Oct. 7, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:49:20
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | |
| All day. | ||
| Hello, gentlemen. | ||
| We're rolling. | ||
| We're rolling. | ||
|
unidentified
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Holy shit. | |
| Evan and Matt. | ||
| I've known you guys for a long time and I've enjoyed your coffee for a long time, so I'm happy you guys could come on here and talk some shit. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love being on shows with Matt, especially with you. | ||
| This is fucking incredible. | ||
| Dude, your ridiculous setup that you put in the kitchen with all the coffee and the espresso. | ||
| I videotaped it so people could see. | ||
| But the measuring of the weight of the grams of the espresso. | ||
| I know you got into it. | ||
| You were into coffee before you were in the military, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you started bringing coffee and a roaster and a whole setup with you overseas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But, like, were you this, like, measuring it and the exact temperature of the water and all that jazz? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think, like, way back in late 90s, I guess, is probably where it all began. | ||
| And I always say this, where, you know, every good story starts with a good chick, basically. | ||
| And I met this barista back in the late 90s, and she turned me on to espresso. | ||
| So I started really going down the rabbit hole in coffee. | ||
| So she was just like really into espresso or something? | ||
|
unidentified
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She wasn't. | |
| She was hot and she was a barista. | ||
| But that was the gateway to this entire thing. | ||
| And then as I continued to evolve my coffee nerd sense of me, I was like, well, you know what? | ||
| This Green Beret thing sounds pretty cool. | ||
| I would love to be able to do that. | ||
| Jump out of planes and maybe overthrow some countries. | ||
| That sounds pretty rad. | ||
| But it never left. | ||
| And so I was still way into coffee. | ||
| I was roasting coffee on fires and on my stove and getting different weird espresso machines. | ||
| And the funny thing is, back when I was an SF guy, people would make fun of me all the time, like, you hipster douchebag. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| If we were together, I would have made fun of you a lot. | ||
| You're like, sweet, 30 minutes to make a cup of coffee? | ||
| What are you fucking doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Well, that's why it's a funny contrast between this badass Special Forces guy and someone who's really meticulous with their coffee. | ||
| No cream. | ||
| Don't you dare. | ||
|
unidentified
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No way. | |
| Jack Carr kind of makes fun of it in his books where he talks about putting honey in his Black Rifle coffee. | ||
| And half of it is just to kind of mock the fact that people who really love coffee won't put anything in it. | ||
| It's a travesty. | ||
| They won't. | ||
| And Jack is one of my friends. | ||
| So when he came out to the house, he was doing research for his book. | ||
| I was making him a cup of coffee. | ||
| And he was like, dude, this is fucking insane. | ||
| Like, how long is this going to take? | ||
|
unidentified
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I was like, man, it takes as long as it takes. | |
| So that entire setup that we just put in your studio, I had that in my coffee lab in my house, that entire thing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I'm out here and I was roasting coffee on my stove and going way down the rabbit hole with Jack. | ||
| And he's taking notes, you know, for his book. | ||
| And he's a former SEAL, you know, so we're talking shit. | ||
| And he's like, you must have just been picked on in the teams, right? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| That's why, you know, I was like, if you just have to run fast, because if you're going to do something weird like this, you got to be able to run really fast, do a lot of fucking pull-ups and push-ups, and shoot really well. | ||
| I think that was one of the things where I was like, man, I got to be really good at all these things because it's got to offset... | ||
| All my D-baggery over here. | ||
|
unidentified
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With coffee! | |
| Some people have to respect you, even though you're so balls deep in a coffee. | ||
| It's an interesting story. | ||
| We both had similar professions post-military as contractors, and I was in this fob, and I'm sitting there, I'm like, why the fuck is there this $50,000 espresso machine for a very small base in the middle of nowhere? | ||
| Well, come to find three years later, I'm chatting with Evan, I'm like, yeah, dude, I don't know, the agency bought some stupid-ass espresso. | ||
| He's like, yep, that That was me. | ||
| So he convinced the supplier or whoever to buy this super intricate freaking espresso machine in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| I'm like, of course it was you. | ||
| Of course it was you. | ||
| So that's exactly the entire story. | ||
| So I'm working at the agency then. | ||
| So fast forward a few years later. | ||
| And the logistics person came to me and he or she was like, hey, what kind of espresso machine or coffee machine should we buy? | ||
| And I was like, oh, don't worry. | ||
| I'll send you the links to it. | ||
| And it was like $30,000 espresso machine from... | ||
| I imported it from Italy and had it flown in through some other logistics situation. | ||
| And she's like, so this is it. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, but we still need a grinder too, right? | ||
| And that was something that kind of lived in not only infamy, that I'd gotten the entire logistic system to buy me this espresso machine from Italy. | ||
| There was no oversight? | ||
| No one was looking at the accounts and going, what the fuck is... | ||
| Contrary to popular belief, congressional oversight and budgets at times is a little bit hazy when you're in war. | ||
| They just kind of say, here's lump sum. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Here's $23 million. | ||
| As long as you can justify it, maybe we'll be okay. | ||
| Well, you know how the government works, too. | ||
| At the end of a fiscal year, they're like, we got some money to spend or we don't get this budget next year. | ||
| And honestly, in Iraq early on, it was like a dumpster fire with cash. | ||
| Just the tax dollars that were just burnt in that place on just dumb shit. | ||
| You couldn't even imagine. | ||
| When I look back on it now, as a guy that's very vested in what's happening to my tax dollars, I'm like, what the fuck were these idiots doing? | ||
| Like, this is so dumb. | ||
| It was so dumb. | ||
| Besides espresso machines, what was the other ridiculous shit that the money was being spent on? | ||
| Oh, well, here's a great example. | ||
| So, and I've got a myriad of them, but we had a field of up-armored vehicles that were really fucking expensive, like $500,000 a pop, give or take. | ||
| We couldn't take them anywhere because... | ||
| They were so obvious that it was a up armored vehicle that you just drive around and people would want to take pot shots at you for the fun of it. | ||
| So you have these beautiful half a million to a million dollar cars that you can't use. | ||
| So you got to go when we're working in the low viz capacity. | ||
| It means, like, you're just trying to blend in, just not get shot, man. | ||
| Like, don't pick a fight. | ||
| Like, let's just blend in, do our job, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| But if you have a really expensive looking, like, G5 or something that's just really a G5 in the middle of fucking Baghdad in a war zone, people are going to want to take- What's the pressure washed and all clean? | ||
| That Mercedes, that big Mercedes. | ||
|
unidentified
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A G-Wagon? | |
| Yeah, a G-Wagon. | ||
| They had G-Wagons? | ||
| Like a bulletproof G-Wagon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| A G-Wagon! | ||
| All of this stuff is up-armored. | ||
| So when you look at this, like any vehicle you want, you can get a level of armor to it. | ||
| But... | ||
| If you buy the most ridiculous and expensive vehicle in the middle of fucking war-torn country X, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. | ||
|
unidentified
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And the whole intent of the mission is to blend in. | |
| So to my point, you'll have fields of shit that you can't use because some dumbass is pulling the trigger on your government tax dollars going, this looks good to me. | ||
| Might as well just see how that looks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pfft! | |
| Why don't they take an old Chevy Blazer and then retrofit it? | ||
| Well, there's that, too. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| Do they do that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| When you look, go down the rabbit hole in armored vehicles. | ||
| Obviously, you probably wouldn't, but if you wanted an armored vehicle... | ||
| Of any kind. | ||
| You can get it. | ||
| Now, there are different armored vehicles from different companies. | ||
| So, for instance, Mercedes builds their armored vehicles from ground up. | ||
| It's one of the best, if not the best, armored vehicle in the world. | ||
| It's built from ground up. | ||
| Jamie has it right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The G-Class originally was a military vehicle, yeah. | ||
| That's why it's so durable. | ||
| Like my wife has one of those. | ||
| It's like the door is like fucking ka-chunk. | ||
| It's not like any other car. | ||
| It's so thick, like the gauge steel. | ||
| They don't make cars like it. | ||
| No, and that, it's so boxy and it's got such good angles to it that I think that it really fits well. | ||
| They look dope. | ||
| They look fucking incredible. | ||
| Do you remember the weight on like a level seven Like how those things are so fucking heavy. | ||
| It offset the gravity of the earth. | ||
| It was so fucking heavy. | ||
| Like those things are so heavy and so top heavy. | ||
| That was the other issue too. | ||
| You're not going anywhere fast in those things. | ||
| So if you need to get out. | ||
| Yeah, if it's armored up, right? | ||
| So you must have like steel plates at the bottom of it. | ||
| It's all built from ground up. | ||
| So it's not as if you have a steel plate that you can remove or something or that's been retro welded in. | ||
| It's built on the factory line. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| For it to be an armored vehicle. | ||
| So do they make them for military guys or do they make them for like dictators? | ||
| No, they make them for really rich pricks or dictator X or military, whoever it is. | ||
| Who doesn't want to get blown up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can take, I think it's something like three rounds of AK-47, so 7.62x39 in a three-inch square. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And that's through the entire vehicle. | ||
| So when you're getting... | ||
| When you're getting lit up in one of those, one, it's an interesting experience that you're never going to forget. | ||
| And then two, you're feeling pretty good, especially if they're shooting at you with AK or just like, whatever, I'm going to have a snack. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys keep doing whatever you're doing. | |
| So have you been inside one while it's under attack? | ||
| Oh, gosh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So what is it like? | ||
| Just tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink? | ||
| Yeah, some tinks. | ||
| And obviously, you know, your job is not to stick around and kind of absorb the rounds, but a level 7 is what it's called. | ||
| And so when you're in a level seven armored vehicle, it's getting shot at by either seven, six, two by 39, or, you know, increase the, the caliber of, of rifle or belt fed. | ||
| It will absorb a certain amount of rounds. | ||
| Sometimes it'll be loud and sometimes it'll be really muted and quiet depending on just where it strikes, where it strikes, how it strikes. | ||
| So if it's striking an angle, if it's perpendicular to the round, where is it hitting, uh, You know, so how close are you to the shooter? | ||
| How perpendicular you are to the round? | ||
| How big is the round? | ||
| So it'll kind of... | ||
| It'll sound different depending on where you're at. | ||
| And you can kind of gauge, like, where's that coming from? | ||
| How much weight does it add to the overall truck? | ||
| Oh gosh. | ||
| Those doors, if you were to put your finger in one of those level 7 doors by hand, it's super heavy. | ||
| You'll get it trimmed off. | ||
| And that's a really weird factoid about level 7s is you never want to roll down the windows and you really can't on a lot of them. | ||
| So if one of your teammates farts in the fucking vehicle, it's the worst because you can't open the door, roll down the window. | ||
| You're like, really, dude? | ||
| Yeah, you can't go through Chick-fil-A drive-thru in one of those things. | ||
| No, you can. | ||
| I think you can get the window down about this far, give or take. | ||
| But it'll also take a finger off if you decide to roll up the window. | ||
| The window is going to be three and a half to four inches thick. | ||
| That's how big it is. | ||
| And it's not glass. | ||
| It's a plastic, essentially. | ||
| Some type of plastic that you can see through. | ||
| And you can see through. | ||
| It looks somewhat like glass. | ||
| If you get close to an armored vehicle... | ||
| How many dickheads are listening to this right now going, I need that in my life? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I need one of those. | ||
| There's actually a lot of companies that do that. | ||
| They take Tacomas or Tundras and they outfit them with Level 7s. | ||
| I mean, I think that's just kind of badass. | ||
| One day I won't. | ||
| Doesn't that DevRolo company do that? | ||
| Do you know that company, DevRolo? | ||
| Oh yeah, that's what I was talking about. | ||
| Yeah, they do that plastic coating on the outside. | ||
| What's that shit called? | ||
| The hard plastic coating on the outside. | ||
| It's like synthetic Kevlar or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's like this hard plastic coating. | ||
| I forget what it's called. | ||
| Usually, they use it for undercoating some cars, but a lot of cars, they do it on the outside as well. | ||
| And then they'll do a whole bulletproof treatment of them. | ||
| Those things are like $500,000, too. | ||
| They're pretty expensive. | ||
| Yeah, expensive. | ||
| Jamie, go to DevRolo. | ||
| They'll do a 700 horsepower engine option and all kinds of crazy shit. | ||
| When you look at the, we'll call it the Mercedes. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Sometimes you'll have a V12 twin turbo V12 and a Mercedes. | ||
| That's got to be 6700 wheels. | ||
| Go to just their model range. | ||
| Where the model range is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then go to the Predator. | ||
| Volo limousine. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| Yeah, they make a limo. | ||
| But the Predator, I think, is their top of the line. | ||
| Oh, that's their F-150. | ||
| They do an F-150 and they also do a Tundra. | ||
| But there's that shit on the outside. | ||
| Line-X? Is that what it's called? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that what it's called? | ||
| Yeah, that's Line-X. Yeah. | ||
| So it's this really durable plastic that you can't scratch or dent. | ||
| So now that you're in Texas, is that going to be your Texas truck? | ||
| I think I might have to... | ||
| DevX. | ||
| Oh, they call it DevX. | ||
| So it's like a version of LineX, I'm sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think it used to be called LineX. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those things are mean looking. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Yeah, that's dope. | ||
| Also, okay, so they do it for Jeeps, too, there. | ||
| Oh, they do it with everything. | ||
| Yeah, it's Linux. | ||
| Because they've been doing... | ||
| Mercedes, ew. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Yeah, it's disgusting. | ||
| Unscratchable, but it looks like shit. | ||
| They look okay, I guess. | ||
| It's kind of like a matte looking, but the texture... | ||
| Yeah, I've seen people do that with Jeeps and shit. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think Dudley did it to one of his. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His Jeep was just at the office. | ||
| I think he's got some kind of... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just saw it. | ||
| I just saw it in Utah. | ||
| I didn't notice that. | ||
| I'll probably just imagine. | ||
| My mind had not been paying attention, though. | ||
| We were looking at so many different things when we were up there. | ||
| Yeah, but that... | ||
| So this company does that, but it's like... | ||
| I think that was like... | ||
| There's a lot of rich Russian guys that drive around those things. | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of a rich Russian thing to do, right? | ||
| It's like... | ||
|
unidentified
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Number one ballasted car in USA. Yeah. | |
| If you're a rich Russian, chances are someone wants to kill you. | ||
| I would say that's a really high percentage. | ||
| It's a high possibility. | ||
| It's a high possibility. | ||
| So when you got out of the military, how long was it before you started Black Rifle? | ||
| It was started basically at the same time. | ||
| Is there coffee in this thing right here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's still coffee in there. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| What kind of coffee is this? | ||
| That is that Cinnabon that I roasted special for this place. | ||
| That Ethiopian shit that you sent me? | ||
| It's a Costa Rican. | ||
| Yeah, what did you think of that Ethiopian? | ||
| It's the fucking bomb diggity, man. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I was turned on to Ethiopian coffee. | ||
| I had this guy, Peter Giuliano. | ||
| He's a coffee expert back in the day. | ||
| I had him on the podcast a few years back. | ||
| I was just interested. | ||
| I was like, what is it? | ||
| These people that are really into coffee. | ||
| I started reading about people who are really into coffee. | ||
| I'm like, I want to know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| Like, what is happening? | ||
| Like, these real heavy coffee nerds. | ||
| Because I would just get coffee and pour cream in it. | ||
| And then I was into, like, MCT oil and grass-fed butter and coffee for a while. | ||
| But the problem with that is people on the podcast got so annoyed with me going... | ||
| Every 30 seconds. | ||
| Because you've got all this grass-fed butter and MCT oil in your throat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just like coats you. | ||
| So I got this guy, Peter Giuliano, come on and he just explained to me the whole thing, how all coffee came from Ethiopia. | ||
| And then the difference between wet processing and dry processing and coffee rust and all these different things. | ||
| We went down the rabbit hole for like three hours. | ||
| The best analogy I have for coffee, it's so similar to wine, right? | ||
| You have the wine connoisseurs that can taste all the tasting notes and all that. | ||
| Then you have the average consumer that goes and buys BadaBox just to get drunk or just for the caffeine. | ||
| It's very similar where if you go down the rabbit hole like Evan specifically. | ||
| With everything, cigars, with everything. | ||
| There's just dorks that take it to the next level. | ||
| And I think that for every one of those, whether it's wine or cigars or coffee or whatever it is, right? | ||
| Which is a total sidebar story of it as well, which is I went and had dinner with Crowder one night and we went to this cigar bar. | ||
| And he's a hardcore cigar aficionado. | ||
| Is he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so he was taking me down, you know, Cigar Street with whatever he's doing. | ||
| And I was taking him down Coffee Street and... | ||
| And so the geekiest conversation in America was taking place between Stephen and me as we're trying to eat steak in this bar in Dallas not too far from his office. | ||
| But I think for every one of those, you actually find a niche subculture of people that also share your... | ||
| You're saying passion for just obscure details and things. | ||
| So when you're talking about wine or coffee, you do have some type of common kinship, I guess, because I get it. | ||
| I totally get why people are into this one little thing and they want to go as deep and as interesting as they can. | ||
| I totally get it because I'm like that with coffee. | ||
| I never get bored of it if I go to Panama or Guatemala or Costa Rica. | ||
| Coffee is so fascinating from every aspect, whether we're looking at it from the international historical consequences of this entire commodity, whether it's commodities trading, whether it's growing and processing the future of coffee, | ||
| where is it headed, how are we optimizing the growing process so we don't run out of it, whether you're looking at it from a roasting or a drinking, all of that You can go as deep and as detailed as you want and it doesn't get fucking boring. | ||
| I could spend the rest of my life. | ||
| Have you guys ever thought about farming in America? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah. | |
| Is it possible to do in America? | ||
| Like can you do it in Texas? | ||
| No. | ||
| The climate's just not correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| We only have Kona out of Hawaii. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's about it. | |
| Which is fucking fantastic. | ||
| I love Kona coffee. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| Some really amazing flavors that come out of the Big Island for whatever reason, right? | ||
| It's a soil. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, it's a soil. | ||
| So when you have the high lava or... | ||
| But let's be honest. | ||
| That's not America. | ||
| No. | ||
| Hawaii's not America. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I mean, I love Hawaii, don't get me wrong. | ||
| But they should be allowed to be their own fucking country. | ||
| They're an island in the middle of the ocean. | ||
| It's five hours by plane from America. | ||
| How the fuck is that America? | ||
| I think they should be protected by America. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| But the idea that that's regular America... | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| There's a specific look Hawaiians have. | ||
| Oh, that dude looks Hawaiian. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's a guy from Iowa? | ||
| Oh, that guy looks Iowan. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's not the way that it works. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right! | |
| I mean, come on, man. | ||
| It's fucking crazy that that's America. | ||
| Yeah, plus, you kind of don't want America to fuck it up. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So it's like, keep it out there. | ||
| So, like, none of the American politicians can fuck that thing up to the point where we can't go out there and at least enjoy it in a peaceful, in a way that's beneficial for everybody. | ||
| I mean, They've done an amazing job of not fucking it up, thinking about how many people come there. | ||
