Josh Barnett, UFC’s youngest heavyweight champ, critiques MMA’s superficial judging and win bonuses, advocating for longer rounds and double finish incentives while comparing it to police accountability failures like George Floyd. His whiskey project, Warbringer Bourbon—mesquite-smoked, sherry-finished—stands out from celebrity-endorsed brands, blending martial arts authenticity with niche flavors. Barnett ties personal integrity to his endorsements, dismissing ideological conformity as spiritual entropy, and contrasts disciplined cultures (Japan’s crisis response) with Western systemic collapse (Katrina, COVID supply chains). His podcast detractors reveal their own resentment toward excellence, he argues, while promoting his "Warmaster Edition" bourbon and workout playlist as tools for self-mastery. [Automatically generated summary]
Especially when you create something exceptional, like if you're an Olympic athlete or you're a world-class athlete or professional athlete, as you continue to move up the ladder of difficulty, so to speak.
The shorter the window is that you can compete at that level, obviously.
But everybody's athletic window is limited.
So the length of time you can be a competitive fighter is, you know, who knows how long.
I guess I've seen some stats that say over five years it starts to decline.
Over seven, or around seven, it really starts to take a nosedive.
And even then, that nine years is still more towards the tails and not into the middle of it.
And, I mean, a lot of folks, you'll see them, you'll get to the UFC... They are there for about three, four years, and then even towards that tail end of that four years, it's like they're no longer in the running for any of the major fights.
That's why it's kind of crazy when you see a high-level fighter who's training for a world championship fight and they're in one of those group class environments where there's like 13 other dudes around them.
Being derived from wrestling, from the jujitsu, from martial arts structured elements, but also the money wasn't there for dedicated trainer-manager types.
Right.
It's like, as soon as the manager construct came into MMA, and I say construct because I don't think most MMA managers are actual managers.
They're mostly just agents.
They find fights and whatever, and they'll get a collective of other fighters under their wings so they can have some sort of collective bargaining by having these other athletes or always being able to shuttle somebody in depending on what a...
The UFC or some other organization might need, but they're not really overseeing someone's career.
What you're essentially saying is they're not like a boxing manager will slowly build you towards a world title fight and a UFC fighter doesn't really get that opportunity.
And it lasted as the youngest UFC champion of all time until Jon Jones beat it by a few months or something like that, by age, when he won his title.
But...
But these management types came into the fold and then they're like, well, you know, we get 33 percent or 20 percent or all these different percentages.
But the other thing about this and the way I approached it was you get these numbers, you get these ideas from boxing and these other avenues that are more established.
But here's the thing.
A boxing manager will take a fighter, house them in the Catskills or whatever, take them to Big Bear, put them in a home, pay for sparring partners, so on and so forth.
And the amount of actual management in terms of logistics and everything else going around someone's career is vastly different from just, oh yeah, well I called up the UFC and said, yeah, I'll throw you in in two weeks.
It's not the same thing.
And you think you deserve 33 and a third percent?
With my fighters...
I tell them, look, once I can make you over $10,000, start paying me.
Because other than that, what am I going to do with your $200?
No, I started off with managing Megumi Fuji's career.
Got her her first fights in the U.S., helped her turn pro, all that, and negotiated her Bellator deals, all that kind of stuff.
I manage Victor Henry as for like a more modern athlete I'm working with.
Victor Henry, he's on eight fight winning streak.
He's probably next in line to fight for a title in Ryzen.
He's been kicking the crap out of people in Ryzen.
He's the deep world champion.
He's beating people up in Russia.
And the thing is, you know, people are so concerned about just the UFC or the American market, which I get it.
It is the largest market.
It is the most notable.
And it has incredible fighters in it.
But there's incredible fighters everywhere, and there's also that process towards graduating a fighter up to their best position and giving them the best experience for that fighter.
And I was just talking to someone at the UFC the other day about Victor, and he goes, you're doing the right thing with him.
You're building him up.
You're making him the best version of himself he can be, and you're taking care of him and getting him paid.
That's part of the experience.
And also, I try to make sure to give my fighters the experience of being around the world, seeing the world.
There's nothing that will change your outlook towards being in other places, especially the more disparate from what you're used to.
I got a great fighter It was a real eye-opening experience, but the thing was, it was eye-opening in all the right ways.
He had such a blast being in such a different environment and getting to be really out of his comfort zone.
And, you know, I live to do stuff like that for my fighters as well.
I don't see how it won't, especially, I think, within that overall apparatus of fighting and the constant...
Fail, failure to succeed rhetoric.
You just can't come out and immediately win at everything that you're trying to do and you won't come out and immediately be great at everything you do.
Some things, sure, but it's about the overall It's about your overall growth and where you started and where you end up.
And I think if you look at the overall talent pool in the world, it used to be that the elite fighters were all either at Pride or at UFC. That's what it used to be.
But now, like you see when Eddie Alvarez went over to one, he fought that Timothy Natsuyukin.
Yeah, and Eddie Alvarez, of course, former UFC champion, is world class.
Yes, he is.
So to see him get beat down by that guy, you go, well, these motherfuckers are out there.
And the talent level's so high.
Like, there's guys that get to the UFC, and right when they get here, you go, holy shit, where's this guy been?
Like, Pyotr Yan.
Who's fighting he's fighting for the title this weekend against Jose Aldo and Piotr Jan is this badass Russian dude who's fucking vicious and when he first came over the UFC I'm like Jesus Christ where's this guy been?
It's like you see these guys who are all over the world now, you know, you've seen elite world-class fighters and it's not just the UFC anymore like I firmly believe Douglas Lima is one of the best welterweights on the planet Agreed.
And I mean, if you think about just the level of awareness of elite fighters now, because of YouTube and because of all these different streaming services, I mean, you can watch, you could be anywhere in the world and watch top flight talent.
Those clips are so great, too, because they'll highlight a specific technique, they'll show the KO or the finish, and then they'll break down all the different moving parts.
This place is an extension of everything that you're trying to create for yourself.
And that is honestly, whether you have the means to create something like this, or you just have the means to create something really small in your own little apartment.
Everything that you do should be...
In worship, so to speak, to the ideal you're trying to create.
Yeah, we were talking about that earlier, that there's too many...
And I think this is part of the problem with social media, is that people are intoxicated with this idea of having other people think they're awesome.
So they put out all this stuff to make it look like they're this amazing person and they'll put up these quotes and put up this shit.
But it's not really what they're into, they just want you to think they're into it.
And it comes off that way.
One of my biggest pet peeves, and I posted a quote last night, not a quote rather, but an image of Miyamoto Musashi, because I got into the Book of Five Rings again.
And I didn't say this last night, but this is what I meant when I posted it.
If you want to take inspiration, there's something about the words of Miyamoto Musashi that are profoundly inspirational.
Because he's a man who bested over 60 men in one-on-one sword fights.
So when he's talking about strategy, or he's talking about technique, and he's talking about preparation, and you must research this, you must look into this, and this is how you go about attacking, this is how you play off your opponent's strategy.
He's talking about life or death with a fucking sword.
Even translation from Japanese to English, even though it's 400 years later, there's something about that guy that gives me goosebumps, man, when I read his shit.
I fell in love with samurai philosophy a long time ago from Nitobe and the Hagakure.
And there's even one called Budo or Samurai Philosophy of the Samurais.
I forget the name of it, but it's a really short, succinct book that really nails down some things.
And I think part of why what they have to say is so...
So authentic and so real, so to speak, is because it's life or death for them.
