Andy Stumpf, a former SEAL and crisis responder, critiques media sensationalism in war narratives—like Jessica Lynch’s rescue—and pandemic mismanagement, citing $400 financial limits for many Americans amid contradictory COVID-19 guidelines. He contrasts military discipline (e.g., BUDS’ "we over me" ethos) with Hollywood distortions, warning against complacency in high-stress situations while advocating small, daily goals for resilience. Rogan questions government overreach and misinformation, like the canceled Brooklyn event and "Kung Flu," while both hope the crisis strengthens community care. Stumpf’s focus on controllable risks—like obesity—clashes with Rogan’s concerns over supply chains and compounding disasters, underscoring how crises expose societal priorities and preparedness gaps. [Automatically generated summary]
My concern is that these decisions are being done by politicians and that they want to do this so that they can be elected come re-election.
They don't want people to be upset at them for not acting.
And so they're making these decisions.
And they're not showing us exactly how they're going to get out of this.
Like, when you're shutting down Los Angeles for a month, just the staggering amount of people that are going to be in debt, and there's some number that we looked it up recently of the amount of people that live check to check.
It's a wild time because of that, because there's no clear information and because you're seeing some people look really healthy and then you're seeing the stories that come out of Italy.
One thing to take into consideration with Italy is Italy has one of the oldest populations.
They have a lot of old people And a shit ton of smokers.
Those two factors are huge here because this is a respiratory disease.
Which I would imagine is going to be, as those generations move on, you're going to have higher risk people living with people who are lower risk but might be transmitting it.
He's immune compromised for sure because of coming off of the testicular cancer and then on top of that with asthma and bronchitis and then he gets a respiratory disease.
Those are the people that really have to worry and I really wish there was a clear way to help them other than shutting down everything for a month.
I was talking to Evan Hafer this morning, called out of the blue, and we were having kind of a conversation about this.
And he brought something up that just about the narrative.
And to me, what's happening right now is it's interesting from a couple of perspectives.
For one, I've traveled the world enough and seen people living in a variety of different living conditions that right now, in my opinion at least...
People are getting a glimpse into what it is like to live in the non-first world.
Maybe you don't even have a grocery store, but if you go there, you can't get everything that you want.
You can't travel when you always want to.
You don't have the freedom of movement that you want.
A lot of people live their life, take the virus out of the equation.
A lot of people live their life day to day in situations just like this or much worse.
So I think it should be eye-opening, hopefully, for people that There's a thin margin between, you know, the excess and luxury that we have in the first world and how fast that can be removed and we can start stepping down that staircase.
And it shows to me, you know, I try to view the videos that you see online of people fist fighting for toilet paper.
I think those are the anomaly and I try not to let the anomaly paint the norm.
I don't think most people are doing that, but there are people that are doing that.
And there are people who are going in And they're hoarding and buying.
I don't think – like toilet paper is a good example.
I can give you 15 different ways to wipe your ass without toilet paper.
Like you're going to be OK. Like do you have a garden hose?
drunk, a couple of the layers of their protective, like this is who I want to portray myself, it starts to strip away.
And what I see are people who are super concerned about me and far less concerned about we.
And the conversation I was having with Evan was, you know, it'd be great if we were talking about, you know, the people who are going to get crushed, and I'm not an economic expert by any stretch, but are the ones you already talked about, are living paycheck to paycheck.
How about the elderly who are in the high-risk category that are on Social Security fixed income?
And they can't even go out right now because they don't feel comfortable getting groceries.
People are going to get destroyed.
And I would love to have a conversation about a social construct or relationship that we have where we start talking about what are we going to do to get food and aid to these people?
What are we going to do to come together and help everybody out instead of assholes and Target hoarding toilet paper?
Yeah.
And to me, a lot of that is driven by fear and a lot of it is driven by panic.
And believe me, I'm not an expert at all, probably on anything in my life.
But one thing that I have some experience in is surviving and thriving in high-risk situations that are high stress, which is kind of what's going on right now.
It's a different type of stress.
And the most dangerous thing you can do is lose control of your emotions or let your emotions take over your decision-making cycle, which is what I see people doing, and it's so dangerous.
And I think we need to start finding ways to back away from that and start talking about the we greater than me.
I don't think there's a toilet paper shortage.
There's a shortage of people with common sense who are buying too much toilet paper, which is freaking other people out.
So they're buying too much stuff, which they don't actually need, which is freaking – you know what I mean?
Well, I think they're hoping that people do buy into a social contract, like maybe we can care about the we over me, but you see people not doing that when they're pressed, and that gets rough.
144 cases, 31 out of 144 to 70 hospitalizations, so 31.3 to 70.3 hospitalizations, 6 to 29 ICU fatalities, 10 So the vast majority of fatalities, you're looking at people between 75 and 84, which is 4.3 to 10.5, and then 85 +, which is 10.4 to 27.3.
So it's really obviously not good for really old people.
It looks like you got a 25% fatality rate at the worst case scenario for hospitalized people that have the case.
But again, for young, healthy people, it's not the big monster that everybody thinks it is.
I mean, there's people running around, terrified, that are young and healthy.
Well, other than the spectrum, too, there's the young people running around terrified and healthy, and then there's the people who are mobbing beaches in Florida on spring break saying...
I think our society is kind of defined by its excess and luxury.
And when you live in that environment, and I'm not saying it negatively at all, but if you live in that environment, if you never leave that environment, if you don't bend yourself before the world bends you a little bit, shit's going to come off the rails when you get pressed.
And that's where the behavior of people scares me far more than the actual virus itself.
I mean, I have no control over if I get the virus and how that plays itself out for me.
I cannot control that.
But I can control my behavior and how I act and try to exude calm when it comes to my kids or my family, my friends, and my social circle.
But yeah, I hope that people on the other side of this, because it's not going to be the end of the world, but I hope on the other side it gives them a greater understanding and appreciation and perspective.
Of what we have, how lucky we are, and then just maybe to think about, you know, the people...
In my experience, spend a lot of time, energy, and effort focusing on things that they cannot control.
And that is definitely one thing that I learned from my old job is that at some point you have to surrender the emotional and mental horsepower on the things that you can't control and only focus on the things that you can, which is specifically yourself.
Like, you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you receive what happens to you.
And being scared, allowing that to make the decision-making process for you is what gets people in substantial trouble.
Like, I'll give you an example from my old job.
Getting shot at is not awesome.
It's actually, it can be quite terrifying.
And the number one rule of a firefight if you get into a gunfight is to win.
But the first thing you need to do is you need to shoot back with overwhelming fire superiority and then you have to maneuver, right?
So you have to pin your enemy in place and then you have to maneuver.
But let's say you get ambushed and you're on the receiving end of that.
And so you take a knee behind a wall and bullets are snapping over your head.
And you don't want to move because you're scared.
And you think, I'm going to die.
So you have fear of death, which is totally real.
And it can paralyze people.
And instead of moving, you sit there and other people maneuver around you.
That fear of death preventing you from doing the things that you had control over, shooting back, maneuvering, coordinating with your team, that fear paralyzes you.
And external circumstances or the enemy that you're fighting will maneuver around you and then they're going to end up killing you.