| Every year, people are constantly going to Hawaii, and they've somehow or another managed to keep it together. | ||
| Well, I think it's pretty much America's vacation spot, where we're like, we'll take that island, so we have bachelorette parties, we can just roll out there and sit on Kauai for a couple days and drink margaritas. | ||
| The thing that I was thinking about when I was flying out there, which is really kind of a morbid thought in some ways, where I was thinking about all the fat that has flown across the ocean so they can go eat more fat on the island of Hawaii, in the sense of just people and the obesity of just generally flying seven hours, landing on an island, and then essentially sitting and eating in a buffet, and then flying back. | ||
| And I was thinking about the fuel That's being utilized to cart just general fat back and forth. | ||
| That's what I was thinking about when I was flying to Hawaii in January. | ||
| Fat and booze. | ||
| Yeah, fat and booze. | ||
| So much booze gets consumed there. | ||
| So much. | ||
| With me too. | ||
| When I go there, I just immediately start drinking. | ||
| I don't drink during the day here. | ||
| Like, very rarely. | ||
| But when I go to Hawaii, like, the moment I land, fuck, yeah! | ||
| There's something about the island vibe that you're like, it's 11am? | ||
| Mimosas, why not? | ||
| Fuck it, we got this. | ||
| Give me something with an umbrella. | ||
| Something with a pineapple slice in it. | ||
| Let's party. | ||
| I fucking love it there, and it's my favorite hunting destination. | ||
| Oh, mine too. | ||
| Because it's a great place to go to get tuned up for, like, elk hunting, because you get so many opportunities when you go to Lanai. | ||
| For Axis, right? | ||
| Yeah, and, like, ethically... | ||
| They have to kill those things. | ||
| There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. | ||
| They bring in snipers on a weekly basis. | ||
| Is that bad out there? | ||
| They have 30,000 deer, plus or minus. | ||
| They don't really know. | ||
| They're doing overhead surveys and shit on an island with 3,000 people. | ||
| And it's tiny. | ||
| Have you been? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| Bro, it's bonkers. | ||
| When you're there at nighttime and you hit the headlights and you just see thousands of eyes, you're like, whoa, this is crazy. | ||
| Well, Axis breed like hogs, as you know. | ||
| And I think a lot of people don't know in Texas with the exotics here, what happened over the last, you know, whatever, hundred years is the rains and storms wash out the high fences. | ||
| And then you get the Axis that escape. | ||
| And now they're like rampant where I live in hill country just an hour away. | ||
| I mean, they're They're fucking everywhere. | ||
| There's almost more than a wild whitetail. | ||
| My wife saw an axis near our house. | ||
| We were driving right next to my house on the way here. | ||
| We saw about a 34-inch axis and about, I don't know, 30 females out there in the field on the way in. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the crazy thing with Texas is they're considered exotics. | ||
| So as long as you have a hunting license, there's not the regulations like there are in the season with whitetails. | ||
| They're walking groceries, which is awesome. | ||
| They're so delicious. | ||
| They're so delicious. | ||
| They consider elk exotics. | ||
| Here? | ||
| Yeah, which is so weird because elk used to be native. | ||
| They used to be native here, but they were extirpated, and then now that they're back again, because they're not standard for Texas, they're now considered exotics, so there's no hunting season for elk out here. | ||
| Have you immersed yourself at all in the Texas hunting culture yet at all? | ||
| I've only been here for a month. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's wild, man, because you go to some... | ||
| I haven't even said y'all yet. | ||
| Y'all? | ||
| You haven't? | ||
| I've tried it. | ||
| It's an ill-fitting shoe for me in my vocabulary. | ||
| I can't use it. | ||
| I'm like a cultural mutt. | ||
| I'm like, what's up, bro, from SoCal, y'all? | ||
| And it's like, wait, what the fuck is this guy? | ||
| He said, bro, shred the gnar, and then y'all. | ||
| Yeah, shred the gnar, y'all. | ||
| But the hunting out here is crazy, because some of the high-fence ranches, and we're talking tens of thousands of acres, and if you ask them, can you shoot a giraffe? | ||
| They're like, everything's got a price tag, old boy. | ||
| And I mean, anything goes. | ||
| But I'm not shooting a giraffe. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But apparently they're delicious. | ||
| But it's out there. | ||
| I have a friend who shot a giraffe and he says they're fucking delicious. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they had to shoot one giraffe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So here's the thing about giraffes. | ||
| They are like every other animal. | ||
| They want to control breeding, right? | ||
| So every other male, large male, wants to control breeding. | ||
| And when you have a large male giraffe that fucks up all the other male giraffes, you're like, okay, we got a real problem with this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so they had to take out this giraffe. | ||
| So he was in Africa at the time. | ||
| And they shot this giraffe and they ate it. | ||
| And he said it was unbelievably delicious. | ||
| Did they reference what it tasted like? | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| It's got to be in the deer family, right? | ||
| Like, something like it? | ||
| Dinosaur? | ||
| What family is giraffe in? | ||
| I have no... | ||
| Here's my thing on it, though. | ||
| I'm not eating anything that is so friendly. | ||
| When you go to the zoo, a baby can feed it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, my daughter... | ||
| I have video of my daughter when she was two. | ||
| I was holding her, and the giraffe comes with this crazy tongue and takes the lettuce from her hands, and she's laughing. | ||
| I mean, they're just too chill, man. | ||
| And they're the only animal that I have no problem with at the zoo, too. | ||
| I used to have a bit about it. | ||
| Because every other animal at the zoo, you're like, let him go! | ||
| What the fuck is this? | ||
| Giraffes have no problem with that fence. | ||
| They're like, another day with no lions. | ||
| And they're just strolling over to where the lettuce is. | ||
| I feel like that's how they talk, very proper. | ||
| Yeah, that's how I think. | ||
| Yeah, I got a couple of those. | ||
| Just hanging. | ||
| Do you have an okapi? | ||
| No, I'm just joking. | ||
| I'm sure they have them out here! | ||
| We do have a zedonk at a ranch. | ||
| What a pretty animal, though. | ||
| The okapi? | ||
| Wow, that's beautiful. | ||
| Have you seen the zedonks here? | ||
| Is it a zebra donkey hybrid? | ||
| Yeah, they cross-pollinate and it's got zebra legs and then a donkey body. | ||
| It's super weird looking. | ||
| Oh, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, because a lot of those animals, if they get out, like a Zedonk crossover, then you have like, you know, Red Stag and Elk can actually mate together and make a hybrid crossbreed. | ||
|
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|
Seriously? | |
| Yeah, that's why they'll never keep on the same fences. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Yeah, cool, huh? | ||
| But that's an infertile animal, right? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| Most hybrids are like that. | ||
| I kind of want it as a pet. | ||
| Wow, what a beautiful thing. | ||
| What is that fucking thing with the giant... | ||
| Yeah, look at that cocksucker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| Woo! | ||
| Look at the size of those! | ||
| I think that's a Watusu. | ||
| I think you can Google that Watusu. | ||
| What the fuck kind of neck does it have to carry that around? | ||
| Look at that headgear. | ||
| It actually says... | ||
| What? | ||
| That's a Florida airboat. | ||
| That's a Watusu. | ||
| That's what it is? | ||
| It's very similar to a Texas Longhorn, but they got these really thick horns on them. | ||
| That's like a sprinter's thighs. | ||
| I think there's a Y in there. | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's a Y in there. | ||
| It's like W-A-Y-T-S-U or something. | ||
| Don't ask me. | ||
| Wild ass looking animal. | ||
| Well, Texas has... | ||
| I did a bit about Texas tigers. | ||
| There's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world. | ||
| One state, more tigers than all of the planet. | ||
| And they're all in dudes' yards. | ||
| Riddle me this. | ||
| Do you think after Joe Exotic that the increase of Texas ownership of... | ||
| Look at that motherfucker! | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| If you showed me that, I'd be like, oh, that's Avatar. | ||
| That's fake. | ||
| That's in a movie. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| Wow, what did that thing taste like? | ||
| It tastes just like cow. | ||
| I've had it. | ||
| I like how that's your first... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Look at that one! | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| What does it taste like? | ||
| I like how that's Joe's first question. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I wonder what that tastes like. | ||
| You need to know. | ||
| It tastes like cruising through. | ||
| Well, everything doesn't taste the same. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I've had people that have never had elk before, and I serve it to them, and they're like, holy shit. | ||
| I'm like, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, this is the real thing. | ||
| You feel different when you eat it. | ||
| You're like, whoo! | ||
| You feel pumped up because it's so filled with nutrients and vitamins and everything, you know? | ||
| It feels like alpha brain for your body. | ||
| Yeah, there's something to it. | ||
| There's definitely something to it. | ||
| There's a reason why they're running away from mountain lions all the time. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever tried it, but I've been taking grass-fed organic beef liver pills and stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You do it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I had a company hook me up, and man, I take that, and about 30 minutes after I eat, I'm super charged if I just take a B12 shot. | ||
| It's the weirdest thing, and I think you have to work your way up in dosage. | ||
| Yeah, that guy, Paul Saldino, Carnivore MD. Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think it's heart and soil supplements. | ||
| He sells grass-fed beef liver, beef heart, trachea, collagen. | ||
| I take all that shit. | ||
| Yeah, Trevor does all that. | ||
| Trevor Thompson, he takes all that shit. | ||
| Yeah, Trevor's super health conscious. | ||
| Yeah, I believe in that, 100%. | ||
| I mean, human beings are supposed to be eating organs. | ||
| When wolves kill, the first thing the alpha does is eat the liver. | ||
| The other wolves stand by and wait, and the alpha eats the liver. | ||
| It's the most nutrient-dense part of the body. | ||
| Do you keep it? | ||
| Do you keep your liver when you... | ||
| I love liver. | ||
| I buy liver at the store, too. | ||
| I buy calves liver when I run an elk liver. | ||
| I love heart, too. | ||
| Heart's delicious. | ||
| Dear heart is my favorite. | ||
| My brother chops it up and sears it in oil, almost fried a little bit. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| And an elk liver is as big as this fucking table. | ||
| It's so big. | ||
| It's an enormous organ. | ||
| Yeah, and I've always looked at the last couple years. | ||
| It's interesting because people will go, why are you keeping that? | ||
| It's funny because I'm, you know, pulling my knife out, going through, you know, as I'm field dressing it. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, we need to keep the heart and liver. | ||
| And it's funny because people... | ||
| Some people don't like it. | ||
| Some people are like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| I'm like, man, it's really good. | ||
| I want to one day shoot a bison and then cut the liver out and squirt bile on it and eat it raw. | ||
| Because that's what the Native Americans did. | ||
| Apparently it was like their favorite thing to do. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they would cut the liver out and cut slices of the liver and squirt bile on the liver and eat it raw. | ||
| I want to taste that. | ||
| I want to know what that tastes like. | ||
| What does the bile do? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Just... | ||
| It's like salty, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they had all sorts of ways to get nutrition that were sort of not just natural, but instinctive. | ||
| Like the liver. | ||
| Today, we don't necessarily eat liver. | ||
| If you gave a survey of how many people eat liver on a daily basis, it's probably not even one-tenth of one percent, right? | ||
| But back then, it was really important for nutrients because... | ||
| Especially if you're living on the plains in the winter and there's no vegetables. | ||
| You're not getting any vegetables. | ||
| The Comanche basically lived off bison. | ||
| And when they would shoot a bison, one of the first things they would do is cut the liver up and eat it raw with bile on it. | ||
|
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|
That's crazy. | |
| I want to know what it tastes like. | ||
| That's my favorite part about living in Texas is I live a bunch next to the hillbillies and I mean that in a complimentary sense but like my neighbor I don't know two months ago was like hey man I just killed a bison on this ranch I got like extra meat he gave me like 150 pounds of organic bison so I mean I love it because everybody's killing shit around here and you eat so good Well, at my studio in LA, I had three commercial freezers. | ||
| So when dudes would come over, I'd give everybody meat. | ||
| I gave meat to people that you would never think would be out there eating elk. | ||
| Just never put your freezer on a GFI switch. | ||
| I learned the hard way. | ||
| In my garage, the GFI switch went off and I didn't check my freezer for like four days. | ||
| Ruined three axis and one at Whitetail. | ||
| I would think the three days it would still be frozen. | ||
| Not in the Texas summer, in the garage. | ||
| But is it a good seal, like a really high-end freezer? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I think I bought a cheap one that first time. | ||
| When my neighborhood caught fire a couple years back, and I had a commercial freezer in my garage, and we had evacuated. | ||
| But my friend Bud stayed by, and when the firefighters were in the area, I said, hey man, I go, go into the freezer. | ||
| I go, that meat is still going to be good, and pull it out and serve it to the firefighters. | ||
| So they fed like fucking 100 firefighters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you kidding me? | |
| Yeah, it was awesome. | ||
| So I had hundreds of pounds of meat in there. | ||
| But it was still frozen. | ||
| It was still good. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, a good seal for like a Yeti cooler. | ||
| Those fucking Yeti coolers, man, they are the shit. | ||
| You can take one of those coolers, fill it with ice, leave it in 100 degrees sun for five days. | ||
| You open that bitch up, there's ice in there. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Well, it does make sense, but it's just shocking. | ||
| When we were, I would row down the middle fork of the salmon in Idaho. | ||
| So we'd do like five, six day trips. | ||
| And I would pack shitty coolers with dry ice and ice and they would last five days. | ||
| So even with a Yeti cooler, a little bit of shade, you can stretch that out for, I don't know, man, you could get a week at least out of that stuff. | ||
| But the funny thing is, with just meat in general, as far as... | ||
| One of the questions that I was trying to ask you earlier was, when you're on that carnivore diet and you were eating nothing but meat, were you eating wild meat or were you also eating some beef and some other things in there? | ||
| I was eating both. | ||
| I was eating a lot of elk, which I always do, but elk is very lean. | ||
| There's no fat in that. | ||
| So I would also cook it in tallow. | ||
| First of all, I had a lot of beef fat. | ||
| I would take scoops of tallow and just eat it. | ||
| I would eat scoops of beef tallow, grass-fed beef tallow, and then I would also cook it in bacon. | ||
| I would eat bacon. | ||
| I'd have like four or five pieces of bacon. | ||
| You have to get fat, otherwise you'll get that rabbit starvation shit going on. | ||
| So I was just trying different ways to get fat in my diet. | ||
| And you did that for a month? | ||
| Yeah, a whole month. | ||
| Lost 12 pounds, and I got real aggressive. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| Yes, I guess. | ||
| It gets you aggressive. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I think so, for sure. | ||
| But also, I think it's just, there's something about your body thinking all it does is eat meat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I think, like, one of the things that my friends have said that have turned vegan is, like, it makes it more peaceful and calm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it makes sense. | ||
| You're grazing. | ||
| You're fucking, you're an herbivore now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you're just out there eating grass and rice all day. | ||
| Like, of course, like, it seems like your body would be calm. | ||
| But on the other side of it, if you're eating meat all the time, your body's like, we gotta kill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's something to that. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because I wasn't trying to be aggressive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I would find myself saying things that were a little too aggressive or like... | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It's like the world's worst fucking excuse. | ||
| You're like, God, you're kind of an asshole today, Joe. | ||
| I've just been eating meat, man! | ||
| I wasn't being a dick, but I was like a little quick to judge things. | ||
| I was like, fuck him! | ||
| It was just a little too much. | ||
| And then there was something, I think there's something to that. | ||
| I had a lot of energy, man. | ||
| That was the other thing that was interesting. | ||
| Oh yeah, all day long. | ||
| That was what was weird. | ||
| There was no crash. | ||
| There was no crashing during the day. | ||
| I had extra energy. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| It felt weird. | ||
| I was eating no sugar. | ||
| What about eggs, fish, all that? | ||
| Anything that's an animal. | ||
| Anything that's an animal. | ||
| The only thing that kept me from eating that way was I got bored. | ||
| I love pasta. | ||
| I love food. | ||
| I love going to a restaurant and they make a nice crab cake or something. | ||
| I love when chefs create things. | ||
| I don't want to say, hey, I don't eat meat. | ||
| I like sushi. | ||
| I like it with the rice. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| It tastes good. | ||
| It's one of the things that I enjoy. | ||
| So for that, I could do it longer if I want. | ||
| I could eat like that forever. | ||
| But I enjoy food too much, I think. | ||
| That's the only reason I'm motivated in life to be pretty good at business is so I can buy pretty good whiskey and be a fat fuck any time I go to a restaurant and buy the lobster roll that's $37. | ||
| And I'm like, it's cool, man. | ||
| Yeah, there's some logic to that. | ||
| Not worrying about what food costs. | ||
| There's something about... | ||
| I feel like when you go to a restaurant, you're going to an art gallery. | ||
| It's like, this guy's an artist, or this woman's an artist. | ||
| She creates these dishes, and then you experience their art. | ||
| I don't want to just eat meat all the time. | ||
| So when I go to restaurants, I eat whatever the fuck I want. | ||
| But I think 80% of my diet's meat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Probably around 80%. | ||
| I've been trying, like I went strictly essentially vegetables and meat for probably the last six months just to see kind of what's going on. | ||
| And honestly, I felt really good. | ||
| And then I shifted just to meat. | ||
| So I'm running just meat now. | ||
| - Yeah? - So I'm interested in what you did. | ||
| And I guess I should probably do a little bit more research. | ||
| But Trevor and I have been talking about it. - What are you doing for fat? | ||
| - Well, I'm using grass-fed, a lot of grass-fed butter. | ||
| I kept all the bones. | ||
| So I'm using all the bone marrow and things like that out of my elk. | ||
| - Oh, that's great, I love bone marrow. - And for the most part, the elk that I shot a couple of weeks ago, that thing was really fat. | ||
| It had a really healthy layer of fat on it, which is a lot more fat than I thought that we would get from those. | ||
| Especially in the rut. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah, mine was pretty fat too. | ||
| It was pretty impressive. | ||
| But I'm trying, you know what I mean? | ||
| I've talked to Trevor a lot over the last several months on... | ||
| How are you feeling? | ||
| Are you crashing at this time? | ||
| He stopped it, right? | ||
| He did it for a while, but then he got off of it. | ||
| He said his hormones kind of plateaued. | ||
| Well, he was doing something crazy, too. | ||
| He was doing carnivore, and he was only eating for like 30 seconds during the day or something, where he would scourge himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He was crazy! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, he was... | ||
| He was fasting until like 4 o'clock in the afternoon. | ||
| So he's doing intermittent fasting. | ||
| He's doing it every day until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. | ||
| And they give himself a feed window of two hours or something like that. | ||
| And he was prepping for his... | ||
| He's doing a couple races, plus he's doing some guiding up in Alaska. | ||
| So he's doing all of these kind of mental exercises, plus the fact that he's... | ||
| Optimizing his diet, doing exercise, physical exercise. | ||
| He's got this really interesting way of kind of looking at life. | ||
| But he's only giving himself maybe an hour of a feeding window a day for a while. | ||
| I like how you call it a feeding window. | ||
| That's how they call it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That intermittent fasting thing is a weird sort of torture cult. | ||
| They're torturing themselves. | ||
| There's benefits to it for sure. | ||
| There's real benefits to not eating all the time because you give your body a break and you let your body digest food. | ||
| And there's benefits to going into ketosis and your body goes into ketosis when it doesn't have glycogen anymore and starts eating fat and burning off the fat. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| There's a host of benefits. | ||
| I'm not the guy to tell you about them. | ||
| There's also a thing where guys do where they want to see how long they can go. | ||
| You know, like marathon runners. | ||
| There's just something to it. | ||
| They want to see how far they can push it. | ||
| And so there's a thing where you're hungry, but you're like, nope, not until 6. I don't eat until 6. Yeah, that's a super aggressive internet minute fasting is weird to me when they eat for like two hours a day. | ||
| I get it if it's like 12, but like 18, 20 hours, that's too much for me. | ||