Reading Storm of Seal by Ernst Jünger, and you're reading this guy's take on being in World War I. And it's not that he was never afraid.
It's not that he didn't understand what war is.
It's just from his position as a soldier and the way he approached things and the way he even still saw beauty in these moments in living in that part of his life.
It's clearly somebody that I believe has a good grip on being towards death, as Heidegger would put it.
Like embracing what it means to be alive and by embracing that, you're also embracing the fact that you are going to die.
It is not going away.
That death is alongside you and you don't know when it's coming.
And there's no need to because you're not supposed to be thinking about whether or not you're going to die or when it's going to come or anything like that.
But you need to be thinking about what you're going to do before that time does show up and how you're going to do it and for why.
How are you finding meaning and fulfillment in life so that when death comes along and tugs on your shirt sleeve, You're like, alright, well this is it.
Yeah, and those guys, people that you've described, whether it's Musashi or any of those people, what comes out in their words is authenticity because of the fact that they have led these extraordinary lives and they have faced incredible danger.
They have lived There's something about that where you can genuinely learn from those people, whereas there's a lot of people that really haven't, but they know that people long for those things, so they try to recreate it.
They try to recreate these quotes, or they try to find some words that will inspire you to get going and seize the moment and make the most of the day and go out there and conquer and kick ass.
It is attempting to take on – it's presenting the persona of that kind of individual mainly because they know that deep down all of us realize that there's weight to those kind of people.
And I'm sure Peterson would be like, it's the bloody archetype or something.
I mean when he talks about – whatever he's talking about, he's talking about – I don't know.
He's talking about it from a place of profound understanding and that resonates like when he critiques Marxism or critiques certain philosophies and certain Certain trends that he sees in social social behavior like he's doing it from a place of profound understanding and that's that's why it resonates with people That's why he became so famous so people think somehow or another that he became so famous because There's an angst in
Yeah, it was someone I was in a relationship with.
And it was just like, I'm getting assaulted in a way.
No, I'm not trying to say words of violence.
Calm down.
I was just under, I felt like I was under attack all the time for things that I didn't do and things that I, from arguments that I had or accusations.
I'm like, I don't understand why I am being, this is being offloaded onto me at the time.
So I start researching and researching and researching because I truly believe, And essentially, like J.S. Mill says, he who understands only one side of the argument, not the other, understands a little of both.
And so even through all this, I had to come to the fact that as much as if you'd want to take that shallow diagnosis of Peterson...
It's the same as if you want to take a shallow diagnosis of Marxism.
These things aren't operating out of complete falsity.
They're not coming out of nowhere.
They're not built upon nothing.
There is truth being said in everything.
They're stemming from truth.
So if you read Marx, there is true critiques.
There's true things within it.
Now, where people often go wrong is they take a seed of truth and they plant a forest of bullshit.
So just because you can grow it doesn't mean you're necessarily like, I think, a bamboo.
So if you put bamboo in a lot of the places, especially in the Pacific Northwest or Western America, it depends on your climate zones.
We're not going to get into all that.
A lot of strains of bamboo will grow to the point that they can't be stopped.
They will grow through concrete.
They will grow through asphalt.
So if you're going to plant it, you have to plant it in steel boxes and concrete barriers and things to make sure that the bamboo stays only where it's supposed to be.
Otherwise, it's going to be fucking everywhere and it's going to out-compete and dominate everything else.
Now, planting the bamboo, great idea.
But if it goes nuts and destroys all your native flora...
But then when you apply it large scale and then you take into account human nature and how humans find ways to blame others for their own shortcomings and find ways to juke the system and then you wind up with a mess.
I mean, that was like our little Haight-Ashbury of sorts.
Yeah.
But, you know, I thought Capitol Hill had really jumped the fucking shark a long time ago when I was reading an article about people wanting to be on Capitol Hill so bad that they were willing to live in shared living space scenarios where they're sharing bathrooms and kitchens and all this and paying stupid money for a room.
And I don't mean...
A room and a house.
I mean purpose-built habitation scenarios to do that.
And I'm just like, why the fuck do you want to live there that bad?
I mean, there's plenty of cool shit there, but there's plenty of cool shit all over Seattle.
Gay or LGBT, I guess now, as you would refer to it, epicenter.
There was a lot of, there had some head shop stuff.
It was just sort of a counterculture district, you know?
And I remember as a kid, you know, we'd go up there and go to the weird little stores.
I mean, that'd be the place where you want to buy some crystals and all that kind of stuff.
It would be there.
But it was a groovy, very densely cultural place.
And, you know, famous for a lot of things, you know, some things unfortunate, like Mia Zapata getting killed behind the Comet Tavern, but also for many, many great things, too.
But it would definitely be the place where you would see something like a Chaz pop up.
It's just that the separation from idea to reality was something like a Chaz, and it's always going to be this case.
It's always going to be just mountains in between the two.
The funniest part, I think, for me is watching that altercation video with Raz and his new police stating, we're the police now.
And the guy being approached for graffitiing a building going, "Well, what's up with all the guns?
Why you guys got all these guns?" And this lady who's filming going, "Don't worry about us having guns.
Who cares about guns?
Cops carry guns.
Guns are no big deal." And I'm just like, "Whoa." You guys are doing exactly what you're complaining about.
But watching that, you know, so the side of me is going, see, like, perhaps, you know, a little bit of fisticuffs could make things a little better, you know, especially if we're to talk about the law of mutual combat that exists in Washington.
What cannabis does is it allows you to have these possibilities that you can open these doors or not, but they're there.
If you're high, if you've been doing your act and you're doing stand-up four or five nights a week and you're really in the groove, you're honed, and you're not going to get thrown off by some pot, you know what you're talking about.
And especially if you smoke pot a lot.
But what pot does do is it gets you to these places where you might not have gotten before.
Like, you go, who the fuck is judging whiskey?
What are they doing?
And then off the cuff, on stage, you'll go into this place that maybe you wouldn't have gone into before.
It also makes stand-up a little more dangerous, so it gets you a little scared, and that is also good because it opens up possibilities and it allows you to stay sharp because you're a little nervous.
I've been doing stand-up for 31 years.
When I go on stage, it's kind of normal.
Even last weekend I did the Houston Improv.
I hadn't done stand-up in 90 days.
But before I went up on stage, I'd listen to a lot of recordings.
I went over my notes.
I knew what I was doing.
And it was fun.
It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't terrifying.
But if I got really high before it, it would be fucking terrifying.
On winter vacation from the University of Montana, one of my wrestling coaches called me up, and AMC Pancration was a pro gym that had pro fighters, and they were out there, and I knew of them, but this was 1996, so this shit was still real DIY, sort of.
There wasn't really an avenue towards things.
I've talked to MMA people now.
They're like, you guys don't get it.
You don't know what it was like back then.
My old wrestling coach, he calls me up.
He goes, hey, I know you've been training.
I know you're into this.
There's an opening to fight this guy, Chris Charnos, on January whatever it was.
So it was 11 days.
I go, alright.
I go, oh, Chris Charnos, yeah, fought in Super Bowl.
He's pro, yeah?
Yeah, okay.
When?
Alright, 11 days.
I'll be there.
And that's it.
I just went and I trained with an old martial arts coach of mine.
Ran a little bit.
I was already training back in Montana over at Jim Harrison's Bushido Khan Karate.
Rest in peace, Sensei.
Much love.
But I'm like, yeah, cool.
I want to fight.
That's it.
I'm standing in line to go through the medicals.