But the reason you didn't move is you allowed that emotion to take over your decision-making process.
You have to detach the two.
Jocko talks about it a lot.
And it's just reinforced constantly in training and in operations overseas.
People ask me, what should I do?
My biggest thing is just try to remain as objective as possible.
You see people freaking out, that doesn't mean that you need to freak out.
Another way I've had it described to me...
That made a big influence on me in the way I think about things.
If you think about two circles, like an archery target, but there's only two circles.
There's the bowl, the 10 ring, which is super small.
And then, goddammit, Dudley, where are you when I need you?
And the only thing that you should spend your time, energy, and effort working on are the things directly inside of your circle of influence.
And even inside of that one there could be the circle of control.
And what do you have control over at all times?
The things that come out of your mouth.
How you behave.
Whether or not you allow your emotions to override your decision-making process.
The way that you communicate.
Whether or not you decide to work out as opposed to shoving 4,000 excess calories in your face every single day.
If you focus on those things and put your time, energy, and effort in there, you're going to get through stressful situations just fine because you actually have more mental capacity because you're trimming off other things that you can't control.
The thing about things that you can't control, though, is some people, they're thinking that this is one of those things that if you were a paranoid person and you prepped and worried about the future, you would have already stockpiled enough food and toilet paper and ammo and all these different things so that you were ready for this, whereas people that were just concentrating on day-to-day life didn't act, didn't think, and then got caught.
I lived 90 days one time purely on military MREs, which stands for meal ready to eat.
It was the initial invasion of Iraq, and that's all we had.
And so there's a couple versions, but there's a cold weather version.
And when I was in at least, it came in a white bag.
It was for like Alpine cold weather operations.
So it had more calories and it had more tasty things in there.
And we had our hands on those.
But, you know, there's some good ones like beef stew was my favorite.
I think it was meal number eight.
And then there's some terrible ones.
We called it like five fingers of death.
It was hot dogs.
I don't know when or where these fucking things were made, but your bulletproof vest could barely contain it if you were to throw it.
This is like eating a cylinder of titanium.
They were disgusting, and I can't recognize the meat source.
At first, it was like, okay, I could eat the main meal, and then my appetite started going.
So there's crackers that come with it, so I could eat those because they'd come with jelly or peanut butter or jam.
There's actually a full economic system inside of the military trading that shit.
shit like you can stock up on peanut butters and get some strawberry jam oh and there's some pound cakes that are good the lemon poppy seed pound cake is the best i don't care what anybody says and the longer it went the less i could eat and by the end of that i was just eating skittles it was all i could do and then we get this care package right before we left uh baghdad and it was like a palette of girl scout cookies and
And, like, the entire unit, I mean, not everybody did this, but basically we were ineffective for 48 hours because guys' stomachs were so destroyed from eating all of the MREs.
And you'd see guys just take a sleeve of Thin Mints and just...
It's a bunch of hot girls in bikinis that go cave diving, and they find blind sharks that live deep in the caves, and then they get, spoiler alert, some people get fucked up by sharks.
I know of them canceling dives because there was shark activity in the area, but I don't know of a single guy who's actually had an interaction where they got bit.
And you see people do the nuclear submarine out of the water, ripping their mouthpiece out because it's called a caustic cocktail.
There's one-way valves in each of the hoses.
So the loop has to be correct and continuous.
So when you exhale, it needs to go into the scrubber.
And then when you inhale, it needs to come...
Because if there was no one-way valve, you know what I mean?
The oxygen would flow through the system without being able to recharge.
Because if you inhale enough, it'll give you another hit of pure oxygen and it can continue that cycle.
But so the canister will start to fill up and you can hear it too.
Like after every dive, you maintain your own gear.
But you'll dump out the canister and the chemical, it'll turn, at least the stuff that I was using when I was in, it'll turn like a purplish color as the effectiveness is starting to reduce.
You can actually do more than one dye with it because you open the container up and you make sure that the chemicals are okay.
And then you tilt it over and on every dive, water starts coming out of it.
And you can hear it on dives too.
It'll start gurgling a little bit as you're inhaling.
There's always a safety ratio in those training evolutions, so you're going to have a diving supervisor.
While everybody's underwater, you're going to have a pretty robust network of people that are up there for safety.
So the dive has been planned.
You've probably already coordinated with where the nearest chamber is.
You've notified the chamber that you're diving, so if you have a pressure-related issue.
You know where the nearest hospital is.
You have a primary, secondary, and tertiary medical plan.
And I forget what it was, but I think it was one dive soup per maybe four dive pairs.
And you dive with buoys in training.
So there's boats that are up top that not only are they there to help in case an emergency would come up, but boats don't see those little buoys because it's just a little orange buoy traveling along.
And at nighttime, you put You know, chem-like glow sticks on them, which nobody is looking for.
So boats are up there to basically push other boats away.
So you'll get up there and you literally just, you know, you wave your hand and the boat will come over and they're going to get you to a corpsman, which is, you know, the medical personnel on the Navy side of the house, and they're going to start treating you right there.
But the chemical, the caustic cocktails are gnarly.
I mean, guys will just come up projectile vomiting.
It doesn't happen that often, but every dive you dip that thing over and the water starts coming out of it.
I had just finished the selection process for the East Coast Command, and they actually...
There are...
What would be the best way to describe it?
There are multiple squadrons inside of that command.
They all have the same skill set, but you need multiple, so one can be on deployment while another one is training and the other one is resting.
You want to get into a rotation cycle.
So at the end of selection, an X number of people get partitioned off to each one of those.
And it takes time to get up to speed because the selection tactics and the way that you train are good, but you get better as you are working with the guys with more experience, specifically the real-world experience.
And so they pulled us out of selection about a month early and sent us over to augment the car's eye detail.
In Afghanistan.
At the very tail end.
I mean, nothing happened.
We basically, you know, you're a deterrent at that point.
And it's one of the worst missions because you can't...
It's very reactive security detail stuff.
You can't really do anything until somebody else does something, so you're already behind the power curve.
It's my least favorite mission set, I think.
But we came back from that, and then the intel started kicking off for Iraq, and they sent us over to Saudi Arabia, and we were there for...
Probably somewhere between 7 to 10 days.
That's where I watched Bush give the speech.
You know, Saddam Hussein has, I think it was 24 hours to comply or turn himself in, whatever it was.
And we had already taken a look at – we knew before going over there that there were two or three objectives that we were going to look at.
So we had already basically planned missions that we were going to do.
While we were in Virginia Beach, we were planning for stuff in Iraq.
So we continued the planning in Iraq.
Saudi Arabia.
And the first target we hit was the number one chem bio target in Iraq.
So to do that, you have to get all your shit on.
It's called MOP gear, Mission Oriented Protective Posture.
It's like a chemical chem bio suit.
Gas mask.
Which compounds a lot of stuff.
You have all your normal shit on anyway.
Like there's guys carrying quickie saws in a hazmat suit with a gas mask on, breathing through a blower on their back, overworking the blower.
And it's amazing how close to suffocation I've actually come inside of those gas masks.
It's the worst feeling ever.
Like you're sucking so hard for air that the mask is like sticking up against your face.
But I think they had gotten enough gas, and we had to hit the tanker on the way back as well.
