Josh Barnett, whiskey distiller and MMA coach, reveals Warbringer’s smoky process—75% of a corn mash bill smoked in containers for three days before fermentation—and critiques celebrity-branded alcohol trends. His coaching philosophy blends physical rigor (like Gotch’s 1,000 squats) with mental strategy, rejecting athletes lacking integrity despite potential. Barnett dismisses plant-based meats as "dog food" and ties modern avoidance of discipline to societal decline, citing Kali Yuga and elite collusion in crises like COVID-19. Upcoming Bloodsport 8 (March 31st, Dallas) promises brutal, highlight-worthy wrestling with no ring, while his award-winning Silver Grin Vodka and Parlor K Rum showcase distillery innovation. Ultimately, Barnett argues substance over spectacle—whether in whiskey, fighting, or life—demands real engagement, not performative detachment. [Automatically generated summary]
What's happening is I've wandered into some sort of a strange portal that's transported me here to this wooden, galaxy-filled, I don't know, I mean, bunker, starship.
And then after three days, we then take all that smoked corn.
Take it back to the distillery and then we will mill it with the 25% roasted corn out of that 75% corn mash bill and then we mill it with also a 25% malted barley or malted rye and we mix it all together we get our mash going and Then starts the process of fermentation.
Well, and the thing is, Buffalo Trace has a rickhouse full of thousands of barrels to choose from, to do whatever they want with.
When you're a startup, or let's just say a craft distillery like us, if we have 30 barrels sitting around, we're pretty happy.
You know?
Yeah.
It takes a lot to get this stuff going.
It takes a lot of little subtle things, which yeast you're using, you know, how long your fermentation cycle is.
And then as it all goes to that distillation run, the low wine run, the stripping run is important, but that's pretty much full tilt.
You're not really looking for anything in particular other than just watching what the level of alcohol you're getting out of it is and what that yield is.
But then on that second distillation run, where the real juice comes from, You've got to make your cuts at the right place.
You want to avoid getting a bunch of heads, and you don't want a bunch of tails.
But you don't want no tails, because some of those volatiles or higher esters will interact in the barrel in ways that come out really pleasant.
But as you initially taste it, it might put a little what you feel is like some slight taint to what you're doing.
It's all processed and the thing is you can't rush any of it.
When the gal was swabbing me, I'm thinking, well, don't try to go up in this one because it's all broken up so bad you can hardly get a swab up that thing.
Yeah, the fact that you've probably slowed down quite a bit is going to make a huge difference to you, whereas a heavyweight, the last thing you're going to lose is power.
And lack of speed is not inherently going to cost you out there in the ring.
George Foreman, big example.
But even at heavyweight, there's not a ton of guys who are 40-plus that were able to...
Relaunch their career and go out there and win a world title George is really the only one if you really think about he's like the number one, but but even Holyfield is still competitive Although not now obviously that thing now when he did with a V tour was real weird Yes, because first of all he took it on short notice, which is a terrible idea when you're almost 60 and Exactly.
You know, and I know Evander had been training and gearing up for a fight with Mike Tyson, and he, you know, he looked half decent on the mitts, but much better later than he did earlier.
And you see him early in the first few videos that he posted, it looked like he really hadn't worked out in a while, and it was really knocking the dust off and getting the old engine lubed up again, and Then as time went on, he started looking pretty good.
But then to take a fight, an actual fight, I think it was like two weeks notice, right?
I have never, other than a roll-on one for doing the Baja 1000. Oh, really?
Yeah, you just basically put on this little condom, and you take the line, you run it down the side of your leg, and you put it off to the back end and off to the side of your shoe, your boot.
So that way, when you're driving, a little crack in the floorboard, and if you pee, it just goes out the car.
Yeah, you know, it's not necessarily a bad idea if you bring someone home to take a really long, convoluted, complex route so they can't figure out how to get back.
I mean, MMA and pro wrestling is crazy enough, but no, no.
I decided that it was probably better for my health and sanity to be with someone that's just plain awesome and calm and is not interested in dropping pins and doing crazy shit.
Because for a while there, all the bigger guys from Eddie's school were training a lot with me, and I was cornering them on a lot of the things they were doing.
So I'm sitting there, and I get this call from Bud, and he's like, what are you doing?
I'm like, I'm just training.
He's like, you want to do the Baja?
Yes.
By the way, I've never done any off-road racing.
Only like road racing and drag racing.
And so I'm like, but I know this is a completely different animal.
In the Baja Peninsula, there is the Baja 500 and 1000, and the 1000 being the granddaddy of them all.
It's one of the most prestigious off-road races in the world.
It's also one of the most dangerous, and they have two ways of doing it.
One is they do a circle where they set it up where you start off in Ensenada generally, and then you'll head down south, and you'll make a loop, and you'll come on back.
And then the other aspect they have is it just goes in a meandering line all the way down to 1000 miles from where you started.
So for the time I did it, I was part of a team and I think I jumped in the car.
Second or third?
Me and Jesse Combs, rest in peace.
Ours went from Ensenada to, I believe, La Paz.
It's one off-road shot all the way down there.
And basically, you're off in the wilderness, in the wilds.
You can see the remnants of courses and things like that, but some of the stuff just gets made as it goes.
And there's also a lot of people that do what's called pre-running, so they'll go out there and they'll map out the track and all that, and they will mark all the hazards and they'll get used to it because, you know, there's a lot on the line with the Baja 1000. And you have, if you've got the money especially, you'll have a trail team that'll travel down the highways and then can intersect with you at different points to do your driver changeovers.
You get out there and you're in the middle of nothing.
And you could be, I remember we jump in the car at four o'clock in the morning, pitch black, lights are on, slap you on the helmet, put your shit on, bye.
And we're already going 50, 60 miles an hour in the middle of nowhere in brush.
And I'm looking at a GPS and looking up ahead.
There's no windshields in any of this stuff because that would just get dirty and then you would get blind.
So you wear your helmets and you sit on microfiber, Like mitts and things to just clear your face off as bushes, cacti, whatever, dust, dirt, silt is flying through that into the cabin and hitting you.
You've got electrolyte drinks that are in a little...
Like a camel setup that you can go and take a drink while you're in the car.
You've got your catheter set up to urinate.
And away you go.
And it's pitch black.
All you can see is what the lights are showing.
And I'm just going, well, you know what?
Tight butthole, I guess.
But there ain't no turning back now.
And we were in a Class 6 vehicle, which was...
It was like a dune buggy with a Subaru Boxster motor in it.
But the thing did top out at like 98 miles an hour on a back road, just going straight, just hauling ass, four gears.
And it's pretty hairy.
I mean, when the sun starts coming up, though, and you're going 30 miles an hour along the side of this rock ridge on this cliff with like a 40-foot drop off to your right, but you're seeing the sunset coming up, the sunrise over the Mexican...
And it is just insane.
But also, people like to do things like create hazards on purpose and then film them for YouTube.
So put a jump where one wasn't.
Put a hole where one wasn't.
Put a cactus right in the middle of the course, perhaps.
I don't know how fast they get, but they're all like 10,000 RPM small blocks and shit just freaking flying.
And you can hear their engine, and then as they start coming up behind you, they start hitting these sirens and stuff to tell you to get the hell out of the way.
And if you don't, they will come up.
Run up right behind you and then bump you right out of the way.
Just shove you right off the road and keep going.
But you watch them hit these whoop-de-whoops and the suspension's just going...
We're doing this kind of thing.
We gotta go over them, let up, get on, let up, get on as we're going.
And the trophy trucks just run right over the top of them like they were nothing there.
I think that by being lighter, you're obviously going to have less impact amongst travel because it's going to have less kinetic energy, less weight bearing down on things and releasing and bearing down on it again.
But to the life of me, maybe they're just really well made.
And I met him through Bud, again, doing Optima Ultimate Streetcar Invitational when I competed over there at SEMA. Bud is a successful television producer with a beautiful wife and family and risks his fucking life every year for a goof.
For people who don't know the show, they pretend to steal your car.
So someone will steal your car.
Say if Josh had a charger, they would steal his charger, and then they would do it all up, and then bring you somewhere under false pretenses, and then unveil your new car.
Well, in this case, they didn't do any of the stealing.
