The Joe Rogan Experience - #1833 - Tim Kennedy

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Tim Kennedy is a Special Forces operator, retired UFC fighter, and founder of Sheepdog Response. His new book, "Scars and Stripes: An Unapologetically American Story of Fighting the Taliban, UFC Warriors, and Myself" is available now.  http://www.timkennedy.com/

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Your comedy, your stand-up was the first one I've been to in probably ten years. Oh, with the Vulcan? Yeah. Yeah, that's a great place, isn't it? Dude, rad. Yeah, it's a fun little spot.

Everybody was cool. It's weird that it's on 6th Street, spot. Yeah. The, uh, everybody was cool. It's weird that it's on sixth street, but yeah. Yeah. My place is too. We up. Um, yeah, it's a sixth street is a unique spot. Yeah. It's a, they're getting, they're doing some stuff to try to, you know, clean it up a little bit. And they, they got rid of that homeless situation. There was like a crazy homeless encampment that was really close to that. They got rid of that. So Austin's a unique place. There's a lot of wild shit in this town. Yeah.

Amazing stuff and really weird stuff. Yeah. It's a great combination though. And it's a great size. You know, you were one of the people that early on got me thinking about Austin because you were always ranting about it. About how great it is. I should have kept my mouth closed.

You should have kept your mouth shut. Because then when you came here, everybody, they're like, ah, where's Joe at? Oh, just moved to Austin. I was like, you shut your mouth. We're on a flight last night coming back. And the Southwest person who obviously lives in Austin, they stopped in Austin and then flew to San Diego. And he's like, and everybody that is going home to visit in San Diego,

please stay. Like he said that over the intercom on a Southwest flight. And I was like, I like this guy. Well, it's like the secret's out, but the barrier to entry is high. It's hard to move to a new city. It's a lot. And then on top of that,

it's hard to find a fucking house here. Everybody I know that finds a house here, they get outbid. Like you got to bid more than the house costs costs it's like they're making this little sneaky move where like save the house if it's listed for 500 grand you gotta offer six yeah because if you don't someone is gonna do that and then you're not gonna make it i've been trying to buy land and i i keep i mean and i'm i'm coming in high well over and then you know still losing out the realtors i cast somebody from californ California just paid cash and came 30% over. Motherfuckers.

Yeah, it's wild out here. And they're building out here like crazy too. When you get out towards Round Rock and out in that area, there's just constant construction. I'm in Cedar Park. That's where our headquarters is. If you're in Austin, Cedar Park was's where our headquarters is and that used to if you're in Austin Cedar Park was like the absolute

hillbill north and now it's just North Austin yeah just everything is just slowly still so small yeah

in comparison to LA every time I go back to LA I'm like fuck this how did I live here yeah I'm so much more relaxed here I concur unfortunately we're talking about it again.

We're fucking it up. Dang it. You look good. Thank you. Thank you. Healthy? Working out? Training?

Yeah, a lot. Yeah. Grappling? No, I'm trying to heal a knee. I have a knee issue right now. I was working out and doing some Muay Thai, and I just, even though it hurts, I still kick with it. And then it was starting to swell.

And so now I've been going to Brigham at Ways to Well and getting it shot up. Dude, he's great. He's great. Ways to Well is awesome. Yeah. Right now it's good. It doesn't hurt at all. So I'm going to give it a couple of months and really do all the knees over toes stuff

and try to rehabilitate it without getting an MRI because I don't want to know what's going on in there. I just did six months of that program. Yeah? Yeah. And it makes a big difference. Oh my of that program. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, it makes a big difference. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. It's not fun though. It's not fun. Um, it's obviously mobility and you're, you're focusing on circulation into the knee.

Um, so it's not good for the ego. It's not fun for the ego because the weight that you're doing for the squats in that style of squatting to have your knees over your toes is way less than if i was going to be a meathead and go and squat you know doing the lunges it's trying to get that deep deep forward lunge to get the knee all the way of the toe and then all the sled pulls and all the sled pushes and it's just like golly can i just do some athlete things you know i know it's healing so i'm'm going to be a better athlete, but it's still not fun. It does change. It remaps your knee. It really does. It changes the structure.

Like, it doesn't feel as loose anymore. Everything feels, like, more rigid and strong and secure. I just, I'm avoiding, I have a, I've had meniscus taken out of this knee, and I'm worried about, you know, cartilage damage. out of this knee and I'm worried about cartilage damage. And that's what I'm worried that this injury is because it's just strangely sharp and not getting better. And so I'm hoping that stem cells and peptides. That's the combo. Well, what I'm really, yeah, I'm hoping that'll do it.

But I just have to not be a meathead. This is what I do. I get the stem cells. I feel pretty good after four weeks. Start crushing the bag again. And then I kind of aggrav not be a meathead. This is what I do. I get the stem cells. I feel pretty good after four weeks. Start crushing the bag again, and then I kind of aggravate it one more time. Yep. I have the mats that I'm on right now,

a level of killer that I've never imagined existing in names that I didn't even know. Oh, the Donahue Death Squad? Oh, yeah. Everybody that came here. And everybody's training at ROCA right now. That's too right yeah it's cool shout out to roca yeah they uh rob's been really rad three workouts a day on those mats that's amazing and um so cool yes you know you have oh this this guy's a two-time olympic gold medalist what's up you know hey

satoshi and as he mauls me um like we're in the cage right here on it and satoshi was just beating me up and then roy mcdonald getting ready for this fight beating me up you know gsp's traveling in and then obviously like gordon and the shanjei ribero team at six blades not but three miles away you have the b team with craig jones yep so like one through 20 yeah the best grapplers in the planet are in Austin. And the check mat guys are here. Oh, yeah. Great Brazilian Fight Factory. It's fucking crazy.

The Tackett kids. It's amazing how many good grapplers are here in this town. All of them. It's amazing. A lot of them, yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Eddie Bravo's thinking about coming here too. He just doesn't want to like overcrowd it because there's already a 10th planet right here.

Yeah. But every time he comes, he's like, fuck, I want to come here. Yeah. There's room. I think so too. There's fucking 2 million people. That's plenty of room. Yeah.

I mean, give or take 10 miles, you can open a new gym. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. And there's a lot of spots, you know, especially if you want to head towards dripping and, you know, that area. Yeah. Dripping's open.

I just opened my gym uh in cedar park so you know there was 10 miles sanjay ribeiro is the closest you know kind of big gym and uh six blades and that was on 183 so he was you know it's a 20 minute 15 minute drive to him nobody's gonna right somebody over there is gonna pick that gym somebody over here is gonna pick this gym there's enough for everybody out there. There's enough for everybody. Tell me what you're doing with sheepdog. Like what is your sheepdog response courses? What are those? The, in light of everything that's been happening. I mean, I've been screaming from every building I can get on that, you know, we need to prepare America for what is happening now. And so

sheepdog response, like the company mission statement is to train and equip people to preserve and protect human life. With that in mind, we do everything from fighting, shooting, and medical to try and make sure everybody that comes to those courses,

teachers, law enforcement, all of them get the basic fundamentals of really the things about saving life. And we have been, I mean, Sheepdog Response, we have, I think, 180 or 210 courses this year. And if you go to the website right now, it's like sold out, sold out. So like, I can't, I'm not going to lower the quality of training because everybody needs to know the right things. As we look at Uvalde and the lack of training and the response and the broken systems and all the things that went wrong in there. I'm like, God, why?

I literally teach every single day what the answer is to all of this, and you can only train so many people in a year. I think you definitely can only train so many people in a year, and it's also taking a long time for people to come to grips with the only solution. It's like you have to be able to protect yourself. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the responsive reactive side of it, which is really important. We have to make our schools hard targets.

We have to get individuals to be responsible and be able to protect themselves. Our basic entry course for teachers and for everyone is called Protector. It's Protector 1 course. And we shoot, we fight how to keep blood in the body, you know, like tourniquets, packing wounds. And then the biggest part is situational awareness. And that's all preventative actions where I see something that could be going wrong. preventative actions where I see something that could be going wrong. But I'd prefer to go upstream to the root cause of what is causing some of this violence, you know, mental health

and these broken young men and try to fix the individual. So we don't, we have to do all these things with our schools. You know, I have been writing nonstop since since these last shootings have been happening, you know, and like the four D's about how to make a school a hard target. What are the four D's? Oh, you have detection, denial entry, you have deterrence, and then you actually have defend. So of those things, identifying what a problem is, and trying to deter from the outside, limited entry. You know, how our headquarters are set up, it's difficult to get in here, it doesn't look like a

place I want to try and get in the, you know, the the bushes are the landscaping is in a way where I'm not going to have access to the windows. Like there's in my building, when you come to the front door, and you get let in, you're in a kill box, you know, you get what led into a lobby, and in that lobby, you can't get past the lobby. And in the lobby, there's somebody that will let you into the next room. And you're stuck there. And unless somebody lets you in, you know, the defend is obviously the last course of action where teachers or law enforcement are going to be protecting their

kids. There's lots of different solutions to that. They have cameras that can have pepper balls in them, you know, lasers that can blind people, but ultimately it's the individual that has to be trained to be able to protect those children. And in that like preventative model of going upstream to fix the problem, we could concurrently, we can do two things at once, right? Like we can make our school harder targets and we can train teachers and we

can get law enforcement to respond correctly while we start talking really about what is causing these young men to be broken. So what do you think we can do about that? Cause that without that, you know, people think guns are the problem, and this is the narrative that we keep hearing, we need gun control. But there's more guns than there are people. So it's not necessarily a gun problem because the vast majority of people, the vast, vast, vast majority would never fucking do anything like this.

It's a very, very, very, very small amount of people that are deranged and broken and would do something like this. So how do we address that? That is the issue. It's a mental health issue. Yeah, but it's a bunch of things that nobody wants to talk about. We're going to be throwing stones, Hollywood, video games, social media. It's more divisive than ever on social media. You get in this echo chamber with your own ideas and those echo chambers and they're crazy ideas sometimes when you're able to curate and editorialize the feed that you get back. So they're only people like if I'm following, if I'm struggling and I'm just following angry

hate rhetoric and that is just building. And so my thoughts are then magnified and compounded by other people reaffirming my own belief system. And in that, in the algorithms, then they put in something that then enrages me. So it's like, bias confirmation, bias confirmation, bias confirmation, oh, and then here's something for me to interact with, because they want us to interact. So you know, the more emotionally driven we are in social media, the more we

participate in it, and the longer that we're on it. So those algorithms are really just dangerous. That's one. Hollywood, where I love Matthew McConaughey and I love his position and I love him as an actor and I love what he had to say and I love that he wants to protect schools and children. You know, but like how many movies has he been in where he had people on their knees and he executed him in the face there? You know, you you can't be on this moral high ground and then be a hypocrite. So if Hollywood is perpetuating You know, I've never let my children Practice putting somebody on their knees and shooting him or watching a movie really done that in a movie. Yeah, what movies he doesn't Um, it was that Guy Ritchie movie. Oh, yeah. The drug dealer movie. Yeah, one of many examples. Yeah.

You know, he's an action star, and he's a great actor, and I really love what he had to say and how we all do have to come together and find solutions. You know, but if, like, Liam Neeson is out there being, you know, hey, we should get rid of guns, but I'm going to take the next $10 million contract for Netflix to be in the next action film. And my kill count is going to be 110. Oh man, I don't know if you can be in that position of moral authority to talk to me about what you should be doing with firearms. Yeah. You don't hear Keanu Reeves talking about what

we should do about firearms. No, he's a great example of somebody that, you know, morally and ethically really walks the line of truth and integrity. And he's John Wick. Yeah. I mean, you'd have to shut the fuck up. He kills so many people. With a pencil, he's like, hey, bah! That was amazing. I mean, he's killed people with everything in those movies.

You know, music, video games, all of those things. But the video games one is an interesting one because there's arguments that video games actually squash the feelings that people have of violence because they allow people to have like a cathartic release through doing these things. And then there's arguments that they desensitize people. I don't know which ones are correct. I mean, I used to play video games a lot when I was fighting. You know, it was, as you know, I'm not somebody that cannot do things. So I'm not good at just. Sitting still.

Yeah, sitting still. So recovery for me in between workouts, you know, Greg Jackson would lock me out of a gym. Like, you know, you can't train five times today, Tim, like get out. So I would have to do something. And, you know, he'd be like, no, don't walk the Sandia Mountains. You know, like, don't go up the trail. Can you just do something? He was trying to just get you to recover from the training routine yeah yeah so like video games was a way that I could just sit there throw on you know the pressure

cuffs on my legs or ice something while I would sit there and relax and what kind of games would you play I loved first-person shooters you know the um, the call of duties and, uh, but being a shooter and having, you know, obviously been in combat a bunch of times, it was artificial. It didn't, I still wanted to go out and shoot, you know, shooting definitely and training and dry firing and practicing is that cathartic process, like really scratches that itch of wanting to drill and train. What I experienced was afterwards, I actually had more like pent up energy, you know, because I'm doing like these, all these intense things, but it's this artificial experience that, I mean, like jerking off compared to going with your partner and having an amazing intimate experience. Two totally different things. I hate the term partner. Thank you.

We've talked about this. Yeah, I just. It's not a partner. I was done. Tell the story. Oh, man. So I'm in New York last week on the book tour. I walk into a coffee shop and we're like right off Times Square.

And I walk in and I asked the barista for an oat milk cappuccino, which is my favorite beverage. And my wife, I asked if she can have a cafe au lait with oat milk and the barista. And I say it just like that. I'll have a oat milk cappuccino, please. My wife would like a cafe au lait. And my wife is really shy and doesn't even like to talk to people she doesn't know to include people at a restaurant. So she oftentimes is like, can we order for me? So I wasn't man answering for her as a feminist. I get it. She requests it.

Yeah, she did. And the lady corrected me calling her my wife and said, you mean partner? No, no. This is my wife. This is my wife. And she would like a cafe au lait, please Just bonkers Imagine how crazy you have to be to talk to a grown man

And tell him to not call your wife your wife That there is a correct way to announce her It's partner I didn't know what to do I think it's partner So you should do that too, Tim I know That's young people today

They're out of their fucking mind. That's what I'm worried about. These poor fucks that are stuck in the fog of woke. That are just trapped in these universities and they get out and they exist in these weird bubbles. Like LA or New York in particular. They're dangerous. Well, they're just nuts. They think that that's how you're supposed to be.

Imagine correcting someone if they said, my partner. Like, imagine if you say, I'll have a cappuccino, and my partner would like a tall black coffee. Oh, you mean your wife. Yeah. Now, that's my fucking, I said partner. That's the word I like. I like partner. I'm gonna use that one. Yeah. Imagine

correcting someone there. You'd be just as gross. I couldn't imagine. It's just so dumb. Like, what do you give a fuck what he's calling? You know what it is? It's just he's married to that lady. He said wife. That's how you say it. That's how people have said it forever. So I'll literally do whatever she wants, and that's how she'd like to be referred. Jesus Christ,

people are nuts. But it's just the idea that somehow or another it's better to say partner than wife. Why would it be better? Gender neutral. What the fuck? It's a woman. You're married to a woman. Women are still okay. What the fuck? It's a woman. Yeah. You're married to a woman. Women are still okay. It's still okay to be a woman. Especially this one.

She, her, still all right. You can still have that in your pronouns, in your Twitter bio. Fucking A, man. I'm learning how all of it works still. I don't get it. I don't think anybody knows. And it'll change. It'll change with the tide.

It'll turn and it'll go down a new road soon. And we're all going to be identified as animals. We're all going to be Fox kin. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not ready for it. I'm not ready for any of this. I don't understand why anybody would think that it's okay to correct you.

That, that doesn't make any sense. I completely understand. I don't like it when men say, this is my partner. I mean, like it's your fucking wife, man.

