The Joe Rogan Experience - #2358 - Chadd Wright
Episode Date: July 31, 2025Chadd Wright is a retired Navy SEAL, endurance athlete, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a cofounder of the Three of Seven Project, a health and self-improvement program for the body, soul, and spirit.... https://www.3of7project.com See Universal Pictures’ NOBODY 2, only in theaters August 15. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The Joe Rogan Experience.
Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Yeah, I do too, man.
I chewed tobacco pretty much since I was about 13 years old.
But you know, as you get older, you start to try to optimize everything, because
the world tells you everything's going to kill you.
Is chewing tobacco going to kill you?
Well, you know.
I've heard people get mouth cancer.
Yeah, that's the main thing, is mouth cancer.
Mouth cancer's pretty nasty.
All forms of cancer are pretty nasty, but mouth cancer can really screw you up.
And I think it's the, you know, like the chemicals that they spray on the tobacco when they're
growing the tobacco. So I don't know, maybe if you grew tobacco organically and then you
chewed it, it wouldn't give you mouth cancer?
Probably makes sense.
I don't know.
Well, I was just reading something that 100% of California wines
that they tested had glyphosate on them.
100%.
Yeah, believe it.
Which is just nuts.
You know, yeah, that stuff is everywhere.
I mean, it's never going to go anywhere,
because when I was in the Navy, I lived in Virginia, and we moved out to a rural community. And
they grew corn and soybeans primarily in the fields, and nothing else would grow in that
dirt. Like, you could for the genetically modified seed or
whatever they put out there, you know what I mean? And how long does that stay in the
soil? Like, does that ever come, can you ever get that out of the dirt so that other things
could or would actually thrive there again? I guess after many, many years you
could.
Yeah, it's many, many years.
I had Will Harris from, he's from Georgia, White Oaks Pastures, you ever heard of that
guy?
I actually listened to that episode that you did with him, man, because I've ordered a
pile of meat from them.
He's great.
He is.
That was a great episode.
And it's a great episode to educate people on like how much time it takes to take an
industrial farm and convert it to regenerative agriculture.
It's not easy.
It's a long grind, super costly, not nearly as profitable.
And you know, he did it over a course of 20 years.
And we have two jars of soil out there that he gave us.
And one of them is a soil from his neighbor's farm
Which is an industrial farm and the other one is his and his is like a dark brown rich alive soil
And the one from his neighbor's farm is just pale and dead and they have to spray shit all over it and use industrial
fertilizer and
Yeah, it's ugly man
And then it's gotten so far that like to turn it around and try to feed all the people that
we have established here in this country in places where nobody's growing food.
It's like it's almost impossible.
It's almost like they're stuck with this system of industrialized farming.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a it's being here in Austin, you know, I don't go to the city
much.
I live on 700 acres in the foothills
of the Appalachian Mountains.
And I come here to the city and you see the result
of packing so many human beings into one area.
Yeah, how you gonna feed them people?
Other than the way that we figured out how to do it.
I mean, how you gonna feed them?
I don't know, man, walking around the city, man, it's just coming from where I live, and don't take this as
negative. I mean, people love cities. There's cool stuff in cities, right? Like, people
get a lot, but me, when I come from where I live, you know, dude, I'm in the woods every
day for hours and hours. I don't go to town hardly ever. I'm a the woods every day for hours and hours.
I don't go to town hardly ever.
I'm a squirrel hunter.
I have a little mountain cur.
We go out and squirrel hunt for hours every day.
But coming to the city, it's like the air burns my nose.
I've been coughing all day today.
You really notice it?
I notice it.
I can smell it.
It smells.
Now, we're staying right in downtown, the smell
reminds me slightly of Lagos, Nigeria, which it's a hundred X in Lagos. It literally burns
your eyes and your nose to breathe the air there. But even in Austin, I can kind of smell
the sour, you know, and then I'm looking at these poor people, man,
like these people laying on these park benches and all this stuff, and I'm like, it just
makes you think, it makes you wonder, the human's propensity to stoop lower than an
animal.
Like we have the propensity as human to stoop lower than an animal. Like, we have the propensity as human to stoop lower than
an animal. In the worst-case scenario. In the worst-case scenarios, yeah. I mean, I
understand there's so much that goes along with the story that those, all
the, all of those people have. And it was funny, I saw a lady sitting on the edge
of the sidewalk today,
she was smoking crack or something. And now my wife's in recovery. And I said, it's just
mind-boggling to me, me being a man of the country, to see the human's propensity to
stoop that low. And she looked at me and she said, well, I've done it.
Wow.
I said, that's good. Man, my woman is so good, brother.
Pete She came out of it.
Chad She came out of it, right? I mean, by the grace of God, but –
Pete Well, I'm glad you didn't come visit us in LA. I would have showed you some real shit.
Chad Dude, I went –
Pete This is nothing.
Chad I went to LA one time when my buddy Jesse Itzler, he took me out there. When all this stuff
started, I got out of the Navy. He said, Chad, he said, he asked me to come coach him, teach him how to run a long ways.
I said, I'll come out there and me and Jesse became fast friends.
He said, I'm going to take you out here to LA.
He said, I'm going to take you on a few of these interviews with these people.
He said, but I want you to realize that if you decide to
do this, your life will never be the same. And I said, all right, let's go.
You mean like do a podcast?
Yeah.
Jesse's an interesting guy.
He's one of my biggest mentors. He's a close friend.
I like that dude a lot. I had him on. I enjoyed talking to him.
Yeah, I love him to death, man. But he took me out there. And LA was, yeah, it put me back really,
some of the places that we went were very similar to some of the areas that we deployed to.
Just the smell and the sights and the way people were living. It was wild, man.
Yeah, it's a chaotic environment and you get to anything, and people that live there get used to it.
They don't know what real peace is like.
You know, like when I would tell people
why I like mountain hunting, I'd be like,
man, it's like a vitamin that you didn't know you needed.
You get out there in the mountains
and you smell that clean air and you just feel it.
Your whole body just goes, ah, this is so much better.
This is so much better to live like this.
It is. I just don't get a chance to do it that often.
You know, I don't live in it like you do. Living in it is the ultimate. You know, if
you could live in it and then go visit other places, that's way better, to live in nature.
The noise too. The noise, I don't think that people who live in the city, they've become acclimated to
all of the constant noise.
It's never quiet.
But when I enter into that environment, like that noise is doing, it does something to
me, like the traffic and the constant humming and it just, I feel like I begin to hold this tension within me.
I don't know what it's doing to me.
I don't know, man.
It's sensory overload.
Yeah.
But I guess you can become accustomed to it.
Well people in New York City have to become accustomed to it and they actually like it.
They like that feeling of sensory overload.
But everybody that I know that likes that is fairly unhealthy.
I don't know any like real fit, fit healthy active people that really enjoy that environment. So why why do you?
Why why I understand you love what you do?
But I mean you could build a studio somewhere out in a
Out in the mountain somewhere like why do you probably do that? We're gonna probably build a studio on a ranch next
That's okay. That's the next move.
I want to have like a tactical course out there. Good for you, man. A bass fishing lake.
And have it set up and do fun shit with guests too. Because people are gonna come see you, man.
That's what I think. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Summer is here
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It's um, I mean what you've done man is so cool.
I tell people all the time, if you ever have the opportunity to go and see someone who
is the best in the world at what they do, take that opportunity.
Whether it's a runner, a fighter, a kayaker, or a podcaster, it's so cool to be here and
to get to witness what you do, how you do it, the level that you go to to make all this
happen.
You're the best in the world. Like, that's
so cool for me, man. Like, if we don't talk here but for 30 minutes, I got to see the
best in the world do what he does. And how cool is that, man?
Oh, thank you.
And like, the hospitality that you have, you know, given me since I've been here, it's
just next level. And that's what you see when you get to given me since I've been here, it's just next level. And
that's what you see when you get to witness the best in the world do
whatever it is they are the best at. You just get to see this whole other level
of proficiency, of skill, of technique, of mastery, and that opens up your mind
into like what's possible
Yeah, this I mean you can go back and watch the beginning episodes this it was terrible in the early days
Well, I'm a podcaster too, man
I mean, I know you are watch your show all the time
I've got like four hundred and something episodes out and same here when I first started a yeah, it was awful
But it's so much fun. I love it
I love it
I found your show because of a video that you did on your Land Cruiser because I'm a
Land Cruiser nut yeah and you were talking about like have a truck that
will fucking like no matter what will work like if they throw EMP pulses in the
air and kill all the electronics which is people don't understand like every
car everyone is driving has a fucking computer in it and if something goes on
that are some sort of a power grid failure or some sort of a solar flare
that knocks out electronics it could knock out your fucking car you have a
brick now it's not gonna work if you don't have a carburetor and you have a
car like a regular old-school car yeah it's not gonna you. If you don't have a carburetor and you have a car like a
regular old-school car, it's not gonna... You know Tucker Carlson, he drives like a
1978 pickup truck. I go, why do you drive that? He goes, because they can't shut it
off. The government can't get in this. Got no GPS. He's super fucking
paranoid. Well the newest vehicle that I have, and yes Land Cruisers are my
favorite. I've become close friends with Daniel at TLC 4x4, and he's done two for me, a 100 series
and a 60 series.
And they did mine too when they were in LA.
Yeah, man, they're just awesome.
Like I said, my favorite part about driving the Land Cruiser is that it makes people smile.
I'm not a very funny guy, you know?
So I don't get many opportunities to make human beings smile, but I can drive
this Land Cruiser and people look at it, point at it, they're smiling and like that just,
that's cool to me.
You know what I mean?
Especially 60 series, I think.
There's just like a core group of people who love those things.
They, yeah, and you don't see them.
I slow down when I see one, I slow down, I check it out.
Yeah, but the newest vehicle that I have, and I'm a car guy, now I was poor most of
my life, I'm still fairly poor, but you know I got enough money I can buy the cars that
I want now. And the newest car that I have is a 1997 Dodge diesel truck. I have two 97, I have an OBS Ford, it's a 97 with the Power Stroke diesel.
I have a 97 Dodge Ram with the Cummins diesel because those are the two best diesel engines
undisputedly that have ever been produced.
I have the 100 series Land Cruiser.
Actually the 100 series is a 98, but I kind of gave that to my brother, so I can't count
that.
The 60 series is a 84.
I have an 86 Toyota they call Pickup.
It's a Hilux.
I don't know if I'm missing something, but I love old cars, man.
Those old Toyotas are bulletproof.
They never break.
That's my squirrel hunting truck.
It'll go anywhere. You know, why am I going to go spend
$30,000 on a side-by-side? I can get in this Toyota truck and I can go anywhere. You can
go in a side-by-side.
That's true.
That's my squirrel hunting truck.
So is squirrel hunting the most hunting that you do?
I love, I do it every day that I'm at home. I squirrel
hunt every day. How much squirrel do you eat? Well, I eat squirrel on special
occasions. I give away a lot of squirrel meat, you know. I'm blessed enough in life
now that I can eat ribeye steak. I give away a lot of squirrels. I don't kill all
the squirrels that we tree, either. Really, since a young age, I was introduced to hunting
with dogs, tree dogs specifically, and there was something about a tree dog that just stirred this passion within me.
It is the only thing that has stuck with me from childhood, young childhood.
The first tree dog I ever walked to, I mean, I didn't even know, I probably shouldn't even
have been in the woods, but I followed my uncle to a coonhound tree down in a swamp.
Even at that age, it just stirred something in me like this is some sort of primal instinct
of partnering with this dog in this chase.
I've done it even up until now. And it's just a unique experience, man.
And the great thing about dogs, hunting dogs too, is the breeding aspect of it.
That's a lot of fun.
So not only do you have your best friend, you know, my little mountain cur, her name's
Wendy, she stays in the house, she's my best friend. You know, my little mountain cur, her name's Wendy. She stays in the house.
She's my best friend.
We hunt every day together.
But now I get to breed her.
I get to select a mate.
And over the course, I'm hoping over the course of the next 30 years or so, I can breed in
these specific characteristics of this type of dog that I value. And so that's fun, you know. Not
only is the hunting fun, but the breeding is fun, the training's fun, everything
about it's fun. And you take a group of guys out squirrel hunting man and it's a
blast because you don't have to be quiet. Look man, you just you're out there in
the woods on four wheelers, everybody's got shotguns, you know, you get to the tree, here's this dog just hammering a tree on this tree, bow, bow,
bow, bow, everybody surrounds the tree, and that squirrel gets nervous and he starts timbering
out going tree to tree, and you've got five or six guys with shotguns blasting away, and
everybody's cutting up and laughing.
I mean, it's just a blast, dude.
But that's my thing, you know?
That's a funny thing.
I like to hunt whitetails. I get to go on my first elk hunt this year.
Oh, wow. Where are you going?
There's a family out in Utah. They own some ranch out there. I think it's called R5 Ranch.
And they wanted to put a hunt on for a veteran.
So they partnered with an outfitter called G3 Outfitters, and they bought a tag, and
for some odd reason, they selected me as their veteran that they want to take out on an elk
hunt.
Now, I've always wanted to elk hunt, man.
I've just never made it happen.
There's a lot that goes into it, as you know.
So they're taking me to New Mexico.
They bought some tag from a landowner, and they're going to take me out there elk hunting.
That's a great spot.
New Mexico's a great spot for elk.
He sent me some pictures of some of these bulls.
I said, what an animal.
Yeah, New New Mexico's got some crazy genetics too.
There's a guy who explained this to me, that there's really two different, besides like
Thule elk and Roosevelt elk, there's Rocky Mountain elk and then there's Yellowstone
elk.
And the Yellowstone elk are an older breed that has larger antlers, a bigger animal.
And you find a lot of those in Arizona,
and you find a lot of those in New Mexico.
So where we're hunting at is right,
it is on the border of Arizona and New Mexico.
Yeah, so I bet you have great genetics out there.
You know what, man, I can't believe it.
I can't believe this is the first, that I'm gonna be my first elk hunt. Are you rifle or bow hunt? It's gonna be
rifle. Now I'm a big archery guy too. When I hunt whitetails, when I
started hunting whitetails that was what I did was bow hunt and still bow hunt
quite a bit. But this is a rifle hunt. I love bow hunting. Rifle hunting is great. It's the most effective, most efficient way
to hunt. But there's something about having to get inside 70, 80 yards, sneaking up, executing
a perfect shot.
Now you're a Hoyt guy too, right?
Yeah.
I have been too all my life.
They make amazing bows.
My wife a couple years ago bought me that RX-7 with the carbon fiber riser.
I always wanted a bow with a carbon riser because I remember hunting so many hunts in
the southeast, whitetail hunts, walking into the stand and your hand just getting so cold
carrying that bow around. Yeah, that's the difference carbon doesn't get cold like that like like aluminum does yeah
That's the main reason I wanted one, but it's been a great bow
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They just, you know.