And this other cat, he looks at me.
His name is also Chris, and he fought on that card.
And he goes, so where do you train, man?
I go, oh...
I train over in Montana, but also trained a bunch in this church basement.
And he just looks at me, he's like, cool.
Later he tells me, he goes, I thought you were going to die.
I thought this guy was just going to annihilate you.
And Matt gets in the ring and he goes, hey, we'd love to have you come back in the summer and fight again.
I'm like, all right, I'll be here.
And that was just a matter of I was so...
The funny thing is I was ready to get out there and amped to do it.
But even then...
When you get started, it felt like my first ever wrestling match to some degree, and everything kind of turned into tunnel vision.
And it's a strange feeling about how everything seems to be going a million miles an hour.
And you watch it back in reverse, and you're like, oh my god, there was actually a lot of time in between segment A to segment B. And I do remember my first wrestling match, especially because I fucking head and arm this guy who had already placed in the district.
That's the crazy thing, right, about life, real life, normal life, and then competition, or chaos, or a fist fight.
There's a thing.
It's like you enter into a world where all of a sudden the sky looks a different color, your hands don't move the right way, you hesitate, you're thinking too much.
It's weird to watch people enter into that world for the first time.
So I'm sitting there, and as someone being so into Nietzsche, I started to look at it as, this is tapping into...
Like your highest state of being, so to speak.
So when I'm in the ring, I feel like...
Things that are attached to me from modern and general living are removed.
I feel like it is the most freeing, alive moment in my life.
And as I can look back, even to that wrestling match, even to getting into fistfights as a little kid, there was always something about me that was drawn to it.
Not just because I wanted to conquer and crush skulls, but that I literally...
I could not get enough of the feeling of aliveness from it.
And it wasn't just that it was dangerous.
It's beyond that.
It is, I think, more akin to people talking about that no mind state.
And of course, if you can operate in that state, well, then you might Michael Jordan yourself a night and look amazing.
But even when that isn't the case, if you can center your focus into being in that moment, Right.
you can't be that way all the time and other people can't relate to you when you're in that state like you just your ability to communicate with your fellow man just isn't really there unless they're also in that state with you right yeah it's these moments where you're forced to live in the moment and You have to.
And everything requires so much attention and so much focus that when you go back to regular life, that's the thing that fighters have a really difficult time with.
Yeah, so it was Eric I was talking to because he's always interested for my take on violence and how violence relates to humanity and how it relates to being.
I listened to his podcast with Jocko, and I would say, I mean, it was really great, and I've never met Jocko, but he sounds like a really awesome dude.
But I said to Eric, I go, one of the things that I saw that was kind of different here in the way that both me and Jocko seem to approach this is that he's so very clinical about it, very regimented, and I understand that because if he's In a military presence, you can't just have a guy who's soaking himself in the enemy's blood and running around the battlefield screaming at the top of his lungs.
That doesn't help anyone.
Reveling in something like this isn't really a necessity in anything.
That is...
It's besides the point.
Especially in 2020. Yeah, especially in 2020 when they went after Gurkha soldiers, Nepalese soldiers who were sent on a kill mission to grab some sort of extremist.
And they were like, well, we want proof too.
So what do they do?
They pull out their cookery and take the dude's head off and bring it back.
And then they went and put that guy on trial for doing his job because we thought, oh, that's too much.
I don't know the history of why the blade takes on that shape, but I can say that the shape of the blade, the way it's designed, is— It's one of the greatest chopping devices you will ever come across because of the angle in the blade and the way that it widens out towards the tip.
It creates this belly of cutting pressure that when you swing that fucker, it just whacks right through anything.
And theirs more resembles early style blades called Tachis, I believe.
And then the Chinese have the broadsword.
And then, of course, you have...
So they don't have the exact same design, I'll give you that.
With the way that they have designed the shape of the edge itself.
And the way that they refine their point with that sort of wedged tip.
But scimitars are curved also for their cutting ability and also for when you're on horse.
So if you come by and you swing that curved blade, when it starts to make bite as you're continuing to go through, it transfers that energy across the blade in such a way that it doesn't tear your arm off your horse.
Imagine if there was a YouTube video of every person who ever died by the hand of a sword just from the beginning of time, just chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.
You'd be like, what the fuck?
That's part of the problem with seeing things on video, right?
Like, you don't see all the life that was lived before that moment where someone was chopped.
You know, Ben likes to be a big mouth of sorts and he really loves to rile shit up.
But...
You know, even the better person, I don't necessarily even mean better than Ben, I just mean the better person as a general, has to look at that which, even if you dislike it, you hate the way Ben speaks and what he has to say, but that doesn't take away from what he's done.
I'm sorry.
His body of work stands on its own.
And you can think him a shitty person or God's greatest.
Sure, but I mean, Ben just should have been subbing guys left and right in Bellator, but he just didn't quite have it.
Now, and my opinion always was, at least from watching it, if you're this inventive of a funk wrestler in collegiate wrestling and what have you, in international wrestling, I know you could be a literal submission machine.
It had to be just approach, maybe pressure to just get those wins.
I mean, there is an issue with, I think, some of the wrestlers coming in and thinking about the game structure of wrestling and being like, okay, so if I win this five minutes, then I'll give him the next two minutes and then I'll take three minutes.
Yeah, if you're into club and mace swinging, there's two people that I highly recommend.
One is Jake Shannon, the other one is Greg Walsh.
Those two guys are...
I mean, mace swinging and club swinging, especially mace swinging for Greg, are part and parcel to the entire foundational aspect of their training stuff.
Jake's a catch guy.
Greg's a physical fitness conditioning guy.
But I think the mace is a fantastic tool for building great strength.
But meeting Carl and getting to train a little bit under Carl made me feel like I met someone who may have been related to me in some way.
I felt like this guy was somehow part of my family, but I didn't know it for so long.
And yet I come from part of that lineage especially.
Yeah.
And we're sitting there, and these Japanese reporters have set this whole thing up.
And they're like, here, we're going to have Carl watch you fighting Minotaur.
All right.
And get his opinions.
And I'm just like, oh, God.
All right.
So Carl's watching this thing, and he's just making comments.
He's tearing into it, and he's being highly critical.
He'd say something.
He'd look at me.
He'd smile a little bit.
He'd say something.
And then we're all said and done.
And the Japanese reporters are just like, oh.
They're just losing their shit.
They're just like, oh God, this is not what we expected to happen.
They're just like, oh, how is this going to fall apart?
Carl just tore this guy a whole new one over this.
And Carl looks at me and he goes, what did I say?
Does that piss you off?
I looked at him and I went...
I don't care.
All I want, all that's important to me is to try and understand what it is from how you see it and see what I can do to take that and be better and to take your criticism and your eyes and your experience and the way you see it so that I can use it to make myself a better fighter.
And he looked at me and he just went, huh.
And then he just started showing me stuff and he would call me and give me workouts and see how I'm doing and Honestly, not being able to spend more time with Carl and even, to an extension, Billy Robinson, even though I got to train under him for years and years and years in Japan.
Billy Robinson worked with Sakuraba and all the UWFI fighters.
And Carl started with New Japan Pro Wrestling, and Tony Inoki brought him in there to be their head trainer.
And he's the one that prepped Inoki for Ali.
Wow.
Getting real rambunctious, and Carl just laughing, smiling, even though he knows that Inoki's been just handicapped, like, oh, you can't throw him, you can't put submissions on him, you can't do this, you can't do that.