It's okay to be, be married. It's okay to be married. It's okay to say wife. It has been a nonstop attack on the vernacular verbiage that we use, you know, and it's in, in every forum, in every, in every opportunity, you know, in Twitter, like on Instagram, it's, it's telling you, it'll like populate sometimes ask you like, would you like to add your, your, your pronoun? Or, um, it's yeah, I don't whatever you just have to tell me how it works I just don't know why it's so important all of a sudden I think it's transgender representation

I get that and I you know it's a very small percentage of the people and those people deserve love and respect for sure and I Fight for him everywhere. I can I get all that. But don't put that on me. I've never needed to say my fucking pronouns. Look at my beard. I'm a man. Let's move on. Look at this. I'm a 220 pound ape. There's no question what I am. Let's move on.

Let's move on. You could be whatever you want, but leave me the fuck alone. I've spent most of my adult life kind of protecting I you could be whatever you want, but leave me the fuck alone the and I I've spent most of my adult life kind of protecting Groups of people that can't protect themselves. Yeah, so I totally sympathize and and am empathetic to trying to to protect Everybody and their beliefs, you know, but But it also stops where you are like you don't get to project that belief onto my beliefs because I have

My own beliefs you don't need to protect my beliefs. I can protect my own beliefs, but um, you know, let's just yeah Stay over here. I think it's a small amount of people that are doing it But the problem is it's like it undermines the all the goodwill that people have towards like these group of progressive minded folks It's the small amount of people that want to force compliance. They want to force people to behave and think a very certain way. Yeah. Back to mental health, I think with shooters, you see a reoccurring theme. You see broken nuclear families.

These young broken men are missing serious masculine elements of who they are. When you look at them, and I'm profiling, I'm generalizing here, you see a very similar young man every single time. He's weak, he's frail, and he's broken. And there's nothing more dangerous than a broken, not healthy masculine figure. Testoster, testosterone's a beautiful thing. And one of the great things about the military is they enhance and they build all of this kind of ability to do very efficient violence. But they also show you how to control it

and how to manage it and the vertical of the chain of command and when is it appropriate. You know, here's your rules of engagement. So it's very controlled. And by the by this process, this arduous refiners fire of shaping a human into a weapon that you have a healthier thing, you have this healthy, beautiful, masculine thing that is very, very different. If you look at me and all of my friends in the special operations community, like these are healthy, great men that love their wives

and they love their children and they love America and they, and like the warrior society and the warrior culture is like this nice balance of their fit. They, they get great night's sleep. They are very good at violence. I mean, Jordan Peterson, you know, himself said the, uh, like a good man, isn't a useless man. A good man is one that is capable and strong and powerful, but knows how to control it. And I couldn't agree more. And when you look at these, these young broken men, you see the same trend over and over again and They are missing these important moments that shape them as men and then they have Testosterone and they have strength and they have violence and they've never known how to channel it you had martial arts

I had martial arts. I had the military we had really healthy ways to burn that kind of growth and learn, you know, getting our asses beat on the mats. And learn discipline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's the incel of the world. Is that just black coffee? Yeah. Oh, yeah. you know, just never have these experiences where they learn how to channel their aggression

and learn how to harness their discipline and learn how to be a fucking man. It's an issue. It's a real issue. And this whole, I think, you know, there's like, it's become a disparaged term, like to be a man. But that's a really important thing to learn how to be. Like when you see someone who holds their shit together and stays calm under pressure and you like wow you you admire that person that that's to be admired yeah it is a thing it's an important thing it's just we are

so goddamn comfortable in this country and we're so accustomed to it and it's been accentuated by the comfort that people experience from being able to talk shit on social media so there's very distorted perception of what's acceptable in terms of how to communicate with other humans it's weird i was in ukraine a week ago and the men there have been hammered for resistance you know being on the border of russia obviously've, they've known what was coming for for a generation. And they have been training relentlessly for the past 20 years. And the young men that you can walk down the streets of Kiev and Maripol, Dnipro, and there is not a fat human in sight. You know, there's not a complete, just a complacent human anywhere to be seen. Every single person there has been hardened,

not just in body, but also in mind. And then I flew from there to Amsterdam, Amsterdam, direct back to LA or back to Austin, which is cool that we have a direct to Amsterdam now. And the moment the plane lands, I get off. I take five steps out of the the gate and I'm like ah I'm back in America. There's just like

weak Soffing people everywhere so so many so many sloppy people here, and if you if you bring that up your fat shaming Don't get that either I don't get that either shame only listen there's things that you have no control over like literal no control over like to shame someone for a disability is a horrendous act it's a horrendous

thing to do but to shame someone for slovenly behavior for things that they have a choice about that's actually probably good for them especially when they're a bad, it's a bad choice. Yeah. That will negative negatively affect us. Like my insurance rates are very,

very high because my insurance has to pay for a lot of unhealthy people. You know, obviously COVID just like went rampant through the community of unhealthy people. Yeah. You know, like I changed nothing about my life. I still worked out every single day.

I still went to the gym every single day. I still flew in the helicopters. I remember you texted me when you got it. You're like, I changed nothing about my life. I still worked out every single day. I still went to the gym every single day. I still flew in the helicopters every single day. I remember you texted me when you got it. You're like, I finally got it. It was like almost two years in. And it took, I'm not gonna tell you how I got it, but it was really hard for me to get it. And I was, when I finally, I was really excited.

You're not gonna tell me how you got it? No, because I'll get somebody in trouble. But it was, by the time you got it though, it was already Omicron. Yeah. Which I got, and I literally had somebody in trouble. But it was, by the time you got it though, it was already Omicron. Yeah. Which I got and I literally had for one day. I was positive for a day. I mean, I'd had the real one, the Delta.

Yeah. And you know, that was only three days. I was positive for five days. I felt sick for like four hours. I hadn't slept in two days. I was working on the border. That's how it always is, right? Yeah.

And I was working and then I came back and I was like, is this, is it cause the border has like this moon dust all along the Del Rio river. And, uh, so I was like, is this just cause I was outside, you know, running and chasing people. So like, is this just moon dust in my sinuses or do I, do I feel like crap? And I kind of had like a headache and, um, I never lost my taste of smell or smell. And, and I was like, I'm going to take a test. And I got a positive. I was like, Oh my God, I got it. And, and I put on a sweatsuit and I got my assault bike and I, I burnt a thousand calories

in an hour, which was pretty rad. And then I came in and the worst part of the whole experience was like, I went to my wife and I was like, well, I don't have to go to work for a couple of days. What are you doing? And she's like, you, you, are you insane go to work for a couple of days. What are you doing? And she's like, are you insane? You literally have COVID. Yeah, you literally have COVID. I was like, but anyways, then she got mad at me.

Well, that's how it goes. Didn't work out. So since we've talked last on the podcast, you have been, well, let's go all the way back to Afghanistan. Because you were there. Oh, God, indeed. You were there during the worst of it when the pullout was happening. Yeah. So, yeah, with 20-something deployments overseas, I've never seen anything like Afghanistan during the fall of Afghanistan. I don't know who was at a strategic level,

not anticipating that the Taliban, every time that we moved an inch on the ground, that the Taliban would not move an inch on the ground. So every, my, myself and all of my peers, all my colleagues, uh, fully forecasted what was going to happen. So as soon as we started collapsing that, that that ground, there was no doubt in any of our minds that every, every inch of ground that we gave up was ground that the Taliban was going to take. So we gave up, you know, Kandahar and Bagram, the two strategic military bases, that means that we just gave up the rest of the country. And we, having been at war there for 20 years and, you know, multiple trips over there, we have lots of friends that deployed with us there. You know, Afghans, the Afghans have a special operations unit called the commandos. We worked alongside them.

Our interpreters are obviously from Afghanistan. So they live in Afghanistan, but they work for us. These people have security clearances. They love the idea of democracy and freedom. They love the idea of a free, independent Afghanistan. They want their daughters to be educated. And those ideals, that philosophy does not align with the Taliban. So as Taliban start taking over Afghanistan, our my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends, and asking me to go contracting companies saying, Hey, I'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy. But none of it was altruistic, you know, like none of it was the right

call to action. It was lots of people. Yes, it was gonna go and save life, but it was it was for money. And, and I was just waiting for, I don't know what I was waiting for. I wasted two days trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here. Until my phone rang, I was in the middle of writing this, that book. And I was with Nick Palmisciano, who's my co author on this book, he's sitting next to me, we're we're working, my phone rings, Chad Robichaux calls me. And he was a Marine Special Operations guy that had

multiple deployments there. And he had a translator named Aziz. And Aziz worked specific specific to special missions units, like the tip of the spear type units. And Aziz had already been told that they're coming to find him and Aziz was on the run with his family. And they were very, very explicit about what they're going to do to his wife and his children in front of him before they kill him. And, and then like Aziz's friends start being murdered. And so Chad calls me and says, Hey, man, I'm gonna go get Aziz. Can you help me? And I said, Yes. I'm on my way. At the same moment next to me, Nick is talking to a young woman named Sarah Verardo. Sarah is this like powerhouse. She runs the Independence Fund,

which is a vet, a military veteran nonprofit that takes care of severely wounded veterans and give them chairs like track automatic track chairs. Her husband is one of the worst. This is a weird title to hold, but he is one of the worst wounded veterans, veterans from the Afghan war. That's her husband. And she's the provider and care and soul care provider. I don't know what the right word is. She takes care of him. And he was wounded in Afghanistan. So her heart is like just, but she has lots of friends in the government. So in this moment, we have the right kind of two people. I have a good mission. I know what I'm gonna do. It's morally right, and somebody has to do it or or Aziz and my my friend's friend is going to be murdered. And I have a method. Sarah can get us routes and approval from the

government. So the four of us started this NGO called save our allies. And that literally that phone call was the beginning of what is now you know, call was the beginning of what is now, you know, what was the most successful NGO movement, an NGO, a non government organization, a nonprofit. So save our allies like that call initiated it, Nick and I were on a plane into the Middle East the next day, we flew into the UAE, the Crown Prince was like the most generous host that you could imagine. One of our friends used to ride motorcycles with the crown prince. And he said, I will give you a C-17 plane. If you can land it, fill it up with a perfect manifest of people and get it out, I'll give you another plane. And that was the, that was the initial promise. And 10 days later, we moved 12,000 people out of Afghanistan,

11% of everybody that left the country during the evacuation, me and three of my friends on the ground and 12 of us total in the Middle East moved. three of my friends on the ground and 12 of us total in the middle East moved. Um, everybody remembers, you know, people hanging onto the landing gear of aircraft and falling to their death. Like that, that was peak Afghanistan withdrawal. And that is a, that is when we got there. Yeah. So when you say that it was like nothing you had seen in 20 years of being deployed yeah in what in what way i mean taliban's gonna taliban so they are definitely doing their thing but it was it was the the desperation of the people trying to find a way to live so at each of these gates a neo operation it's a non-combat non-combat gates, a neo operation, it's a non combat non combatant

evacuation operation, it's a it's a military operation, if a neo takes place, they keep calling it a neo. But that's if the military ran it. And if the military ran it, you would see, you know, a special forces unit with a big, like the Ranger regiment or 82nd airborne that come in that build this huge exterior perimeter that control the ground strategically, then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are coming in and planes are coming out and we're building manifests, we're confirming that everybody that goes on the plane are the right people. This was not a Neo, this was run by the State Department. So instead of that, think of a big strategic military operation, instead of

think the airport became an embassy. And like in the movies, you're running the embassy. And if you get in, you know, like you're safe, and then they'll get you out. That's how they started treating H Kaya, the the airport in Kabul, as an embassy. So the military just secured the perimeter of the embassy, the airport, and anybody that got on the airport was able to get out, except the military wasn't allowed to go outside of the airport. So all the people in the city of Kabul were stuck. That's where we had to come in. So we had to go out into Kabul and grab the people and then smuggle them past the Taliban to get them onto planes. And to answer your question, that perimeter of the base where the gates, there's tens

of thousands of people that were lining up here and they maybe walked a few days. So by the time they get there, they're dehydrated. They have nothing there. There's no food. There's no water. The Taliban, if there's too many people, they'll just take a magazine and just dump it into the crowd to move them back

or to like crowd control them. They'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people. The women, they would float babies like you're at a baseball game with a beach ball. They would float the like you're at a baseball game with a beach ball. They would float the baby towards the gate in the hopes that a Marine or a soldier would reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety. And when that didn't work, the moms would take the babies and they'd try to throw them over the walls. Well, guess what's on either side of the wall? Constantino wire. There's fucking Constantino's on either side of the wall? Constantina wire. There's fucking

Constantina wire on both sides of this wall. So these babies would land in the, in, in the wire and we're in the middle of moving, you know, hundreds of people at a time, like smuggling them past the Taliban. And I'm stepping over a baby in water, or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt alive by the Taliban. You know, one of the teams as they're, they went out into Kabul and they, they, they just missed it by seconds. They're going to go pick up this woman that was a journalist for, um, that the Afghan, uh, one of the Afghan news organizations, but the Taliban got to her first. They pull up the Taliban, see these guys in the car, they drop her on their hood of the car and they execute her on the car. As they just look

at the dudes in the car, there's nothing that they can do. Just execute her. This was every day. So when I said a level of desperation, I've never seen before. This is, I mean, this is like no American, no, no American can imagine that type of desperation. And that was everywhere you looked. And how long were you there for while this was happening? Our ground team, there's myself and three other, um, like personnel recovery experts, uh, we're there total for 10 days. And did it dissipate somewhat? Did the, no, no, just got more desperate. So everybody that was watching on television, they saw saw curated, controlled information is way worse on the ground. So what looked like this assemblance of an assembly line

of planes taking off and planes coming in, what that is inside a controlled environment, you know, that was in on the base outside, if you if you know, if you if you go 1000 meters outside of the wire, it is just chaos, anarchy, apocalyptic level madness, you know, like, really, really, really total Taliban experience out there. out there. Man. And so when you're leaving 10 days later, what, what are you, how are you feeling?

What, one of our, one of the guys with us is codenamed C spray. He didn't eat in those 10 days. He lost 20 something pounds in, in the 10 days that he was there. And, you know, he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just because he didn't have any enzymes left in his stomach to break anything down. You know, when you're running out the wire to grab a family and come back in, you don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over, but you still see it. And that was that's the thing that tortures my mind is, I still saw it all. But I didn't have the time to address it emotionally think about this dead body I'm

stepping over, because I'm really busy trying to get to this family. And then we get to this family. And I confirm, we had to be really judicious in how we confirmed who the people were. You know, if I bring, if I brought back one person that wasn't the right person to bring back, I would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission. If I bring back one radical terrorist, that's not escaping, but trying to get to the United States, and everything would be for not so we had a really deliberate Department of State Department

of Defense approved manifest that would go officially through the government, they would submit all of their paperwork, they would have, you know, digital versions of it. So I would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to meet me. And then once I met up with them, they would have a far recognition signal, that would be not to like give up the tradecraft, but they'd have a way to let me know that that is the right person. And that then would come face to face. And then they'd have another thing

like a secret word that they had to sneak into a sentence. And that's a near recognition signal. And then they have to give me their documents. And the documents have to be real. And it has to be the right person and the same ones that were submitted. So cool, I got the right person. So come on, I got your family. Why are these other 40 people with you? Like, oh, it's, it's like, it's my cousin. And, you know, and her family. And it's, you know, my brother and his family. And it's like, they got to stay. they got to stay like you're coming with me and they're staying.

Sorry. You can get in the car. You can't, you have five seconds. Then, uh, by that time, usually the Taliban have spotted us and it's a foot race to make it back into the wire before they catch us.