| We would be up in the mountains, cruising around, we were going shed hunting, and it's, you know, 4.30, 5 o'clock, and he's like, I can't eat yet. | ||
| Like, you haven't eaten all day. | ||
| You just want a little something? | ||
| No, I'm not eating until Thursday. | ||
| I don't fuck around with that shit when I'm in the mountains. | ||
| If I'm hunting, I eat all the time. | ||
| I eat constantly. | ||
| I'm not doing any intermittent fasting when I'm walking 10 miles a day in the mountains. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| When you have to, I never know when the real work is going to begin. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't want to be in that position. | ||
| And I found myself in that position the last couple of years where it's time to turn it on. | ||
| And shit, man, I was on a stock a few weeks ago and it took me over an hour to move 30 yards. | ||
| Just trying to move on this big bull as slow as I could. | ||
| There were cows everywhere. | ||
| So I had eyes everywhere looking for me. | ||
| It's amazing if you don't move fast and you have the right camo, what you can get away with. | ||
| You can get away. | ||
| And I didn't know what I could get away with or I couldn't get away with. | ||
| And I feel like I'm doing Tai Chi or something, you know, just moving as slow as you can. | ||
| And then you never know when, how long is that stock going to be? | ||
| And then how long is the post work if I If I shoot this animal, how long am I going to have to track it? | ||
| Where is all the work in this going to start and end? | ||
| So I'm the same way. | ||
| I have to eat throughout the day. | ||
| I have to keep putting fuel in my body because I'm always expecting shit's going to get real, like... | ||
| Yeah, and those hunting situations, you just don't know. | ||
| You don't know if you're going to have to pack out in an hour. | ||
| You should be fueled up. | ||
| Because if you get really tired and you just feel weak and woozy, you could push through it in a regular day. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But if you're out there in the mountains and you're at 8,000 feet and then you have 100 pounds of elk on your back and you have to walk over this ridge and it's going to take you two miles to get to the truck... | ||
| Good fucking luck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You should have prepared. | ||
| Better be gassed up. | ||
| A little bit more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I eat, man. | ||
| You gotta eat. | ||
| But I think there's real benefits to, you know, occasionally fasting. | ||
| And then that intermittent fasting, I think human beings probably eat too much. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Generally, if you look at Americans in particular, we're fat as fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the wrong stuff, too. | ||
| I mean, I've always made that joke when people are like having a donut and they're just like, I have no energy and they're chugging coffee. | ||
| I'm like, eat some fucking good carbs and some meat and you're going to feel great. | ||
| It's just, yeah, the diet in America is very interesting to me, especially when we travel and we're with some of the other guys that don't have the same dietary habits as us. | ||
| And I'm like, you ate gas station burritos and a hot dog and that's what you had today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just too available. | |
| And I'm not like discrediting it. | ||
| It's your life. | ||
| Do what you want. | ||
| But it's weird. | ||
| And then they feel like shit all day. | ||
| And you're like, well, no wonder you had trash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just too available. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's too much all the time. | ||
| And I think that's where the intermittent fasting, at least for a lot of guys, it can really help because it's ultimately saying... | ||
| I'm not going to take part in just the ease of all the food that's available all the time, and I'm going to take part in two or three hours a day or whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah, just give yourself some discipline. | ||
| Yeah, give yourself some discipline. | ||
| Now, when you're eating this all-meat diet, how much of what you're eating is the elk and wild game, and what are you using? | ||
| I'm using, right now, I'm only using wild fish, so salmon for the most part, and elk. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So I brought... | ||
| What about other fat sources? | ||
| Well, I mean, outside of that little... | ||
| A little Onnit nugget that you gave me earlier. | ||
| Those protein bites? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Those are so fucking addictive. | ||
| So good. | ||
| So good. | ||
| But I think for MCT, I use a lot of MCT, and I'm not saying it's good whatsoever. | ||
| I just want to see what the fuck happens to my body when I do nothing but good, when I say non-processed fats, wild meat all the way through. | ||
| And then stick to it for two, three, four weeks and see how I'm feeling. | ||
| Just make sure you get enough fat. | ||
| That's the real problem with people when they get really tired. | ||
| Because your body is most certainly going to go into ketosis at certain points in time. | ||
| But there's also something that happens when you eat so much protein, your body converts that protein into glucose. | ||
| I think it's called glucogenesis or something like that. | ||
| You'll experience that too, but you're going to need fat. | ||
| If you don't, you're going to get fatigued. | ||
| It'll start fucking with you. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why I got really into tallow and really started eating a lot of bacon and things like that. | ||
| Why do you think there's such a national misconception that fat's bad for your body? | ||
| Because I hear that from a lot of people. | ||
| Like, I don't want to eat it. | ||
| It's fat. | ||
| Well, they were told that for the longest time. | ||
| Well, first of all, there's real evidence that sugar and these companies that made sugar paid scientists to fuck with data to put heart disease and all these problems that people are having with clogged arteries. | ||
| To push that off on saturated fat and to take that away from sugar. | ||
| And sugar is terrible for you. | ||
| Sugar in that form is so unnatural. | ||
| Fat in the form of meat is very natural. | ||
| It's what human beings have been eating since the beginning of time. | ||
| Yeah, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, saturated fat is all pretty good for you. | ||
| Just stay away from trans fat. | ||
| Well, unsaturated fats that come from vegetable oils, I think it's called linoleic acid, is fucking terrible for you. | ||
| Not only is it terrible for you, there's real evidence that it makes you hungry. | ||
| That you're eating it and there's no nutrients in it, so your body gets hungrier. | ||
| Throughout human history, there's never been a time until recently where people got oils directly from plants in large quantities like that you know if you got oil from plants it was like oil from avocados like natural or you got your oil from you know beef fat or chicken fat or things that's natural for human beings right these saturated fats that are natural your body knows what to do with them your body doesn't know what the fuck to do with canola oil What is it? | ||
| Your body's like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Your body gets a hold of some raw honey. | ||
| Your body knows exactly what to do with it. | ||
| But your body gets a hold of fucking corn syrup and that kind of shit. | ||
| It's like, what is this? | ||
| It just doesn't make sense to your body. | ||
| And I think we've gotten into this processed food thing. | ||
| And processed food is almost entirely... | ||
| First of all, it's a new human creation. | ||
| And it should never be your first choice. | ||
| Your first choice should be natural foods. | ||
| Look, Apple. | ||
| Steak. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| You can eat that. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| Your body knows what the fuck to do with that. | ||
| But you get into seed oils and all these really heavily processed seed oils. | ||
| There's real evidence that that is a giant part of what's wrong with the health of Americans today is these ultra-processed vegetable oils. | ||
| They're fucking terrible for you. | ||
| But it doesn't seem to me like that's a stretch in logic, right? | ||
| So for just the American diet in general, for us to look at the traditional food pyramid and say, well, that's bullshit. | ||
| Ultimately, you know, if grains and processed foods sit at the cornerstone of your entire diet... | ||
| You're going to have some issues. | ||
| You can kind of look around. | ||
| You don't even have to be a rocket surgeon to figure that out, right? | ||
| It's like, holy shit, obesity is an epidemic in the United States. | ||
| We're eating a ton of processed food, and all the guys that I know that are healthy are eating whole foods for the most part. | ||
| And it's not because you have more discipline or because you have more access or wealth. | ||
| I know a ton of guys that are not very wealthy that eat whole foods, and they're feeding in certain windows, and they're still in the military, still doing fucking incredibly difficult missions, and they're really healthy. | ||
| So when I look around, I say, well... | ||
| Okay, if you stick to whole foods and you limit your amount of caloric intake, we're not dealing in a high intellect thought process here. | ||
| It should be pretty easy. | ||
| But I think what people want is they want their easy button, right? | ||
| Well, you're hungry. | ||
| You see Jack in the box. | ||
| You pull in. | ||
| You get a burger. | ||
| You're like, oh, now I feel better. | ||
| But meanwhile, you just force some shit into your system. | ||
| And your system's got to burn off all this bullshit that you poured in there. | ||
| But there's even foods that people think are healthy that are not really good for you. | ||
| Like, for instance, white rice is better than brown rice. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Like, people think white rice, like, oh, I'll have brown rice. | ||
| I'm being healthy. | ||
| I'll have brown rice. | ||
| It's got to be one of the biggest misconceptions out there. | ||
| That fucking stuff, there's arsenic in that. | ||
| But it's brown. | ||
| Yeah, it's not good. | ||
| It's brown. | ||
| It looks like grains. | ||
| That's all I eat is white, Rex. | ||
| That shit is terrible for you. | ||
|
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It's terrible. | |
| There's a reason why Asian cultures for a long time have been getting rid of that outside, that husk. | ||
| The Japanese got it right with food, I'm telling you. | ||
| Sushi, white rice, seaweed, just all day. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of countries that figured it out. | ||
| We're just not one of them. | ||
| We're like ultra-processed seed oils, sugar, corn syrup. | ||
| Yeah, preservatives, fucking gallons of preservatives, glyphosate on all our plants. | ||
| There's also evidence that animals, and I've been getting into this lately, animals that eat these ultra-processed foods, then you eat them. | ||
| Animals that eat ultra-processed corn, then you eat that animal. | ||
| You're getting some of the bullshit from the corn and some of the bullshit from that. | ||
| All these seed oil acids, you're getting these things in your body, too. | ||
| But that makes sense to me. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It makes complete sense to me when we look at what they're eating, and then you're eating them. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You're not stretching and connecting a lot of complex thought there in the sense of... | ||
| When people are trying to sell me on the idea, like, no, it's great. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| It's like, no, man, like, those chickens are eating arsenic and they're packed in, you know, right on top of each other, shitting on each other everywhere. | ||
| Like, I'd rather have a free-range egg. | ||
| I'd rather have that. | ||
| I'd rather have free-range chicken. | ||
| It's no offense to however you want to eat, but it's just a preference of eating. | ||
| It's pretty easy. | ||
| I think that the argument comes from maybe corporate impact in marketing where Americans will consume it without thinking and go, well, it's good because Jack in the Box told me that it's organic. | ||
| Well, I think if there's any one thing in this country where there's a massive... | ||
| Lack of understanding in terms of the way people perceive what's good and what's bad. | ||
| It's nutrition. | ||
| Because there's so few doctors that really know what the fuck they're talking about. | ||
| There's doctors out there that'll tell you you don't need supplements. | ||
| You don't need supplements. | ||
| You need a healthy, balanced diet. | ||
| And then you look at them, they got a gut. | ||
| They look bloated. | ||
| They look like they're dying. | ||
| What the fuck is going on, man? | ||
| I just typed in brown rice versus white rice just to see what would pop up. | ||
| And all five, six articles that come up say the opposite of what you guys just said. | ||
| That it's good for you? | ||
| That brown rice has an advantage over white rice. | ||
| Advantage? | ||
| What's the advantage? | ||
| It says that there's nutrients and antioxidants and white rice has empty calories. | ||
| Yeah, listen, rice is basically just carbohydrates. | ||
| It is just calories. | ||
| But the shell of the brown rice is not good for you. | ||
| Google this. | ||
| The negative consequences of brown rice. | ||
| I think it's not necessarily a nutritional thing. | ||
| You get a lot of vegan propaganda in these articles that are written by these people. | ||
| The one I went to was a company I get food from sometimes. | ||
| I'm paid by them. | ||
| Do me a favor. | ||
| Google the negative impact of brown rice, negative health consequences of brown rice. | ||
| But that's got to be across the border with food companies. | ||
| I was actually just listening to a doctor discuss this. | ||
| Brown rice. | ||
| Brown rice is the brand of German tag, both of which are responsible for giving the high fiber of the brand of German. | ||
| Also irritates the digestive tract, leading to digestive problems, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, leaky gut syndrome. | ||
| I would skip that source usually. | ||
| Times of India is bad, but they eat a lot of rice over there. | ||
| I get all my facts from Wikipedia, man. | ||
| It's usually not the best source that we would start with, I would say. | ||
| Well, that's the problem. | ||
| Where do you get? | ||
| That's what I was trying to say. | ||
| WebMD is usually pretty good. | ||
| I just typed in brown rice. | ||
| The problem with brown rice. | ||
| Go that Invictus Fitness. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| The problem with brown rice. | ||
| Diacin often insists that people should eat brown rice. | ||
| Majority of your protein. | ||
| Brown rice has also been reported high levels of inorganic arsenic, which is what I said, which is a toxin known to potentially cause liver, lung, kidney, and bladder cancer. | ||
| Some arsenic is just naturally occurring mineral. | ||
| But the inorganic kind comes from chemicals and pesticides. | ||
| A researcher named Alan Aragon said, He's a very highly respected fellow. | ||
| I've read his shit online. | ||
| Run two different research projects comparing the effects of white rice and brown rice on the body. | ||
| See the findings below. | ||
| White rice actually has an equal or better nutritional yield and also has a better nitrogen-retentive effect than brown rice. | ||
| This is also because fiber and fight. | ||
| What's that word? | ||
| Phytate. | ||
| Phytate. | ||
| Fiber and phytate content of brown rice act as an anti-nutrient, reducing the bioavailability of the micronutrients it contains. | ||
| Since no one is reading the fucking link, I'll just lay things out here for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the problem with things that are posted online is that there's a lot of people that want to get you to eat a certain way. | ||
| And they'd like you to eat whole foods. | ||
| They'd like you to eat plant-based foods. | ||
| They'd like you to eat... | ||
| Carnivore, they'd like you to eat keto, and they'll try to spell things out with user bias or with confirmation bias. | ||
| If you've talked to people that are carnivore-based people, they'll just tell you, this is the only way you should eat, and this is why. | ||
| You talk to people that are vegans, this is the only way you should eat, and this is why. | ||
| More now than ever before, people think that plant-based is the way to go. | ||
| So oftentimes when you Google brown rice or white rice or vegetables or whatever, you'll only find the positive consequences. | ||
| It's very rare to find the negative consequences of eating leafy green vegetables, but they exist. | ||
| The negative consequences, first of all, oxalates. | ||
| My Cyrus's old boyfriend Her ex-husband. | ||
| He had to get fucking surgery because he was getting these kidney stones because he was eating so much leafy green vegetables. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Yeah, you get oxalates. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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See? | |
| Just another reason why I shouldn't eat greens. | ||
| But then there's other people that'll tell you that greens are super healthy for you and there's all these benefits to eating greens and that a certain level of... | ||
| I think a certain amount of eating greens, there's a hermetic effect where your body is like, certain plants have chemicals that they release to try to discourage predation. | ||
| So they'll release these chemicals and these chemicals, they'll discourage animals from eating them. | ||
| In fact, when it goes back to giraffes, there's certain giraffes that have actually starved because, and this is really crazy. | ||
| When the giraffes upwind were eating certain plants, the leaves downwind caught the fact that they were being eaten and they changed their taste profile. | ||
| So they release a certain chemical that makes the giraffes discouraged from eating them. | ||
| So these giraffes hated eating this shit. | ||
| It's really crazy. | ||
| Nature is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, chemicals that plants release. | ||
| Plants don't want to be fucking eaten. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they have to figure out how to survive. | ||
| So nature has all these strategies for survival. | ||
| And one of the strategies that plants have is they release these chemicals in order to make themselves taste like shit or even be poisonous. | ||
| I've been hearing more and more of this, and it's interesting because when I look at what's going on with your gut, right? | ||
| I was just having this conversation earlier with a retired Special Forces guy, a good friend of mine, and we were talking about our life in the military and what's happening in our gut biome, right? | ||
| What's happening with the balance of your ecosystem down here. | ||
| And we've lived this life of going overseas and overseas repetitively on a yearly, sometimes more annual cycle in these developing world countries and combat zones. | ||
| We're nuking our gut every time we go over there and anti-malarials, anti-inflammatories, all of the different things. | ||
| We're just dropping bombs in our gut. | ||
| And then we're eating high-preservative foods, so meals ready to eat. | ||
| And you're eating MREs. | ||
| You're not sleeping. | ||
| You're nuking your gut with antibiotics. | ||
| Burning tires and burn pits. | ||
| And so now, how much is happening down here? | ||
| And when we're talking about plant-based or carnivore or paleo or any of these other things, how much is it really dependent on the individual and whether or not they were breastfed as kids? | ||
| How many anti-inflammatories have they taken? | ||
| What type of lifestyle do they have? | ||
| Where your ancestors come from. | ||
| Yeah, where your ancestors come from. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Anytime we try to templatize a system or some type of system and say, oh, that's going to work for everybody, right? | ||
| It fucking might not work for anybody. | ||
| That's what's super complicated about diet. | ||
| There are some people that they eat a vegan diet and it's perfect for them. | ||
| They have no problem with it. | ||
| And there's other people that get really sick. | ||
| And there's other people that eat a carnivore diet and they feel like dog shit. | ||
| They feel terrible. | ||
| They feel lethargic. | ||
| And I don't know if they're doing it right or wrong, but there's some people that eat it and they feel great. | ||
| You've got to find what works for you. | ||
| But the thing is, people are so dogmatic about diet. | ||
| And it becomes an ideology. | ||
| It becomes like a religion. | ||
| And especially like vegans and carnivores. | ||
| The vegan people and the carnivore people, they're like the right and the left wing of America. | ||
| They're like the Antifa and the Proud Boys. | ||
| They're like the fucking... | ||
|
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They really are! | |
| They fucking believe 100% in their way of life only. | ||
| This is the only way. | ||
| And they'll tell you based on their own anecdotal evidence. | ||
| The thing you need to know, though, about vegans is there's a number, I think it's more, there's a giant number of them that eat meat when they're drunk. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's a huge percentage, right? | ||
| I'm not even going to call those guys out, but it was interesting. | ||
| My wife posted holding up like six fillets like a year or so ago. | ||
| And man, a vegan, she got posted on some vegan page. | ||
| And they just went after her like, I hope you effing die, you this, you that. | ||
| And I was like, damn, she's just having a filet, man. | ||
| But I think that anything on the diet side and fitness, it's super individualized for success because not everything that works for you would work for me. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are too lazy to figure out and do the actual effort to see what best diet for them, their work routine. | ||
| It requires work. | ||
| It's easier just to say, eh, I'll be lazy today. | ||
| It's hard to figure out what works for you. | ||
| You've got to be real honest about it. | ||
| And, you know, so many people, they, like, here's the argument for, like, if you get drunk and you wind up eating meat. | ||
| You also get drunk, you eat donuts, right? | ||
| You also get drunk, you eat, like, they were talking about this on MeatEater. | ||
| There's a podcast out right now with that Paul Saldino guy that I was just talking about. | ||
| They got into this. | ||
| And it's, human beings like things that taste good but are bad for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you're going to analyze your diet and you're going to really do it right, you've got to be disciplined. | ||
| So if you're going to do it, you should really do blood work. | ||
| You should really exercise and write down your routines and write down how you feel after you exercised and then try to figure out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why people like the carnivore diet is because it's one of the best elimination diets. | ||
| You're basically taking everything out except meat. | ||
| And then you kind of find out, hey, you know, my body doesn't react well to this. | ||
| Or my, you know, my body has a real problem with that. | ||
| Or some people it's caffeine, and some people it's just fucking whatever it is. | ||
| It's like, you gotta find out what's fucking with you. | ||