So you're just sitting there waiting for three and a half, you know, three and three-quarter hours, and about ten minutes out, you start getting your gas mask and stuff on because you've got to stuff the drape.
And, you know, night vision goggles.
Have you ever looked through a pair of night vision goggles?
Which is why you notice when people are actually using them, they will all constantly have movement in their head because they're increasing their field of view and up and down.
And that's when you can orient them to a good offset to your eye.
Now imagine putting a gas mask in between your eye and the lens of the night vision goggle.
Things that you need to see at night and will get in trouble for if you lose.
It was terrible.
So we come in, number one chem biotarget in Iraq, and we had looked at it from the perspective of like air conditioning specialists and, you know, from architects to what we could encounter on the ground, potential threats, satellite imagery of historical stuff, and we get there.
And by the time I even got on the ground, there was already a firefight going on.
The helicopter that I was in had 27 rounds come through the helicopter.
Not a single person was hurt.
Guys were reaching up to scratch their ass and a round would come through and dismiss everybody.
And by the time I got to the front door of that structure, I was probably as close to being unconscious due to asphyxiation as I often am doing jujitsu, getting choked out.
Like the world is just coming down.
And instantaneously we could tell...
That it was an agricultural school.
Like the intelligence was so horribly and incredibly off when it came to that.
So I just ripped my mask off at some point because I would have rather died from whatever horrendous disease could have been in there than suffocate.
And then we cleared through it and I knocked my night vision goggles off with a sledgehammer.
I had to go back.
It was a shit show.
So we get back from that.
The next morning we wake up and I remember having a cup of coffee with a buddy of mine.
I was like, hey, man, I don't think we're going to get out of this if things keep going like they did last night.
And shortly after that, a few days after that, we got word that Jessica had been captured.
So we forward staged and went up to Nazaria.
And...
The information that we had going into the hospital is that it was a Fedayeen hotbed, like 50 to 500 people was the expected amount of resistance that we could have, and we could fit 27 people in the helicopter.
So that's what we launched with in the back of our head.
And fortunately, we didn't meet any resistance inside of the structure.
And it actually was kind of business as usual.
Looking back, like there was nothing exciting about that target whatsoever.
People in the modern day, if they were to action that target now with the experience that they have, they wouldn't even register on the radar scope.
Or the little amount of resistance that was encountered outside, it just would be another day at the office.
If you're a male or a female, you're not going to have a good go of it, for sure.
And, again, I'm not an exact expert on what happens specifically with her— But from my understanding, she experienced that as well as all the other medical issues.
But when we – she was in bad shape when we pulled her out of the hospital for sure.
But then – so – and I remember there were two people with us that were carrying video cameras.
And there was a little bit of footage that was taken from that like when she was in the hospital bed in the hospital.
And a lot of the rest of it was from the cameras on the helicopters and some – the sensors overhead.
But the narrative from that, not a word was said by anybody that was there executing that objective or from her.
And I think my hypothesis is we were a month into that war.
A lot of that war was based on we need to go rid this country and this dictator of their WMDs.
We hadn't – Found any.
From a PR perspective wise, it wasn't probably going as well as they wanted it to do and they wanted to have a PR victory.
But the stuff that was said, the stuff that made the news, all the stuff that got blown out of proportion, none of that came from the people that were actually there.
I get a little grainy on the details of what happened in between the wreck and when we picked her up because there are conflicting narratives.
There are...
I don't know what the correct word would be.
Stories.
Or there are reports that they attempted to put her into an ambulance and bring her back to U.S. forces.
But at that same time, the Fedayeen were using ambulances as basically military fighting vehicles.
So they said that when they tried to do that, the ambulance was shot at, which makes sense if there was a trend of people using an ambulance as a military vehicle.
That would make sense and they would get turned around.
So they might have tried to bring her back.
You know, that hospital was being used as a fedain staging point because they're, I mean, they're not dumb people.
They understand we're not going to likely bomb hospitals or religious structures.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting for me when I was listening to you talk with Trevor.
People are super fascinated by war and combat, and I wish they wouldn't be because it's not fascinating.
It's actually really simple most often.
You're not out there reinventing the wheel.
You're doing the simplest of tactics that you can because they're almost always effective.
You can build complexity, but you have to have a mastery of the simple first.
It's not a crazy, unique experience.
It doesn't give you any...
Insight or special powers.
I mean it just doesn't make you unique.
It's just a bizarre occupation.
But it's not – to me at least it's not fascinating and I wish other people were less fascinated by it because then they would be less likely to be taken advantage of by people who are snake oil salesmen.
And the shit that people try to pull that when it goes that route and it's enticing in a wartime environment.
The vast majority of the military doesn't see combat.
I think 15% or less actually engages in direct combat.
But you go to a bar and it's like, oh man, there's a lot of combat vets in here.
Like every single person in the military is telling war stories.
And that is to a degree I would say harmless.
Unless you start attaching your identity to that.
And you start leveraging people's fascination.
Oh, look at this person.
Look what he did.
Let's have a relationship with that person.
Let's give this person this.
And then they start – to me, the biggest threat to the veteran community is veterans themselves getting so tied to an occupation – Instead of trying to figure out who they are, they get stuck in the rearview mirror looking at what they used to do.
You know, because it is what you used to do.
It's not who you are.
And people who can't disconnect those two things, I think that they struggle.
And you see guys looking for handouts.
And then, you know, the more that you can create this dossier of who you are, it's amazing.
I mean, it opens doors.
It really does.
My background is 100% a two-sided knife.
It'll open doors, and some of them I'm not qualified to walk through, but they will open it because of what they think or are fascinated by what I used to do.
But still, you understand why that would be compelling to at least try to understand it or process it in your mind for someone who isn't going to experience it.
Like for me, when I talk to you or if I talk to Jocko or anybody that's had a lot of experience I am fascinated.
And I can understand why it would be something that you would want people to not be fascinated by.
But for someone on the outside looking in, I want to know what that's...
Because the only experience that we can sort of absorb is film.
Yeah, I mean, how could you ever make that authentic?
I think Trevor and I were talking about Saving Private Ryan and the storm in the beach at Normandy was probably the only scene ever in a movie that accurately represents what it must have been like at that time.
I actually think we talked about this last time too briefly.
Black Hawk Down gets a little bit right.
You can get an understanding of like...
The confusion, the sense of losing utter and complete control, not knowing what to do next, having limited information, having to make decisions on limited information, having to make decisions where somebody might live and others might die.
You can get snippets of that, but I don't think there's any one film or TV show that captures it really accurately.
The whole famous guy playing someone else thing has got to be so fucking strange.
If you're that person, like Jessica Lynch, if they did the Jessica Lynch story and Scarlett Johansson played Jessica Lynch, she'd probably be like, what in the fuck is going on?
Here's the one example that I always use, and I'm sorry if you've heard this before, but the fucking end of the film, Mark Schultz in the movie has a UFC fight.
And in the real world, he had a UFC fight against Big Daddy Goodrich.
Big Daddy Goodrich is a pioneer of MMA, a famous fighter in the world of fighting.
I mean, he's a legend, right?
And Mark Schultz Mounted him and beat his ass.
