The Joe Rogan Experience - #1492 - Jocko Willink

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Jocko Willink is a decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, author of the book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. His podcast, The Jocko Podcast, is also available on Spotify.

If anybody's got the answers, it's Jocko. Got any answers? Oh, I'm not quite so sure about that. I'm not sure how this movie ends. This is the dumbest fucking movie ever. Do you know Magic the Gathering is now racist? I don't even know what Magic the Gathering is. It's some dorky game that nerds play.

Sorry, nerds. How is it racist? I don't know. I only saw the title of the article that they're trying to cancel Magic the Gathering. I'm like, oh, sorry. How is it? How is it racist? Um, I don't know. It was just read. I only saw the title of the article that they're trying to cancel magic, the gathering. I'm like, Oh Christ, I thought that's what you guys liked. I thought they liked magic, the gathering. I have no idea. Everything's, everything's, everything's problematic. Everyone's getting canceled. It's amazing how many people did blackface. Yeah, it's very strange. It's very strange. It's very strange.

I mean, it was on primetime TV, right? Yeah, a bunch of times. Yeah. I mean, like in the modern world, primetime TV. Jimmy Fallon was doing, well, he's doing a Chris Rock impression, which, by the way, you used to be able to do. When I was in high school, my friends were Mr. T for Halloween. Nobody gave a fuck Nobody was like Jimmy. What's wrong with you everybody's like oh, you're mr. T for Halloween

It was never like a problem. It's very it's a very strange thing You know like you can do whiteface no problem here. It is what is magic the gathering invoke prejudice card that's It's an enchantment card which restricts the caster's opponents only using summons that match the skin color of their opposing creatures. Huh? If you brought me on to talk about this, I should leave now. About Magic the Gathering. This is why I'm here, man.

We're in a bad way. It just shows how fucked up everything is. There's a lot of thin skin out there right now, apparently. I just don't, I mean, it seems like a perfect storm. Like if you wanted to engineer the downfall of society, you would do it in several steps. You would have a reality show president where everybody's mad at him. And then all the liberals get their feathers in a ruffle and everybody gets real super uptight. And then there's this big divide between the left and the right that's kind of manufactured.

And then you have this disease. Just lock everyone inside. Yeah, unprecedented. Shut down the economy. Force people to not work. So if your business falls apart, you could be the most hardworking, diligent, disciplined person who's always at work an hour early, always has your eyes dotted and your T's crossed and you still go broke and you're still fucked. And then you have this George Floyd thing and then boom, it just ignites the power keg. The other thing that you have to wrap around all this

is this social media, which is, you know, I'm only going to post things that are just going to completely make everyone that sees whatever I'm posting emotional and and filled with rage. Whether you're on the left or you're on the right. My goal is to enrage people. That's the goal. And then that just gets spun up over and over. So you're taking all these little incidents and you're multiplying times thousands and thousands of views. And then on top of that, mainstream media is the same thing, right? It's not like there's this huge difference between what the mainstream media shows and what social media.

They're both emotional media, just trying to make people emotional, which is the worst possible thing. No one makes good decisions when they're emotional. No. I spent my adult life trying to train humans to not get emotional in pressure situations. Why? Because it's going to end up bad every single time, every single time. And yet that's what our, that's what our society is based on right now. But it's based on these emotional reactions.

Yeah. Because of social media, I think, and because of things like YouTube and user-created content where anybody can kind of make videos, so many things are vying for folks' attention that mainstream media has resorted to click-baity type shit. Whether it's New York Times articles, which used to be beyond reproach, they've gone social justice warrior and click-baity. And all these other websites are 100% click-baity. that's the only way they can get people to pay attention like i saw like the dumbest fucking article i couldn't believe how dumb it was it was an article on ozark is like has ozark been canceled and i'm like fuck they canceled that show that show is amazing so then i click on the article the entire article is about a guy who couldn't find Season one on Ozark because there was a glitch and then he found it and so it's not kid

So the whole article was just bullshit. Yeah, but they got me They get everybody got you to click they got their advertising dollars because they can show the engagement with the audience exactly Well, here's a good one. CNN showed a guy got shot yesterday in San Bernardino. A Hispanic man got shot in San Bernardino. So that's the title. The title of the article is Hispanic man gets gunned down by the police in San Bernardino. What they leave out is the guy had a gun and was shooting at the cops.

So this guy's got a gun. There's photos of this gentleman with a gun. And there's a cop on his knees about to shoot the guy. The guy's standing in front of a gas station. There's gas pumps. Maybe he felt like they wouldn't shoot at him because the gas tanks were right behind

him. The pumps were right behind him. But why would they leave that out? Guy with gun in gunfight with cops dies is the right title. Not Hispanic man gunned down by cops. They're literally trying to incite anger and violence. They know that you read that and you see Hispanic man shot by cops like these motherfuckers. They're murderers. They won't stop.

And they leave out this picture of this man with a gun pointing it You're looking at me like I'm gonna say some kind of really profound answer I got nothing for you Because because you're exactly right that what is it? What do they set up that headline for? It's a outrage people anyone that actually opens it up and regions would actually probably say something like hmm Sounds like the cops did a good job on that one and killed a bad guy before he blew up a gas station in her He killed a bunch of innocent people But that's that's obviously not that I think if you try to write a headline the other way of how these heroic cops Face man with gun eliminate him before he can cause terror in this neighborhood. That would be a nice headline to read. But you're not going to see it.

You're not going to see that. Not today. Because it's not going to drive enough people crazy. Today, if your wife tweets, all lives matter, you can get fired. It doesn't even have to be you anymore. All lives matter. Just imagine a time where saying all lives matter is so controversial that you could get fired. Didn't that happen to a soccer player or something?

Yes. A soccer player's wife tweeted something like that. Yeah. The guy who runs the Kings or the guy who's the commentator for the Kings, they fired him, you know, and then this is a lot of it is this, right? So people are feeling a certain way and they're not, they're not feeling like this girl that wrote all lives matter. Do you think that was her clandestine way of showing that she's all about white pride? You know what I mean? No, she was thinking, Hey, everyone matters. She's probably having some nice thoughts, you know, she's, but then all of a sudden, no, this chick is evil, right, for doing this. And I think there's a lot of that. I think there's a lot of people that, I think most that's completely wrong. That's disgusting. It's horrible. It's heinous to watch.

I haven't heard anyone say anything other than that. So how are we just getting so completely divided on this whole thing and start attacking each other just over absolutely everything? That's a good point because this is literally a case where no one is saying there's nothing wrong with that cop did no one no one zero people zero people But yet everybody's still at each other's throats zero people have have Stuck up for that guy in any way shape or form even law enforcement. No law enforcement people saying you gotta understand This is how you control a man. You gotta lean on his neck for about eight minutes 40 40 45 seconds 46 seconds No one saying that and unfortunately what you know what you know what they're saying. They're saying Defund the police. Yeah, they're saying no more choke holds right which I think is crazy is crazy

Yeah, if you want to get someone to be under control and you can't choke them You know what you have to do? You have to hit them in the head with a baton seven times. And you've got to risk giving them brain damage, permanently injuring them. If people know what they're doing. I mean, obviously, if people know what they're doing, we'll put a choke on them. They'll wake up. They'll be cuffed.

We're all good. Yeah, obviously. But, you know, it's the people that are doing it wrong is the problem. The people that shouldn't be doing it in the first place. It's untrained people. But if you're a cop and you're in a fight for your life and you can't use chokeholds, that's fucking crazy. It's insane.

You're going to get shot and killed. Or somebody else is going to get shot and killed. Someone's going to take your gun. Yeah. And the idea of defund the police. And I understand the premise. Okay. And this is once again where many people that say defund the police, they don't mean, hey,

just get rid of police. Of course, there's a fraction of people that are saying defund the police means we don't want any more police anymore. There's a portion of people saying that. There's some people that are saying, well, if we defund the police, we can relocate some of that money and we can do, you know, better schools and we can put money into the infrastructure inside these neighborhoods. But here's the problem. You know what the police need more than anything else. They need money for training. And the way the police departments are set up, they do the most ridiculously

minuscule amount of training for what their job is. So as you know, I was in the SEAL teams, we would train for 18 months, 18 months. We would train to go on a six month deployment. Cops, they train, they get like two hours or four hours of combatives training a year a year that's that's complete insanity insanity it's complete insanity the thing i've been saying is cops should train one-fifth of the time one-fifth of the time you should be training whether it's two hours a day four times a week Or whether it's one day a week where you're gonna go and you're gonna go through scenarios You're gonna do combatives. You're gonna work with simunition. You're gonna do de-escalation drills

Because it's really hard I mean being a cop is I think is the hardest job in the world and by the way They're not gonna have to worry about defunding the police because no one's going to want to be a cop anymore. Who is going to be fired up to be a cop right now? Who's going to think, you know what? When I grow up, I want to be hated by entire, you know, by a massive portion of the country. I want to be viewed as someone that's, uh, that kills innocent people. The recruiting in cop for police is going to go down so hard.

It's going to be ridiculous. It's going to be ridiculous. It's going to be ridiculous. And then who are you getting there? You're going to get people that are worst level people, worst level humans are going to show up to be cops. So the training piece though, they should do very, very scenario driven training, right? Where you come into a room and this isn't like super expensive stuff either you come into a room There's a person there They appear to be compliant you ask you you learn how to talk to them You very quickly learn that instead of yelling them out of the out of the gate you say hey, man, what's going on? Hey, what's your name? You know what's going on? We got a call here is everything okay, you just immediately de-escalate

Then you learn what to do when they're not when they don't respond the way you want them to respond then you learn what? To do when they start to do something drastic. What's the best thing for you and you play through these scenarios? It's just like jujitsu in the fact that What what makes you just you're good? What makes you just you're good is we can go hard against each other Over and over again and not really get hurt not really get killed so you just so good? What makes you just so good is we can go hard against each other over and over again and not really get hurt, not really get killed. So you get really good at it. That's what you need to do in training for police. You need to go through these tough scenarios over and over again because you do get better at it. You do get better at it. You become, you learn how to mentally detach and not get emotional and realize that there's other things that are happening when you see the

George Floyd case a Couple of the other cops too. I think two of the other guys were complete rookies, right? They had been on the force for a very short period of time No one in that group of four. Obviously you got the killer himself He's he's actually conducting the act but all the other guys are not paying attention. They're they're all emotional themselves Hey stay back and and they're probably watching him saying what's why isn't that guy moving and they're just caught up in it Whereas if someone would have showed up on the scene or one of those guys had been through some good training in their life They would have said

What's happening here hold on my partner over there has been on this guy for two minutes. He's not moving anymore. I'm going to walk over and say, Hey man, let me take over. I got this. Go over there. Decompress. This takes training. You have to train people. And I got, I saw this over and over again in the SEAL teams training guys. You get a young kid that's coming through training for the first time and they go into a room and they're getting shot with simunition bullets or there's someone yelling and screaming or they, we'd put, we'd put Arabic women coming, walking out of rooms. We'd have people get blown up with wounds. We would do this to them over and over again. So they realize, okay, I just got to relax. I got to take a step back. I got to detach

from this situation so I can process what's happening and I can make a good decision because as I said earlier, no one can make a good decision because as I said earlier, no one is making a good decision when they're panicked, when they're freaked out, when they're scared as a jujitsu guy, when someone puts hands on you, you're not actually scared, right? You're like, Oh, okay. I know what to do here. If you don't know jujitsu, if you've never had someone grab you before, or you haven't had someone grab you in 17 months or 14 months no one's laid hands on you because you got a badge and a gun so people when you tell them do something 95% of time they go okay yeah I don't

want to get in trouble but then somebody grabs you you're instantly your your emotions are spiked your adrenaline spiked and the only way to overcome that is through consistent training that that happens on a regular basis. You can't just train somebody one time. It's like ring rust. You know, you can't just train somebody one time and, oh, now I don't need to train anymore. No, you need to do continuous training. So, so that fact right there, we, if we want to, if we want to help the police through these situations, we need to invest more money into them. We need to get them better training. We need to invest more money into them. We need to get them better training

we need to pull them out of the field to train and Pull them out of the field to decompress because You ever done a ride-along? No like you Whether you're doing a ride-along whether you're going into any situation where you're thinking you could be killed And even if it's just a remote chance, but you're doing that all the time, all the time. And you're hearing, you're seeing on the news, you're, Oh, you hear this. Oh, your buddy got shot. Your buddy got whatever this other guy got, you know, take his gun taken away. Like that stuff happens. That stuff happens. People get killed. I mean, there's been, I think there's been 31 cops killed this year 31 cops killed this year and a lot of those

that's not including you know like a car accident or COVID there's been a bunch of COVID but just people that have been engaged with bad guys and they got killed so you're a cop when another cop gets killed you're thinking that could be you. So that's your mindset. And that mindset builds and that mindset builds and you're working 10 hour days and you're working 12 hour days and there's no training and there's no breaks. Where do you end up? Right? Where do you end up? You end up being a little bit paranoid. You end up being a little bit angry. What happens when you get in a fight with your wife? You know, it's like all these things you add them together it's a freaking hard job and

from a from a like an entire Systemic way of training and recruiting and and keeping police Ready to do their job Whatever that job entails because let's face it most of the, whatever that job entails. Cause let's face it. Most of the time that in job entails, well, I guess most of the time it entails, Hey, I'm going to go have a bad, I'm about to go have a bad relationship with another human being. That's what's about to happen, right? Whether I'm pulling you over, whether I'm, I've been called to your house cause you were yelling and screaming

and people heard your wife screaming or whatever. That's what's happening. I'm showing up in a bad relationship. You don't like me and I already don't like you. That's where we start. That's what's happening. I'm showing up in a bad relationship. You don't like me and I already don't like you. That's where we start That's where we start. So we got to train people for that We also got to train them for all the times that they go into Help people save people. They're the first people on the scene at car accidents. People are bleeding out We got to train them for that And then they have to also be trained for hey, this is a bad guy That's gonna this is the guy that you just talked about at a gas station with a weapon that wants to kill a bunch of people.

You got to be prepared for that whole spectrum as a police officer. And yet we send them to a three month long police academy and then we send them out in the street and that's what they do day in, day out, day in, day out. It seems to me that they need to be vetted too much better than they are now just like the seals Like you can't get through buds unless you are a superior human being you have to be able to tolerate a bunch of shit That most people are gonna fall apart during and this is this seems to me That there's a great way to weed out people that just don't have it Yeah, there's to weed out people that just don't have it. Yeah.

There's one thing that's interesting just from a physical perspective. Most police departments don't even have a minimum physical requirement to continue to be on the force. You have to be at a certain level to graduate from the academies, but oftentimes there's no standard beyond that. Yeah. I've seen cops before that were like, this is hilarious. Like what is going to stop someone from closing the distance on you?

Like you, you ain't getting to that gun. Yep. But the mental aspect is stuff that you can get better at. Yes. You can get better at it, but you only get better at it through training. Right. And you only get really comfortable through training a lot. And yet we put these people in these horrible positions over and over and over again. Through training right and you only get really comfortable through training a lot and yet

we put these people in these horrible positions over and over and over again and We get we don't give them the proper training and now there's these politicians that because of the current social climate They're encouraged to want to defund the police. That's a great way for them to get Brownie points from their constituents the people want the police defunded which is that what it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life it's it's so crazy that this is actually gaining steam to the point where in Minneapolis because they're trying to quiet down the mob they've actually gone ahead and done it what the fuck is Minneapolis gonna look like in a year from now? It's gonna look like Mad Max. I Mean it's gonna be crazy. That's gonna be it's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be

You know criminals will go there to commit crimes if there's no if there's no police there Are you crazy by the way this Jocko energy drink is the shit? Yeah, I just don't understand where they think this game ends. And I don't think they've planned it out. They're not playing chess. The other the other thing that, you know, you're talking about this brownie points for the politicians and and there's brownie points and there's people trying to create sides. It's my side versus your side. And that's a completely political thing. Right. sides it's my side versus your side and that's a completely political thing right and all that does is increase the divide between the police and the civilians and and this reminds me a lot of of a counterinsurgency right so

counterinsurgency the insurgents are you know bad guys inside of a country the country's not bad there's some bad guys in a country. So what you have to do is you actually have to go out and build relationships with the good people inside that country so that the good people inside that country can help you get rid of the bad people. What happens if you go out and this, so this is Ramadi, Iraq. This is my last deployment to Iraq. There's a bunch of just totally normal, good people, Iraqi people that are living in the city of Ramadi. What do they want to do? You know what they want to do? They want to send their kids to

school. They want to run their little market. They want to do whatever that, whatever they do, that's what they want to do. They have the same goal as a normal family. They're just a normal bunch of people. And inside that group of people, there's a bunch of bad people. And these are insurgents. Some of them are foreign fighters. Some of them are foreign regime elements from Saddam. But they're bad. And they want to create chaos and mayhem.

So, Americans, we go in there. If we go in there super heavy-handed, and while I go to capture or kill one bad guy I Kill or maim a couple of those normal civilians what happens? Well a couple of those normal civilians family go wait you guys aren't good. You guys are bad you guys just killed my brother and he didn't do anything wrong and Then we do it again, And then we do it again. And then we do it again. And each time that we do this, we're, we're creating more animosity from the local populace who, by the way, like I said, they're just good, normal people. So what we had

to do is really focus on going out and building relationships with the local populace. How do we do that? And one of the things, this happened after I left, but you remember the surge that took place and they sent a bunch more troops over there. Part of the reason that they sent that surge and part of the reason that that was allowed to happen was because the Battle of Ramadi, where I fought, went very well.