It's just such a crazy moment that they decided to actually do that match where Ali is there with boxing gloves on and Inoki is kicking him in the legs.
2001. 2001. So for probably the first 10 years of UFC, the highlight stuff around every event, around every promotional opportunity around UFC, what is it?
Knockouts, knockouts, knockouts, knockouts.
Everybody's getting primed to watch for knockouts.
And yet people are going to the ground and getting choked.
People are going to the ground and getting armbarred.
You need to have a better scoring system, and you need to get rid of incompetence, and then when you go to other states, you need to take control of the situation.
So if you have win bonuses and, you know, if a guy comes in and he's getting 50, and then if he wins, he gets another 50, you stole $50,000 from that guy by giving him incompetent judging.
And that's a lot of ways the UFC style of pricing, which seems to be kind of the general model for MMA, is that you get $5 to fight and $5 to win for a guy that you might have paid him $8 to just fight.
Yeah, true.
And I understand the concept of a win bonus is incentivizing, but it only incentivizes to win.
So if I'm running a company, if I hire somebody, if I put them on a long-term exclusive deal, I do it because I believe in them.
Now, there may be ups and downs and what have you, and I could make a mistake and I'll just have to take that.
But I want this individual to be able to go out there and give me absolutely everything they have and know that they're not going to be punished.
If they fall short.
And so I'm going to pay them appropriately.
Now, on the flip side of things, if I'm running something as big as the UFC, I'm going to just have a lot of one-off deals on the lower levels until I see that person that I think, I'm going to invest in this person.
And that's the thing.
There's skin in the game in that investment.
And there's skin in the game for them.
And that's where you're going to get the best responses out of people.
And that's where you're going to get their best efforts and their best energies.
And sometimes you're going to be wrong, but sometimes isn't all the time.
I'll take the exception to the rule as long as the rule is giving me what I need.
Look, man, if someone wants to put me in a position to do that, I'll do it.
But nobody wants to.
And at the same time, nobody wants to create the proper accountability structure for judging, either.
Or even for some of these athletic commission apparatus, for all these things.
Which is, when you talk about Chaz and all these things and about universality, everybody, whether they're voting left, right, middle, doesn't matter.
Everybody, however they fall on any side of any of this shit, Everybody knows, and I think that part of this big protest slash riot at times slash what have you, is that everyone knows that a lot of these state and these bureaucratic structures aren't unaccountable.
They're not being held accountable.
And the ability to affect them, to make them accountable, is also minimal, if potentially impossible.
And then on top of that, What is the thing that you see as the apparatus that you interact with and interacts with you the most and directly?
Because what you're seeing with the justice system, when people who live in the hood see police brutality over and over and over again and nothing ever happens, and then finally the world pays attention.
You know, it's been really interesting to me to see people come out And try to – I don't know if they're necessarily trying to justify, but they're definitely taking the side of trying to demonize George.
And I'm like – because of his previous stuff about like the home invasion with the pointing a gun at a pregnant woman's belly or he's on drugs and what have you.
And I go, you know what?
You don't even realize this, but you just made the greatest argument for why he shouldn't be dead.
Because whether you've done something terrible or you've been the best person ever, you need to get the same amount of justice as anybody else.
That you need to be, if you have to be put into cuffs or anything like that, if you have to be brought in, whether you did XYZ or you did the nicest thing ever and you just had this one slip up that was real...
It has to be the same across the board.
That is the great argument that why police have to be held far more accountable than your average citizenry.
And that means not to just Land a bunch of shit on top of their head and like, live up to this, you know, dumb fuck.
No, it's why you need to prepare them and help them and foster them to be able to be capable.
Like, who's ever going to be capable of doing anything if you don't give them the right support?
I can't send in some amateur, just started, whatever fighter to go out there and fight Ben Askren.
That's never going to...
I'm just going to get them murdered.
Like, they're not capable.
But I, you know...
Over time, maybe I can get them to the position and maybe they'll never be capable of being able to fight a Ben Askren, or maybe they're not capable of being a police officer, but also maybe they're not capable of being a lot of things, but there is something that they are capable for.
But when that leaves the realm of my responsibility, then that's a different story.
Well, when Jocko was on the podcast, and obviously Jocko has a deep level experience at training people in war, I mean, in training Navy SEALs, training the elite of the elite.
And he said they should be doing 20% of all their time on the job training.
There is no way to have a rule of law society and proxy out your violence to another apparatus instead of you doing it yourself.
Without that apparatus fighting handicapped all the time.
It's just the way it has to be.
You know, the dude that freaked out, he was getting arrested and he was drunk at his car and what have you, and then he finds out he's actually going to be taken in for this DUI. Like, oh shit, steal the taser.
Okay, I get all that, but as soon as you fucked up and he got away and his back's due, you can't shoot him.
Someone had a real good point that you shouldn't call the police for something like that in the first place.
Because the person is drunk and they're asleep in their car and there should be someone you can call where that person knows they're not going to get arrested.
Someone was like, listen, man, we're going to get you an Uber.
I mean, if you are in an office and you have a dispute with someone and you sit down and want to talk to them person to person, you're putting yourself in a handicap.
If you have a real dispute with a person, like say if someone did something to you that you found questionable or against the rules, like you're incentivized to contact HR. Yeah, they really push that.
There's so many weak guys that would – when a woman will – like I was reading this thing about the Unabomber, about one of the things that happened with the Unabomber with his brother.
The brother had – He had to chastise the Unabomber, because the Unabomber, when Ted Kaczynski, he had this issue with a woman where he was interested in her, and she wasn't interested in him.
And when she wasn't interested in him anymore, he started leaving all these fucked up notes for her, saying horrible shit to her, and the brother had to like...
Like, that's real with men.
And for a woman, that shit's scary.
See, like, for a man, it's scary.
Like, oh, this bitch is going to slash my tires, or she's going to say I raped her, or she's going to make up a story about me.
You know, it's hard enough for men and women to try and figure out how to interact with each other in a space to even get in each other's pants, to create anything of value.
You're both facing adversity, the same adversity, and dealing with it in your own ways.
And that creates camaraderie.
It really does.
And it can create an intense...
But that doesn't necessarily mean even that that can be sufficient or that relationship can then go towards something more long-term and firm, right?
Which, you know, we're so great at lying to ourselves and fooling ourselves all the time.
Like, oh, I'm so intense with this person and we hooked up and this and that and then you start getting together and then it's a shit show.
You know, because you thought that just because you guys had this one metric at which you guys were both very intense, that that would cover for everything else.
And it's like, well, no, that's not how relationships are built.
Hey, there's a great website or a great YouTube that I send all of my friends and all of my fighters, for sure, called Academy of Ideas.
And this dude has these awesome lectures on all kinds of things dealing with life and current climate stuff and all these different things, but all taking pieces and building these lectures around philosophers and people.
Throughout historical, historically correct lens, or not historically correct, but, you know, going through papers and pieces by all these people throughout time.
And it's been really, you know, things like that.
I mean, we need things to help us with orientation in such an absurd world.
And we take for granted that things are just microphones and cameras, and I don't know how many tens of people are going to watch this because I'm on the show, but...
You know, I have this whiskey, right?
I love the shit out of it, but I'm not making a whiskey to be a celebrity with a product.
Otherwise, I'd have vodka because that's just a who-gives-a-shit-and-quality thing.
I remember being on tour in Japan for New Japan Pro Wrestling and having...
So it's pretty common that as you go from town to town, you would then go out and you'd be taken out by sponsors for the town, the local sponsors or maybe whoever put the event on, what have you.