And what happens to the people that get left behind? They're murdered or Or used, you know, there's pilots and their doctors and their engineers and they run the sewage system, they run the electrical plant. So they're trying to get out but the Taliban want them to stay because all the infrastructure that's built there are operated by people that were friendly to the Americans. So they want like if they want their power plant to work, they have to have all

the engineers that ran it. So they don't want them to work they have to have all the engineers that ran it so they don't want them to leave they don't want the pilots to leave because their airport won't work they don't they don't have anybody to run their air traffic control they don't have anybody to you know make sure the water purification system works properly so they're trying to keep all those people there but all those people know that they'll then be slaves to the taliban so they're trying to get out and that's that's the that's the tough catch-22 position that we were in I could only imagine the frustration that so many people like yourself who've been

over there must have to how this was all handled that this should have been they should have known what was going to happen if you just decided to pull out the way they did but yes i mean the the level of frustration i've never seen anything in it like it in my lifetime in the military, where there was that many, many men and women from the military, so active and unified, and we have to do something, you know, the I'm never going to forget my countryman's response to Afghanistan and Ukraine, the generosity of just America. You know, it's a different thing from being, you know, that nationalist compared to being a patriot. You know, these patriots were throwing money to pay for gas on planes,

they were, you know, helping us buy buses to position out in Kabul, like we literally bought buses that we'd put in intersections to have people meet there. And they would bring that bus on to the air on to the airbase. And none of this would have been possible, you know, without without the UAE, and the Crown Prince and the sheik without their generosity, and then without the American people just stepping up and veterans, especially, they just, I just never seen it. So as angry as I am as to the way that we strategically did that withdrawal, I have never been more proud of the American people.

It was amazing. It's great that you could have that perspective while also encountering such a horrific scene. Because I got to imagine that the horrific aspects of it would be overwhelming for most people yeah you kind of focus at the work I love mr. Rogers I do he said this thing people are parents were asking what do we do in light of like all these terrible things that are happening? And he says, look to the helpers. You will always see people doing good work and helping. And, and I really take this, I don't know if, I don't know how that works really in the brain,

but I didn't focus on, I saw all the soldiers from the 82nd being so brave. And I saw all the Marines on the walls, you know, protecting all of these people trying to come in and trying to find the right people. I mean, they're children, you know, they're,

they're 18, 19, 20 year old young men and women that volunteer to serve. And then here they are thrust into this apocalypse like scenario. And they're just, they're so, so incredible. I look at them, you know, I look at the, I look at my team, Sean G was our ground force commander, C spray, and Dave, you know, I look at them, I see their, their eyes just sunken in from not sleeping for six, seven days in a row. And, but they're still going like, I look at that, you know, I look at that 82nd guy as I'm like,

Hey man, can you pick up this constant Tina wire so I can slip, slip underneath here with this little kid? He's like, yeah, bro picks up like that's rad. But when the bomb goes off but when the bomb goes off at the end of August, that was what we knew going to be the end of us being able to be effective in going outside the wire and grab people and bring them back in. The base just was going to get locked down. And that's that that was starting to hurt. That's when I realized. So our list kept growing. Right? I said, we moved 12,000 people in 10 days. Like think think about 12,000. You've you've been to arenas with 12,000 people in 10 days, we put them we confirmed who they were, which is a miracle in itself. Thank you, Sarah Ver verardo so saver allies found these people confirmed who they were got them approved from the government and then put them on a plane and flew them out

in 10 days but after the bomb happens and we are limited in our ability to be effective and this list is growing and growing and growing this. That is when like my soul just starts dropping out the bottom because the list grows and my, and we're not bringing anybody else in. So Sean G, our ground force commander, you know, listening to him tell Sarah, she's like, well, what's the point of us still building, being, making this list? He's like, so we know who we left behind. And, uh, and I was just like this is dumb like this is this is really bad how many people got left behind 40,000 on our list I think do we have any idea what happened to them we left back Americans. They are in the control of the Taliban if they're alive.

We're still actively working. We have now moved 17,000 people total out of Afghanistan. We've moved another 5,000 people since Afghanistan became fully under control the Taliban. And we How do you get them out while it's in control the Taliban? We're very sneaky. So it's 5000 people covertly. Yeah. And we have so we like lily pad. We once you get them out, you take them to a place, you know, Qatar, UAE, Pakistan, and you stage them there as you work through the Department of State immigration process.

And immigration right now is a pretty tough thing to work through. Gordon Ryan, you know, is a great example, his amazing, wonderful wife, You know, he's trying to get her processed through legally. My best friend, Nick Palmichiano, who wrote that book with me, his wife, it took her two and a half years. And she did everything perfect, two and a half years with a green card to become an American citizen. You know, so we have 5,000 people that are stuck in this process. So we have 5,000 people that are stuck in this process. A little shout out to some of the senators that are pushing to extend the SIV application. So that's the special immigration visa. It's a special visa for people coming from war-torn countries.

It was going to end where the SIV visa wouldn't be applicable. where we, the SIV visa wouldn't be applicable. And some, you know, Mike Waltz and Senator Tillis and the guys like that are stepping up and like, no, no, no, we have a bunch of allies still that are stuck. Let's figure out what to do with them first. How was that not taken into consideration before we pulled out? I just don't understand how anyone in good conscience

could have handled it the way they did. And why did they handle it the way they did? Was there a reason? Um, there was a, there was a date that was set on the campaign trail that we would be pulling out after 20 years. And so on, you know, September 11 2021, we, when I say we America said that we were going to be leaving Afghanistan, and to stay true to those campaign promises. And, you know, we're, and I'm not like, against leaving Afghanistan, you know, I didn't want to fight in Afghanistan anymore. I don't think anybody else did. And the having been there for 20 years, like whether it was a good war, a feudal war, that that's for strategic level people to

argue about. But the way that we left, that that was really problematic, obviously. left. That that was really problematic, obviously. I don't know. Have we ever done anything like this before? Yeah, I mean, it happened in Saigon. At the end of the Vietnam War, you know, we have I mean, you go all the way back to soon as you he tells you how to to retreat. You know, if You can see other instances where we did it poorly, like Dunkirk, like had the Englishmen not stood up and hopped on private owned boats and crossed the channel. You know, there's a good chance that all of Great Britain would have fallen to the Nazis. You know, that was a bad plan. plan. So it's happened multiple times.

But I don't know why we just don't seem to learn from history. And then we just bury history intentionally. It's bonkers. Yeah, it is bonkers. It's got to be a strange feeling to be you, to have experienced so many of you've experienced and then to come back here and see all these people that are just blissfully ignorant of what's going on in the world while there's stuff in their face with Krispy Kreme donuts yeah it's kind of insulting a little bit, you know, Memorial Day just happened. And, and I think about all of all of the amazing men and women that have fought so bravely for this country. And I like, so what are we doing to make sure their sacrifice was worth it? Right? Are we really moving forward the ideals that it is to be an American? And I think being American is a beautiful thing.

And the ideals that this country were founded on are beautiful, powerful things. And, uh, but then it, uh, it's not appreciated and totally taken for taken for granted. Yeah, completely. And I don't think there's any way to really educate people on what's happening unless you physically expose them to it or unless they make a concerted effort to educate themselves. I don't. So many people just they don't know. Like we pulled out of Afghanistan. There was some noise in the media for like a few weeks. Like 45 days. for like a few weeks. It was like 45 days.

Yeah, and then gone. And then it drifted off. And I was well aware that there were still people left behind there. And I'm like, well, what happens to those people? And it's just the discussion just ended. And then, you know, they're mad at somebody for doing something on TV or somebody did something here. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are getting a divorce.

There's something. There's always some distraction. Will Smith slaps Chris Rock and that's it. We stopped talking about it and meanwhile it's it's one of the biggest cluster fucks in the history of this country in terms of that was the largest evacuation in american history like ever and uh and it was there's no there's no way i i would love to like be able to put numbers but there's no way, I would love to be able to put numbers, but there's no way for us to assume or guess the type of atrocities and the number of them that happened outside. The ones I saw firsthand would take pages of this notebook. And there's thousands of soldiers that saw that every single moment. And that was just within eyes distance, you know, who knew what happened three blocks in where the actual Taliban checkpoints were. So

every route into the base was controlled by the Taliban. And every military expert on the planet, you know, whoever, whoever controls the outside perimeter actually controls that ground. So the Taliban control the outside perimeter. So they controlled the airport. Everybody that got into that base was either able to circumvent, like get past one of the Taliban checkpoints, or had to go through it. You know, it's like, oh, thank you for this passport. What is your job? Your occupation is you are a plumber. You can't leave, you know, oh, you work for the americans i have you on this list you cannot leave and uh and then you're just with the taliban and if i'm not hearing it

from you i'm not hearing it this is the problem it's like this is a this it's a crazy scenario and it's not being discussed publicly no because it's um it's not comfortable to talk about like mental health. It seems like all these things that we should be talking about, we don't want to talk about because they're like kind of bummer topics. But they have to be. You know, we have people left in Afghanistan and we have some of the people that we got out of Afghanistan that are trapped in these lily pad countries that can't make it back. I'm not even saying they have to come to the United States, but we have to do something with them, right?

Like we I personally escorted a couple hundred into Albania, like, amazing. George Soros's son, I was got to meet him. And he paid these were all I think they're like employees, or they're on an internship program in Afghanistan, but they're a lot of them were Afghan Albanian, dual citizens. And he Pete, George Soros, Jr, paid for these guys to be bought brought back to have to Albania. So I took a plane full of a couple 100 people and flew them into Albania. And this is one of the wildest things. I get on a get on a C 17 bomb has gone off, you know, like a bunch

13 Americans die. The base is shut down. I mean, it is like it is a fortress now nobody's coming on, nobody's going off. The plumbing is going out, there's no more clear, clean water. They're taking tractors and driving overnight vision and rifles. So we don't leave them behind. I'm watching like a boot Marine take a pickaxe and go into a helicopter and just start destroying the helicopter. And, uh, yeah, like a black Hawk or a little bird. And as like a, an, an, uh, an aspiring helicopter pilot that would love to buy a helicopter. I'm like watching them destroy a Sikorsky. I'm like, you know, like it was to destroy me. And, uh, like this has happened all around us as, as, you know, bombs going off and, you know, you hear a gunfire and things are burning.

We're starting to destroy all of our sensitive documents. And we're just collapsing down this base. I get on the, we pack a C-17 full of people. C-17 wrap closes. I have to get on a military C-17 because my plane out, which was a private jet that we had set up as our emergency evacuation, it crash lands in Pakistan. As it's flying into Afghanistan, it has an engine go out. So it has to do an emergency crash landing into Pakistan. And now I'm sitting here in Afghanistan. Like, I don't know how I'm getting

out. I have no idea. And so fortunately, the military is amazing you know and they they took care of us and so they flew the four of us volunteers where i'm not there in any military capacity i'm fully there as a civilian working for an ngo an approved government uh an approved government non-profit so with authorities all the way up and down and uh and i get on this military C-17 and the ramp closes. And as that like last little bit of Afghanistan light finally leaves my vision, I turn around and I see these four, 400 people sitting on the floor of a C-17. They've never been in an aircraft before. They've never left Afghanistan before. That vast majority of them. And, you know,

and I'm thinking about all the people that we left behind. And the way that you leave a combat zone is way different than the way that we take off from like an airport, like this nice gradual slope, the way military planes take off or land, it is like full power straight up and they start doing like these maneuvers to make sure that they don't get shot out of the sky. So all these people on this plane are freaking out and the old women who are exhausted and dehydrated, they start passing out. And just so people get an understanding of who these people are that we're bringing out,

I'm like, Hey, I need a doctor. Is there a doctor in here? Like 17 people stand up, you know, all, all some Americans, some, uh, Afghan doctors, there was like an orthopedic surgeon and there's a vascular surgeon. And, uh, so like they all just come in and that's, who's on these planes. These aren't just, I know it's really easy to like, oh, there are these brown people from the Middle East, that is so racist and wrong. Like these are amazing humans that are educated and they speak English and they just happen to be trapped in Afghanistan. They just have to be born and then trapped in Afghanistan. And then the plane

lands. And we're figuring out what to do with all these people. And like, hey, we already have a place to move this next group. So I got a couple hours of sleep. I got a little bite of food and then I hopped on another plane to bring these people into Albania. And I take them to Albania and there's this beautiful resort on the water

that Mr. Soros Jr. had financed. And when I get there, these kids are out in the grass and they're playing and they're drawing. And they're giggling and they're laughing. And it was just my brain couldn't compute. Like these people were just I just brought these people out of Afghanistan. It was just really, really cool. The resilience, like how beautiful the species we are. They had mental health teachers there that were already happy like present for

these children to start working through this experience they just had pretty rad fuck heavy what was the when when they decided to pull out? What was the strategy in terms of like getting people out? Did they have any no? So it was just like figure it out on your own We're gonna leave and all the people that worked as translators all the people that worked as our allies They just left them. Yeah, but when I swear they good luck Now how would they ever expect? Yeah, but buenos suerte. Good luck. Now, how would they ever expect anyone to cooperate with us?

Ever again? Yeah. I don't know. Or what kind of message that sends our current allies. Yeah. You know, if you're... And just to the rest of the world. Yeah. Like, what are we? I think Afghanistan was a contributor to Putin's enthusiasm to go into Ukraine. He's like, what are they going to do? They're not going to do anything.

I think it was Bagram, the general, the Afghan general that ran Bagram base, American forces in the dead of night, loaded all of their people and the stuff that they could carry into the planes that they had left the base. He woke up to an empty base with Taliban just driving onto the most strategic piece of land in the whole entire country. And the Taliban just like walk into the arms room, open the door and start grabbing ARs off the, off the racks that the military just left there. Night vision, PVS 31s, you know, Taliban's like, Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Infuriating. Yeah. Like what was the price tag on the amount of stuff that was left behind? Some preposterous number. I'd say $40, $70 billion. I don't know. That is a really Google-able number. Is that a verb now?

Google-able? Yeah, Google-able. Should be. I think it is. If you Google, that's a verb, right? Yeah. I Googled it. I Googled it.

Yeah. Tens of billions of dollars dollars i don't remember the exact number but it's wild and is anyone accountable for this does anybody does anybody apologize like how does this work does anybody say we fucked up we could have done this better i mean that's that's all on the public relations department of the government to do. On the voter side, like the only way that you affect change is by voting. So the consequence to bad policy is the people choosing people that enact different policies. The problem is we're so tribalized.

act different policies. The problem is we're so tribalized. We're so polarized in this country that there's people that will vote Democrat no matter what. That's wild to me. So I am a radical centrist. You know, like I look at these two fringe sides and I like, bro, you're crazy on the far right. Right. They're like, look on the far left. I'm like, Ooh, bro, you're crazy. And I'm just like in the middle of being like, Oh, who here thinks that Afghanistan is a wreck? Bunch of people raise their hands. Okay, cool. Who thinks that we should enact legislation to protect schools and spend money to be able to harden our schools and address mental health? And like everybody raises their hand.

Not a single hand has stayed down, right? And then you're like, who thinks that it's a great plan for Russia to be able to take land that leads up to NATO countries? Loving NATO or like Ukraine, don't like Ukraine, think that they're corrupt, any of it. Everybody is like, yeah, I don't want communism at my door. And then you go, well, who thinks there's a problem with immigration right now? And I mean, obviously in Texas, every Texan is going to be like, bro, there's a crazy problem. Like everybody generally is like, yeah, I think the immigration system is broken. Let's figure out how to fix it. Even if you're like, no, build the wall or no, let them all in. Everybody still agrees that

there's a problem with immigration. We have to fix it. So in the middle here are just a bunch of people with a lot of issues that we all agree need to be fixed and then I guess we can't have a conversation because we are so divided about what the best solution is I think there's a giant percentage of us that are in the middle but there's enough people that are so crazy on either side that you choose to say that crazy, I just can't tolerate. So I'm going to join in with this crazy, you know, like I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to side with Antifa because I think the proud boys are gross.