And since it went well, people said, well, maybe we can pull this off. So they sent more troops. And one of the directives that General Petraeus gave is he said there can be no more drive by counterinsurgency. And what he meant that by that was when you go to a neighborhood, you can't just drive through the neighborhood in your Humvee, in your bulletproof Humvee with your windows up, drive through, show of force force and then leave that that doesn't work

what you have to do is stop your vehicles you have to get out you have to talk to the local populace you have to ask them what's going on you have to ask them if they need anything you have to build relationships with the local populace the good local populace that just wants those insurgents out of there and that's what I don't see happening. And the more we increase this divide between the police and the civilians, the worse that's going to get. And so the police have to start doing a better job of outreach of, Hey, well, you know, I asked you if you did a ride along, they should be offering ride alongs all the time to the local

kids, 17 year old kids, 15 year old kids. Hey, come and see what my job is like. Come and help me out. That 15 year old kid, he knows who the bad actors are. He knows who the good kids are. You know, bring that kid along on a ride along, let him see what it looks like from your angle. Get out, meet the parents, meet the families. That's where we're failing to build relationships between the police and the civilians and that causes That that that causes these problems. I think you're a hundred percent correct, but I don't hear anybody repeating what you're saying That's what's terrifying to me. I think everything you're saying is logical. It makes sense. It comes from experience I don't hear anybody saying this. Yeah, and I well, I think maybe it's because people just don't recognize what's happening because

they're too in it, right? They're too in it. They're, they're wrapped up in it. And, and that's another part, you know, I talked about recruiting, who you recruiting, recruit those kids, recruit those kids, but you have to build a relationship with them before you can add, before anyone's going to go into the police. And look, the, I think it's the, I think it's the LA police department. If you look at the LA police department compared to the racial makeup of LA, they, they're pretty equivalent and they're

pretty equivalent on purpose. They do that for a reason. So you got to get that. You got to continue to build that, those relationships so that we talk to one another You know, we actually communicate with each other because any time you know, I'm allowed to sit over here in my area You're sitting over there in your area We're building animosity. We build that kind of animosity between each other and now the littlest thing the littlest thing I mean there was a woman that was killed in Minneapolis like two three years ago Do you remember this one? Yes female? like a yoga instructor Called the police the police called the police to report a disturbance police showed up and there's no video no footage

She gets killed by the cops She gets killed by the cops It's insane that these things happen. But we also have to remember what, like I said, what is a police officer thinking about? And what kind of training and we give them and what kind of psychological screening to your point, what kind of strike? And it's not just a one time psychological screening, because guess what? People get burnt out and it happens at different times to different people. You take 35 guys in combat. I've got some guys at the end of a six month deployment there. You know

what they're telling me? Can I stay longer? I'm doing fine. You get one month into that deployment and you've got other guys that are saying, Hey, do you need anyone to head home early? Right? That happens. So you think in a police force of a thousand people or whatever size your police forces, you're going to have some people that are steady, mentally stable. They can deal with it. They can go, they can, they can get being an officer involved shooting today and tomorrow they can go back to their job and be perfectly fine. There's other people they could never work again after they're an officer involved shooting. What kind of investment are we making into this psychological health of police? And look, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm sitting

here just putting it all on the police because everyone is playing a role in this. And one of the things that you need to look at as well is how to get arrested, right? There should be a public service course on how you should get arrested. This is what you should do. If the cops are pulling you over, if the cops ask you, if the cops approach you about something, here's what you should think. One of the things you should think is, okay, this cop may not be bad. This cop may be looking out for my welfare right now.

That's a great hopeful thought. The other thing that you have to think is kind of worst case scenario. This cop might be agitated. This cop might be looking for somebody that fits my description. This cop might, might've just been in a fight with his wife. He might've just lost a partner. There's a million bad things. Use that scenario in your head. Use that scenario in your head to, to contemplate how you're going to interact with a police officer, which is, you know what they're looking at? They're looking at your hands. You know why because that's where the threat comes from the threat comes from your hands So when you're making quick movement with your hands don't do that listen to what they say move move slowly when you move This should be public service. The police should be putting out

Hey, if you interact with the police we hate to have say this, but since our police sometimes are in bad situations, here's some things we recommend and we highly suggest and we beg. We beg that you do this. We beg because what happens to these cops when they kill somebody? What happens to them? Their lives are totally destroyed. Well, that was the thing about that guy in Minneapolis. He'd already killed people. He'd already killed people. He'd already been involved in I think it's at least two shootings.

And he had more than a dozen complaints against him. Yeah. Not good. Not good. I mean, it's obvious by the end, by the end result. That's the type of guy he was. It's pretty obvious by the fact that he was able to do that to a man. The guy's literally calling out to his dead mother.

You know, I mean the, the, the type of man that can stay on someone's neck while they're doing that. When all that guy did was have a counterfeit $20 bill. That's it. This is where, when you talk about psychological screening and that, that's why I'm saying it has to be it has to be constant. Yeah, because People people change. Yeah, right and red flags. I mean Like you said hindsight's 2020 we're looking at this case now. We're going oh who the hell lets this guy continue to police and By the way, interestingly enough if you talk to internal affairs at police departments The vast majority of the complaints that they get about

other, about police are from police. So they come, they report each other. That's little known fact. Most of the, most of the reports don't come from the civilians out there saying, Hey, this happened or that happened. Most of the time it's cops saying, Hey, this guy was out of line here. Well, that's, that's a good sign. This, it just just it doesn't look rosy when I'm looking at the future. I know I don't see a way during this climate. Because you know look for every 10 viral video that you see of a of a cop hitting and somebody with a baton or a Riot or throwing something through a window for every 10 of those viral videos. There's another viral video that has You know the guy with the free hugs t-shirt on that's out talking to the cops and saying hey You know I I get it and they're communicating with each other and talking. And when you communicate with people, it's just like a hostage rescue, basic technique. You want to humanize, you want to humanize instead of dehumanize. And right now we're just dehumanizing

each other completely. And that's what scares me more than anything else is if we can't talk to each other, because look, you take the most hardened soldier in war some you know some badass soldier that's done for deployments six deployments whatever and you put them into a room with a kid and a mom an Iraqi kid and her mom or an Afghan kid a mom and you put them in that room and say hey sit here for 15 minutes and find out what they're about here's an interpreter that that guy's gonna come out of there gone yeah I get where they're about. Here's an interpreter that that guy's going to come out of there going, yeah, I get where they're coming from. And same thing, vice versa. You take a hardened jihadist and you say, Hey, talk to this guy over here about what

he's trying to do inside your country. Just, just, just talk to him when you open up the communications and are you going to get some extremists on both ends? Yes, you will. So maybe I shouldn't have said the most hardened, and the most hardened because you know what the most hardened soldier becomes a killer Becomes a killer that that happens happens all the time. You know, I I Shouldn't say it happens all time. It happens from time to time. That's how you get the me lie massacre It happens the the most hardened jihadist. They're not going to change their mind They're not going to come to any, any rose colored view of America, but barring those total extremes, you've got people, you got other human beings.

And if you can get them to talk to each other, they can find consensus. They can find common ground. But if they're not talking to each other, then we don't move it make any progress and what to your whole kind of point about what's happening right now, there's less and less communication between people open communication. And you say, oh, okay. Explain to me what happened. Tell me what went down. And then you say, hey, let me tell you what it's like for a cop, being a cop, when he sees that, when he sees something going on. You know how many domestic violence cases happen and the person shows up and they're getting assaulted by both parties? So maybe that's what this cop was thinking when he showed up and

Saw your mom in this situation and did this to your dad, right? Like this is real conversations, but we don't we don't have them and not only we don't have them. It seems like It seems like there's forces that are actively trying to prevent us from talking to each other from sitting down at a table And saying hey man What tell me what's going on? What for us? Who wants who wants the country to be divided it's the people that you're talking about earlier that that how do they score points? How do I score points with this group? How do I score points with the other group? It's by making Making everything as divisive as possible It's it's it's horrible to watch man. It's sicken, making everything as divisive as possible. It's, it's, it's horrible

to watch, man. It's sickening to watch. I was reading a whole series of tweets where there's a journalist that was talking about how, um, cops shooting black men is a real problem, but another real problem that's not being discussed by this black lives matter group is black on black crime and how do we stop all the murders that are taking place in chicago and this this is something that should be discussed and this guy was getting attacked and one of the one of the another journalist literally tweeting at him saying you have been told not to discuss this. But yet he ignores these commands that he should not discuss.

This is a very real issue. As if somehow or another bringing up another issue that is also a problem diminishes the original issue of this guy getting killed by cops, which of course it doesn't. Yeah.

But the idea is that there's problems. There's real problems. And it's not just the cops killing these people. Look, the cop killed this guy in Minneapolis. He didn't do anything in Seattle. How the fuck did that shit happen in Seattle? Well, it happened in Seattle because of this reactionary world where one person does something somewhere it gets through social media it gets

through the mainstream media it becomes this this huge inflammatory subject and then the next thing you know windows are getting smashed things are getting lit on fire cars are getting turned over blocks Blocks are getting taken. And that's where we find ourselves. I think it was May 29th. There was a cop killed, I want to say in Texas. And he was killed when they rolled onto a scene. They got a call, hey, suspicious person running through the neighborhood. They roll up on the scene.

They start, a couple, a few cops are now searching for this guy and they see a building with an open door. They go, okay, let's that maybe he's in there. Let's go clear this building with an open door. They go in this building with an open door. There's shots fired. One of the cops killed one of the other cops. So, so, so just, just you know friendly fire death that right there if you if you take that and you just extrapolate that over how hard it is to

be a police officer that you can be going into a building and you shoot one of your friends because you think they're bad. That is a real problem. That's how hard this job is. My point is that's how hard this job is, but we have to do a better job of explaining that. We have to do a better job of explaining how hard this job is. As far as the, uh, Hey, don't talk about black on black violence. I was trying I was talking with my podcast bro, echo Charles who's a black guy and

We were talking about that and I said, you know, I think it might have a little bit to do with this if you were if you're watching UFC and there's two guys that are fighting and the round ends, like just, just at the end of the round, all of a sudden the referee comes in and like punches one of the, like, like just,

just Muay Thai kicks a guy in the head and knocks him out. Everyone would be completely, utterly outraged about this. Right. Cause of course that guy wasn't in the game. What's that guy doing? So I think there's a little bit of that. That's that's the the referee is supposed to not do that and When you see a cop the thought is hey that guy's like that guy's viewed as a referee

That guy's not supposed to be doing this. So I think that is kind of where some of that, that, that outrage comes from because this is a cop. This isn't supposed to be happening here. This, this guy is no, not supposed to be killing people. Right.

And he did. That's also that the cop is just a person who has this extraordinary power. Yes. Extraordinary extraordinary power. Yes. And extraordinary responsibility, too. Right. What's terrifying to me is that when I'm looking at this idea to defund the police, and then I'm thinking, like, what do these neighborhoods look like if you wind up doing that? And then how do you get back out of that?

What do you do? Refund the police? Do you ramp it up and do it better next time i mean this is a long process you're looking at a lot of trial and error here over you know perhaps multiple years before they figure out what what they fucked up yeah and i know there's some there's some city i think it's in new jersey that camden yes that completely disband dismantled their police but then they rebuilt a new police department and I actually get that like you could get a department that was so completely

and utterly corrupt that you said, you know what? We're getting rid of all of them. And you ever see cocaine Cowboys? No great documentary. But one of the things it talks about is the corruption during the cocaine era of the 80s where the entire graduating police force, from the police academy, the entire graduating year, everyone was either murdered

or went to jail for corruption. Everyone. The entire graduating class. That's how bad it was. So, if you have that kind of problem, I get it. You might want to dismantle that police force. You know what happens in the SEAL team sometimes?

Sometimes there's a platoon that's so bad that they just dismantle the whole platoon. How often does that happen? Very rarely, but it does happen. Really? Yep. And what causes something like that? Usually, well, the problem is bad leadership. It's always bad leadership because you can take a bunch of knuckleheads and you give them a good leader and they'll do they'll do fine so it's always comes down to the leadership

so sometimes they'll replace a leader but if the and usually when they replace leader you'll watch the platoon will turn around almost instantly because someone steps in and says all right here's what we're doing here's how we're doing it and they they make that change But sometimes you have just like a bad platoon and they say, you know what? You guys are done. It seems incredibly difficult to be a good leader. One of the, one of the more interesting things about what you're doing, uh, with your platform, whether it's your podcast or the Instagram videos that you put out, you're showing what good leadership is. There's not a lot of people,

when you look at, if you get a thousand people, how many of those people are going to be a real good leader? Well, this is what's, this is what has become my career after the SEAL teams, because I got very, very lucky in the SEAL teams. Very, very lucky. First of all, my whole career was just luck. I was the luckiest guy ever in the SEAL teams and I happen to be in the right places at the right times and I got some great experience in Some very tough situations and then the last thing that I did in the SEAL teams for almost the last three years I was in was I ran the training the tactical training not the training where guys carry boats on their head and carry logs around? But I didn't do that. I didn't I went through it, but I didn't run that training. I ran the training where

Everything I was talking about you're running scenarios. You're putting people in bad situations. You're using simunition You're doing all these things so I got to see over and over again leaders get put into pressure situations and how their leaders responded that how the team responds to that leader and what these different things wash out how they wash out and what's interesting is and what I Really realized when I was in that position is that their leadership is a skill And you can get better at it now just like fighting just like jiu-jitsu There's certain people that have a natural propensity to be good at it.

You got some, let's say someone's really strong, right? They're going to have an advantage. Let's say someone's super flexible. They're going to have a little advantage. Let's say someone has, they're big, right? These things are advantages in fighting. In leadership, it's the same thing. Let's say someone is super articulate.

That's helpful. Let's say someone doesn't have a bad temper. That's very helpful. But's say someone is super articulate. That's helpful. Let's say someone doesn't have a bad temper. That's very helpful, but everyone is at a different level. Well, just like you can take a bunch of different sized and shaped and athletic ability people, and you can make them better at fighting. You can take a bunch of people with different levels of leadership characteristics and you can improve them. And then there are actual moves. There's actual moves that you can do as a leader that are just like a jujitsu move. Oh, Joe comes to me and he's yelling and screaming at me that he didn't get the, he didn't, I didn't give him two extra

people to go on his job. Instead of me going, Hey Joe, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. Instead, I actually listened to you, right? I listened to you say, well, hold on. I didn't know you needed that many people. What do you what do you need them for? So I show a little sense of urgency. I kind of reflect what your emotions are so I'm not just Creating a fight between you and me because if you and I are fighting you and I are not finding a solution So I'm gonna reflect a little bit of your emotion and then I'm gonna diminish it a little bit so you and I can Have a real conversation. So there's moves that you can do as a leader that functioned like a jiu-jitsu move and they're very very powerful and the more of them you learn the better off you'll be and

You need to practice them. You won't be good at them out of the gate It's gonna take some just like if I showed you an arm lock and you never done jiu-jitsu before You're not gonna be able to get on the mat and do it to somebody you're gonna have to try it a couple times you have to learn the little nuances to the move so there are ways that leaders can get better and yes there's absolutely natural leadership qualities that make people just a natural better leader but they even those people can improve so your question of out of a people, how many really good leaders there are,

well, you have to ask, okay, you're just talking about how many people are just naturally born great leaders. Probably your suspicion is correct. It's not a huge amount. But how many of those leaders can you improve exponentially in their ability to lead? And that's what, you know, I have a company, Echelon Front. That's what we do all the time is we go and work with companies. We work with leaders. That is exactly what we do and we take companies of I mean we work with companies that have 150,000 employees and you start getting everyone all the all the leaders aligned and getting the frontline troops understanding where the

where the leadership is and what they're thinking and getting the frontline troops, understanding where the leadership is and what they're thinking. And so you can become a much, much better leader over time. Now, how much of this do we see in the civilian sector? How much, even more directly, how much of this do we see in the political world? The answer is an unbelievably small amount. I mean, it's a ridiculously small amount. It's a ridiculously small amount. Why is that? I bet there's a there's a lot of reasons first of all who who at this point in The world thinks that that sounds like a great job, right? Hey, I'm gonna go get attacked from all sides

I'm gonna have my personal life picked apart I'm gonna get you know make I'm gonna work really hard and really not I'm gonna pay cap my personal life picked apart. I'm going to get, you know, make, I'm going to work really hard and really not, I'm going to have a pay cap on how much money I make. There's all kinds of reasons why becoming a politician doesn't look like the best job for, for most people that would look and say, Hey, would I rather be the CEO of a company and make a ton of money and make, create a huge product and leave a big impact and influence thousands of people that work at my company in a positive way? Or would I rather go and get ridiculed and get broke down and have to try and get my

job again in four years or two years or whatever the case may be? It's a tough, that's a tough job too. And a lot of people say, I'm not going to, why would I jump into that game? Well, I know I say that. Why would I jump into that game? Why would I want to go and be a politician right now? Right? It's crazy.

Like for me to, for me to want to go into the into the political world there would have to be Complete and utter chaos in America. I mean wait way beyond beyond where we're at right thought about this Yeah, I mean I'm telling you what I think when because people ask no you should do this you should do that I say You know we're not at a point where we need this. We might be about four days away from it. We could be. I think the answer, you know, let's get Dwayne The Rock Johnson. I agree with you. He's the guy that could really, I think, unify people.

And I think he would have to run as an independent. And I recommend he does it right now. Right now. He should be like, yeah, you know what? I'm in. I'm in. I think he would win. I think he would win. I really think he would win as an independent. He's Obviously a smart guy. He's super articulate He listens

You can tell that he listens. I mean when you see him interact with people he's he's very genuine how he interacts He's built businesses Right. He's built big well Really, uh productive businesses that are doing great genuine how he interacts he's built businesses right he's built big well really productive businesses that are doing great he's I think he'd be great it's got a fantastic work ethic I got a fantastic work work ethic that he you know he built he came up from nothing right he had seven bucks in his pocket we all know the story and and he has more bucks in his pocket than that now

so And most important I think I think he's just a popular guy You know he would get up and and when the country's going through hard times you know, I was talking to a friend on the way up here and They were saying hey, you know people people want leadership and they're looking for it and they're not hearing it. And a lot of times people don't even recognize the fact that they don't have leadership. You don't even recognize it. It's a leadership vacuum. So they don't even

know what they should be thinking. Let me give you an example. Let's take a SEAL platoon. SEAL platoon raids a house. There's some explosions. There's some gunfire. And no one's really sure where it's coming from. And no one's really sure what to do. Now that individual, a lot of the individuals in that platoon are just kind of holding on security. They're not really sure what to do. And they're not really even recognizing that there's a leadership vacuum. But then someone comes in, the leader, the platoon chief, the platoon commander comes in and goes, everyone get to the roof right now. And everyone goes, Oh, cool. Now we know what to do.