| And most people don't. | ||
| Most people just, you know, they go to a doctor, the doctor prescribes medication, they keep eating the same old shit, but now they have chemicals in here that are supposed to offset whatever negative stuff that they have in their diet. | ||
| I'm like, What's an interesting segue on that, too, because that's like, in part, some of the nonprofit stuff I do on this side is solely based on that, the individualized treatment for veterans, specifically in law enforcement, because you see a lot with the military, DOD, the VA, like you're saying, you show up, don't feel good, and it's a blanket treatment, right? | ||
| Here's some antidepressants, here's all that, but it's a Band-Aid for a bullet hole, and if you're not actually... | ||
| If you're figuring out what the cause is and you're treating symptoms, then the third and fourth order effects of those treatments are going to make that individual worse. | ||
| Some of the issues they have, like I think I have PTSD, if that's a guy saying they're PTSD, they go through and they find out they have TBI and 40% memory function, short term memory function. | ||
| And so now you go to cognitive therapy and you get the guys or gals working through it that way. | ||
| But the only way to figure that out is through brain scans and blood work and actually focusing on the individual rather than being lazy and say, Here's some antidepressants when the whole time the issue was something completely different. | ||
| And then you have budget problems, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So the veterans hospitals don't have enough money to send you through all these different scans and all these different doctors and specialists and try to fine tune what's wrong with you. | ||
| Well, I think that that's, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is our politicians, we'll say, our leadership. | ||
| They love to go to war. | ||
| They love it. | ||
| Like, you know, hey, how many times can we send more guys to war? | ||
| How many countries, you know, and I'm a participant in that endeavor, by the way, right? | ||
| I've invaded Iraq. | ||
| I've spent a lot of my adult life in war, specifically in both Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| But the thing that I've noticed in my adult life is that politicians love it. | ||
| They love to send 18 to 26-year-old men and women. | ||
| They love to send them to war. | ||
| What they hate is paying the fucking bill. | ||
| That's what they hate. | ||
| They hate paying for the after effects. | ||
| They hate standing by their word in the sense of... | ||
| Hey, we're going to take care of you, all your health problems, your education. | ||
| We're going to start really fixing the VA system so there's long-term care. | ||
| What most veterans that I know, what they have to do is they have to continue to lobby the government over and over and over for them to prove that what's happened to their body is connected to their service. | ||
| The issue that I continue to see is that this is a lack of, one, it's a lack of experience for our politicians. | ||
| They don't quite understand what war is and the long-term effects on individual soldiers. | ||
| After decades of service, and I think hundreds of my friends, every one of us has some type of long-term effect from their service. | ||
| Every one of us. | ||
| In the sense of, do you have sleep issues? | ||
| Do you have gut issues? | ||
| Do you have inflammation? | ||
| Are you missing a limb? | ||
| And really, it's disgusting the amount of emphasis there is on going. | ||
| And then the lack of emphasis on care. | ||
| It really saddens me as a society when we have to rely on non-profits. | ||
| Right. | ||
| to pay for the care of veterans because the military or the DOD and the tax, the taxpayer essentially, and I think if they understood this, if they knew they weren't paying for the long-term care of our service members to the degree that they needed, they would absolutely have no issues stepping up and saying, they would absolutely have no issues stepping up and saying, Hey, we have to do something about this. | ||
| And it's, it's really when we look at the entire system and how it's, it's put together, there's no way that a person, and this is a good story from my friend, Clint. | ||
| He's missing both his legs recently from last year during COVID. | ||
| What was happening is that his leg was changing as far as the shape of it, because he was growing an additional, additional layer of bone where his leg was blown off. | ||
| And he needed a new leg, but he couldn't get in to get a new leg. | ||
| So he was confined to his wheelchair for almost six months during this process and he couldn't get an appointment. | ||
| There's no reason why that should happen. | ||
| See, that's unacceptable. | ||
| There's literally zero reason. | ||
| We can't have the largest transfer of wealth from a taxpayer into the military-industrial complex in modern history without zero ethical argument as far as our entire political system, and then not continue to care for our veterans. | ||
| There's just no way that we can do that as a society, because I think ultimately that defines us and who we are collectively, and it's not a good grade. | ||
| Well, there's a long history of the United States doing that. | ||
| Remember when people were coming back from the first Gulf War and they were having all these issues with radiation because they used that depleted uranium rounds. | ||
| And they kind of denied, first of all, that they used them. | ||
| They denied that this effect was related to that. | ||
| And then birth defects and all sorts of weird radiation sickness issues that people were having. | ||
| They were calling it Gulf War Syndrome. | ||
| But they did their very best to not take care of these people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, you look from Agent Orange in Vietnam and the long-term effects of that and all the studies and research that's coming out right now with the burn pits and the carcinogens and how much cancer, but then they're like, ah, you can't really draw the conclusion that it came from burning shit for six months, you know? | ||
| And to Evan's point as well, it's tragic, to be honest, that there's tens of thousands of nonprofits that are having to do the legwork. | ||
| Without government grants or funding, the money is coming from people that are participating in philanthropy saying, I want to do something good for these guys and gals that have real issues. | ||
| To Clint, he's missing his legs, and you're going to make him be in a wheelchair for months? | ||
| For me, that's just absolutely unacceptable, and there has to be change. | ||
| What about the story you were telling right before the show about your friend who lost her arms? | ||
| Explain that. | ||
| One of her good friends, Mary, she's an EOD tech, had both of her arms blown off when she tried to catch some ordinance that they were going to dispose of. | ||
| Essentially, she has a full-time caregiver, and she went to go see her family for, I believe it was a month. | ||
| During that time, she didn't have the caregiver because she was with her husband and family, and they were taking care of her. | ||
| Well, the VA determined after that stint that she doesn't need a full-time caregiver because she obviously was fine that month she was away. | ||
| And this is a young lady, amazing person, just nubs. | ||
| She calls herself Wonder Nubs. | ||
| Bless her heart. | ||
| She's fucking hilarious. | ||
| But she can't do things that come so easily to us, like grab things, use the toilet. | ||
| And she has a really funny Twitter about wiping her ass, I believe she said. | ||
| The fact that that's happening and someone in the VA wasn't like, oh, that's fucking stupid. | ||
| Here you go, full-time caregiver like that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| They're just trying to find a way to cut money left and right. | ||
| And it's just numbers on a piece of paper. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's numbers on a piece of paper, and I don't think people want to be reminded. | ||
| One, these are bad decisions. | ||
| As we look back in history, and we look at Iraq in particular, and we look at the tens of thousands of service members that served in Iraq, to include myself, I don't know if they want to be reminded of that section of our history on a regular basis either. | ||
| And so when we have amputees and we have health issues with the burn pits, that really I think is our cause that we need to talk about as our Agent Orange is, you know, I think Jon Stewart just recently brought it up and we're active in the Hunter 7 Foundation, | ||
| which does a lot of research in this, but there's zero reason why the government is not funding to the tune of millions of dollars of research to figure out what's happening to the service members with their directly related lung and health issues from burn pits. | ||
| There's zero reason because the only reason is because if they acknowledge that it's a problem, they're going to have to pay for it. | ||
| Can you explain burn pits to people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was essentially a big pit where you would put all of your garbage. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| So that's batteries. | ||
| That's all the plastics. | ||
| It's anything and everything that is required. | ||
| Fecal matter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fecal matter. | ||
| It's tires. | ||
| It's anything that is directly associated with Your living condition in a war that you need to get rid of. | ||
| And you would shove it all into a pit, and then it would burn 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And yes. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And how close is this to where you guys were living? | ||
| In every one of the firebases I was at. | ||
| Four and a half years is how much time I have on the ground in Iraq. | ||
| In every one of my firebases, there was a burn pit. | ||
| And not only that, you're going to have young privates out there with sticks rolling it over in the smoke with probably some knitted fake mask that they're wearing that they got. | ||
| And they're the ones in there actually rotating the trash to burn it through completely. | ||
| So they're completely subjected to that environment from a very long time. | ||
| Whose fucking idea was that? | ||
| Really smart. | ||
| Really, really smart, you know, officers and contractors. | ||
| The same guys that decided that, you know, the invasion was going to be a really good idea of Iraq. | ||
| They're the same people making those types of decisions in the way that, you know, obviously, when we look at this now and we look back on it and we go, that's dumb as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There was somebody in a series of people at that point in time in 2003 to 2009 in Iraq that were saying, this is a good idea. | ||
| And that type of mentality, I think, is the same type of mentality today that says, this is a good idea for us not to fund the research to figure out what the fuck is going on. | ||
| So we can do something about it. | ||
| And when we talk about it, right, our voices are only so big. | ||
| But I think if people knew what was happening with our generation of veterans, because, you know, I'm 43, you're 33, 34. 34. You've got all these guys that are coming up with strange cancers. | ||
| One of Jocko's friends and our friends, he just died of cancer. | ||
| He's a Medal of Honor recipient. | ||
| Had a strange heart organ cancer or some kind of cancer in his back, and he just died six months down the road. | ||
| And what's happening, and when we talk about the other foundations and people that are diving into some of this research, it's incredibly underfunded. | ||
| They're starting to have this direct connection between the burn pits themselves and the chemicals that ultimately we're exposed to or were exposed to. | ||
| And a lot of the cancers that guys are coming, when I say that, they're developing, I guess. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it has to be. | ||
| There's no fucking way that's good for you. | ||
| There's no fucking way. | ||
| And that's in the same camp? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| It's right there on the fog. | ||
| You would have to put... | ||
| I would take a towel and I would wet it. | ||
| And then I would put it down underneath my door going into this little container, little shipping container. | ||
| And I would put another one on the top. | ||
| Just so I could sleep the rest of the evening because the smoke was so bad from the burn pits as it would move in. | ||
| You couldn't sleep because you couldn't sleep without coughing. | ||
| And it was going, that was every day depending on your fire base. | ||
| That was every day. | ||
| So it wasn't the fact that, hey man, I got all my fingers and toes. | ||
| You know, I survived seven years of war. | ||
| I feel like a counter argument to that would be like, well, whatever idiots you signed up for it. | ||
| That's not an argument. | ||
| Find those people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| If you're willing to spend a hundred thousand to a million dollars on a guy or a gal to train them up to do a specific job because you look at how much it costs to put them through training and school after school after school and then they get out and we're just like, have fun. | ||
| Especially guys and gals like we're talking tier one units. | ||
| I have friends that have done 16, 17, 18 deployments. | ||
| And it's an injustice because they're willing to sacrifice their life, limb and body and eyesight for, you know, I guess the politicians to send them to war. | ||
| But then it's a moral obligation as our society that we have to fight. | ||
| Look out for them when they come back. | ||
| And it's not happening. | ||
| It's insane that this is prevalent. | ||
| They have these burn pits at every base. | ||
| That's fucking insane. | ||
| And for the most part, most people don't... | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| In Afghanistan, at its peak, more than 400 tons of waste was disposed using burn pits daily. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, and then the question is like, what else do you do? | ||
| Like San Francisco fog. | ||
| One soldier described the smoke as thick as San Francisco fog. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Another called it like pollen dust. | ||
| The color of smoke could be blue and black or yellow and orange. | ||
| However, it's mostly black. | ||
| Everyone inhaled and ingested it. | ||
| It was absorbed by their skin. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck. | |
| Which is interesting because I think a lot of people that have deployed, if you said, hey, we got to get this trash burnt, we got to do it, we signed up for it, we got it. | ||
| But then you got to give them the research and the medical clinicians that understand this going forward and after the fact to actually... | ||
| Hopefully not die like this from cancer. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You gotta not do that. | ||
| No, I agree, but I'm saying... | ||
| But there's no way you would say, hey, let's let these guys breathe in this shit and then take care of them. | ||
| No, you should not burn that shit. | ||
| They've gotta figure out another way to get rid of it. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| I mean, but even landfills are fucking terrible. | ||
| One of the things they're finding out when they're doing these satellite overviews is that methane, like they're trying to find the largest sources of methane and what's contributing to greenhouse gases... | ||
| It's fucking landfills. | ||
| Landfills where you take all your food, they pour it into the ground, they just cover it up with dirt, and it's just leaking methane into the atmosphere. | ||
| It's fucking terrible. | ||
| Like, I don't know what the solution is, but the solution's definitely not burn it right where the soldiers are sleeping. | ||
| No, and I think that Now that as we continue to evolve, hopefully as a society, and we look at the way that we deploy service members overseas, we've at least identified this as a problem. | ||
| But the big thing that I see is we have to continue to look at the problem, fund the research, and look at the direct connection between these types of activities, meaning burn pits. | ||
| We're looking at burn pit and I'm saying, That's burn pit, but it's also... | ||
| I know Tim, obviously, he's been on the podcast. | ||
| He's an SF guy. | ||
| I'm an SF guy. | ||
| But when we look at the long-term effects of, we'll call it the special operations community, because I'm obviously from that subculture, but sleep deprivation, anti-inflammatories, anti-malarials, burn pits, multiple rotations, PTSD, this is a holistic health issue for most of these guys returning. | ||
| If they don't have direct or visible combat wounds, they have some type of residual, they've been affected by the war in a long-term residual way. | ||
| And I think what happens is the VA continues to evolve at least past these wars. | ||
| We have to look at it as a collective and say, how do we turn everybody's attention within the VA system to directly take care of these guys in a very positive and impactful way? | ||
| So we don't have people like Mary Dagg that get denied a full-time service caregiver. | ||
| How does that stand now? | ||
| Is it still the way it is right now? | ||
| That was like five days ago. | ||
| I haven't talked to her since. | ||
| I'm actually going to call her after this. | ||
| But yeah, at least give the resources and the funding necessary because I'm sure VA as an organization wants to do good and wants to do great things. | ||
| I think that when people just say, the VA sucks, it's the wrong way to look at this. | ||
| It's how do we critically think and solve the problem and put in process and a plan to go, here's the resources you need so we can fix the issues that are right in front of our face. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't imagine being a VA bean counter or being someone who works for a VA bean counter who gets the call that you have to cut the budget by X amount. | ||
| So figure out where you're going to slash these benefits. | ||
| And then you have to look at these people that you're talking to either on the phone or through email. | ||
| You can't even look at them as a human. | ||
| You've got to look at them as a number on a ledger. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And then you have, you know, an incredible giving nation that backfills that need through, you know, nonprofit organizations. | ||
| Yeah, I guess my only intent in that conversation is I think the government needs to do a much better job of leading the conversation than being towed around by the entire conversation. | ||
| They need to get out in front of it. | ||
| They have to take responsibility for it. | ||
| And I think that's the big one, which is taking responsibility for, you know, war just in general and then taking responsibility for the after effects of the individual soldiers, sailors, Marines, post-war. | ||
| That just seems to me the thing to do. | ||
| And I think most people, if they realize these things were happening, I think the last time I tried to schedule a VA appointment, it was going to take me 200 plus days to get in to see a physician, you know, about a shoulder injury. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 200 days? | ||
| I'm going to be special. | ||
| I'm not missing anything, right? | ||
| But there are a lot of people that have been directly affected by this that need care. | ||
| And now we have the ability, I think, based on the current administration, to go see a primary care provider outside of the VA, which I think was a huge step. | ||
| But there's still a lot to do. | ||
| For us, having this company and what we're doing with it, it's a big part of the mission of how we run the company, what we're doing with the company. | ||
| It is a huge part of our mission just in general. | ||
| It's something we do every day. | ||
| And it's awesome. | ||
| And I think that's one of the reasons why people love you guys so much. | ||
| I mean, it's the amount of support that you guys have out there in the public. | ||
| Did I send you that picture when I was in Italy and that guy was in front of me in line? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The guy in front of me in line with a black rifle coffee t-shirt on. | ||
| I'm like, all right, man. | ||
| There's something to what you guys are doing that resonates with people that it's not just a coffee brand, but it's a coffee brand that supports first responders, military, veterans. | ||
| And it means a lot to people, I think, because of that. | ||
| Yeah, I think something I'm really proud of with the company, too, is giving a more, like, visceral understanding and perspective of the veteran experience, because before the company and kind of the commercials and stuff we did, I think there was a very singular perspective of what a veteran was. | ||
| It was kind of the chest-beating, you know, chiseled Navy SEAL. Tattooed, bearded. | ||
| Yeah, and while that exists, I think that it's good to shed light on... | ||
| Hey, man, you're tattooed and bearded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I didn't go full Navy Seal and gel my hair today. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| But like bringing light to the community that there's so many creative people and veterans are humans. | ||
| We're just Americans. | ||
| And a lot of these guys and gals have other professions and they're talented. | ||
| They're artists. | ||
| And I think humanizing that a little bit allows people not to look at veterans like the two ways that I've seen a lot throughout the years are you're their Captain America. | ||
| Or you're a pill-popping, depressed veteran that goes to bed every night beating your wife. | ||
| And you're like, 90% of us are in the middle of just people that want to do, hopefully normal people, trying to do some extraordinary things in the name of a free society. | ||
| I think it's just a cool thing that people like supporting companies like yours that do have a great message and that do do good things. | ||
| It's a nice aspect that you guys can put that message out there and people understand what you're about and that this is a company that was really started by two guys who are veterans. | ||
| I mean, it's a big company now, but Really just came down to you guys and your love of coffee and just deciding to do this and then start doing good with the money. | ||
| And people love that, man. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| It resonates with people a lot. | ||
| I mean, I've had Black Rifle t-shirts on before and people talk to me about it. | ||
| It means a lot to them. | ||
| Well, I mean, we're thankful that it means a lot to them because we wouldn't be in the position we are to kind of focus on the things that we think are matter and support the organizations that we do. | ||
| And I mean, I think that's both of us's end user and end user experience is exactly what we want to have a great quality product and something that motivates people to wake up in the morning and kick ass. | ||
| And if they didn't purchase it, we wouldn't be here doing what we're trying to do. | ||
| There's also a thing about with you, Evan, it's so obviously authentic. | ||
| There's a video of you roasting coffee with a frying pan over a fire. | ||
| You're such a dork with this stuff. | ||
| It's so obvious and it's real. | ||
| I mean, I love people that geek out on shit. | ||
| I just fucking love it. | ||
| Even if it's something that... | ||
| And I love coffee, but even if it's something that I don't even love, I just love when people are really into shit. | ||
| It's very contagious. | ||
| Well, and it... | ||
| It's super fun, as I was talking earlier, right? | ||