You know, it's like that kind of a thing. Like that's what people tend to do. They just, they tend to decide to side with one of the tribes, even though they probably have a conglomerate or conglomeration of ideas that they've adopted from sort of both. Maybe economically, they're more conservative, but socially, they're more liberal. It's like most people are kind of in the middle. And this is, I think one of the things that happened during COVID is that people were sort of alarmed by the way some of the governments handled things,

particularly the way Canada handled things, the way some of the states handled things. And it made people lean towards whatever side was going to impose less restrictions on them and respect freedom more. Florida grew. Florida, Texas. Yeah, Arizona grew. Places, Nevada grew. People got the fuck out of California because they're like, I don't like where this is going. And I need to I need to be someplace where I feel like I'm not going to be restricted in my actions by a government that really doesn't have a good idea on how to protect me anyway. And they want to infantilize me in some sort of a way.

They want to infantilize me in some sort of a way. Yeah. I just released this documentary called No Help Is Coming. And it addresses that specifically. It's all up to you. As Trudeau and Gavin Newsom just landed in California and had a thing last week. And there's pictures of them together. And you're looking at the draconian level legislation that is happening in canada and in canada and california similarly and then the number of people that are just running for their lives yeah to get away from those types

of things you look at australia and you're like that is australia they had concentration camps in australia you know like is this real is this 2022 i guess it is and well They had concentration camps in Australia? You know, like, is this real? Is this 2022? I guess it is. Well, there were quarantine camps. Quarantine camps. And they concentrated people there. Yeah. But they weren't concentration camps.

But they were just quarantine camps. Quarantine camps. And even if you've had COVID and gotten over it, even if you don't have it mildly, you have to be in a camp. Yeah. Even though it's a respiratory disease and there's no history ever of being able to control a respiratory disease. Anything that spreads the way COVID spread, particularly that one, which is one of the most contagious diseases we've ever experienced. Yeah.

Especially Omicron. So fucking contagious. You're not containing that. No. I just really like freedom. I think it's super important. And I've always thought it was important, but I realized how important it is once I've moved to Texas, because it's not just that Texas gave you more freedom. It changed the way people behaved during the pandemic, as opposed to California,

where people are still afraid. They're still terrified. People are traumatized. They're still terrified. I mean, they're traumatized. Yeah. They're not healthy. No, there was a level of anxiety that existed already there. I mean, there's so many people in California that are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and they're, they're freaking out already and they're not doing jack shit with their body. There's sedentary lifestyle and they're seeking to mitigate some of the problems that come with that with pharmaceutical drugs and then a pandemic hits. So they've got psychological issues. They've got cultural issues.

They've got an issue with the way they view government and the way they view the government, particularly in California, that they almost want them to take care of everything. They want them to hold their hand. And then you come here and there's none of that. No. And that's what I loved. I'm like, we're in, you know, fuck it. I mean, dude, I came out here two fucking years ago. Now it's been two years. You came to the right moment, man. I did. You dodged a bullet. Well, I saw it coming, man. I'm, I'm one of those, I smell smoke. Let's get the

fuck out of here. I'm, I'm that guy. Cause I, I, I have a lot of faith in some people, you know, I have almost no faith in most people. And I saw it was falling apart there, and I saw the paranoia and the anxiety was ramping up. And I had known so many people that had already had COVID by that point and gotten over it. And I resented this idea that I'm supposed to think about it the same way that someone who's 90 and obese is supposed to think about it like it's a death sentence i'm like i'm not thinking about it that way i'm thinking about it i don't want to get it but this is not going to kill me like i'm 99 sure i could fucking skate through this in a healthy way if i you know use the right medication and take care of myself and

why am i being locked out of the restaurants why why can't why am i being locked out of the restaurants why why can't why am i being locked out of the gym can't go to the gym yeah you can't i mean the one thing that will save your life even gyms outside you were supposed to wear a mask like where you i need to see some fucking mask data because these guys have bandanas on i mean i just i smell farts i don't think this is working yeah uh data is weird, especially around mental health right now. Yeah. Trying to learn about suicide and depression and anxiety and the type of prescriptions that are being prescribed post and during COVID. The things that I'm seeing in the world right now are very, very scary because people are not both physically and emotionally healthy. Like we're in a really dangerous moment where we either turn a corner and start making good decisions about being individually responsible about our health and mental and

physical health. Or I think we're going to have some really serious repercussions. You know, we're seeing it already, like the insane rise of suicide and substance abuse. And it's, it's frightening. I mean, the veteran community right now, they're not even reporting the data of veterans, veteran suicides and active duty suicides because they are so high and they don't want people to know about them. You know about this? How high is it? So 18 to 35 year olds are the most vulnerable population that are just coming back from a deployment for suicide. And they have seen an 80% increase, I think it was like 86% increase in suicides in that group of people coming back from combat. And what do they attribute that to? from combat. And what do they attribute that to? Every coping mechanism that should exist for a healthy human, right? Like I get good sleep.

I exercise. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I have sex with my wife. You know, I have great friends. I have an amazing family. These are all healthy coping coping mechanisms that are that are in place for like a healthy, well adjusted person. They're coming back. You know, they haven't seen their wife. They've seen a whole bunch of stuff. They can't go outside and exercise, you know, two years of containment where gyms are closed. You know, they can't even go on the base on the gym on base for like the past year and a half and crazy crazy well i mean not only is it crazy but then you're breeding crazy by creating an environment that breeds crazy yeah and then we know what the byproduct is like this is unprecedented mental health problems within the veteran community so i you know if on on instagram like i'm posting all hey here's the suicide hotline number you know like here here are ways to seek help you know, if on, on Instagram, I'm like, I'm posting all, Hey, here's the suicide hotline number. You know, like here, here are ways to seek help, you know,

find a friend. I just two days ago in Washington, DC, we did a rock around the mall in Washington, DC. I did a post. I said, Hey, come out for mental health. We had a hundred people just show up to go for a walk, um, with, you know, 40 pounds on their backs. And I tried to kill them all in a good, healthy way. So they couldn't kill themselves, you know, and all of those things like community and sweat and friendship and laughing, like those are all really great things for humans to experience. And none of that has happened for the past couple of years. Yeah. And heaven forbid that we talk about it. Yeah, it's the unthought of consequences of the way they enacted measures to supposedly protect us. And that thing that you just said that's very important is the amount of overdose deaths and the amount of suicides, how much it ramped up.

And in many places per age group, it far surpassed the people that were dying from COVID. Yeah. per age group, it far surpassed the people that were dying from COVID. Yeah. Especially with young people that aren't as susceptible to COVID, but were just as susceptible to suicide. More susceptible than young people. Yeah. You know, the startling statistic, by 2030, 23 times more people will die, veterans and

soldiers, will die of suicide then died in the whole entire combat time of the past 20 years 23 23 oh my god oh my god Jesus Christ that's so crazy so we I'm just preaching the gospel go outside an exercise go find a friend, you know, there's nothing wrong with calling. And then we, then, I mean, then the legislation, people like, oh, well, maybe we enact some red flag gun laws to protect these people. Like, no, no, what you're going to do is not, you're going to prevent them from going and

seeking help because they're going to be scared that you, there's no, there's not going to be any due process to get them off this list. Once you get them on this list and then you'll take their stuff, they'll never get it back. Now they're not going to do it. So whatever thought they might've had about going and getting some help now, they're not going to do it. So great. Like you just made the problem worse. Well, there's also the real issue, the very real issue that someone could turn you in when it's not justified. Well, I got a bunch of haters.

Yeah, I'm sure. I think I'm a pretty healthy person, but there's no doubt that they'd be like, just to piss Tim off, like 1-800-BE-A-SNITCH. I've looked into your Instagram comments before. Oh, they're wild. I don't read my own. Why would you do that? I don't read my own, but I'll occasionally read my own but I'll occasionally read my friends

and if it's you if you post something controversial I'm like let's see what the crazy Jesus I'll read into it and I'm like what the fuck man and I'll click on the links and a lot of times it's not even a real person it's like no posts blocked account

you can't look at their photos there's probably no photos. Yeah. A bunch of our... So Matt Best, Evan Hafer, Jared Taylor, Mike Glover, Coleon, all of those guys. If you click on some of the people that are... There's about 500 or 600 of these pages. And there's somebody that has built this big, huge infrastructure to target us. And they are troll comments. There's somebody writing in perfect English, whether that's a Russian bot, a China bot, or an actual just crazy troll. And they have dedicated meme pages and saying outlandish wild things.

Like that Matt Best is anti-2A or that Tim Kennedy hates freedom. Yeah, they were saying that Evan was anti-2A. I had to have him in here. He's like, what do I do about this? I'm like, please, come on. Let's talk about this. This is so fucking insane. Your company's called Black Rifle Coffee.

And they're trying to say you're anti-Second Amendment. What the fuck is going on? In that confirmation bias, where you have this, this kind of preconceived notion, and then you go out and look for any, anything that supports your wild ideas. You know, if, if I think the, the number 17 is my magical number, I can go out and I can find the number 17 on a freeway sign, man, I knew it. You know, I knew that's my magic number, right?

And then I'm driving down the road. I turn left into a residential area and I look down at my speedometer. Oh, I'm at 17. And so like you start getting this belief. And it is the most dangerous thing in confirmation bias, especially when it has crazy ideas, like anti-freedom ideas or like hating a specific person and you're looking for reasons not to like them. It is dangerous for investigators on, on the law enforcement side. Like they, we have specific measures for detectives to prevent them from using confirmation bias,

you know, where I think, I think you're guilty. So I'm going to start looking for evidence that supports my belief that you are guilty. Did you ever see the Amanda Knox trial on Netflix? No. There's a documentary on Amanda Knox and what happened to her in Italy. It's exactly that. Yeah. I had her on the podcast.

She's an amazing person. She's so articulate and so smart and so resilient. And what's fascinating is one of the subjects we got into was I said, do you think you would, I would never wish this on anyone because it happened to her when she was 20 years old. She was falsely accused of murder. There's plenty of evidence that there was this guy from Africa. They know who he is. His DNA is all over the house. His blood's in the house. Like he w he came into the house and he said he was in the house and said he got there when the guy was killing her

and he ran away like the fucking story is so bad it's so bad and they still tried to pin it on her because that's who they initially supposed was doing it and that there's zero evidence yeah but they they tried her twice twice for this but it's that kind of shitty detective work that you're talking about avoiding because people are human and humans have egos and egos lead you to make decisions that aren't rational or justifiable but they support your initial assertion which if you say it turns out I was wrong now all of a sudden people go well you don't know what the fuck you're doing and nobody wants to do that. Yeah. Have to break it. Somebody have enough inner development or interpersonal skills to acknowledge that they're wrong. Right. Like that doesn't happen

anymore. Well, it's like the checks and balances just weren't in place for him to accuse her in the first place. The prosecutor that accused her in the first place, He was well off. He was off. It was all wrong But this is what we're talking about that try to avoid on I Love throwing darts at social media in that same confirmation vein you know when you curate your own feed and you're following a bunch of pages that it Reaffirms those beliefs and that's dangerous where you're not getting any outs You know, I follow people that I like way disagree with. Um, so I can hear their ideas so that make sure that my ideas, like, man, that's a great point that she just made. Maybe I want to look into this. And, uh, and then I take a little peek or I could be a psychopath and I could, you know,

block all of those people that disagree with me and then only follow all the people that, that agree with me. And, you know, I'm getting i'm getting weird articles but i'm like oh but that's an article that supports my what this crazy idea that i have yeah and uh that's not healthy yeah and most people aren't very good at managing that stuff they only just subscribe to or click on links that they're interested in like that that support their initial assertions, that support their confirmation bias. And that's a giant problem with people because they don't get taught that.

They don't get taught. They also, people think of ideas as if it's a part of them. And when you have an idea about something, you want that idea to be confirmed. You want that idea to turn out to be true. So you're like, ha ha, I won. I'm correct. But you can't attach yourself to ideas, you can't.

And you gotta be willing to abandon them. You have to be. That inquisitive mind, you know, where I want, I'm gonna always assume that I don't understand this thing and I wanna know more about it regardless. We'll use jujitsu. Like I'm, I've been doing jujitsu for forever. And, uh, and I feel right now, like I'm relearning all of jujitsu because jujitsu has evolved so fast in the past few years. And, you know, I'm going up to

like, uh, the Jean Carlos and the Gordon Ryans and, And, you know, what is this thing that you just did? So I've been doing jujitsu for, you know, 30 years. What is this? This is neat. Isn't that wild? It's so cool. There's so many variables. Or I could go back to my own gym and, you know,

be in the big fish in my super tiny little pond and never adapt or never grow or never learn anything new. And when you do that intellectually, where this is what I think and this is what I know, but I'm never going to subject myself to anything different. Like how dangerous is that? It is very dangerous, but it's more common than not. It's more common for people to do that than it is for people to seek out new ways to learn and humble themselves with new information. And jujitsu, it forces you to do that. You know, if you, I mean, it is really, really fascinating that what the changes that have

taken place in jujitsu, essentially, I mean, jujitsu has always evolved right there's like the 10th planet system that used flexibility and the closed guard and rubber guard and it's really weird and interesting way and then there's a lot of people that did that and they would try these moves out on people and they would have no idea what the fuck they're doing and they'd be tapping before they knew it was too late yeah they didn't understand and then the leg lock system came into place and when the leg lock system came into place like oh my god like i stopped training really hard somewhere around the time that the leg lock systems got put into place so i'm a baby when it comes to that and i might be a black belt in jujitsu but like when i train with gabe tuttle and he explains to me that

all the ashi garami positions and all the different ways to counter. I'm like, holy shit. This is like starting from scratch almost. It's like I understand how to do a heel hook. I get it. But just the subtle variations on how to defend and when you're safe and when you're not safe and how to set up two, three moves in advance

because you're knowing that this person is going to try to get out of it by going this way. So you're stopping this and then you're implementing that as like crazy. There's so much to learn. And then John Dana, he's sitting there. Um, and he's like the wildest on the spectrum, brilliant nerd. And he's like going through these steps and, uh, I'm on the mat and I know I'm about to drill it, but I want to run off the mat and go grab a video camera and record it so that I can, and then write it down. So I would have any chance of remembering all of the details that he put into it. Right. You know, and then I, um, Paolo Brandao, who is, um, like I'm a Hoyla Gracie black belt and he's like the Gracie who might as here,

I have Gracie might as see the park. He owns Gracie might as South. Um, and like, I'll go back to him and like, we'll be trying to drill these things, these things together. I'm actually useless, man. I don't even remember how to do this. Why don't you get like a little tripod and put your iPhone on it and just like film? I don't know. It's weird.

It's not a bad idea. It's not. I think, I think when my knee heals up, that's my move. I think I need to, cause I like all the stuff that I worked with Gabe, I'm like, God damn it. I don't know if I could demonstrate half of it. Yeah, Gordon and John both have online tutorials that are really amazing. Yeah, BJJ Fanatics.