No thievery.
But the deception was...
Oh, hey, Dan, the UFC, the magazine, is going to do this photo shoot on me, and they would love it if I could bring, like, a muscle car or something, so could we use your Firebird?
He's like, yeah, that's awesome.
They're like, yeah, they'll give you, like, 500 bucks for the time and other things.
Sounds great.
Amazing.
And so I'm standing there with—it's me and Ariane, and at this moment— Bud or whoever is directing the photo shoot, he just goes, alright, and action!
And Ariane throws like a whole bucket of red paint all over the car, and then I swing a sledgehammer through the front windshield.
And I came, I worked on this a little bit with him.
I did some of the deconstruction.
I helped Lucky with a little bit of the electrical.
I worked with...
Andreas a little bit on some of the other touches and me and Chip sat down to do just the rough outlining and designing about what kind of a car in terms of purpose we wanted to build out of it.
I know, and I understand if you want to build something museum quality, but then I'm like, well, then just put it in a museum.
What's the fucking point?
But in terms of what's the fucking point, at SEMA this year, there's always some trend that is...
Trash, in my opinion, that always seems like maybe it got started in an interesting way and then it just like runs the gamut of just every copycat version of it that's just like, oh God, we don't need any more of this.
This year, or last year I guess, it was turning your classic car electric.
I'm just like, why would you take the soul and spirit out of a machine And replace and make it even more material, more mechanical, and less engaging.
And then it's so bad now that even with EVs for all kinds of aspects, there's people selling you, I don't know how they put it together, but it's a thing that makes car noises for you.
I guess they just add that to the rest of other fake shit that they're doing in their life and the way that they're doing things and, you know, hunky-dory.
But at the same time, I'm still, like, with Victor Henry, who you just saw in UFC, we're building, he bought a 70 Cutlass S off of me, and we're building this thing up.
Phytek is giving us fuel injection to do on the whole car.
I've had a 455 with aluminum heads, roller cam that I had sitting around putting it, tunnel ram.
Which, by the way, was fantastic, and I really wanted to talk about that, because Victor Henry was super impressive.
It's so rare that you see a guy enter the UFC, kind of unheralded, but with a good reputation, but not a lot of hype behind him, but perform that way against a guy like Howney Barcelos.
And it's like Victor said to the press afterwards where you know they usually ask a bunch of like just rote questions like well you know what did you think about being underestimated or whatever he goes look You guys are UFC people.
You know about UFC, you know about people in UFC, and you don't really know anything else.
And so, what you don't know about I'm not surprised that you're not acquainted, like that you wouldn't really understand how to put this on some sort of metric.
That's a good example because most people are not going to take that fight with Barcelos on such a short notice because he requires a lot of preparation.
It was us putting our game plan fully into implementation because Howney is such a tough guy, very physical athlete, great wrestling background as well, and a diehard heavy striker.
So our thing is, well, you know, all right, we're not going to wrestle with him.
Like, there's no point.
I don't feel that Victor couldn't or couldn't submit him potentially, but why put it in places where we feel like...
I'd be giving something up or putting it in a place that he wants to be.
But we also know he loves fighting on the feet more than anything else, for the most part.
And he really believes in his striking skills.
So you could get into a big fight with him about that, but now you're kind of...
Putting yourself in a position to kill or be killed, and why?
So the idea was, keep tearing apart at his body.
Keep him fighting on the back foot.
Don't let him fight moving forward.
And use constant fakes, feints.
Keep tagging the body over and over and over again.
Getting our chip shots in.
Hitting first and always hitting last.
And watching out for his right uppercut.
His right hand and how he loves to pull with his head movement and then throw a punch behind it.
So not getting too extended, letting that guy get his work off at times, but pulling with a half step, getting right out of range so that we're not behind or running into any of that stuff and continue to chip away at that body and take away his endurance and bank on our cardio and scoring and scoring and scoring and If the opportunity presents itself, we had a few things up our sleeves for potential fight enders.
But also, we knew that if you keep pulling a guy apart, eventually, if they feel like they're losing in any way, they're going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And the bigger they get, the more openings they're going to leave behind.
And there was a couple times it seemed like Vic had him rocked.
Maybe he could have taken him out, but Houni's so tough.
So we're not going to just...
And so Vic just kept pouring it on, pouring it on, pouring it on, pouring it on.
And, you know, in time, we just were able to pull Howney's tactics apart and leave him exposed to our opportunities.
But, you know, the guy never stopped fighting the whole fight.
You know, even in the third round, whenever he got a chance to get off, he was trying to take Vic's head off.
I think he's 34, going to be 35. So at that age, especially in the lighter weight classes, as we were saying before, he's in a position where you've got to kind of get going now.
And then, to me, it kind of reminded me of the ECGC, I think it's called, where there's a system around heart patients, Where they put cuffs around you and they hook you up to an EKG and then with your heart rate and your pulse rate, It's supposed to move and squeeze in succession to create extra circulation or help with circulation.
And so there's been studies that say there's a lot of benefits for this for people that have had heart issues or circulation-related stuff and whatever.
And so I started talking to the gal there about how does this compare.
And so getting little bits of information like that, getting to understand more about what the systems are and what their intention is, what problems are they trying to solve.
That's great for me as a trainer because then I can take that information back and then figure out how to use it with my athletes, find other complementary things to go with it.
And anything you can do to try and give that athlete that – not just that extra edge now but something that can keep them in the battle even further along in their career.
which is, even though I'm a heavyweight and we can get away with having longer careers to a degree, I feel that the way I was trained from the beginning has a lot to do with me being able to stay in this game as long as I have.
And through then, I trained with Jim Harrison, rest in peace, one of the old school blood and guts, bare knuckle karate guys.
You know, the kind of guy where even Chuck Norris and all them are like, that's a dude you don't fuck with.
I mean, it was being at a celebration of life last year because he died during COVID and we couldn't really put together a proper goodbye.
And it was like me and Superfoot and Troy Dorsey and a bunch of different legends.
But then listening to guys that weren't martial artists even talking about it, but people from law enforcement when he did this special – he was a part of this special criminal unit in East St. Louis.
And hearing the stories about, direct from these guys' mouth, about being there with him or people in the military.
And hearing the stories about – direct from these guys in his mouth about being there with him or people in the military.
It's like, yeah, well, when Jim Harrison was paid to do some work in military action and go over and different things and talking about him in that regard, and it's like, this guy is something that doesn't exist anymore.
This is like Ernst Jünger type stuff.
Even I, who trained under him and knew him very well, I still had to sit back like, wow, what an individual.
Well, even prior to that, the guy who really got me into martial arts to begin with was Fred Sato, who was one of the founders of the Seattle Judo Dojo and one of the original four...
That is Bruce Lee, Fred Sato, Taki Kimura, and Jesse Glover.
That's the original four.
And I remember, you know, looking through little old books, picture books and stuff, of, you know, Fred Sato and Jesse and all them with Bruce, and they're just in someone's backyard.
I don't even remember whose backyard it was, when Bruce Lee is a little skinny kid going to Garfield High School in Seattle.
So, FYI, people, if you watch Dragon, the Bruce Lee story...
But the point is, it's like, why would you change the life story of a historical figure who's one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts?
I got into catch basically through Matt Hume, who was training, who had trained over in Japan with Funaki and Suzuki, and then got to train with Sayama.
And so he's training under these guys that all come from this Carl Gotch catch lineage, who also are from Antonia Inoki.
So back in the 70s, Inoki...
He split off from Japan Wrestling Association or something like that.
So him and Giant Baba, they make a split.
They both are trained under Ricky Dozan.
And Baba goes, he makes all Japan pro wrestling.
And Inoki goes, he makes New Japan pro wrestling.
And Inoki's approach is, we're going to make this the world's strongest martial art.
That's our goal.
This is when we present professional wrestling, it's going to be something called strong style, and it's going to be the king of sports.
It's going to stand at the zenith of all things.
And it's going to be incorporated with martial arts and fight skills and all these aspects of reality combat.
And he brings in Karl Gotch to come and run this gym.
And so all these guys are all getting trained by Karl Gotch, who is a catch wrestler originally from Hungary.
And he goes and trains.
He was an Olympian and Greco-Roman.