Yeah, it's incremental improvements based on like how the industry is going.
But we went to the Hoyt Factor.
I've been to the Hoyt Factor a few times, but we went recently and showed the process
that they make those things. It's so incredible.
It's all these like super sophisticated computers and machines and CNC machines.
They're cutting the aluminum and they have like
so many different steps to make sure that
quality control is perfect.
And at the end when you get it you really appreciate it.
And they're so smooth now.
Like I've been bow hunting for 12 years now.
13 years, 13 years.
And just the difference in 13 years is crazy.
Like if I go back and pick up one
of my old bows, it just feels archaic. They're so smooth now. The draw cycle is so smooth and they're
so dead in the hand when you fire them. And those parallel limbs and they're so short and compact.
You know, the old bows we used to shoot back in the day, the old Viper Tex and all that from Hoyt and Matthews had the old SQ2s and Q2s and they
were just long and unwieldy in the stand.
You can make, like you said, 100 yard shots now with a compound bow.
Back then, I mean, there wasn't nobody shooting inbows at 100 yards. No. Because they just weren't tuned, I think, so finely as the bows that we have today.
I mean, that RX-7, man, every time I shoot that bow, it amazes me at how that arrow just
flies like a laser beam.
I'm like, good night, man.
Yeah.
It's a cool...
Have you ever shot a stick bow? Yes, okay? I'm not good at it though
I was shot it on vacation once I was shocked at how bad I was because I'm so good with a compound
Yeah, try to figure out where to aim where it goes. Yeah all this shit and how to let loose right?
It's I have a buddy who hunts exclusive my buddy
Ryan Callahan he hunts exclusively with a homemade
bow.
He's got a long bow that he made.
I don't know if he made this one.
I know he's made them before.
But it's those real simple bows.
You can't even get much energy out of that thing, but it's the extra challenge.
You got to get real close.
You got to get real close and be real accurate.
Yeah. Challenge you got to get real close. You got to get real close and be real accurate Yeah, I went I took man on a mule deer hunt that been uh, the Wasatch range in Utah
Two years ago and yeah, I mean you you got to get within
Seven to ten yards of that animal with it with a long bow. Yeah, I mean I do
I do anyways, you know Fred bear my he might could have made a 20 or 30 yard shot, but you got to get right
in their laps.
I was on public land.
It was a wilderness area.
That's where I like to hunt.
I like wilderness areas.
That's the highest designation of preservation that Congress can award to a piece of land.
So if you're in a wilderness area, you know there's not gonna be no horses, no mechanized tools, nobody's gonna be
clearing trails with a chainsaw up there. If you ever want to go in the
backcountry, find a wilderness area. Not a national park, not a national forest.
Find a wilderness area. But we were watching these mule deer, and you know I'd
watch them in the morning, they'd
get up and feed.
And then I'd wait for them to go lay down, and then you had to move on that mule deer
and use the terrain, put the terrain between you and him, and they'd be bedded down.
And you could get with, the closest I got to one was about five yards, and he was bedded down
under a tree just kind of out in this big old rock.
I was way up in the mountains, big old rocky area.
Well I stalked all the way up there to him and I got about five yards from where I last
seen him, where I saw him bed down at.
You know I lost sight of him when I started to stalk, and I got impatient.
And I got there and I was laid down up
against the rock and that tree was right there and I thought you know it took me
about an hour to stalk over here I said I wonder if he got up moved and I peeked
my head up over that rock and that big son of a gun was just looking right at
me I'm talking about eye to eye five yards. He jumped up and tore out of there.
That was the closest I got to killing one. But if I would have just laid there with that long bow
and been patient and waited for him to stand up off his bed, I could have drew and shot him
right there. Well, he's probably already alert. He probably heard you. I don't know if he heard me or not. I had the wind.
I had the wind.
Your ears are so good.
I had shoes on, but you know, I'm stalking across big granite rock slabs and stuff, so
it was pretty quiet.
I mean, there was no indication when I picked my head up, he was still laying there on bed.
There was no indication that he knew I was there other than when he
saw me peek my head over the rock and stand up and tear out of there, you know.
They're the most difficult to hunt because they're just dealing with mountain lions all
day long. And they're just always like, and they'll jump the string quicker than any animal.
Other than like, the craziest ones are axis deer. Have you ever hunted axis deer?
I haven't no axis deer evolved with tigers so there they move so fast
I had a video of an axis deer that I shot at at 70 plus yards and
With a lighted knock and you see the arrow long. His arrows going
290 feet a second you see this arrow launching towards this deer, and this deer is feeding
in the field, totally broadside, he hears the arrow within 10 yards, ducks down, hauls
out and he's gone by the time the arrow got to him.
He hears the arrow in flight.
Exactly.
He had no idea.
We were very far away.
That's why I took the shot.
It's one of the things with those animals like you're sometimes better off taking a long shot than a close shot
Because they hear that bow go off and they just duck and go I mean
They're not trying to duck under your arrow what they're trying to do is load up their weapons or load up their legs rather
Get super low so they can launch themselves forward and go on
They're just trying to take off as quickly as possible, and that means dropping down,
and when they drop down, arrows go right over them.
But this one was so fast, within 10 yards,
he was nowhere near the arrow.
His ass was over here.
The vitals where I aimed for was right here.
He was already over there.
He was two feet away from it,
and he didn't start moving
until that arrow was 10 yards away from him.
Where was that at? That was in Hawaii. Hawaii, okay. Lanai is a crazy place, Two feet away from it and he didn't start moving until that arrow was 10 yards away from it.
Where was that at?
That was in Hawaii.
Hawaii, okay.
Lanai is a crazy place because Lanai has no predators and it's a small island.
It only has 3,000 people living on it, but it has 30,000 deer, plus.
So they want you to kill them.
They want you to kill them.
Kill them as many as you can.
They have people that are snipers that go out there at night and everybody on the island eats good because it's the best
meat. Axis deer is delicious if you've ever had it. It's right up there with elk. It's
fantastic meat and they're just completely overpopulated so they have to do it. So people
hunt them there 365 days a year so high pressure. So they're used to like they're always with
their head on a swivelivel always looking around for a hunter
That would be a fun hunt. That would tune you up. Oh, it's great before elk season
Yeah, that would tune you up because you'll get if you blow a stalk you get another stalk in ten seconds
Like you're on another animal and you're in these fields that used to be where the Dole plant grew pineapples
So it's kind of a weird ground like I guess the way they plant grew pineapples. So it's kind of a weird ground.
I guess the way they would farm pineapples,
they would put a layer of plastic down,
and then the soil would be above the plastic.
So everywhere you go, it's weird.
You see almost like garbage bag plastic
underneath the dirt all over the place.
Oh, it'd be dirty.
And these animals are,
you'll sit on the top of a hill and look down on
a field and you might see 600 axis deer wandering around this field.
Good night, man.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's crazy.
It's so unnatural.
But-
Are they, they're not native?
No.
Okay.
They were given to King Kamehameha by I think the king of India
Whatever the ruler of India was in the 1800s and they gave and they've had them on this island forever And they're just completely overpopulated. Yeah, they're all like all over the place and big ones, too
Big be a fun hunt. Oh, it's a great hunt. It's a great if you have a rifle. It's a no-brainer
It's like you're 100% gonna get a deer
But if you got a bow, I mean I went out there with Cam Haynes and Remy Warren and Adam Green tree
And all these just like bona fide killers who like world-class hunters cams best in the world
That's the world and we and John Dudley was there too
We went out there and we were there for like six or seven days and everyone was successful.
And then we made a podcast about it, blew up the Outfitters, a great place to go hunt.
You stay at the Four Seasons, incredible food, amazing amenities, beautiful, beautiful resort.
And then you get to go and hunt in this incredible place.
But after we left, he said they had a hundred and fifty people
Come within that season from from then until the time we went back the next year one guy was successful with a bow
one
One night man, and you're so many opportunities, but they're so fast and if you had odds bad odds
Yeah, well you have here's the deal don't try the morning
I used I've hunted in the morning and
I've been successful, but it's too fucking quiet. You really want to go in the afternoon
because in the afternoon you get a lot of wind and you just got to pick your spots and
play your stalks correctly.
Have you turkey hunted?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Eastern or what type of turkey?
California. It was in California.
Okay. I don't know what's out there. Mariums or?
Probably. It was in the wine country.
I went up there with Steve Rinella.
He took me turkey hunting. It was fun.
You know, his buddy's a big squirrel hunter.
Steve's buddy's a big squirrel hunter.
What's that guy's name? Clay Newcomb.
He's got a bunch of feist dogs.
I think he hunts off of mules.
I tell you what we ought to do. We ought to set up a big squirrel hunt with everybody.
Me and you and Clay and Cam, we ought to set up a big squirrel hunt one weekend.
I've had squirrel hunts. With Rinella, he cooked some squirrel up for us. It was good.
Boy, if we could get him to come in and cook too, that would be outstanding.
It would be.
Because I have a hard time making this wild game
taste worth a flip.
Do you?
I'm just not a good cook, man.
I noticed that.
Well, I was gonna talk to you about your steak cooking.
We gotta work on that.
Yeah, I'm just not much of a cook, man.
I watched you cook a steak on a Traeger,
and I was like, listen,
the way to cook a steak on a Traeger is,
you can cook a steak on a Traeger.
Like, you could cook, like, if you have a roast, like, you can cook a good roast on a Traeger is you can cook a steak on a Traeger. Like you could cook, like if you have a roast,
like you can cook a good roast on the Traeger,
but the reality is you need to be able to sear it.
And so you can't really sear things on a Traeger.
And I saw what you did,
you tried to turn the temperature up real high
and then cook it at the end.
The key is get it on a frying pan.
Like get it low and slow on the Traeger.
I like 225 degrees with the super smoke.
Get it nice and smoky
Mm-hmm get it up to 120 degrees and then cast iron skillet
Okay, motherfucker hot put some beef tallow in there and
Like 90 seconds on each side seals it up. Now. Do you do much to your own cooking? Yeah
I do almost all my own cook. Okay. Yeah, I cook a lot. Does your wife cook? Yeah, she cooks too
Yeah, my wife cooks. I'm so blessed that cook a lot. Does your wife cook? Yeah, she cooks too.
Yeah, my wife cooks.
I'm so blessed that she cooks because I've got a long ways to go.
I actually made a goal of mine I've been working on.
I cook for her one night a week.
And it's worked out a few times, but I'm learning.
I appreciate that tip on the steak though.
Yeah, the tip on the steak, it's reverse sear is what it's called and I learned that from whiskey bent my friend Chad whiskey bent barbecue
And he said if you really want to cook it steak correctly
He goes you want it to be slowly cooked and then sear the outside a lot of people I try to sear it first
He's like, I don't agree with that
You know
I think the way to get it the juiciest steak is to slow cook it and then sear it
at the end, the reverse sear method.
Well, I'm going to try that when I get to the house.
It's the move.
It's the move.
My cousin raises all the cows we eat.
Oh, that's great.
So my mama makes all the bread we eat.
My wife grows all the vegetables that we eat.
I'm going to say seasonally, you know what I mean, seasonally.
My cousin raises all the cows. You know, we
get our water right out of the ground. I take buckets of water once a week, go collect water,
comes right out of a spring, some old rednecks, found a spring back in there and ran a PVC
pipe out of it, you know, and so we just go there and collect all our water.
So you're totally off the grid.
Well, you know, we'll order some stuff from the grocery store, you know, just...
But your home is totally off the grid.
It wouldn't be hard at all to ramp things up to the point that we were 100% eating what
we could produce as a family unit.
No one person, like no one person is going to produce everything that they need for them what we could produce as a family unit.
No one person is going to produce everything that they need for them and their family to eat.
My cousin, he raises cows,
so we know where they're coming from,
we know how they're living,
we know what they're being fed.
Like I said, my mama makes bread,
my wife can grow anything.
It's an effort.
You know, I hunt.
I can bring in wild game meat at any time.
Everybody thinks about when the apocalypse comes, you know, you think you're going to be eating all these deer and elk and stuff.
You're going to be eating squirrel, buddy.
Squirrel and birds, maybe a possum every now and then.
Them deer is going to be gone quick.
Probably, right? Maybe a possum every now and then them deer is gonna be gone quick probably you know small game smuts
If you want to really?
subsistence
You know get your meat from the wild you got to be able to hunt small game
squirrels rabbits coon
Possum you got to be able to hunt them you know you go out and try to hunt a coon without a dog
You ain't gonna kill no coon. Right.
You know?
I can take a good dog out and kill ten coons in an hour if I'm in a good spot.
What does raccoon taste like?
Raccoon's pretty greasy.
You gotta, again, you gotta cook it right.
You know?
So much wild game.
Other than elk, I found elk seems to be really, really good even if you're not a skilled cook.
Yeah. You know you know to me anyways
It's the best wild game meat I've ever ate. Yeah, but but like these squirrels coons
Things like small game even rabbit
They can get real tough
You know that you can is that raccoon? Yeah, that's coon right there
You cook it in a crock pot a lot of these small game, you slow cook it, you know?
And that kind of helps keep it moist and break it down.
Yeah.
But anyways, man, I'm all over the darn place.
And you probably have to cook it to a high temperature, too.
Raccoons probably get trichinosis, right?
I don't know if a coon does or not.
I've killed a bunch of bears, and I know they do.
They do. Yeah, that's the one thing I didn't like about bear coon does or not. I've killed a bunch of bears, and I know they do. They do.
Yeah, that's the one thing I didn't like about bear.
Yeah, me too.
It makes me uncomfortable.
I've killed two black bears, both of them with my bow.
Both of them about 500 pounds.
Whoa.
Those are big black bears.
They're big, big black bears.
Are these Georgia black bears?
No, these are Virginia.
Oh.
There's a place in Virginia called the Great Dismal Swamp.
It's about a 110,000 acre continuous block of land.
That's what's left of it.
It's eat up with bears.
I mean, I would take my coon dog down the swamp bottom.
We called it the run.
And during springtime, when them bears were out with cubs, I couldn't even hardly run my coon dog up and down through there.
There were so many bears in there. And them sows would get, they would get, you know, mad at us for being in there and start popping their teeth and making racket.
I took a young man with me down in there one time. First time he ever been coon hunting. I was hunting a dog called a leopard curr and I cut that dog loose
in there and he went down in there, boom, slammed, treed. I thought, all right, this is good because
coon hunting can be rough. We walked down in there and I had this young guy with me. He had the rifle.
We got up to the tree and I walk up to that dog and leash it up and I'm fooling with the
dog getting it leashed back on the tree there,
and he said, what is that?
I said, what are you talking about?
He said, stop and listen.
And I stopped, and that dog quit barking for a second, and all of a sudden I could hear
bark raining down on the leaves above my head, because it was summertime.