And so I'd get taken out to these restaurants and they would always order stuff like cow, intestines.
There's four different types that are raw or this or that.
And they're always...
I figure what they're trying to do is test me.
Like, see if you fucking eat this.
Does Mikey like it or what?
And so...
Yeah, you're probably the only person laughing at that one here.
But it's a traditional setup where they have an oven with rocks and stone, and they will throw water over the stones and things like that.
It's not a dry one like a finish, but...
It's similar to any other sort of sauna setups as you can come across, but it's not a steam room.
And that's also famous for they have a process where they take these bundles of tree branches with leaves and everything on them and They'll use white oak, eucalyptus, and put blends together.
And what they'll do is they'll take these two bundles, and they'll whip the air around you as you're sitting there.
They whack your body with it.
And these leaves, these bundles, are made of mostly fresh.
So they're still oils.
They're still live.
There's still elements within it.
It's not fully dried out or anything like that.
And so this thing is all being hit upon you, and they'll hit your feet, and they'll do all this kind of stuff.
To be honest.
So the first time I ever went through this, this guy is like beating my ass with these things.
And I'm just like, okay, I can get through this.
I know this has got to be healthy.
I've read the Wikipedia.
It sounds all great.
And I'm sitting there and you go through sessions, like three-minute sessions or whatever.
And I'm on the third one, which is towards the end.
And he's whacking away and he's whipping these things around me and circulating all this super hot air.
And I swear to God, my pale ass, sensitive white boy skin was just felt like it was on fucking fire.
And to the point that I started, I'm like, I got, I got, I can't do the name.
And so I get up and I'm, I'm, I'm yelling in Japanese in Russia and jumping into a cold pool because I'm, I, I'm so fucked up from getting my ass beat by this little Russian guy with a pile of sticks.
And as you can relate, when you're sitting in those things, and it's pretty fucking hot, and you're trying to get through it, like, sometimes you're just...
It basically came down to the fact that Apple is too much in charge of your hardware and your software.
The minute the iPhone came out, I was like, cool phone, but you're telling me I've got to pay you more money to expand my memory or my storage capacity when I have a fucking memory card?
You see, you know, Keith, all the every time my guy goes.
Keith's up there just like, don't crush me while I'm up here trying to sing.
There's this chick who must have been this tiny little blonde thing who maybe weighed 110 pounds on her best day, who I chucked her once, and then she comes back.
She goes, I'm going to do it while holding this beer the whole fucking time.
And mind you, it was a can, but still...
I have a picture that I got from someone where she's launched into the air.
He'll have her beer.
She lands on the crowd.
And when she comes back to backstage, she goes, yeah, I didn't spill it.
I came on here a long time ago and I said, life gives you the opportunity to grow in as many ways as you want to choose to.
You didn't come out of the womb and just start shooting arrows.
It was something you decided you wanted to do.
And as you went through life, Joe Rogan's journey brought him to all these different things.
And from those, he acquired new things, new endeavors, but all these things required growth, required having to suck or whatever or deal with new things to begin with.
I'm learning how to distill.
Our head distiller's like, I want you running these runs from front...
I want you to learn how to do this from start to finish.
The quality of the corn kernels itself and the way they're cut.
To begin with, the way they're initially milled, which leaves them all in big kernels, but it exposes the sugars in such a way that when we go and we put it out there in the smoker, that this kernel of corn gets hit.
The smoke hits all of it and brings all these sugars to the surface.
Alfred, one of the investors, came to me and said, hey, we could make this fucking thing that's going to, you know, Conor McGregor's got a whiskey in this.
And I go, hold on.
I'm not here to talk bad about Conor McGregor and what he's doing.
I don't care if my product and his product are different.
It's fine.
And I understand the marketing potential, but I'm a whiskey head.
I got into this shit living in Japan.
My family's always drank whiskey.
It's always been around us, but I really got deep into being a connoisseur of this shit living over in Japan.
And so...
I was actually actively searching to link up with a whiskey distillery.
There it is.
Yeah, there I am, shoveling mesquite chips, to create a whiskey.
And I know that there's like McConaughey and other people, and Slipknot has a whiskey.
That's the thing is I've always tried to do everything that I do that way.
Because in a sense, if you take the concept of what is your word, your word is essentially the social credit on anything you do.
And if your word...
Doesn't have value, right?
If it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, if it isn't consistent, then no one's going to ever fucking believe you.
Well, when I'm endorsing things, that's an extension of my word.
So if I'm going to put bullshit out in the world that I don't fully invest in, then my word is going to get degraded.
So for even something like a whiskey, you could easily just merchandise it.
Like, who gives a fuck, right?
You could take that approach.
Or you could take the approach of every bottle of this shit that goes out and gets into someone's hands and touches their lips is an extension of me and my word.
Nietzsche would say, a man goes into a crowd, he He comes in with one mind and gets rid of it and takes on another.
It's true.
There's a difference between the mindset of groups and the mindset of the individual.
I'm not one to be such a hardcore individualist where I think the individual is I mean, I believe it is the starting point of everything, but it's not the end point of everything.
And we're made to be social creatures.
Exiling somebody out of a tribe way back when was tantamount to basically giving them a death sentence.
And they've said that somebody being in isolation away from other people can, at a point, become more detrimental than even being an alcoholic.
I don't know how they came up with that metric, how that lined up per se, but I know that by not...
Being attached to not having proper interaction with others is degradation to your sense of being and it is incredibly harmful to you.
So we're made to be in groups and we're also made to be individuals.
Now, I would say that the makeup of what you bring into a group is also related to what you create as an individual.
If you come in as a fully formed, healthy, capable individual, then you're only going to be somebody who could potentially, as long as you can keep what's important about yourself, you're only going to be a benefit to such a group.
There's certainly a little bit of that, but it's also just keeping your ideas...
The same.
Or not.
Like, sometimes there's benefit to change.
I mean, there's benefit to recognizing that these ideas that you have, in a lot of cases, they're really just sort of a defense mechanism and they've sort of shielded you from growth.
And then maybe you run into new people that have new ideas and these ideas resonate with you in a different way and you go, Okay, well now I'm faced with this truth that I can't ignore, that my previous conceptions of the world were twisted in some sort of a way.
A simple one I came across was even involved with this COVID stuff was trying to talk to people about how the mainstream media has had bad narratives from the get, you know, be it they were given bad information, but they fucking double down on it all the time.
Or if it's the WHO and they're running interference for China, whatever, right?
There's all this manipulation going on around something that is not subjective.
Viruses aren't subjective.
You can't play this game with that kind of thing.
And people would fight me tooth and fucking nail to defend the mainstream media over it.
And I'd go, look, here's example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Look at how they're all fucking wrong.
They're fucked up.
They're doing this.
They're politicizing.
They're doing all these different things for different reasons.
But none of it is really for your own...
Betterment of understanding and to be safer and healthier.
Or even just to say, we still don't know yet because we just don't have the data.
And people fight tooth and nail over this shit because there's so many people that use the current media apparatus as their mainstream sense-making apparatus.
And if you tear that away from them...
Now they have to sit back and go, what do I really know?
What is the reality of what I think truth is?
What is the metric upon understanding now that you've just shown me that...
And of course, even at its best, of course media is going to be faulty at times because it's just made up of people.
And that's what you see with whether it's CNN or Fox News or any of these motherfuckers.
They have this idea that they've been selling you, whether it's this idea about Russia, whether it's the idea about COVID, whether it's the idea about Trump, whether it's the idea about Biden.