And he trained in professional wrestling when it was also a much more reality-based product.
But then he goes to the Snake Pit in Wigan, England and trains with Billy Riley.
Who is one of the godfathers of catch-as-catch-can wrestling, which the term itself comes from Wigan England.
Catch-as-catch-can.
Get him any way you can.
Where these old, these tough-as-shit miners get out from the mines at the end of the day.
They go and they have their pints and what have you, and then they go up on the hills and in the grass and they throw bets down and they just challenge each other and go after it.
And this, eventually, starts to become what we know as professional wrestling.
And at some point, professional wrestling is a 100% legitimate sport, but then it starts becoming worked over time.
The carnivals were a part of it because you could, like, let's say you got Tootsmont and...
I'm trying to remember the rest of them.
The Gold Dust Trio, they go around up and down the West Coast and they go and they put these shows together.
But one of the tricks that they would do is they could have someone who's a ringer, like a real nasty badass, who is either in the crowd to go wrestle someone that didn't know who this person was and go in and just murk them and take all their money.
Or here's the other thing is they set it up where they have a guy in the ring doing all these matches, just smashing up all the locals.
And then they say, well, who's willing to get in here next?
And then they have a guy sitting in the audience who is their plant.
He gets in the ring.
He wins.
And then everybody bets against him.
The Gold Dust Trio bets on him and takes all the money and away they go.
And so this is also where the terminology of marks comes in because the audience, everyone's a mark.
That was the beginning of conning stuff and setting up a potential predetermined.
But then it also got to the point where...
Really highly skilled, evenly matched guys could be out there for an hour and a half.
And it's just like, people don't want to watch this.
They want to watch more action-packed, action-oriented stuff.
And so then you start working the matches and putting more flourishes and things in it.
It becomes more popular, more interesting.
And then you start...
I mean, the basic premise of professional wrestling still exists, and that is you have a face and a heel.
So basically, you have a good guy and a bad guy, and the good guy is trying to overcome the bad guy.
And at some point, he will go through all kinds of torment and suffering and what have you, and then come out on the other side victorious and overcome the problem.
It's basically...
a little four-sided ring.
And oftentimes, pro wrestling does a great job of mirroring the sentiments of the culture around it at large.
And this actually would be a really great conversation to have with Eric Weinstein because he's such a huge pro wrestling fan.
He's got two parts where, you know, it's got clips of him talking about kayfabe on here and work shoots and all this kind of stuff in terms of politics and culture.
Mostly politics, but...
So the idea of it on a metaphysical level, he would enjoy that conversation, I think.
And I got to connect with him.
I was just talking to him the other day.
He's like, are you in LA? I'm like, I'm actually heading to Austin to go hang out with folks and go do some stuff, but I'm coming back.
But so pro wrestling starts getting worked at some point, but then it starts getting even more and more exorbitant and outrageous.
And you start getting guys like Gorgeous George and you start, you know, people that are really playing to these big personalities and cutting promos.
And then you get the territories that start, they start branching out and each one would have sort of their own spin on things.
But at one point, pro wrestling was the way it was like MMA is now, except it was mainly confined to straight matches of grappling with submissions.
But, you know, you'd have incidents like Ad Santel.
He beats this world judo champion from the Kodokan.
And he goes, well, I'm the world champion of judo now.
And the Kodokan goes, what the fuck the hell you are?
Get him!
And so all these guys keep coming after Ad Santel.
They eventually have this giant showdown in Yasukuni Jinja, the shrine in Japan.
And he does, I don't remember, three matches over five days or something like that.
I got to train a bit with Carl, although he didn't ask me to do all the requirements and all that.
And I met him through a magazine interview where Gong Kaktogi brought me over to meet with him in Tampa.
And I believe Jake Shannon helped set it up, in fact.
Because Jake and Carl were really close.
And then eventually Billy and Jake would become very close because I brought Billy to Jake because Billy left Japan and came back to America and was living in Arkansas with some of his family.
And I said, hey, can we do something with Billy here?
Like get him doing seminars, something.
Let's keep him active.
Let's put some money in his pocket.
Let's do something.
And Jake...
And structured this whole thing and got Billy out to the rest of the world.
And it was amazing.
And it was so incredible that Jake was able to do this for Billy and bring Billy to everyone and have some of this stuff taped, do these seminars and expose again what was old is now new.
But to imagine somebody requiring that, like a Carl Gotch type guy today, before he takes on any students, what a small pool of talent you'd have to draw from.
Hierarchy of coaching where people think that if you don't take someone from the ground up If you don't like really work with like bottom level athletes and bring them into top shape But I don't I don't I don't necessarily I mean there are people I've started from near ground zero and brought up I mean Victor when I got him he had five amateur fights but It's also something let's say like this There's guys that can teach you all these techniques and how to lift and blah, blah, blah, right?
They're giving you all this structure.
But beyond teaching you how to throw punches and do this, there's also the concept of why.
Why?
And not just why for you, why for you versus this guy, why for you at this time, why for you based on what your body's doing.
I mean, there's all these different contextual and subjective elements that come into this whole thing.
And I was talking to, I had three athletes I worked with fight at LFA. Last weekend.
Me and Chad George are working with these athletes.
And so Lou Schwenke goes out there and knocks a dude out in the first round.
Chase Gibson has a great scrap back and forth with Javier Garcia, who's very tough.
He wins a unanimous decision.
And then Ozzy Diaz goes out and knocks his guy out in the first round.
And I'm talking to someone and I go, yeah, there's a lot of folks that can get a guy all pumped up and teach him how to throw a bunch of punches and do all this kind of stuff.
But Can they actually break down the opponents and all their tendencies, being able to see through that athlete and go like, okay, when things are at their best, here's what they're going to do.
When things are at their worst, here's what they're likely to do.
Here's their tendencies.
Here's the things that you can pretty much count on that they're always going to go to when things get tough.
When things are at their hardest, people are always going to go to what they're best at.
And then it's also to look at your athlete and go, okay, How do I need to structure this guy's fight, not just on the day, but in all the training leading up to it, so that he's able to mitigate the strengths of his opponent and emphasize his own strengths and keep away from his weaknesses.
And there's that aspect and then there's the mental aspect of how to get into that person's head and give them the right motivation or the right comfort or whatever is necessary at that moment to get them at their best.
Actually, one of them that was a real eye-opener was one on coaching women.
And there was all kinds of great little bits of knowledge that I got out of that, just for general coaching and for working with female athletes.
This thing was written by a female volleyball coach, and I wish I could remember the name of it.
It was an excellent book, though.
And then it was just, I think, just paying attention, reading, About things like psychology and philosophy and other things.
I mean, it's one thing to say to read philosophy, let's say, but reading Nietzsche for me is not just about philosophy.
It's about human behavior.
It's about psychology.
They call him like the first psychologist philosopher in a way.
And so just being open enough to let the world show you what it is and for people to show you who they are because...
You'll come...
Yes, everyone's an individual.
They all have their idiosyncrasies.
But in most ways...
We're more alike than we're different.
And we've been more alike in almost entirely the same ways since anyone has ever been able to write about what a human being is like, period.
If you read about ancient Greece, if you read in the Bible or the Quran or any, whatever, you can grab yourself a cuneiform tablet or you start reading hieroglyphs, you're not going to get a radically new, different story about what a human being is, how they think, how they feel, what are their motivations and what it takes for flourishing.
It's never changed.
You know, you can say that we've evolved, but we're no really...
But on what level?
I mean, maybe we still have the remnants of a tailbone, but even in society and as it evolves, technology may more emphasize how we interact with the world and things and maybe the intensity at which we may express ourselves for good or for bad.
But it's not new.
Envy is still there.
Egos are still there.
Ego from the point of being healthy to the point of being unhealthy.
Same with envy.
Same with resentment.
All this stuff is all the same shit.
Go read Gilgamesh.
It's all the same shit.
We're not telling new stories.
We're telling the same story over and over and over again.
And I think that as a coach...
Beyond that, you know, deeper meaning of being in humanity, but at the same time, it's just allow yourself to be open to see things.
Let people tell you who they are.
And if you really are interested in trying to be about something, it's not always about charging headlong into it.
Sometimes it's about sitting back and just shutting the fuck up and listening.