So same thing happening in America right now. There's no kind of voice saying, Hey, everyone, this is what I just saw on this video. This is what I just saw. This was a heinous crime. This obviously we have some deep rooted problems that we need to fix here's the way I'm gonna move forward addressing these problems getting to the bottom of them and here's how long the timeline is gonna be and by the way my ears are open and you know where the place you know where I'm coming right now I'll be in Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon that's you know like oh we got a problem like that if we have a problem like that. I am going on the ground I will be there. I'll be there. What about my guys? I'm the president so I'll be there in what two hours

I'll be there on the ground. I'm gonna find out what's going on. I'm gonna meet with people. We're gonna talk I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna find out what this means. I'm gonna get to the bottom of these problems That's that's what then you can actually speak From a position of okay. I just spoke to these nine people matter of fact. They're coming with me We're gonna come up with a plan We're gonna come up with a plan together You know, that's another huge leadership. Everyone thinks in the military that the that the leader's sitting at the top going All right, gentlemen, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna going to approach this building from the West. We're going to assault the front

door. No, that's not the way it works. That's not the way it should work. The way it should work is I say to you, Joe, I say, hey, Joe, here's the target I want you to go after tonight. Come up with a plan. And you say, okay, cool. And then you, if you're a good leader, you get with your team and say, hey guys, here's the target we're going after. How do you all think we should do it? And now you all come up with your own plan together. And then you come back to me and say, Hey guys, here's the target we're going after. How do you all think we should do it? And now you all come up with your own plan together. And then you come back to me and say, Hey Jocko, here's how I want to do it. And I said, looks good. And maybe if I got to make a little adjustment, I say, Hey, make this a little adjustment here, or maybe use this weapon over here or whatever. I make little tiny adjustments, but it's still your plan.

And from a leadership perspective, that means you and your team are totally bought into the plan. You made it up. As opposed to me coming down and barking orders at you and telling you how we're going to do it. Doesn't work. I mean, I can force you to do it because I outrank you. No, I order you to do this. That doesn't fly. You know how many times in my entire military career I said, hey, I'm the boss.

You better do what I tell you to do. You want to know how many times I said that? Zero. Zero times. No one thinks like that. So in a leadership position, what you have to do is say, hey, I'm going to come. I'm going to find out what's going on. I'm going to talk to people and we're going to put together a plan to figure out how we're

going to get this solved. This is not acceptable in America. That sounds fantastic. But what if you're a Republican and they're Democrats, and then you get on the ground and you have a mayor that's non-compliant, you have a governor that disagrees with your strategy. They don't want you there in the first place. They want to work it out themselves. They want to defund the police. They're voting unanimously to defund the police. They don't like what you're saying. Cool. Okay.

If that's where we're at right now, let's come up with a plan. Let's see how we get through this. Here's some things I'm worried about. Because if you're telling me you want to defund the police because you think that this police department is completely and utterly corrupt. Okay, let's explore that. Because you could be right. You could be right. This is where a lot of leaders make a mistake where it becomes an ego thing, especially

like you're talking Republican and Democrat. So that means if I'm a Republican, no Democrat can have a good idea ever. And if I'm a Democrat, no Republican can have a good idea ever. That's completely wrong. That's completely wrong. So even right now, like when you threaten me right now, right now, you're like, hey, what if I tell you I want to defund the police and I tell you I don the cops. And I want you to tell me all those things as a good leader. You know what I'm gonna say? All right. There must be something really bad going on here beyond even

what I just saw on this video. I'm coming and I want to hear what's happening. And I want you to tell me what your suggestions are. And if your suggestions are to defund the police, let's explore where that, where that plays out. Let's see where that ends up. Because as we start peeling back the layers, even the most ardent anti-police person, you're going to get to a point where you say, okay, when one of your constituents' house is being broken into, who are they going to call?

What mechanism are we going to put in place for security? How are we going to keep people safe from crime? And then they've got to answer that question. And maybe they come up with a good answer. I don't know yet, but as a leader, you have to listen to other people's ideas and we have to, you, you absolutely have to do that. There's a saying from Patton leader on the front line is always right. The leader on the front, the leader on the front line is always, always right. The leader on the front, the leader on the front line is always right. So I've always tried to embrace that theory, not just from a leadership perspective, but even from a human perspective, you know, when you want to tell me something that I don't know about, I'm going to listen to you. I'm actually going to, I'm actually

really going to listen to you. I'm going to try and ask myself, well, let's see, Joe lives in this city and Joe's here with this community. And Joe is telling me right now that we should have no police here. Well, could he be very emotional? Yes, he could. Does that mean I should not listen to anything he says? No, it doesn't. It means I should monitor your emotions and I should take that into account. But I should also be saying there's got to be some core of truth to what he's saying now Is it possible that Joe's just a bad actor and just evil? Yes, it is. How do I know that unless I listen to you? Their answer is you don't you know what I'm hearing right now Jocko and the rock That's what I'm hearing. Come on, son.

I think, yeah, well, I really hope it doesn't get to that point. What you're saying all makes fantastic sense. But the problem is everybody is so partisan. It's so difficult to get people to work together. And people are so, they have so much invested in keeping this party divided by these party lines. Keeping the country divided by the right and the left. It's so nuts. It's completely nuts.

It's completely nuts. And when you hear the extremists on either side, you should say to yourself, you should say to yourself, they want us to fight, right? It's like, you know, here, I'll drop dime on myself. I'm a big, like when I was a kid in the SEAL teams, I was an instigator. If I could talk smack to two different people and let them start to get escalating like they wanted to fight, I would do that all day long, especially once I started training people jujitsu.

You know, I'd be the guy that was saying, oh, he thinks he could take you now because he trained for two weeks. You haven't been here. And he'd be like, what are you, he said that that you know, I would do that all day long escalate So we have to do that because it's fun to watch people fight to the death Instigating people oh, it's fun. Yeah, there's there's some level of fun to it. Yeah, but fighting to the death is a different kind of fun Yeah, but fighting to the death is a different kind of fun. Yeah, but when you recognize that when people on the extremes are telling you extreme things, that what they want is to create a divide. That's what they want.

So that you just go, you know what? I just can't have that, so I'm voting here. Or I just can't have this, so I'm voting here. It's a nightmare. It is a nightmare. It's a very difficult one to get out of you need real leadership to get out of it yep and that's just absent right now on both sides totally absent and there's no middle ground no no there's no one that says well you know i i you know i i like some of trump's policies right someone says that it's like oh just destroy that you must be a nuts

Yeah, or you know, I agree with I agree with Nancy Pelosi on this thing. You must be you know a communist, you know either way, but that's the way that's where we're at Yeah, that's that's why unfortunately well fortunately unfortunately, but if if the rock was gonna run I think he would oh, I think he would, I think he would have to run as an independent to just say, listen, I'm not down. There's some things I agree with over there. There's some things I agree with over there. So you know what I'm doing?

I'm going in the middle, which is where most of America is. So if you want to vote extremist, you can go to this side, other extreme, you can go to this side. Everyone else vote for me. When was the last time someone even won as a governor That was an independent was it Jesse Ventura? Possibly Minnesota. Yeah, possibly might have been him I Mean you never even hear about it. Yeah, well that's there's a whole like money thing that happens right?

There's a whole money thing where if you're not a Republican or Democrat You're not gonna get those big coffers full of money to put paid advertising out and get people in the streets to vote for you. Yeah, you don't have the machine behind you. You don't have the DNC behind you or the Republican Party. Yeah, it's a real weird situation we find ourselves in with no clear path to sanity. There's no clear path to sanity if we don't talk to each other and right now we're not Yeah, we're not I've seen uh, you know, the people are so

Just angry and just angry when you talk to him about this stuff Just anger comes out. It's horrible. It's horrible to watch. Yeah. What disturbs me is that I don't see, I mean, in the past when there's been disputes or things have been wrong, it seems like there's a clear path to sort of work things out.

It doesn't seem like a clear path. It seems like every day it kind of gets a little worse, like people get ramped up even more. And then there's this event that's looming on the horizon, this November event, this election event. And no matter what, whether it's left or right, whether Biden wins or Trump wins, there's going to be madness and chaos.

It seems hard for me to understand that biden could it could maintain his health you know through a presidency that seems very challenging to me yeah i mean it seems like he's been going down you know with his coherence level you can kind of see it over even months right yeah he's on a really really rapid downward spiral Well, it seems stressful for anybody Except trump for whatever fucking reason That guy eats it up. But for most people running for president alone just the grueling just the schedule that's involved and traveling and doing all these speeches and

The schedule that's involved and traveling and doing all these speeches. It just breaks them down. I mean, one of the reasons why Hillary lost was she just wasn't willing to travel as much. There was all these different events that she was supposed to go to. She just couldn't go. She couldn't take it anymore. She thought she was going to win anyway. So she just laid back.

Yeah. Yeah. It definitely is a brutal thing. But it's really also just completely insane that the two candidates are these two people. Well, yeah. First of all, the best the Democrats could do. I mean, they had all these other people that were well-spoken. It seemed like young and healthy.

And there's, you know, there's so many. That is hard to comprehend. Yeah. Right. It's really hard to comprehend that. Yeah. That you're looking at these this group of whatever we we got 350 million people, 320 million people in America, and this is who you end up with? Yeah.

I mean, fucking anybody but Biden. Anybody. I mean, we don't even know who his vice president is, right? That's going to make a big deal. That's going to be a big deal. Because the vice president is compelling and interesting. And he says he's going to pick a woman. Whether he picks...

The problem is, he was going to pick Klobuchar, but Klobuchar was responsible for a lot of those guys skating in Minneapolis. So, well, that's not good. And then if he's going to go with Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard kind of took the legs off of that lady. So then who's left? Mayor Pete? He seems like a guy who's just you know like he's got a

playbook he's kind of like following this obama playbook and i just don't feel it from him at all at least he's gay we'd have a gay guy in office that'd lighten people up a little bit i believe that we had a powerful gay leader i think it'd be great for the country like i think you know like the the one of the things about Obama being in office, beside the fact that he's very articulate and educated and just a well-spoken statesman, is that it's like, hey, look, we're making progress. We have a black president. Like, I felt that.

I felt like a wave across the country. People are like, you can be president in this country like even if you're born out of a single family single mother family and you're a black guy you can you as long as you got the goods you can make it like this is great this means we really are living in a meritocracy and it would be great if there was a gay guy that had the same experience like like all the people that are homophobes like yeah but that fucking mayor pete he's got me yeah he i'm not the bible says but you know what fuck the bible i'm voting for that guy he's better than trump i mean that would be great but he's just i don't think he's the guy maybe he's the guy someday but he's also a young

guy right so who else who the fuck is there especially since it's gonna be biden and he said it's gonna be a woman he's definitely not gonna go with tulsi she's too fucking dangerous yeah the the democrats are scared of her she doesn't play games which is so crazy i know she's got everything everything they want woman of color congresswoman served overseas uh two deployments yeah she's got everything she's super articulate super articulate she's level-headed super level-headed very woman, served overseas, two deployments. Yeah. She's got everything. She's super articulate. Super articulate. She's level-headed.

Super level-headed. Very intelligent. Yeah. But she's just not corrupt. She's got this one problem. That's the one problem. I mean, other than that, you look at it like, Jesus Christ, this lady, she's willing to talk to people on the other side she's you know

she's a a stateswoman she's a you know the way she speaks she speaks like a leader they won't even consider her she's too dangerous well so who else is there i'm going back to uh dj duane the rock johnson yes that's what i'm going back to independent. Yeah as an independent. Yeah, and Dwayne and Jocko 2020 Come on, man. We need you It's it's very very It's very horrible and and when I see all this divide right this is one thing that just To it to have been in the military and to have been on the battlefield and fought alongside guys of every background, every background that you can imagine, white,

black, Mexican, whatever, Puerto Rican, Asian, everyone's out there. Everyone's out there. And by the way, going to memorial services for these guys overseas there's not one thought in your head there's not one thought in your head that's thinking oh underneath the the flag on that coffin is that a black guy or that a white guy not one thought in your head is thinking that in any way shape or form all you know is that that person took a bullet got blown up that could be. They took that for me. And to come back here and now see this country being ripped apart,

that's the most horrible thing for me. This is something that gets discussed a lot by guys in teams and by different guys in the military, period, that when you've served overseas with with these guys that racism becomes the the least the least considered thing it's you you your brothers because you're literally the consequences of your actions, the consequences of your day-to-day existence is so dire. Life and death. It's the most drastic consequences that we are aware of.

There's nothing, you're losing your life. Or you're not. Or they save you or they don't. You're brothers. You're all together. But in this world, the consequences are less grave. And the requirements of people are less extreme. You're not as tested. You're not, your character is not as exposed. You are not as, you're not as vulnerable

in that sense. And because of that, I think people are more outraged. And they're finding more reasons why we're separate, more reasons to divide us, more reasons why they're different from us, whether it's because of ideology or skin color. You know, Sam Harris has a podcast where he's discussing all the different things, and he brings up one really great point. The podcast that's out now. He said, could you imagine a world where we think of color the same way we think of hair color. Like the color of people's skin is the same way. Could you imagine a world where I don't trust redheads? You know, I don't.

Those people with dark brown hair are fucking creepy to me. You know, all the people in my neighborhood that are blonde, they're all shady. Like that seems so preposterous. Well, one day the goal would be so great. If one day that's how we feel about all skin color, that it's no different than hair color. It's just characteristics that you were born with. You have no control over who you are is what's important. That's it. Yeah. And I think that's, that's what, that's the position that the military puts you in. It puts you in this position of, look, I got to rely on this guy. I got to rely on this guy. And if they're reliable, I'm down. I'm good.

If they're not reliable, I got a problem. And it doesn't matter what color they are. It doesn't matter what they're, it doesn't matter any of that. It's like, is this person going to be there? Is this a good person that's going to be be there to back me up And that's all we care about and so for me This is like super regressive to be going through that to watch the country go through this and think how did wait Wasn't I just ten years ago like overseas with a bunch of guys and we didn't care about any of this didn't didn't didn't enter into our minds we're not looking at it all the time and I guess part of it is because You got a beer in a fight you're in a struggle and and right now let's face it in America They're not a lot of struggling happening. We're kind of making our own struggle, right?

Exactly. Yeah, and I think one of the things you've talked about that's very important is that a lot of this divide is because of this really shitty way of communicating, whether it's through social media or whether it's through reading stories or watching videos. It's a terrible way to not just get information, but it's a terrible way to interact with people. Like the way to interact with people is the way you and I are doing it right now, just talking to people. And I think the vast majority of problems would be solved amongst reasonable people if they just talked through. They just talked and tried to figure out, you know, hey, man, I didn't like that you did this. Well, all right, well, I was thinking when I did this, you're right.

Here's why I did it, and this is what I was thinking, and I was wrong because of that. And if people could just say that and people could accept that people could shake hands or hug it out rather than have a fucking twitter beef that leads to a gunfight I mean literally that's the the way we exchange information with each other back and forth through social media is the absolute worst way people can talk you're not looking at each other you don't get any social cues you don't feel any empathy towards that person that you're not in front of them you're not looking at each other. You don't get any social cues. You don't feel any empathy towards that person. You're not in front of them.

You're not there. And you're looking to see how many people agree or disagree, who's liking or disagree, because it's a public thing, right? So how many likes do they get? Their thing got 400 likes. Mine only got 20. Shit. Am I wrong here? It's just a terrible way for us.

It's a newfound way for us to communicate and a terrible way for us it's a new found way for us to communicate and a terrible way for us to communicate we're not designed for it this is not how we evolved we evolved to communicate with social cues and to look at each other and be around each other you could say something

to a person and you're both laughing or you see it written down the same way. And you're like, that guy's a fucking asshole. Yeah. Even from a leadership perspective, you know, we'll talk about this a lot with,

Hey, I'll, you know, I sent you, I'll send you an email, you know, that says, Hey Joe,

can you get this project done next week? Thanks. And you're in a bad mood when you read that, you know? You're going, who the hell do you think you're telling? But if I was like, hey, Joe, can you get this project done by next week? We really need it. And I'm looking at you and kind of give me a blank stare, and I explain it to you a little bit more,

and all of a sudden it turns into a perfectly good conversation. Exactly. But when I send you that email, or in this case, a tweet, then you hate me. Yeah, it's like we've got management to do, right? Yeah. You got to, when you you hate me. Yeah, it's like we got management to do right yeah, you got a When you want something out of someone or you want you want some things to get done You got to manage that person's personality and mood and you got to manage the relationship that you have with each other And you have to be proactive you have to you'd have to call them. What's up, man?

How you doing everything good you good like they have to get a good feeling out out of you yeah and you gotta say this is i gotta ask you this favor i need this thing from you and then and then you're rolling and everything's good exactly you don't do it that way then people go fuck this guy well this guy just wants things from me or this guy's annoying or you know this guy's treating me like a bitch. Exactly. Yeah. The world through Zoom right now. So we're doing a lot of Zooming. So my company has a long front. The just the video alone increases your ability to communicate. Right.

