to grow but i'd like to see and i think it's already

moving this direction smaller more surgical uses of it i just the military in my opinion is not good at building infrastructure and holding terrain for a long period of time it's just not what we're designed to do right it's not the design of the military, for that matter. What is the overall view about getting out of Syria? It probably depends on the people that you ask. What about people that you talk to? Both sides of the coin. I will get answers from, I think we're making a difference,

to we're wasting our time. And I got that on the initial invasion of Iraq, the initial invasion of Afghanistan. There is one of the things that I enjoyed about the community I came from is that critical thinking was it's rewarded. It's not there's no attempt. And people think about this. You know, you watch Full Metal Jacket, you know, choke yourself with my hand and you get told what to do and how to do it and how much time you have to do it. People think that critical thinking has no place in the military, but where I came from, that's what we're looking for is people who are able to critically

think. So there would be, we would have political arguments, religious arguments, philosophical arguments in the team room, and then come together and go do exactly what it is that our nation expected us to do so you're going to get both you got there are people who are conservative and liberal republican and democrat and everything in between so i wish i could give you like a very precise answer but i have heard every spectrum of answer from this is awesome to this is stupid i've you know what confuses me i've heard different opinions on asad whether asad is, whether he's gassed his citizens, or whether or not he's a victim of propaganda, some mass smear campaign. I'm like, whoa, this is way past my pay grade. I've heard the same thing, and it's beyond mine as well, too.

or this is a real threat or whether you know he or whether it's something like the saddam hussein situation where yes he was an evil dictator but also removing him might create a power vacuum like libya create a power vacuum and qaddafi with libya i mean libya is a horrific example of that right yeah and i don't i don't know the long-term solution to those problems. Like I said, I spend enough of my waking hours truly questioning whether or not anything that I was involved in made my family or your family or Jamie's family safer. Did my actions erode what the rest of the world thinks about the United States of America? And, I mean, I flow back and forth. I think it had an impact in the moment. I think it had an impact stopping the water coming out of the dam. I think it was essential that it needed to be done.

But I don't know if any of that has an impact beyond that time period that it occurred. How much does it help you in talking about this stuff to give you a perspective? Like I know Cleared Hot, your podcast, you're very active with that. How much does that help you flesh these ideas out and have conversations about them? One of the most cathartic things that I do

is talk on the podcast about these topics. And I'll do a mix between guests and Q&A. Guess what people ask me about? They want to know about war and they want to know about these topics. So, and I'll do mix between guests and Q and a, guess what people ask me about? They want to know about war and they want to know about that stuff. And it forces me to sit there and truly gauge the depth of my beliefs and then answer the questions for myself as to why do I believe this? It is by far one of the most cathartic things that I have done is the ability to sit down and reflect. And I mean, I'm pretty honest about, I mean, if people ask me about killing, I'll talk about killing. If people ask me about mistakes, I'll tell you the worst mistakes that I ever made. Parenting, relationship with my wife, military, fill in the blank. So it's been

huge. And to be honest, I mean, you know this, I owe the suggestion from you to start in that podcast. I owe you a huge thank you for giving me that nudge. Well, you're so good. You were great on my podcast. I just knew you would do great at it. Yeah, I don't know. I probably have said to too many people, you should start a podcast. But it's worked with so many, with Jocko.

Phenomenal. And I bet you it's cathartic for him as well too i haven't asked him about it but i would suspect that it's the same thing yeah he's a he's a unique human he's an american treasure he should go in a time capsule right next to jerry number one he really should man he's something special but it's also like in terms of motivation he's a mindset alterer like you you hear the way he discusses things and thinks about things and if you can adopt those ideas and put them into your own head you really can shift who you are and and how you move through

this world if you can adopt a fraction of his ideas yeah or it'll change your philosophy there are some people that i see go very like they seem seem to be searching and they just want to dive in. It's like, you know, maintain some of yourself and adopt as much of that as you possibly can because you can go too far in anything. But yeah, the stuff that he's doing and the number of people, the number of times his name comes up in a positive manner, it's unbelievable. And I mean, I listened to the JRE where you're like, you know what, Jocko? I'm going to tell you something that I think I've said too much. You should start a podcast. Well, you know, Goggins is another one.

You know, Goggins just being a guest on this podcast. I know he hasn't started his own podcast, but one thing he did do is if you listen to Goggins' audio book, in his audio book, he has the book itself, which is read by another guy. He has the book itself, which is read by another guy, and then him and that guy discuss various chapters in the book and discuss the real events that led to these different things and how he felt about them. So it's a podcast wrapped up in a book, and it's excellent. So much better than just reading chapter and verse, all that additional information and all the breadth and depth that you can gather from that yeah it's an incredible medium i didn't i don't know i think i told you this i had never listened to a podcast before i came on yours so i didn't well we went a little crazy on that one and i maybe you know i talked a touch about guantanamo bay and but i still would say the same thing I just maybe would have been more educated about the breadth and depth of your podcast

it's I didn't realize at the feet and again I'm a fraction in comparison to other podcasts out there but even the volume of response that I get to mine it's unbelievable the number of people who are consuming this type of medium is mind-blowing well it's free

which is great and it's also it's easy you get it on your phone instantly so you could be in your car your phone is bluetooth up to your car and you say oh there's a nuclear hot bam you press play it starts playing yeah and because you know essentially it's audio is not that uh it's not that big a file it can stream really easily over 4g like instantaneously it's uh it's amazing you know it's just and to have everything free and instantly accessible like that so if you're a truck driver if you're driving long distances for work or if you're traveling on a plane and you can scroll pick a topic yeah i mean yeah what do you want to learn about there's that podcast out there for it, whatever it is.

For anything. There's crime podcasts and there's comedy podcasts and politics and technology. It's like it's never ending. And there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them and they're all free. So it's an amazing medium. And it's also a medium with a very low gate of entry. Like it's not difficult to jump over that gate or to get through all you really all you need is an account somewhere and you can do i've done a bunch of them just with

my iphone just using the voice recorder application from voice notes from a podcast uh from an iphone record it and then i'll send it to jamie and jamie will upload them like we've done a bunch of them on planes where just me and tony hinchcliffe sat on a plane, and we have a couple of cocktails, start talking shit into the iPhone. Into the phone. Yeah. And then, you know, that reaches a million people. Yeah. I mean, $400, you could start a podcast for $400.

Yeah. You get a recording device and some way to gather the sound, and you're off and running. Yeah. And there's so many people out there with unique perspectives, like you, like Jocko. There's hundreds of them. It's an exciting time. Exciting time for the medium. Listen, we did sit fucking three hours.

How crazy is that? It's almost four o'clock. It always feels like 90 minutes. I know. It's a time warp in this room, man. There's something weird. I think it's this table. Something going on.

It seems to be it. Andy, I love you, buddy. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you, man. Andy Stumpf, ladies and gentlemen. Cleared Hot Podcast available everywhere. Go get it.

Bye.