There's hundreds of hours of stuff. Yeah, and they're so easy to consume. It's formatted well. It's filmed well. The audio's good. Yeah, it's very clear, too. They're very clear in the steps, the's formatted. Well, it's filmed. Well, the audio is good. Yeah, it's very clear too They're very clear in the steps the steps of progression and and you know what the reasons for doing each individual step are Yeah, the great instructors. Well, John is a cheat code as Gordon Ryan puts it

He's it like where do you find one of those? Where do you find a guy who is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, a legit super genius, who then falls in love with Jiu Jitsu to the point where he's sleeping on the mats and teaching classes all day long. And coincidentally, he's injured. So because he's injured, he can't compete himself. So he pours all of his brilliance into other people because he's got an artificial hip and he needs an artificial knee and he's

Really fucked for playing rugby when he's younger. Yeah, it's um, okay he and I are gonna be cornering Rory McDonald and In the PFL. Yep on the PFL. Where's that? It's in Atlanta on July 1st And so getting Rory ready for this fight. First of all, that guy's a monster on July 1st. And so getting Rory ready for this fight, first of all, that guy's a monster. Rory's awesome. Rory is not just a great human.

I love him to death. And his wife is beautiful and such a great woman. But he has evolved as an... I've never... I mean, he's always... Do you remember the Robbie Lawler, Rory McDonald? One of the best fights.

How do you forget that fight? Anybody who's never seen it, go and watch it. Jesus Christ, that was a crazy fight. The Glover fight that just happened. Incredible. Those two fights for me are like fight. The Glover fight that just happened. Incredible. Those two fights for me are like number one and number one on any given day. Yeah, they're right there.

But Rory right now physically is a freak. So I'll go in right here and get beat up by him at the 10th Planet Gym. And then I'll step out and somebody else will go in with him. And then John and I will be coaching him. And then I'll step out and somebody else will go in with him. And then John and I will be coaching him. And getting the opportunity to coach a fighter with John also gives me a new layer kind of peeling back the way that his mind works. And he is truly brilliant. You know, he's a great human. He's a great coach in jujitsu, but he's also a great human. He's a great coach in jiu-jitsu, but he's also a great fighter. Like, he understands how all of it works,

and putting it together best spoke for a single person is pretty neat. Yeah, he knows. He also coaches people in striking, which is wild. Like, Gary Tonin, I was like, well, who's Gary's striking coach? Like, John's Gary's striking coach, too. I'm like, what? What? But if you told me anybody else was doing it, I was like, well, who's Gary's striking coach? Like John's Gary's striking coach too. I'm like, what? What? But if you told me anybody else was doing it, I'm like, my God, man, go to a real striking coach. But with Don Herr, I'm like, okay, all right, I bet he can do it.

The fucking guy has no life outside of the gym. This is what's crazy. He'll teach all day long, and then he doesn't have a girlfriend. He goes and watches fucking wrestling videos. He's watching guys from Bulgaria wrestle. He's watching people from Japan do Kyokushin. He's just constantly absorbing technique. It's really wild.

My least favorite thing to hear from him is when I'm training with a person, and that person that I'm training with does a great thing. John's like, hey, great job, Gordon. You know, like Gordon Ryan, great sweep. I'm like, Oh yeah, I just got, I'm about to get smashed. You know, I hate hearing it on the side of his voice. Gordon Ryan put pressure on the left shoulder. Yep. And very rarely does he go great, great job, Tim Kennedy. Tim Kennedy That doesn't come out very often He just laughs at me You have to earn that, I guess I've heard he's got a lot of really interesting killers

That people haven't seen yet I've invited you a couple times Just to sit there I can't, I want to train As soon as this knee has gotten to the point Where I'm comfortable that I can push it I'm going to get back on the mat I do my conditioning in their morning class time. And, uh, and we set up like our bikes and our

rowers and our skiers. So we can just by osmosis watch technique as they're doing it. So I'm like on the skier, just like this, this creep, just staring right at him. Just like I'm staring into your eyes as I'm just going, my heart rates up in the yellow, you know? And, uh, and they just laugh, you know,

it's like me and Shane and Sean Apperson. I'm, I'm that old school approach where I do my boxing separate. I do my Muay Thai separate. I do my wrestling separate and I do my jujitsu separate. And then I do MMA where I try to put them all together, but I try to develop each of those pieces as like a kind of a traditionalist have you tried it other ways yeah but you like this way you like to like really concentrate because I really love um I love like the sweet

science of boxing and you know the footwork is different than when I do Muay Thai you know and there's there's parts but then I get to go and paint my mma picture and put it all together in my style but the uh like if i'm for me getting better in jujitsu if i just did mma and i'm not you know no gi and gi slightly different techniques the way i'm going to position my hip for a camorra is going to be different i don't have the friction you know i don't have a belt to grab to prevent them from rolling forward like these are just slightly variations, different variations. I like doing it really specific to each of the respective arts. The only thing that I would think would be difficult to transition back and forth between the two would be Muay Thai and boxing.

The Muay Thai boxing thing I think would be difficult because the stances are different and the fear of leg kicks. Like you can't go heavy on that front leg and move in when a guy could just sidestep and chop your calf. Yeah. If I want Lama Shako footwork and I'm only doing Muay Thai, but that footwork is really, really useful in MMA. But I'm just doing MMA and Muay Thai. Like I'm never going to get the good footwork that I need to be a good boxer. Right. And I'm not going to get the good head movement because the head movement in Muay Thai is way different than that in boxing. Right.

And I'm not going to learn how to put my shoulder in the right position to protect my chin where I can keep my lead hand low unless I do just boxing. unless I do just boxing. So if I want to take those very unique elements of boxing and then integrate it into my striking style, I do have to train that thing individually and then implement it into my style. Yeah. Well, it makes sense. I mean, there's certainly subtleties to each individual thing

that you can't learn if you incorporate everything together. And you learn that when you see just combat jiu-jitsu. Combat jiu-jitsu, which is a really interesting concept. I mean, at the beginning, I was like, this sounds silly. You're going to smack each other. But now I'm like, this is fucking great. This is awesome. It makes jiu-jitsu.

Well, first of all, there's a lot of things, like when guys are in the 50-50 or when they're diving on heel hooks and their face is right there and someone just smashed. And guys are getting TKO'd. I watched quite a few TKOs with just palm strikes to the face. You're getting smashed from the top, and you realize, like, hey, you can't just grab legs.

You can't just grab legs when this guy has full use of his hands, and he's standing over you. You're realizing, like, what things are actually practical. I mean, you and I are both old enough to remember the Pancrae's days. Oh, yeah. I had 30 fights in Pancrae's, half of which were knockouts. Wow. I put people to sleep.

With palm strikes. With palm strikes. Yeah. The All-Army Combatives Tournament, which is like this arduous hell of a tournament. Three days. First day is grappling. Second day is Pancrae's. Third day is MMA.

And violent, violent Pancraeas fights with high-level fighters. And guys can hit hard. Let's go back to Boss Rooten. Boss Rooten was the best at it because he had the most flexible wrists. And he would pull his hand way back. His jab would hurt. Oh, my God. His hook would hurt. He would smash guys like like this like he was

throwing punches like here's there's quite a few i mean look at this yeah that's beautiful these are just slaps but this this shows you and by the way that's not even the most realistic use of that position the most realistic use of that position i go back to henzo gracie when henzo gracie fought there was a judo guy in one of those early, like, World Combat League, one of those early tournaments. With this fucking guy, it might have been extreme fighting.

This guy apparently was fucking with Henzo and calling him up in the middle of the night and calling his hotel room. So when Henzo got behind him, he took his back, he just elbowed the base of his brain. That'll do it. Boom, boom.

And that's the most effective use of the back mount. But because it's illegal to hit someone in the back of the head, we don't see that. I'm not sure why it's illegal to hit someone in the back of the head. Because you get hit in the back of the head all the time. Like if you get hit with a roundhouse kick, there's a high likelihood you're getting hit in the back of the head. all the time. Like, if you get hit with a roundhouse kick, there's a high likelihood you're getting hit in the back of the head. Because if you're standing sideways and you get neck kicked,

guess where that fucking foot is landing? It's the back of your goddamn head. You get hit with a heel hook. Here's Henzo. So Henzo gets his dude back. God, I love Henzo. Boom, boom, boom. I mean, come the fuck on. I mean, that is the most effective use of the back mount because he's using

full power. Obviously, he has a fantastic back mount too. And he's using – and the guy's tapping. He's using – and watch how he steps on him. Watch how he steps on him when he gets off him. Watch this. Because the guy was a dick. Get out of here. He stepped on his neck.

And the referee's like, hey, you can't do that. He's like, yeah, but I just did. I teach – I call it making soup, where you take the back. And it's nice when we're in my gym. I have a judo subfloor, Fuji mats. There's springs. I think there's 16 springs underneath every one of our floors. Oh, that's great.

Yeah, like you're on an Olympic judo floor. And padded walls, air conditioning. We got fans. It's just the most conducive environment for it to be nice, safe training. You and I step out into that parking lot, the whole world changes about what jujitsu should look like, right? So making soup is when I take that back mount, you know, I just take their face, and I push it into the ground. You know, like, I only need an inch for me to break his orbital socket in his nose on the concrete, you know, and then like once those teeth and a little bit of, you know, the cerebral spinal fluid drips out of the nose you know and a little

bit of the blood and gum and saliva like that all gets mixed in front of this this guy's face before the darkness slowly closes in like that's the end of the fight you know yeah and concrete and with a back mount it's well just fighting a judo guy. Yeah. Imagine that. Wearing a winter coat, fighting a judo guy in the street. Satoshi threw me, you know, Olympic gold medalist, just threw me to the ground over and over and over again. Dan or her, he's like, how beautiful. And I, because I was on the receiving end of it. He said, how beautiful is it for how effective it is that he can just take somebody and put them on the ground i was like yeah it's really beautiful how are his submissions um

not definitely not his i i i don't think he ever attacked one time really just control yeah yeah and he had great control he was really hard to get out from under he's really strong he has this gigantic head. Yeah, he's huge. You know, and his hands are, you know, his grips are wild. He's like 5'10", 260, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he was hard.

Very Mark Hunt-esque. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, but it's such a sweetheart to train with. He was great. But being able to, you know, I can knock you out with my fist or my elbow or my shin or my knee but he takes the earth and he hits you with the earth hits you with the with the earth yeah yeah the earth is big the earth doesn't move when you hit it it's not like a heavy bag you're taking a stubborn dumb object

me and then you're taking a movable and a non-moving object like the earth and like yeah i've seen so many horrific street fights on on instagram and youtube where a guy picks a guy up and slams him on the ground it's the worst it's the scariest thing man because you land head first on the ground like that when somebody hoists you up in the air bam i mean fuck that's we uh back to leg locks in the ground i was teaching a course in new york a sheet dog response course and there was a couple black belts that that locks in the ground, I was teaching a course in New York, a sheepdog response course. And there was a couple of black belts that were in the course. And we're fighting for guns and knives, the rubber guns and knives. And I'm in half guard.

And I take, you know, he had the weapon, the gun in his arm, in his waistband. And I kind of, he was covering it with his arm and I pulled it out the back. So I now have his gun. And he like dives, he like dives underneath like he's going to go for a leg lock. And while you have the gun, oh, I have the gun and I was standing over him and I'm just like, so I tap him as he's, you know, like I'm good at leg locks and I'm just like moving my feet. So he's not getting a finish, but I'm like tapping his forehead with the gun. And, uh, he still hadn hadn't processed like as he's like having this piece of plastic hit him in the face and he like finally opens his eyes and the realization that

I'm tapping him in the face with the gun that as he's diving for a leg lock you know how dangerous you know sports jiu-jitsu is to combat jiu-jitsu that's why I love that combat jiu-jitsu it's adding a degree of realness. Well, it's definitely opening up people's eyes that were just straight-up jiu-jitsu players that took a chance and didn't want to do MMA but said, let me see what happens when you add slaps. Yeah.

You know, but you see guys who excel at that, like guys like Wagner Rocha, who's, you know, a jiu-jitsu black belt but also an MMA fighter. And so he gets on top of guys and smashes them. Just smashes them. He's good. Yeah, it's just like there's a lot of positions that aren't really effective

unless you make this agreement where you're not going to slap or strike. It's the same thing with boxing. People always say boxing is a very effective martial art. Sure, if we make an agreement that I'm not going to pick you up and throw you on the ground. Or if we make an agreement I'm not going to kick your legs out from under you. Yeah, it's like as soon as you make an agreement with that, there's a great video on Glory Kickboxing's Instagram page of this dude, I forget his name, this Russian guy. Like a real high level guy who fought Badr Hari, fought a lot of guys, but he's fighting this boxer.

And it's a boxing versus Muay Thai fight. And it's hilarious to watch because this is it. Yeah, it's comical. What is his name? Does it say his name? This dude, I've seen this guy fight multiple times. Four of those kicks, we're done. I mean, it's crazy.

Because the guy comes in trying to box, and he's just getting his legs destroyed. He never gets a chance to set his feet. And then he gets head kicked and then chopped out, and then this is the end of it. He's like eventually like, what the fuck, man? And that guy's not walking for days, by the way. Alexey Ignashov. That's it, right? Yeah, that's the dude and he's he's a a fucking super technical guy who was uh i think he actually has one decision win

over badr hari like back in the day but like super super high level beautifully oh my god he's he's excellent his uh downfall was the the hooch He liked to drink a little bit too much, partied. Haleo Gracie, Hoyler, told me as we were talking about jiu-jitsu evolving, he said, my dad would say that if somebody can touch your face while you're doing jiu-jitsu, that you're doing jiu-jitsu wrong. I'm like, dude, that's brilliant. Yeah. Well, you've seen the Kevin Holland, uh, Jacare fight. Yeah. He knocks Jacare out from his back. He's on his back. He punches

him in the face and, and staggers him and then finishes him off. Like, which is like, yeah, guys can do that, man. You can't let a guy punch you in the face. I think, um, it was, um, Eve Edwards told me that Dwayne Ludwig broke his eye socket from the guard. Like he's in Dwayne's guard and Dwayne broke his eye socket with a punch. It's like, what the fuck, man? Well, Dwayne hits hard from everywhere. Yeah. It was perfect technique.

But there's reality to MMA that you need to know if you're a jiu-jitsu guy because you have this distorted idea of what you can and can't do. I love having the our jujitsu gym, Gracie Humida Cedar Park, is in our Sheepdog Response Building in Cedar Park. So you're always reminded as like the special forces guys

walking by, you know, as this like Marine Recon guys walking by, as this Navy SEALs walking by, like they're all good level fighters, MMA. They also do jujitsu. So when you're out there, like, you know, Jean-Claude Badoni's and, uh, is teaching the evening class, super talented black belt. Uh, they're still like, I'm walking, I'm walking by, you know, like 220 pound, hairy handed dude with like chunked up hands and scar tissue around his eyes.

Don't forget where we are and what this is. This is real jiu-jitsu. Yeah, you're learning a single aspect of fighting, and that aspect doesn't work if you add a lot of other stuff in. An important one. Yes, very important. It was probably the most important. I mean, one of the things we learned from the early days of the UFC was, with all things considered, if you only know one sport, if you only know one art, jiu-jitsu is pretty fucking effective.

It wasn't until everybody else learned jiu-jitsu that jiu-jitsu became a very important aspect of it, but not the primary aspect. Remember the early days of the UFC? All we thought about was jiu-jitsu. Everybody was just scrambling to jiu-jitsu schools. Law enforcement, if you're in law enforcement and you don't train jiu-jitsu, shame on you. Period. You have to go and learn it because it is a superpower.

And this is what I tell them. A trained person touching an untrained person, that untrained person has no choice over what I want to do with their body. Right. I can do anything I want to it. You know, like I can effortlessly put their hands behind their back and put them in cuffs. You know, I can move them cautiously and gracely and kindly to the car as a trained person. And it is so powerful to have that control over somebody else.