Massively. It doesn't get all the way there. Right. But just being able to look at someone and have a conversation with them as opposed to either just a hearing them on the phone or absolutely. So so that idea of, hey, I'm actually going to sit down and talk to you. I'm actually gonna sit down and Hey, I'll meet you. The are like we pivoted obviously once, you know, we used to go into, or we still do, but going into businesses and working with them,

shaking hands, how you doing, talking to them. And then all of a sudden in three days, we were doing everything online, everything. hey, meet me on this Zoom call. And you can get there. You can get 97% effectiveness just by looking at someone and talking to them. Like I said, there's a little percentage that you're still not going to get. But if you think you're going to communicate effectively through social media tweets, you're just freaking wrong. Yeah, that's one step below email, right? Social media tweets is one step below email. Email is one step above that.

Phone calls is one step above that. Zoom is a step above that. Another layer. Person to person is the best. Person to person is the best. That's what we're designed for. Everything else is just, and that's what's leading to all this fucking madness and chaos.

A lot of it is fueled. It's weaponized by social media tweets. Yeah, because by the way, when you send me a tweet to be an asshole to me, I actually just retweet that and tell everyone what an asshole you are. A bunch of people retweet it as well. It's a freaking mayhem.

Oh, God. We're not working together. We're not working together, right? That's another thing that COVID did, right? All of a sudden, we're not working together. You know, it's an, we're not, we don't, we're not working together. Right. That's another thing that COVID did. Right. All of a sudden we took everyone in isolate them. You're not, you're not seeing them. You're not talking to them.

So now everyone is almost strictly communicating by these methods that you're talking about. Yeah. This is horrible, horrible for society, horrible for society. The, uh, the idea of coming to work in a place, right? The idea of, hey, I'm going to show up and work at a place with other people. That is such a huge part of getting back to where we need to be. Like when you pull everyone out of work and even worse, and I'm not even just beyond COVID. You know, what happens?

We've moved all manufacturing overseas, right? So all those people that used to go and work in the same place every day, that used to show up and have a common mission and a common goal, they don't have that anymore. Much of the middle class doesn't have that anymore. They used to have it. They don't have it anymore. And that's interestingly,

China's middle class is growing right now. Why is their middle class growing? Because they're manufacturing, they're making things, they're filling that void of people that have that level of skillset of, Hey, you know what? I just got out of high school. I can't afford college. So what am I going to do? Right? Oh, well in China, well, you can say, okay, well, I guess I'm going to work at a factory. Hey, it's a horrible sweatshop. It's whatever we need that they need to improve their, their conditions. But Hey, these people have a job. They have a purpose. They're moving in a certain direction in America. We've kind of on a massive scale gotten rid of that class of people's purpose.

And that's a big focus for you, right? company origin in particular yeah oh which by the way I got the boots they're fucking dope you guys make great shit it's like really high quality really beautifully manufactured stuff like and there's something very valuable right now about American made it used to be there's it was very divisive. Like you said, American-made, like, what are you, xenophobic? You don't like foreigners? What the fuck is wrong with you?

But now you realize like, oh, well, with COVID, you know, we were cut off from even getting goods and supplies from other countries. And then we were getting so much of our medical supplies from China. And then we're getting so much of our vaccines and medicine, all these different things manufactured by China. You're like, hey, why don't we do that here? Well, we used to, but it was cheaper by like a dollar a thing to send it over there. Like, oh, Christ. And people are realizing now there's a great benefit to making things here in America. And it's not just this idea of national pride.

National pride's great. But also, like, you don't have to go anywhere to get things, and you keep jobs here. Yeah. And I think Kanye West is looking to build the same thing as we're doing. He wants to manufacture stuff in America. Why? Because he knows when you have a bunch of underprivileged kids, the best thing you can provide a bunch of underprivileged kids is jobs, jobs that

they can entry level jobs. I know when I was a kid, it was almost like, Hey, if you're not careful, you're going to end up working in the factory, right? That's what's going to, you know, you can end up working in a factory. No one wanted a factory job. The thing is, so, so that kind of became a mantra. Oh, you, you don't want to work in a factory. You better go to college. Well, there's, first of all, factory work has changed. There's jobs that people do in a factory that takes a massive skill set. And the boots, you know, the origin boots. We were probably a year, two years, three years from losing the knowledge of how to actually do that.

two years three years from losing the knowledge of how to actually do that and Luckily, my buddy Pete has started, you know Grabbing people that know how to do it and passing that information down to the next generation so we can actually be a self-sufficient country and we can bring back those jobs of people that look, that's a that's a Proud way to make a living. These are craftsmen. Like you said, these are craftsmen and craftswomen, by the way. Our factory is mostly filled with women. And they're out there.

They have a skill set. They're learning a skill set. There's upward mobility. As you get better at your job, as you can do more things, you can make more money. And by the way, you're making something. You're making something with your hands. You're producing something here in this country. That's just like, well, it's like when you go hunting, when I go hunting, you get something for yourself. There's a certain feeling of being self-sufficient

and America on a large scale, especially during COVID, we look up and say, wait a second, we can't even make that stuff. We don't even know how to make that. That's a nightmare Well the boots in particular think think about if you started from scratch like if I started from scratch I don't know shit about how to make a boot If I had a it would take there's a long learning curve of figuring out how to make an excellent boot that fits right It's well made and durable like those boots that you guys sell like I was going over I was looking at this thing. I'm like they fucking put some time and effort into this thing like this is a really well crafted piece of art Yeah, and it's it's it's functional artwork

And that knowledge because that's not that's not that's not our generation that learned that right we're we're pulling that information From the old shoe dogs up in Maine that are 60 years old, 70 years, almost, you know, out of the workforce, having to bring them back into the workforce to, to educate the has learned now how to weave the material for our geese So he's the guy that knows how to weave material. This is the bro This is so complicated Where do you see all these different pieces of string coming together get this big machine with so he's got like a loom Yeah, he's got we've got looms up there, but we had to get the knowledge right from the old-timers that said, okay Let me show you how to do this and like you just said how long would it take to figure out a loom on your own first of all i think i would fail because i don't think i'd have the patience if i just had this machine to look at

so capturing this knowledge so that we can become a self-sufficient country again it's got to be paramount in what we're doing and it it's not just, it's not just, hey, because I'm pro America. Yes, I am. But if, if we want to get rid of the kind of social unrest that we have right now, Hey, in Ramadi, you got a 15 year old kid that's putting a roadside bomb in the road. You know why he's doing that? Is he doing it for some big ideology? No, he's not. He's doing it because he's going to get paid $50 by the insurgents. He wants a job. He wants a life. He wants to make money. What happens in America? What happens with kids in the inner city that are underprivileged when they don't have a job? What are they going to do? What are they going to do? They're going to fall into,

oh, maybe I'll sell drugs. Maybe I'll commit robberies whatever I'm gonna do, but they're not doing it by choice in many cases or if they're doing it by choice It's because they don't see any other choices to even make so we've let our manufacturing go away and now we've got voids we've got voids where people don't have an ability to make an income and that's where people don't have an ability to make an income. And that's just a complete loss of pride, right? If you don't have the ability to earn money, to take care of yourself, to take care of your family, if you don't have that ability, what are you going to do?

You're going to figure out how to make it happen. It's so short-sighted too. I mean, it was all done for just a small amount of profit per item. Small amount of profit per item, And it costs the country so much. Yeah. And, and, and then the, then the narrative became, we're not able to do it. That's why we don't do it. We're not able to do it. That became the narrative.

Well, you know, even the big corporations would say, well, you know, we'd love to, we'd love to make stuff here, but it's impossible. It's impossible. Well, that that's ridiculous completely and totally ridiculous it's also like you when you go through detroit and you realize that detroit at one point in time in the early 20th century was one of the richest countries in the world or excuse me one of the richest cities in the world you you you go through and you realize okay this is where they were making all the fucking badass cars all the amazing American cars of the 60s and the 70s, they were all made right there. And then they fucked up. Someone made some decisions to save a little bit of money and make a little bit of money and completely short-sighted.

Didn't look at the economy as a whole. Didn't look at the nation from a position of a patriot. Someone who looks at the country in a whole. What's best for the country? They just said, what is the best way that we can maximize our profit? Well, we need to set up factories in Mexico and China and all these other places

we can get people to work for nothing. You can't buy a fucking cell phone that's made in America. All the people that design and engineer cell phones for Apple, they're right here. They're not making them here. There's not a fucking single cell phone that's made in America. Try buying one that's made with all American parts, all American labor in America. What?

No such thing. Doesn't exist. And what you're going to be told is it can't be done. That's hilarious. Cannot be done. That's what's cool about Elon Musk. He's like, oh, watch this. Yeah, exactly. I'll make cars here. Oh watch this. Yeah, I'll make cars here

I'll make them awesome. I'll make rocket ships Yeah, we need a couple more of those dudes, yeah, it's uh, it's It's good that people are opening their eyes though it's good that people are realizing because of the pandemic and because the fact that all Goods and services that were being imported on a daily basis were shut down and also people are terrified of getting things over there what are you gonna spray everything down everything's infected and what do you what i'm scared what do i do yeah but the medicine is the craziest one the fact that we rely on china for some ungodly percentage of all of our medicine like holy shit guys like is this the

right way to do this just for profit yeah it's it seems like we got a little bit lucky with covid yes like right a little bit lucky because it turned out to be not not bad did you ever get the antibody test no fuck i should have tested you today sorry because you think you might have had it right i'm so the end of January, right, right. As this thing was kicking off, I did a live tour. I did Austin. Then I did Washington DC. Then I did New York city, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA. Every event shook hands and bro hugged between a thousand and 2000 people. That's what I did at the end of January. I went to the, the absolute like ground zero locations for COVID and just, just bro hugged and talked to a bunch of people and shook hands and, you know, just got after it. And then I got sick.

Uh, yeah. Like a week later or something. Two weeks later, I guess it was February. I was sick and I was like, Hmm I wonder what that is and then and then March came around and we started sick The the the sick like often it wasn't real bad It wasn't real bad, but it was it was you know, it was bad enough that I you know I I think I might have skipped like I'm just gonna stretch today cuz I really feel like crap for a workout type of thing So I didn't get, I wasn't down hard.

I wasn't in, and I didn't miss any, I didn't miss anything, but I felt bad. And so I figured that was my, that was my COVID experience. My wife got sick. My son got sick,

two daughters in college and my young daughter didn't get sick at all. My 10 year old daughter didn't get sick at all. So I was like, sounds like it. Yeah. But did you have it or not? No, I didn't.

I'm making a fucking text right now i'm gonna get a doctor in here in an hour and a half and we're done i'm gonna i'm gonna make this happen because i want to find out you would be the only guy that's tested positive if you did no we had uh tim's buddy what's his name ben he didn't false positive then we tested him again yeah i think it would be i think it would be crazy if that travel schedule that I had, sitting on all those airplanes to and from all those different airports, in all those airports, that's just crazy. Yeah.

All right. I'm asking right now. Can we get one at 3.30? Bam. I'm going to make it happen. That was another. We were talking about egos. That was another, you know, we're talking about egos. The, the, the scary thing about the whole COVID unraveling was that the leadership wouldn't say, Hey, you know what? I actually think I was wrong about this and we're moving in this direction now. Right. Not just leadership, but everyone, everyone just, Hey, no, you know what? I think I was wrong here, but maybe we need to adjust this.

Here's it. So you, you didn't get to see that. That's a great point. Cause that, that really was a failure of leadership because it was very clear at certain point in time when they found out when they did the large scale antibodies test, particularly in California. And they were like, Jesus Christ, hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to this. This is not what we thought. Like, And the amount of people that are actually sick, instant result back. COVID inbound. You're dead. The amount of people that actually tested positive for the antibodies was way higher than they thought it was.

And the amount of people that were actually hospitalized was way lower. And then they looked at the average death that people died. It's actually older than the average death that people die. Yeah. Yeah, my son pointed that out to me Yeah, we shut down the fucking economy for that. Yeah, I Guess I was was a little bit whatever I Was pretty real I was pretty cavalier through the whole thing our buddy. Dr. Pete. Yeah, he was Well, he was way nervous well he was way nervous because he was in early right and when you saw the early stuff yeah when you're like hey

it's one out of every 10 people are dying right but even he was making adjustments he said wait a second in italy there's different cities that was i think where he started changing his his attitude he said wait a second in italy there's different cities and in some cities, they're really compressed together. And people are old people living with young people in the same place. And Oh, wait a second. We need to separate this out. And then it just, Hey, it wasn't as bad. Thank God. Yeah. Thank God it wasn't as bad. And, uh, my buddy, Andrew Schultz had a great point. He said, basically COVID exposed weaknesses in both business and in people's health. That's what it really did.

The lockdown did. Because there was businesses that literally couldn't survive a week without money coming in. Well, that's a badly managed business or a business that has a very small and narrow profit margin. And then there's people that literally can't survive any sort of disruption in their immune system. Their immune system is shattered. One of the things that came out of it that I found out from Dr. Rhonda Patrick was that 70% of America is deficient in vitamin D. 70%. 29% is severely deficient to the point where they have medical issues because of a deficiency in vitamin D.

Yeah, you've got to get on that. You've got to get on the vitamin D for sure. You vitamin D for sure get on the vitamin D and the best way To get it is to get out in the Sun. Yeah, and that's the one thing you weren't supposed to do The whole thing is fucking madness. It was a perfect storm. Yeah, it's like when the plague in The what the Black Plague they thought it was they thought it was cats They thought cats delivered the plague to everyone so they killed all the cats. But it wasn't the cats. It was the rats and the mice. And so when you killed the cats, guess what happened to the rats and the mice?

They went insane. So it was almost the same kind of thing you see unfolding. Yeah. And no one saying, hey, you know what? Actually, we're wrong here. Hey, you know what? And what about the masks? So this was crazy.

I got some buddies that texted me. They said, hey, there's this thing coming. You origin, you guys should start making masks just to, just to cover your face. And I said, Oh, okay. I don't know anything about this stuff. I talked to my buddy Pete. I said, Hey, it sounds like that we're going to need to make masks. And he says, okay. So we, we start thinking about, Hey, how would we make these things? And then a couple days later, the government, the government comes out and says, masks don't do anything. Don't worry. Don't wear a mask. Don't get masks. So I talked to Pete. I said, hey, man, it looks like this isn't a good, it looks like we don't need to do

it because it looks like it doesn't help at all. Five days later, they're like, everyone wear a mask at all times. And by the way, we're going to pass laws that require you to wear a mask. I called Pete. I'm like, it looks like we need to make masks, you know, and we ended up making hundred a couple hundred thousand masks and We were we were sending them to this is the weird thing we're sending them to hospitals, but we donated thousands of masks to hospitals and And and and then you know two weeks later. It was like actually, they don't do anything. I still don't know. Well, it's hard.

The problem is people get shamed. And the World Health Organization came out and basically said the only reason you should be wearing a mask, where is the CDC? Now, the world here to Fauci said U.S. government held off promoting face masks because it knew shortages were so bad that even doctors couldn't get enough. So is he just saying that now? This morning or today, since we started. So guess what? We all got lied to. We all got lied to.

Held off on promoting face masks because it knew shortages were so bad even doctors couldn't get enough. Recently, the CDC said the only people that should be wearing masks are people that are treating COVID patients and that regular people shouldn't be wearing masks. And then the World Health Organization said that asymptomatic people, it's extremely rare that they transmit to other people. So we were worried about asymptomatic people, which is the reason why we kept kids out of school. And we were worried about overwhelming the hospitals, which is why we did all this other stuff as well. Which is what drove me crazy about my kids school. I was like, hey, you fucks. This doesn't even kill the kids.

It's killing. The kids get killed by the flu. Meanwhile, you don't even scan the teachers or the staff or anybody. People have the flu. They don't want to miss a day of work. They just fucking show up and give it to everybody. That's normal. And kids actually die from the flu. And it's not a small number. It's not a small. And kids actually die from the flu. And it's not a small

number. It's not a small number of people that die from the flu. Last year was 62,000. I mean, it's not as many as COVID, but then you're hearing two camps. You're hearing one, the COVID deaths are actually underreported because a lot of people die from COVID and they don't even register it.

Okay. Boy, I guess it's worse than it is. And then you're hearing, no, no, no. Actually, we're getting incentivized to report deaths as COVID. Elon Musk on the podcast said, if you got killed by a shark, but you were COVID positive, they would list it as a COVID death. Obviously he was being facetious, but not entirely because there's a lot of people with leukemia that also had covid listed as a covid death obesity heart attacks listed as a covid death because they tested positive for covid cancer also had covid covid death i mean fuck that's really disturbing you know when you hear those statistics then you see these things that they're saying and just the lack of trust that you end up with the government

when the government is already people just generally don't really trust the government a lot. Right. Right. There's no one that's always thinking the government has always given them the straight skinny. And it goes back to this clickbaity bullshit. My wife pointed out this story yesterday where she's reading about this kid that died. 17 year old kid. Perfectly healthy. It says she reads into the article type one diabetes. Type one diabetes is not perfectly healthy, it says. She reads into the article, type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is not perfectly healthy. No.

That's really sick and fucking dangerous and you have to take insulin to stay alive. Yeah. And you can get complications from like, oh, everyone's living type 1 diabetes. Diabetics can live real normally and then they can have an instance that causes them to die. Yeah, they can have their foot removed. Yeah, there's all sorts of shit that goes wrong when you have diabetes.

Your immune system is severely compromised. But it's like our information, it's not pure. We're getting all this muddy thing. And Fauci telling us the only reason why they told us not to wear masks is because they knew you didn't have enough. Like, holy shit. How many people died because of that, you fuck? And then the World Health Organization says, actually, no one died because of that.

You don't have to worry about it. You really don't need to wear a mask. Like, fucking what is happening? I think so much of this ego plays so much into this of people not wanting to admit they're wrong. Here's another thing that people won't say. I don't know. Right. I don't know.