I mean, they're selling you some shit And it's very, very difficult to get an unbiased perspective on the world.
They would write all this kind of completely disingenuous, just narrative-driven bullshit around you.
A person who brings people on and has conversations and tries to flourish that idea of...
The marketplace of ideas, like having conversations and trying to earnestly and sincerely explore things and try to have a better grip on the world and try to better orient themselves towards just knowing and knowledge, in addition to even having a fucking good time about it, being here.
When someone reaches a point where they're interacting with too many people and they have this potential to really influence things.
In terms of the political process, in terms of the way people view things, that becomes very dangerous for people that have a different perspective on things or people that are connected to a traditional machine.
I understand why people would attack me, and I understand why you'd even look at very small things that are taken out of context and develop your own perception of me that's inaccurate.
If this world was logical, a person like me wouldn't have no place where someone just comes from doing some live stream on a fucking laptop and then ten years later has hundreds of millions of downloads.
I think you're tapping into something that is universal.
I think that, you know, when it comes to like...
I love studying history and religion because those are some of the oldest insights into the way people think and the way people act.
And within these frameworks are tons of Windows into human thought process and psychology.
And it's the same.
None of it has changed over the oldest religious texts, the oldest historical things we can find, the stories that exist, the myths, all these things.
This is the same shit over and over and over again.
The first time I ever saw that was reading the Hagakure and seeing that the complaints and the issues, the criticisms that this monk, who was a former samurai, had of his current era in the 19th century, the same criticisms and problems and the same...
actions deriving from the same human places of insecurity and psychological elements.
It's all the same shit.
Nothing has changed.
We're not any different than a person in the sixth century in the Roman Empire or anything like that than anybody this era.
We're not different people.
We have different technology.
We have different communication in terms of which language you use, but we don't act differently.
We're not driven from different impulses.
We're not Rousseau.
We're not a blank slate.
I don't buy that concept at all because history would look so much radically different, but it fucking doesn't.
And I've written you so many times, and at times whoever has your old number, who's probably incredibly confused about what the fuck is this guy talking about, but about how I think a person like you is critical.
Towards the interaction of the current paradigm is.
You are a necessity.
Because right, wrong, whatever your personal opinion is, is whatever, it's the fact of creating the ability for people to get out here and speak.
Nobody ever had...
Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders in a place to feel more open.
And I'll say as politicians, they probably were as open as they could be, but they're fucking politicians in this current paradigm of the Western politician.
Who knows how legitimately sincere any of those fuckers are.
This has been probably the only place that you could have had someone like that and allowed it to that window into their least politician self.
I got to sit here and listen to Andrew Yang talk about UBI and be like, nah, dude, I don't fucking buy it.
I like you.
You know?
I fucking like you.
I like you.
Or it's just a matter of not being so pent up on, oh God, well my narrative, my ideology, my fucking, I gotta tribalize all this into such a degree that I have to tear down everything else around me so that mine can exist.
And that even goes with this bourbon or anything I do.
Like, I don't need to cut other things down for mine to rise to, for other people to enjoy it.
You don't have to tear apart the mainstream media for yours to exist.
Mind you, the mainstream media tries to destroy you all the time.
And this is not to say that managers aren't an important thing.
I think managers are very important.
How many times has anybody worked in a place where they have management that is so divorced from the creative or from the actuality of creating a product or whatever the job role is and yet these people are making decisions all the time?
And bleeding into telling people how to do their job instead of managing people to be able to be best at their job.
Well, they're invested in it as well because they have mortgages and they have bills and they want the money to keep rolling in.
So their idea is to make sure that whatever this thing that they're doing, whether it's a newspaper or whether it's a television show, they want to make sure that they stay in the most wide mainstream of lanes.
It's going to bring in the most money.
And that's the weird part about media in general, is that it's motivated by people that are trying to seek a profit.
That's what they're doing.
And there's a giant machine behind them.
We have two video editors and Jamie.
That's the whole deal.
And you can't...
This wouldn't exist any other way.
If you had more people, you would have like, well, you need a more diverse group of people working here.
Somebody who is trans or what have you might show up for a job that you need filled, and somehow you'd be like, well, because you're trans, you can't...
No, if they're capable of doing the job, you hire the fucking person.
I agree, but the way it looks in terms of optics, people feel like they need to hire X amount of Asian people and X amount of this people, and there's a weird...
It's a horrible heuristic saying that the makeup of somebody's external or the external makeup of a company somehow has any real indication of its actual quality and character.
One of the things I like about when Peterson brings that up is, and people always neglect this, is he goes, It almost seems as if really that perhaps women are just fucking smarter than us.
Like they're just saner.
They're like, oh, why be a maniac that only lives for this job?
Instead, how about I be a person that does all these other fulfilling things in their life instead of driving myself into this insane, near single-minded obsession?
I keep telling people, like, there's two people that I really idealize.
I don't even know if they know this.
So Bill and Wanda Goldberg and Michael Jai White and Gillian.
There are two couples with families that I look at them and I think, this is proof that this is a thing that is creatable.
You can have a beautiful, amazing family and have a great relationship and you can continue to create and make great things and you can really have it all.
It really is possible.
And I look at that and that's what I want.
I want family.
I want to be able to create my own sort of tribe around that from a familial sense.
And I want to bring a child into the world and pass along all that has been given, and I say given, to me by all these amazing people and all the amazing relationships and experiences that I've acquired throughout life.
And I try to do that with my so-called quote-unquote kids, my students.
And I impart these This lineage down to them, these experiences, this knowledge, I give to them, and I give to my friends, and I do as much as I can to keep the flame alive.
People have talked to me about running my blood sport events.
My pro wrestling stuff that I've been doing.
And me and GCW could easily put together a blood sport event with no audience...
And as long as we got the revenue to do so, we'll make a killer event.
We don't need an audience for what we create.
And the UFC has done a great job in the way they have been handling, testing, and putting people in.
One of my best friends, Eric Hammer, Eric Arabello, he trains and works with Spike, who fights in UFC right now, a ginger-haired wild man.
And he told me all about the process they put everybody through for testing.
And he also works with Benil Dariush.
It's pretty rigorous.
You know, hats off to the UFC for keeping people employed.
And this isn't to knock at Bellator either, because I'm sure they have their reason and their rationale for running their business the way that they do.
But the UFC found a way that they could create the opportunity to keep people working, so to speak.
Combat sports is such an integrated part of Japanese culture, be it doing judo or karate or something like that, just in grade school or middle school.
No, no, no, because there's something about a Conor McGregor fight at the fucking sold-out T-Mobile Arena where everybody goes apeshit and Sinead O'Connor singing and there's blue smoke everywhere or green smoke everywhere.
There's something wild about that, too, where it's a spectacle.
But there's something uniquely raw about these Apex fights, where they have them at the Apex Center, and the one we did won in Florida as well.
So if you've got a protest and you're out here to say, like, hey, fucking get your shit together, and then someone starts lighting off fireworks in the middle of your crowd, or someone starts turning it into, hey, get your shit together, hey, we're going to push your shit in, Right.
Well, one of the interesting things that seems to be happening, and I've been reading a lot about this, is one of the things that the CDC, the death rate of COVID has dropped so low, it's in consideration for being removed from pandemic status.
Yeah, so I think what's happening is younger people are getting it now because a lot of people, believe it or not, got it because of the protest.
Head distiller, David, used to work in infectious disease, and he told me about the structure of the disease itself and why is soap and water so effective.