And if you're in that protect and serve mode, you, it is your obligation. It's your duty to know it. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's like having no gun. It's almost like that. It's almost like you're, you're really helpless. And I didn't, you know, when I first started doing jujitsu, I had a very distorted idea of what my abilities would be. And I've, I think that that's a lot of people I think a lot of people like oh I'm a good athlete I'm strong I'll be fine and then you find someone who's your size who just fucking throws you around like a rag doll and strangles you at will and you're like oh shit like this is fucking different you know but then there's also like the other thing like

I had a friend of mine who was a jiu-jitsu black belt took an MMA fight and I knew he did he did no striking he was not a striker at all and uh I go hey man I go do you know the guy you're fighting and they're like no I don't know the guy I'm fighting I'm like what you can do to people with jiu-jitsu some people can do to you striking like you're fucked like you're standing with that guy he's just gonna like Anderson Silva or something. You don't know who the guy is. It's like there's there's people that you don't know They they might have only had one fight, but they're fucking nasty. They're really good They just trained really hard and they haven't happened They've never competed or only competed a couple of times and you could run into that guy in a fight And that's a terrible place to be to be butt scooting towards some guy who's trying to literally separate the muscle

from the fucking shin you know or or separate your your thigh meat with his shins like this is terrifying it's awesome you opened all of that with a guy that trains really hard yeah that's the thing yes you know yeah you train really hard. Yes. That's the thing. Yes. You train really hard. Whatever it is your modality is, if you don't do that thing hard, you don't train that thing hard against a fully resistant opponent, then you're not going to be good. But if you do,

man, you're a force. Yeah, you're a force. And it's a beautiful thing to have just that ability. And it's a beautiful thing to practice just for fun. Like, you could practice archery and never want to shoot an animal not only want to shoot a target you can practice jiu-jitsu and never want to get into a fight but the beautiful thing is you have this talent now you have this ability even if you never use it if all you do is train that's fine but if the shit goes down

your body knows what to do it's like instinctively if you lock up with someone you're gonna look for an inside trip you're gonna know what to do when you get to a side control position and you see there's an opportunity to mount you're gonna mount them if they turn over you're gonna take their back if their neck is there you're gonna take the choke it's just gonna be there it's a you've done it so many times instead of having to think through things like i saw the UFC I'll do this like no no no no you're not going to be able to do that you have to train it but if you do train it you don't have to use it but if you need to use it it's fucking there yeah that applies with all training

you know whatever theater that we're traveling to um Ukraine Afghanistan the military and special operations, you know, they train that skill set, the basic fundamentals so much that you can take these guys and put them anywhere. And they perform at such a high level. It's because of the training, you know, because it is so rigorous, it's so arduous. It doesn't matter where they go. They're still able to do whatever the mission is. That's the argument that's missing about the police, is that the police don't train the way special operations train, but yet they're involved in combat scenarios on a regular basis. Yeah. So what we're experiencing right now is a byproduct of what society has forced police to become. You know, they're demonizing military training for law enforcement. And then obviously we just experienced defund the police and, you know, nearly every large city has seen a crazy rise in crime. And the ones that these large cities that defunded their police to include Austin, you know, we know, we've never seen homicides like this.

You get the Chicago's and the Boston's just like, oh, this is so scary. And how does it make any sense that I'm going to provide this group that I want to protect us with less training and less funding, but then still want them to be a better product to be able to protect us. And then the people that they're protecting, I'm going to disarm. So the people coming to save them are untrained and unprepared. It is, it's creating this disastrous situation. You know, it's not like, Oh, I want to prevent rapes from happening. So me as a good person, I'm going to like chop my penis off. Like that's the dumbest argument you could ever make. Like that's not going to prevent rapes. It is going to empowering people or preventing consequences for a rapist to try and rape somebody. You know, it's not cutting the genitals off of every man. Right. That's crazy. off of every man. Right. That's crazy. So what do you think is the roadblock for, I mean, obviously what you're saying in terms of with law enforcement is it's common sense. So why is it so hard to get something implemented like a rigorous training course? I think it's ignorance. I think the first thing is society culture right now we have been we've been emasculating the military, the law enforcement for a while, you know, we want a

kinder, softer, gentler, you know, and I get they're dealing with mental health, and we can have specialists that can come in and deal with somebody having a mental health crisis, but we still need men and women that will run towards the sound of gunfire and know what to do. Yeah. And we don't right now. We, we have, we have been weakening them and we have been making them ill-equipped to respond to that. And then I think you've all day is a great example of not properly trained with broken systems that are not ready to do the right thing. And we will have more of that, unless we get them the right training. And we get our schools to become hard targets. And then we go upstream to the origin, the genesis of these problems,

which is mental health with the individual. If we don't do those things, then it's never going to be fixed. I think everybody agrees that the problem is a mental health problem, ultimately, because there's only one way you could ever do something like that. You have to be mentally ill. So how does someone solve the mental health aspect of it? I mean, what can be done? I, I, I, I believe it is this, it is a large cultural shift. You know, the, the, the nuclear family that where, you know, mother and father are loving their child and trying to make that person be a healthy, adjusted human, um, that has been demonized. So with a broken family comes often a broken person. Um,

with a broken family comes often a broken person um masculinity it's been attacked non-stop and you know we've we've demonized any any kind of of masculine attributes you know let's know it's let's in every way try to feminize men and that a feminine man is a is a dangerous thing um when it comes to violence. Now, on the spectrum of being a man, we have very feminine men, and I love them, and they're fine, and I'll take care of them, and that there's nothing wrong with that. But a broken one is a dangerous thing.

Any broken thing, especially one that's capable of violence. One that's capable of violence, who feels like the world has abandoned them and they want to leave a mark. Bowling, cyber bowling, social media, video games, movies, all of them. When I say it's a cultural shift, it has to be this large effort of all of us being like, okay, these are not things that are healthy for us to have a healthy society. But most people who play violent video games would never be violent.

For sure. The vast majority. For sure. They're just kids who enjoy it or adults who enjoy it because they think it's fun. Yeah. And I want them to be able to still do that. Yeah, me too. I think of it the same way I think about gun control.

Like the vast majority of people would never use a gun in a mass shooting. gun control like the vast majority of people would never use a gun in a mass shooting i don't think the solution is to punish everyone by eliminating the right and taking away your constitutional right i don't think that's the solution i think the solution is you have to figure out a way to prevent it from happening in these vulnerable places and did you hear it's a fucking shooting again yesterday they're at a kid's uh camp's camp in Dallas and they killed the guy immediately. Oh, I did, yeah. Showed up at a fucking kid's camp with 250 people and opened fire

and the cops got to him quick. Shoot out with the cops. The cops killed him. And I mean, but you're not hearing about it because guns were used to prevent another mass shooting. That's another very difficult group of data to find is the number of shootings that were prevented by somebody with a gun. Yeah. It's really, I mean, as somebody that runs a training company, I'm always looking for not just anecdotal examples,

but data for me to be like, okay, what was a good thing that happened? What was a dangerous thing that happened in the A of I want to AR every shooting, like an after action review, I want to look at the things that they did right, and the things that they did wrong. I want to sustain the things that they did right. And then I want to make sure that we address the things that did wrong. So we in training, have a better system. And we're trying to do that with shootings, and it pops up for a second, like there was, you know, a shooting at this mall in San Antonio, and somebody in the parking lot, it was a, the guy gets out of the car, he's walking towards the mall, and somebody spots him

and ends up confronting him and was concealed carrying and stop this guy from doing this active shooter, it was impossible to find any of the information about what happened. And that's very commonplace about how difficult it is to find that type of data. Well, Coleon was on the podcast a couple days ago. Love that guy. I love that guy too. And we broke down the numbers. And when they talk about gun violence, it's staggering the amount of gun violence that's actually suicide.

He said it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 65%. And then, you know, there's cops killing bad guys. That's a certain percentage of it. And then a giant chunk is gang violence. And so when you get down to, like, what is actually happening with guns, like, there's a lot of socioeconomic problems that are contributing to this. There's a lot of cultural problems that are contributing to it because you have these communities that have never been fixed. They have the same issues that they've had for decades upon decades because they've been ignored. And while we'll spend billions of dollars to help foreign countries,

we don't spend a fucking nickel to try to fix all these really damaged and fucked up inner cities where people are growing up with this heightened sense of despair. It never gets any better. Everyone around you is either involved in crime or affected by crime. There's drug dealing and violence and gang violence. And this is your reality. And the only way to get social cred is to become a shooter, to become somebody who's capable of doing the horrific

things that you're seeing all around you and then if i'm looking for an argument for me to say how dangerous firearms are i just automatically grab gun violence in its entirety and don't understand or break down i don't take that one extra minute to go a layer deep to understand what the real numbers look like but i'll just take that that those mass aggreg go a layer deep to understand what the real numbers look like. But I'll just take that, that those mass aggregates and be like, Oh yeah, look, look at all this. Like, no man, like 65% of that's suicide. And a lot of this is gang violence. A whole bunch of it is law enforcement. Yeah. It's lame. It's a lame blanket. Yeah. It's a lame blanket to throw over gun violence. You know, mass shootings are fucking horrific, but you know what? What's also considered mass shootings when they talk about the amount of mass shootings is when gangs get together and shoot at each other.

That's a mass shooting because there's more than one people shot and it's more, you know, it's just. But the bottom line about all of it is we keep looking at one aspect of the problem, which is the amount of guns. We're not looking at the mental health aspect of it. You hear no legislation or no programs that are being implemented and put into place to try to reach out to people and help people that have been bullied, that are despair, that are filled with despair, and they don't have enough. They feel like their life is over before it's even begun.

Yeah. First, if you're out there, I love you um if you've been bullied i'm sorry but uh find find one of us because we'll like we'll talk to you yeah there's hope tomorrow's going to be better but uh it's hard to believe that while it's happening to you when you feel like your world is over. I've personally experienced that. I was in Morro Bay, California, took all my clothes off and swam due west into the ocean. I had a couple of women pregnant. I thought I might have HIV. I lost my pro fight, dark, dark moment,

and swam a mile, two miles out into the fog and Jesus Christ. Yeah. Um, tread in water in, in this cold water and I'm in the fog now. Like I couldn't see the rock anymore. I couldn't hear the waves anymore. I have no idea which way the coast is. And I just had to sit there and tread water. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. And the coldness, man, I wanted to wanted to live so bad i never i wasn't thinking about killing myself you know like i just was so i just needed a moment you know i needed a baptism i needed to be like a phoenix rising from the ashes a mile out at least yeah i mean i'm a good swimmer my dad was an olympic level swimmer we grew up swimming at a... Yeah, but ocean swimming is a motherfucker.

Yeah, especially in Morro Bay. If you know, if you're south, if you're on the north side of that rock, the current from the south side of the rock through the breakers, I mean, there's some powerful current. And, you know, I swam for about 45 minutes. So that, I mean, that's a mile and a half at least.

And so I'm in just treading water in the fog, butt ass naked. And thank God, somebody saw me walk into the water. And Morro Bay is like a retirement city. And so I'm assuming I'm just imagining I never knew I never knew who it was. This old woman went and called the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard boat. This is one of the earlier earliest chapters of book, is describing, like this is kind of, 9-11 happened very shortly after that and woke me up as to I need to do something. And this Coast Guard boat comes up and this captain has his legs dangling off the side of the boat. He's like, hey, what are you doing down there? My arrogance as a young man, our frontal lo our frontal lobe, not developed clearly at this moment. I'm like, I'm swimming. He's like, no shit. Like even, even in that moment, I'm a sarcastic little prick. And he's like, uh, so, so what's going on? So I give him like a summary, a little executive summary of my life right now. He's still in the water. I'm still in the water. He's just talking to me as I'm treading water. And I give him the update and he's

like, man, I was gonna offer you to get out of the drink. But quite frankly, I just stay down there. I'm like, Oh my god, what a dick, right? It's like, yeah, but it's real cold. And he like leans over and he's like, I see that. Like you are it's just he's like just these mental punches of me treading water. I've been out here for 45 minutes, 53 degree water, um, in the fog, you know, thank God he didn't run over me. And he's like, I'm only off for one time. If you want to get out of that water, I was like, I want to get out of the water. So he throws down one of those cargo nets off the

side of the boat. My hands could barely work. You know, like I clamber up the side of the boat with like little claw hands. And he put one of those Navy wool blankets, they're green, and it's just like pure wool. And it felt like millions of little needles stabbing me in my back. And it was like the most wonderful feeling, you know, so I sympathize to that feeling of darkness, but I also have seen the other side of it and I like I wanted to live so bad and feeling all that pain all over my back like it was the most wonderful feeling to know I'm alive you know I never and so I I get what that darkness feels like but I also know how beautiful life is after that like you could have died out there for sure very Very easily. Yeah. Very easily. And if you didn't

get rescued by the coast guard and you're, you're in the fog, didn't lift. Yeah. I don't believe in God or, or, or whatever I do, but I know there's no way to describe why I'm not dead. When you, when you go through my life and you read moments like this, you're just like this, this, this is not possible, you know, from this, you're just like this, this, this is not possible, you know, from Afghanistan, you know, just this last August to Ukraine to combat tours, you know, getting blown up in Afghanistan and, you know, multi-day gunfights periods of time where I'm like crawling on the ground, trying to find a magazine that has bullets in it. Cause I've run out of bullets. When you start going through this, you're just like, this is, but moments, moments like

that, you know, God's pretty right. Thanks, man. Do you, do you think you're fortunate or do you think that there's really like a plan out there for you? Do you think that you are doing enough good work that somehow or another, this is either predestined or, or you're just making the best out of it as it goes along and you decide that it's predestined. Like, yeah, I mean, back to confirmation bias, right? Like I can have my beliefs and I'm looking for examples that support that construct. But, uh, I think objectively, if you take a step back and

you look into every religion, if we're looking at karma, people that do good and you see good that comes back to them, however that happens, I believe that I know what I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm supposed to be equipping and training people to be able to preserve and protect human life. I know that. You're not just doing that. You're also making people better humans. And that, I think, is as much of a part of it as anything,

is that in doing that, in training and equipping people to take care of themselves and to protect life and training people in martial arts, you're making better humans. They become better human. Some people don't want to hear that because they don't want to do the work so they don't want to hear that that makes you a better human but guess what it does it does it does yeah it's done we're both examples of it we both have you're a really bad the horrible person you know you hear you've talked about it many

times and anybody that knows me like I carry a ton of shame and humiliation over periods of my life. And when I talked to somebody that knew me back then, I'm like, Oh man. So every young man is just filled with ego and anger. And you know, you could go and take that anger and channel it in the worst ways possible and ruin a bunch of people's lives, or you can find martial arts and become an inspiration and help a lot of people and become a better human being. And that's what's happened to both of us. And it's happened to countless people that we know. Every fucking manly man that I know has had anger issues and has had ego issues and has all these things that we call toxic masculinity, all these things that befall so many men because there's a long history of men fighting in wars, protecting families, hunting and gathering and needing to have this ability to perform violence

and this ability to be aggressive and With no channel of that you can get off the fucking rails Yeah, really easily really easy, but then you look at these these giant, you know, the Jocko Willink's, you know And the Glover Teixeira's there's not a human nicer human than Glover Right, you know like the kindest we he and I trained together when he was a purple belt. When he first came to the United States, first time that he had his crappy little visa and walked into the pit and was at slow kickboxing, just mopping the mats with all of us. I was at the time we would have to drive from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara to train with the closest purple belt. Wow. So this has got to be like early 90s then, right?

Yep, mid-90s. Glover was the boogeyman for like six years because he couldn't get into the United States. For six years, he was the scariest guy in the 205-pound division that wasn't in the UFC. And I was always keeping an eye on him. I was always like, when are we going to get Glover into the UFC? And then he got into the UFC,

and I don't know if Kyle Kingsbury was his first fight but it was one of his first fights I was there for that and I watched him maul Kyle's like holy fuck is this guy good which goes to show you how goddamn good John Jones is because John John Jones was the first guy to shut him down inside the octagon I mean John's the best to ever do it. He's one of them. You know, I mean, my GOAT list is pretty long because I don't think you could say there's one guy that's the best because, like, Khabib never even got challenged. I mean, it's hard to not.