About that time, about a 300 pound black bear comes sliding down out of that tree like it
was on a fireman's pole landed. I'm talking about that joker landed right in the midst of me, him, and the dog.
And he's standing there, he's just frozen.
He's never been coon hunting before.
He's got the gun.
He's just frozen.
And about the time that bear hit the ground, I snapped the leash off of that dog, because
the dog was my only chance to run this bear out of our vicinity.
And these cur dogs are real gritty.
They won't back up.
I mean, they won't back up from nothing.
They're like a game cock, man.
And that dog tore out after that bear, ran him out.
I looked over at that boy, I said,
were you just gonna, you've got the gun,
you just stood there and didn't,
he said, well I thought that happens all the time.
But that's how many bears was in this area, man.
So I'd be out there whitetail hunting,
you know, and a big old 500 pound boar bear would come up,
you know, I've had him climb the tree
that I was
sitting in the tree stand. But if a big one came by, it's hard not to shoot a big trophy
bear, especially with a bow. So I've killed two, but when we killed them bear, I would
just – there was a lot of real poor people that lived around in there. Well, there was one man named Zachariah.
He was about a 90-year-old black man.
He had one eye.
He hunted year-round because he had to hunt to eat.
We'd see him out in the field deer hunting in the middle of summertime.
Wouldn't nobody say nothing to him because they knew he had to eat.
But I'd call Zachariah when I'd kill that bear.
Well then he would call all of his people in the community,
and we'd take that bear down to the skinning shed,
and within 10 minutes we'd have 50 people lined up at the skinning shed with grocery bags.
And so we would cut this bear up and process this bear,
and these, you know, poor people, they'd come down there and get them a big piece of meat.
Well, by the time everybody was done, they wasn't maybe but one piece of meat left, you
know what I mean?
Because I don't like bear, but I sure do like killing them.
Have you ever had it cooked well?
Done well?
We've cooked some at the house, but I haven't, I mean, I haven't, that's what I'm saying.
I'm not a good cook.
You just have to learn how to do it.
My friends John and Jen, they run an outfitter in,
they're outfitters in Alberta and they're bear hunters. And I've been bear hunting with them
and they take like a roast and they'll cook it on a Traeger. They brine it. They put it in like,
uh, they marinate it and it's fantastic. It's like some of like better than the best roast
beef you've ever had. Oh, I know there's a way
There's a way to make it taste good
It's all it's also in what they eat
You know, yeah
You get them and they've been eating like a dead moose and you know
And they've been feasting on that for a couple weeks and then it's rotten and they just they stink and that's not yeah
No, they want to get acorn bears these bears. We were killing what they would, the reason they were so big, they were eating corn and soybeans.
Yeah, perfect.
You know?
Now they'd eat a pile of deer guts too.
I mean.
Yeah, they'd eat everything.
I would gut a deer out there, you know, if I killed a deer, I'd gut it in the woods.
I don't gut them back at the house.
I just gut them in the woods and you come back an hour later and they wouldn't be, not
a speck of them guts left.
Crazy. I mean, they would not a speck of them guts left. Crazy.
I mean they would eat the fire out of them.
Do you know that the early pioneers preferred bear meat and they used deer just for skins?
No, I did not know that.
Yeah, like Daniel Boone and all those fellows, those guys, they were bear hunters.
They wanted the fat.
Yeah, they wanted the fat and they ate bare meat because they thought it was closer to
beef.
Huh.
Yeah.
Well, it is closer to beef, I would say, than deer.
Yeah, I would say so.
Especially if it's cooked well, it's delicious.
It's just you got to get a bear that's not eating rotten meat and not eating fish and
cook it right.
But if you cook it right, it's fantastic.
It's really good.
Bear sausage is fantastic.
It's all just in how you get it prepared.
Yeah.
How you do it.
Rinell is really good at it.
Well, see, I gotta start running in the right circles
with people that can cook.
Yeah.
That's my problem.
My friend Jesse, who owns this restaurant here
called Die Due, what is Jesse's that,
he runs a school that teaches people how to shoot hogs,
how to butcher them, how to cook
them.
And you know, he likes old, ruddy, old hogs, and he really knows how to do it correctly.
So this is it.
This is a new school of traditional cookery.
So Jesse will take people and he'll take them out there,
teach them how to hunt, teach them everything about it, how to stalk an animal, how to dress
the game, how to cook it and prepare it and what the cuts you're looking for. And he teaches classes
on this. How cool is that? It's amazing. I mean, it's a small class because he wants to do it correctly, but
He's incredible in that restaurant if you ever get a chance to go to a Dai Douai in town. It's amazing
I'm gonna go ahead and tell you if you can make an old
Boarhog taste good. Yeah, you have got to be a master. He's a master
He also like cooked diver ducks for us, which everybody says are disgusting. Yeah, and they were fantastic
And he's like it's all just in the preparation
Yeah, marinated them he slow cooked them on a on a smoker. They were fantastic all that stuff just takes time
Yeah, it just takes time. It's so much easier just to just to cook a ribeye. Oh, yeah, you know what I mean?
That's the easiest. It's the easiest is yeah, it's just
There's something about wild game to me. It's a different kind of food.
It feels different when you eat it.
There's more energy to it.
It's like it's just so nutrient dense.
You eat it, and your whole body just goes, woo.
Woo.
You feel it.
You cook an elk steak, and you eat that medium rare and you just biting into it and
it's juicy and argh.
I can't wait, man.
Oh yeah.
I hope I get one.
I think I got a good chance of getting one.
These boys are serious.
Yeah.
So.
Well, with a rifle your chances are a lot higher and I know you're a real good shot.
So you're probably, a guy like you also could shoot accurately at a distance
Which is huge. Yeah, no idea you're there
You know
You can I'm sure you can make a 500 yard shot easy and if your rifles tuned correctly for something like that
It's like you got a pretty good shot. Have you been uh, have you been up to the Yukon territory at all?
No, no, I haven't I just got back. What were you doing up there?
It's been, you know, it's been quite the journey both on the macro and the micro level
to wind up here at this table with you.
I spent the last, about the last month sitting with a good friend of mine, one of my biggest
mentors in my life, I'd sit with him for hours on
end while he was dying.
And then I had to leave him and I went out to the Yukon.
Sorry man.
We need to talk more about that by the way.
And I had a teammate that I went through SEAL training and all with. He was paralyzed 14 years ago and
he wanted to go on an adventure and I said well, there's a race out there.
It's a thousand mile kayaking race. It's the longest kayaking race in the world on the Yukon River.
Totally unsupported.
He said, all right.
He prepared for about two years.
And we went out there and did that on the Yukon River.
Wow.
I came home and my buddy died the day I got home.
And so it's been a, man, it's been a while, last month or so. Have you ever
got to sit with anybody?
While they're dying?
Important to you?
Not while they're dying.
I highly recommend it. It will teach you so much, man.
About what's important.
It has made me grow. Like, I don't know man, it just gives me the daggone chills thinking about it and
the crazy thing is is the type of person I used to be I would have thought,
you know, going and sitting with someone who's dying is a waste of time.
Like I got other things to do, right? You do too. We got busy lives.
Well this man, he mentored me hunting and everything, working, all that. His name was Don Tidwell. From the time I was about 13 to
the time I left to go become a Navy SEAL. Well, I did my whole Navy thing. I got out, I reconnected with
Dawn for a while, but then I started this company now that we have, 3 of 7
project, got busy. I have a curse from my military service. I have this unique
ability to be able to forget you ever existed. When I get on some sort of mission and you're not part of that anymore,
I can forget you ever existed.
And so I lost touch with him because of my own selfishness
and been doing this thing for the last four or five years.
Well, his wife called me and said,
look, he just wants to see you one more time.
He's got pancreatic cancer.
He's got maybe two weeks left.
He just wants to see you one more time.
Whew. Good night, man.
Took a lot of courage for me to go show up in front of him
and sit down with him and say, Mr. Dawn,
I'm sorry I haven't been the friend to you that you deserve.
Will you forgive me?
He's laying there dying.
He looks back at me and says,
son, there's nothing to forgive.
I mean, just like, and then from that point,
I'd go sit with him twice a week
for eight or nine or 10 hours,
just sit right there by his bed.
I'd read the scriptures to him.
He only had a third grade education.
We read about the gospel and we read about the resurrection,
and we read about creation. You know, the first thing that you learn, I think, when
you sit with somebody that's dying is that death is the great foe that sits above mankind
and scoffs at our wisdom. You get what I'm saying?
Yeah.
He said that death is this great foe. It is the enemy that sits above us and mocks the
wisdom of man. Mr. Don had built basically an empire within the community he lived in. He had made millions and millions
of dollars as an entrepreneur, couldn't read or write. But he still had to succumb to this
process that's coming for all of us. I don't know, man. That was like, that just hit me. Like, we think we want to look up at the sky
and we want to explain how the cosmos began, and we can't even solve our own biggest problem.
We can't solve our own biggest problem, which is death, right? It's the biggest problem for all of us.
We can't figure out how to solve it, how to overcome it.
We don't think about this enough. Have you ever thought, why are you dying?
Have you ever thought about that? Sure.
Like, I get it.
All of us, we understand death as we go along through this life, and then something happens.
We get hit by a car, one of our organs fail, cancer happens, whatever, and we say, that
killed us, right?
And that thing did kill us, but your entire life is leading you to that point.
Why do you have to die?
Like it's by necessity you must die.
Why?
What's killing you?
What's killing you?
Well, age.
Your body stops reproducing correctly.
Your cells don't reproduce correctly.
So why does that happen?
No, every all sing that every animal almost every animal on this planet has a timeline that it exists. It's probably
It's probably a
natural function of keeping a balance like all of nature has balance and
I mean can imagine if mosquitoes lived a thousand years, what a fucking pain in the ass
that would be?
No, they'd get a couple, but how long
does a mosquito live, a week?
How long does a fly live, a week?
Good, because otherwise we'd be fucked.
You know, a deer, a good deer, a deer that's like
the best days of its life, it's like 13 years, it's done.
It's over, it's limping, it's gonna get torn apart
by coyotes. Whatever gets it
Everything has a time because if it didn't then there'd be too many people
There's too many balance would be balance be all fucked up. That's that's a great answer, man
The thing is there's a lot of scientists that are working on that a lot of scientists that I've talked to that are treating aging
Like a disease so instead of just accepting the fact like oh you're 50 now that are treating aging like a disease. So instead of just accepting
the fact like, oh, you're 50 now, things are slowing down, like, well, why are they slowing
down and what can we do to reverse that? I love thinking along those lines, man. Like,
yeah, I love that. At the very least, what it does is improves your performance radically
as an older person improves your physical performance is what was what people would
be capable of naturally
with no supplements 20, 30 years ago.
It's a very different world today, very, very, very different.
And with all the different modalities, all the different things you could do like hyperbaric
treatments, NMN supplementation, red light therapy, cold plunge, sauna, all these different things radically change the
composition of your body and your overall metabolic health.
Radically changes it.
And then with hormone therapy and all the other different things that you can do, I
mean, it's just a, just because of science and because of people figuring these things
out, it's a radically different world than it was in the past. But is there a solution?
Is there a fix for death?
Is anyone searching or even contemplating that?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Sinclair is all over that.
He's a guy from Harvard that we've had on the podcast a few times.
That's his primary study.
They're treating aging as a disease
and trying to figure out what different types of medication,
what different types of therapies,
what's the root cause of the cells aging
and not reproducing correctly.
It's an ugly thing, man.
Oh, it gets rough,
especially if you don't take care of yourself.
That's the rough one.
When you see people that have been drinking their whole life
and then they quit at 75
And you're like, it's a little late
You know even torturing your body forcing your body to process poison for decades
Yeah, you know and the and also just living in cities alone
You knew you were talking about that smell that that weird smell that you get in cities
That's fucking break brake dust and tires
and exhaust fumes and do do and do do a little bit do not bad here go to San Francisco I
found a turd on the side of the trail today a human turd it was a terrible log too man
yeah my wife went back took a video of it you might see it on YouTube in the next couple of days.
Okay. Your visit to Austin.
But yeah, man, just sitting with him makes me contemplate these things. And for me, obviously
because of my worldview being shaped by Scripture, it makes me go to Scripture and bounce these questions off of the Scriptures, you know?
And even, I think it was powerful too, because, you know, I'm sitting with a man who's important
to me, who is bearing this burden of death, and by the way, he bore it well.
It was amazing to me that I could go and sit with him and he would talk to me and take time to spend with me even in the midst of
this terrible process that he was going through. I told him, I said, you could have just laid
there on this bed and not said a word to anybody and nobody would have blamed you. It's scary.
He couldn't sit still because he was in so much pain.
It's daggone cancer, it's rough, man.
Pancreatic is a bad thing.
Yeah, it's rough.
But then, you know, he had these same questions that I'm thinking, like, why does this have
to happen?
You know, and then for me then to have to go and search the Scriptures and then come to him with the
Scriptures and share the Scriptures with him to, you know, give him some of the answers
that he had, you know?
It's like, I would read a Scripture to him and he would say, because again, Mr. Don had
a strong faith in the message of what we call the gospel, but he
didn't know all the other stuff because he couldn't read.
So I would read a scripture to him, and then he would say, read another one.
Read another one.
And I was seeing, it was the wildest thing, dude. I've
never seen anything like it before. I've been following the Lord Jesus for 13 years now.
I was reading these words off of the page, not even explaining them to Him. I was just
reading Him these scriptures, and they were manifesting, like, power in him.
Like, you could see, you witnessed a change in his expression and his attitude.
It was like these words I'm reading are manifesting power and hope and like literal energy.
Like, I would come over and read the scriptures to him, and he would have been in bed for
the last four days, wouldn't get up for anybody.
I'd read the scriptures to him, and then next thing you know, we'd be out on the porch.
Like he'd get out of bed, and we'd go walk out on the porch.
I'd have to help him walk, right?
And his wife kept saying, you're the best thing for him right now. I'm like, no, you don't understand.
It's not my presence. For somehow I'm reading him from these scriptures, and it's like manifesting
some sort of power and hope in him, and it like would give him energy in some way. And
I can't explain, I've never seen it happen, like, I've never witnessed
that before, you know?
Well, it's probably even more profound because he can't read, so you're reading it to him.
Dude, dude.
Right?
Dude, it was wild, man. Like, and I would read these scriptures to him, Joe, and he
would say, yeah, I understand that now.
And like, we're reading complex things.
Like we're reading about the resurrection, like the bodily resurrection of all the saints
at the second coming of Christ.
And you know, he asked me, one of the questions he asked me, has anybody ever really explained
to you what happens when we leave here?
You know?
Because he's wondering these things.