Well, it emulsifies the fats around the virus itself and it breaks it down.
But he also says that coronaviruses are known for enjoying colder weathers.
So fall and winter is a possibility.
And then when you talk about spikes...
So that thing, one of the things that really was in my mind when I was talking about people fighting tooth and nail to defend their use of mainstream media as their de facto sense-making apparatus is that...
I was posting stuff about wearing masks.
And by the way, all the people that I listen to who are giving me information, either stuff coming straight past the firewall in China, like weird Twitter accounts and YouTubers and whatever, I had my supplies end of January because, one, I live in an earthquake state and I needed to I live in an earthquake state and I needed to have it anyways.
So it didn't make – it wasn't like no skin off my nose.
I didn't have enough – I wasn't storing water and whatever.
And, okay, I should have that just in case there's an earthquake.
So I'll do it for this.
And then, but I had enough toilet paper.
I had enough things because I figured people are going to be the big problem.
That's what's, that's the thing that I can, that's going to affect this the most.
And I told so many people and they all looked at me like, what are you, some sort of fucking weirdo prepper?
And I go...
I guess.
But when I can wipe my ass, you'll be, you know, let's see what you do and let's see how much your cat likes it when you've got no more toilet paper left over.
But I was like, look, everybody, we need to be wearing masks.
And people would fight me because the mainstream media said, don't wear masks.
You know, we need masks for the...
Look, fuckface, I didn't say N95 mask, which, by the way, there's also N99, and there's also P95 and P99, and you don't even understand the classification of masks, and now you're going to fucking tell me when I've already done the research, and I know what the difference is.
And now you're going to just fucking put cloth over your face.
Do something.
When you had Lex on here, fucking sweet dude, Lex Friedman.
I personally think it's due to just mask wearing on a cultural basis.
I think it's due to...
If you tell people in Japan, like, okay, hey, we got some shit coming up.
Here's these three things that you need to do.
They will do them.
It's the same reason why when you have...
You have a natural disaster coupled with a nuclear issue like the tsunami, Fukushima, that the older people will come up and go, okay, hey, you younger guys, you've got families, you've not lived as long as us, leave.
We're going to go in.
We'll take care of it.
That's why they will put together...
Resource centers or fallout centers for people to house in while everything's destroyed and no one's getting raped and murdered.
Whereas Katrina hits, you fill up the Superdome because, holy shit, man, there's all these people that are displaced.
You guys are suffering like mad.
Okay, well, we got at least this piece of property that we can use to try and help people out.
And it turns into a fucking nightmare in that place.
I find that so fascinating, how cultures evolve so differently.
It's just so interesting that human beings—I mean, even the negative aspects of it.
Like, I was talking to a friend of mine once.
We were talking about communism and the threat of communism.
Oh, you don't have to worry about that here.
And I'm like, listen, man, the people that live in North Korea are humans in 2020. And they are under the grip of a military dictatorship.
There's no getting around that.
The people that live in the United States in 2020 are not.
But they're just humans on Earth during the same time, and there's styles of living.
It's a weird way to look at it, but if you look at it in terms of styles of living, there are styles of living.
And these styles of living, whether you're in a cult, or whether you're in a commune, or whether you're a part of a Republican town, or whether you're living in Chaz before they tore it down, there's styles of living.
And some styles are far more problematic than others.
And the style of living that we should really be worried about is top-down power.
One person like a Kim Jong-un who's running the whole fucking show.
And if you don't cry when his dad dies, you have to go to jail for six months.
I had a conversation with someone a long time ago.
And I go, look, the problem is if you have the ability to at least vote.
I mean, that's a whole other discussion about how effective our votes are anymore.
But at least there is some semblance of us being a part of the process and being able to freely protest and do other things to try and influence the way government is going.
of the process and being able to freely protest and do other things to try and influence the way government is going.
When you have this massive top-down structure, it's just not going to happen.
When you have this massive top-down structure, it's just not going to happen.
They're going to dictate from top-down.
They're going to dictate from top-down.
Plus, it's the idea that you can predict everything that everyone's going to need all the time.
And that's just impossible.
You can't predict every necessity.
You can't predict every problem that's going to come.
That and just what I understand, what little I will say I understand from even reading people like Nassim Taleb or Balaji Srinivasan or epidemiologists or talking to my head distiller or my student Mary who literally works on COVID machines in a microbiology lab.
Okay, I can understand a little bit, but I know that even they don't have all the information.
Nobody can.
It's novel because it's new.
Now, I know that they've been studying Chinese horseshoe bat coronaviruses since like 2015, or maybe even sooner than that, especially after the issue that the world had with SARS. So, of course, it starts to become a priority.
Fine.
But here we are, here and now.
What I don't know, I'm not going to just assume that things will just be fucking fine.
That's just not a way I can approach things.
What I have to do is, what I can take on responsibility for myself, okay, that's mine.
But for other people, different story.
And when I can do something as simple as wear a mask and be in public, I'm not damaging.
I'm insuring myself and others from hardly doing anything.
Well, we also talked about before the podcast, you take the necessary precautions to protect your own health in terms of supplementation, in terms of...
And following up on any kind of studies and just any previous understanding of supplementation in regards to other viruses and infection and things like that.
But also...
When this first came down, I had stuff to protect my eyes.
When the shit hit the fan, the big fear was that this was going to be something that we really had to worry about that was going to kill a giant percentage.
But for a while there, what I would do is, when I would leave the house, I had my outdoor clothes and my indoor clothes.
When I came back in the house, I took all my shit off in my little foyer, put it in the corner, Cleaned, took a shower, cleaned up, then put on my indoor clothes.
To make sure that if I was an issue, all right, I don't know what this virus can or will do, but I'm going to avoid bringing it into my house as best as possible.
From what sources I have, coronaviruses are not the kind of thing that mutates very much, and what they're more likely to do is become more benign and not more aggressive.
I have heard that, but I also have heard that the strain in India is so vastly different than the strain here that if they develop a vaccine for the strain that's in North America, it literally won't work for what's in India.
The unknown is one of the greatest motivators or creators of fear.
But I would say that this reminded me a lot from Git.
As soon as it was like, okay, we need to shelter in place or safer at home or whatever the case may be.
And it just made me think of Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men.
He wrote, you know, you can change your name.
You can do this.
You can do that and go to some other place.
But at the end of the day, when you're laying there in bed and you look up at the ceiling, it's just yourself staring back at you.
And you're made up of the days that came before and nothing else.
So you can cry and change what all, but you're not any different.
You're the same person.
It doesn't matter where you are in the world.
You're still you.
And so these people are having to sit there at times, especially those that don't.
There's these people in a relationship where they're now starting to realize, well, what kind of relationship do I really fucking have?
What is this built upon?
Or even sitting at home and people having to sit there and basically be in the mirror All day long with themselves.
And how many people are really – how many people are really built upon the foundational tools of like fulfilling meaningful things?
Like things that – I don't want to die.
Tomorrow, today, not even five years from now, not ten.
Hell, if given the chance, I would fucking live a thousand years if I could because I think that this world is so fucking amazing that there is...
I don't think I could learn all the languages, eat all the foods, even the ones I don't like, see all the mountains, all the architecture, meet all the people, all the cultures, all the fucking everything that exists in this just glorious fucking amazing place.
I don't know.
I feel sad that my life can't go on long enough to know these things.
But I've lived such a life to this point.
There are things that...
10-year-old me would just have fucking had an aneurysm, thinking that this was ever going to be the way his life turned out, considering what an outcasted, pushed aside, bullied, fucked with...