Like, as a leader, I've been in situations where I did not know for this is I might tell leaders all the time I say listen tell your people the truth about what's happening By the way, we're seeing examples where this is factually not happening inside America right now If you're a leader tell the people the truth about what's going on. That's what you need to do And then people come back to me and they say well, what if? What if I don't know what what if I don't know what, what if I don't know the truth? Then what you do is you say, Hey, I don't know the truth. Hey guys, I don't know. I don't know exactly how this is going to play out. These are some contingencies

that I'm preparing for. That is so much more acceptable from the troops than when you try and pretend like you know what you're talking about. And it turns out you're wrong. Right? I mean, Trump does this so much that people lose track of it right where he thinks something and he just goes out on a limb He just walks right out on a limb and says hey this Cove itself will be gone in a week Yeah, and and you know, then he just saws off the limb behind his foot. He does that all the time It's it's a good example of how not to lead because then people start to trust you less and less. And then when things like this happen, where you find out that they actually did purposely now think if they would have said this, like, Oh, we're worried about, we don't have enough masks. Then you know what you come out and say, you come out and you say, listen, everyone,

we're not a hundred percent sure what the masks do for people, but we do know this inside of a medical environment. We have to prioritize getting those people that are absolutely exposed these masks. That is why we are going to put some kind of a control over who's allowed to buy them. You just tell the truth. Well, that was kind of happening at some places. Like Amazon was only doing that. They were only selling those, what is it, N95 masks? N95s.

Yeah, they were selling them only to hospital workers. There you go they were allocating them along with uh other types of uh hand sanitizer and a bunch of different things they were selling specifically to them first and first responders perfect example yeah what you don't do is say hey everyone don't worry about it right right what fauci did but if him if he's saying that like well, well, hey, fucko. Now we can't trust you ever again. Exactly. Yeah. That's that's the freaking problem. You're looking at this guy. Next time there's some kind of disease. Next time there's a problem. How do we know if we can listen to you? It's also a thing he was saying a couple of weeks ago.

The United States doesn't open up soon. We could we could face permanent damage. Oh, economic damage yeah permanent economic you think yeah and i'm like wait hey hey hey how come you didn't say this before how come you didn't say hey we have to weigh in the pros and the cons here yeah you know you you should have and this is actually something i uh i talked to peter t about I said hey, it seems like maybe some people should be quarantined and other people Shouldn't and he's like yeah, absolutely So like my dad who's an older guy who's you know, he's an older guy Compromised immune system. Guess what? He should be isolated. He should be quarantine. Yeah, should my

17 year old son should my 20-year-old daughter, my 18-year-old daughter, my 10-year-old, should they be in isolation? Should they be quarantined? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Hey, first week, two weeks, we're here and it's a 10% bother. We're hearing all these things. Cool.

You can make an in extremis call. You can say, hey, guys, I don't know what's happening, but in Italy, it looks real bad. Guess what we're going to do? We're going to shut down for two weeks. I'm sorry, but this is what we're going to do. And you go, the nation says, ah, okay. Okay, we get it. And then two weeks later, you say, you know what?

It looks like it really might impact our medical systems. We're going to shut down for another two weeks. Just another two weeks. And everyone goes, you know, I got to pay my mortgage, but okay, two more weeks. And then you say, then you got to have the courage and the ability to put your ego in check and say, you know what?

Thank you. May not have been necessary. We don't know right now, but it looks like we can start opening back up. Let's rock and roll. The other problem is once they tell you what to do. They don't want to stop having that power and control Oh, yeah, they love governor literally said wear masks because then we can get back some of our freedoms Yeah, you're gonna give away freedom. You got that kind of power. Maybe I should run for governor

Yeah, I didn't know I could control freedoms. You got my vote give away freedoms the I didn't know I could control freedoms. You got my vote. Give away freedoms? The business is surviving, right? You're talking about the business is surviving. There's a lot of businesses, especially little businesses, right? Little jiu-jitsu schools, little restaurants. You want a restaurant to operate on 50% capacity?

Restaurants aren't making this kind of money where they can throw away 50% of their profits, 50% of their capability to make money. They still, cause they still got to have that cook. Yeah. That cook is there. The dishwasher is there, right? There's your bare minimum. Yeah. And they got to be there no matter what. If you serve 50 people, great. If you only serve 25, you don't make any money. Yeah. So there's all, there's going to be, there's a lot of businesses that run that day to day, you know, month to month, paycheck to paycheck to try and stay afloat. That's the, that's what America does. And sometimes they're able to creep out of that and they get ahead and that's awesome. That's how you end up with these big, powerful companies. Yeah. I've had a couple of restaurant owners in, uh, Adam Perry Lang, who owns a APL steakhouse and, uh Zuccarino, and Evan Funke, who own,

they own Felix, well, she owns Felix, Janet owns Felix, and he's the head chef, and they were explaining to me profit margins. And it's fucking crazy. It's, when you really look at how difficult it is to run a restaurant and all the decisions that have to be made and you know food goes bad if you keep it too long and you got to buy a certain amount of food you anticipate a certain amount of customers you got to know your customer he was explaining you got to you we know our customers so i know most of them are not going to order this so i'm going to have certain amount of meals that i'm going to have of the fish and more meals of the steak and the

pasta is primary that's what most people are of the fish and more meals of the steak and the pasta is primary. That's what most people are coming here for. And like, fuck. And then you tell them, oh, you can only open up at 60% and waitresses have to wear a fucking hazmat suit. And it's like, God damn, man. What are they? 10%, 15%, 5% profit margin?

I think they were saying 14% is how they operate. But it's difficult. It's very difficult. And people don't want to spend too much money on meals. And so it has to be kind of engineered. How can you do it right? And Janet has had a ton of successful restaurants. She's a wizard at it. I mean, she's been doing it straight out of college. And her problem was she was in the process of building multiple restaurants. So all of her money were out, even though she's extremely profitable and very, very successful at all these restaurants. She's building out all these other restaurants at the same time with that money because she knows how to make money. She knows how to run these businesses. So she's doing it. So she's got a Jamaican restaurant.

She's got an Italian restaurant. She's got all these things happening. And then boom, the government tells you you have to shut down. Yeah, that's the profit margin. There's so many, you know, because we work with all kinds of different businesses. Yeah. And the profit margin on many, many is really really lean one of my favorite examples is big construction companies Big construction companies that are doing you know 500 million dollar projects or you know 700 million dollar

bridges and Coliseum's and stuff their profit margin Is like 4% 4% whole 5% if they do awesome. It's like 4% Holy shit percent whole five percent if they do awesome. It's like six percent That is so insane and they're you know Ordering concrete and they've got to have it show it up a certain time and then the rebar wasn't in place like it's crazy they're the margin for error is so small and There's so many businesses that operate like that and a lot of times

I think some of the people in government, they've never been in business before. Right. And so they don't understand that for them, Hey, just operate at 50% capacity inside your restaurant. You'll be fine. That's a very good point. And they've never run a business.

You know, I have a jujitsu gym. We got shut down. So now, now we're now they're telling us, Hey, you can allow people back in the gym. They just have to be six feet apart. We can't do jujitsu six feet apart. You can't do Muay Thai six feet apart. So what are we supposed to do now? And by the way, what about, Oh, you want us to check people and we want to have this, there's all these protocols that are putting in place to have someone come into the gym. So now we've got to hire extra people. We've got to hire extra cleaning staff because the gym has

to shut down for this period of a day and they need to re-clean everything like obviously the people that are making these rules have never been in never been in business before yeah telling a person who is running a jujitsu gym the people have to be six feet apart the whole jujitsu is zero apart zero feet apart zero zero space. That's the whole goal of jiu-jitsu This is smash the whole goal take your body and smash someone's body with it That the whole idea is no space. Yeah, that literally is the foundation of jiu-jitsu a pressure applied with no space And this goes back to the idea of, as a leader, taking the information from the frontline troops. You tell me what's a good way to run this.

You tell me. You tell me what's a good way to run this. And let's see if we can figure out a solution to this problem. Well, you would really want to talk to jiu-jitsu gym owners. And my suggestion, I've never run a jiu-jitsu gym. I've been in a shitload of them my suggestion would be have people fill out a waiver so they waive their rights have people fill out a form that says i have not tested positive i've showed no symptoms of illness

i i promise that if i do i will not train and i will get myself tested testing is readily available now you know for a long time we were getting shamed because we were testing people yeah i was tracking on that angry that we were testing people like look you can test people too you fuck just like you could buy a steak it just costs money you know are you mad that people have steak and you can't afford a steak well you know there's people that they're different stages of life, you know, in this game called society and capitalism. And you start off at square A, you know, everybody starts at a different spot, granted. But I started at the bottom and you figure out a way to get a fucking test.

And if you're in a spot right now in your life where you can't have a test, well, definitely don't go and expose yourself till we know what the fuck it is. But don't get mad if people can afford tests, you crazy fucks. And what we're at right now with Jiu-Jitsu gyms is you should have a form that you fill out. Just like when I was at a restaurant, I went to the Lonesome Dove restaurant. Shout out to them in Austin, Texas. Fantastic place. They make you fill out a little form. It says you haven't been tested positive.

You're not sick. You're not showing any symptoms. They do a little temperature check. Check your forehead. Oh, you're looking good. All right, come on in. Sit down. Did they pack you in or did they keep you?

No, they kept you a little bit separated, but that was two weeks ago. And there's another place, Gus's Fried Chicken. Shout out to Gus's. Best fucking fried chicken on earth in Austin, Texas. We went there two weeks ago, and you couldn't eat there. You had to wear a mask in the restaurant and you had to order takeout. So we got takeout. Then we came back again yesterday.

Yesterday, no fucking mask. Everybody's in there sitting. All the seats are packed. They strongly suggest you wear a mask. And no one's listening. No one wore a fucking mask. The waiters all wore masks. It's like things are getting different. There was another restaurant, Red Ash, that we ate at Saturday night.

That place had 75% capacity, and you had to wear a mask until you got to your table, and then you had to wear a mask again if you had to go take a leak. You had to put your mask back on, take a leak, come back, and it doesn't make any sense. It's like there's health department guidelines, and they're trying to open up, and they don't want to get sued they don't want to get people mad and like we're we're we're trying to protect everybody but we don't know how to do it and it doesn't matter what the science of you you could show them an article that shows that masks are bullshit and they're still going to tell you but you're still going to wear your mask because we're playing a little game here we're playing a game called keep people safe nobody's saying a goddamn

thing about take your vitamins drink water We're healthy work out good get out in the Sun No, no, the government never says that you don't hear it. You got governor knew someone is fucking goofy slick back hair He's not telling you to go work out and get in the Sun It's gonna be a bit. I think America can only take so much and I kind of said this from the beginning Like you can keep American locked down for a little while two weeks Four weeks and then people start saying you know what I gotta go out. I gotta go make something happen I gotta do something I gotta earn money

It's a people that are looking around saying, uh, well, I don't really need to earn any money right now They're the ones that are saying everyone stay in your house and don't come out and wear a mask Alright, we got a doctor coming at 3 30. No, I think I got you a positive this time I don't really need to earn any money right now. They're the ones that are saying everyone stay in your house and don't come out and wear a mask. All right. We got a doctor coming at 3.30. I told him I think I got you a positive this time. He's wanting to get a positive. He's like, fuck. Oh, he hasn't got any positives yet?

A bunch of goddamn healthy people in here. Yeah. I've had, now I've had, I think I've had seven, no, eight tests. One, two, three, four nose swabs. I've had four, yeah, four nose swabs and four antibody tests. I haven't, me personally, I've still come out negative every time. But the other thing that he said, and this doctor is a very smart guy and a young, healthy guy. He said, that doesn't mean you haven't been exposed to it. It means your immune system did its job. And it's another thing

that people are saying, people saying, oh, well, you just got lucky. You haven't been around someone who had it. He goes, no, no, no. Many of the people that I tested are positive or in a family where the other people that are also in that family are negative. So they have it. They've been around these people for fucking weeks and they don't get it. Why? Because they have a better immune system, particularly children. So I guess I'm in a win-win situation now because if I had it, if I tested positive, I was like, see, no factor. I powered through it. You beat it. Now, even if I had it, if I tested positive, I was like, see, no factor. I powered through it. You beat it. Now, even if I didn't have it, I'm going to say, hey, see, I beat it.

Yeah. I'm going to win-win. Yeah. I know, depending upon what your results are, I know nine people that have had it now. And out of those people, only one of them had it bad. And that was my friend Michael Yeo. And he got it bad from, it's real easy to track. He flew all the way to New York, no sleep.

What was the date? He was in January. January? Jamie? No. Early February or late January? March. March?

His show in New York was March, the very beginning of March. So end of February. End of February he was here. And then he went. Okay. So he left here. That weekend went to New york no sleep right flies to new york does radio does tv all said does his comedy gigs no sleep does gigs the next day same

deal does promo all this shit flies back home no sleep gets up in the morning drives to vegas with his wife and kids the fucking kids screaming in the car drives back home that night hangs out with his wife's family in vegas and drives back home that and so eight hours in the car, drives back home that night. Hangs out with his wife's family in Vegas and drives back home that night. So eight hours in the car, just that day. Then the next day he's got auditions, day after that he's got auditions, then boom, hits the wall and he's fucked. He feels like shit.

And he felt like shit, by the way his mom got it, she also tested positive, beat it in a day. How long was he down for? He was down for a week. But he ran himself to also vitamin D deficient. And so all those things. Ran himself down, vitamin D deficient, doesn't take care of himself. But he caught the perfect storm of exhaustion and travel.

Travel fucks you up. It fucks you up. Yeah. And leading into this, I've been traveling all the time my whole life. Matter of fact, the lockdown is the most consecutive nights I've ever spent with my wife since we've been married. And we've been married for 20 years. Most consecutive nights because, you know, I was in the Navy.

I was deploying. I was going on trips. And then when I retired, I was working with consulting all over the place. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. So it's been kind of cool hanging out with my wife night after night Alright, these are FDA approved kits too. So we're good. So we're totally gonna find out for real fully legit doctors pumped What do you think you think I you think I've had it or not? What do you think?

Yeah, I would say because your kid your youngest kid didn't get it get sick And then the other people did get sick, but no one got it badly and I know your family's very healthy i know your your daughter's a savage your son's a savage i would imagine you probably had it thinking about all the places you've been i bet you i bet you test positive for the antibodies i know a few jujitsu guys have got it but they all just got coughs yeah oh yeah plus plus on top of all this i'm in my gym you know i was in my gym oh yeah you know i got all kinds of we we have a lot of people that show up at my gym cause they just want to train. They want to come check it out. Yeah. And my gym is big. You know, we've got 2000 members, right? Yeah. It's 2000 members. Cause it's not just a jiu jitsu gym, uh, victory MMA and fitness

in San Diego, California. But you know, so it's a big gym and you know, every 2000 members, that means they're all interacting with three or four other people outside of the gym, if not five or 10 people. And they're literally sweating in each other's mouths. Oh, yeah. That's another thing. That's another indicator. When I got sick, my main training partner, this guy, Andy, Andy Burke, who I train with

all the time, he got sick. And then his girlfriend got sick, who's also a jujitsu fighter, MMA fighter. She got sick and then his girlfriend got sick who's also a jiu-jitsu fighter MMA fighter she got sick too. So We'll see I'm curious it's hard when you train hard you get sick It's part part of the the thing too when you break down your body and your your immune system gets you know When you're one of those guys that trains really hard you do have a tendency to get little colds Because your immune system gets tested here's something I've noticed when I have downtime like let's say this has happened to me a few times I'm going to Montana and I'm Super stoked. I'm gonna go up there and chill right

As soon as I get up there I get sick Really it's happened to me like maybe three times where I I finally have Really? It's happened to me like maybe three times where I finally have four days or five days where I, you know, don't have anything scheduled. I'm going to go up there. I'm going to shoot my bow. I'm going to chill. And I get up there and it's like my mind switches and all of a sudden I get sick. It's like I saved up illness to where I know I can be allowed to get sick.

Has that ever happened to you? No, but there's a good argument there for for just the way your mind controls your whole system. Yeah. Because your mind is just like pedal to the fucking metal, slayer in the background. Run! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da When it's silence, your body's like, fuck, what have we been up to? I feel like that happens. I was wondering if it ever happened to you because it's happened enough times that I'm talking about it. Well, my best example is Cam Haines.

That motherfucker's never sick. And if he's sick, he still runs anyway. He's just got a little bit of a cough. But out of all the people that I know, I don't know anybody who's consistently putting in the kind of hours every day that he does. Oh, yeah. He runs 16 miles every fucking day. Yeah. Sometimes a marathon.

Sometimes a marathon every day while he works eight hours a day, and then he gets home and lifts weights. I mean, it's not like he runs and that's it. And he gets his reps in. Yeah, he gets his reps in with his bow every day. And he's lifting. And he's lifting every day. Every day. He doesn't take days off That fucking guy's never sick if he's sick. It's like the next day. He's running again. You look at his Instagram

It's hey. It's a great day to run out there fucking I Did I think there's something to forcing your body to consistently and constantly perform totally yeah imagine not Like Olympics right you're in the olympics for wrestling let's say and you've got your whole entire life is on one day if you get sick like right anything bad happens that day yeah you're done yeah those big moments like that are fuck when you're you're so stressed out too so your immune system is is super jack. But I think there's a, there's a thing about peaking for a big event, whether it's a fight or the Olympics or something versus maintaining consistent conditioning. They're very different things.

Like a good example is Tim Kennedy. Tim Kennedy went through, uh, I believe two camps in a row camp fight got canceled, kept training, went through another full camp and then when he fought calvin gastelum yep that guy's never tired and he was gassing out in the fight and there's a real good indication from all involved that is because of overtraining i know that when i would

train fighters you could absolutely see when they would overtrain it wasn't a big question you'd go in you'd have a fighter that's whatever level at, let's say, let's say jujitsu because I'm training jujitsu with them. And every day, you know, they're, they, they feel a certain level. And then one day you come in and you train with them and they're just, they just suck. And I would tell them, it's like, Hey man, two days off, go eat some steak. Cause you would know a hundred percent that they're overtrained. Yeah.