I mean, Khabib didn't fight as many people as John did. He didn't defend his title as many as John did. But Khabib, Michael Johnson was the only one to even crack him. Michael Johnson tagged him one time and he beat the fuck out of Michael Johnson in that fight. You remember when he's on top of him? You know I'm supposed to fight for a title.

You know I'm supposed to... Give up now. I'm going to hurt you. Just stop. He's saying give up now. And he got him in a Kimura. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, will you fucking tap tap because it got so far back i'm waiting for that snap that we've all seen so many times like the frank by all fractures oh oh the jacare one never arm never comes back that upper arm snap is fucking horrific man there's something about that one when they get the kimura oh we uh i i did it standing in combat to a guy that

Tried to grab some stuff off my kit and the Kimura is like the best Technique to defend if somebody's trying to take stuff off of you like law enforcement It's one of the first techniques that they should learn about how to keep their weapon on them I mean lock the wrist reach over grab their wrist, bring their wrist back behind their head. And, uh, and in like a snap, I break literally every bone in his whole entire arm and dislocate his, his shoulder and his collarbone snaps as his face hits the wall and it breaks all the bones in his face, you know? And, and, uh, you know, I have, I have grenades and flashbangs and knives and a gun all on my body armor. So you can't take that stuff.

But it was that fast. His whole arm, he'll never use again. It's wild. Yeah, it's such an effective. Yeah, it's horrific. When Frank Mir did it to Noguera, I'll never forget that. When you know it, it goes over. And Noguera's, like looking at his arm and heartbreaking.

Woo! Yeah. I don't want to, I'm never going to experience that. I'm going to tap way early. What are you doing to us? Jamie! Oh, man. That's not even the worst one. Frank Mayer's broken a few arms. The worst one, in my opinion, was the Tim Sylvia

one when he snapped his forearm because he bends his forearm backwards here it is he was kind of on the Frank yeah so Frank gets on top and when Frank gets on top this is the arm

is that right arm yeah get ready he had great like submission power you know you have there it is he's got it so no Gara in trying to advance position he left that arm out there here comes no here comes and as he rolls them over twice, that's right. It's right here. I'm like flexing my whole body. Snap. I can't breathe.

That's uncomfortable. That's horrific. That made my palms sweat. Yeah, that arm's never the same again. It's never going to be the same again. And Noguera's so nice. Yeah. He's such a gem.

He's such a gem. But that arm has a giant scar. Forever. Like a fish getting gutted. You have never broken a bone? Really? No. Nothing?

Nothing. Not even a hand? Nope. Wow. That's crazy. How's that possible? I don't know if it's like John Hackleman, old school. We'd hit boards sometimes.

We'd hit bags without gloves sometimes. I know boxing coaches right now are like, don't listen to Tim. You know, keep your gloves and wraps on. But like. There's something to that. There is something to that. I've never broken my hand in any way. That's crazy.

Yeah. Do you ever use Makiwara? Yeah. Yeah. That, I mean, there's something real about that for sure. I mean, you see the giant calluses that people build up on their knuckles. I mean, that's got to. And the early martial arts. You know, I had Shot real about that for sure. I mean, you see the giant calluses that people build up on their knuckles. I mean, that's got to be. And the early martial arts.

I had Shotokan karate in there. Japanese jiu-jitsu. I had Taekwondo. So there was like lots of form strikes, boards, and all those things just developed. Amazing that you've never broken anything. That's crazy. My early fights, I wouldn't rap. Really?

Yeah. You just put the gloves over? I just put the gloves on. And I probably had 20 or 30 fights on Indian reservations kind of pre-real sanctioning before states were allowing MMA. What was the logic? That there's less padding? No, I like to feel and grip and grab.

I didn't have the Winkle Johns and the Gibsons to wrap my hands perfect like they do now. Early fighting, we would literally use boxing wraps and then tape our hands. We didn't know any better. So I would just be like, I can't grab like this. And I definitely can't punch like this. So I'd rather wear, I have big hands. I'd rather wear like a medium-sized glove that I just can't punch like this. So I'd rather wear, you know, I have big hands. I'd rather wear like a medium-sized glove that I just have to force my hand in. I'm wearing a smaller glove so my hand can get into different angles and I definitely can grab a lot easier.

Yeah. It's like I just liked it. Have you ever thought of the argument that we should have no gloves? Yeah. Because I kind of am with that up until I saw the bare knuckle boxing and people's faces get destroyed. Yeah. I'm like, God damn. Like, when knuckle boxing and people's faces get destroyed. I'm like, God damn. When you see Chris Lieben,

do you see Chris Lieben's face after one of his fights? It looks like he got attacked with a hatchet. Even Chad Mendes, he dominated that whole entire fight. He comes out, he had a couple of cuts, and he's swollen up. But I love it. And I love... It's just weird that you can kick someone

in the face with your shins you can elbow someone in the face with your elbows no covering or protection at all those things are both much harder than your hands you could kick things pretty fucking hard with your shin or you could never hit them like that like just think of like shin on shin contact when people crack shins together

it's horrible but if you hit your hand on a shin like that, it's probably going to break. Yeah. So why is it that you can protect your hands with a wrap? And it's like, it gives you an unrealistic expectation of what the hands are capable of doing. Yeah. I think it, cause it prolongs action.

I guess. You get, you get more violence. You get more punchy punchy. I guess. It's just like, You get more punchy punchy. I guess. It's just like there's some things that are unrealistic. Yeah. Like I do, one thing I do like, and it's very controversial, but I like 1FC's policy of strikes on the ground.

You can knee to the head on the ground. I love it. My favorite, my favorite, Jason Mayhem Miller. We had two fights against each other. The first one, we were allowed to, like, pride rules. You know, soccer kicks, knees to the head. Where was that in? It was ECC, Elite Cage Fighting Championship. Wild eight-man tournament.

We had Dennis Kang, Jason Mayhem Miller. Dennis Kang was a bad motherfucker. He was a bad motherfucker. People forgot about him. Oh, I did not. For a long time, he was a bad motherfucker. He was so good. Never quite made it to that championship level,

but there were some years where Dennis Kang was a fucking straight-up killer. Yes, he was. And in that A-man tournament, he's a killer. That fight mopped the mat with Jason Mayhem Miller. You know, I just crushed him on the ground, knees to the head, soccer kicks to the head. You know, he's trying to fight off his back. And I'm just like eating his legs up, he shoots a crappy shot, you know, a little snap down on the north south, well,

you know, as he's belly down, just dropping knees to the sides of the top of his head, one fight, you know, then fast forward two years, I think we're the same person, two years, I think we're the same person, slightly different rule set. And, uh, it's, it's proper MMA. And, um, you know, I lose a split decision, but when you see us in almost the exact same positions with the same, but I just wasn't allowed to do damage in half the positions is we it's, it's weird to like, well, it's like what you're talking about with the, the combatives training that like, if I can tap you in the head with a gun, that's not good. Right. And if you're in a position where I could knee you in the head, I feel like that should be implemented. I feel like this, we're getting an unrealistic idea of what's possible in these positions. I got to put my hand on the ground. Oh,

you can't touch me. Did you see Mighty Mouse's fight where he got KO'd with a knee to the ground in 1FC? Yep. I think 1FC has a better rule set in that regard. I do too. But I also don't like cages. I think they should fight in a large open area because there's a thing about a cage that allows you to get back up to your feet. It also allows you to take guys down.

I think much more realistic is like if you can have a basketball game and you can have it on this big-ass fucking basketball court, why can't you have two guys stand in the middle of that big-ass basketball court, mat that fucker up, everybody gets a clear view. Yeah, as a... I was undefeated in the smaller cage.

So anytime I fought... You can't get away. I know. You know, like, I would chase, you know, like Luke Rockhold. You watch that fight, we're in the big cage, and I'm chasing him around the whole entire fight, and he's just, like, peppering me with good footwork and outside strikes, you watch that fight, we're in the big cage, and I'm chasing him around the whole entire fight, and he's just peppering me with good footwork and outside strikes.

And then we get to the little cage with Melvin Menhoff and Robbie Lawler. Both of those fights were in little cages, and you watch how that fight went down. I just, like a pit bull on top of him, and I just mauled him. And totally different. You give Robbie an extra five feet of circumference,

like that dude's going to be blasting me from the outside in that southpaw with that nasty cross the whole entire fight no thank you yeah yeah it's crazy like people forget that you had this long career in like so many you fought in so many organizations before you got to the ufc was running from the the UFC. You're running from them? Yeah. In what way? I was making so much more money. Oh. Not fighting for, my first fight in the UFC, I made half the money that I made in my fight, the one fight before that. Really? Yeah. Half. Wow. Yeah. And zero sponsor money. And you know, like peak sponsor money. And, you know, like, peak sponsor money. You came in, was Reebok already in place?

With no sponsor money? No sponsor money. Yeah, Hodger Gracie was my first fight in the UFC. I had one fight. Was Hodger in the UFC or was that in Strikeforce? No, Hodger was my first fight in the UFC. I forgot Hodger fought in the UFC or was that in Strikeforce? No, Hadjer was my first fight in the UFC. I forgot Hadjer fought in the UFC. Wow.

Super scary moment when I shot a crappy single leg and he took my back. I had Hadjer Gracie on my back. This is not according to plan. Greg Jackson's like, you're dumb, Tim. You're so dumb. Why did you do that? You're not supposed to do this. How did you wind up with Jackson?

What led you to be over there? I mean, I was really torn between going with Bob Cook and, um, AKA or going to Jackson. Uh, it was, you know, when I think it was when I lost to Jacare, it was a really close fight. I really thought I won. Um, I, you know, I, I, I won on every measurable matrix, but I have big swollen closed eye and Greg was there and won. I, you know, I, I won on every measurable matrix, but I have big swollen closed eye. And Greg was there and Greg was like, you know, you really missed real key moments in preparation and kind of how you executed your game plan. And I was like, yeah, you're not wrong. You know, he's like, you need to be in a real fight camp. You know, like I can help introductions, you know, I can literally connect you with American Top Team. I was friends with Bob Cook, and I thought really similar to dan her now like i just really

appreciate that that intellectual approach to martial arts and uh you know it wasn't just fighting it wasn't you know sweat and staff on the mat it was like hey let's take a moment and think about what we're doing here as a martial artist so that just really jived with me thank god for those camps. Thank God for people like Dan Lambert that dump a ton of money into a place like American Top Team. Where would the sport be if it wasn't for those outliers, those people who decide... I mean, I don't know what kind of fucking headaches

are involved in running something like Jackson Winklejohn, but it must be nuts. It must be nuts. You're dealing with a hundred savages. You got Russians coming in here and guys coming in that are kickboxers and guys coming in that are wrestlers and everyone's beating the shit out of each other

and you're trying to see what cream is going to rise to the top. I don't want to do it. Fuck that. My jujitsu gym is like proper traditional. Everybody wears white geese Except you got one day where you get to wear your competition blue key if you want, but it's all it's a white key gym you know like we're bowing old school bowing at the beginning of class bowing at the end of class and

You know everybody's like checking fingernails everybody got deodorant. You know it is like a really nice checking fingernails is good. Yeah. BJ Penn. BJ Penn's got some talents. He's running for governor. Yes. You might win, man. They love him. Yeah. Hawaii loves BJ Penn. So I listened to a couple of interviews of him recently.

And he's my era of MMA. And some of my peers from that era have struggled with TBI and CTE and you hear it and how they talk and they struggled being entrepreneurs, second life after fighting. Miller, great example of how traumatic and dangerous with substance abuse and violence. BJ sounds great.

He was articulate. He had, back to issues, he was like talking specifically about issues I know the Hawaii party system is weird because you kind of just have to be like only one party's going to be voted so you have degrees of one party and uh you know he had just talking about issues I was like all right BJ yeah he's got he's got a very good grasp on the problems in Hawaii. He thought about it for a long time before he ran. And when he was on the podcast, he was talking very specifically about problems that they face and why those problems exist and what he thinks he could do about it.

A guy that works with me at Sheepdog Response, his name's Yako. Great black belt, like super talented, very Yako Kalili. And he has a large Hawaiian family, you know, and some of his kids he's adopted. And just how poor some areas of Hawaii are and how little resources they have for, you know, substance abuse. And like, he's just a great human. And, you know, he's a real martial artist. And he just did the right thing and taking care of the he just has a beautiful family. But he's a great example of all the things that are broken about Hawaii. As with Tulsi in, in New York last week, you know, we're talking, you know, she's, she loves politics, and she's pretty passionate about all of them. And, but listening to her talk about broken Hawaii, man, it's just like, it's, it's tough.

It's tough. It's tough. There's a lot of poverty and a lot of drugs and a lot of crime. And, um, what is she going to do now? I asked her that and keeping her cards tight to her. She is, she is. And, uh, you know, she like, right now I'm just kind of doing this. She was doing like the media tour. So I think she did like 10 TV shows last week, got to go to dinner with her. And it was fun because we talked. We went to this Indian restaurant in New York. I did a signing at the Barnes & Noble.

And we come across the street and have dinner with her in this Indian restaurant. It took us four and a half hours to get our food. And normally I would, yeah, normally I would have been outraged, but instead I got to spend four and a half hours with Tulsi and, and just talk, you know, we talked to go to the store and buy the ingredients. They had to have, what the fuck, man. Yeah. We talked to human traffic, counter human trafficking. We talked, you know, school shootings. We talked, you know, her career. And it was just fun to, she and I do not agree on a lot of, you know, a lot of things. And it's fun to be with somebody that you don't agree with. And, you know, the cream rises to the top.

And the better ideas as we kind of flush these out. And it was cool because we were both doing a lot of media. You know, I think the next morning I was on Fox and Friends and you never know what people are going to ask you, like whatever hot button topic they're looking for a soundbite. So the night before, her and I are just kind of running through all of these ideas and these problems and it's something that I wish all Americans did more frequently.

Oh, you disagree with me? I don't hate you, but I want to talk to you what do you guys disagree about uh foreign policy um she's a non-interventionalist foreign policy yep yeah and i'm definitely like an american first strong foreign presence you know um you know we pulled out of ukraine uh the military. The Special Forces goes all over the world and trains militaries. And it not just better equips and better trains that military, but it also creates opportunities for,

you know, we have connections. You know, like the Czech Republic. I deployed with the Czech Republic with their Special Forces and horrible gunfights, wild, wild rides. And those are friends that until we die, I will love those guys for forever. And then I go back to the Czech Republic, I go to their special forces base and, you know, teach some some human intelligence courses and do like this exchange of information. They, Eastern Europe, they had some different tactics than we used.