| I'm really fortunate just as an adult in America right now in so many different ways. | ||
| But I get to do this coffee when I say I'm in coffee every day and I get to explore any piece of the entire aspect of coffee anytime I want. | ||
| And get as detailed into it as much as I want. | ||
| But the thing that I've found that is just as interesting, if not more interesting than coffee, is as the company gets bigger, you know, developing our ecosystem as a company. | ||
| We have 400 employees now, right? | ||
| It's a bigger company. | ||
| 50-plus percent of them are veterans. | ||
| And as I look at our ecosystem and how we support different nonprofits and what we're doing in the company, it's an incredible high—well, it sounds like a commercial, but I love seeing this incredible high-quality product because I love going to these countries. | ||
| Central and South America working directly with the farmers and then pulling it back through and then uniting the customer and the company as one in this really fucking cool ecosystem. | ||
| And it wasn't something that I started out necessarily thinking about where, you know, I wanted to be in charge of a company of 400 people. | ||
| That's not what I started out to do. | ||
| I literally was roasting coffee in my garage because I was trying to find something else to do when the CIA told me that I couldn't work for him anymore, right? | ||
| Like, fuck. | ||
| Why did they tell you you couldn't work for him anymore? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| You know... | ||
| A wide variety of reasons. | ||
| I worked there for nine years. | ||
| I deployed probably seven out of those nine years. | ||
| I was angry, and I don't want to say that it was directly my fault, but the organization that I started with in Iraq and kind of went from Iraq to Afghanistan... | ||
| I was tired and burnt out. | ||
| And I was fucking angry. | ||
| And honestly, they had probably every right to tell me to hit the road. | ||
| And I'm glad that they did. | ||
| At the end of the day, it was a wake-up call. | ||
| A wide variety of reasons. | ||
| I was callous. | ||
| I was emotionally unavailable. | ||
| There was a fucking laundry list of things that were broken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did you get past all that? | |
| You know, I met my wife in Denver and we got pregnant. | ||
| I hate when guys say that. | ||
| We? | ||
| She got pregnant. | ||
| No, I fucked my wife and she got pregnant. | ||
| Now we're talking! | ||
| I really thought about it It was hard for me to think about it, but I was most fearful of not being able to love my daughter because I didn't have the emotional capacity to do that. | ||
| And it was eye-opening. | ||
| It was actually very scary because that's not the kind of person that I wanted to be. | ||
| And we've all seen examples of people who are that and then realize it later in life. | ||
| The saddest thing in the world is when you see a parent and then they have a grown kid that they fucked up because they did have all these other problems they never dealt with. | ||
| And then it's too late. | ||
| And then you have this angry child who you were never there for. | ||
| And then you're like, fuck. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I looked at it, and I knew in order to be a loving father, a good husband, and a good man, I had to change a lot of shit. | ||
| I really had to have a very difficult series of conversations with myself and give myself a lot of fucking tough love. | ||
| And starting a business was one of the things that I needed to do because it gave me... | ||
| I couldn't work for anyone else after that. | ||
| I was kind of done with working for other people. | ||
| I was not necessarily searching for purpose, but I knew that I really wanted to do something with coffee and, you know, a wide variety of reasons that I love coffee. | ||
| Black Rifle was an homage to my service rifle. | ||
| And I found myself wanting to teach myself a new skill. | ||
| And then what I wrote was a mission statement. | ||
| And my mission statement was just a mission statement for my life in general, which was to transition out of government service and live a happy and fulfilling life. | ||
| It had nothing to do with money, you know, running a company or hiring people. | ||
| I just wanted to find how to be happy and fulfill myself outside of being a commando or a CIA guy, whatever that definition for myself was. | ||
| But more importantly, as I've continued to develop myself, and I'm not saying I'm even close to being a commando It's a constant state of evolution to be a better man. | ||
| And I also knew that all the lies that I told myself up to that point of, you know, I'm a Green Beret, so, you know, I'm less than a one percentile and I'm a fucking badass and I'm this and I'm that. | ||
| All of that would have been a lie if I would have been a bad father. | ||
| All of that would have been meaningless. | ||
| It would have been garbage. | ||
| It's just propaganda. | ||
| Every one of my combat rotations, every one of my friends that has been killed or maimed in this war, it would have been a complete unjustifiable lie to myself to say, if I don't be the best man that I possibly can be... | ||
| And work on it now, then all of that is for naught. | ||
| It's all shit. | ||
| So I literally after my first year in business, I was sitting in my garage and And I had sold everything that I had owned, you know, and I was chips in on this entire thing. | ||
| And I didn't have anything left to sell. | ||
| I didn't have, I was living in this shitty rental. | ||
| My wife was, you know, packing boxes and roasting coffee. | ||
| And I was getting kind of down on myself and I was crying on this Pelican case in my garage. | ||
| And it was a distinct turning point in my life where I said... | ||
| Get up. | ||
| Stop making excuses. | ||
| Stop being a fucking pussy. | ||
| And do something about your life. | ||
| And when I say that, that's the conversation. | ||
| That's the exact conversation I had with myself. | ||
| And I've had that conversation almost every day in the last several years about just how can I continue to develop this ecosystem that meets my mission statement for my company that... | ||
| Quite literally has nothing to do with money, but how do I continue to be positive impact in my environment versus negative, taking away or contributing to toxicity, which is, man, I don't want to have anything to do with that life anymore. | ||
| There's a lot of people that have a problem with the way they are, and they make a decision to change, but they fall back into their old patterns because it's comfortable and because they're used to that. | ||
| So how did you avoid doing that? | ||
| How did you make real change? | ||
| Well, one, it's recognizing it, right? | ||
| It's kind of recognizing that you have an addiction when you have an addiction. | ||
| You know, when you have emotional or anger issues and you're just angry or whatever it is for no real reason... | ||
| I think, one, you have to recognize that you have a problem. | ||
| And I think, you know, I've continued to recognize that I have a problem. | ||
| And it's like quitting a habit or anything that you're doing, whether it's quitting smoking or working through a very disciplined diet. | ||
| And it's every minute you have the ability, sometimes every second you have the ability to make a decision and have a conscious effort to focus on improvement. | ||
| And when I feel myself, because there are times when I feel myself sliding backwards a little bit into more of a negative Evan situation, And we do it all the time. | ||
| And this is one thing I will say about the guys that we have together is it's not just myself. | ||
| It's, you know, my friends in the military, they're called, it sounds so ridiculous, but it is. | ||
| It's like we have our battle buddies, for lack of a better term. | ||
| But Matt and Jared, our other partner, we formed a team. | ||
| And the other people within our company that formed a team, We can talk to each other in a way that's very candid. | ||
| We can emotionally expose. | ||
| And the other thing is, Matt and I will do it all the time. | ||
| If we're talking and we're talking about negative and we're grinding ourselves into a negative hole, we're like, stop. | ||
| Stop right now. | ||
| We got better shit to talk about. | ||
| Pull ourselves out. | ||
| Dust ourselves off. | ||
| And... | ||
| If you're by yourself, it's much more difficult. | ||
| I think when you have really good friends for us, we're business partners. | ||
| I can be that guy for him and he can be that guy for me and Jared can be the guy for all of us. | ||
| And we have really good friends, we have good business partners, we have good people in the company that... | ||
| They help. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| And leaving one culture, one subculture of, you know, really tight-knit special operations group of guys, starting a business by yourself is difficult enough, right? | ||
| I would imagine it's an extremely difficult endeavor. | ||
| Doing it without your friends and people you can trust and people you can rely on, I can't even imagine. | ||
| Because the things that we've had to go through in the last several years and the reminders... | ||
| Matt won't let me be a shitbag. | ||
| It's just not possible. | ||
| He won't... | ||
| If I start being a lazy shitbag... | ||
| He went to Deseret for like a week and I was like, you're gonna hunt or fucking work, bro. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| he won't, he won't let me be a shit bag and I won't let him be a shit bag either. | ||
| In the sense of if I seem dragging, if there's something going on, what I call him, like, what's going on? | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| What, what can I talk to you about? | ||
| So I think one, it's focusing on yourself, identifying you have a problem, looking at every minute and every second at times, depending on when it is, uh, on how to be better. | ||
| And then building a, building a supportive team around you that understands what's going on and how they can continue to get you up. | ||
| And we've had to do this for a lot. | ||
| We've had to cut a lot of toxic people out of our lives. | ||
| We've had to cut some toxic people out of our lives because they're just negative weight. | ||
| They'll hold you back. | ||
| That's probably been the most challenging thing for me over the years. | ||
| There's always going to be extraneous influences that impact you, but... | ||
| I've had to change environments about five different times and find the right team for me and that my core competencies work with theirs. | ||
| Because a lot of people have asked this over the years, like, how did you get the team? | ||
| Like, well, we went through seven different teams, you know, toxic relationships or ones that just didn't mesh well together. | ||
| And the hardest part of that is just taking that leap of faith and saying... | ||
| Well, this is going to be really weird, but I'm packing my rucksack. | ||
| It's what I did. | ||
| I had a good life. | ||
| I was making a lot of money in my business at the time. | ||
| And I didn't like the direction things were going. | ||
| And Evan called me and was like, do you want to jump into Utah? | ||
| And let's go. | ||
| And I packed up, moved out of my house, broke up with my girlfriend at the time, drove to Utah in my Tundra in one bag and said, well, time to start over at 26, seven years old. | ||
| And I completely started over. | ||
| I lived in an Airbnb for six months. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| At face value, that was terrifying. | ||
| But the second I landed in Utah and got in that Airbnb, I was like, fuck, all I got to worry about is the one bag of clothes I have and going to work tomorrow is something that I'm passionate about and that I love. | ||
| And the rent's paid, so we're good. | ||
| And from there on, I've just chased that feeling. | ||
| And then all the toxicity that has impacted my life with relationships just get out. | ||
| It's also got to help that you're doing a business with friends as opposed to doing a business with a bunch of corporate dorks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I see people that are involved in business and I see the conversations they have and it's almost like they're speaking some strange language, some fake language and they all get together and talk corporate talk and then they get out of there and they take these big... | ||
| They take this big deep breath and they have a drink or they drive home because they're living bullshit. | ||
| They're living a lie all day long. | ||
| They're pretending to be someone they're not. | ||
| I call that the ivory tower syndrome. | ||
| They just blow hot air and don't do anything, and they don't believe in their mission. | ||
| And I think that's been the most impactful thing for us is we believe in it, and it's easy to be authentic or communication style between the team. | ||
| And again, the hardest part is probably maintaining that cultural ecosystem in the company, especially as you scale it, because you want people to be authentic. | ||
| Open, candid, radical transparency. | ||
| Obviously, we're not saying, you know, making fun of people, but we want to be able to say, fuck, let's get this done, instead of... | ||
| And that's why I think we've done so well so far, is because we just stick to the mission and grind it out. | ||
| I mean, we're all kind of a bunch of knuckle-draggers. | ||
| They're dumb. | ||
| We just outwork our intelligence. | ||
| Yeah, and I think to your point, maintaining mission focus, all of these things that we learned in the military, write your mission statements, maintain your mission focus, radical transparency. | ||
| I'm a zealot at the end of the day. | ||
| I love coffee. | ||
| I love the company. | ||
| I love the ecosystem. | ||
| And it's easy for me. | ||
| I can go in and high-five everybody and we can joke around in the company. | ||
| We have incredible atmosphere as far as the ecosystem of the company. | ||
| I love going to work there. | ||
| I would hate to go to work in a corporate environment. | ||
| I actually hate the word corporate. | ||
| Because to me, it just says, this is stodgy, spreadsheet-driven bullshit where you've got a bunch of people that pontificate about things that they have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
| And what they want to do is they want to run a company only for the profit versus the pursuit of authenticity under a real mission. | ||
| There's a huge difference. | ||
| I've stepped into corporate environments a lot and especially like finance guys are some of the worst fucking people ever in the sense of, you know, they're not funny. | ||
| They have no sense of humor. | ||
| I've told bankers to get the fuck out of my office when they're like 15 minutes late just to get some like payback and how many times that they've screwed good people over and So the company itself, in the sense of any company and how you kind of create that environment, I don't like this standard corporate templatized system that people work through. | ||
| It's confusing to me as well because you know when people are fake. | ||
| You know when you're having a conversation with some executive and he's like, oh yeah, Susie, you're... | ||
| You're an incredible asset to the company. | ||
| It's like, you don't know who that person is. | ||
| It's inauthentic. | ||
| It's fake. | ||
| And I would hate to go to work in a place like that every day. | ||
| And most people do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a giant problem with human beings today is that most people don't have a purpose. | ||
| They don't feel good about what they're doing. | ||
| You know, it's that Thoreau quote, most men live lives of quiet desperation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that is real, man. | ||
| That's really what a lot of people are going through every day, just not having any real connection to what they're doing, where they feel good about it, they feel like they have a purpose, they feel like it makes... | ||
| Like, they matter. | ||
| Like, they really do matter. | ||
| You know, and then when a lot of these people, when they wind up getting fired by their company, you know, after 30 years of working there, and they realize that they were nothing. | ||
| They didn't mean anything. | ||
| It wasn't important. | ||
| It's devastating. | ||
| I think a lot of people like kind of succumb to like that social construct and like this is what you have to do the nine to five kind of thing but not to be a fatalist but something like my positive mindset like we're all born terminal the second we come out of that womb we're gonna fucking die and I've always wanted to be super proud because you know I think there's certain aspects of the former jobs I had you have to kind of I agree and be comfortable with the fact that there's a high probability of dying and or life-changing events. | ||
| And I think once you realize that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when. | ||
| Whether that's when I'm 60 and have a heart attack or I live to be 90 or I die tomorrow. | ||
| And that drives me every single day because I look back and go, I don't want to miss out on this fucking crazy thing called life. | ||
| You have one chance to live this cool fucking experience, whether or not you believe in afterlife or not, but we're all going to die. | ||
| And it's very bizarre for me that people don't take leaps of faith because they get so trepidatious in everything that they do. | ||
| And they're like, whoa, whoa, what if? | ||
| And they hate that uncomfortable feeling. | ||
| We just fucking punch it in the face and go kid it. | ||
| But the problem is roots. | ||
| You know, people, they grow roots before they know what they actually want to do. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, look, you go to college, right? | ||
| And then you have student debt. | ||
| So these are roots, right? | ||
| Now you have to pay off that student debt. | ||
| So you have these obligations. | ||
| Then you get a job. | ||
| And maybe you lease a car. | ||
| Maybe you get an apartment. | ||
| Now you have roots. | ||
| You have bills you have to pay. | ||
| You have obligations that you can't shirk. | ||
| So maybe you try to save. | ||
| So you save a little. | ||
| Maybe you save 10% of your income every week. | ||
| So you're putting it away, you're putting it away, and you realize how quickly that goes away. | ||
| You have taxes. | ||
| And then you find yourself five, six, seven years in, you're like, I want to make a change. | ||
| But you have all this shit that you're paying for. | ||
| And then you reward yourself for this terrible job that you hate by getting a new car. | ||
| Or maybe you buy a fucking boat. | ||
| You know, that's what people do. | ||
| And then you're 38 and you're like, God damn it. | ||
| I fucking hate my life. | ||
| But now maybe you have a child. | ||
| Maybe you're married. | ||
| Maybe your wife doesn't work anymore because she's pregnant. | ||
| And you're like, fuck! | ||
| Like, what am I going to do with my life? | ||
| And then you find yourself stuck, and you take pills, you take antidepressants, you do something. | ||
| And this is the story of the American life that is untold, and this is a lot of people's existence. | ||
| They find themselves in this meaningless path, and then they hear about guys like you, and they get excited. | ||
| They're like, maybe I can figure this out. | ||
| And some of them do. | ||
| And some of them start a business in their garage. | ||
| And some of them get together with their friends and say, let's partner up. | ||
| Let's do something. | ||
| And let's take a chance. | ||
| Let's plan. | ||
| And two years from now, we'll make the leap. | ||
| Let's start it online. | ||
| Let's do something. | ||
| And that's the real American dream, is finding independence, being your own boss, finding something that you really love. | ||
| Instead of just doing a job, finding a job that actually means something to you. | ||
| Yeah, it's like finding the excuse to do it. | ||
| And I think there's two avenues there. | ||
| You can always find an excuse not to do something. | ||
| But if you look for the excuse of why you should, your output's going to be so much better. | ||
| And I've had that conversation with people where they say, I just don't have the time. | ||
| You can always find time to work out. | ||
| You want to be your fitness goals. | ||
| Find a fucking retention band and a kettlebell and we'll fuck you up. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| Give me 30 minutes. | ||
| And I think that's applicable to anything and everything. | ||
| If you wanted to get into music, you can find 20 minutes in the day or get 20 minutes less of sleep to practice your guitar or learn graphic design. | ||
| I mean, the opportunity is out there, especially with the technological era. | ||
| Everything's free right now. | ||
| You can go on YouTube and become a master in any technical skill for the most part. | ||
| You might not have the accreditation of a degree, but it's there. | ||
| The information's there. | ||
| The only inhibitor is you. | ||
| I don't have the time, people. | ||
| Don't know what the fuck they're talking about. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| I can find you some folks. | ||
| I can find you some folks. | ||
| Like my friend Cam Haynes. | ||
| That motherfucker works a full-time job, eight hours a day, and often runs a marathon a day. | ||
| And then he goes at home, and then he shoots his bow for hours, and then he lifts weights. | ||
| So shut the fuck up. | ||
| There's people that find time. | ||
| That's like over and over and over. | ||
| You know, it's Cam. | ||
| I love following Cam because guess what? | ||
| Nothing but positivity comes out of his mouth. | ||
| He's freaking a rock star when it comes to all of the things that you just mentioned. | ||
| Guys like that exist. | ||
| You don't have to be... | ||
| You know, a Goggins or a Haynes or a Dudley or any of these guys. | ||
| It's a matter of, hey man, you want to make some changes? | ||
| You're going to have to also risk a little bit too. | ||
| And that's one thing. | ||
| You're going to have to experience discomfort. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're going to have to suck it up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's going to hurt a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, if you want to have stronger legs, you know, squats aren't the best fucking thing in the world to do, you know, twice a week or once a week. | ||
| They don't feel good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't feel good. | |
| That's the way your legs get stronger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the way you get stronger. | ||
| You don't... | ||
| Grow from being comfortable. | ||
| No. | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| You've got to experience that awful feeling. | ||
| That's why most people don't grow. | ||
| Most people don't grow because they gravitate towards comfort. | ||
| And that's one thing I will say about this is, you know, combat to me taught me so many different things about myself. | ||
| But the one thing that it taught me was that life is finite. | ||
| And in order to live, in order to live, you got to risk. | ||
| You got to risk it and you got to suck a little bit. | ||
| You know, for the payoff at the end, you know, that last minute of light that you have in this world, you don't want to be sitting there doing an audit of all the things you should have done. | ||
| That would be the fucking worst. | ||
| That's really the only thing I truly, truly fear in life is to be on a deathbed and go, I should have done this. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure there'll be small things, but that's the driving force in everything of my life is I don't want the regrets. | ||