A hundred percent. What do you tell vegans? Two days off, eat some steak? Yeah, I would tell them definitely eat some steak. You need that steak. Get some steak in you. Yeah, just give them an elk. Just give them one good piece of backstrap.

Just try. Just trust me. Just eat it and run through a fucking wall yeah that's the really weird thing about watching people go through camps through fight camps and you know i really i basically don't train fighters anymore like i used to just because i don't have time anymore but you would you would work so hard to make sure that on that night That they're there yeah, they're there and some people get in the cage and they do better Than they would normally do some people get in the cage, and they don't do as good and you got you know Jeremy Stevens is a great example because

Especially when he first came out started training with me, and he's not he's not with us anymore but when he first started training less like he was a white belt in Jiu Jitsu But man when he got in the cage he would just elevate man like mentally psychologically elevate and he would perform way better in the cage and then I've had other fighters that you get it like they would be Kicking people's asses in training and they get in the cage and it's a down step and it's so hard to see that so hard is because sometimes those guys are very committed and they're working hard and They're doing great and they just get in there and just it's a psychological thing

You know some people are dwarfed by the moment. It's very interesting to say It's a some people are also afraid of the embarrassment of losing. That's a big one. And they can't trust the process. They can't just remove themselves and just go out there and fight. Do you follow Muay Thai at all? A little bit, but not to any great extent. There's a guy who George St. Pierre brought into his training camp when he was doing the Ultimate fighter, Jean-Paul Skarbowski. Mm-hmm.

And he's this French savage Muay Thai fighter who would basically get drunk every night. He showed up at training at GSP's camp drunk. Like he was out all night. He was in Vegas, right? So the ultimate fighter's in Vegas. Drinks all night. Shows up in the day the next day and fucks everybody up. And they're like, this is so embarrassing. Like, guys were, like, devastated.

Like, this guy literally came in holding, he's got a cup, like, from, like, one of those to-go cups from one of the Vegas clubs. He showed up in the morning. See if you can find it because it's kind of hilarious. Looks like a guy who should be driving an Uber, okay? He's not built like a savage He's just his mind is just he's got the I don't give a fuck and he's got it down Yeah, and was a you know world champion Muay Thai fighter beat champions at Lumpini Stadium in Thailand and just amazing fighter well You know you always hear about the comparisons of a black belt in jiu-jitsu versus a white belt right somebody that's known anything and it's real real obvious but when you get at a

high level of muay thai it's very similar maybe not quite as similar because there's always this idea that well you know i at least know if i throw a i at least know as a human how to throw a punch at least there's some idea right there's some like a normal human has no idea of how to do an arm lock zero you at least know have some concept of how to throw a punch so there is like a puncher's chance but i remember the first time i sparred with a real muay thai guy i was i felt like a white belt i was like oh okay because i would think about throwing a kick and i would get you know kicked myself i would think about it and kick and I would get, you know, kicked myself. I would think about it and get kicked. Oh, he knows exactly what I'm going to do.

Just like a white belt in jujitsu. You know, you can predict everything that they're going to do. There he is. Oh, yeah, I remember this guy. He shows up. I mean, look, no six pack. I mean, literally looks like a guy. If you saw that guy show up, you're like, look at this dad bod motherfucker.

Just, just, he showed up straight from the club. I mean, you can kind of tell he's drunk. And he gets in and starts training with these guys. And see if he can get to some actual training footage because they were humiliated. I mean, he was ragdolling these dudes and beating the shit out of them and dropping them. And it looks like nothing. But it's the problem, you know, He's a world-class kickboxer, and these guys just really have no idea how to handle his movement

and the skills that he has. Yeah, people underestimate. People don't think there's as much of a difference between a black belt in jiu-jitsu and what would be considered an equivalent world champion in Muay Thai. Oh, yeah. There's a big difference. Step in the ring and see how that works out for you guys sometimes get cocky about that i had a buddy of mine who was taking an mma fight and he wasn't

doing any striking he was doing very little striking and he's a really good ground fighter and i said do you know how you can toy with a guy on the ground and they really have no chance he goes yeah i go people could do that to you standing like you have to understand that the fight starts standing. It's not like it's not EBI rules where you start on a guy's back, and you have a really good chance of submitting him if you've got a great rear naked choke. This is not that. This is you start 20 feet away from the guy, and you're standing.

And you have to close that distance. You're not a great wrestler either. Yeah, well, that's the key component, right? Yes, it's a giant factor. Because at least if you wrestle, you can go, well, at least I know I have a decent chance of taking him down. Yes. A decent chance.

And even that's no guarantee anymore. Well, I go back to Mark Schultz when he fought in the UFC. When Mark Schultz fought in the UFC, he only fought one UFC fight. But that's when we got to see a world champion, Olympic gold medalist, top of the food chain wrestler. You're only on your feet if he wants you to be. Good luck throwing that punch or kick because

you have no chance. He's going to close the distance and drag you to the ground. Unless you have really good takedown defense. Back then when he fought Big Daddy Goodrich, people didn't really have it. Unless they were wrestlers, they didn't really have good takedown defense. It hadn't really been established as a part of the whole skill set of MMA yet. You basically had what you came in there with.

You're a karate guy, that's what you had. You're a Muay Thai guy, that's what you got. You got to hope you land that elbow before that guy clinches with you. And there is an overall strategic advantage to grappling. Yes. Because you can close the distance, and if you're going to punch me, you have to get close enough to,

you have to make contact with me, which means I can grab a hold of you and get you down. That's why the early UFCs, it was like, oh, you're going to have to get close enough to either punch or kick me, and when you do that, I can grab a hold of you and get you to the ground. Also, the chaos factor,

especially in a street fight, the chaos factor is like bodies are flying, there's bad timing, the clinches happen. It's not like every, you know, you'll watch the occasional street fight the chaos factor it's like bodies are flying there's bad timing the clinches happen it's not like every you know you'll you'll watch the occasional street fight where a guy tees off on some drunk guy and you know it lands the perfect punch and knocks him out cold that does happen but you know what also happens melee wild shit misses and then someone clinches and then the worst thing in the world is to fight a grappler

Who's good at takedowns when you're on the concrete that is the absolute worst thing in the world you get suplex on your head on? The concrete I mean one of the worst things that could ever happen you're basically getting hit in the head by the world Yeah, well this is why I When I talk about you know people say well, what kind of self-defense you you always say jujitsu for self-defense But you know you shouldn't let a street fight go to the ground. Here's how it works out. If you come to me and you want to fight me and you, like, square off, like, in a boxing stance, I can run away from you. Right?

I can just run away. I can just run away. I'm going to get away from you. I don't want to fight you. If you want to kick me, I can run away from you. Like, there's my primary self-defense is I'm just going to run away from you. When you grab a hold of me, now everything is I'm just going to run away from you. When you grab a hold of me now, everything's different. I can't run away anymore. Now I have to actually

know how to handle myself in a grappling situation. So that's why I start with jujitsu and look, absolutely learn boxing, learn more time, learn wrestling. Absolutely. No doubt about it. But the very first thing you need to learn is because if you want to fight me, I can run away. If you square off and you know, you put your dukes up and say, come on, or you push me, good, I'm running away. That's fine. I'll take that. But as soon as you grab a hold of me, now I got a problem because I can't run away anymore. The real problem is the ego where people don't know how to fight and someone puts their dukes up and they decide to see what they can do.

They decide in that moment to either fake it Or just like see if they can possibly hit the guy and then they get the bank Somebody tees off on them. Yeah, I think that's I think the whole thing with CTE right now That's why I think the popularity of Jiu Jitsu is going to continue because It's a large part of fighting same with wrestling grappling in general, I think is going to continue to get more and more popular because, because of CT, because, you know, as a parent, you're not looking, Hey, I really want my kid to be sparring a lot when they're 13. Right? No, there's not too many parents that are saying that right now. It's not a good idea. So I think, but you still want your kids to know how to fight, right? So how are

we going to do that? Well, we're going to teach them jujitsu and wrestling and let them have that base. And then if they get older, hey, should they know how to throw punches? Absolutely. Should they get in the boxing ring sometimes and do some Muay Thai matches? Absolutely. You should absolutely do that as a human. But, you know, you can do that when you're 17, maybe 16. You can start getting that stuff in.

But the kids jujitsu, i don't think there's anything else better for them i completely agree and i think with martial arts with striking it's good to know just to know distance just to understand where you're safe and where you're not safe and understand tells understand what's happening when someone does this when someone does this and then this is coming when they do this this is coming like you should know that because some people don't know that that you you should know how to protect yourself how to keep your hands up how to duck under things you should know that it should you should understand the timing you should understand distance and timing those are important things but fucking swinging knuckles with some guy

in the street is so goddamn dangerous because first of all you don't know what he knows and you're everyone's vulnerable. Everyone. Every person that gets punched in the face is vulnerable. And if you just want to have like some sort of a kickboxing match with some man on the concrete,

like I don't advise that. No. No. I advise clinch and trip. Yeah. I advise get out of there. Yeah. Get out of there if you can.

That's actually what I advise. Yeah. Definitely if someone wants to start some shit with you, you're absolutely better off just swallowing your ego and getting the fuck out of Dodge I That's the warrior kid books. Yeah teach those kids. Hey, there's gonna be problems. There's gonna be bullies

If you can you don't need to fight them Yeah, and what's oh I am somebody hit me up, you know, cuz I'm always telling people change you just to change you to Have somebody hit me up, you know, I've tried it But I don't I want to try to try it a couple times, but I don't like to fight And I'm like hey if you don't like the fight to fight you more than anyone else should learn jujitsu Because if you know jujitsu you probably your chances of having to fight will go down a lot just by the way you carry yourself Just the way by by the way you present yourself The chance of you having to fight go down a lot also with jiu-jitsu you're involved in real-life Struggles the thing about like karate sparring and a lot of point like light sparring is it's not the real

Chaos that comes with an actual fight whereas jiu-jitsu is full blast Someone's trying to get you it's full full. So you get used to full blast You get you get accustomed to it You know what to expect as someone swings for you and you clinch with them You know what it's like to resist with a 100% non-compliant body You know someone's like fuck really trying to get away from you really it's not like play sparring. Yes, you can go full out And you know where this brings us right back to? Police officers. Yes. Well Andrew Yang said it best. He said I think that every police officer should be a purple belt

That's an incredible statement. It's a good level, right? It's like an attainable level within a couple of years, but with a couple of years man, you get your ass kicked You've kicked some ass you've you've like a purple belt is basically a black belt who hasn't done enough time yet that's all it is yeah i mean once you've got past blue belt like blue belt is i put in the time i've learned how to do some stuff and maybe i'll do this i might make it i might make purple belt like you basically everybody who gets a purple you want to grab and go hang in there you are a fucking black belt what's better to say and you're a black belt in jujitsu you're gonna be a black belt in there. You are a fucking black belt. What's better to say and you're a black belt in jiu-jitsu You're gonna be a black belt in jiu-jitsu. Just keep fucking going

You you already have exhibited enough technique that you could actually one day achieve that just keep going yeah, the amount of confidence and and mental clarity that Cops would have if every cop was a purple belt oh it would be amazing amazing nothing better that we could do than to just somehow make that happen yeah good idea for uh andrew yang the horrible video of this guy involved with this lady and he's he's a cop and he's talking to this lady and she's non-compliant and he grabs her, and he fucking brute-strengths her to the ground and throws her on her stomach and then gets her in a rear-naked choke,

and people are filming this and yelling. It's a terrible rear-naked choke. You'd tell he sucks. The whole thing is terrible. I couldn't imagine a black belt ever handling it that way, ever, ever. First of all, you wouldn't be so threatened by her. She's not physically threatening at all, and you wouldn't want to bully her and show her that you could throw her around like that.

It wouldn't happen. It wouldn't happen. Fear, right? That's fear kicking in. And it's fear not only of his ego, but it might be legitimately, when's the last time he put hands on somebody? I mean, if you put hands on people a lot, you know you don't have to do what he did in that situation. I haven't seen the video, but you know you don't have to do that. I think he's just a pussy.

When I'm looking at the video, I just think he just wants to throw his weight around, which is another thing you wouldn't do if you know how to fight. That's part of why a lot of people act like that is because they really don't know how to fight. They really don't know how to do that to a grown man. So when they're doing it to someone who they can do it to because they're just bigger, they do it. They'll force them to impose themselves, to be a bully. It's horrible to see. But you wouldn't see a black belt doing that to somebody.

The amount of confidence that he has. Exactly. And it's the same thing with kids. I posted something a few months ago, but it's, you know, some, some bully thing and popped up. And then I said, Hey, if you want to stop bullying, um, you know, have kids train jujitsu, Muay Thai wrestling, boxing, have it in school. They should be teaching kids in school. And here's the thing. People thought, I said, not only will it prevent them from getting bullied. It will prevent them from bullying. Yes. Which people don't understand. People cannot comprehend what that means. And it's exactly what you just said.

If somebody actually knows how to fight and you've been humbled and you've been beat down and you've been choked and you know what that feels like and you know what it means and you know how that feels. The chances of you look, you could still be an asshole, but the chances of you becoming a bully are way less way less than if you're insecure and scared and have a you know trying to make up for your ego by abusing people that's who becomes bullies yeah with kids and with adults 100 the more the more you train the more secure you are the smaller your ego is the more you're able to step back and see things clearly you know that's one of the horrible things about that the George Floyd was The other cops they're not detached from the situation

They're all wound up in it and you get to teaches you and fighting teaches you That if you do that if you allow yourself to get wrapped up in the stuff You're gonna you're gonna make bad decisions I think also for kids a lot of the reasons why they do horrible shit is because they have too much fucking energy. Oh, yeah. They're all jacked up with young hormones. Oh, yeah. Testosterone.

Yeah. Testosterone and. And angst. And angst. And bro, it's kind of fun, right? You know, like. Yeah. It's kind of fun.

Like there's mayhem going on. Yeah. Is that the right word? Am I a jerk for saying that? I don't know. you know like you it's kind of fun like there's mayhem going on and when I what is that the right word am I a jerk for saying that I don't know when I was a kid that kind of mayhem I wanted to be a part of it you know if and and actually I was talking to one of my LA cop buddies and I was asking him the difference between like the the 92 riots was a 92 or 93 Ronnie King those those riots and these riots those riots he was like those were the people that kind of instigated and started and perpetuated those rides those were

Real like gangsters like shot callers were making those things happen This one these riots were he was like yeah, these are kids These are kids that drove down from Riverside These are kids that well, you know and and, some of their attitudes was like, hey, there's been, you know, injustices against police. We want to stand up to that. Got it. And then he said, of course, there's a criminal element as well that are legit, normal robbery

crews that are saying, oh, cool, we got some good cover right now. Let's get in there and make some, you know, steal some stuff and we probably won't get caught. But that's a a big difference so you do have an element of kids that are like oh there's some mayhem going on there's some mayhem going on guess what 17 year old boys like they like mayhem they like mosh pits right you love that stuff that was my childhood if there was some mayhem i I wanted to find it. Right. And that fuels these things.

Normal boy behavior. Normal boy behavior, especially when those boys are getting told, don't go out, don't do this. And they're being locked up in houses right now with COVID. They've got freaking steam coming out of their ears. And then all of a sudden the cops are going to stand down while you smash windows and steal shit and everybody can get free sneakers. Yes. It had nothing to do with George Floyd. It had so many things to do with so many different steps.

Yeah. So many different factors that had collided together on that one day. Yeah. Yeah, it's, man, I don't know how this one ends up, man. I don't know how it ends up either. It ends up with me getting the fuck out of L.A. Gone, huh? Looks like it.

Gone. Looks like it. Gone. Looks like it. I don't see the benefit. I want to come back and visit a lot, but it's just not a smart place. It's not smartly managed either. I'm rooted here, unfortunately, by the ocean. Yeah. Because I'm an ocean guy.

Yeah. And so there's really limited choices in the world yeah it really is that's a problem you know they kind of got me you're that connected to the ocean what is it about the ocean that you you always post pictures of the sunrise in the ocean i don't think there's you know going surfing going surfing, just going, just going in the ocean. And plus my, my life was kind of being in the SEAL teams was always, we always had that. It was part of our life, you know, part of our life was the ocean growing up in the ocean. Just there's some, I don't know, you know, I guess, I guess for me, it's a huge like nature thing, right? You know,

people, you should be, you should go go outside go outside and go hike in a mountain You know go go to Montana and hike around see what that feels like go to Go to Idaho check that out go to the mountains go to California mountains that you feel different You feel different you feel humbled you feel small you feel perspective So the ocean does that for me, and it's just mind clearing right you go out surfing like your mind is clear it's kind of like jujitsu hey you got to get out there you're you you don't even know what you sometimes you don't even you know you get done with a good role in jujitsu and you say well hey you don't barely even remember it because your mind is just

gone you're just monkey mind zen this total zen state same thing with the being in the water for me surfing same thing like oh i'm out here and my mind is just empty it's monkey mind and and i think that's really good for you plus the fact it's humbling plus the fact it's healthy so yeah i just have a a strong connection to the ocean i know my son's a real waterman you know know, he's out, he surfs all the time. I'd hate to do that to him. And then my little daughter's getting her surfing on. So yeah, it's just one of those things, man. Yeah, I get it. There's a reason why surf towns like, like towns that are near the ocean are chill. Like you get humbled by that. Like you take

yourself seriously. Look at that fucking body of water over there stupid Yeah, you ain't shit. I You know people say well What makes the SEAL team so good in one of the major components is the ocean? Because when you've got to do an operation that involves the water it just sucks it just everything about it sucks Everything about it sucks. You're getting in a you know you're parachuting from a plane into the water. It's nighttime. You got boat, you're freaking parachute, like drifting around. You got to get your motor started. It's freezing cold boats flip over. Then you got to drive that boat to the beach and you've got to drive through the surf zone. Your weapons are

covered with sand. You're freezing cold. It's just everything sucks. Everything sucks about it. So when that's kind of your starting, and by the way, you haven't even conducted your operation yet. You haven't even started the operation and you're freezing cold. You're tired. Your radio got flooded out. Your night vision goggles are freaking filled with sand. Everything sucks.