I mean, he's just a top of the food chain Olympic gold medalist wrestler.
Just took him down at will.
Just what you would expect.
And never fought again because he had a wrestling contract.
He was coaching, I believe, at Brigham Young.
They didn't want him to do it.
This was back in the early days of the UFC, too.
It was bare knuckle, the whole deal.
But in the movie, he fights a Russian guy.
Like, why do you have him fight a Russian guy when he fought Big Daddy Goodrich?
They made it look like they were doing coke and they insinuated some freaky sexual stuff.
It was like, there's a lot of weirdness in that movie.
Why are you doing this?
But this is just Hollywood, man.
This is just what producers do.
You know, they think they know better and they want to make something exciting and so they fuck with reality to turn it into a based on an historical event or based on a real world story.
But, you know, it allows you, you can take those experiences and do amazing, positive things with them.
And Jocko is an example that I would point to with that.
Not everything that happens in the military applies to the civilian world.
You just can't take a lot of the things that the military does and apply them.
But some of the things you can do are the leadership lessons, which Jaco does.
I mean, he's freaking amazing at it, at taking those lessons and applying them and talking about them in manners that people can adapt them.
But not all the experiences are that way.
We should, I think, because people are fascinated with it Take what can improve society and so we don't have to relearn the lessons because, you know, I can't speak for Jocko, obviously, but the things that he learned and he talked about in his books or continues to talk about, those were taught to all of us instead of the military.
And then somebody taught the person who taught us.
Like those have been passed along.
We need to spread the word a little bit farther and wider.
And that's what I'm saying.
It opens some doors and we're qualified or I'm qualified to go in that door, but in other doors I'm not qualified to go into.
But if they're all open and you have your choice, you can get yourself in trouble.
Jaco is an example that I point to all the time of somebody who is taking those lessons that people are fascinated by and recapsulating them in terms that they can apply in their everyday life.
Yeah, there's certain human beings like him that are their fuel.
Like you can go to him and it will change your state.
Like, you could go to Jocko's Instagram page and watch one of his videos, and it'll enact a physical change in your state, and it'll go, fuck it, I'm going to the gym.
It's people with time or people that are at work and fucking hate their job and they have free time where they can just leave comments and that's one of the reasons why so many of them are toxic.
Technology is something I'm very fascinated by, and I'll go to a technology YouTube page, and I'll watch someone doing a review of, say, a new Linux laptop, and then I'll go into the comments.
There's no negativity!
It's all nerds just talking about different builds and what they do for the kernels and this and that and how they break this down and restore that.
It's different.
For them, this is just an area of expertise and fascination.
But when it comes to social things, though, that's when things get wacky.
When it comes to political things, that's the grossest of the gross.
Anything involved in MAGA, You're not going to learn anything from that.
They would change the verbiage that they used in a face-to-face conversation.
They're emotionally heated.
Again, a lot of it I put back to people letting their emotions drive their behavior and the way they communicate instead of detaching from that and being objective, which is easier to let the emotions do it when you're angry at a keyboard.
It'd be very hard to do face-to-face because there's consequences to your emotional behavior.
There's consequences for sure, but there's also you realize what a cunt you're being if you say something really mean to someone.
Even if you say something mean to a small girl, this 100-pound girl in front of you, and you say something mean, and you see her so that you feel bad, unless you're a sociopath.
But again, so this is sociopaths out there, and this is another thing that I try to tell people often.
The best people that I ever was around in my entire life was in the SEAL community, and my mortal enemies and the worst people I've ever seen on the face of the earth was in the SEAL community as well.
He was the honor man in my BUDS class, which, if I look back, he had passed more evolutions from a statistical perspective than anybody else in the class.
They weren't actually...
Viewing him through the lens of, is this person honorable?
They weren't grading him by his integrity.
But it just goes to show you that no selection process is perfect.
And if you can't separate an individual from an occupation or a uniform or a black belt, right?
If you think that because you have a black belt that you're going to be an awesome person or because somebody is a SEAL that you're going to be a great person, stand the fuck by.
And it's not the norm.
I don't want him as the anomaly to paint the norm, but it's important for people to remember that those people are out there.
And again, they can leverage – from my background, they can leverage the fascination, the curiosity, people wanting to give back.
I mean one of the most common questions that I get from people is – How can I thank people for their service?
I'm like, well, A, just say thank you.
And then my answer to them is B is provide them an opportunity if you feel it's necessary, but don't allow them – don't do anything for them and don't give them any special treatment.
Make them earn it.
Because then you can get a true look at the individual as opposed to perhaps just the shiny object that you were focusing on before.
If you have a job, you're like, hey, I want to provide opportunities for veterans.
No problem.
Provide the opportunities for veterans, but treat them exactly like the person who is in the cubicle next to them, if it's in that environment, obviously.
And if you hold...
The person that was a non-veteran to a certain standard, you better hold the veteran to the same standard.
Don't let them get away with anything because it doesn't help them either.
You know, it helps everybody in the organization if you set the standard and make sure everybody holds it.
It's insidious to an organization to set a standard.
And why is this guy getting special treatment like, dude, he was a SEAL. He gives a fuck.
It's just a job title.
And if that person is sociopathic or they are – there's a bell curve.
There's a top 10 percent and the top and the bottom 10 percent.
If he's in that bottom 10 percent, by holding him to that standard, you're going to get an objective viewpoint of that as opposed to just being blinded by whatever it may be.
So what you're talking about, you know, BUDS is a physical test.
You're actually, I would say, having gone back as an instructor, which I learned much more about the process applying the curriculum as opposed to going through it, because as a student, you're just like, ah, I want this day to be over.
As an instructor, you can kind of, and you also don't really know what you're going to do the next day as a student.
As an instructor, I can look at the entire curriculum in the story arc of where you start on day one and the product you're going to get at the end.
It's a physical test, but we're using the body to test the mind.
We're stressing the body.
We're going to make you tired, hungry, hypothermic.
We're going to get you so exhausted to the point that you're going to hallucinate.
And then we're going to take a look at how you behave.
Do you value we over me?
One of the first things they do in BUDS, you're explaining the concept of a swim buddy.
And you don't get to go anywhere farther than six feet away from another human being for that six-month time period.
That is the opposite of most people's mentality.
And you can test it early on.
You'll yell at them and you'll say, hey, you got 30 seconds to go run out to the ocean and get wet.
And in the first few days, they just take off and they start running because they forgot about their swim buddy.
They're me-centric.
And so you bring them back and you punish them, the individual that made that choice, and then also the swim buddy to reinforce that people – there are consequences to other people from your behaviors.
And after about two weeks, you really can't separate people from their swim buddy.
So it's a lesson and it's at a beginning point where you can instill this philosophy of we is greater than me.
And it's one of the most beautiful things I think from the SEAL community.
If you talk to people, where my experience has been is in talking to people, in their most dire moments where things are getting the worst, they're often more concerned about the people to their left and right than they are about themselves.
My biggest fear probably, I know what it was in the SEAL community, but to this day, is that I am not going to be there when somebody needs me.
That was my biggest fear in the SEAL community that I wasn't going to live up to the standard of the people to the left and right held at me and that they were going to suffer for it.
I was more concerned about letting them down than myself getting hurt or killed.