Listening to someone who's telling you something or just Listening in a metaphorical sense, just allowing things to show you something.
Watch that footage over and over and over again and throw your preconceived notions aside and just let it happen and then see how much you start seeing that repeats itself.
Yeah, there's probably a great benefit in learning how to teach women because from my personal experience, women learn better in a sense that they don't have as much ego when it comes to martial arts and they also don't muscle things.
I think that teaching all types of people is incredibly useful.
And I liked teaching women a lot, especially because they smelled better and took better care of themselves.
But you can't go out there generally and just start screaming at a girl like, why are you so stupid?
They're gonna take that in a whole different way.
Although I've had athletes that were females That needed more tough love than they needed more gentle guidance.
And to that, it just came down to the individual athlete themselves.
And I feel like you need to learn how to coach women and men, and then In and amongst that, you then need to know how to coach every single woman, every single man on an individual level.
Because they're not just women, they're not just men, they're individuals.
One of the things I would do at CSW is people come up to me, and Victor even was part of this process.
I mean, he was training with a good friend of mine, Jimmy Romero.
And Jimmy was at Legends when you guys were all there.
And at some point, Jimmy's like, man, I just can't keep doing this.
There's not enough money.
I'm going broke.
And I got stuff to do.
I have a kid on the way.
This ain't flying.
He loves martial arts.
And Jimmy was just...
Just coming by CMMA the other day and running pads for Chad and all that.
It was awesome to see him.
But I completely understood his position.
But what happened is, well, okay, there's no more team.
But he'd been bringing his guys down to CSW to come train and spar.
And this kid, Victor, was his protege.
And he's a super solid kid.
And I could see it.
And everybody around him that I knew all vouched for what a good kid this dude was.
And He's growing up in Southgate, which is like the Mexican Compton in L.A. So it's a rough-ass place.
And, you know, he's been shot before just sitting on the stoop playing with his friends.
And someone does drive by and stray bullet.
Bing!
You know, all this kind of stuff.
I mean, this kid's got a wildlife.
And I'm just like, all right.
I call him up.
I go, hey, I heard the team is disbanded and what have you.
Be here on Monday.
Well, I don't have any money.
Just be here on Monday.
He shows up.
I give him stuff to do.
Come check in on him.
He's been doing it.
All right.
Now I start taking a more personal approach.
Now I'm more right beside him as I'm doing things.
He gets it that, okay, if you're serious about it and I tell you something, and if you don't do it, that's your choice.
If it's not that important to you, you're not going to do it?
All right.
If it's not important to you, then it's not important for me to give it to you in the first place.
Not important for me to spend my time on you.
Vic then...
He says this to another athlete at the school who was brought in, who had come up to me before and goes, man, I see what you're doing with Victor and some of these other folks, and they're having a lot of success, and I really like the way that you're working with them.
Would it be possible if I could work under you?
And I just said, let me think about it.
And at some point, I think this guy, a fighter under me, AJ Bryant, another great kid, heavy hitter, and he's got a fight coming up in May.
He goes to Vic on the side.
He goes, hey man, what does that even mean?
I'll think about it.
I mean, what is this?
And Vic just turns to him and goes, look, if he just, you show up, you keep showing up, you train your ass off.
He's going to come over to you at some point and he's going to give you something to do.
He's going to tell you something, whether it needed to be done here or it needs to be done outside of the ring, outside of the gym.
But he's going to come to you and he's going to say something.
If you don't do it, if you're not, he's just going to be like, you're not serious and that's it.
Fuck off.
And so, you know, eventually I come over and I'm like, alright, hey, do this.
I just leave.
Or, you know, I start feeding him little bits and I see, no, this kid is serious.
He really does want it.
And then...
I take AJ under my wing.
I start working with him all the time.
He's a part of the team.
We're all going.
We're all training.
Turn him pro.
After his last amateur MMA fight, I turn to him.
I go, alright, that's enough of that.
You've got enough experience for fucking free.
Fighting for free.
That's it.
You're going pro.
Let's move on.
And he's like, okay.
And boom, I have him fighting like five or six times in a year.
Like right off the bat.
And I was like, if you're serious, I'm going to get you placing him.
Took him to Russia.
I'm fighting all over the US. We're going to do it.
But anything I'm going to ask of my athletes is not going to be any less than anything I've ever done in terms of severity or intensity.
And oftentimes, it is less.
It's like you guys are going to get the benefit of all the shit I had to do and all the things that have created new structure for us as athletes now to take advantage of.
But that same underlying sentiment about being the meanest, toughest motherfucker out there, and whether you go down or your hand is raised at the end of the day, you keep your head high the same way.
And even with someone like Haoni, I met Haoni before that fight in Brazil when I was training with Pedro Hizzo and Master Roberto Letao, rest in peace.
And I remember Pedro going, hey man, this kid at my gym and this kid is dynamite.
He is such a badass.
And I met him and I'm watching him and I got to roll with him a little bit and get to see him.
And so I run into him again even before the fight.
And he's like, oh hey, hey master.
I'm like, oh, oh hey, hey, we met in Brazil.
He's like, yes, no, that was me.
And it's like, fuck, you know.
God.
Well...
At the end of the day, it sucks that one of you has to win and one of you is going to lose.
But, and you'll see this even at the end of the fight, the way Victor approached, it's like, it's nothing but love.
Me and Pedro, we couldn't be happier for our athletes.
And even though I know Howney lost the fight, If he had won, I'd still be happy for Haoni.
I'd still have a lot of love for him and be like, man, Pedro, that's amazing.
You guys are great.
And to have the opportunity to fight people that have that kind of respect and love of martial arts...
That brings up an interesting point, because one of the things that's happening today in MMA, and it seems it has a lot of elements of pro wrestling in it, is that there's a lot of shit talking for promotion.
And Chael Sonnen was probably the best at it at one point in time.
It's as if the knowledge to create new things is gone.
It's lost.
It is a foreign idea anymore.
And with fighting, it's like, well, sure, we can become better athletes and we can do all this training and what have you.
But at the end of the day, we start treating it more as an entertainment sport.
And it is entertainment.
Don't get me wrong.
It really is.
But when all you have to offer...
is how much you win and then how much racy, spicy shit you talk about your opponent.
Not only does that say something about the people employing those means, to which you can at least understand to a degree that, well, this is their occupation and they want to get the higher contract, the higher spot on the card.
Because what they're doing is they're providing you with, like, fast food TV. Like, you don't have to drive by and pull into the, you know, drive into McDonald's.
But to bring it back to MMA, this trend, does it bother you at all when you see like right now we're dealing, this is very recent into the Colby Covington-Jorge Masvidal fight just happened and then Jorge Masvidal just sucker punched Colby at a restaurant somewhere.
Someone once tried to argue because I said, well, rights are an abstract concept.
I understand the concept of Lockean property rights and all these things, and it's wonderful, but rights are what you can defend at the end of the day.
You know, if you're like, well, I deserve to have this right and that right, it's like, well, who provides them for you?
How do you keep them?
How do you keep someone from saying, no, you don't?
You use somebody else's violence, you proxy it out to a state, or you have to do it yourself.
And you're not getting away from that, ever.
Nowhere, anywhere.
And we live in a society where all of this is violence is something that happens to other people now.
Violence is something that's done by someone else on our behalf.
We don't take any accountability for it.
We don't have...
And with that, it's like, if someone says, don't talk about my fucking kids and my family, and you cross that line, Okay, if he does nothing about it, if he just goes and whinges on Twitter about it, what does that mean?
That means nothing.
If he goes and calls the cops, well, he talked about it, and the cops just go, well, that's within his legal rights.
You know, I've never said two bad words about this guy ever.
Never.
I'm not going to talk shit about him.
And he's just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, all right.
So he starts going in.
So I responded in kind.
And I started ripping on him a bit.
He ran his mouth some more.
And at the time, I remember my manager that I had, he's like, oh, well, you know, you can go.
I go, no, no, no, no, no.
This isn't, I'm not getting in the ring with this guy.
So I can make him a bunch of money and give him notoriety and all this after I beat his ass.
Like, nah, you don't get to make a bunch of money off of my name.
I go, look, we're going to be out at this event.