Like, I'm about to depart this tent, buddy. What's about to happen? And I'm like, well, the only
answer I can give you, Mr. Don, has got to come from these scriptures. And I would read
these complex scriptures to him, 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, and he would under...
like, it would make sense to him in his mind more than my mind could comprehend
the truth of what I was reading. Like, that was what was wild. It was like...
Because of that stage in his life where he's taking it in.
This veil between this realm and the next realm was getting thin, and he was taking
in the truth of this word and processing it logically at a level that I can't process
it because this veil for us is still so thin, unless you hit that DMT, right?
We'll talk about that later.
But, right?
And so I'm witnessing it was wild, dude.
And two, like, crazy things happened.
When I'd sit with him, like, every couple hours I'd get up and go check in with his
wife or something, and we had a camera in the room with him, and we could watch what
he was doing.
And when I would walk out of the room, you'd give it a few minutes and you would see him
start to look above him, and he would be reaching like this for stuff above him.
And like, we didn't know what he was doing.
We never even asked him.
I wish I would have asked him, like,
Mr. Don, what are you seeing? Like, what are you reaching for? Well, then, back when I
would come back in the room with him, he would stop doing it. And then, toward the end there,
he had a stroke. He was paralyzed. His whole left side of his body was paralyzed, and so
he was just, you know, he couldn't
sit up or do anything.
And then finally, at the very end, when he passed away, he literally sits up erect in
his, out of his hospital bed, reaches both of his hands straight up like this,
and then lays back down and departs the tent.
Whoa.
So I started researching this. What the crap is going on here?
God, I wish you asked him what he was reaching for.
You watch, there are, I found this hospice nurse on Instagram, I don't remember her name,
but she's like posting all these videos of people doing this exact thing.
And they're reaching for stuff, and she's a hospice nurse.
Did you save it?
Do you have it on your phone?
I don't have it.
I don't remember. She's got a lot of following. She's got a big following.
Jamie will probably find it.
Hospice nurse on Instagram or whatever. She posts all these videos of these people.
Is this her? Oh, they're reaching.
They're like calling out. I don't know if that's not her, but this is another one. That's not the one I watch.
It's a very common thing, and they're calling out a lot of times the names of loved ones
that have passed before them.
They're seeing something!
They're seeing into the other realm.
Oh, it's that lady on the far right over there.
That's the one I watch.
She's a little crazy, but I'm gonna go ahead and tell you she puts out some
wild stuff, man. This is common stuff, man. What's her name? What's her name, Jamie? It
says below. Hospice Nurse Penny.
... weeks before their death. When they're able to tell us what they're seeing, when
they're able to tell us about these visions, they're almost always above them or up in the corner of the room. But sometimes as they get closer to the end of life and they're seeing. When they're able to tell us about these visions, they're almost always above them or up in the corner of the room. But sometimes as they get closer to the end
of life and they're no longer able to communicate, we start seeing them reach into the air. So
I'm convinced that when they are reaching into the air, they're reaching towards those
people who they love, who have died before them.
This woman's not a believer as far as I know.
I don't know what her, you know, how her worldview is in terms of what happens after this, but
she's just sitting here showing you, saying, hey, this happens.
We can't figure out why.
We can't figure out what's going on.
Obviously for me, when I see that happening, when Mr. Don sits up in the bed, even though he's literally paralyzed by a stroke,
he sits, it's an impossibility! He sits up in his bed and reaches both hands in the air and then lays down and departs the tent.
I have to believe that his transportation had arrived.
You know what I mean?
And to witness that, how does that not strengthen your witnessing something that's tangible. It's like, how does that
not strengthen at least your faith that there is something coming after this?
You know what I mean?
There's so many stories. And the thing is, people have this arrogant assumption,
and this is a lot of based on academics and
science and this belief that we have all the answers to reality.
When we don't even really understand consciousness, we don't.
Consciousness is a massive mystery.
So this idea that we've got it solved, and when I hear people say, when you die, that's
it, it's over.
Like, how do you know?
You're just saying this.
You're just saying this.
That is as much of a belief system as any religion.
This belief in something that you have no evidence of whatsoever, but there's so many
anecdotal stories of people with near-death experiences, including Sebastian Junger.
Do you know who he is?
I've heard the name.
Brilliant journalist, great author, has written some incredible books. He did
Restrepo, right? A documentary about the war, and he's just an amazing, interesting,
very, very intelligent guy. And the last time he was on the podcast He was telling us a story about he had a medical emergency some sort of was like a an artery burst, right Jamie
something inside of his his abdomen and he was bleeding out on the inside and he was dying and he
Got to the hospital and had this near-death experience that like very very vivid
experience interacting with his father
like just beyond anything that he would have ever comprehended and came back with a completely different perspective on life and death and like what this is and where that there is something
else there's something out there and people that have had near-death experiences or died and been resuscitated, they come back with the same fucking story over and over and over
and over and over and over and over and over again. There's not a lot of variation. There's
different interpretations of what they're seeing, but it all fits within the same framework.
It all fits within a framework that there's something there.
Did you see the video of this kid like a couple weeks ago? No, it's having a wild experience where he sees Jesus
He sees his dead father. Come on. It's beautiful. What why is this kid?
I think he was sick and he's coming out of surgery. I don't know the exact story on what was happening to him
This video goes on long, it's a 10 minute
video but.
Whoa.
He's in a dream, he's dreaming.
Yeah he's dreaming alright, he's seeing into a different, he's seeing into the next round.
Yeah.
I want this hot chicken.
Yeah, you could dismiss that, you could dismiss that if you wanted to. Yeah. I want this hot chicken. Yeah.
That's crazy.
You could dismiss that.
You could dismiss that if you wanted to.
Yeah, you can, man.
But look, man.
And I don't even need all these signs and wonders.
I don't even need all that, man.
It's great when you get the opportunity to witness things.
I got to witness with my friend Mr. Dawn and just just see his faith and see that the Word manifests power in him like it's
great when you get to see it but you can get too carried away with all that stuff
too you know what I mean it's like I don't know man you know I'm wondering Joe
if the Almighty ain't calling you.
Calling me how? On the phone?
Calling you man.
What do you mean? In what way?
I'm just wondering. I think a lot of people are wondering what the Almighty is doing,
what He's working in you. See, Scripture is dripping with something that's called election.
A lot of people get mad about me talking about this, but this truth that we will never choose God, the Almighty.
We will never choose to believe.
As a matter of fact, Scripture actually says over and over again,
the whole message of the cross is foolishness.
It's foolishness!
I mean, seriously?
Some dude died on a cross?
What does that represent to man?
That represents weakness? That represents weakness.
That represents defeat. That represents death. You're gone. The message of the cross is foolishness
to man. We will never choose to believe in the message of what we call the gospel.
That is, that Jesus Christ died on the cross according to the Scriptures.
He was buried, and that He rose again by His own power according to the Scriptures.
That's foolishness.
And the only way that we can or will ever believe that, like truly place our faith in
that and everything that's contained in that statement right there, because there's a lot
there, you could literally spend the rest of your life meditating on that right there,
the gospel, the what was done on the cross and by way of the resurrection of Christ.
You would never get to the end of it. You would never comprehend everything. You would never search it to its bottom.
You will never believe that. And the only way that you can believe that is if the Almighty in His grace
basically makes you alive spiritually.
Because these things are spiritually discerned.
They're not logically discerned.
They're foolishness to man.
These things must be spiritually appraised. And so, the Almighty, by His grace, makes you alive, literally spiritually alive,
so that then you can discern the truth of not only the Gospel, but everything,
the totality of what is contained in Scripture. It's called the doctrine of election.
And so when I say, I wonder if the Almighty's calling you,
what I mean is I wonder if you are one of the Almighty's elect. Pete Oh boy.
Pete That's a lot.
Jared And if you are, you better hold on to your britches, son.
I oftentimes wonder what's going on and why me.
You must, man.
You must.
It doesn't make sense.
You must.
And that's a personal thing, man, and I hope you don't take that as any disrespect.
No, I don't. as any disrespect. It's just, for me, seeing... it's odd how much we have in common, seeing
what a special human being you are. Like, it's exciting for me to be able to hope that
the Almighty is indeed calling you. Like, that's exciting, dude! Like, literally,
I prayed for you last night! Like, I literally, on your behalf, I beg the Almighty to basically
make you alive spiritually so that you could have discernment and be able to
appraise these things that are in Scripture that have seemed like foolishness for so long
to you.
You know what?
They seem like foolishness to me for a long, long time, dude.
What changed?
We're talking about a bunch of wild stuff, man.
Can I take you back while we're in the middle of this?
I'd like to take you back to how you got on this journey of being a podcaster and then
to that.
Because I want to know, what is the transition from the seals to becoming this guy who's
very outspoken on YouTube and starts putting these videos out and things get interesting,
and then you very, very religious
and spreading that in your YouTube as well.
How did this whole journey get started for you?
Well I decided I wanted to become a SEAL because I wasn't really good at anything else in life
and I didn't want to go back to school and all that stuff.
That's a long story but I decided I wanted to do that.
I finally, I went to join the Navy.
They disqualified me, sent me back home after boot camp, wouldn't let me go to Bud's, told
me I never would be able to become a SEAL because I had a pericardial cyst on my heart,
seven centimeter cyst on my heart.
You can look it up, research Navy SEAL pericardial cyst.
You can read the whole medical journal.
I'm the only one.
Came back home, paid for my own heart surgery as a civilian,
showed back up in the Navy less than a year later,
made it all the way through SEAL training unscathed.
So what they have to do, they have to remove the cyst?
Yeah, they had to cut my chest open
and take a big old cyst off my heart.
How big is the, did they have to open your ribs
the whole deal?
About from here to here.
Also they go through the ribs?
Yeah, they peeled my peck up, peeled it up,
cut me open right there, went in there
and took that cyst off.
How long did it take to recover from that?
Took me about a year.
I was back in the Navy about a year after that surgery.
You know, but if it wouldn't have been for that,
I wouldn't have made it through SEAL training.
Man, I didn't even know how to swim, dude.
I didn't know how to swim.
That's crazy.
I was the most unlikely person to ever make it through SEAL training.
Hands down.
Did you have any background in physical fitness?
No.
Nothing?
Lord, no I didn't, man.
It took me two or three months to pass a mile and a half run.
Wow.
Yeah.
Made it through SEAL training, all this and that, good stuff.
I had a very colorful career.
Started off real good, got real bad.
I mean, I've been through it all.
In SEAL training, at the end of our BUDS prep phase, you know, I was awarded the Hard Charger
Award.
You know, everybody selected me.
The instructor, Cadre, said, you're the one that's going to make it.
I was actually the only one to ever receive that award to make it through that training
pipeline.
Everyone else they had selected up until that point all quit.
But they selected me not based on my physical abilities, but based on the fact that I had had a dang heart
surgery just to have a chance to toe the line, to try something that everybody quits anyways.
So did you train for the SEAL training? Did you give yourself enough time to get physically fit?
After that heart surgery, when I went in the first time, I could barely pass the physical
standards test that I needed to pass to get the SEAL contract. If I would have went straight through
and wouldn't have had that heart surgery, there's no way I would have made it. I wouldn't
have been able to meet the physical standards once I actually got the buds. There's no way.
But when I had that heart surgery, and then I finally got to where I could, you know,
okay, man, at that point, I wanted it so bad, because I had to go through all that.
You see what I'm saying?
I didn't want it that bad until I had to go through all that pain and fear and have my
chest cut open and all this crap.
But man, when I came out the other end of that, like I said, man, I was like a game
rooster, man.
It was like you look into the eye of a game rooster and he's got one burning hot desire
It's to fight. I mean you a man appreciates combat sports. You ought to go watch a cock fight one day
I mean just that's what I had. I just had this burning hot desire
To for this thing
Nothing was going to stop me
Made it all the way through. Man, I had
a lot of ups and downs in my time in the teams. That's a whole, that's a three hour long story,
but basically-
We got plenty of time.
Basically, man, I got to my SEAL team and they had slaughtered our entire team to cover down on Africa and a
couple other European countries and I got so pissed because I'm like there's a
war happening like that's the reason I joined. Like, everybody that joined wants to go and
fight in this war. And here and now, I wind up at this place that's, you know, not going to go
where everybody wants to go. I got so hateful. And through the course of a couple of years, I just got involved in all manner of what
I would call sin.
All manner.
Drunkenness, sleeping around with women, hurting people on purpose, hateful, terrible person.
I didn't love anybody. And the whole downfall of it is I was overseas and we had a range day.
The night before I had went out and just burned it down, son.
I had no business going to the range that day.
I'm going to go ahead and tell you.
But what do you do? You get up and go to the range, right?
I'm sitting over on the range messing with my gun
pretty out of it and
I have a negligent discharge and the guy that's standing beside me as my gunner's mate and
It barely skims him in the side of his leg
And it was pointed down. thank God, pointed down.
That happened, and that was the thing that like, like stopped me in my tracks.
Like holy crap, Chad, if you keep going the way that you're going, you're going to kill
somebody.
You know what I mean?
I mean, I was involved in all manner of sin, buddy. Stop me right there. I had to go through a trident review board,
a disciplinary review board, a captain's mask, the whole nine yards. Luckily, I had a good
enough reputation up to that point that I had guys that vouched for me. Specifically my sea daddy, Jake Hubman. He wrote a whole
long thing. Chad's done well. This and that. They presented that.
The Navy let me stay in, keep my trident. Well, went back home, moved in with some
lesbians. Still continuing on this path or this trajectory of just ugliness, just hatefulness,
you know what I mean?
But I had kind of started hiding it a little more, you know?
While I was at work, I was like, okay, if I'm going to go to work, I'm going to have
to square myself away a little bit.
You know, to tell you how hateful I was, this man Jake Hubman, my sea daddy, he started
struggling with alcoholism shortly after I had that big mistake.
Well, I got back in the platoon and they told us, they said, well, you know, Jake's struggling
with alcoholism, we're sending him off to this rehab program.
They said, just leave him
alone. Well, remember I told you I can forget people exist? I just forgot he existed. A
couple months later he killed himself. That's what kind of friend I was. That's what kind
of person I was. Here's this guy who, that's the kind of person that I still am sometimes today.
There's literally nothing good in me, I'm convinced of that.
Here's this man who had poured so much into me, literally trained me up, taught me the
ways of war, it's on account of his mentorship, probably that I was able to stay alive throughout
the course of my career.
And I just turned my back on him. When he was going through
the hardest time of his life, he killed himself. I don't ever get to make that up. I just ignored
him. That's the kind of thing, does this describe to you the type of person that I was?
Yeah, for sure.
That's pretty bad, ain't it, brother? I mean, that's pretty bad, that's pretty ugly.
Understandably selfish, given the circumstances.
So I get back in the platoon, get ready, deploy again.
I'm keeping my wickedness under control, you know, outwardly, but it's still all there,
man.