So like this cool cross-pollination of ideas and tactics and trade craft. And then I come back and I bring those back to my unit and some of those stay. And, but those relationships are built. You know, when we left Ukraine, that training, those relationships

and those contacts don't exist. So, you know, us coming in now trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to help you guys? We're like starting cold. You know, it's like cold. It's like a cold call to do a sale. How difficult is that to then go to somebody that you're at the gym with all the time and you talk to, dude, I just got this new thing. It's an awesome, you know, pre-workout two totally different experiences right success When when were we in Ukraine we were there. I mean we were we I think we're all the way up to 2016 So the agreements that the US government has with those Countries there's lots of different levels of them, what kind of participation and collaboration we're going to

have. And, you know, sometimes some special operations can even come to the United States and go to our special forces, like they can go through our, our training. And like they can as if they're earning a green beret, go through every single phase and learn how we plan and how our tactics are like these are really good allies that we're going to be aligned with forever you know british australian um you know if at ranger school you'll see german infantry officers and you'll see um australian sas guys it's rad and then they bring that back to their their respective countries

and all um you know with risingides, all ships will be raised. That kind of approach too. So, Tulsi and I don't agree on where, you know, we should be. That's cool. We got to talk through a little bit of it. At least it's a discussion. Yeah. What's fascinating with me about her is how the left is completely ignoring her although she was a democratic

congresswoman yeah for eight years but the right has her on everything with full total respect knowing she's a democrat it's it's so interesting yeah like one of the things that's been very strange about this whole polarization between the two-party system in america is how the right will allow people to come on that they disagree with and talk to, and they'll talk to them respectfully, and they don't attack them. Whereas if I watch a person who's a right-wing person who gets on CNN or MSNBC, they're getting attacked. Non-stop. That's the only way. There's never a civil discussion where you're allowed to agree to disagree or have a discussion about why you

disagree. I think it has a lot to do with the reason that you end up being, um, you know, my, my beliefs and my ideas, I'm always looking for an opposing or a conflicting idea, which will either make my, my beliefs more sound, or I'll have to take a second look at them because there's something wrong with it. Yes. And somebody like that is naturally going to be subscribing to, you know, maybe more conservative ideals than over here,

where like, this is my belief system. And I don't, as an isolationist, like I don't, with my ideas, I don't want anybody to disagree with me and um like but i also with tulsi and uh bill mares bill mayor mar mar yeah they're democrats yeah and um now i think a lot of the democrats are looking at them like are you guys republicans yeah exactly no you're not you're still democrats, but the outlier fringe of that party has left them. The whole line of rational just moved so much further away, and where a Bill Maher and a Tulsi Gabbard are now like centrists.

Well, they're considered centrists, but some people say they're far right. That's crazy. It's nuts. I've heard people say Bill Maher has adopted a far right that's crazy nuts i've heard people say like bill bill maher's adopted a far right ideology like what i've seen it there's but that's just twitter twitter is a goddamn mental health you want mental health problems that's the center of mental health problems in this country but what's unique to me is that this there's a this I think probably what happened was the response from Donald Trump that the response to Donald Trump being president he was so polarizing and he attacked people in a

way that was so non-presidential and the way he would behave was so non-presidential that that's just his thing when someone comes after him he comes back at them even harder yeah but when you're the president and you do that it just gets everybody's panties in a wad yeah and he's just fucking taking gallons of gasoline and chucking it on the fire and so when they got rid of him and they got him out of there they're like we gotta make sure this never happens again meanwhile it's gonna happen again it's gonna happen again he's coming back and he might even win but this polarization polarization has hardened them. The thing with Trump,

because of Trump's behavior, the way he communicates, which I just think is a terrible way to communicate as a president. But if you're his supporter, you love it. You're like, yeah, stick it to him. Finally, someone sticks up for us. And so it's like, yeah, I get your feelings. I understand why you would love that. And I understand that he's right about many things. to him finally someone sticks up for us and so it's like yeah i get your feelings i understand why you would love that and i understand that he's right about many things there's a crazy video that's out there that shows all the things that donald trump predicted if joe biden gets an office and how all of them have taken place have you seen that video no i'm gonna send it to jamie because it's so wild it's so wild you watch it play out and you're like, holy shit.

Yeah. Because it's so crazy that it's that blatant. You would think, wait a minute, is this theatrical? I mean, this is crazy. At a point, we're a two-party system a, you know, nearly 50, 50 split down the middle. Um, at no point would I in that presidential position, like your job is to try to bring as many people from each respective side

together. Yeah. Bring everybody together. That not his approach. No, that's why it's, it's so not, it's not how a leader behaves.

Like he was very, he's got a huge ego, and that's what's led him to this amazing amount of success that he's had. But that huge ego, once he gets into a position about, here, pray this from the beginning and give me some volume. Before I took office, there was a lot of folks out there, a lot of folks out there making some pretty bold predictions about how things would turn out. Hold on, stop for a second. This video does not sound like that. It sounds fine.

What's coming through the computer? Why is that happening? Because I played it today on my phone and it sounded perfect. They're coming for your guns. They're coming for your jobs.. They're coming for your guns. They're coming for your jobs and they're coming for your freedom. They hate American energy and Joe Biden will shut it all down. He's going to. If I became president. Biden's elected. He will wipe out your energy industry. Another prediction that is my favorite one I must add is that if I got elected, gas prices going five, six, seven dollars for a gallon. You flood your communities with criminal aliens,

drugs and crime while they live behind beautiful gated compounds. They try to take away your gun, Second Amendment. They want to take it away while they enjoy private security. That's fully armed. I never understood that. I spent trillions of dollars rebuilding foreign nations, fighting foreign wars and defending foreign borders. Well, the predictions of doom and gloom six months in. Here's where I stand. You want to use the word recession

or depression think of the single mom totally put food on the table next month you know it's uh it's sad so if your primary concern right now is inflation we could stop it in 30 minutes well I took offers he finally went outside he went to get an ice cream the bottom line is this I say you're not doing a very good job. This was campaigning pre-election? You can't take any questions now from the press. Yeah. Wow.

It was him campaigning pre-election and what has actually taken place. I mean, it's just... Uncomfortable. It's wild. And what's interesting is even CNN is starting to push back against it. Like Don Lemon was interviewing the woman who is the new press secretary for the White House. And he was asking, is Joe Biden going to be fit for 2024? And she's like, he's fine.

He's great. Like, what are you talking about? And you're watching and you're going, what the fuck are you talking about? He's definitely not. That's not true. Like, you know, that's not true. You know that's not true. You're gaslighting us. I saw Ocasio-Cortez asked if

she would support the president in a 2024 run. And she's like, let's talk about the issues that we're trying to fix right now. And they're like, so would you support the president? You didn't answer me. That's what the journalist asked her. And she's like, we have

issues right now that we need to address first and and then she let her off you know but yeah yeah crazy it's gonna be it's gonna be wild well it's it's 2020 or we got midterms right now yeah i don't know i wonder what's gonna happen but it's like there's no clear shining example of what we really need. I mean, unity would be nice. I wish it was so much more about the issue than the individual, where we could talk about all of the issues and find the candidate that has the best solution for those interviews. That's just crazy talk.

Who the fuck are you? Yeah, it would be nice. But, you know, I think there's also the giant problem of money in politics. It's just, unless you remove that, unless it really is for the people, then you've got a bunch of people that are getting people to do things. Once they get into office, it's going to benefit their bottom line. And that's what we have here. We have a corrupt system.

We've agreed that it's okay if it's corrupt as long as we write it down, as long as we know that it's legal corruption. That Ukraine bill, the $40 billion that got put in, everybody's like, oh, the corruption over there. And I was like, we can't throw stones from where we are in our glass house of corruption where you have a senator that makes, you know, whatever, $200,000 and is worth

$40 million. Yeah, no, she's worth a lot more than that. I wasn't saying any individual. Nancy Pelosi? No, I wasn't. Oh, okay, I am. That's another great example. She's worth hundreds of millions. But she's never done anything besides public service? Do you know that she's better at stock trading than Warren Buffett or George Soros? She's got a better record than any of those guys.

Those guys are professionals. All they have done is been rich and make themselves richer. And she's better at it. By a good margin. By a good margin. That's not good. And it's better at it. By a good margin. By a good margin. That's not good. And it's weird. Is it weird? Because like, she knows about things

before they happen. It's almost like it's insider trading, Tim Kennedy. Almost. I would never ever make that accusation, though. It's hilarious. I'm sure you've seen the interview where they asked her what do you think about stopping Congress from people, members of Congress from trading stocks?

Like, oh, that's an idea. Can we just do term limits and not let them get rich while in office from how they vote? There should be some measures that are put into place. But the problem is then we'd get even less qualified people that want to be president and less qualified people that want to be congressman. If they didn't think that there was some sort of financial incentive, there's zero financial incentive. All you're doing is being a civil servant. Boy. I like that, though.

I like it, too. But I just think – but they're also going to crawl up your ass with a microscope and find out who you fuck when you're in high school. Like, it's just – Politics are out for me. Oh, my God. It's the amount of chaos that's involved. And there's, you know, there's nothing that seems to be like a clear solution to fix any of that. It just seems to be like, we're just going to complain about it. And it's going to be

chaotic until the Chinese take over. Don't say that. Why would you say that Joe? Take that back. Take that back. Well, they already got John Cena. Once they got John Cena, I was like, oh my God. We're already the same group that obviously was in Afghanistan, Save Our Allies. Did you read about Benji Hull? No. So he was a journalist with Fox News that got blown up in Ukraine. And a couple of journalists that were with him died and he was horrifically injured. Our organization, Save Our Allies, was the group that went in and found him, rescued him, saved his life, and then got him out of Ukraine and into American level medical care. And then all the way, he's currently in Bamsi, like right here in San Antonio. all the way he's currently in bamsey like right here in san antonio and first it is so cool that journalists are brave like that to go and to go you know to go into cobble to go into ukraine to

go into down to the border and to see what is really happening down there it's like you know little nod to them and uh but that guy no painkiller after he is very, very seriously injured. His family haven't seen the wounds. So like, I'm not going to explain them. But, you know, tourniquets on for hours, and he has to make it through all these checkpoints. And this is like peak invasion. And they're able to get him out of Ukraine and save his life. And that ground team from Save Our Allies that was so creative and how they literally went into the front lines, grabbed this journalist, dead bodies around him, got him medical care, and then got him out of the country before he died. And Benji Hall, you're a badass. Wow. Yeah, pretty rad. There's a lot of badasses out there as much as we want to talk about people that are fat and lazy and soft in this country

there is a large number of fucking incredible human beings that are here i'm surrounded by him you know i i talk about wanting america to be more healthy and fitter and stronger and individually responsible and able to secure a school, you know, be able to protect your kids. I fully believe that, that we need to be better and we're the weakest that we've ever been. But I'm like surrounded by in the military, in my position there, I'm just surrounded by the best and most brilliant men that ever existed. Like these guys are so incredible. And then the guys that I work with at Cheap Dark

Response, their heart as servants, you know, teaching teachers, teaching law enforcement, you know, teaching civilians that just want to be better mothers and fathers to be able to protect themselves and their families. Like how rad is it that they've dedicated their whole entire lives to this idea? Like they'll teach 14 hour days. They'll come back into the office, start cleaning all the weapons, start cleaning the mats, mopping, sanitizing,

you know, to do it all again the next day. And it's so humbling to see how many great humans there are out there. And we so often just like focus at the bad at the expense of the good never being recognized? Well, I think for a lot of people, they're just surrounded by the bad. And that's what they look to as a benchmark. Unfortunately, they don't have access to the type of people that you're around. And if they did, they would judge themselves in comparison. It's just a thing that people

do automatically. You imitate your atmosphere. And if your atmosphere is filled with beasts and these guys are just putting in the work every day and if you want the kind of respect that they get from you, you've got to put in that kind of work too. And rising tide lifts all boats. That's right. And everybody gets in it together. And you come out of the other end, you're better because of that because you know iron sharpens iron and that's just how it goes it's so important so just go and do it you know

the um the scars and stripe this book the whole reason like we dropped it right now is in this editorialized curated existence where you know instagram I'm using a filter to make myself look good. That whole book is about failure and struggle and every single one of the mistakes that I ever made, you know, it is not this self ejaculating memoir of like, why I'm this amazing person. It is all the reasons that I'm not, you know, it's all of the reasons why it is normal for us to struggle. It is normal for you to not be able to deadlift that 500 pounds, unless you have conditioned yourself and failed and pushed yourself so your body in adaptation is able to do it. And we think exclusively physically when we talk about adaptation, but like your soul and your brain and the total human condition is all part of it. And you have to struggle, you know, you, you, you have to see failure, you know, failed at business. Now I have great businesses, you know, failed at relationships and the pain of the, of that failure, like hurt

being a 10 year old in wrestling for the first time and getting pinned in my first match and having to stand up in that gymnasium, that big, huge Itasca gymnasium. And my dad is sitting right there. I could still see him right here on the side of the mat, you know, and, and that my head hung in shame as the other guy gets his hand lifted, you know, in wrestling, it's just so fast. Just hand goes up. But the, the, the echoes of that failure just resounding in my head as I have to walk single elimination, my tournament's over, you know, and if I had not experienced that failure, there's no way you'd see me fight for world titles. There's no way I'd become a black belt. You know, if you took that moment away from me and I got a participation trophy and we both got our hands raised, that moment's gone.

Right. And it is so important. And you apply that with everything. Like I stick my hand on a stove, I burn my hand. I learned not to put my hand on the stove and that's that pain. And that's that process of failure that we are, we are taking that away from this generation. Yeah. It needs to be ingrained. They need to understand that it's a benefit. You have to look at those failures and go, you have fuel now. Yeah.

You have fuel. And you can decide to ignore it and you can decide to wallow in the shame of loss or you can be far better because of this. Because there's nothing that motivates you like humiliation. No. No. you can be far better because of this. Cause there's nothing that motivates you like humiliation. No, no. We, if you're out of shape, I'm never going to make fun of some,

a fat person walking to the gym. So proud that you're there. Right. But I will look at you walking into a Krispy Kreme and making it. Yeah. Another con conscious decision about what your lifestyle looks like, where I'm going to have to pay for your healthcare in a few years. Yeah, you know, like, those are two very different things. I will embrace you, I will help you program, I will help you diet, you know, people walking into through my doors,

some of them have never held a firearm in their life. You know, they don't know the first thing about situational awareness, they don't know where to park, they don't understand that they should park towards the front of the parking lot underneath the light, and that they see somebody with their window down the engine off, and they're sitting there smoking a cigarette with the backed in and they're looking at everybody walking through the parking lot, maybe that person might try to mug you as you get out of your car, maybe, you know, and it is these these complete new ideas to them, and watching their brains start firing, seeing these things for the first time, explaining why profiling and generalizing when it comes to protecting your own life is useful and how the sixth sense is a real thing.

You know, like that feeling where, did that guy look at me weird? In society, we're like, okay, no, no, I'm not going to look at that guy and make any assumptions about him because it's culturally rude or inappropriate. And I'm going to talk myself out of this. And then that guy assaults me. You know, like now this poor woman's been raped because she talked herself out of it. You know, and we can train and we can sharpen, we condition. And it is the most beautiful, magical thing to watch these people, teachers right now, just flooding, clamoring to us. And I cannot run enough courses.

And you can see them starving. Like they want to protect their students so bad. It's such a beautiful thing. I own a private school. You know, I launched Apogee Strong and Apogee, our school, to address what's happening in schools and what's happening with our young men and women and seeing parents walk in and being like, wait, I get, I get to be involved in what happens with my own, with my own child's education. Yes, you do. Wait, I get to, my son has to exercise and keep a journal as to what he's in, what books he's reading, you know? And like, what, this is rad. And it is just the life it is. It is, it is provided a second wind. I'm going to do this till the day I die. And it is just the life. It has provided a second wind.

I'm going to do this till the day I die. And I love seeing this realization that people can take control of their own destinies, especially around safety. Well said. I'm glad you're out there, Tim Kennedy. Love you, man. You too. I love you too. Can you keep doing this?

I think I'm going to. You're going to? Please. I think I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah. Scars and Stripes. It's available right now. It's everywhere. Audiobook. I think I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah. Scars and Stripes. It's available right now. It's everywhere.

Audiobook. Did you read the audiobook? I did. Fuck yeah. No, it was hard. I bet. But you have to. I cry.

It took me a day to get through three paragraphs. Oof. Yeah. Audiobooks, man. That's why I'm never going to get in that stupid chamber you have in the back. Never going to do it. I just experienced a version of it. Hard pass, man.

It's even different in that one. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, brother. Appreciate you very much. Bye, everybody.