And that starts with that ethos from SEAL training, but it's not a complicated course.
We're stressing the body to stress the mind.
And if you look at the people who make it through, so when I went back as an instructor, As a student, when you're going through training, if somebody next to you quits, you never see them again.
Like, there's no, hey, dude, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, they're just gone.
And you continue on with your day because you just want to graduate the program.
As an instructor, you can talk to those people and you can ask really important questions.
And my favorite question is, why?
You said this was your lifelong goal.
This is all you've ever wanted to do.
You left a D1 scholarship to come here because you saw for yourself no value in the higher education and you wanted to come to the SEAL community and you quit.
Why?
Time and time and time again, the answer I would get from the students is they got overwhelmed.
So they were doing the opposite of keeping their world small.
Because there's two ways you can look at BUDS. It's 180 days long, I think plus or minus one or two.
Or you could look at it as a sunrise and a sunset 180 times.
So you could look at a pie and go, oh my god, I have to eat this whole thing.
Or you can look at a slice and eat the slice and not worry about the rest of the slices and keep doing that and doing that until the training process is complete.
Hell Week is another good example.
It starts Sunday in the evening and ends Friday in the afternoon and you get about two hours of sleep on Wednesday.
That's it.
It's It's horrendous to go through and it's pretty entertaining as an instructor because you can just totally fuck with the students because they're off their rocker by Tuesday afternoon.
But almost all of the attrition occurs from Sunday night until I'd say Tuesday morning.
And beyond that, you're probably going to make it through because you've invested so much.
But the advice that I was given when I went through was don't look at Hell Week as a five-day pipeline.
Just make it to your next meal.
They have to feed you every six hours.
So if I can stack six hours on six hours on six hours and just focus on getting to the next meal, doesn't matter how much I'm in pain, doesn't matter how cold I am, if I can just get to the next meal, I'll get a reprieve, a mental reset, and I can continue on.
That's That in combination with some, you know, the mental toughness is how you approach and set your goals and then resilience.
And my definition of resilience would be the ability to get bent and come back stronger than you were before.
And the way you do that is by bending yourself as often as possible, which...
You do all the time by running sprints.
You know what I mean?
You're doing that stuff.
You're mentally tough because of that.
And if you can apply that resilience to setting and approaching your goals from digestible perspectives, you can accomplish an insane amount.
I mean, it's a physical test, but we're just testing the mind.
Can the individual ignore the big and focus on the small?
Can you do the step that you need to do and not get overwhelmed, regardless if you're tired, exhausted, hungry, cold?
I mean, that's really all it is.
It's not a complex training program.
There's the ocean.
There's the beach.
There's some telephone poles.
There's some boats.
And then later on, we introduce scuba gear and towards the tail end of it, you know, some demolition and pistol and rifle.
If you win a task like in Hell Week, you'll sit by the— Tasks such as?
A boat crew race is a perfect one.
Jamie can pull up a picture.
It's Bud's Hell Week Boat Crew Race, and there will be students running with boats on their heads.
And people get bald spots from it and we'll do races like, hey, take that boat that's supposed to be in the ocean, and you're going to run with it on your head.
There's a crew of seven people, three people on each side and the leader in the back.
And at the end of four miles, we'll be done with this.
The winning boat crew will get a little break, and the losing boat crews will get remediated.
And then you got to imagine sometimes there's water sloshing around in there.
Sometimes they'll get sand in there.
Because we do let them paddle.
They'll do races where they have to run, go out past the surf zone, flip the boat over for no reason other than it's difficult and it forces them to get wet, right the boat, come back in, continue the race.
Like from a physiological perspective, there's ones that are faster runners and from a contractile potential, like more stamina or cardiorespiratory endurance.
But most of them are the same.
It's like probably like a 3% difference between the students.
But these little pods of seven people...
Some of them can work together and they're just crushing it.
And other ones, you'll see, you know, there's oars in the boat.
So when they run, they're stuffed on the top and you'll see they'll be out paddling and then you'll just see a sword fight start with people just knocking each other's heads off with oars.
It seems like that's one of those things that once you get through, and once you get through BUDS, and once you get through Hell Week, and once you get through all the difficult physical tasks, and you actually become a SEAL, how many people maintain that sort of Goggins, Jocko level of discipline and keep training constantly, and how many people do the bare minimum?
Again, hard to say because I know it has drastically changed since I was in.
The amount of – so I was telling you before, I sat down with Henner Gracie yesterday and we were just talking a lot about his interaction with law enforcement and how they got started and it was with the Rodney King riots.
Actually, I didn't know that but that's when they started interfacing with law enforcement.
He had his dad, the generation before him, they started sitting on a panel, you know, talking about, I think essentially combatives with the, you know, hand on hand type stuff with the LAPD. But that's where it started and it's grown since then.
When I went through...
I don't remember much discussion of martial arts at all.
There was prisoner handling or, you know, detaining people and cuffing them.
The terminating point would be to get their hands behind their back and flex cuff them.
We didn't use metal handcuffs.
We would use tie ties, you know, just because you can put a lot, you can slide them in your gear and just easily cinch on them.
But I think that it has drastically changed since I have been in it.
I think a lot of that, though, is driven by individuals.
I mean, I'm sure you see it.
I mean, I feel so stupid being late to the game, to jiu-jitsu.
And I know that it is definitely...
I don't want to say invading all of those communities, but that might be a good term.
Infecting.
There's a groundswell from guys who are learning on their own.
So it's increasing, but it was not prevalent when I was in.
Unless you were an individual practitioner doing it on your own or had a buddy that would do it with you.
I would have assumed that it would have been a core part of training, like from the beginning, just to build character and to understand what happens if you do lose your gun or if you are in a situation where you don't have a weapon.
Well, there's not a lot of situations in real life that you can point back to from my community where that has happened.
And quite frankly, ego gets into the way.
And you'll hear guys say things like, well, why do I need to...
Bro, I don't need to go hands-on with anybody.
This is all I got right here.
And that's purely just ego.
Right.
What ends up happening is – and I was talking with Henner about this yesterday and I have a much better understanding of it now.
You can elicit actions from people if you don't know what you're doing.
If you do have to go hands-on and you're trying to detain somebody but you're asking about how much I weighed, right?
How much gear I had.
So I usually would float somewhere between 205 to 215 when I was in.
So add 80 to 90 pounds on top of that, and now I'm kneeling on your back.
But I don't understand weight distribution.
I don't understand leverage.
I don't understand the way that the joints move that well.
And you're trying to comply, but I'm applying so much weight to you that it's forcing you towards a fight-or-flight situation.
And you can...
Increase the deadliness of these situations unintentionally and get yourself into a position where you might have to take somebody's life, but they didn't deserve it.
It was actually your fault because you drove them to that point because you were not judiciously applying the pressure that you needed to.
If you're out on the streets and you have verbal commands and then a taser and maybe a pepper spray is in there somewhere, I don't even know if they still use that, but then your next resource is a gun.
And you rapidly go through all those options.
I understand how those situations occur and I'm not trying to justify them in any way whatsoever, but I understand what happens when you reach the limits of your tools and you're left with what you think is a life-threatening situation.
I actually just, the only reason I started is because I wanted him to shut up.