| Not even a letter. | ||
| You know, those are the things where it's like, I want to jump out of planes. | ||
| I want to, you know, experience a foreign language. | ||
| I want to go to war. | ||
| When you look at those things as a younger, when I looked at them as a younger man, when I look at them now, I'm not going to be... | ||
| You know, whatever age it is, thinking back, going, man, I really wish I would have tried to be a commando. | ||
| I've already got that. | ||
| Now I can focus, I think, a lot more of my energy on how do we, you know, become a better father, how to become a better business owner, a better friend. | ||
| But I didn't leave anything on the table in the previous 20 years. | ||
| I didn't leave any of that shit on the table going, man, I really wish I would have done that. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| Like I... I pushed it as hard as I could with whatever was given to me. | ||
| I did the best that I could with what I got. | ||
| And honestly, I'm operating, I think, at about 150% right now. | ||
| I'm overextending what capacity I have up here to try to put it all together. | ||
| Honestly, I'm just trying to fucking run it as hard as I can because the machine... | ||
| That I was given is like, I'm very fortunate. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But I got to run this thing way past its capability to get the most out of it. | ||
| Now, there's some guys that, you know, maybe they're phenoms and they're much more intelligent than I am. | ||
| That would be, you know, one of the things I joke around, I say is like, man, I'd love to be an astrophysicist. | ||
| Unfortunately, I'm just not that bright. | ||
| So I'm gonna have to settle for what the fuck I'm doing. | ||
| But would you? | ||
| Yeah, theoretical physicists would be fucking awesome. | ||
| I'd love to do that. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I think you found the right spot. | ||
| I think people find the right spot. | ||
| If you put enough attention into what you're doing and you gravitate towards what you love, you find the right spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You do. | ||
| I used to think that I was a giant loser because I couldn't work a job. | ||
| Because I was like, I'm just too lazy. | ||
| I'm just too undisciplined. | ||
| I really used to think that. | ||
| And then I realized like, oh no, I'm not lazy. | ||
| I just hate things that suck. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're probably a creative. | ||
| It's pretty much the same as me. | ||
| Once I figured out things that I loved, I'm like, oh, look, all of a sudden I'm not lazy anymore. | ||
| Now I'm obsessed. | ||
| And I used to think that was a weakness. | ||
| That, like, oh, I'm not disciplined. | ||
| I'm just obsessed. | ||
| I'm just a crazy person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if I find something that I like, I can get really good at it because I'm crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then I realize, like, oh, but all that shit that they tell you about, like, ADHD and being hyperactive and not being able to pay attention, that's actually, you have energy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't want to sit in a fucking chair when you're 10 years old while some person who doesn't give a fuck about you or what they're teaching is just rambling on in front of you and you're just going crazy. | ||
| You can't wait to get out of there. | ||
| And the doctor's like, this man needs to be on some medication. | ||
| This young man has problems paying attention. | ||
| Well, he should. | ||
| He should. | ||
| Well, he's got a goddamn chance. | ||
| Maybe he could fucking rocket out of this system. | ||
| Maybe he's got enough energy to get away from the gravity of this bullshit that you're teaching them every day. | ||
| So instead of saying, like, oh, this girl needs to be on medication, maybe that girl has a goddamn chance of escaping the hell that you live in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I couldn't. | ||
| I can't agree more on that. | ||
| I think all of us have this ball of fucking energy and it zaps everything around us. | ||
| And if you try to point it in a direction where it doesn't work, I could never be a finance guy. | ||
| I could never be a numbers guy. | ||
| Any of that. | ||
| I am too fucking ADHD. But what that allows me to do is think in the clouds and be super creative and write and build content and music and all these things. | ||
| And we had a really cool exercise in the business. | ||
| We did kind of like... | ||
| Remember when the... | ||
| Creative problem? | ||
| Yeah, creative problem solving. | ||
| And we all had to take this pretty intricate test. | ||
| And it was the best one I've ever done. | ||
| But it pretty much kind of tells you where you live as far as if you're like an ideator, a developer, and all these characteristics of your brain. | ||
| And that's kind of how you build a team. | ||
| Because Evan's like an implementer. | ||
| He's like, get this fucking shit done. | ||
| And I'm more of like an ideator where I come up and develop ideas, but then I don't have the follow through, at least on the business side. | ||
| And so learning about yourself, just because you live in the clouds doesn't mean that you have ADHD and you need to take anti-frickin' whatever. | ||
| I just think we have this terrible idea of how to develop human beings. | ||
| There's not a kid in the world that wants to sit at a desk eight hours a day. | ||
| There's not a kid in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not normal. | |
| But those that do, great, there's a big system for you. | ||
| But even them. | ||
| I don't know how healthy that is. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you can't be an accountant or an astrophysicist. | ||
| But you need activity. | ||
| And children are deprived of activity most of the day. | ||
| And I should have been out portaging boats on like really nasty, you know, in British Columbia somewhere by some asshole dude that was, you know, here's 10 minutes worth of work. | ||
| Now you're just going to work you into the ground. | ||
| And when I say that, that's the level of, I guess, patience that I had for any of it in the sense of you can't sit a kid at a desk, or at least kids like me, for six or eight hours a day. | ||
| Or anybody in this room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anybody. | |
| My daughter's six years old now. | ||
| We were just having this conversation about school is VTC because of COVID. Yeah. | ||
| Man, she's six years old, and you want her to sit in front of a laptop for six hours a day? | ||
| You should watch those classes. | ||
| I sat in while my 10-year-old was at school, and I watched how the teachers talk, and I watched what was going on. | ||
| I'm like, holy shit. | ||
| And she looked at me, and she goes, it's so boring. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's looked up. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's so boring. | |
| Are they just talking monotone the whole time? | ||
| Well, in Texas, they let him go to school. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She's in school here. | ||
| She goes to actual school, you know? | ||
| And my 12-year-old goes to school next week. | ||
| She was doing video for the first couple weeks, and then they're easing him back into school. | ||
| Look, this is a travesty. | ||
| These kids are getting, especially kids in public school systems, especially kids that have working parents. | ||
| This is fucking devastating for them. | ||
| Devastating. | ||
| Devastating. | ||
| And it's going to fuck up their development for years to come. | ||
| Took six months and didn't learn anything for six months. | ||
| That fucks with your development. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| That's what happened to a lot of these kids. | ||
| They're not learning shit when they're sitting in front of their laptop. | ||
| They're barely paying attention. | ||
| You can't expect kids to sit in front of a laptop. | ||
| It's terrible for them. | ||
| It's a terrible idea, and it's a terrible way to experiment on kids, which is you're pulling this out of your... | ||
| You know, you're pulling this out of your ass. | ||
| Yes, I think this is going to work. | ||
| Let's put them in front of a laptop and we're going to sit them there for six or eight hours a day or whatever it is. | ||
| We're going to give them a lunch break. | ||
| I was having this conversation with my wife. | ||
| I'm like, this is a horrible idea that they're experimenting with kids. | ||
| Just ultimately, you have to give them some type of... | ||
| Pre-existing assignments, but you can't sit them in front of a laptop. | ||
| The other thing is I don't want to teach my kids how to sit in front of a laptop for six hours a day to give them the discipline to do that. | ||
| They were telling my daughter she had to eat lunch in front of the laptop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, you have to eat lunch in front of the laptop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They have to see you eat lunch. | ||
| I go, no you don't. | ||
| I go, let me talk to the teacher. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You don't have to eat lunch in front of the laptop. | ||
| Come sit at the kitchen table. | ||
| Let's talk. | ||
| What's the desired outcome in that form of education? | ||
| They're assholes. | ||
| They don't know what the fuck they're doing. | ||
| This is all making it up on the go. | ||
| If they could justify in some way that a kid should eat lunch in front of a laptop instead of eat lunch at their kitchen table, why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| So you could see them eat lunch? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Yeah, and why would you ever think that that's acceptable to do this? | ||
| It's also the teachers don't have any oversight either. | ||
| Some of these teachers are so bored. | ||
| They're so bored and boring. | ||
| And I've watched them talk rude to the kids. | ||
| I'm like, this is gross. | ||
| It's so bad for them. | ||
| And at least now, the one shining star I will say to this is that hopefully we come out of this with the ability of some type of homeschooling system that actually works. | ||
| Because the one thing about homeschooling for the nation is, what's the one stereotype of homeschooled kids that we've all kind of- Religious psychos. | ||
| Yeah, they're weirdos, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Weird old introverts. | ||
| But now we're at least living in a time where hopefully this catches up and we can educate children from our home and maybe a balance between the home and the school that gives them some form of adjustment that works for them. | ||
| That's the one thing I will say about this where I'm like, God... | ||
| This has been a good thing from a perspective in my life, which is I don't travel as much. | ||
| I've chopped a bunch of travel out of my schedule. | ||
| My wife stays home with the kids. | ||
| I've been home with the kids way more than I have in the last five years. | ||
| And it's forced us to look inside the family a lot more than, you know, on the go, constantly driving outside of the family, doing things outside of the family. | ||
| It's really forced us to be, I think, a much tighter family unit with the four of us. | ||
| And I'm always trying to find the positive in it regardless. | ||
| There's plenty of negative out there. | ||
| We've all talked about it and we hear it on the fucking news every day. | ||
| I will say the forcing function in all of this has made my family, I think, tighter, much tighter. | ||
| I hope it has for a lot of other people, but I know it's been very detrimental to a lot of family units, too, because they have a lot of financial issues. | ||
| They have domestic violence issues. | ||
| But for my family, it's really forced us to look inside and really work on us. | ||
| And so I can say, we're going to try to come out of this a much better family. | ||
| Well, it's like all struggles, right? | ||
| Some struggles make a better person. | ||
| Some struggles destroy you. | ||
| And it really depends on what the struggle is and where you're at when you come into it. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people, this is a real eye-opener about your health. | ||
| And that's what I'm hoping, that more people pay attention to your body. | ||
| There's a direct correlation between your health and your ability to overcome diseases. | ||
| And I really, really hope that that message gets out there and that more people understand that if you are obese, if you do have a bad diet, these are things you can handle. | ||
| You can do something about this. | ||
| And this is the wake-up call. | ||
| Please, fucking take care of yourself. | ||
| It may be the difference between catching this shit and living through it and maybe in some cases breezing right through it. | ||
| I have a bunch of friends that caught it and like, yeah, I had a cough for a day. | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| Quite a few friends that had a cough for a day and felt like shit for two or three days afterwards and then we're done with it and we're working out five days later. | ||
| Most all my healthy friends is that way too. | ||
| They're athletic. | ||
| I coughed a little bit, kind of felt sick one day and the next day I was fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| Paul Rodriguez, okay, who's a friend of mine who's a comedian, he's, I mean, Paul's gotta be in his 60s, right? | ||
| He was famous in the fucking 70s. | ||
| Paul, I tested everybody, and we did this Comedy Store documentary, and I tested, he was the only one who tested positive for the antibodies. | ||
| And I go, when do you think you got it? | ||
| And he goes, I don't know. | ||
| He goes, I think I had a cold in February. | ||
| He's like he had a cold for a couple days. | ||
| He fucking parties. | ||
| He's not out there eating wheatgrass and fucking doing squats. | ||
| He's having fun. | ||
| He's a comic. | ||
| He's a real old school comic. | ||
| Getting down. | ||
| Partying. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Walked it off. | ||
| I mean, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| But for people that are unhealthy, I just really hope that this is the wake-up call. | ||
| Take care of your goddamn body. | ||
| Take care of your health. | ||
| Take some vitamin D and zinc and C and just make that a priority. | ||
| Make it a priority, whereas if you got sick, you're not worried. | ||
| It's interesting, too, because a lot of things that people rely on as far as substances will absolutely go away if you follow a healthy diet and exercise routine. | ||
| I mean, the euphoria and how I feel post-workout is one of the most amazing feelings I've ever had. | ||
| So it's not only like a bodily function, it's a cognitive one as well. | ||
| All the endorphins you get, and you're like, I'm ready for the day, and then you feel accomplished. | ||
| I mean, it's like, incremental success makes great success. | ||
| And those little wins throughout the day, and I think working out is one of them, more people need that feeling of, fuck, I feel good. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Food is probably the most overused tool to deal with anxiety, and exercise is the most underused tool to deal with depression. | ||
| And those two things, like, food will fuck you up if you just eat to calm yourself. | ||
| And exercise will help you in a gigantic way if you use it to deal with depression and anxiety and everything else. | ||
| So let me ask the question, though, because I've heard you talk about it on the show, which, why is it that we can't have that national conversation? | ||
| Why do you think our, I mean, we just had the presidential debates last night, but why is it- Those were not debates! | ||
| That was fucking crazy. | ||
| I put it on my Instagram. | ||
| I'm like, you don't need me. | ||
| You need big John McCarthy. | ||
| John McCarthy. | ||
| Get the UFC ref in here. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| But he's the most authoritative UFC referee because he was a cop for years. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Stand over there! | ||
| Stand over there! | ||
| He fucking controls the situation. | ||
| He would have controlled that. | ||
| Man, yeah. | ||
| Why can't we have the conversation? | ||
| Because you can't be mean. | ||
| You can't say, hey, stop shoving sugar and fucking saturated bullshit and fucking oils and vegetable grease and all the crap and fucking all the nonsense that people stuff in their face. | ||
| Stop! | ||
| Stop doing that! | ||
| You're fat! | ||
| It's fucking you up! | ||
| There's a fucking picture, man, from like the early 1900s. | ||
| Of a guy at a carnival, and he's the fat guy at a sideshow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And he's a normal fat guy for today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you looked at this picture, and like, you know- And he was like an exhibit? | ||
| He was an exhibit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Shut up. | ||
| He was so fat that people were like, holy fuck, look at this guy. | ||
| You could see when Disneyland was open, you could see a hundred of those guys rolling around on scooters. | ||
| He's a normal person today, like a normal overweight person. | ||
| Because people didn't have the access to bullshit back then. | ||
| To get that fat was hard. | ||
| When you don't have that kind of sugar in your diet, the amount of gluten and grains and fucking nonsense that people eat today, it's so easy to get that fat. | ||
| But back then it was really hard. | ||
| See if you can find that picture, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I typed it in and I found a lot of giant fat guys. | |
| From back then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But see, find the one that was, the guy was, it was in a side show at a carnival. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I typed in. | |
| I don't know how to find that particular. | ||
| Harold Huge, alive, 712 pounds. | ||
| Well, go to the one in the upper left-hand corner. | ||
| Look at that guy. | ||
| That guy you could find anywhere today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can cruise down to the supermarket. | ||
| That was a sideshow guy. | ||
| That's a sideshow guy back then. | ||
| Harold, huge. | ||
| But that's a drawing, unfortunately. | ||
| Look at that guy up there. | ||
| Go to that guy up above that. | ||
| Go to that guy right there. | ||
| That guy's fucking right down the street. | ||
| Go to the barbecue store. | ||
| Barbecue store. | ||
| Restaurant. | ||
| That guy's waiting in line for more bread. | ||
| How do you change that, right? | ||
| Where if you say something like that, you'll have people that are heavier and say you're fat shaming. | ||
| I am. | ||
| That's what I'm doing. | ||
| That's how you feel bad. | ||
| You feel bad if someone fat shames you and then you make decisions. | ||
| You can't fat comfort. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, look at that. | |
| That's nothing. | ||
| Four fat men at the circus. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's Jared Taylor right there. | ||
| The subculture that we grew up in, right, in our 20s, when we were 18 to 20, 30, whatever it was, like, man, we would have guys slapping food out of your hands and going fatty, because in the middle, back in the day, and I'm not saying back in the day, right, I guess it makes me sound old, but... | ||
| I'm washed up enough to say that now. | ||
| Yeah, we're washed up enough. | ||
| Dude, you could shame the shit out of people, and that's just the way it worked, which was, hey, fatty... | ||
| And if you weren't meeting a task or, you know, task condition standard, you would have guys in NCOs, non-commissioned officers, in your chow line selecting your food for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Going, dude, you're going to eat this. | ||
| You're not going to eat this. | ||
| And then people would go to eat something and literally slap it out of your face and go, you're not eating that. | ||
| Now, there's these open discussions and you read it and all of a sudden... | ||
| We're bad people because we want people to be healthier if we say, hey, that person's obese or that's fat and that's unhealthy. | ||
| How did this turn to people being a bad guy? | ||
| Because people are trying to be nice. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| They think it's good to be nice. | ||
| And it is good to be nice. | ||
| But the reality is when you're mean to someone about certain things that you actually can change. | ||
| It's one thing. | ||
| It's like you say to someone, you got a stupid fucking nose, man. | ||
| Well, you can't do anything about your nose. | ||
| But if you say to someone, bro, you're fat as fuck. | ||
| And then they have to feel that. | ||
| Like, oh my god. | ||
| I hate being fat. | ||
| Make a choice. | ||
| Make a choice. | ||
| Do something. | ||
| Well... | ||
| Is it better to be nice to someone about that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Most certainly. | ||
| Is it better if you have a friend, and I've had friends that I pulled aside and said, listen, man, you've got to lose weight. | ||
| You've got to do something to lose weight. | ||
| You know how many of them have done that? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| They don't listen. | ||
| The only time it ever works is when the person decides that they want to make a change. | ||
| And oftentimes that comes from pain. | ||
| And oftentimes that comes from being mocked. | ||
| And yeah, it's not nice. | ||
| It's not nice to... | ||
| Yeah, but you know what's not nice is dying of diabetes, especially if it's coming from an empathetic position, where you're like, I'm saying this because I want you to live, which means I like you. | ||
| But the thing is, people are lazy. | ||
| And when you tell them that they're fat, all people like to consider is, like, you are shaming a person because of their body shape, and that's terrible, and that's awful. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But if you also say to that person, like, hey... | ||
| I love you. | ||
| I care about you. | ||
| But I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| You're fat as fuck. | ||
| And you need to lose weight. | ||
| That's also fat shaming? | ||
| But there's very few ways to get through to someone. | ||
| If someone's drunk, if they're a fucking alcoholic and they get drunk every night, and you pull them aside and go, hey man, You are a fucking drunk. | ||
| And you need to stop. | ||
| You need to get your shit together. | ||
| And they feel bad because they love you. | ||
| Like, wow, Evan says I'm a drunk. | ||
| I respect Evan. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| God damn it, I gotta get my life together. | ||
| Somehow or another, that's okay. | ||
| But telling someone that they're a fat fuck is not okay because you're fat shaming. | ||
| Well, because you're making them feel bad because of their addiction to food versus their addiction to alcohol? | ||
| If you see someone smoking every day and go, hey man, those fucking things are going to kill you, are you cigarette shaming? | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Evan told me I was drinking a little too much whiskey at one point and I said, you're offending me. | ||
| You're shaming, alcohol shaming me. | ||
| He actually told me that he identified as somebody that doesn't drink at all. | ||
| I identify as a non-drinker now, so I'm fine. | ||
| This whiskey identifies as water, so your argument isn't valid, Evan. | ||
| Do you know that they're using gender-neutral language in the SEALs now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| It made it all the way to the SEALs. | ||