Well, we go up to Tunisia, North Africa, and Arabs attack the
embassy up there, when all that Benghazi and that stuff went down. That happened all over North
Africa. So we went up there, re-secured the embassy. We came back, we left there and came back to
Germany to re-jock our equipment, because that mission was over in Tunisia. We came back to Germany to re-jock our equipment, because that mission was over in Tunisia,
came back to Germany to re-jock, and then we were going out to Nigeria. And while we
were in Germany, the only way for me to tell you this in just simple terms is we were staying
in a barracks that was inhabited by some sort of demon.
And that was the genesis of my conversion, of me being made aware that, okay.
So when you say it's inhabited by a demon, like, in what way?
So I was in there with a couple other guys.
I wish I would have wrote all this down.
I was laying in bed one night in this place.
There was nobody else in this building.
It was just me and a couple.
There were me and a guy in one room and two other guys in the room across the hall there.
Okay?
Well I'm laying in bed, and I, and
all of a sudden I'm jolted awake by something that hits my door. And I lay in bed for maybe
30 seconds, and while I'm laying there listening, I can hear some strange voices echoing up
and down the hall of this building that we're in.
And so immediately I get up, open the door, walk out, nobody's out there, walk around,
nobody's in the building, go in my buddy's room, beside me, they're both passed out.
But it scared me, dude.
I was like, what on earth is this?
It scared me. And these things, these things
would like, the oven would be turned on, like these bumps and noises, but more than all of that, there became this oppressive feeling of like evil in this
place.
And the guys that I was with in there, they started getting freaked out about it too.
We called our senior chief who had been staying there before us.
It was just like an old empty place that guys would come and stay in for a few nights before
they left out.
We called our senior chief, like, hey man, did you have any strange experiences in this
place?
He was like, oh yeah.
Yeah, there's something in there.
And so, but like I remember walking into this place and there was a stairwell.
I would walk up the first flight of stairs and then there would be a second flight that cut back and
there was like a landing up there, because we were staying on the second deck.
And like, I would, you know as a hunter, like, how you have that sense when something is
like staring at you?
Like you would, I would feel this thing staring at me up there on that landing,
and I would fully expect to turn around and see some sort of something up there. And I
never saw it in physical form. We started doing this research online about, you know,
looking at these forms and stuff, about this place that we were, you know, in and finding all kinds of other
stuff about it.
I'm like, well, whatever is going on here, I can't sleep at night.
Like I don't want to be in that place, because it's literally scaring me that bad.
And the sanity check was the dudes I was with were getting freaked out, too.
And like, I wish I would have talked to them and written down the things that they were
specifically experiencing.
Do you remember any of it?
So that I would...
It's been so long ago, man.
Like, the experience that I had was so powerful.
Like, that just is the one thing that sticks in my mind.
But I remember the two guys
across the hallway, one of them had to leave. They were going out to a different site, and that dude,
the other dude was left in that room by himself. He moved across the hallway to stay in the room
that me and my guy were with, because he didn't want to stay in that room by himself. And so, I was literally at my wits end with this.
Like I was so, like I couldn't sleep at night.
How long did you stay there for?
This would have probably went on for about a week.
Yeah, this probably would have went on for about a week.
We were there for maybe two weeks.
And so, I called my little brother at my wits end because, again, I just told you the type
of person that I was.
I had no interest in spiritual matters.
I didn't believe in demons or spiritual warfare or God or any of that, right?
But I'm like, here and now I have encountered something that seems very real to me, and it's not in this realm. Here's some sort of entity that
I don't know how to combat. I called my little brother, because I knew my little brother
was a Christian. And I said, well, here's one of these Christians. They'll have a little
bit of, maybe a little bit of insight on this spiritual stuff that
might be going on here.
He said, well man, I ain't ever ran into nothing like that.
He said, I'm going to put you in touch with my pastor of my local church here.
They were real close.
His name's James Cordell.
James called me the next day and I told him what all was going on.
Well, he acted like it was no big deal.
I said, no, buddy, I said, you don't understand.
I said, there's something in here.
I don't know what it is.
He said, ain't no big deal.
He said, put me on speakerphone.
He said, I'm going to walk around.
He said, walk around this building in up and down the hallways.
And he said, I'm going
to pray.
And I put him on speakerphone, I'm walking around this building, up and down the hallways,
in my room.
He's praying against this thing in the name of Jesus Christ.
He says, all right, now, we had a little kitchenette there.
He said, you have some olive oil in there? I said, now, we had a little kitchenette there. He said, you have some olive oil in there?
I said, yeah, we got a bottle.
He said, take just a little dab of that olive oil, and just dab it on the top of your doorframe
there.
So I did it.
Joe, I'm thinking the whole time, this is so stupid.
But what else do I do in this situation?
Let's try this, right?
Let's give this a shot!" And I dabbed that
little olive oil up there, and we get off the phone. We wind, I leave, go to work. We
come back that evening, wind down. Total, like, peace had returned to this place. Like, I no longer heard or felt or was experiencing any sort of fear
or anything. Like, it all was gone. Like, all of a sudden it was just like, oh,
okay, now I'm just in another little barracks room here. Like...
06 Do the other guys feel the same way?
06 So this is what's funny. I didn't Did the other guys feel the same way?
So this is what's funny.
I didn't tell the other guys that I did that.
Because they were all gone when I walked around with this crazy man on speaker phone.
It's embarrassing.
I mean, in a certain sense, it's still embarrassing to tell that story today.
Again, this is foolishness, man.
Like, you're asking me to tell this story on this platform? Like, this, it's hard, you know what I mean?
Because who's going to believe this? Like, but I don't care. I'm just telling you, like, what I remember
that experience as, and it impacted me so much that it changed the trajectory of my entire life. And the next morning we woke up, and my buddy woke up in the room, he said, what's all over
the door?
And I looked up, and that little dab of olive oil had somehow, like, dripped down and covered
the entire door of the room that we were staying in, and you could see it toward
the bottom of the door, like the drips, like the whole door was like shiny. And
he said, what's all over the door? And I said, don't worry about it, man. I don't
know what the crap that is. I was so embarrassed to tell him that I had done
that. But it was just a dab of olive oil.
It was just literally a dab of olive.
I don't even know where that fits into the whole experience.
I don't even know where or how that fits in.
I don't even know what this thing was, or why this thing would have been attached to
a place.
I don't understand that, man.
I don't, and I'm, again, I'm not, like, big on this whole spiritual warfare thing.
But after that happened, all that happened, no more nothing in this place, I said, I have got to get my hands on scripture and figure
out more about this figure, Jesus, who I heard this man praying in the name of, right?
Because obviously there was some power being wielded there by the name of Jesus in prayer. And so I did. I got
my hands on a Bible. I started reading the book of Matthew. I began my, again, the, through
this, this was obviously the experience that the Almighty had chosen to call me out of
darkness into the marvelous light of His truth,
opened the Bible. I had seen the Bible before. I had, you know, heard it read. I had even read
it before in the past, but it was never anything that meant anything. I couldn't understand it,
you know what I mean? Like, what the crap is this trying to say to me here? I began to read in the
book of Matthew, and I began to, well, for the first time in my life, I realized how
all of that applied to me as the hopeless, wicked, ugly, depraved human being that I, like, my mind was awakened to my own state.
I didn't realize how ugly and depraved I was.
Like when I let my, when I passed up on my friend and he killed himself, like I didn't
think nothing of that. I just had this revelation of who I was and why I so needed something to save me from
that. And when I had that revelation, literally by the grace of God opening my, making me
spiritually alive, able to discern the Scriptures, when I had that revelation, I read about Jesus,
His life, His death, why He died according to the Scriptures, his resurrection, what that means for me.
I...
It changed everything. Like literally, I was made a new creature
overnight. It's the greatest miracle
that God the Almighty could ever work is taking somebody like me
who was literally so useless, making me alive, making me a brand new creature, waking up day and being completely changed in how I see the world, how I see myself, how I see
the words on these pages, how I see the creator of in life produced that amount of change nearly
instantaneously.
And I'll never forget walking down into the Little Platoon hut, like, the next day after
having this revelation of the gospel and what it means for me and who I am.
And like, dude, I didn't...
It's crazy, man.
It literally changed my desires.
Like that's the miracle, right?
Like how do you change your desire?
How do you internally change your desires? Like, I didn't, I had no appetite
for pornography anymore. I had no appetite for the foul language that I used. Like, I
had no appetite for gossip. Like, I...
Overnight. Literally overnight. Like, my literal desires were changed.
And that was the, ultimately, more so than the whole thing that was going on in the barracks,
and the guy saying the prayer, and this thing leaving. Like that experience of being made a new creature, and the realization of what on earth just
has happened to me, that was the thing.
And is the thing that I cling to so tightly.
Like nothing else could have produced that type of change in me,
but the grace of God and the revelation that He's given me of who I am and who He is. As you go, this has been from then to now just a long and arduous, sometimes joyful,
but process of sanctification, essentially.
One of the things that I pray most often is for the Holy Spirit to conform me into the
likeness and image of Jesus Christ at all cost.
At all cost.
Well first time I prayed that, that was hard to pray, man.
You read about Jesus in Isaiah 53.
What does it say about him? He was a man of sorrow, well acquainted with
grief.
Come for me into the image of Christ. And that process of sanctification is ongoing.
My understanding of the Scriptures is ongoing and progressive, even still to this day and hopefully to the very day that I depart this tent.
It's everything to me, man. Like it's, it's, no, no, no, no, it's literally everything to me.
Some people say, well, Chad doesn't, sometimes don't you have moments of doubt? Well, yeah, I'd be a liar.
Think about what I believe. Yeah. Sometimes don't you have moments of doubt? Yeah,
I have moments of doubt sometimes. Yeah, for sure, man. But what I realize is that
Yeah, for sure, man. But what I realize is that if I could possibly depart from this faith that I have in the
Almighty, if I could possibly even depart from that faith, what would I have?
I would have nothing.
Like what's the point?
This is the fascinating aspect of this that an atheist needs to take into consideration.
What you're talking about had a real result.
This belief in faith has had a real transformative result on you as a human being.
Now if there was nothing to this, if this is all nonsense, and there was a method that
you could use, just some sort of a way of viewing the world that would instantaneously
change the way you see yourself and see everything.
Wouldn't that method be explored? And wouldn't that be taught? If this is the thing that
brought you to who you are now, that's a real thing. Regardless of whether or not anybody
wants to believe in Jesus Christ or believe in the
resurrection or believe in the Gospels, it works. Like, that's the thing about Christians, like,
real Christians, and I've been very fortunate to meet a bunch of them. I had a weird journey
in religion myself because I went to Catholic school when I was in first grade and it kind of ruined me. They were horrible.
This nun, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember anybody from when I was six
years old but I remember that bitch. She was so fucking mean man and just the
experience the way they treated children, it was so fear-based and I was like this is not God. God has nothing to do with this. This is people.
This is people. And it kind of
set a tone for my life, you know, where I dismissed any
any notions that there was some sort of truth in these religions. But the more I've explored, not just Christianity,
but many different religions, people are trying to document a truth. And it's very hard to decipher
through the tongue of man. It's very hard to decipher. When human beings write things down,
and human being give statements on things, you have
to always take into consideration human nature.
Human beings are not that accurate in how they depict things.
And then you have the problem with translations.
You have the problem with it going from ancient Hebrew to Latin and Greek and all these different
languages and then you have the problem with spiritual narcissism. So you have the people that are the conveyors of the message who take on these powers themselves
that are above normal men and control people.
Before Martin Luther came around and made a phonetic version of the Bible, there's very
few people could read, and very few people could read Latin.
They didn't know what it said.
So you had to rely on the priest to tell you everything.
When people started being able to translate these things
into different languages, it's wonderful,
but also something's probably missing.
My friend Rick Strassman, he's a scholar,
he's the guy who wrote that book,
the DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
He did these
slow drip studies, these FDA approved studies on DMT with people, with patients.
I'm very interested in that.
He's a fascinating guy. Well, he learned ancient Hebrew just so that he could read the Bible
in its native tongue. And it took him 16 years to do that. I believe it. Yeah, he's a fast endeavor. Yeah fascinating guy
I think they were trying they were writing something down one of things I learned from Wes Huff Wesley Huff
Who's a biblical scholar who's been on the podcast?
He told me that the the book of Isaiah when they find it, they found a version of it in the
Dead Sea Scrolls that is identical word to word for a version of it that they found a
thousand years later.
That's pretty miraculous.
A thousand years!
Not only that, but what about the content of Isaiah? What about Isaiah 53 as it describes the suffering
servant, how it literally outlines the life and death of Jesus Christ, and it was written,
what, 400 years before the crucifixion? Like, even the content of Isaiah, not only the accuracy
of the translation and the accuracy over that span of time when you compare copies, but
even the content of it, how did this prophet write this thing about this person and it
was fulfilled perfectly, literally to a T, by the person of Jesus Christ hundreds of years
later.
Oh, it's crazy.
So, and by the way, man, like, I'm not telling you or anyone listening to this, this, what
we call testimony, like, what the Lord's given me experientially in life to share with other
people. I'm not telling you life to share with other people.
I'm not telling you this to convince you of anything.
Like, there's nothing that I can say to convince you in the truth of the gospel.
Like, I truly believe that.
There's no words that I can use.
There's no logic that I can use, there's no logic that I can apply, there's nothing that I or anyone
else can say to convince you of this.
And it goes back to what we started off in the conversation with of these things must
be spiritually discerned, and it is by grace, God's grace, that we are made alive and able
to discern the truth of these things.
That's a hard thing to accept, man.
Like, that man is totally depraved, and I can't say anything
to convince anyone of the truth of these scriptures.
But the scriptures are dripping,
literally dripping with that very fact.
That's the interesting thing about the scriptures.
They leave nothing for man.
It's almost the single thing that separates what's contained in the Holy Scriptures from
other religious philosophy.
It literally leaves nothing for man.
What do you mean by that?
Meaning, there is nothing that you can do to be made righteous in the eyes of the Creator.
There is nothing that you can do to save yourself. As a matter of fact, without the grace and the help of the Almighty, you
can't even believe the truth. You won't do it. You are spiritually dead prior to regeneration.
You see what I'm saying? When you're dead,
if we had a dead man land on the floor right here,
and I said,
dead man,
hearkening to my voice,
there is a hospital
a mile down the road,
and if you'll get up
and walk to that hospital, or you'll allow me to take
you to that hospital, they'll shock you and bring you back to life. Is he going to respond to that
message? He's going to lay there dead, right? We're dead, spiritually, until we are made alive
dead spiritually until we are made alive by the grace of the Almighty. It leaves nothing for man.
Not a thread.
It leaves me not a single thread that I can cling to.
And then you look at the whole saga of Scripture.
Well, what's this all about anyways? And then you look at the whole saga of Scripture.