If that dude's there, and I'm here with Hammer, if that dude comes up to me and starts running his mouth, I'm going to tell him once, and then when I see that motherfucker go to the bathroom, I'm going to have Hammer come with me.
Hammer's going to block the door, and I'm going to fucking tear him apart.
I'm going to walk in.
I said, I fucking told you.
You're looking me dead in the eyes.
Put your hands up.
We're going.
If you can see when we leave, you'll be lucky.
If I haven't bit off pieces of flesh out of your body, you'll be lucky.
If you can fight again after this, you'll be lucky.
But I told you.
And my manager's like, don't do that.
And I go, it's not up to me.
It's up to them.
Nothing happened.
Nothing ever happens, to be honest.
But it's just, don't fuck around with these things.
Hold yourself in high esteem, and with that...
Give that to other people until they give you a reason not to and then just be like, you know what?
First of all, that whole scene, doing that, in that manner, in that place, is a great example of what's wrong with the glorification of just being able to go up to someone and smack them in the face.
Simply in terms of man to man and who's capable and what's capable.
And you know what?
That may be the case in the microcosm of things, but if you hit anybody for any reason in public at this point, you have the very real fact of all of the powers of law that be,
especially depending on who you are and what the public and the cathedral thinks of you, smashing you to death until you have your penniless, bankrupt, That's not gonna happen here.
It's not about giving Will Smith a pass or saying what he did was right.
But what I am saying is that from his perspective, if it was that important, he could have barring going up there and hitting Chris in front of everyone.
And he could have said something if he had to do it right then and there, if he felt that it was that egregious of a remark.
And I agree with you, Chris Rock's a comedian.
The presenters at the Oscars are supposed to be entertainers, often crack jokes that either A, that they do themselves in Chris's perspective, or from Chris's situation, or ones that are written for him.
Chris is a comedian.
I highly doubt that they don't know each other at this point, being in Hollywood for as long as they have.
And in my opinion, if you really want to settle things, Go do it personally.
Speak to the person first.
Give them an opportunity to apologize for things, especially if they didn't realize that what they were doing was...
Regardless of what you and I think of how important or what the weight of what Chris said was, just removing us out of the equation, if it's really that important to Jada, Therefore, it then becomes important to Will.
Then he should deal with it on a personal level and have a conversation with Chris before anything.
He was getting away with it as if he was living in a fictional movie.
Like, the idea that you think it's smart, while wearing a tuxedo, to walk onto a stage in front of the world, like literally the world, one of the biggest award shows on earth, if not the biggest, and smack a comedian for the most mild joke, and then sit there quivering, saying, keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth!
And everybody's just gonna sit there in the shit that you just took on the table.
You just pulled your pants down, took a shit on the dinner table, and they all just sit there and look at that.
It's just the whole idea behind it is completely irrational, but what I'm saying is like these people live in this fake world of, you know, you're protected by guards, you're driven by limos, you're on the red carpet, you know, like all of it is crazy life.
And he's so goddamn famous and so removed from regular discourse and interaction with regular people that he, for whatever reason in his head, acted like he's a character in a movie.
It was a rare instance where someone is so enormously famous and successful like Will Smith, That they literally still allowed him to not just win the Academy Award, but also go up and accept it and give a speech after he assaulted a small comedian.
I don't necessarily think people are going to change their behavior, but dumb people might.
But also, it's just like, what are we saying as a society when the people that we look up to, for whatever reason, for good or for bad, we look up to actors.
And the Academy Awards is supposed to be them in their most regal Their most regal outfits, their best behavior, and to drop down to violence for something so innocuous as a G.I. Jane joke.
You know, Jada's allowed to take offense, and Will's allowed to take offense, but to jump up, run on stage, slap him, and then throw the scene that he did is a completely different story.
To at least to go and give Chris an opportunity to talk to him, and maybe even Jada, and just be like, look, one, you can see that he did not mean to try and cause any actual harm to you.
So, you know what?
Just tell him, if you didn't like it, tell him face-to-face and be like, yo, man, I... It really, you know, hey Jada, it really bugged you.
But to me, regardless of whether you're Will Smith or you're the other Will Smith, the former special forces guy who speaks Russian, was in all tons of 70s and 80s movies, played Conan's dad in Conan the Barbarian, that badass motherfucker.
You could be that guy, this other super popular Will Smith, or Will Smith that nobody actually knows who that person is.
The approach has to be the same.
There is no exception for you if you played Ali or if you played Conan's dad or if nobody's seen you play anything even with yourself.
Well I think what we're looking at also is the culmination of a long period of like emotional distress.
Like that family's been public about all their issues and, you know, there's a conversation that they had to have, like the two of them together about infidelity or about open relationships and they were openly mocked because of that.
But I think there's a certain defensiveness that comes along with that.
So for me, I'm like, look, if you're adding stress into your life by publicizing and externalizing everything, which, again, says something more about the state of things, like, why are you externalizing this shit?
Like, even when I told this story about, oh, you know, this fighter and I had beef.
I ain't gonna say his name because you know what?
I'm not trying to create more beef because I'm not trying to live my life, even though I'm the war master, in some point of irrational, unnecessary conflict.
When conflict comes, conflict, if it has to get to that, That's my whole point.
What we're seeing represented in the media and in society, whether it's in films or television shows or even in the news in a lot of ways, it doesn't resonate with what we know to be true and real with real life.
Like even just the way they communicate.
They don't communicate like a real person.
So, so much of it, we've sort of accepted that so much of what you see is bullshit.
And I just don't think like living that kind of life where you are that kind of person, you're an actor, you're constantly on the red carpet, you're in this weird public pedestal place.
I think you can get a very distorted sense of reality and I think that's what we saw manifest itself.
René Guénon, a French philosopher, and Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, a volume.
We wrote two whole giant books on this.
And, you know, I sent you a quote from Spengler, and I'm like, this is from 1922. And it's talking about the...
of the media into the way people view the world and how there has never been a more powerful machine than this to degrade and deracinate human beings.
And all they had was radio back then.
They're like, oh God, this could be a huge problem.
They thought the printing press was going to make a huge issue where all people did was just dream away in books all day long and not actually make anything or create anything.
And yet people like Ganon and Spengler and Nietzsche saw these patterns of human behavior.
I mean, even beyond the cyclical history of the Hindus, Ganon, who takes a lot from the Hindus, and Spengler.
There's also even Strauss and Howe with their fourth turning concept.
It's like every 80 years that there's going to be a complete changeover.
You have these four ages that you'll go through.
How's it go?
It's like artist, nomad, or is it nomad, artist?
Nomad, and then you get hero, and then it just keeps repeating itself about every 80 years.
And Strauss and Howe think that our fourth turning will come around 2030. I don't entirely buy into the entirety of the fourth turning concept because it's like, oh, the millennials are going to be the hero generation.
I truly believe that at least this kind of aligns with the fourth turning concept in that.
It takes calamity to change humanity.
I believe that too.
And part of what Ganon and Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's concept is the last man.
And this is, you know, you want to understand this, go read Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
With Ganon, start with Crisis of the Modern World.
With Spengler, probably Man and Technics is the easiest one to get with.
If you feel like it, there's a lot of people have now started reproducing his work so it makes it easier to get a hold of because it was hard.
When I had to get my two copies, I found a couple old used ones and I had to pay like 120 bucks to get them.
Now it's a lot cheaper.
But there is, I would say, you can go ahead and go with volume one form and actuality into perspectives of world history, but be prepared to be in for a long haul with that stuff.
What they're going on about is that you'll see these, the, how the comfort of technology and way I see technology is like basically think of technology as not just illuminating or exposing, right?
Like understanding the grains of sand that you can then take and then build into, see how you can then create the form of a cup through heat and pressure.
And now you have this vessel that can be used to hold things, or it could be a ballistic weapon.
It could be all kinds of stuff.
However, you know, you want to see what you could do with that cup.
But it's also about ability.
Abating nature, right?
So technology is putting a roof over your head and then running water and lights and every little step further away of abating nature from how it can interact or how it can force you to and your being and existence and your action in the world.
You start abating nature, abating nature, abating nature.
I don't have to walk somewhere anymore.
I could get on a bicycle.
Well, I can get off a bicycle and I can ride a horse.