I had known him for like a year and he's like, jiu-jitsu.
And for me, it's like the harder you push that at me, I'm like, I'm not doing it ever.
I don't care.
Oh, you like carrot cake?
I'm never having a piece of carrot cake.
I will not have a piece.
So, we were at my house, drunk, downstairs at the bar, and he was just like, you know, we were standing there drinking, he tried to put me like a standing head and armchair, he's like, this is how I would choke.
He was like, if you start right now, you'll never tap me.
He was a four-stripe white belt at the time, got his blue belt shortly after.
And I think one of the first things that happened was his radio got ripped off.
That's a fucking problem, right?
If you need to call for backup.
But fortunately they have procedures like...
I guess if you check in and then for a certain period of time, like if you don't, people start moving their car in the right direction, start coming to you.
If you don't check in in a longer period of time, you know, the lights and sirens come on.
Obviously, I wasn't there, but it was – he pulled somebody over for a particular reason.
I don't know what it was.
And this is an interesting thing too that I've come to understand better, developing friendships with law enforcement.
They come up to a car and they're just – they're doing a stop and it's another touch point for their day.
But somebody in a car might be in the back of their mind thinking, oh my god, I have a misdemeanor or a felony.
I might be going to prison for the rest of my life.
So two very different head spaces as they converge.
In this instance, I believe there's a pistol that was in between the driver's seat and the little center console.
The individual went for it and somehow they came out of the car and it just became a scuffle at that point and they fought until other cops arrived and basically dogpiled on the person and ended it.
And it was over, I believe they were at that for like 10 to 15 minutes.
Jesus Christ.
And for people who don't understand how hard it is to go that hard for 10 or 15 minutes, I mean, fuck.
Like I can kind of see a little bit of the alphabet, but don't even think for a second that I'm trying to put together words yet, let alone sentences.
And so I'll go and I was the role player for two of those.
And it was interesting.
I saw some of the same stuff where you can elicit responses for people.
I was resisting, but not a crazy amount.
And the amount of pressure that they started applying to me, grabbing fingers and pulling my fingers back, I wanted to ramp it up, just like anybody else would.
So without that skill or without that tool in their tool belt, You run out of options.
I mean, they have a dangerous job as it is.
And so after doing that defensive tactics, it's actually why I created this shirt.
Hegan Machado, I believe, Howder, Matt, and then my coach, Travis, who you met the last time I was on, is the owner of the SBGs.
But you talk to these guys and we do this session and You can see that their eyes are kind of wide, like, what the fuck just happened?
And then the next thing I want to know is about cost.
And Travis does an awesome job, and I think it's SPG-wide.
They will give a discount for law enforcement, but I feel like it's so important for them, and I want them to be better at doing their job for my family.
So I literally just made this shirt, and every penny that goes from the sale of the shirt, I'm going to start doing scholarships.
Not all the way for the guys because they need to have some skin in the game.
But I want to get as many law enforcement and first responders on the mats as possible.
So I want to lower the cost working with Travis and the SBG organization to start with to just get people in the door.
Because, I mean, you know this probably better than anybody.
Like you don't actually have to know that much.
To radically increase your safety, especially if you're dealing with somebody who doesn't know shit.
And imagine if every police officer or first responder had that ability, whether it comes to dealing...
Because, you know, these guys are not dealing with people.
It's not like, hey, Joe, it's great to see you today.
Nobody calls 911 and is like, oh my God, let me tell you about the most awesome day that I just had.
Are you ready for this?
Fuck, it was my birthday.
We had a party.
There was a cake.
The presents were amazing.
No, it's like, oh my, they're going to crisis.
They're dealing with drunk people.
They're dealing with people who are on drugs.
And I don't want to see anybody get hurt or killed, specifically them.
So I want to have more tools.
And I don't want them to have an economic...
Buffer to that.
So trying to raise as much, or not raise as much money, but sell as many shirts as possible and then go all that money towards scholarshipping those guys into the organization.
Yeah, I think all martial arts, I mean, I think they should learn striking for sure.
But I think that out of all martial arts, jujitsu for a law enforcement officer is probably the most important because the struggle for a gun, the struggle for, you know, getting ahold of someone pulling a gun and being able to control their arm and getting ahold of them, it's so critical.
You can see those behaviors in a simple arm drag where you can step behind and control the other arm.
For a law enforcement officer to understand that concept and be able to do that, you're already in control.
Whereas if you don't, you see the guy, and the next thing you know, you're in a boxing match, and it's like, I don't know, maybe you were a Golden Gloves boxer, and maybe your teeth are going to get fucking knocked out, and you're going to get a knock, your family's going to get a knock on the door.
Yeah, I always try to tell people, you know, for every law enforcement video that you see where things went wrong, when someone was a piece of shit, and some cop did something horribly abusive, you've got to think of the millions of interactions that cops have with people who don't go.
You're getting a very biased perspective of what it's like to be a law enforcement officer.
And then on top of that, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement, always have been, because I'm a person who understands the necessity.
I understand what a lawless world would look like.
And people only want to look at the cops that have done poorly.
But it's like what you were talking about with SEALs, with anything.
The bottom 10%, the top 10%.
There's a certain type of person that's a police officer that shouldn't be a cop.
They just shouldn't be a cop.
And a lot of times those are the ones you're seeing in these situations.
And also, a lot of times when you're looking at these videos, you're looking at someone who's got severe PTSD. Untreated, unrespected, they're encountering every day, they're encountering liars and thieves, and at any moment, they're pulling somebody over and they could lose their life.
At any moment, they're looking at this car, and it's got tinted windows, they don't know who's in the backseat, and they're like, fuck, is there a shotgun pointed at my face right now?
Yeah, and I was driving down the street once in LA, and there was a billboard where they were trying to hire police officers, and they were touting how much money you get paid.
And I remember thinking, looking at that billboard, that is one of the worst pieces of motivation.
Like, if that's your motivation to be a police officer, look, you can get $35,000 a year to start.
Like, hey, get out now.
Get out now.
Because if you don't truly love the idea of being a law enforcement officer, if you're not truly in love with that, and you're just saying, oh, this is a good way to make $50,000 a year.
The military is a stable paycheck, but if you're coming to the military for the money, you're probably better off doing a shorter tenure or tour.
If you want to stay for longer and you want to dive deep, it probably, at least from my opinion, would be that you need to have some sense of purpose or calling that is coming from that occupation as well, because you're not going to get rich in the military, for sure.
What you get out of that though, the one thing that I notice from military folks and just from, whether it's team guys or just people that have, there's a level of discipline that I know that you have.
If you've had a successful career in the military, particularly if you're a team guy, there's a level of discipline that you have that gives me comfort.
I'm like, I know this guy's got his shit together.
So you see guys, they're just wildly entrepreneurial because they'll find something they're passionate about and then they apply that same concept of just continuing to go forward.
They'll have micro failures, but they don't allow micro failures to impact macro outcomes, right?
Like, my advice is always write things down that you want to do.
What do you want to do?
Well, write yourself down a schedule every day.
Like, write yourself down a schedule.
I mean, you might have to adjust it based on time constraints.