Well, what's this all about anyways? Let's take it all the way back to Genesis,
all the way through Revelation and everything in between.
The whole saga is to glorify the Son, Jesus Christ.
What's the purpose in me even being saved. It's so that I can be presented to Christ as His bride.
What do you mean by that?
We, God's people, the whole purpose of our existence is for us to be presented to Jesus
The whole purpose of our existence is for us to be presented to Jesus Christ as His own people, who will glorify Him for all of eternity.
It's to glor of the Father.
It can be changed. The whole saga, the only purpose of it all is to present this...
I can't say this word real well... peculiar people to the Son as a bride, an offering to glorify the Son for
all of eternity. The whole saga is to lift up and glorify Jesus Christ. It's the only
purpose for me even being saved. And you're convinced of this?
Well, I think that I'm not convinced of this because that's what I want to believe.
Like I'm convinced of this because I'm convinced of the truth of the Holy Scriptures.
And again, when you look at the thing from a 30,000-foot view, I'm convinced of that.
Because why would I want to believe that?
Why would I want to... if I wrote this story, would it not give me something to cling to?
Would it not... if I wrote the story, would it not give me some other purpose than just
being offered up as a bride to the glorification of the Son, Jesus Christ? Like, if I wrote that story, wouldn't I write it differently than that?
Because I'm man, right? I would leave myself something to cling to. Surely this salvation
means something more than just that I am part of this special people now being offered up as a bride to Christ.
Surely, there's something that I can do in this life, a choice that I can make to believe in this.
Like, surely I have the power to make that choice.
But if I had the power to make the choice to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ,
in and of myself, then that salvation would be coming from me.
You see what I'm saying?
When you realize you don't even have the power of choice in you, you are dead.
You will not choose it. When you realize you don't even have
the power of choice. So you believe it has to be that this wisdom has to enter
you somehow? You are entered by what scripture calls the Holy Spirit, which is
the Spirit of God who comes and dwells in you.
And that is the entity that makes you spiritually alive and gives you the ability to appraise
the Scriptures,
essentially spiritual things, because before that it's foolishness.
Have you ever paid any attention to the Shroud of Turin? Have you ever looked into it at all?
I've just seen it pop up, you know, as I scroll through. Well, they used to dismiss
it because they used to say they did a carbon date on it and it was only 500
years old, but they've since made some revisions to that and there's a lot of
people that believe because of the wear of the cloth, the age of the cloth, and I think they've
done subsequent tests that place it around 2,000 years old, which is really fascinating.
The other thing that's fascinating is they didn't even know what the image completely
was until someone took photographs of it and then looked at the negatives.
And in the negatives, then you get this image of Jesus, not just Jesus,
but with the scars and the markings on his back, the part of his body where he's pierced,
the piercings on the wrists. And they really do believe that this thing is 2,000 years old.
And the other thing that's strange is they have no explanation as to how that image was created
They think that image was created somehow from some sort of a burst of energy. It's not stained. It's not died and
It's it's not something that's easily reproduced
Especially if you think about the timeline if this is supposedly a forgery
like how would they make an image that would only show up in a negative?
And what would be the motivation to fake this in this manner?
See if you can get some photos of what it looks like, Jamie.
You know what I love about what you're saying, Joe?
It's so amazing how the Almighty works in each of us differently.
Like look at this. This is, this image, if you
see the original, see the originals to the left, like they didn't, you know, they
saw that and they're like, huh, what is this? But once you look at it with the
the negative, show the negative again, the black and white, once you see the
negative of it, see, make that larger, then it starts getting very strange.
Because you look at the piercings on the wrist and there's these blood stains in these areas,
it's very strange. And it's a very large piece of cloth. I think it wrapped his entire body and so it was like seven feet long and then they folded it
so it's his back and his front so he was inside of this thing and
This is the image I think it was debunked recently was it debunked again. I think so what they say now
I remember seeing something about it
They found some sort of processes that have been around for a few hundred years that do some sort of this like negative transfer.
But did they know that 2,000 years ago?
Oh, that's right. I think the carbon dating has been readjusted to.
Oh, really? What are they saying now?
I mean, I typed in debunked and I was looking through a few articles.
See, there's people that believe and there's people that don't believe and it gets weird.
It gets weird because there's a lot of people that want to debunk things. A new research shows that the carbon dating of the shroud is fake.
Findings that it was the carbon dating that was fake, not the shroud. This is a central
conclusion.
There's a few articles about it being fake, but again, I don't know if they're 100% like
this is fake or if they're just haters, you know.
Right.
You know what's interesting to me about the body of Christ?
The physical body, like is being transposed onto that shroud, whether it's real or not.
Have you ever thought about this?
If you think about going back to talking about death and why do we have to die, why is it
a necessity for all humans? Well, the Scripture
tells us that for human, the reason that we must die is because of sin, right? That started
with the very first sin of man and woman in the very beginning, right? Because Scripture tells us that man was
created to exist eternally in the beginning, the human physical form. But
when man sinned, a lot of things happened. Death, that's the moment,
scripturally, that's when death entered the equation.
So this sin is a big problem.
Like that is the genesis of death entering the equation and becoming a reality for all
men.
I wonder a lot what happened when that sin caused death in man. It's almost like it changed man's
genetic makeup. It's almost like man was created in the beginning to exist in a physical body
eternally, meaning he had perfect genetics, right? He could exist, nothing decayed, he could continue on for all eternity.
He also had the ability to be in the presence of the Almighty.
In some way, the human, and we began to age.
And it even, when I think about it along those lines, it's totally theoretical, by the way. That's how we inherit our sinful nature is because the result of sin actually changed the genetic makeup of man's physical body.
And therefore by necessity he now has to die because he ages.
And also we lost our ability to perceive the Almighty and to actually converse with Him.
We lost something in our brain.
That's why I wonder about that DMT stuff.
We lost something in our brain that originally allowed us to see into this other realm and
converse with this Almighty Being.
We lost the ability to do
that because of sin.
Which brings me to the body of Christ.
The interesting thing about the body, physical body of Jesus Christ, He was the only man,
according to Scripture, who ever fulfilled the law of God completely and perfectly, which means his physical body, his literal physical body,
was not affected by sin, which is the thing that is causing all of us to die by necessity.
And I just wonder if that physical body, if the body of Christ, if Christ would have grown to maturity,
which He did, which was about when He started His ministry, was full adult maturity, I wonder
if He would not have been crucified if He could have lived in that physical body forever.
If the aging process would have stopped and he would have never had to die because
the effects of sin were not upon him, the curse was not upon him. And it makes me think
about that body because they took his body off the cross, laid it in the tomb. When we
die our bodies begin to go through decay very quickly.
You've seen that, killing animals. You kill something within a few hours.
It starts to get kind of blowed up, stiff as a board.
After about a day, it stinks, all nasty.
He died. They put him in that tomb.
He was there for three days. That body didn't decay.
The Spirit then re-entered that same body.
And that body, that same body, rose up and eventually ascended into heaven.
He took that body with Him into this other realm.
It just makes me wonder, like, what the human body was like in the beginning when we were
created perfectly with this mental ability to interact with this other realm, converse
with the Almighty.
The absence of sin, In other words, our
genetics were perfect, the human body was perfect, it would not die.
So this is if you're taking the Old Testament absolutely and literally. And if
that, if you do that, how do you, what do you think about evolution?
Um, that's a great, that's a great... What do you think about... I've's a great, that's a great...
What do you think about?
I've been thinking about evolution a little bit here lately.
The various forms of humans that have been detected, including recently, Denisovans,
what was that one?
Juliennes?
What's that one?
The giant, huge-headed people.
They don't even know how big they were.
They think they were quite a bit larger than us. They found multiple types of humans. Obviously
Neanderthals, but... Well, if you can't tell by now, I like to think about things.
Oh, I do too. It's fun. It's fun, you know what I mean? Like, the whole thing I just
talked about was like totally theoretical. Like, I can't prove any of that, but when I think about evolution, one of the
first things that's striking to me is how on earth, well first of all, consciousness
is a big problem. You mentioned that earlier. But how on earth did we, as the beings that we are, or we could take any being on Earth and use it as an example,
how do we go through, how many millions, or do some say billions?
Of life?
Of years?
Of evolution?
Not for humans, but for life, yeah.
What is life, how long ago did life first appear on Earth? I think single celled organisms, it's like
three billion years. Now what I'm about to do here is I'm about to apply some
country boy logic here, Joe.
Here it goes. What does it say? 3.5 billion years ago. 3.5 billion years
from life to
what we are as beings now. Now look, are you ready for this country boy logic, son?
I'd love to hear it.
How on earth did we go through 3.5 billion years of evolution
and being shaped by our environment?
Uh-huh.
And here we are after 3.5 billion years, and we can't stay around for
more than about 75 years, and everything around us can kill us?
Like, if I think about, now again, country boy logic here, if I think a 3.5 billion year long process of an organism being shaped by
its environment, I would like to hope it would produce something a little better than what
we are today.
What it's produced is pretty fucking extraordinary in comparison to all the other animals.
Inhuman.
Inhuman.
Yeah, inhumans.
Yeah.
Nothing is even close.
And then you have to think of how long humans have been around in this form, at least according
to science.
They believe it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 500,000 years based on the fossil
evidence.
It could go further or back, probably go further back eventually.
They'll probably figure it's like six or seven.
But there's a timeline. There's a timeline when homo sapiens existed and when they didn't exist
before. And then there's a bunch of different forms of human. There's a bunch of different
hominids, a bunch of, you know, there's Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, there's a ton of them. So what we've
been able to achieve in this relatively speaking, when
you think about 3.5 billion, which is a number that you can't really comprehend. You say
it but it's too big. It's too big to really wrap your head around. Think about the behavior
characteristics that you can breed into your dogs in a short period of time. Now, I am, I am, I heartily agree and believe in
adaptation. Yeah. Heartily agree in different forms, drastically different
forms of human. Look at just dogs, just look at dogs. Your dog came from a wolf,
okay? I have two dogs. I have a golden retriever and I have a spaniel, this
little puppy that we just got.
And both of them also descended from wolves.
And it's ridiculous.
They have zero killer instinct other than squirrels, my dog Marshall who kills squirrels,
and turtles.
But he's not a wolf.
He's some sort of a new thing that we've created through selection and breeding and over time
it's a totally different animal just like we are.
We are a totally different animal than Neanderthal, a totally different animal to ancient man.
We're just different.
We're different in some ways.
And especially if you go way back to Australia,ithecine and all these different animals that these different hominids that were very primitive much more ape-like than us
There's a path you could see it
It's like there's a lot of mysteries the big one is the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years
That's a crazy one
One of the things that I always wonder
when you're reading, particularly the really old
text, when it gets into like the Dead Sea Scrolls, when it gets into the Old Testament
and even stuff that's before that, it's like, what were they trying to remember?
Because you've got to remember, before this stuff was even written down, it was an oral
history for about a thousand years.
What was the original story?
And that's where I think the truth is. I think there's truth. I don't think these people
were making up myths and fairy tales. I think that's a silly way to think about it. I think
it's much more likely that some immense events had happened over the course of human history and these people were trying
to document it with whatever limited ability to express themselves that they had at the
time.
There's something there.
It's just the problem I always have with all religions is man, the tongue of man, is human beings and our desire to, we use hyperbole, we exaggerate, we change times,
we write things that make ourselves look better than we should, history is written by the
winners.
It's very difficult to know, like, what was the genesis of it?
What was the original thing that they were trying to write down?
But I think there's truth in the original thing.
Man, you're headed in the right direction, Joe.
When you said the problem you always have is with man, man is indeed the problem, my
friend.
You are headed down the right path, man.
Well, we are the problem, but we are also seeking solutions.
People like you, people like me, people that want problem, but we are also seeking solutions. People like you,
people like me, people that want to be better people, and there's a lot of people out there
that are listening to this, people that want a better world, they want a better society,
and they recognize that there's certain things that you can do both to change your life and
to inspire others. Like, there's a reason for those instincts.
They're not necessarily even self-serving. A lot of them are community-serving. And that's,
in a way, self-serving, because the more healthy your community is, the better you'll feel,
the better your life will be. There's reward systems that are built into our tribal nature.
reward systems that are built into our tribal nature. And there's a lot of good to that. And I think, like I said before, like if you do follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, you
will have a better life. If you believe it, you will, and you live by it, you will have
a better life. But there's that weird jump that you have to make right? There's the weird jump where you have to you have to abandon
this critical thinking and logical mind and
accept that there's an extreme value in living this way and
This it's not it hasn't been around for all these years by accident
and I really do believe that at the origins, and we all wish we could know, we could hear it.
That's the frustrating thing about it. This is all really the Word of God. Like, hey,
come back and give us a refresher course. How about, you know, like, maybe we're not bad,
we just need to know. I tell you what, Joe, I should just let you talk the whole dang podcast, man, because
you are so good at just summing stuff up and getting to the root of questions and things.
And you know, like, you know, you talked about that whole, that transition from just like
living it out to have a better life to all of a sudden
like placing your entire hope in this message of the gospel.
Like, that's that transition that I was talking about that you can't choose.
You know what I mean?
Like, so you're summarizing all of this so well, man. And it's interesting to me too that, you know, the
Almighty has these plans for each of us, his sons and daughters, and he leads us
each along this path to the ultimate revelation that we are searching for. But
every path looks different.
And it's so interesting to me to get to hear you speak this way because he led me along
this path that involved this spiritual warfare.
What was I?
I was a warrior.
Like, I understood warfare.
I understood encountering an enemy.
And that's the story I told you, you know? He kind of led me to this ultimate revelation and to this regeneration along the lines of
that.
I have to believe that and I have to hope that he is leading you along this path specifically,
the way you're experiencing it, because that's how your mind works, man.
Like you're a master.
You are intelligent, you understand things, you want things to be somewhat logical and
orderly, and you know, like the Shroud of Turin thing, or, you know, any of these other artifacts,
or the Dead Sea Scrolls, or something like that.
Like I can do without knowing about all that and be just fine.
But according to the way the Almighty made you, maybe you can't do without all that stuff
and be just fine, because you're different than me.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. And be just fine because you're different than me. You know what I mean? Yeah, so I want you
Man, it sounds so weird cuz I only we just met but like I want you man to be
confident in
The direction that you're going with the questions that you ask and the way that you search
Cuz it's beautiful, man
Well, thank you. Yeah, it's beautiful.
I'm blessed with the time.
I'm blessed with the time to ponder things.
Yeah, that is a very big blessing, man.
It is, because if you're too busy and your life is too overwhelmed with obligations,
and I have a lot of them, but fortunately for me, a lot of my job gives me time.
It gives me time to think.
A lot of what I do.
And a lot of these conversations give me time to think.
And talking to different people with different perspectives, different life experiences,
and what they're trying to figure out.
Because we're all trying to figure out, like, what is the purpose of this?