Well, I could get off this horse and I have a car.
And each thing makes it so nature has less effect on you.
And you are abating the effects of terrain, which also another aspect of time would be the roads to then be able to travel.
Okay, no roads?
Take a plane or a helicopter or what have you, you know, from the Wright brothers all the way up to 787s.
I mean, man starts on this journey of materialism and starts seeing everything as atoms and pieces and parts and things without any spirit to him anymore.
This is, you know, back to the thing about EVs.
It's just like, well, you know, just make stuff, right?
Technology will allow me to do this, so just do it.
It's a constant conflict of...
Shoulda or coulda instead of shoulda.
And, you know, we have a phone that has all this access to all.
I could go look up audio books on YouTube of getting on and, you know, people's lectures on all these different things.
But it could also be this thing that deranges me in how I start now having resentment and envy with people I'll never meet, I've never seen, in a life that they're carefully constructing to be seen in one way versus the totality of what life is really like for anyone.
And so now you get all these people across all these platforms that can now reach out way further than any tribe has ever been able to do before.
Now all of a sudden it's like, well, Dunbar's number says like 200 people that you could actually have a real relationship with.
Well, now you've got all these electronic relationships on top of that.
And they're making you believe as if you're really invested and engaged with this person, but you're not.
You know what I mean?
And at the same time, I'm not going to sit here and just say, like, everything about social media and electronics and technology is just evil and bad.
Yeah, what's going on with technology is that there's nothing wrong with it, but what is wrong is not having discipline and not having the ability to accurately assess whether or not something is good for you or bad for you.
It's one of the differences between martial artists and other folks is that you're willingly participating in something that develops character and discipline, and it's very different.
It is something that allows you to create a safe space for suffering.
A place where you can go and bleed and sweat with your brothers and sisters and create community and have deep personal relationships based on the intensity of the activity because I have to trust that if you and I are rolling, that like, oh, if Joe catches me, he's not just gonna break my shit off, Because he feels like it.
Instead, he's gonna allow me to tap.
And even then, it's like when I roll with folks, I'll lock something in super tight, and if I start feeling like, uh-oh, this shit's going to go, I back off.
I go, look, man, it's not worth it.
And there's been times where I've rolled with folks, and they don't tap.
They think they're going to get out of it, and I clack, and I immediately let go.
If we're not doing this, then neither one of us is growing.
And even just the thin veneer of, oh, we're not just hanging out even in this gym.
And I like that.
It's part of the reason why I'm here.
It's not the only reason, but having these relationships is part of why I'm here also, because I enjoy it.
We have something in common, which we can have a rapport about.
But we...
There are all these quote-unquote owner's manuals across time and history and cultures, and they're more alike than they're different, and there's a lot to be learned from it.
And I'm not a theist in any way, but I study religion because there are actual philosophical and metaphysical truths embedded within these things.
And sometimes they're the oldest text I can get a hold of for a particular culture.
Don't you think that – I agree with you that religions do hold truths and many of the ancient spiritual texts do hold guidelines on how to love thy neighbor, treat thy neighbor as if they were your brother.
Yeah, all that stuff.
But don't you think, like, physical action needs to happen, too, to completely form a person?
If you're just studying these works, but you're not applying them in a way that tests you, tests your morals, tests your physical will, your discipline, your mind, tests the way patterns of thinking that you're able to cultivate and maintain under pressure.
This goes back to what the Kali Yuga will entail and how people will behave.
To Nietzsche and The Last Man, to Spengler, and he breaks everything down into spring, summer, autumn, winter.
We're in winter.
And when he wrote The Client of the West, he's talking about the winter, the winter of our discontent, I guess.
When you get to these parts in time, you see that everything becomes this little compartmentalized aspect.
Training in the gym is this compartmentalized thing where I'm just doing jujitsu, maybe.
And then when I go and I go to church, if you're a church-going person, that's its own compartmentalized thing.
And when I go to school—and so everything is this other—everything's a deracidated, atomized, you know— It's a materialized way of doing things, and nothing is integrated into itself to make a synthesis of all aspects of being in the world.
That's a great way to put it.
And it's not even about whether you're good at it or great at it or you suck.
It doesn't matter.
Finding places on a broad scale, finding things that challenge you and allow you to grow are an absolute necessity.
Agitation or suffering in some way is going to help you break down and build up.
It's like tearing down the muscle tissue and then it comes back bigger and stronger.
It's the same for a person in terms of their being.
Also, the body needs to move.
We're not made to sit around all day long.
And we're not made to sit and do nothing and just eat processed stuff.
Also, which is really so bizarre how much nudging is going on to try and get everyone to eat fake processed meat everywhere.
Empathetic and emotional attachment to animals in any way and you can't see yourself having an animal die in any sense for you to...
Okay.
Valid.
You do what you got to do to make this work for you, but I accept that and it's totally fine.
And all the stuff about this is healthier, it's this, it's that, bullshit.
This is a luxury diet born of modernity.
It's exactly the kind of thing you would see in the Kali Yuga.
It is this idea that you can somehow...
Pretty much every historical tribe, peoples, nations, everything that has helped people grow.
The fact that it is said that our ability to harness fire and cook animal proteins is what allowed us to get in the caloric and vitamin and intake that we needed for our brains to grow— To become us.
That's a very good way to put it, and I like that you called them an aristocracy, because that's essentially the way we look at extremely wealthy business people in this country.
We look at them as like, if this guy is able to accumulate billions of dollars, he must be a special class of person, because clearly that's the one thing that every working person aspires to, is to become exorbitantly wealthy.
He goes to one cat, fucks with him, and then flies over to the other roof and fucks with the other cat and then goes back and forth until the cats decide they're never going to catch this bird, but they're so round up, they're so angry, they start going to war.
And the raven follows them.
The crow is like laughing while these guys are going to war.
Research shows that crows and other corvids, a family of birds that includes ravens and magpies, know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds.
According to a 2020 study in Estat, This is considered a cornerstone of self-awareness and shared by just a handful of animal species besides humans.
I wonder what the test entailed, that they can ponder the content of their own minds.
I know I saw an article talking about that chickens can actually be trained to have the intelligence of a toddler, like a three-year-old, where you can teach them to take shapes and put them in the right boxes and things like that.
We think that we can compartmentalize everything we do.
Oh, I go and I work out because I want a six pack or I work out because, you know, we always have this external reason instead of an internal reason of I'm a human being and I need to fucking move.
I can't just sit here and be unable to open a jar.
That's pathetic.
A jar in and of itself is technology manifest.
And now I'm too weak to even operate the thing that's made to make my life fucking easier?
Because you're going to get to this point where it's either your mind decides that you're going to get it done Or you'd make a decision, it's not possible.
And when you're doing these kind of hard, strenuous activities, and I explain this to my fighters constantly, most of this incredibly hard training, it isn't so much about the body, it's about you telling yourself that I can go past what I thought my limitations were.
And it's such a throwaway concept in today's way of being that people just think like, oh, that's just part of like, oh, I can biohack the body.
I can do that.
It's just the whole concept.
Everybody says that.
No, this is fundamental towards your development.
And like you say, being able to – even sitting here and you and me talking about this whole Chris Rock thing, me disagreeing on one end.
and you starting from another, I don't think we really disagreed, though.
Not exactly, but even still, what do we have but a dialogue?
And we expressed all these different things.
People work just on that surface to begin with because that's how our...
Our heuristics work, right?
We don't have – until we have the opportunity to sit down and get into the deeper branches of all this where it starts from.
It's like an hourglass.
All these ideas come to this one point and then they can all break away into others.
And being able to have these conversations, to have people around you that you can have that – So to speak, conflict with is good.
This is part of the process.
Part of why I'm trying to track down Eric who I know is an incredibly busy person is because I want to talk to him so that he can challenge my ideas and vice versa and that we can get insights that we wouldn't have had otherwise because I want to try and get the most out of life and I want to get the most out of me and hopefully my friends think I'm helping them in the same way.
That's one of the things that's come out of this podcast for me that was, in a sense, accidental.
Because I started it out just to have fun and just talk with friends and have a good time.
And then along the way, it became a thing where I got to sit down with very intelligent people and pick their brains and get to see how their minds decipher the world.