And now you got to conduct your operation. So in order to survive that way on a regular basis, that's one of the things that makes the SEAL teams good is we're used to this one additional component all the time that you always have to deal with. You have to figure that out. You have to be able to gut through it. That's why in basic SEAL trading, they just put you in the water for a long time. They just put you in there. Well, you have to develop an attitude that embraces the suck. Oh yeah. Yeah yeah for sure you actually enjoy it in some way some crazy way that you know it sucks like that video that i always

quote your video good dude i listen to that in my head all the time and i'm listening i've watched the video a ton of times and listen to it i've played it on this podcast at least four times but i hear it when i'm training like if i'm running hills and i'm fucking exhausted and there's like another hundred yards to get to the top of that hill i hear good good good you're exhausted it means you're fucking doing it yeah good well suck it up what what are your what's your choice what else are you going to think about cry you know cry curl up in a ball can't do it no it No, it's like, no, actually, good. Bring it.

Let's make this happen. Yeah. And if you can do that, I also do that in the sauna. When I'm exhausted in the sauna and it's like 190 degrees and I'm 19 minutes in and, you know, I'm doing a 30 minute session. I'm like, good, good. Sucks. It means it's going to have a great effect on your body.

You're going to get that hormetic effect. This is how you get the heat shock proteins pussy. You know hang in there good It's if you want to if you want to do something that's worthwhile. Yeah, it's gonna suck Yeah, it's just gonna suck and you might as well. Just enjoy that part of it. Yes Yeah, I Mock myself to the other thing I do. Oh you make fun of yourself. Oh all the time Yeah, I get pissed at that little part of my brain. I be like oh really you think you're gonna i think i'm gonna listen to you yeah not happening not happening i did these like these i put these things in the

kids books you know what i mean put those things i've you know those kids books like there's a one of the kids books talks about this hill horrible hill you know like this what's this what you're gonna face horrible hill and what are are you gonna do? You know? It's gonna suck Just got to do it. Yeah, you just do it, but the thing is it's always sucks while it's happening It's always fucking horrible But then when it's over it feels great that you got through this suck And I don't think most people who don't experience suck. They don't experience that feeling of conquering suck

Yeah, and that's the that's the important thing to try and remember. Yes, you remember it. I remember it I remember what that so even when it's sucking. I'm like, I know how this is gonna feel I know this plays out and you know what actually I know other feeling you know is when you don't do it Yeah, and the end of the day comes you're like dude. That was pathetic You didn't even you know you and that's just the worst feeling That's the feeling that really makes you sick And so between that carrot and stick carrot being like I know this is gonna be good and stick me I know at the end of the day if I'm putting my head on the pillow, and I was a bitch

That doesn't feel good. I don't want none of that bitch, that doesn't feel good. I don't want none of that. It's the worst feeling of all time. It's horrible. It's also when you're a type of person that wants to achieve, and so you're always trying to get things done, you're always trying to push yourself. When you fall short because of cowardice or because it is the worst feeling

or just failure, any kind of failure. The reason why you would one of the reasons why i mean at least i can speak for myself personally i do things so hard is because i've felt that sting of failure i you need to know what that feels like especially when you quit you need to know what quit yeah see that's it you need to know when your own and you need to hear that that fucking sting feel that sting So that when it comes up again you're like not today bitch not today I've been here before Keep going keep going

Find a way, but there's something about good like just even saying it it makes me smile Really does it works it really does work because it's an attitude changer and I use the sauna sauna is really easy it's not that it's just fucking 30 minutes you just deal with it but there's something about those last 11 minutes that you can get in your head like fuck me really good I probably get the good effect if I just leave now there's like all these little mind games you play but if you just say good does it suck good yeah I started to start smiling you can rationalize a lot of that you can start rationalizing of why well you know these last four minutes won't really make that big of a difference a shift in perception and I always noticed that from listening to music when

I run like there's something about listening to a great fucking song when a great song kicks on when you're running like if i'm i'm running in ted nugit stranglehold comes on you know there's something about stranglehold because it also has like a double meaning right it's jujitsu it's drunk you know you're like this so when you hear that here i come again now baby i can run i can run i can get extra energy i'm like where the fuck is that energy coming from? Well, it's coming from my mind, right? The music stimulates my mind. It kicks in those endorphins.

And then all of a sudden I got an extra gear. Well, how come I can't just conjure up that fucking extra gear? I think you can. You can. You got to figure out how to do that all the time. Yeah, that always is horrible to see like in a fight when a guy either he loses a fight and after he loses the fight, he's raging. He's all mad, but he was just gassed.

Right. He was just gassed. Right. Where was that? Where was it? Where was that right there? Yeah. Two and a half minutes ago.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's just overcoming anxiety for fighters. Sometimes it's just when it's over and the plug is pulled, you know, it's over and they're like, fuck. And then they're angry and raging because they realize they failed. They didn't manage their energy correctly. They didn't manage their mind, their anxiety. Yeah, exactly, the same feeling of fucking loser.

Fucking loser. I'm so hard on myself, man. Everything I've ever done wrong, everything I've ever said wrong, just everything. I'll be in the middle of working out sometimes and I'll think about it and go fuck. But that is also that hard on myself. That's what makes you work. Yeah, and that keeps you going, that makes you achieve.

It's like people think that it's easy to just kind of go out there and get things done, but it's not. That's why most people don't do it yeah you know i so i don't sleep a lot right and sometimes people are like and look i'm not saying you should shouldn't sleep everyone should sleep as much as they can i don't sleep a lot people like hey no why don't you sleep more and i'm like bro i wish i could like i wish there wasn't this little thing in the back of my head going hey hey you know you're actually that you could be doing a lot more right now. What about this? What about that?

What about the other thing like that's what's going on in my head? There's not something that's going Gee, I have to get up like no, there's a thing in there going you better get up. You better get up They're tracking on you. They're watching you you better get up here. It's happening. There's a bad guy out there He's training harder like that's what's in my head it's not in my head like oh no no i hey please let the freaking let let the freaking powers of the world allow me to go into bed at night and just pass out and be like oh i'm i'm good i'm satisfied with my life right now i wish i could feel that for freaking eight hours a night it ain't there it ain't there. It ain't there.

It's like, oh, people talk about staying hungry. I'm fucking starving. I'm starving. All the time. All the time. Like, stay hungry. Yeah, you have to, like, ah. Yeah.

I know. It never ends. It doesn't end. That's the thing. And as soon as and you soon as as soon as i get somewhere as soon as i get somewhere i'm like oh where else where i need to go i need to go somewhere else yeah now i'm worried about getting soft yeah yeah always no matter what i've ever done if i was like oh one day there'll be a thing where i'll be calm satisfied and calm no with everything that's good that comes now. There's an equal fear of becoming a pussy There's a fear of now becoming lazy and becoming like second-rate and just like god damn it. There's no end

Yeah, there's no so now. I don't even think there's an end. No there's there's definitely not a man You know that's what that's what's funny about shooting the shooting the bow right is what's what I find funny about shooting the bow is Anger aggression really doesn't help you at all at all. You know what it fucks you up, huh? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's anger and aggression is all fast twitch shit, too It's all movement whereas the bow is like you got to have the mind of no mind You got to just just execute and just stay Completely focused on the task totally detached from what's happening. Yeah, and he's gonna sit there and it's a new skill really

Oh, it's totally new skin for me like in the competition that I experience I always the only competition I had other than inside the gym You know training partners is fighting and that's all fast stuff. It's all like explosions and movement. So anytime where there's danger and anxiety and fear, your body's geared up to go quick and move quick. But with hunting, it's the opposite. When you're drawing back on an animal, all that anxiety, like, you better get that quick

out of your head. There's no quick. There's execute and calm calmness stay in the zone Nothing is exists other than the process of executing the perfect shot. It's the same thing with shooting You know you have you draw fast you move fast you draw fast I mean as soon as you punch out that weapon you gotta go boom and like you just gotta let that thing go Yeah, you see guys myself included like you ever shot headplates before? Yes.

And you know, there's six headplates. You'd see me or someone else, they miss one. And if they don't let that go, then everything falls apart. The wheels fall off. If they miss one and then they try and shoot, usually I would just miss one and just keep shooting like it didn't even happen and maybe go back and get it where you kind of have to go back and get it. But if you go, how did I miss that? shooting like it didn't even happen and maybe go back and get it where you kind of have to go back and get it but

if you go How'd I miss that? Oh, it's just a total and a complete and utter disaster It was a great video that Tim Kennedy put off of him shooting on the range And you know he puts dummy rounds and with regular rounds and he hits the dummy round and click and he's a look at that trigger control Trigger discipline because like there was no flinch. There was no nothing. It was just click. There was no movement. It was perfect.

Which is what you're trying to achieve. Which is what you're trying to achieve. The last thing you want to see is click. You little weird fucking. Remember when I first started shooting rifles? That's when I would experience that thing where you're anticipating the 30 Win Mag 30 uh uh um um wind mag uh 300 wind mag so it's got a lot of kick to it you know it's a boom it's like a loud loud kicking gun so um there was no round in the chamber and i pulled it and i saw myself doing i'm like you bitch like

you better learn how to stop doing that one thing that's interesting is learning how to shoot a bow radically increase my accuracy with a rifle oh yeah radically yeah because it's so still there's so much stillness and everything's freehand right you're very rarely shooting a rifle at an animal freehand usually trying to find a rest unless it's like inside of you know 60 70 yards you're probably going to try to arrest you're not going to shoot a 300-yard shot with a rifle freehand. But with a bow, everything's freehand. So with a rifle, I just knew that all it was just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, let it go off. Just let it go off.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Boom. Like when I started shooting at Taron Tactical, shooting on the range, the easiest thing for me was a rifle. I was like, oh, God, all i have to do is just squeeze and it'll the trigger will go off i'm so used to a bow where there's so many moving parts and you're using your back and you're letting it go off a surprise shot it made a big difference in my rifle accuracy yeah that there was when uh when dudley was teaching me how to shoot and andy was there too so andy was

like translating for me he's like hey what he means he's translating it to seal like pistol shooting and they're kind of like communicating to each other and then andy said hey what he's saying is like you know front side focus i was like okay cool got it you know and uh it was awesome to have have freaking dudley i know the first person that ever shows me anything about archery is dudley saying hey here's the bow and here's exactly how to shoot you idiot and I'm like thank you it's pretty goddamn lucky yeah I mean we're both real lucky in that regard I learned how to bow hunt from Cam Haines and John Duddler like she's it's pretty lucky those are those are like the world champions yeah yeah yeah that's uh

that's Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Jordan and LeBron James. Completely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. We're very fortunate. And there's something about hunting, too, that once you... It seems like when you're looking at it on the surface, it seems so straightforward. And then once you start doing it, it's very much like martial arts where

you're like god damn there's a lot of layers to this shit there's so many layers you know and then when you're hanging out with a guy like cam or a guy like dudley and you hunt with them and you see them hunt you go oh like this is i get it this is a black belt oh yeah this is some mundial's champion here oh yeah yeah It's exactly what it is. So, so crazy. Yeah. So crazy to see those guys in action. And just to be like listening to what Dudley's telling me about what a freaking elk is going to do.

Yeah. He's going to come over here. Yeah. I'm like, well, I guess that's just about to happen. Oh, and it just happened. Yeah. It's madness. And then with Dudley, too, it's like he's so into cooking it, too.

He's so good at cooking. It's like you get the whole lifestyle thing from him. You get like this learning how the art of archery, which really is an art form. It's an art form just like martial arts are. And then this moment of keeping your shit together and the execution of a shot and then the big payoff when that does happen and then the harvesting the animal carrying it out and then the meal that meal afterwards when you've had a successful hunting trip it's like god damn when we were in camp in utah and dudley made that neck that uh neck roast with with

jalapenos and the bell peppers and holy shit but it was also so good because you knew what went down you know you were there when he shot the elk and it's all it's all so crazy it's it's it's so satisfying that I can't imagine it not being a part of my life and not in that meat not being a part of my diet mm changes you. Yeah. So it's too bad that it's not more available to people, you know? Yeah, it's not. It's hard.

There's a high bar for accessibility. And we got real lucky. Oh, for sure. We get to hunt at the Deseret Ranch in Utah, which is this incredible place. It's a private property. I mean, it's all wild animals. There's no fences, but it's private property, so there's not an overwhelming number of people. There's a lot of guys that try to go on public land, and unless you're willing to hike in 20 miles,

and there's a lot of guys that are willing now to hike in 20 miles because there's now this culture of these really fit backpack hunters, like these Aaron Snyder type dudes, who put these fucking heavy packs on and they just go. They're training for this moment all year round. Like Aaron has this crazy setup in his gym where he has this elevated treadmill. And then the treadmill on each side has like an Olympic bar, and you lift the bar so you're holding weight, and you're going up this elevated treadmill. I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ, man. But that's what you have to do if you want to be mountain fit to be able to do that. And that's the barrier for entry. To go and do these public land hunts, everybody stops at the trailhead. Everybody gets out of their car, and then how far are you going to go and do these public land hunts everybody stops at the trailhead everybody gets

out of their car and then how far are you going to go because he's willing to go 20 fucking miles in are you willing to go 20 miles in yeah that's going to take eight hours and then come 20 miles back out with a moose on your back freaking moose on your back that's like that's totally legit yeah totally legit that's as legit as it gets yeah and most of those guys all had to learn themselves they ought to teach themselves and you know they've all you know we're real lucky that like we get this amazing coaching so we're getting these these even though there's so many layers to it and we're both kind i mean i've been doing it now i've been hunting for eight years bow hunting for i guess six six ish total rookie you know i'm still like

a blue belt or maybe maybe i'm like getting ready to be a purple belt maybe i might get my purple belt soon but you know you go out with those guys they're fucking 10th degree black belts and it's like there's even though there's you know this this barrier for entry it is still possible it's still possible but It's still possible. But it's just like jujitsu. It's like when you're talking to that blue belt, you're like, keep fucking going. Yeah. And you can make it.

You can do this. You know, speaking of which, I have to at least bring this up a little bit to clarify a little bit what I did to John Dudley on the jujitsu mats. You broke his neck. You broke his fucking neck. What do you mean what you did? Here's the only part that you're missing a little bit, right? So I'm giving him his wife, like a jujitsu private. So you broke his neck in front of his wife.

Andy's there. Little Dud was there. This is getting worse. You broke his neck in front of his wife and his son. So I'm just completely, you know, Iin and okay. This is this this is that And I'm not even I'm not even doing it like this that we in one weekend Andy John and me we did we did archery which I had never done before Then we did jujitsu which John had never done before and then we went on the wind tunnel which John had never done before then we did jujitsu which John had never done before and then we went on the wind tunnel which

John had never done before you know cuz Andy's like a sky god Parachuting blah blah blah and so we did those three things. It was kind of like a cool weekend I mean, that's kind of an epic weekend really. Yeah, let's be honest. So it's jujitsu time. So I'm like, okay cool So I'm going over. Hey, this is the guard. This is the mountain going over all the basic stuff. I'm Cool, so I'm going over. Hey. This is the guard. This is the mount going over all the basic stuff. I'm I'm just giving the basic overall kind of concepts so I get done with that you know and I'm done like I'm done. I'm just done. I'm like okay. You know great. It's good introduction and then Dudley is Like well, let's go a little bit

And I'm like does the wrong language. I would have pulled him aside come here So so he's like let's go a little bit and even that you know what I'm totally cool with that Of course he wasn't I thought he wasn't mean and he wasn't thinking he was gonna be it wasn't it He wants experience. Yeah. Yeah, I shouldn't have even said let's go a little he was like he was like hey Can we can we try it? You know something like that just being cool, and I'm like absolutely man. No problem so So I lay down on the ground right and i'm like he says well what should i do i go you know just attack me so i laid out on my back i'm like just attack me and guess what he did what he did he freaking attacked me he like came at me and dudley's a

big strong athletic guy he's six what is he six five at least? Yeah, so he caught me fucking he grabs You know, I'm chillin, you know, I'm just like, okay cool. He comes at me I think I like grabbed me and so I kind of replaced guard and then I sweep him and I'm Matt and saw mounted and all this is just pretty chill and I put in a Ezekiel choke right which I have a little yeah no Ezekiel choke I have a little I have a little good technique for doing it but no big deal so I put in the Ezekiel choke he's

this is the thing that I really wish I should have explained more because we hadn't rolled I wasn't like hey when you start to feel like you got if you got to tap out right he knew to tap out but I kind of figure everyone knows how to tap out so I I put the choke in on him, right? Well, he doesn't know what to do. So he, he's grabbing me and he's pulling, he's squeezing me. So he's on the bottom.