But if you just write down, today I'm going to run four miles, I'm going to do 500 push-ups, I'm going to do 1,000 sit-ups, I'm going to do this and that and that and this, and then check it off.
Do those things.
If you could just write shit down and make sure you do it every goddamn day, write down what you have to do that day, it's amazing what you can accomplish.
This fucking lady, she was a noob, and she didn't know what she was doing.
She slid.
She was on this little side hill trying to put her skis on, and she just, whee, right into the trail, right when I was coming around a corner, and I was like, I'm going to kill this lady.
I got to wipe out.
And I wiped out, cracked my fucking head, but slammed my knee really hard, and I knew something was wrong, and then I went and got it checked, and I did an MRI, and there's actually a fracture in the shin bone.
I was like, okay, great.
So the doctor's like, you can't run for six weeks.
Outdoorsmen make an excellent hunting frame, a pack.
It's like a really sturdy pack that I learned about from Remy Warren and Steve Rannell and these guys just swear by this one backpack frame because it's like super sturdy.
And it's just excellent for packing out like elk.
Like, you know, you've had to pack out an elk before.
You don't know what weight is until you're going uphill with a fucking leg on your back.
The difference between a backpack with a frame, like a Kofaru, a really well-made outdoor-centric backpack versus some bullshit backpack that's just designed to have a laptop in it and you're trying to carry shit for It's a big difference.
Just the way the loading shelf is, and the way it straps in, and the angle that it's supposed to sit on your back, there's all science to it.
So with these Outdoorsman's frames, you get the best aspects of an outdoor pack, but you have this big-ass post on the back, just like an Olympic bar.
You slide those plates on it and clamp it down, and it all sits perfect.
Insane workout with one of those on, one of those stairmills.
It was hard-packed snow, and my legs went up, and my head went down.
It was a big bang.
I have a strong neck, fortunately, so there wasn't as much rattle as could have been.
And I kind of knew it was coming.
I was like, oh, here we go.
But my bell was rung for sure.
Because I was a little dizzy afterwards, I was with my 11-year-old and we were going on to the ski lift and I was out of it and the things come around and I timed it wrong.
I'm like, fuck, I went too soon.
I'm stuck and I'm like, I can't go.
I fell down and this lady had to help me get back up because I was just out of it.
That's what I actually thought about that afterwards because you will see people who, you know, I'm here because I want to learn to protect myself in the street.
And if I had done that on the street...
And had my head cracked on concrete?
I'd either been waking up in the hospital or not at all.
You want to get them to the ground or a standing guillotine.
Like when you're in a front position, that's another one that's really fucking dangerous, man.
A guillotine?
Yeah, guys have gone for takedowns with guillotines.
Like I said, a guy shoots in for a takedown, and a guy grabs a guillotine and pulls back, and then this guy's head is the first thing that hits the ground.
In training, shoots in for the takedown, and the guy gets him in a guillotine, and all their weight together falls on this guy's head, and his neck compresses, and his neck breaks, and he loses his ability to move for the rest of his life.
That's a common one, in fact.
Not common, but it's happened multiple times that I'm aware of.
And, you know, you gotta imagine on the street, you know, someone tries to take you down on the street and you elevate and go into a guillotine position and they fall down and slam their fucking head first.
One thing that is a good criticism about jiu-jitsu is the lack of takedowns.
And that is a real factor in any sort of real-world situation.
The hope is if you're in a bar or something like that, there's a scramble, most things wind up on the ground.
That's true.
Until you deal with a skilled opponent, and if you deal with a skilled opponent who has takedown defense, and then you're stuck in the situation where, okay, now you're in a realm where you're a white belt, and this guy's a black belt.
Like if someone is a wrestler who can strike, it's a terrible position to be in.
And we saw that with a lot of, in the early UFCs in particular, a lot of jujitsu black belts just didn't have takedowns.
And then they would get involved with a wrestler Who would easily stuff their takedown, and the wrestler was a better striker.
It's a beautiful thing to learn if you can get someone that will really work with you and who's technique-oriented, not someone who just wants you to spar all the time.
Because one of the things that happens with judo a lot when people are just getting involved in it There's a lot of scrambling on the feet that could put your legs in a compromised position when your knee blows out.
It's not that often, but some guys are really good at it.
And the guys that are really good at it, it comes up.
There's some guys.
Back when Caro Parisian was fighting, Caro was a great judo player who was in the earlier days of the successful UFC, was one of the better judo guys, and he would hit hip tosses and all kinds of different judo throws all the time.
And Ronda, of course, would do it all the time too, but...
With Rhonda, that was basically the only way she would take you down was with upper body grabs.
Her move was to grab the head and then take people down with that and use judo.
But it does happen.
But it only happens with skilled players.
But when it does happen, it's a big surprise oftentimes.
You know, I mean, just, and again, with wrestling, see, I always say that if a kid wants to learn martial arts, like, there's a lot of good things they should learn, but one of the things they should learn first is wrestling, because it sucks so hard.
It sucks so hard.
It'll teach you whether or not you really want to fight, whether you really want to compete.
I need to determine whether or not he was talking about his experience, other people's experience, or he was making up every goddamn thing he was saying.
And he's like, seven rounds, and I'm going to use birdshot.
I was like, fuck, man, this is getting worse every time...
He's like, birdshot's what I need, right?
Birdshot will do it.
I'm like, birdshot's great for birds.
So he basically wants a huge shotgun with a huge magazine tube, but a barrel that sits two feet back from the magazine tube, so he'll just bounce stuff.
As you're saying that, I'm thinking about literally what's happening in this country, and I hope that we get to the point where we see the sun and we feel it, but then we have to also not forget.
I think we have it really, really easy in this country.
What you were saying about this is the reality of third world countries or places where, I mean, you're under a military dictatorship where you can't get food.
You can't travel wherever you want to.
You don't have the freedom to move about whenever you want to.
And we're in this weird situation here today in California.
They've put this lockdown on everybody where supposedly until April 19th, you can't have a gathering of more than 10 people.
And you're all essential businesses are supposed to be closed.
Well, fucking good luck with that.
Good luck with a whole month of telling people they can't work.
And then later on in the day, another person came out and downstream of that took a bath in the water.
And later on in the day, a woman came out with two kids and got their drinking water downstream from both of those things and went back to their house.
Yeah, but if you see enough of those things or in that, it reframes the way that you look at what people complain about.
And I have thought about that day very often because in that short period of time, it's just like, I don't ever really have that much to complain about.
Like what's going to go on right now for the next few months, I would guess, maybe the rest of the year is going to be horrendous.
And I hope that everybody makes it out okay on the other side.
But the reality is people are going to die and it's going to suck and it's going to destroy families.
And the economic destruction will probably be worse than the physical destruction from the death side of the house.
But we're still going to be okay at the end of that.
And even if it gets horrendous here, we are doing so much better than so many other people on the face of this earth.
Their daily best is not going to even approach what it's going to look like at our worst as we navigate our way through this.
My biggest concern is not just the deaths, which is a big concern, not just the financial crisis, which is also a big concern, but it's also the government gobbling up freedoms in exchange for the illusion of safety.
It's because they're finding the seams in people's attention span.
They're instead of...
Being objective, they're being emotional.
And that clouds your vision and it clouds your judgment.