Like, what am I doing here? And some of the most miserable,
anxiety-ridden people that I know have no belief system. Some of the most miserable,
anxiety-driven people that I know are atheists. And some of the most angry and bitter and
attacking and condescending and atheists. And also Christian. Yeah, well there's a lot of
Christians that way too. Yeah, there's a lot of Muslims that way, there's a lot
of Buddhists that way, there's a lot of people that are full of shit. And that's,
you know, that's with everything. Like, you can get a good plumber, you can
get a terrible plumber, you know, and it's just how human beings vary
considerably. There's a philosopher that Martin Luther quotes in his book, The Bondage of the Will,
and this philosopher says, you can make anything out of anything. And he's talking about Scripture.
You can take the Holy Scriptures and you can make anything out of them that you want to make out of
them. Right, if you want to interpret it in a completely different way.
Yes, sir.
You can make anything out of anything.
And that's where we have these issues.
You know, people love to point out the hypocrisy in the body of Christ.
The visible church.
Christians.
People who proclaim to be Christians, the hypocrisy
of Christians.
And I would agree with you 100%.
There is a lot of hypocrisy, and a lot of what the visible church does is makes what
they want to make out of the scriptures in order to control people.
I mean, that's like huge, man.
Yeah, and there's also the issue of mega pastors.
When you think about a rock star, you think about someone who's selling out an arena,
right?
You think about a preacher, you think about like a Joel Olsteen type character, unfortunately,
because they're more popular than any of the other ones.
And so that becomes, that's a far, it's on the far spectrum, a fringe figure.
You know, Rolls Royces, private jets, expensive suits, all of it's fucked.
None of it makes any sense.
None of it seems remotely Christian, right? To amass billions of dollars
in enormous plots of land and have huge houses and you're flying around in 65 million dollar
planes.
Dude, you're a comedian, you gotta watch this dude named Jesse Duplantis.
Is he a comic?
Oh no, he's like a mega preacher, but dude, you just gotta watch videos of this dude, man.
Put him on.
Is he off the charts?
Oh my gosh, dude.
Well, you know, that's how Kinnison started.
One of the greatest comedians, if not the greatest of all time, Sam Kinnison started
out as a tent preacher.
Well, you know, when people like to point out the hypocrisy of Christians, like, I
get what you're saying, man, like, and how religion is
used to control people. You can make anything out of anything. But here's the thing, here's how I
would respond to you as a Christian. Yes, you are right. I am a hypocrite. I am a liar. I'm a cheater. Now I'm not really a thief per se. I don't steal. I covet people.
The things that they have. The things of this world. I hate. I do all of those things. That's the point. Like, in that realization of who I am, that revelation is the foundation
of my clinging to Christ.
Right. I see what you're saying.
Like, clinging to... do I want to do those things?
No, I don't want to do those things. But there is something in me, there is a remnant in me,
that leads me to do things that I don't want to do, and the things that I want to do,
things that I don't want to do, and the things that I want to do, I don't actually do. Now not 100% of the time.
That's not my desire, but when I actually, when I do those things now, the difference
is my response to them.
So like, I told you how wicked I used to be.
Well, you know, used to be, if I had an argument with my wife,
you know, maybe I was rushing out the door and I was, maybe I yelled at my wife, and I went out and got my
truck and went to work. The rest of the day, I would be justifying my
yelling at my wife. She deserved to be yelled at. Screw her, man. Like, she's in the wrong.
Now when I do those things,
I yell at my wife, I walk out the door. It's the same thing that I did
before, but I do it now and I get in my
car and it crushes me, dude.
I'm like, I can't believe I just did the thing that I know I don't want to do, but I did
it anyways.
It's my response to those things.
The most, I think, accurate way or picture to describe this, remember I told you I woke
up the next day and like my desires
had changed?
Yeah.
The most accurate way I've heard this described is if you had two plates of food, you know,
you had a plate of the finest food, and then you had a bucket of garbage. You turn a pig loose into the room. The pig is going to go and stick his head in
that bucket of garbage and eat that garbage before he eats the food off of
that fine plate. Because he likes the smell of garbage. He's attracted to the
taste and the smell of that garbage. We have pigs at the house. Like, that's what he would do. He would go eat the garbage before he ate the good stuff.
And so,
that pig, he's eating that garbage and there's this good stuff right here next to him.
And he doesn't even, he's not even ashamed that he's eating that garbage because he's a pig.
If you had the power to snap your fingers and to turn that pig into a man, that man
would then lift his head up out of that garbage, and he would look around him and he would
be ashamed that he had been eating that garbage.
And he would depart from that garbage and go to the finer food.
Right?
That's what he would do.
That's the transition that I tried to describe to you earlier, how I was changed overnight.
It was like I no longer desired garbage more than I desired the fine things that the Lord has offered to
me. My desires changed, right? I see what you're saying. But we still go back, like
that there's a remnant of that pig in us, and every now and then we want to go
back and eat that garbage, but we're ashamed. We don't want anybody to see us, and we're ashamed, and it upsets our stomach, and we
respond to it differently.
And that's kind of the change, and tying this all back into, well, why aren't Christians
perfect?
They preach all this stuff.
As a preacher or as a teacher,
the closer you preach the true
literal word of Scripture in terms of standards, the closer you get to that standard that's portrayed by Scripture,
the more of a hypocrite you are going to become, because you can't meet it.
So, what you're saying though, this is what I was getting at, what you're saying is one
of the best examples of the power of being a Christian. What I'm talking about is the general
perception of people on the outside that don't really, maybe don't, maybe hang out mostly in
secular circles, maybe they have a bunch of friends that are atheists, and they see religion as this
big scam. And because the most popular versions of religion for a long
time is televised religion, you know, that's the, when you think about people's exposure
that aren't religious to religion, what do they, they hear about scandals, they hear
about, you know, the, the pedophilia in the Catholic church, they hear about money that's being inappropriately spent.
So the versions that they get are like, oh, this is just bullshit to control people.
And they don't hear enough about genuine transformation stories and why this is valuable and why it's also valuable to
Intelligent people because this has always been this
Is a misconception or at least a narrative that's pushed out that it's for dull-minded people
It's for dull-minded people that can't make sense of the world. It's too much confusion to them
So they need a structure which is totally in alignment with the whole truth that
this cross thing is foolishness. Like, I understand that. Right. Well, the fact that you do makes it
much more palatable for people, too. What you were saying makes more sense to people because, like,
okay, he's addressing these feelings that I have, too. Yeah, I mean, you read in, I think it's 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the Apostle Paul is
writing like, hey, I didn't come to you with these wise words, like, trying to convince
you of anything.
I simply have preached to you this gospel and notice that not many of you who are considered wise
Like were able to believe this because it's it's literally foolishness
Until you're made alive and it was
It's funny. It was by the Almighty's
sovereign immutable will that He chose the cross
as to be the story of redemption for man.
It's funny that He chose the cross, and He man by a message that is seemingly foolish.
It's so backwards.
He chose to destroy man's wisdom.
Our natural man's wisdom, right?
All the great things that man has done and known and discovered. He chose
to destroy all of that by this foolish message of the cross for his own good pleasure. Because
man in his wisdom did not know God when he came here in the body and the person of Jesus Christ, they actually
killed Him.
So He said, I'm going to destroy y'all's natural wisdom with this message of foolishness.
Kind of comedic.
Pete Slauson So, if it really did happen, it's the most
bizarre way to get a message across.
Jared Slauson It's the most bizarre way that you could ever,
like literally even imagine, man.
Now, and imagine you trying to explain to people your experiences with whatever you
encountered in those barracks.
And people hearing that, like, it's the problem with unique experiences that are completely
outside of the norm.
Well, what's more outside of the norm than the resurrection of Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ being actually the Son of God?
Like imagine trying to explain that to people. They'd be like, what are you talking about?
There's this guy's name is Jesus like shut the fuck up. Yeah, what do you want a multi-level marketing scheme?
Like what are you talking about? Man, this guy want money from you? Like what is this guy?
He's got fucking your wife. Like what's going on? No, no, no, no, man
It's not like that like okay, right, right
But if it really is true, you would be stuck
You'd be stuck with this story and you can't leave that part out. No, you're you're commanded to tell the entire story
So you have this conundrum? right? This part is going to sound
crazy, but…
Jared
You summed it up well, Joe. You summed it up well, brother.
Joe It's the most fascinating thing of it, but
I always tell people, look all that, look at it, but also know that if you live that
way, and if you believe that, and if you follow those teachings, you will have a better life. There's something to it. There's a reason why people have been
doing it. There's a reason why true Christians are some of the nicest, most compassionate,
friendliest, charitable people that you'll ever meet. There's something to it. There's
something to it. There's an origin of it all. There's truth in the origin of it all. It's just trying to figure out what it means.
And then the translations, even the translations in English
that you're reading, the way they communicate
is so different than the way we communicate today.
So you have to realize the evolution of human discourse
over thousands of years, the way we phrase things,
the way we describe things, the way we
describe things, the way we talk about things, is all very different. So you have
to get scholars who understand the original way they talked about these
things, and why did they say a phrase this way? What is the
meaning of this? Isn't it so good that we have men that have dedicated, men and women who have dedicated
their entire lives to that job?
You follow that Wesley Huff guy?
Oh yeah, yeah.
He's fantastic.
I do, man. I'm so thankful for men like him. R.C. Spurl is one that I love to read his
stuff. He's passed now. Martin Luther, of course, is another one. But I mean, because you think about me, like, what do I spend a day reading
scripture? Two hours a day, maybe? Sometimes three? Like, I'm never going to become the
expert.
Right.
You know, you spend an hour a day or two hours a day doing anything, you're never going to
become the expert.
No, you'll be proficient.
You'll be proficient. Yeah, you'll be able to kind
of know your way around it, but the stuff that you're talking about knowing, which is stuff worth
knowing, you know, that's the meat that we can consume. Also, when you're talking about the Old
Testament and the New Testament, you put the two of them together, you're dealing with thousands of
pages. Yeah. Thousands. Thousands of pages of very confusing Scripture, where some of it you're reading
and you have to read it three or four times and you just gotta go, okay, what exactly
is he trying to say here?
Because you have to figure out how it fits with the rest of it.
Yes.
Because you can read it in a way and you're like, this is contradictory. If Scripture is contradictory, it is not from God. It cannot,
by nature of what we know about the nature of the Almighty, what's revealed in Scripture
to us just about His nature, His attributes, right? It's one of my favorite things to study, the attributes of the Almighty, which we cannot even begin
to grasp the fullness of it. But some of his attributes have been revealed to us, and so,
if that is his word, it cannot contradict itself. Because that would go against what we know of
as
Who he is, you know yet? Yeah, but yet sometimes it does
Seemingly yeah seemingly and again, this is probably the interpretation of man
You know, and this is where it gets problematic. I mean, it is ultimately fascinating that you have something like the Book of Isaiah, where they found an
older version that they didn't even know existed, that turns out to be a thousand years older in
its verbatim. Fascinating, right? It is. But before that got written down, they talked about it for a long time, a long time,
and so few people could write things down, and so few people could read.
That's where it gets weird. But I think ultimately behind it all, they're trying to tell a story.
They're trying to tell a fantastic story. And I think ultimately, too, I think something you could add to that, Joe, is if what I'm
saying is correct in terms of what I believe about Scripture, ultimately there has also
to be some divine influence over the preservation of those Scriptures. It's the only way, right? It
would be the only way for the scriptures in their original language to be truly
the Word of the Almighty to man, the complete revelation of the Almighty to man. Like, there has to be some divine influence
for that to happen.
Right, but then you have to take it back to the origins of it, like, what was that? What
was that divine influence? How did it? You know, we like to kind of the...
And here's another thing, man, it all involves faith.
It does involve an aspect of faith, like, you know, because we look at the letters in
the New Testament, who were mostly written by the Apostle Paul. And the only way that we can trust that, okay,
this is the literal message from God to us, but it's coming through a man, like how does that
happen? Well, we have to believe that, again, the Almighty is influencing man through the power of His Spirit in the man to write
the things that the man wrote.
You know, that's like, that's why this belief in the Holy Spirit and of the believer actually
being possessed with the Spirit of God is so essential.
Like, it has to be that way, or else the Apostle Paul's writing his opinions.
Or he's writing based off of his experience. You know, you could take it all the way back.
What did Pilate say to Jesus? What is truth? Well, you know, what is, like, truth? I don't even know that truth can come from man alone, because everything that we
have experienced is so influenced by our upbringing, by our perspective, by our memory, by so many
factors.
That's why I hate seeing these guys, these former
military guys attacking each other, man. About he did this and he did that and he
didn't do this and he did that, didn't do that. I'm like, I mean some guys might
flat-out be, you know, telling us a fib, you know, I get that, right? You know,
that's not good. But man, so many people are recounting experiences that they've had in their life, in their service,
in whatever it may be, and like, all of that is shaped by their unique perspective and
the way that their mind works and, you know, it's like I can't attack a dude for that,
you know what I mean? So if we're saying that the Bible is truly
the perfect revelation of God to man, then we have to understand that the source of
that, all of that, did not come from man in some way. It was wrought by God through man,
if that makes sense.
It does make sense, and that is the
ultimate truth where it all started from. It's just trying to like sift through
the tongue of man to get to whatever that truth is. Yeah. And then this thing
that will ultimately, I mean unless some insane technology comes about, we'll
never know. We'll never be able to go back in time and figure that out.
That's a problem, ain't it?
It's an issue.
You know, I talked to my buddy about that while I was sitting there with him, you know,
as he was passing away. And you know, Scripture describes when you leave your physical body here on earth, you know, your spirit basically goes into the presence of the Almighty immediately.
But in that state, you're unclothed, and you don't want to be unclothed. And like I was
I'm having all these I lost my train of thought there on where we were going with that, but
Yeah, man, I forgot the original question, but it was it pertained to something I had conversation with him.
Well, you were talking with him about
this this sort of
leap of faith that you have to make. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's what I was talking with him about this sort of leap of faith that you have to make.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, that's what I was talking to him about.
I was like, right now, Mr. Don, there is an element of faith in what you believe, and
that's a problem. It's hard to explain that. That's a problem. But when you
leave here, you're no longer going to have to live by faith. Once you get there, you're
going to know you made it. But it goes back to what you were saying, like, we'll never know.
There's always going to be an element of faith in what we believe.
Like there has to be, as it pertains to things of God, there's always going to be a certain
element of faith. That very faith is the gift that the Lord gives to His elect. The ability
to believe. Like, that is the gift, that element of faith. That's the gift that I treasure
more than anything else that I have in my life. But it's still tough. Remember I told you I have doubts sometimes?
Of course. Well, that's where the skeptical person steps in and says, well, this is ridiculous.
It's all based on, you have to believe in faith because logically it doesn't make any sense.