| I sent it to Jocko and I sent it to Goggins. | ||
| And I was like, what the fuck is this shit? | ||
| I was the same. | ||
| I was texting or talking to Jocko this morning. | ||
| Did you read it? | ||
| I hadn't seen it. | ||
| Gender neutral. | ||
| You can't identify as him or her. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| They've changed this entire... | ||
| How did that get in there? | ||
| How did that get all the way to the SEALs? | ||
| How did someone not say, hey, fuck you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck off. | |
| I think that it's the same way that most of these policies kind of, they bypass logic. | ||
| They go through some type of bureaucratic mechanism where somebody thinks it's a good idea. | ||
| And typically this is going to be an officer that's looking to be promoted off of some merit where they're going to go, I'm going to change this. | ||
| This is going to be a good thing for my career because this is where I'm going to hang my hat on this. | ||
| I'm going to look progressive. | ||
| I'm going to look really good for the rest of the command. | ||
| This is going to resonate with the rest of the culture that we're living in right now. | ||
| People are going to go, ooh, even the SEALs are being progressive. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think that's how it happens. | ||
| When you gunned down the bad guys, were you a they or a them? | ||
|
unidentified
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What were you? | |
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the ridiculousness of it. | ||
| I mean, these are like trained warfighters doing one of the most difficult jobs on the planet, and we're going to bring, you know, bureaucratic, like, weird fucking bullshit into it. | ||
| It's like, no, we are training them to do the world's worst act, which is kill another human being in hopefulness that it's saving more human lives. | ||
| I mean, this is not a PC job. | ||
| You're getting trained with hand grenades, rocket launchers, guns to put night vision on and sneak into houses and shoot motherfuckers in the face. | ||
| The danger is, if you do make it politically correct, you're going to cost U.S. service members lives. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| And then if you bring all this bullshit into it, then you're decreasing the survivability and the training that these guys and gals need to succeed and be a high-functioning unit to live. | ||
| This is not a game of sensitivity. | ||
| This is a game of life and death. | ||
| And people say, oh, you're exaggerating. | ||
| It's not going to cost people lives to be polite and use non-gendered language. | ||
| No, this is one step on a fucking greased up hill. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And this is what happens. | ||
| If you let that shit get in there, it's going to be like, people used to say, like, why does anyone care about what goes on in college campuses? | ||
| This is not happening in the real world. | ||
| Stop worrying about leftist ideology that's permeating in school. | ||
| Well, look at what happened in Seattle. | ||
| Look what's going on in Portland. | ||
| That shit bleeds out into real life. | ||
| And if that shit bleeds out into the seals, you got real problems. | ||
| Well, I... I think that's a really good point from the entire warfighter. | ||
| When we look at the entire warfighter across America, we have a very small subsection of guys that carry the lion's share of the warfighting. | ||
| And, you know, the special operations community, the infantry, and the combat arms. | ||
| So when we look at that, it's a really small number of guys. | ||
| And to Matt's point, it's the most politically incorrect profession in the United States, quite possibly in the world. | ||
| Because what you're doing is you're taking human life. | ||
| You can't have these two things. | ||
| You can't be politically correct and shoot people in the face. | ||
| You can't have both. | ||
| I'm sorry, America. | ||
| You can't have the two. | ||
| You have to have your warfighters that are out there, especially when you're America, you have to have the guys that are trained to go out at night and do this every fucking night and take it to every terrorist, every bad guy internationally to protect you in your sleeping beds. | ||
| You have to do that. | ||
| You can't have a politically correct warfighter. | ||
| Knock, knock. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You identify as a politically correct nonviolent terrorist. | ||
| I guess we'll move on to the next house. | ||
| That doesn't work. | ||
| It's completely illogical. | ||
| You can't fight wars with a politically correct attorney. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And guess what? | ||
| They're not politically correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| The people that you're opposing, these fucking dictators and all these different terrorist organizations, they're not playing by those rules. | ||
| If you play by those rules, you're handicapping yourself. | ||
| And it's just nonsense. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, and those types of people have no regard for human life, you know, and I've seen it personally, when politics get involved in wars, it kills people. | ||
| I mean, I have a few instances where there were, you know, you can't drop ordinance on guys you just got ambushed by, because the local village said you can't use, you know, bombs from planes. | ||
| And you're like, we, one of our guys just got shot. | ||
| We killed the three that ran out the front door, but the six that ran out the back door, I'm just supposed to let them go live from an ethical perspective. | ||
| They're going to go do this again, and I hope they don't go plant bombs and blow up a whole engineer vehicle and kill six Americans. | ||
| Where's the efficacy in that? | ||
| Because you didn't want to offend somebody? | ||
| Politics don't work in war. | ||
| Obviously, you need rules and regulations and ROE and things that... | ||
| But that's where the training comes in. | ||
| You're acting on an ethical basis on the ground. | ||
| But again, I don't think anybody understands, if you haven't been there, how dynamic and complex some of these situations when it's completely dark, you're under night vision and a laser, and you're having to make moments... | ||
| Seconds, milliseconds to make a decision whether you survive or you don't. | ||
| There's no black and white with that. | ||
| It's very complicated. | ||
| And that goes back to the whole thing where you've got to look out for veterans and post-service because they're put in some very, very, very difficult situations. | ||
| Yeah, when you're yelling at someone and giving out orders, you can't ask them what pronouns they use. | ||
| And they're going to lie and deceive. | ||
| I mean, you know, my Teamler and Squad Leader both got killed because of that. | ||
| We did a call-out, and they said no one was in the building. | ||
| They swore to a law and all this stuff, and we went in there, and we got hemmed up really, really bad. | ||
| So, you know, there's no moral, like... | ||
| The decision-making on their side as far as, well, better tell the Americans we are hard-pointed in this building with AK-47s and suicide vests. | ||
| No, they're going to lie their balls off because they're trying to fucking kill us. | ||
| Well, I think that when the expectation for the overall, you know, the warrior class, really what it is, for them to kind of adapt to this politically correct culture, we've seen it, I think, and I've seen it, especially when we look at some of the other countries that we actually have fought with. | ||
| Some of these guys have to come to the United States, for instance, to get really good weapons training because weapons are illegal in places like the UK. | ||
| So you'll have British soldiers that'll come over here, especially their special forces. | ||
| They'll come over and train with us because they have restrictions on how often they can use firearms in the UK. | ||
| So that's a great plan. | ||
| Let's make all firearms illegal. | ||
| And then, oh, by the way, our special operations have a hard time training with them. | ||
| And there's a very distinct and huge difference between the proficiency and the way that they're utilizing their weapons and the way that we do it because of our culture. | ||
| So our warrior class as a society, we really have to look at it and say, how do we protect them? | ||
| You know, and if we're going to continue to maintain, you know, our sovereignty and security of the nation, we really have to create a place where these guys are not affected by the bullshit that goes on in the United States as far as, | ||
| you know, woke cancer culture bullshit and We've got to protect them from this, and we've also got to just decide that these guys are trained at a high proficiency level to do something exceedingly difficult, and we want to keep them over there. | ||
| They are a break glass in case of war, and now wars are just perpetual, essentially. | ||
| So keep them separate from the rest of this because we really want those guys to be proficient so we can go to bed every night and kind of rest easy. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| One of the things you talked about, about where this probably came from, it's a reoccurring theme in Jack Carr's books as well, is that there's these officers that are career politicians, really, that are also in the military, and they're really just trying to advance their career. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| It's one of those archetypes that resonates. | ||
| You go, oh, I bet that guy's real. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| It makes sense as sort of an evil, sort of a bullshit artist that happens to be an officer and claims responsibility for all the good things and doesn't take responsibility for the bad things, winds up getting people killed or winds up being corrupt. | ||
| How often is that really the case? | ||
| It's often, and we run into it, and I've described it a lot, as you have a group of, and it can be non-commissioned officers or officers, and you have a group of guys. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Non-commissioned officers are guys that have enlisted in the military, and they either went to college or didn't go to college, but they've enlisted and they've worked their way up through the ranks. | ||
| Officers have gone to college, they've gone to either ROTC or the academy, and And there's two distinctly different ranking systems. | ||
| So enlisted, I just go down, raise your hand, join the military, work your way up. | ||
| The officers are typically in charge of the NCOs. | ||
| That's most of the time. | ||
| There are some special operations units where that's a little bit more fluid. | ||
| But in any government bureaucracy, specifically in the military, and I think even in the intelligence community, you have... | ||
| You have personality types just like you do in any organization. | ||
| You have the mission first guys, people. | ||
| They're like, I'm ready to fucking do whatever it is I need to do in order to accomplish the mission. | ||
| They're the bread and butter of what's happening overseas, and there's a ton of those guys. | ||
| And then you have a minority of me's. | ||
| And the me's are the guys that are, I'm here to elevate and rank. | ||
| I'm here to shirk responsibility and make sure that I take responsibility for other people's actions. | ||
| And I'm here to be a careerist, essentially. | ||
| And I'll do anything to get promoted to include what they call throwing our guys under the bus. | ||
| So Andy Stump's a good example. | ||
| He was an officer, but you would never know that, right? | ||
| He would never throw his guys under the bus. | ||
| Jocko's a great example. | ||
| He'd never throw his guys under the bus. | ||
| You know, good leaders eat last. | ||
| They're not careerists. | ||
| They're not trying to do anything or say anything in order to get promoted. | ||
| They're mission first, very capable and driven people that ultimately don't care if they get credit for what happens. | ||
| And most of the time, those guys sacrifice their career and their promotions. | ||
| Because they're going to always default to what's right. | ||
| The me's are always going to default to what's best for me. | ||
| And then what happens is those me's start to get a, they move up much faster and more effectively than the mission guys. | ||
| And the subsequent effect of that which you see is you have the me guys that are moving up in ranks and then it is a massive you know downside to the guys that are mission first because they want to focus on their team and getting what they need to get done done and then they pretty much get out of the military because they're like ah I don't like this political crap. | ||
| I hear that all the time from guys. | ||
| It's a big... | ||
| The retention on a lot of the really great guys and gals that serve, I think, is directly correlated to the me people because they're essentially all about professional progression rather than how do we do the best mission and then give the team... | ||
| Everything's a team effort in life. | ||
| You can't accomplish shit on your own, really. | ||
| Just like a podcast, you need... | ||
| The producer, you need the book. | ||
| It's a team effort, and sure, you have the leader, but when you have the officer types, and even at some NCOs, I did it. | ||
| And they put a lot of the guys at risk where they'll do dumb shit on target. | ||
| It happened to me where we did land, sea, and air movement for the sake of doing it, and I was the routes NCO. I'm like, hey, why? | ||
| Why aren't we landing on the X or the Y? Like, we're good to go. | ||
| Like, 160th said we're in. | ||
| Like, shut up, Vest. | ||
| This is what we're doing. | ||
| And it was essentially because an officer wanted to use his Rangers by Lancey or Air for whatever no write-up that he might get a Bronze Star for when the only thing that happened was risking the lives of Americans and special operation guys because you just made them move X amount of clicks farther on that movement to target, which, you know, Why isn't there checks and balances to eliminate those guys or to make sure that those guys get exposed? | ||
| Because I would imagine that for the enlisted men and for the NCOs and for all the people that have the right thoughts in mind and the right intentions in mind, they would not want that to be there. | ||
| And I would imagine that that's the majority of the people. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| I think that that's why the special operations community has such a high rate of volunteer because they're escaping the conventional military where there's more careerism in the conventional military. | ||
| And when you go to the special operations world, There's less of that. | ||
| It's more of a peer system. | ||
| It's driven on the individual capabilities in the sense of this is my team. | ||
| Everything that I do is going to be evaluated by my team. | ||
| Ultimately, if I'm an officer that's messed up, I can be fired. | ||
| My team can fire me. | ||
| There's less of that in the conventional military system because there's a hierarchy of tradition. | ||
| Now, I think the conventional military can definitely take a page out of the special operations community book and ultimately make really good decisions on how they select officers and leaders just in general. | ||
| Because leadership is, one, it's a dying art in society. | ||
| I think it's a dying art in general because of what's happening. | ||
| You have to be accountable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The military has an incredible institution of knowledge on how to really curate good leaders. | ||
| They do. | ||
| In the special operations community, of course, I'm biased, but they create incredible leaders. | ||
| They know how to really curate people's talent and put the right people in the right positions and then develop leaders. | ||
| Well, that's why Jocko does so well, bringing that knowledge to business and doing all these speeches where he's so well sought after because they want to hear a real leader. | ||
| They do. | ||
| With the highest stakes in the world, combat, and talking about what leadership entails. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And for my example that I made earlier, that was a one-off. | ||
| I mean, the leadership that came out of Ranger Battalion, I mean, I couldn't have been more thankful to be a part of that unit. | ||
| And you see a lot of those guys that work their way up through the ranks of Ranger Battalion move on to Tier 1 units and do have extraordinary heroic careers. | ||
| And you can definitely tell the cultural differences from a special operations leadership to the conventional armor. | ||
| And that's not a knock on the conventional, because I think if you raise your right hand, you're epic. | ||
| I think there's some knots to be untied with some of the leadership and the career officers because there's a certain point probably when you pin a star, you're no longer an officer, you're a politician. | ||
| You're a politician and you're appointed by politicians. | ||
| So once you move up past a certain rank, you're essentially appointed by politicians. | ||
| And which now every four to eight years, obviously there's a rotation in how you're selected, who is selected for what. | ||
| So you'll start to see different aspects of the officer corps shift based on administration because it's led by the administration. | ||
| And then it takes a few years and then ultimately it goes back and forth and back and forth. | ||
| But, you know, to go back to your original question is how do you continue to develop that? | ||
| I think the checks and balances are, it's a very traditionally based organization, right? | ||
| the military is incredible at a lot of different things. | ||
| And one thing that there has to be is there has to be somewhat of a firewall from what's happening and the newest trend and, you know, the newest trend in social science and how it affects our military. | ||
| I think there really has to be a big wall as far as what's affecting it and what isn't. | ||
| And I think that as far as how we get the right people in the right places in the military, boy, that's probably a three-hour podcast in itself as far as unpacking that. | ||
| There's some incredible, and not to take away from anything that's happening, but there are some incredible people that continue to serve in the most honorable capacity in the United States military day in and day out. | ||
| They're mission-first people that we never hear about. | ||
| go through 20, you know, 30 years of a career, they retire and they move in next door and you'd never know what they did. | ||
| And those are the guys that, you know, when we, when we look at the community, when we look at what we're doing just in general, uh, those are, those are the guys that I really respect in the sense of, uh, you know, we have our subculture those are the guys that I really respect in the sense of, uh, you know, we have our subculture and our friends, but you know, the, the people are trying to earn our respect for the guys that we know have always served in silence that are the silent professionals that | ||
| And if we have their respect and we can continue to promote in different aspects of what they're doing in their mission, we do that all the time. | ||
| And when we do that, what I mean by that is, you know, whether it's donating money or time or all the things that we try to do, we've shipped hundreds of thousands of bags of coffee overseas. | ||
| To guys that are serving the country, to our friends that are in command-driven units that are doing really difficult work. | ||
| And our little sacrifice that we make, and it's really not a sacrifice, our little commitment to them is just ship them coffee. | ||
| How do we dedicate more time and money and encourage the good people that serve the country day in and day out that... | ||
| They're the heroes, right? | ||
| When we look at this, when I look at the SEAL team memo, for instance, and I say, there's a guy up there that made some change because he wants to get a promotion. | ||
| But that's not really going to change the teams. | ||
| The teams are going to stay the same. | ||
| Those guys are going to go to work every day just like they have. | ||
| They're going to be silent professionals doing very difficult work day in and day out. | ||
| It doesn't matter if you identify them as LAMP or their or thems or who's or whatever it is. | ||
| They're going to still do the mission. | ||
| Thank goodness they're doing that mission. | ||
| How do we just keep promoting it? | ||
| Well, that's the fear that I have of people that don't have an understanding of this that are involved in policy. | ||
| When you talk about people defunding the military and when I talked to Tim Kennedy and he talked to me about the stark difference between the previous administration and when Trump took over. | ||
| And one thing, say good things are bad things about Trump all day long. | ||
| But one good thing you can say is he gave the military the money that they needed and he let them off the leash. | ||
| He didn't politicize it. | ||
| He just gave them the money that they needed and they stopped ISIS in a year. | ||
| And he talked about it in great detail. | ||
| He's like the difference was so stark between the previous administration and when Trump took over and having the resources to do what they needed to do and get in the green light. | ||
| And he's like, we stopped ISIS in a year. | ||
| There was no in ISIS camps that they wouldn't airstrike because of politics. | ||
| And then when they transitioned over to kind of the ground force command level and said, what do we got to do to wipe ISIS? They go, here's the plan. | ||
| Go. | ||
| Dead. | ||
| Done. | ||
| That's the way it needs to be, in my opinion. | ||
| That is the way it needs to be if you want to stay safe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not just us, but other parts of the world. | ||
| When you have radical fundamentalists like that that are doing wild shit, man, and you could watch the videos that do get leaked. | ||
| I mean, it's fucking horrific. | ||
| And the idea that somehow or another these policies are dictated by people who don't understand what's happening there and not by military people, not by people that are on the ground. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Why did I... I don't know exactly what the answer is to that, which is when you have professional politicians, and especially career politicians, that really, they're fundamentally corrupted by ultimately the military lobbying aspects of our country. | ||
| They're going to be driven left or right in any one of these countries. | ||
| And when I say that, Afghanistan is a really good example. | ||
| How many days did it take us to overthrow Afghanistan or the Taliban in Afghanistan? | ||
| What, 150 days? | ||
| And that was back in 2000, September, October, November of 2001, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So roughly 90 days after the towers went down, we invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. | ||
| It took us less than six months to essentially go from north to south in that country with a small contingent of special operations and CIA guys, roughly, give or take. | ||
| And then you have a long-term war of occupation, which has lasted almost 20 years now. | ||
| And we have the special operations units that essentially invaded, overthrew the Taliban, and then we have a long-term war of occupation, and we have several different administrations that have continued to increase troop size. | ||
| To what reason? | ||
| Why? | ||
| And then Trump, like him or not, is saying, well, let's downsize our troop involvement in Central Asia or Afghanistan. | ||