And when they're not paying attention because they're scared because they're online all goddamn day looking at people taking pictures of the empty toilet paper aisle in the grocery store, other people who might have malicious intent are moving on that intent and nobody is paying attention to it.
Where there's moments where they can pass something like the Patriot Act or the Patriot Act 2, they do it.
It's not because they've set this up to pass that.
No, they use it as an opportunity because they know that people are scared and they use it as an opportunity to further diminish our rights because it makes it easier for them to control us.
And that's a real concern right now.
It's a real concern right now.
And it's something that people go, oh, that's the last thing you should be thinking about.
No, it's one of the things you should be thinking about.
There's many things you should be thinking about right now, besides your safety and your health and not spreading a disease and making sure you wash your hands and stay away from old people and maintain social distance.
All that stuff is important, but also recognize what the fuck these...
Career politicians and these career lawmakers and these career people that are in charge of controlling mass groups of people.
Any laws that help you, any rights that help you, it makes their job more difficult.
And that's something to be concerned with right now.
I think if you don't experience fear, you might trend towards the sociopathic side of the spectrum.
But it's totally natural.
It should be expected.
But you have a choice in how you receive what is going on and you can allow the fear to cloud your judgment and drive your decision-making process or You can recognize that the fear of something, you know, fear of death overseas isn't what keeps you alive.
Objective, analytical thought process and doing the things that need to be done keep you alive regardless of how scared you are or fearful you are.
That's what keeps you alive.
It's okay to be scared, but just don't let it take over and control you.
And I still think that those numbers are incredibly low.
I think a lot of people are probably dealing – if you look at how they describe the symptoms, I bet a lot of people have already dealt with it and don't even realize it.
No, and according to all who trained with him, I mean the guy trained as diligently and as hard as anyone that's a professional fighter.
He just really went after it and really took it and took the approach of like that this is a life lesson and he's going to go at it with a hundred percent of his being.
And I just am a big fan of this guy.
I'm a big fan of him as an actor.
But when I found this out and I watched this, I was like, okay, this guy's a real fucking deal.
Yeah, the fact that he's uniquely fit and tough guy.
But the thing about the shin, if someone just does it gently, like John Jones did it gently to Jim Norton.
My friend Jim Norton is a series of fighters who have done things to him, like put him in chokeholds and arm bars and leg kicked him because he asked them to do it.
And gently, just gently, just gently, just gently.
There was a guy named Pedro Hizzo and he used to fight in the UFC in the heavyweight division and he fought Randy Couture and Randy Couture's leg was so fucked up from that fight that it took him six months to recover.
Six months to recover from the leg kicks.
He's the hardest kicker I've ever seen in all my years of watching people kick legs.
I saw Pedro kick the bag at Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu in like the late 90s.
I was there I forget what I was there for.
And Pedro just happened to be doing a workout on the bag.
And this was like the early days of big gyms in Los Angeles.
There wasn't a lot of them.
There was Hickson's Place.
And then Horian had the Gracie and Torrance.
And then there was Beverly Hills Jiu-Jitsu.
It was like this kind of high-end mixed martial arts place they were putting together.
And Pedro was there training.
And there was this, you know, 150-pound heavy bag.
And Pedro leg kicks this thing just...
I watched his bag bend in half and then he does it again.
What's interesting is they still, for some strange reason, I'm pretty sure, please Google this, are tie steel cups still allowed in MMA? I know Kenny Florian, throughout his career as a fighter, wore a tie cup.
Hugo Martin, who was one of the- shout out to Hugo, who was the creator, one of the creators of Doom Eternals, this new amazing video game that's gonna ruin my life.
Shall wear a groin protector of their own selection as type proved by the commissioner.
Yeah, see?
So it doesn't say- Yeah, you have to, but that's MMA. Oh, okay, I thought this was the IBJJF. Yeah, see, so it's male mixed martial artist, shall wear.
Okay.
Of a type approved by the commissioner, the commissioners may say you can't wear a steel one.
But Kenny Florian throughout his whole career wore a steel tie cup.
Yeah, I mean, you rarely see nut shots in tie fights, and I really think that's probably a big part of it, because they know there's a fucking steel cup there.
They don't know how long it's going to take for this virus to run its cycle.
And it could conceivably take a year.
I don't know, man.
That's the weirdest thing about all this.
Sometimes when I'm in bed at night, I'll get up to take a leak or something like that, and I'll go, this is crazy.
No one knows what's happening.
No one knows what's going to happen.
And then we're relying on politicians to make these decisions and these choices based on disease experts who weren't adequately funded or prepared to take this on in the first place.
Apparently, the Trump administration had gotten rid of the pandemic office.
And then they did the same thing to Kellyanne Conway.
And they're asking her.
And she's like, well, do you know my husband's half Asian?
My children are Asian.
Like, do you think I'm great?
Like, what do you...
I'm not going to deal in hypotheticals.
She's like, well, this is a nonsense conversation, but it's this goddamn social justice narrative that people are still trying to push, even in times of crisis.
Who called it the Kung Flu?
Like, if Bobby McFuckface called it Kung Flu, and you got a video of, hey, Bobby, don't do that.
Also, this is something that they know makes people upset and is something they know that can get a rise and something they know that can get traction in terms of a news story.
The one good thing about this is it highlights how much nonsense we put credence to, how much nonsense we spend time paying attention to.
And when you're just trying to get food and toilet paper and stay healthy and not get a fucking killer disease, all those other things get thrown out the window.
And that's the good thing about this.
That's one of the only good things.
The other good thing, I think, is I'm hoping this gives us a greater sense of community.
I mean, I'm hoping that people come together.
I really do.
I really hope people come together and they realize that this is...
We have had it so easy, and it's one of the reasons why we've been complaining about stupid shit, is because we had it so easy.
The idea of camo with animals is so interesting to me, you know, because when I first found out that animals don't see things the way we see things, they see movement.
Yeah.
But it makes sense.
You know, like, they have to.
That's what keeps them alive.
Something twitches, like, what the fuck was that?
Was that something real?
Have you seen an elk kind of look in your direction, not even sure what you are?
I almost feel like, for me, I would have maybe gone and donated the meat.
Because it's like, one of the things about, and people say, why would you do that?
One of the things about hunting is, I think you have to do it a lot.
It's like stand-up or jujitsu or a lot there's a lot of things Where the experience is so intense and so alien from everyday life that you have to be accustomed to like one of the things about Fighting that I always found like I fought way better when I fought often because of like like one of my biggest Tournaments that I won was the American Open that I won right at I fought one week and then I fought the next week and And I'm like,
Yeah, they fucking have 30,000 deer in a tiny island with 3,000 people.
So they need you to, and also it's really hard to do.
Like bow hunting on Lanai, one of the things that Dudley and I found out and Cam on our last hunt last year, we go, how many people are bow hunting this year?
But it's just the concern is it could get to the pool.
I don't want to have my body adjust to eating regular food when that might be the only thing available.
I'm really concerned that we could come down to a supply chain problem and a food problem if that does happen.
This is one thing.
This is one thing of a virus.
What if one thing gets compounded by solar flares that knock out the power grid or an earthquake or multiple things that could happen simultaneously at any time?