And through that, I've learned so much about the way my own brain works and why you'll slide into one pattern or another pattern and it might not necessarily even be accurate or relative.
The way that people that are not being disingenuous describe your podcast as an exploration of ideas and conversations Is 100% true.
And last time I sat in here, which is also kind of funny, because I can't wait for everyone to be like, oh my god, I can't believe you did Joe Rogan.
I'm like, this is like my sixth time, assholes.
But it's, I said it last time, this right now is so fucking important, I cannot stress it anymore, that there is a place where people can come on here and have conversations and express ideas.
I don't give a fuck if you like them or not.
You have to interact with that which is the unknown and that which you don't even like.
When it came to things that I felt were fucked up or ideas or ideologies and philosophical contents that I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
None of this reads okay in my book at all.
My position isn't to then go just read all the things and study all the things of people that hate it.
And then once you've done that, now you can make your own decision.
At least you heard their arguments, hopefully, in the best way that they felt they could make them.
And being here, and especially seeing after, I mean, it's just so, to me, a lot of things are self-evident in terms of the actions that happen and what seems to be a really clear underlying reason why.
You catch COVID. You say, hey, I did this, and I'm good, and that was great.
I'm glad I'm not hurt.
This is what I did.
This is for all of you to understand what I went through.
So I'm helped in a way.
I saw it as Joe Rogan is giving his experience to try and bring something good into the world.
There was nothing framed about it in like, And you know, I did it with this one trick that they don't want you to know about.
It wasn't that kind of thing.
It was just simply a matter of, hey man, here's what I went through.
Here's what I did to the detail.
Hey man, I'm okay.
Take it for what you will.
I'm just trying to put things out into the ether to bring more things to the world.
Maybe it's going to help other people.
But the response was, hey, that's not the narrative.
Fuck you.
You got to be destroyed.
And I'm like, that...
I mean, how does somebody not...
And then seeing people like, yeah, I see...
Exactly.
Joe Rogan's so evil.
He's such a bad person.
Wait a second.
We're literally in a pandemic.
A guy says, hey, I'm suffering in this too, but I did this and it seemed to work for me.
Hey, do something with it if you want.
Maybe this could be useful for you or other people or someone else could go, why don't we run this through some sort of controlled study as best as we can.
Let's try to use some potential positive opportunities to then apply it to other people.
But no, no, no, no.
That's not the way we've decided this has to be.
That's not the route that we have decided through propaganda and, you know, basically nudging and other things, you know, read Walter Lippmann's public opinion, go read Edward Bernays' propaganda and public relations, and then go see how this shit is fully applied through this concept of the cathedral at anything it determines is a heretic.
And it's like, well, is the point for us Through our actions to make the world a better place potentially or to have things out there for other people to use to maybe create their own benefit?
Or is the whole point of why we're doing this to create this structure for whatever oligarchs remain at the top to then decide how the world should exist for you and for you to then just go, okay, this is the punch card you've put into ENIAC right now.
This is what I'm going to do because you put it in.
Yeah, it was an extreme time where people were so tested, like their ability to deal with adversity, their ability to deal with anxiety, all those were stressed to attend.
And people freaked out and they're looking for things to freak out about.
And when someone took what they think is like an alternative path, didn't get vaccinated, but got over COVID very quickly with a series of medications.
They thought that I was doing something evil.
And I'm like, look, I'm just telling you that this is what I did.
And they only focus on that one drug, too, which is so crazy.
Because that was the number one thing that was making the rounds that was counter-narrative.
And the cathedral, this concept of, like, essentially...
The idea was originally penned is all these emergent...
They're disassociated groups, but they all worship at the same church.
So they're all in the same religion anyways.
So they all have the same belief structure.
Although I tend to believe that there is actually some levels of collusion at the highest levels where there is some organization.
Don't tell me that the mainstream media doesn't talk to politicians or talk to this person or that person or speak with Bill Gates before they go on to think...
And if there's one thing at the bottom of all this, when it came to COVID, one, we, as a people, especially in the West, Kali Yuga, we're afraid of death.
Death, violence, these are abstract ideas.
Now, these are things that happen to other people, not to us.
These are things that don't exist for me, they exist for someone over there.
And having that unhealthy relationship with death puts you in a really unhealthy relationship with being because you're denying an absolute.
You're denying your endpoint, whether you like it or not.
You're refusing to engage with something that is in your future.
When?
Don't know.
A lot of things go into that.
But with COVID, the denial of death was so strong and was pushing people to act so utterly irrational and erratic.
It was a great example of the decline of the West manifest.
And the fact that People don't have that internal security in like, well, you know, I've done my life.
I've lived my life.
I'm going to do the best that I can by the things that I think are the way to approach the world.
And when I die, I die.
I just hope that what I put into it was something that is now within everybody that was a part of my life and everybody that was a part of my life before that put into me.
I've put into them and it will live on.
And like the idea of Not necessarily a great chain of being, because it's kind of a different concept, but that I carry the fire for Jim Harrison.
I carry the fire for Fred Sato.
I carry the fire for Santia Noi.
All these people that have ever been in my life, I carry the fire for Carl Gotch and Billy Robinson.
And whatever I do, when I sit here on this podcast, Billy and Carl and Santia and all these folks, my dad, my grandfather, they're here with me.
As I speak to you, as I have what I have formulated in my way of being and my Dasein is here.
It's the same for anyone if you want to actually...
If you want to make this a part of who you are, if you really want to actualize everything that's been put into you and passed through, we don't...
I'm not just here on a rock spinning in space.
I'm an evolved monkey.
Living in this state of nihilism doesn't bring you anything but misery.
And you lose out on so much.
You don't just lose out on, let's say, success or especially material things.
No, you lose out on the deeper things, the spiritual things.
You lose out on what's amazing about being a person, is that you can meet people like yourself that have been tested and through that have developed these exceptional characters.
And because of your exceptional character, it makes for a fascinating friendship.
And prior to coming on the podcast, my girlfriend will back it up on like, Oh, fuck, I'm actually nervous right now because, you know, we're buddies and we've been doing this for a while now, but now this shit is so fucking huge that it's like, oh no, is everyone going to pour over every single little thing I say?
If I become something different because it grew bigger, I'll quit.
If it gets to a point where I can't do it anymore, where I have to do it in some sort of weird way, where I walk on eggshells and mine my P's and Q's, fuck that.
We'll just say 99% of everyone's complaint on you, any criticism, is essentially they're putting insincerity on you.
That's really what it is.
Joe Rogan is this because of that.
Joe Rogan is that because of this.
And it's always from a concept of insincerity.
It isn't because of the actual content of your stuff, because they've decided, they've already packaged and framed up who you are and what you are and what you're talking about and why you're talking about it in a way that has insincerity and some sort of ulterior motive beyond This is me.
This is what I'm into.
This is what I believe now.
But yet, I'm gonna have people on here to talk to me about these things.
And yes, you will argue with people about stuff that you don't buy into.
You'll also allow yourself to be convinced.
And that's the thing, is that until you sit by and allow someone to show you these different ideas and approaches, even to understand, like, that's total bullshit.
You don't know it until you've allowed yourself to engage with it.
And we live in an era where essentially everybody assumes everything is insincere, where people approach everything from, well, I have ulterior motives for what I want to do.
I want material gains.
I want this.
I want notoriety.
I want to be famous or what have you.
Not just I want to do something because I think it's a good thing to do and it intrigues me and I like it.
But the thing is when you do something like that because it's a good thing to do because it intrigues you and you like it, it resonates with people because they're so starving for that.
Because most of what you see, you see a lot of people that are cynical, and they think that everything is insincere, and you just find the thing that's the most acceptable to you that's also insincere.
Sagar and Jetty has a really good analysis of what is causing the rise of gas prices.
I don't want to fuck it up, but I would guide people to go look up Rise—excuse me, that's their old show— Breaking Points, it's their new show with Crystal and Sager, and Sager breaks down in a very detailed and nuanced way what's going on.
To dumb it down to the simplest version I could think of, instead of telling everyone to buy EVs, and all of a sudden, hey, you got 50 grand laying around, just buy an EV. Or, like, we're going to have to cinch our belts up.