I'm a really sort of twisted up, confused young lad and getting to where I am now and I can leave this place and die and my life has been fucking great.
I'm fulfilled.
I live because I want to experience things, I want to create more, I want to do more with my life, but my life has been great enough.
It's been great.
I've had all the things that I need that are essential in life.
If there's no risk, if there's no struggle, there's no overcoming.
And, you know, it's like I always say, like I always say, I have this concept of human entropy, that all humans without proper suffering and overcoming, to use some generic words, obviously from a Nietzschean perspective, you just go to your lowest state of energy.
People are...
All things in the universe are subject to entropy and humans are no different.
And so obviously we experience entropy and then our bodies break down and obviously we have cellular degradation and things like that.
But we can spiritually degrade.
And if we don't have...
Proper overcoming.
If we don't have a certain kind of suffering in our life or agitation, we don't grow.
And I'm also a big fan of Heidegger, so like being towards death.
Knowing that this is inescapable.
Stop trying to...
To look for anything to alleviate the burden of your own death and the responsibility of your own creation of an authentic life.
Because at the end of the day, you can do all these different fucking things.
You can change your mind.
You can become this kind of fucking ideological.
You're a communist or you're an alt-right or you're this or you're that.
You can create all these little things.
You can be a Christian or a Catholic or whatever, right?
If you're using these things to replace your ownership of authenticity and carrying the burden of your own being in the world, then eventually, regardless of all this shit that you do, when you're laying in bed at night and you're looking up at that fucking ceiling, you know that you're a fucking when you're laying in bed at night and you're looking up at that fucking ceiling, you know that you're a fucking fraud and that Yes.
So, you know, for me it was, yeah, let's buy this gun made in 1970 and it has an incredibly rare amount of spare parts available and reloading data and all this stuff.
I mean, it kicks pretty substantial, but I've seen women shoot them with no problem.
Yeah.
I learned to the point of taking the—in fact, I dislocated my shoulder fighting Cro Cop.
So I couldn't work on my Cobra, my Mustang, and I couldn't even drive it at the time.
I was like, well, this blows.
What can I do?
All right.
Well, while my arm's in a sling, I'm going to take my auto mag apart and completely take it down to the frame, have the frame be blasted, put it all back together.
And then I was on this forum, so I'm talking with this legendary Pistolero, rest in peace, Lee Juris, who is famous for creating these custom, badass auto mags and taking antelope with auto mags at 200, 300 yards.
And so I'm sitting there just chatting with this guy on direct message on fucking forums.
And he's like, yeah, OK, well, when you're going to if you want to slick this action up, here's here's the type of compound I would use.
Here's this.
You know, here's the places.
And so here I am.
Just fucking away, playing around on this little – tinkering around on this piece and put my gun back together and go out and shoot it and it just fucking cloverleafs things and it's brilliant.
But it's also the brilliant that regardless whether it's pistols or – it doesn't matter the thing.
You're learning.
You're learning.
You're putting yourself in the position to where, okay, well, you're going to make mistakes and now you're part of that creative process.
By being as involved in the whiskey, it means that much more to me but I also – Don't know any other way to do it.
Like, I probably could have had someone make that playlist for Spotify for me.
Or just thrown in a few tracks and then just use the recommendation at the bottom.
Well, and your podcast, like anything else anybody does, will take on evolution.
Yeah.
One of the things that I would say in regards to you is the way people talk about you, to me, says more about them than it ever says about you.
And when I have someone, let's say, respond and take a bunch of uncharitable takes, I'm like, oh, you actually don't fucking pay attention, do you?
You're really not listening.
You're not listening at all.
You don't understand anything of what Joe's creating here.
You have no clue.
And you're telling me not about Joe at all.
You're only telling me about yourself.
And I just, through everything you do, that opportunity for new pathways, new growth, better understanding, what is it, the Maya Angelou quote, we do the best we can, and when we know better, we do better.
And that's a really simple way of looking at things, but when we know better, we can do better.
When we know better, whether we do better, we can just do differently sometimes.
And seeing the progress of this podcast Like I told you, I talk to people from the internet dark web.
Now, I talk to the IDW guys.
I talk to Dr. So.
I talk to James Lindsay.
I talk to Eric Weinstein.
I've been to dinner with Eric.
And there's probably other people I'll meet through this.
And for me, it's just I want to be exposed to all these people's ideas and thoughts and these conversations, especially when they're going to be in areas of expertise.
Yeah, it's fascinating, and for me, it's very valuable to be able to get those people's thoughts, and yours as well, to get them out to the world.
I think it's very beneficial.
And I think for a guy like you, it's very beneficial because they look at you, and again, if they looked at you on the outside, they go, oh, the youngest ever fucking UFC heavyweight champion has got some shit to say?
Something I've had to deal with in my life is that I think that there was or is maybe even still this...
Idea, this construct of what I'm supposed to be and how successful or what have you I should be, right?
And if I exceed that, people get pissed that I'm somehow doing something in a way that they don't think I should be or that I'm getting notoriety in a way that I'm No, no, no.
You're not supposed to be that person.
No, you're supposed to be this and only this.
And if you exceed that, fuck you for not being what I want you to be.
Yeah, and I realized that when I was like 21. And I remember real distinctly the time period when I recognized it.
I just recognized that I had a deep flaw in the way I was looking at things.
And I realized, like, oh, this is weak.
But once I recognized it as a weakness, it was impossible to embrace it anymore.
Then I realized, like, oh, okay.
That feeling of discomfort that you get when looking at someone who's clearly better than you at stuff...
That should be a blessing.
You should be happy that that person exists because that person is fuel.
That's going to motivate you to do better as long as you approach it with the right mentality.
As long as you don't become a hater.
Haters are all losers.
There's no winners that are haters.
And they don't even realize that every time they hate, they think they're getting you or getting that guy or taking her down or throwing these jabs out there and that it's going to work and make you feel bad.
What they don't realize is they're literally stealing time away from their own interests and loves.
Well, nobody lies to themselves more than themselves.
And unfortunately, we are the best at finding every excuse we can to justify our position.
And it's just like, okay, I'm dealing with whatever from all this ideological poisoning and all this shit in my own home.
And yet, at the end of the day, instead of going out there and just being like, look at how terrible everything is and just taking a very surface level understanding, just being like, well, it sucks.
I'm going to tell you it sucks.
And I'm going to tell you that this person sucks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the reality is, is that, okay, even the ideological stuff, it's not all bullshit.
Not everything is a lie.
And it wasn't necessarily created just to damage me.
Stop making it all about myself.
And even then, it's also like, okay.
If all you can do is say something bad about the person that you chose to be in a relationship with, then that says more about you than them.
And to think that I would never be involved in somebody with somebody that I didn't love and enjoy.
And so to say that regardless of how things finished, that doesn't mean to sit there and say that that which was negative takes precedent over anything else is a really myopic way of viewing things.
And it's more or less I would see it as a tool to to narrow your focus into that which you you want to take precedent.
Which you so you can you can justify your your grievance in this instead of saying, OK, well, I can have a real grievance.
and that's totally acceptable, and I can justify it, I can show for the grievance itself.
But this wasn't only a grievance.
The whole thing itself isn't nothing but grievance.
They can get it from the website warbringerbourbon.com slash warmaster and we ship to everything but I think maybe only seven states and it is available in some liquor stores.
Obviously can't get it any bars really right now since they're not open but it is yeah go through with the website use warbringer10 to get 10 bucks off.