| I think the only bipartisan agreement that they've had in the Senate and the Congress in the last six months was to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan. | ||
| To what reason? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And when Trump talks about it, this is where it gets creepy. | ||
| He says there is a military-industrial complex that wants to go to war. | ||
| They want to keep war going. | ||
| They want that money. | ||
| Endless war. | ||
| A lot of money. | ||
| No one even brings it up. | ||
| He says it, and it doesn't become a big issue. | ||
| He brought it up in an interview on Fox News, and that was it. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| And no one... | ||
| Everyone's like... | ||
| No, it wasn't a giant deal. | ||
| Like, wait a minute, you're saying we have a large contingent of soldiers over there just for money? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Like, what are you saying? | ||
| I think, you know, and I think personally, yes, I think large-scale wars of occupation are about the transference of wealth from the taxpayer to the military-industrial complex, because I've seen it. | ||
| A small-scale special operations contingent, as far as we'll use Afghanistan as the template, You can do a lot with a force multiplier, and it's by, with, and through your local nationals. | ||
| And I think it's typically a more mature soldier that already has a mature and developed brain, too, by the way. | ||
| You know, past the age of 24, typically special operations guys are a little bit older. | ||
| And then you have a force multiplying effect, and ultimately you don't have a large... | ||
| Large-scale war of occupation, which now you have 18-year-old kids that are driving around in tanks, that are flying around in big, robust C5 logistics, but it's less... | ||
| It's more cost-effective to do that, and... | ||
| I think it's also not as politically advantageous for politicians. | ||
| So people love to support and celebrate the previous administration for all the great things that Obama did. | ||
| Okay, but he increased troop levels in both Afghanistan. | ||
| They say, well, he withdrew from Iraq. | ||
| But no, we had another surge in Iraq after that. | ||
| And we surged in Afghanistan after that. | ||
| Well... | ||
| There's really not a coherent and logical argument that I can hear or that I've heard in the last 10 years that I've either been in Afghanistan or Iraq for a large-scale military occupational force in either one of those countries. | ||
| So when you have a president that's saying, I think we should downsize our footprint, And you don't have the left or the right supporting that. | ||
| It seems fucking crazy to me. | ||
| One, it seems crazy. | ||
| And two, where are our media outlets and where are the other people saying, maybe we should break this down and look at it from the second and third order effects of a troop downsize. | ||
| Can we still maintain the sovereignty and the security of the United States and At a more cost-effective rate, meaning less blood, less treasure. | ||
| Can we do that? | ||
| My answer to that is absolutely we should be able to do that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But you know why we can't? | ||
| Because it's more cost-effective for us to have a special operations smaller contingent, and it's more costly to move big logistics, you know, tanks and airplanes and fuel and everything else. | ||
| That's where taxpayers, you as a taxpayer, are essentially paying to fund all of that. | ||
| And that's my two cents on it, at least. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy that that's both Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| And that there's no one stepping up and saying, this is nonsense. | ||
| We need to stop doing this. | ||
| And I don't understand... | ||
| I don't exactly understand why either. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| Because I keep waiting. | ||
| I keep waiting for the congressmen and the senators and a few of these other people to step up and say, wait a minute. | ||
| Can we decrease our footprint in these countries and still maintain security and ultimately protect the sovereignty of the United States? | ||
| I think we can. | ||
| But nobody is stepping in to the shoot after Trump and essentially backing him and saying, yes, I think this is a good idea. | ||
| The left should be all over this. | ||
| They should be, hey, less war, right? | ||
| I mean, this is the hippie movement. | ||
| Like, less war is good. | ||
| No, you had the left fighting him over his Syrian troop withdrawal, which is insane to me that you had media outlets that were defending the increase of troop levels in Syria. | ||
| So what I don't understand, like, why is it just the sheer amount of money? | ||
| So are they influencing the politicians and the politicians all uniformly agree to go along with this? | ||
| I'd say probably a large part is government contracts, right? | ||
| Bullets, oil, you know, they'd all cost money, missiles, and a lot of those are government contracts ran by private entities. | ||
| And the cash flow that goes to the government, they have to subsidize and go to other companies to get what they need. | ||
| And there's a lot. | ||
| I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| I mean, trillions. | ||
| Trillions. | ||
| This is trillions of dollars. | ||
| On overall scope. | ||
| Senate rejects Paul's proposal on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's today. | ||
| No, July. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what was the vote on that? | ||
| I forget. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where they agree is we need to maintain or increase or maintain troop levels in Afghanistan. | ||
| That's where we can get everybody to agree. | ||
| That's completely rational and coherent. | ||
| What is their argument for it? | ||
| Especially coming from the left. | ||
| I have heard the argument, and it's to maintain stability because they don't want the state to ultimately collapse and cause a failed state, which then puts us back into the previous circumstance where the Taliban can continue to increase their power, ultimately developing a new terrorist organization or harboring terrorist organizations. | ||
| And my answer to that is... | ||
| You don't need tanks on the ground to do that. | ||
| You need a bunch of commandos and a few CIA guys. | ||
| There's 23 provinces in that country. | ||
| It's really not that big. | ||
| You have Pakistan, obviously, and a few of these bordering countries, but you don't need a large scale occupational force to do what you're talking about. | ||
| So what does the large scale occupational force serve? | ||
| From my perspective, it serves the transference of taxpayer dollars from the taxpayer into the military-industrial complex. | ||
| That's what it serves. | ||
| Now, the argument is that they need all of this in order to maintain stability within Afghanistan. | ||
| That's the argument. | ||
| They need all of it. | ||
| That's not a good argument? | ||
| I don't think so, because I think that they've proven that they can, if the mission or the end state, and that's the other issue, what's your success criteria? | ||
| So lay out the success criteria for Afghanistan. | ||
| Have you ever heard the United States government's success criteria for Afghanistan? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's because there really isn't one, which is a fucking problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Go to war without success criteria. | ||
| It's really easy to maintain a military footprint for an endless amount of time because you're always chasing a new definition for what it means to succeed. | ||
| There's no definition of win. | ||
| There's no end to it. | ||
| So why is there not... | ||
| Minimum success criteria is something that you need to have on anything. | ||
| What do I need in order for this organization to deem itself a success? | ||
| The expectation for our politicians and our leaders is they have to publish minimum success criteria for any war they ever go into. | ||
| And then once we meet that, there needs to be a post-effect plan as to how the hell do we get out? | ||
| So do you think essentially what happens is the military-industrial complex or the lobbyists or the special interest groups, do they make agreements with politicians? | ||
| Do they communicate with politicians and tell them what their goals are and here's where we're going to help you, this is what we want you to do? | ||
| Like how do they get them all to agree on this? | ||
| I think that they have a very complex way of organizing and funding think tanks the way that people think about war, the way they think about stability. | ||
| I think that they have access, right? | ||
| So when you have access, and most of these companies, if you go to D.C., You know, drive around and look at what companies are inside the beltway. | ||
| Look at what companies are publicly traded, publicly traded large companies within this type of industry. | ||
| And they have access. | ||
| And their entire monetization strategy and how they make money requires war. | ||
| So how they continue to grow their company and profit is Directly is related to how much war is being conducted. | ||
| So if they have close relationships with all of the politicians within DC, and their entire monetization strategy is built on increased war... | ||
| Do you think they're working for the taxpayer, any kind of withdrawal troops? | ||
| When I say that, it's directly contradictory to what I think the majority of the public would like to see. | ||
| I think the majority of the public would like to see a decreased footprint, decreased war, especially large-scale occupational wars, and they don't financially benefit from that. | ||
| It's contradictory. | ||
| Wouldn't you like to hear Trump talk about this? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I would love for any politician to keep talking about this. | ||
| It seems like he's at least the only president in our recent lifetime that's actually brought up the fact the military-industrial complex is actually influencing these decisions. | ||
| I would love to have any politician, especially Trump or the president, talk about the military-industrial complex and how affected DC politics is and how effective we are in the DOD as a nation in funding overseas wars. | ||
| And say what you want. | ||
| And I want to say that as far as the pro-Trump, anti-Trump. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of the left, they continue to kind of parade around about all the great things that Obama did. | ||
| He increased our war capacity overseas. | ||
| He didn't decrease it. | ||
| Did he shut down Gitmo? | ||
| Did he do any of these things that he said that he was going to do? | ||
| For a group of people that claim that they're so anti-war, the one thing that they should be saying, gosh, this guy might have a point. | ||
| We might want to decrease our footprint overseas. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| But to contradict what we were saying earlier, the benefit of Trump was that he added funding to the military. | ||
| He gave them the green light. | ||
| He let them off their leash. | ||
| Where do you draw the line? | ||
| I think it's a more cost-effective way, too. | ||
| So if you have minimum success criteria, for instance, in the case of ISIS in Iraq, you have success criteria that are clearly laid out, which is defeat and destroy ISIS and eliminate any stronghold, essentially any occupied land that they have. | ||
| you go to work and you take it all away from them, and then you're done. | ||
| You leave. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| And that's what they did, essentially. | ||
| And now, granted, we still have forces in Iraq, but not to the degree that we did when we were increasing to push ISIS out. | ||
| So with success criteria and ultimately clearly defined goals and objectives directly associated to any war— That's what you do. | ||
| That is an absolute expectation that we should have for any politician voting yes, and we should hold our politicians accountable for strict adherence to the success criteria of any war. | ||
| The problem is, is they keep changing every two to four years. | ||
| They keep changing the success criteria. | ||
| Well, that's endless war, and he's right about that. | ||
| These guys want endless war. | ||
| And both sides. | ||
| So, both sides want it. | ||
| Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why do we want endless war in these places? | ||
| That doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| It really doesn't. | ||
| And the only thing that makes sense to me in this capacity is that... | ||
| These guys all have a direct benefit where they're all being persuaded by the same organizations to keep the troops and keep the transference of wealth from the taxpayer into the military-industrial complex. | ||
| That's fucking terrifying. | ||
| Absolutely it is. | ||
| It is absolutely terrifying. | ||
| And we, as a nation, should be having that conversation. | ||
| That's the conversation that I want us to have as a nation versus the conversation that we're having about, you know, crazy shit. | ||
| Like crazy, unimportant shit that's really, it's honestly boring. | ||
| And I think it's a distraction and a sideshow to what's really happening. | ||
| But it's just crazy that you're not hearing this conversation anywhere. | ||
| Like this conversation is happening on this podcast and it's reaching millions of people. | ||
| But why is this unique? | ||
| That's what's nuts. | ||
| What's nuts is that this isn't on CBS or NBC or Vice or any of these places. | ||
| This is not in this long form. | ||
| You're not getting this conversation. | ||
| You're not getting it spelled out the way you just spelled it out. | ||
| No, and I think that there's a... | ||
| Maybe Vice. | ||
| Maybe Vice has had some pieces that I missed. | ||
| I'm sure they have. | ||
| And I'm sure there are a lot of people that would love to debate me over what's actually happening. | ||
| You'd be hard-pressed to find people with two guys sitting across the table that have more experience, specifically in these countries, working in these countries. | ||
| I have seven and a half years in Iraq and Afghanistan in my life. | ||
| Seven and a half years in both military and as an agency contractor. | ||
| And when I look at what we do in those countries, and I'm not thinking about it in theory, right? | ||
| I'm not thinking about it in theory. | ||
| I'm looking at it saying, this is what I saw. | ||
| This is my firsthand experience. | ||
| And this is what I've kind of looked and being able to reflect on it for the last five, six years since I left the military and the government. | ||
| I've been able to reflect on it and really ask a lot of complex questions as to why do we keep doing the same thing over and over and over again? | ||
| And it's frustrating because I understand what it takes to stabilize these countries. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| And I also understand what doesn't work. | ||
| And we're doing a lot of shit that doesn't work. | ||
| Well, and the hard part with that, I think, is there's been such a diversion away from the wars that no one's actively thinking about how many U.S. soldiers, men and women in the military, are currently deployed. | ||
| There's so much going on in the nation that that conversation's not even happening. | ||
| I'd venture to say most people are like, oh, we still got people in Afghanistan? | ||
| And they're going out on missions and stuff, and it's like an injustice to not have those conversations about what's the end goal, what is the success criteria for Afghanistan, because I'm sure they want to go out and do their job, and they're willing to risk their lives for it, but what's the job? | ||
| And you don't really see any of that coming out of what that mission, what the end goal looks like. | ||
| And if there is an end goal, why are we there kind of thing. | ||
| And I haven't heard it from friends that are on the ground. | ||
| They have our international strategic counter-terrorist objectives, which is to deny sanctuary for any terrorist organization. | ||
| And I'm sure that we could pull it up. | ||
| But at the end of the day, we're occupying a foreign country with our military. | ||
| We should be talking about this on a national level as to what are our goals, what are our objectives, what are our success criteria, and when the fuck do we get out of this place? | ||
| We should be having that conversation on a regular cycle because guys are still dying. | ||
| We're still spending a lot of money and we're still spending a lot of our time and lives with the men and women that serve our country. | ||
| These people are still getting wounded and killed in places like Afghanistan and we're not having a national complex conversation about it. | ||
| It's crazy to me. | ||
| It seems certifiable. | ||
| Like as a country, it's like, man, you guys are crazy. | ||
| You need to have this conversation. - It almost seems like it's too uncomfortable for people to discuss. | ||
| And particularly because it's going on for so long, since it's happened since 2001, it's so long. | ||
| It almost seems like people just, it's too much. | ||
| They don't, why is this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They just keep moving. | ||
| You know, it almost seems like that and then obviously someone's taking advantage of that and profiting off of it. | ||
| It's a hard conversation. | ||
| You're going to have kids that are going to Afghanistan that were, from the first wave of soldiers that were fighting in Afghanistan, you're having children. | ||
| They're children. | ||
| They were born after September 11th and now they're there. | ||
| Now they're there. | ||
| To me, as a guy that's served in both of those countries, and to me as a guy that loves our country, we really need to have that national conversation with everybody and say, this is a generational war, everyone. | ||
| Is this something we really want to continue to pay for with our blood and our treasure? | ||
| Is this something we really want to do? | ||
| And I think, obviously, I'm biased, but I think these are the important issues that we should be discussing, right? | ||
| So how much more do we really have? | ||
| Do we really have the patience for? | ||
| Not necessarily the patience, but how much more is really acceptable in And how do we elevate and have these complex conversations without the interference of people that ultimately profit from war, too? | ||
| I think that's the conversation. | ||
| We have to take that out and have this as a society, and they don't want to have it. | ||
| The interference of people who profit from war. | ||
| And that is something that's happening. | ||
| And it's happening behind closed doors. | ||
| It's not happening in a transparent way. | ||
| We can clearly see where the decisions are being made. | ||
| being influenced behind closed doors. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And if they're being influenced behind closed doors, they're also being influenced overtly through, I would say, they're overtly being influenced by think tanks and studies that are funded by large institutions that they're overtly being influenced by think tanks and studies that are funded by large institutions that | ||
| So instead of the government spending its time really investigating and looking at complex war plans and how we pull out of these places, you know, we're trying to figure out, you know, how we can change memos so we don't offend anybody. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I never expected this conversation to go down this road, but it makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| I didn't either, actually. | ||
| No, I didn't either. | ||
| I was just chilling here and I was like, I'm just gonna listen for the next fucking 20 minutes. | ||
| We started talking about coffee and eating the right foods and fuck. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| That's the beauty of podcasts, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you just get a chance to talk. | ||
| Let's wrap it up with that. | ||
| I mean, is there anything else you could say to people? | ||
| Is there anything people can do about this? | ||
| Is there anything that you think people should be aware of that they're not other than what you just said? | ||
| I think, you know, honestly, I don't know. | ||
| I don't want to be a defeatist. | ||
| I think that it's one of those things, and you've talked a lot about it in your podcast. | ||
| I think the expectation for us to expect more out of our politicians, I think, in sourcing different types of information from a wide variety of people, I think for us, this is white noise, right? | ||
| When you look at all the white noise issues that are out there, we have big issues. | ||
| We have big issues. | ||
| How the fuck do we get off this rock if there's a bigger rock coming towards us? | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| Holy shit, do you think we should figure that one out? | ||
| I don't know, but these are complex conversations that I think we should hold our leaders accountable for sticking to the hard problems and having those conversations versus these ridiculous sideshow white noise conversations that ultimately are just a distraction from From what we as a nation should be making our government do for us. | ||
| It's just such a complex wave. | ||
| Such a complex web, rather. | ||
| So there's just so much to think of. | ||
| It's almost impossible for a human being to look at the whole picture from above and see all these different factors that are playing against each other. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I think we're... | ||
| It's mind-numbing when you start to critically think about one thing and then the bajillion things that are going on in society. | ||
| Well, that's how they get away with this, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And good leaders are not financially motivated, which is almost impossible. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like getting the money out of politics. | ||
| Because if they look at this and they go, well, it's futile already. | ||
| Might as well just profit from it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's the worst thing ever is when politics stopped becoming a service to your country, it became political gain and monetary gain because you can get paid. | ||
| Well, when you find out that politicians, they make $100,000 a year, but they're worth $100 million. | ||
| Yeah, how? | ||
| How? | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| Yeah, and everybody's like... | ||
| No one says, hey, get in front of us and tell us exactly where you got that money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Break it down. | ||
| Tell us, why is your husband worth this much? | ||
| Or why is your wife worth this much? | ||
| I understand you're only worth that much, but your wife's worth $50 million. | ||
| And your kids are all worth $50 million apiece, or whatever it is. | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| And why are we just like... | ||
| Whistling and looking around and pretending this stuff doesn't exist. | ||
| What a noble cause. | ||
| He works for $100,000 and you're like, he paid $1.3 million in his tax filings. | ||
| What the fuck's going on here, man? | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| Man, thank you. | ||
| Thank you a lot. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for everything, man. | ||
|
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This is awesome, man. | |
| Thanks for the way you guys run your company. | ||
| Thanks for the ethics and just the way you guys carry yourselves. | ||
| I appreciate you guys very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate the effort. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. |
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