And so this is, the problem with that is that you're making this assumption that the human mind is
flawless and that it can perceive truth regardless
of your learned experiences, regardless of what you know about the world.
You could see truth even if it's a completely unique thing.
You could know that it doesn't exist.
Like there's no way.
There's no way you know.
And if it is a puzzle, what greater puzzle than you have to believe something that defies
logic? If it is a puzzle, what greater puzzle than you have to believe something that defies
logic.
Like if you were gonna, if you're gonna demand faith of someone, you would deliver it in
a way that this, the only way to buy into this is that you have to get past your logic,
you have to abandon it, and you have to believe something
that you've been told is impossible.
But my answer to that is...
You're going to make a good preacher one day, man.
My answer to that is, isn't everything impossible?
This is the problem with that.
The problem is, Terrence McKenna once said that science only demands of you one miracle.
That's the big
bang. If you believe in one miracle, everything else it says
it can explain with materialist science. So if you the the
miracle of the big bang is way crazier to believe than the
resurrection of a human being. That's that seems more logical.
It seems more plausible. People live, people die, maybe people come back to life. I'll buy that more than the entire universe is smaller than the
head of a pen. And through no process that anybody's adequately explained becomes everything.
And maybe as a continual process, it happens over and over and over again.
Well, you like to look into all this stuff. My wife sent me a YouTube video or something the other day.
Apparently they saw something with one of these telescopes or something that they look into the cosmos with
that has completely, like, destroyed all their evidence of their theology behind the Big Bang.
Yes. James Webb Telescope. Yeah, they're finding,
they think that some of what they were interpreting as the initial signals of
the Big Bang are not that. Not only that, but the origin, the birth of
the universe is far older than they think it was, because they're finding
galaxies that are far too large and formed that are
so far away that they would have had to form far quicker than they thought was possible
from the moment of the Big Bang to now.
So this is extended in some people's eyes, the birth of the universe to 22 plus billion
years old instead of 13.7 or whatever it is.
So they think it's possibly even older.
But then there's also questions like the Big Bang itself might not be correct. You
might be just interpreting the signals of this part of the space, part of the
universe, we just can't see yet because we don't have the ability to see further
than what the James Webb telescope can do. So as we develop better and better
tools with each iteration,
you're going to have a much deeper understanding of the vastness of the universe itself, which
may ultimately be infinite. And Roger Penrose thinks that not only was there not just a
big bang, that there's a continual cycle of these things that happen for eternity, that
there's never been a beginning
Go and wrap your mind around that wrap your mind around that wrap him because we always want to think in terms of our own
personal biological limitations
We have a birth and we have a death. Yeah, well, what was the birth of the universe?
Well, why why assume that why because we have this tiny little lifespan of a hundred years
Why assume that? Why? Because we have this tiny little lifespan of a hundred years? ISKRA constraints of time, like in your mind, you know what I mean? Freaking wild, man.
Well then time gets real weird when you get into the Old Testament, like how old was Noah?
Well, yeah.
What does that mean?
They lived a long time, you know, that kind of goes along with my theory of at the fall
of man literally marring man's genetic code and how that has just kind of progressively
gotten worse over time.
It's possible, but it's also possible that their interpretation of time is different
because they didn't understand calendars.
What they considered a year was not what we were talking about.
We're talking about a completely different time.
We have such a limited understanding of just a human civilization. I mean, there's new findings, like constantly, that are completely throwing a monkey wrench
into the timeline of human history.
And you know, some of the biggest ones are happening in Egypt right now, where they're
finding structures under, through tomography to these use of satellites.
They're finding these structures underneath the pyramids that go down two kilometers
deep.
Very controversial stuff, but they've repeated it over and over again.
There's these cylinders and there's coils that seem to be wrapped around these cylinders.
They're hundreds of meters deep and then there's more structures underneath there.
They're like, well, what is this?
Who made this?
Explaining the pyramids themselves is impossible.
They try, they pretend.
People were just smarter than you think.
Okay, maybe, but also crazy
that you've got this fucking thing
that's what, 17 acres in its footprint,
2,300,000 stones.
Some of them cut from a quarry 500 miles away placed hundreds of feet in the ceiling
Some of them are 50 plus tons that they've moved into these positions
Cut perfectly you can't even a razor blade in between of them set the perfect north south east and west and now you find out
There's structures underneath them that might go down two kilometers. We might have a completely fucked up understanding of human history
And it's very likely we do.
Yeah, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation around, I'm sure you have had somebody on
to talk about this period of human history and scripture where it talks about essentially
these angelic beings basically procreating with human women and creating some sort of
hybrid race, men of renown with special knowledge.
It would seem that something like that, when you look at the example and all of the stuff
you just talked about with the pyramids, there was, they were getting special knowledge. There was something weird.
From, from some source. I don't know. Some source. Like you said, we can't understand it, man.
Well, we don't, unfortunately, because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria,
we have a limited understanding of what was going on, but what, what they did
accomplish that's still there today baffles, just baffles
the greatest human minds.
They're like, pfft.
What I love about you is you're not afraid to ask these questions, man.
And what you're doing here on the show, it's like you're not afraid to dig into anything.
Well, I don't think you should be afraid of questions, and no one should be.
But a lot of people's pride, you know, like
keep them from... Yeah, there's that. Kind of asking those questions, I mean. Well,
people take themselves seriously, you know. I don't really take myself very seriously,
luckily. And I also am not married to my ideas. My ideas are just ideas, and
they're not mine. They're just ideas, and I'll entertain those ideas. But if they're
wrong, I'll say, oh, that's wrong. I thought this, this is why I thought that.
This is what it turns out really is.
And I think if you can do that, you'll have a healthier perspective.
Just ask questions.
Don't be afraid to sound foolish because there's probably a reason why you want to ask that
question.
And maybe there's a logical answer that'll make you seem foolish for asking the question,
like, oh, okay, now I get it.
But maybe not.
And there's a lot of assumptions that people cling to.
Boy, we found out a lot about that during COVID.
There's a lot of shit that people just believe wholeheartedly that's 100% not true.
And you'll yell at people about it, and you'll fucking change people's lives, and you'll
treat people like plague rats, and it's 100% incorrect.
And you've based your entire identity on this information that's 100% incorrect.
And then, years later, you're still justifying it because your ego won't allow you to admit
that you were incorrect.
You had made false assumptions, you had gone
down the wrong way of thinking, and here you are, stuck with this undeniable truth that's
right in front of your face. You were fucking wrong. You were wrong, you got played, you
can't trust the government, you can't trust the pharmaceutical drug companies, you can't
trust anybody that's making a profit off of you. There it is right in front of your face.
That's the problem with taking yourself too seriously.
That's the problem with being married to your ideas.
That's the problem with always wanting to be right and always wanting to sound intelligent.
That's so good.
Joe, that's so impactful for me to hear you say that because I have to share this with
you. Of course, I had a
told a few of my close buddies and friends that I was coming on the show today to have a conversation with you and
It's amazing people's response
When you tell them that you're gonna come and sit down
To the mighty Joe Rogan
The most powerful man on the internet. I've heard you called that.
Dude, don't be offended by any of that. This is just what
people say. You know, I had so many people tell me, now Chad, when you go sit down
with Joe, you better just stick to what you know. And I'm like, I'm sitting here like, buddy, I don't know a whole lot.
Like, when you really get down, like what you said, man, like you're not attached to
your ideas, and a lot of times they're not even your ideas. You just think about things
deeply, and you ask these questions, and when you live that
way, you do come to the realization that, man, there's very little that I actually know
when we define the word or the idea of knowing something.
And even Scripture tells us any man that thinks he knows anything hasn't known as he ought
to know.
In other words, as soon as you think you have the answers to most things, you are totally
backwards.
You haven't known.
The ultimate form, I think one of the ultimate forms of knowledge or knowing is realizing
that you really don't know much.
Absolutely.
But it's just funny that you talked about that
and that was some of the advice I received from friends.
But if you only talk about the things you know about.
Stick with what you know, yeah.
Yeah, but the problem with that is like,
you're never gonna get anywhere.
You gotta be able to talk about things you don't know.
I agree, and yeah man, it's people's perspective
of what you've built here and what you do and what
you've accomplished.
I think it's just like so skewed, just based off of some of the conversations I had, you
know what I mean?
Well, it's always going to get weird when anything gets large.
People have their own opinions and their own perceptions of things that are successful.
Why do you keep going at this point?
It's fun.
You enjoy it?
I like it, yeah.
That's good.
Yeah, I like it.
I enjoy it.
It's enriching.
I like talking to people.
I like learning new things, like having interesting conversations, fun conversations.
What was your first kind of big break?
As a podcaster?
As a podcaster?
I mean, just in general, as someone who's public.
I guess the big one was Fear Factor.
You know, that was the one that kind of made me famous.
But what led you there?
I was on a TV show before that called News Radio.
It was a sitcom.
Okay.
I was on that.
Before that, it was a stand-up comic.
And, you know, my trajectory has been very slow, which is good.
It's healthier for you.
You can, you get it better.
Like you can deal with it.
Because the worst thing that ever happens is like a 20 year old kid becomes super famous.
You're just fucked, you're fucked.
You're not gonna be able to handle that.
You're gonna be off the rails.
It's just too weird.
The world is a totally different place.
Everybody knows who you are, where you go.
Everyone around you needs you.
So you have all these talking heads around you
that are kissing your ass.
Your perception of the world's completely distorted
You never had to truly develop your character, you know, you've you've got untold wealth
You know in your teens like you can't handle that nobody can handle that no child stars ever make it out and seem normal
They're all fucked. It's like cement where you you mix it wrong, you know, there's not enough waters not enough sand
Whatever it is. The the formulation is wrong
It's you're never gonna fix it. You know fix it after the fact. It's already formed and
It's a tragedy but to get fame slowly as long as you're always
working on your character and
One of the things that will keep you sane
When you're going through fame in particular is
voluntary adversity
Like particularly working out and that's good brother. I can relate to that. Oh, yeah
I know you're big into ultra running and that kind of voluntary adverse. I took up jujitsu recently, too, right?
But it's fucking tiring huh a guy with the kind of endurance
that you have isn't it amazing how tired you get? It was rough dude. Bad rough. Yeah Jiu-Jitsu
is humiliating. It's humbling. But there's a lot of power in that humbling. It makes
the rest of your life so much easier. It really. That jujitsu was a huge factor in my sanity
and my ability to stay sane through everything.
Is that I'm getting humbled all the time.
I'm exhausted all the time.
Dudes are strangling me all the time.
You know, it was like you just kind of,
like so that kind of conflict was so overwhelming
but yet also positive and helped me so much
with character development, my understanding of myself, and what I was able to accomplish
if I worked hard enough.
It allows you to navigate the weird waters of fame so much easier.
It's a, that's really impactful to hear you say that, Joe, because I think that is, is
and has been my exact same experience, you know, and we've been doing, we've been, I've
been kind of public for the last five years now and it's, it's been kind of slow, but,
but again, it kind of went big there within two years.
The YouTube and stuff blew up to the point that I'm nowhere, obviously, on the level
that you experience in your life, but you can't go out in public without somebody's
going to stop you.
Well, you're at the level where I know who you are.
In all these comments and all this stuff, you know what I mean?
But continuously choosing to do these challenges that... I don't even know if I'm going to be
able to do it.
The Yukon race, the Yukon 1000, we didn't finish that.
We went 435 miles and David started having circulation issues in his lower body because
he's paralyzed.
Blood doesn't flow very well.
And like, his leg is usually the size just of his femur, you know, or his bones.
And by the third day, his legs were the same size as my legs.
And he started to develop these pressure sores on his butt, which is very, very dangerous for people who are paralyzed,
just from sitting in that kayak for 18 hours a day.
But like, we didn't complete that.
But we were out there, like truly in the, in truly in wilderness, like
struggling
against not only the miles, but just the environment. Like, I love to hear all these hippie people talk about Mother Earth.
It's like, Mother Earth will freaking kill you, son.
You talk about Mother Earth around me, that tells me one thing, you ain't spent much time in nature.
Yeah, exactly.
But man, we're out there just like struggling through this, and it became something that
for my teammate, he physically wasn't in a place that he could safely continue.
But like, that so refreshed me, dude. Being out there, the experience, the struggle,
it's brutal, man. Like 120, 130 mile days, 18 hour days in this kayak, you're getting
three hours of sleep, having to cook all your food, it's all self-contained. But like I come out the other end of that,
man, I'm just like so dialed in, dude. Without those experiences, I agree with you 100%,
man.
I think all men need voluntary adversity. I think that's one of the reasons why people
are so filled with anxiety and depression. And I think you need to challenge yourself all the time, and I think it needs to be physical. I think
it's not just a mental thing. I think people need physical challenge. I think
it's a very important part for maintaining sanity. It is for me, for sure.
I have to have something, you know, on the micro level daily, on the micro level I
have to have maybe two things, big things a year that I
look at and I'm like, I don't know if I can actually finish that or not.
You know what I mean?
And then it forces me to train, to learn, to prepare, to plan.
That's when you get, if we want to move toward mental toughness and how this kind of
preps you and keeps you going through life, like that's where all the mental toughness is really built, is through the training process.
Like on race day,
you shouldn't be getting any more mentally tough on race day, you know what I mean?
Yeah, you waited too long. Yeah, but your brain is just a muscle like any other muscle in my in my experience
Yeah, it's if you if you stop exercising it and people want to act
like there are
People out there maybe like me or like David Goggins or these people that have become so mentally tough
Like David Goggins or these people that have become so mentally tough that we're just good. We should be able to show up anywhere, anytime, and perform and just crush everyone.
That's not how it works.
Every one of us, we have to prepare and train and train day in and day out and go through
the process in order to perform.
That's a never-ending thing.
But people want to believe that you can just become mentally tough and then possess that
and perform for the rest of your life.
They want to believe that because they don't want to do the work that's required to actually
perform at a high, high level. Right.
You know, it's almost like an out that people want to take or believe in.
Well, listen, man, I'm glad you're out there.
I appreciate you very much.
I appreciate you coming in and doing the show, and Three of Seven Project's on YouTube.
Do you want anything else?
Just ThreeOfSevenProject.com.
If you want to come train with us, that's what, I mean, that's my passion in life is
not only my faith, but teaching.
And everything that we do is, we have training exercises, you know, once a month or something.
And I'm out there with you, suffering with you.
Beautiful.
And go check it out if you want to come hang out.
And Joe, man, I can't thank you enough for your generosity.
My pleasure. There's many times during that conversation that you could have come hang out. And Joe, man, I can't thank you enough for your generosity. My pleasure.
There's many times during that conversation that you could have made me look like a fool,
I'm sure.
No, no, no.
You had a lot of grace for me, brother.
I enjoyed it very much.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Bye, everybody. Bye!