I'm mounted. I've got the Ezekiel choke in. And in order to defend himself in his own mind, he's squeezing me into him, which the way I do my Ezekiel choke it hurts I mean it compresses the choke even more and so what are you doing basically I put my hand I make a fist and I put my fist in my sternum and then I you know grab the forearm here and then arch my shoulder so there's the neck right here it closes it right so it's putting the fist into the fist into right it's a it's a trach It's an air choke. It's gnarly and so I'm just doing this and you can see that hole and you shrug

But as I'm doing this he's panicking and pulling me into him And he only did it for a second and then he 10 and he taps out I was like yeah, you know and I wasn't I was just like oh, you know boom and then he taps And then the rest of the stories I guess I didn't know a lot about the rest of this day I didn't know any of the rest of the story because he didn't want to Feel like a baby. Yeah fractured like his hyoid bone and then it built calcium up around it So he calls up Andy one day and he goes dude. I think I got throat cancer Because there's something growing in my throat

And he goes the doctor gets an x-ray, and he's like hey Did you do something to your neck because there's a there's a hairline fracture? That's not now calcium deposit around it And he's like oh, I know what happened so I guess in my defense It wasn't that it wasn't like a big deal it wasn't it wasn't crazy it wasn't crazy it was just normal be like if if you grab somebody that showed up here is like hey you know hey can you roll with me you'd be like oh cool and

you put them in a kind of whatever presented itself maybe you don't lock them maybe you do come here problem is when you get used to doing certain types of chokes and then you're doing it to someone who doesn't especially that where you got a fist yeah And I this is I guess this is the only thing He make no mistake about it even though. I was just chilling. He was not he was going level 7 berserker mode on me He's such a good athlete You know the other thing about people that have never done jujitsu when they're doing it with someone who's a black belt they probably feel like they can just kind

of go crazy and you'll just absorb it and deal with it and so they just try it let's see what happens when i go crazy so now he holds this over my head you know he broke his neck yeah oh i know i know one day i'm like i'm like we're up in montana and i said hey man he's like he sits like he was at my house he's oh thanks for having us over i go bro you you know you taught me how to do this you brought me up here you take me hunting like you're doing all this awesome stuff man i you know you're the man dude i really appreciate it he goes yeah you know what you did for me i'm like what he goes broke my neck It's awful bro. Oh, it's all good now though right? Oh, yeah, so I'm bothering him anymore. Oh, I don't know about that I

Thought you meant it's all good between us. It's all good between us. He just said we do bow We're freaking fired up. I think every time he swallows he thinks about you. No, he coughs. Oh, no. He coughs. Hopefully, I mean, I haven't talked to him about it. I don't like to bring it up a lot. So there's something in there that's fucking with his throat. Something in there that's making him cough. So they'd have to probably get in there and scrape it.

So while we're hunting, he would be like, and then he'd look at me. Oh, no. And I'm just thinking, oh, I'm such a horrible me. Oh, no, I'm just thinking of such a such a horrible person Oh, no, it's you know, I was I always say like, uh, You know, I Dean Lister. I'd have been Dean Lister's training partner for 20-something years Up until recently he never hurt me and I never hurt him never I mean until recently Yeah, cuz he he ended up hurting me and he ended up hurting me in the dumbest possible way I Show up to class this was like

This is over a year ago cuz I hurt my archery for a while I Show up to class late right and he's teaching and we're just gonna roll but I come out and he's like finishing the class and I'm cold and I'm just just getting on the mat and he's says oh, let me show let me show something he goes here lay down and he gets a He gets a straight like he gets an Americana on me or a Camara But anyways, he's like hey try and get out by straightening your arm and the whole class is watching He goes try and get out by straightening your arm. Um and I go okay cool

And so he puts me across he gets across side. puts the think it wasn't I think was an action Uh a camera he says He's all right now try and this is in front of us. He goes like straight arm He's about to straight he's about my arm is here And he's about to straight he wants me to try and get out by like doing almost like a hitchhiker escape or something so he says uh He says try and get out by straightening your arm. I go, okay. I straighten my arm and he just in a millisecond And you could hear it

arm locks me Totally destroyed my arm. No, not totally. It was injured very bad the first time in my life I had to get a sling this bro. This guy comes over to me Dean Lister and he goes bro And he's all he's such a nice guy. He's all I'm so sorry and he goes I didn't know your elbow wasn't very flexible. I go, bro, it's an elbow. Elbows aren't flexible. They're bone, dude.

I didn't know your elbow wasn't flexible. D needs a DNA test because I know he's at least 86% Neanderthal. Yeah, at a minimum. The way his neck and his shoulders move together. At a minimum. You can see that dude with like a big club. For sure. And a total, total mutant and a savant on the jujitsu mats.

Oh, yeah. A complete savant on the jujitsu mats. Well, he's literally the missing link. He's the link. I shouldn't say the missing link. The link to jujitsu expanding into the leg lock game. Modern jujitsu. It's 100% Dean Lister.

100%. And the statement that he made to John Danaher has become world famous because Dan heard said it on my podcast He said Dean Lister said to him. Why would you enjoy? Why would you ignore 50% of the human body? And Donna her being the fucking genius that he is was like, why would you enjoy? Yeah, why would you so would you know most of the like, you know all the all these new things that are coming out now, right? Yeah, you know you see Gordon all the, all these new things that are coming out now, right? Yeah. You know, you see Gordon Ryan, just insane. All these guys that are really attacking legs now.

And by the way, just like Dean, Gordon's not only good at attacking legs, he's good at everything. But I, I was asking Dean cause I watched, you know, Dean's done all these moves to me for years, you know, and just just just over and over again right this is what we do which is what we've been doing we've been doing it since he won adcc when when eddie beat hoyler when dean won when he beat kakareko in the finals with uh what they now call 50 50 which he and i called kakareko after that we called that kakareko no one started doing it for another many many years probably ten years

Regularly I was there that year. Oh, yeah, and I wasn't there that year. I was I was there when Eddie Won in San Diego. We were all I competed in San Diego Dean competed in San Diego and Eddie competed in San Diego for the trials I was there for that too. Eddie won. Yeah Dean won I lost to Dean one I lost to Big country Roy Nelson. Yeah. Yeah, and I did because I wasn't very tactically smart I scrambled to position and I tried to get a matter fact I got a crucifix because that was kind of one of my go-to moves get a crucifix and I get a choke from there when

I should have taken the back and gotten points and I didn't and Roy Nelson who is a great guy and he's a total stud uh he I got the crucifix position and he like powered out of bounds and so then and he beat me because he's a much better uh wrestler than me and awesome at jiu-jitsu too anyways uh when won that, like we were doing this stuff. So anyways, right. Like probably six months ago or three months ago, I was asking Dina, I said, Hey Dina, are you starting to see things that you didn't know? Right. When you're watching, cause he watches, you know, I said, are you starting to see jujitsu things that you didn't that you didn't know like footlock stuff And he's like he's like yeah about three or four months ago I started seeing some things that I didn't think of so that's how long it took people to

Get to and then start to develop their own stuff, which is which is pretty crazy Well, it's fascinating that once the game moved into this sort of leg lock heavy Style that so many guy like Craig Jones and Gordon Ryan and Gary Tonin, there's so many of those guys that you're seeing this game getting tighter and tighter with leg locks. And the way John Donaher examines everything too, because Donaher's body is broken. He can't really compete anymore. I mean, he has an artificial hip.

He's got an artificial knee. His body's really fucked up. And his other knee is really unstable. So he can roll, but he can only roll very controlled with guys who understand his physical limitations. And you can see how he understands positions. You can get a lot out of rolling with him. There's a great video, actually, of Gordon Ryan rolling with John Donaher. And obviously, they're not using strength. They're just flow rolling. But you see how tactical he is

and how ahead of every position he is and how his deep understanding of it. And part of it is because he's teaching these guys and he's teaching them from a position where he can't really do it himself. He can do it, but he can't compete. He can't roll and do it. Right, right. But he has the mind for it, so he's seeing it from the outside. And he's also this fucking really genius human being. So he's able to break

this down and then he has this core group of badasses that understand what a great pleasure it is to have this genius teach you i mean it's not a coincidence that that whole henzo gracie team has become the one of the biggest threats like that the whole team is filled with fucking murderers yeah and they're just to again emphasize the point is leg locks are a part of the game. And there was a time period where people thought that leg locks would change the game completely.

And at a certain point, the defenses for the leg locks become known. And all of a sudden you have to go back to the other parts of jujitsu. And that's why you see guys like Tonin, right? He doesn't always win with heel hooks, but you have to address them or you will lose right and Yeah, those guys it's really cool to see those guys coming up

I mean, it's actually I'm kind of saying it coming up like I'm like like there But I'm watching this development come which I was that kind of ground zero with Dean Lister and the crazy thing is Dean Lister. And the crazy thing is Dean Lister, he has like a crazy savant mind where I would create one thing for every, whatever, for every 20 things that Dean created, it's probably like Eddie, and I don't know Eddie as well as you do, but just the creative

part of his brain is what the most powerful thing was yeah and then once people saw it they're like okay now we can build upon this yeah for Eddie it's 100% the creative part of his brain also the fact that when I met Eddie he hated lifting weights he wouldn't lift weights because I would try to get him to lift weights I'm like come on let's lift weights I'm gonna fucking lift shit like you can go lift weights. So he was this little tiny guy, and he had to rely on technique. So he had to rely on trickery. Plus, he was a musician, right?

So he's always this creative guy, and he smoked a lot of weed, too. So he was always thinking about things outside the box. And he's also this guy that doesn't like people telling him he's wrong. So, you know, you can't do it that way. He's like, oh, really? Hmm, let's see if if i can and then he would find a way to do it and you know and he just developed all these like weird entries into things and these weird setups that people didn't see coming and once he sort of improved upon these and then started expanding upon them and then developing that whole 10th planet system i mean really it's insanely creative system that's just developed based on his ability to

just think outside the box i had jeff glover at my training in my dream for a long time teaching he's the same thing where he's small he's crazy flexible he smokes a lot of weed and like he would just do wild things wild things I was at a judge I was at I was actually at ADCC and I was with my son my son was probably like nine or something and we're there watching and Jeff Glover's about to compete this was before I really was friends with Jeff was he doing that donkey guard thing back then he was doing everything He waited donkey guard hadn't become super popular, but he was kind of in the beginning stages of it So I'm sitting there next to my son and we're at ADCC. So it's it's a small thing

You know I go I and I said to my son, you know, I watch this guy that's about to come out he's crazy and Glover comes out and he'd like just he falls on his back, flips inverted guard, and starts, like, just going insane, just doing insane things. And, you know, the rest of the matches are two guys, you know, playing patty cakes and looking for the takedown. Glover comes out, falls down, freaking just doing all kinds of wild stuff, and then submits the dude in 38 seconds. And my son looks at me, and he goes, he goes, I thought you meant like crazy.

And he goes, I didn't know you meant crazy. And I go, yes. He thought you meant like brutish. Yes, brutish, crazy. He didn't think I meant what that weird creative thing is. Yeah, that's one of the best things about learning jujitsu from a small person. Like those small guys,

they figure out how to get around things i mean there's been a bunch of you know hoyler gracie's a great example of it too eddie glover yeah yeah that's that's why i'm never a good that's why i'm a bad person to introduce people to jiu-jitsu right because they just think oh yeah of course you're a gorilla you know you outweigh me by 40 or 50 pounds yeah i love i love I used to always have Jeff Glover on standby at my gym Be like, oh you don't oh, yeah, okay Go train with that guy over there see what happens and when Jeff goes against a like a big strong guy You're gonna get some yeah, they really get so disappointed in themselves. It's so sad

He said he said the easiest people for him to roll with were big, like, muscular guys. Really? He says the easiest people for him to roll with are big, muscular guys. Like, big, muscular guys. He says, oh, I love rolling with them. They're so easy. That's so crazy because most people get injured rolling with them. That guy's so freaking flexible. Yeah. I think his neck's jacked up now.

Oh, is it now? Yeah. That's a thing that gets everybody is the goddamn neck. You know, because very few guys really strengthen their neck correctly either. I think the neck is one thing that you absolutely should strengthen. I think you can get away with not lifting weights and doing jujitsu, but I don't think you can get away with not strengthening your neck for very long. Yeah, it's one of those things, and it connects you to the rest of your

freaking body. You also use it. You use it more than you think, you know, especially me. I was, uh, my, my favorite technique is probably had an arm choke and you're using your neck to secure that arm. And once you develop a feel for holding an arm in place with that neck, that neck gets a workout, man. You know, you really, that neck it's a workout man you know you really you use it a lot more than you think and if you can strengthen your neck it's just it's such a big advantage it's also a big advantage in avoiding getting hurt because it strengthens the whole chain from the top of your spine all the way down you know that's why i'm such a big fan of that iron neck i just used it right now right before the podcast I was doing it.

I do it every fucking day, man. I put that nail on it. I bought one. Love it. They emailed me a bunch. They're like, bro, how do you like it? I'm like, it's all good. It's fucking awesome, man.

Between that and, you know, there's a few other back exercises and stuff that I think are critical. Strengthen the lower back, too, because it's another thing that guys always get jacked is their lower back. Yeah. You know, the weird thing is people's necks get jacked up regardless But there's people that go through life doing whatever paperwork and they end up with a bad neck Yeah, that is a vulnerable thing

So if you don't take care of it, especially when you are abusing it when you are getting choked when you are not tapping It's one of those things I judge people on their necks on the size of their neck Yeah, if I see someone little skinny neck We doing man. Yeah do some go do some I just just doesn't seem like it would be a good thing to have It's that's the thing that holds your head on I can't wait for the future When your neck is all jacked up and you go in and they just put you in surgery for two hours And you come out you got a metal spine

Yeah, I'm gonna be the first worst and I'm I'm right in line You want to give me a metal spine or any metal components inside my body you're down with that. I'm 100% down Let's make it happen. He's got a fake disc He's got a titanium articulating disc which where lower back is his lower back had been so smashed and suppressed That his you know, that's one of the things that's why men, when they get older, they shrink is your discs get squished to the point and they start touching. You get stenosis.

Do you think you can go too far with flexibility that it starts to injure you over the long term? Well, I don't think you can go too far with flexibility, but flexibility without strength, perhaps, because maybe that inflexibility, like maybe you'll get like some muscle damage, you know, when you're trying to push too far, that'll prevent you from getting disc damage. Maybe that's just speculation, but I think it's critical. It's just so critical to strengthen your back, man. I mean, I'm always doing reverse hypers, and I do all these different back extensions. I just think strengthening that whole column, and yoga in particular, and then the neck, the iron neck.

I just think that whole thing, it's like too many guys just rely on their workouts to strengthen that, and they don't take it as like, hey, I really like doing jiu-jitsu. I really like doing Muay Thai. I want to put in the time to work out these areas. How's that he's back now It's not a hundred percent It's still fucks with him a little bit, but he's rolling again, but he's got a fake discs a disc It's a titanium disc that they replaced the smushy part with this thing that rolls and moves But it still creates some inflammation.

Look, I know I had Ronnie Coleman here last week. I know. I listened to it. And his whole back is all fused, and it's horrible, man. I mean, he can't walk, and he's the king, greatest Olympian of all time. I mean, he's a fucking amazing pro bodybuilder. Eight-time Mr. Olympia. I watched the documentary. Did you see the documentary i didn't i didn't really good man really just what a good guy great guy what a nice guy couldn't be

nicer couldn't and in pain in fucking agony and still working friendly and oh wouldn't wouldn't have it any other way and he talks about the the days that he like he was talking about uh squatting 800 pounds and that uh like he said he was gonna do it for two reps and after the two reps he could have gotten more and to this day he thinks he should have got more that's what we were talking about earlier right that's keeping up at night that's why he's a champion I mean that really is that that's what made him a champion did you watch the vid the the West Side versus documentary? No, I didn't.

I got to interview Louie. That's why I got the reverse hyper out here. I have another piece of his equipment too, that belt squat machine, which is amazing. It puts all the weight on your hips versus on your back. He's a fucking wild dude, man. Wild. I want to go out there and hang out.

He would love you, man. He would love you. You would love him too, man. That is who Louie is. And he's got this fucking gym filled with barbarians. Oh, yeah. All they're doing is just trying to lift the maximum amount of weight they can lift. It's insane. My kid watched that.

And he, you know, I think he's just all about it now. West side. Him and his little buddies talking about Louie Simmons. He's contagious. Go harder. Go heavier. I mean, Jamie and I were in his office interviewing him. That's where we did it.

We actually did the podcast at Westside. Yeah, I was in Columbus doing stand-up. And I just had to interview him. God, that's awesome. I just knew. I knew just like I want to get the guy in his gym, too. It was just fucking amazing. He gave us a to get the guy in his gym to just Fucking amazing give us a tour of the gym and then we did a podcast at his desk. It was awesome

What a rare human being Yeah, they don't make them like Louie Simmons But also a genius like here's a guy who figured out like his disc was fucked up and they were like we're gonna fuse you And he's like well, let me think of this something made it compress I'm gonna figure out something to make it decompress and strengthen that area and that's like well let me think of this something made it compress i'm going to figure out something to make it decompress and strengthen that area and that's where the reverse hyper came from which i think should be a staple in every gym that reverse hyper machine for strengthening the lower back and then actively decompressing i've never found anything better and that's all in louis simmons mind it came out of his own brain because of his injury that he came back from after

and was squatting whatever 729 world record at whatever 62 years old yeah but i wouldn't recommend any things he does i mean here's a guy who got his biceps reattached and then blew it out because it was too annoying to not be able to work out so he just went back to working out and pop snapped back off no they all cold so he's got. So he just went back to working out and pop, snap back off. They all cold. So he's got no biceps. Just pulls back. Crazy animal. He got his shoulder redone.

They gave him an artificial shoulder. Goes back to the gym and they're like, you're going to max out today. His friends made him max out after his shoulder surgery with an artificial shoulder. Like, okay. That's just the culture. Yeah. The culture is it doesn't matter don't matter in the in the Documentary one of the guys was saying my goal

Was to hurt Louie when he came in the gym my goal was to hurt him I wanted him to get hurt. I wanted to push him so hard that he got hurt That is then this is one of his buddies., one of his friends one of his training partners. My goal was to hurt him. That's that culture though I mean, that's how you develop such a legendary place. You have to have The sensibilities are beyond what a normal person would consider a prudent thing to do Yeah, and if people the people that could withstand that kind of pressure became champions became world record holders It's all about the mind, Jaco. That's what it takes.

Nobody knows more than you. We just did three hours, dude. Let me give you a COVID test now. It's 3.30. Let's get some. All right, let's get some. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you, man.

Right on. Bye, everybody. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

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