They were telling people that they should avoid chemotherapy for their dog.
That was one of them.
I'm not kidding.
Because I made a screenshot of it because it was so fucking crazy that I was like, that can't be what someone's actually saying people should do because- Because there's no fucking...
Because they're running out of money.
See if you can find that, Jamie, before I find the screenshot because I... I think it's in here.
If your upper echelon of elites are just managerial types, that they're rent seekers, they get into a position, all they do is they get rent off of it, they can't make, create, or build, or fix things.
Anything.
All they can do is manage.
They can push the papers along.
They can make the system grow.
They can put more managerials in.
They can solidify their position.
They can consolidate things, but they can't make stuff.
If there's a problem, they can't really fix it because, one, they're absolutely way too fucking slow at doing anything because there's so many steps in between all aspects to fix something like, I guess Flint has water now, but it took forever.
And by the way, I mean, most people have probably forgotten completely that there was an entire American city with poisoned water, and no one ever really followed up on, hey, guess what?
Well, what he definitely is, is the best representation of an intelligent, articulate statesman who is a president of our lifetime, other than Clinton, and Clinton was kind of a sketchy dude who liked to fuck everybody.
Because in the realm of politics, okay, you got all this mass of people.
These people need to make a decision.
So at some point, they're going to go through some process of figuring out who they want their representatives to be because everyone can't speak at once.
Someone's got to distill the messages and what have you.
And people don't want to work in a gigantic collective of everything.
At some point, somebody is going to be either the natural born leader or they're going to make them the leader because it isn't for everyone.
And it's not even to everyone's capabilities to be the leader or to be the spokesperson to deal with The conflict from argumentation and so on and so forth, and to be the person to stand up and to get people to believe, like, if he says to do it, I'll do it.
You know what I mean?
Also, you then also start to have things like, alright, We live in a liberal democratic republic.
So you're going to need in politics, oh, I need someone to run my campaign.
I need someone to do this.
So you start getting the division of labor in and amongst even your political party itself to then handle all these specific tasks and get specialized people to do it.
Well, then they also then become part of that oligarchy because...
It can't just be Joe Schmo and Betty Nobody.
It's got to be somebody that is either A, capable of being the person that's the campaign manager and the speech writer.
Your upper echelon to go out there and to represent on your behalf.
And especially in America, which is a representative republic, it's a representative democracy, somebody is there on your behalf.
Although there is a jillion unelected non-democratic officials like a Fauci or what have you that are out there making all kinds of rules, doing all kinds of things that you have no say in and you get to do nothing about it.
The thing is, as Mikels points out, it always, eventually, either by necessity or just by nature, every group becomes an oligarchy, always.
And the thing about it is, okay, well, if it is an oligarchy, one, you should be truthful about it and not try to lie to everyone and say, like, oh, no, no, we all have a say in this.
No, the fuck you don't.
You don't.
We do.
And if we don't like the sound of that, we ain't changing it.
Period.
And instead, in this modern age, what we'll do is we'll get the cathedral to go and tell you how you're supposed to think.
And then you'll come around to us or we'll nudge you until eventually you come to the point that, you know what?
Eating meat is bad.
You know, why?
Because reasons and studies and statistics and, you know.
I'd like to add listen to Samo Burja Burja's conversation.
He had Samo s-a-m-o-b-u-r-j-a He has a company that is centered around Analyzing all world events and politics and everything and trying to Bismarck analytics.
And I'd also say Michael Malice and Curtis Yarvin on You're Welcome.
I like to talk to him about anarcho-capitalism and anarchy in general and why it doesn't work.
But I also respect him in a lot of ways for putting his opinions out there.
And look, if he's friends with Lex and he's friends with you and he's friends with my other buddy, Ethan, No, you'll love him.
He's a great guy.
And Yarvin, as smeared and misunderstood as he is, I think has a lot of interesting insight.
And I also think that, you know, just for your own sake, not just Ukraine or any, but for any understanding and getting a better idea on all about how, especially the West works on a political level, read James Burnham's The Machiavellian's.
It is the easiest way to get Familiarized with the thinkings of what's called the Italian elite theorists, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels.
And they look at politics from the perspective of power, but from also the perspective of how these things work, especially in a democratic sense, and how even though the concept of what we call liberalism Which, as an aside note, I hate it when people call leftism liberalism or leftist liberals.
I'm like, no, everybody in America essentially is a liberal because we are a liberal society.
We are built on classic English liberalism that is the bedrock of who we are.
I think we're good to go.
At some point, this all goes away and the oligarchs and the managerial class decide everything for you.
And you think that what you're doing is going to influence these things, but it doesn't.
You think that when, oh, there's this big, you know, uprising of populist movement of against this or that, it's like, yeah, it was all astroturfed.
I'm sure somebody in the elite class somewhere funded it.
The government either put rules in place to increase its probability of happening, which is an argument of law, culture is decided by law and not the other way.
And that's an even deeper concept to get into, but just simply that at the end of the day, human beings organize themselves in such a way that there's always a representative at some point.
And be it a king, be it a president, be it an elite managerial class, that's how it's going to happen.
And once a managerial class sets itself up, the only thing it wants to do especially is manage because it's not there to create.
It's not there to fix.
No, it's there to continue management and to ensure, most of all, that they stay there.
That they don't lose their positions.
And so a lot of what I saw COVID as, like, this is managerialism manifest.
It's not about whether this is healthy or that's healthy or we could make this change or, okay, what we didn't know, an overreaction makes sense.
It's the unknown.
And even despite our massive fear of death in modernity in the Kali Yuga, We still need to approach things, the unknown, as like, it's the unknown.
The fuck if I know what's really gonna happen?
Yeah, I'm probably gonna overreact.
Until I know more, until I've had a little bit more time, then I can readjust.
But the readjustment really never happened very – definitely didn't happen with any sort of real speed because the managerial class is sitting back like, we cannot make a mistake on this in any way where it can be used against us, regardless if it's small or large, right or wrong.
If it was right, I guess it wouldn't even be a mistake.
But any way that it could be used as ammo against us to lose our position to our enemies.
Because all politics breaks down into a friend-enemy distinction.
And that who is along with my narrative is my friend and that who is against it is my enemy.
Because if you're against it, that means you could then use it to somehow say, I don't deserve to be here.
And if I lose my spot in the managerial...
I've lost, and all this way of rent-seeking is now taken from me, and that's all I do anyways because I'm not capable of probably starting a successful car company where I redesign suspension.
No, no.
All I know how to do, I go to school, I get raised up through this managerial oligarchic class, I go to the right schools, I say all the right things, I join the right clubs, I get primed to go into places.
Then I get to become a managerial myself.
And when I'm in politics, I'm part of that managerial oligarchic class, and then when I leave politics, I'm still in it because now I'm working at Pfizer when I used to be a part of whatever, like the...
FDA. Yeah, or this, and I'm going back and forth between the two.
I'm doing all this stuff for Monsanto, then I'm president, then I go back to it, and then I get to go and do dinners While I'm in office at $30,000, $50,000 a plate and rake in all this cash and then go back to me and telling you about how you need to cinch your belts about this or that or any number of reasons, any other scenarios you can come up with.
That managerial class of person isn't capable of then coming down here and running a simple podcast.
No, their podcast has to be backed by parts of the cathedral that then back the managerial class to allow them to continue to push the same narratives that their class wants you to push and put things out there the way that they think is beneficial to them.
So they can then go back to being a manager in some other way.
And it's like the homeless problem in LA. Every time I see someone rallying for they're going to go for some office, I'm like, well, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to build this low-income housing.
How are you going to put a paranoid schizophrenic on crack in a low-income housing?
How are you going to do that?
You basically don't really give a shit about all these people in the street suffering.
You think that it's okay for a person to live this way, you know, deranged in their own head, self-medicating and living in filth as long as you create some boondoggle where you've got a bunch of property development people that are making money off of it and you're making money off of it and your little shadow corp or whatever is making money.
It's just like, you have to be a Machiavellian To do that and sit back and then walk out on those streets if you're Maxine Waters.
And I was in her district not long ago and it's like, wow.
But then my friend Coleon Noir pointed out that he's a lawyer, and he went to San Francisco, and he was talking to these people up there about the homeless problem, and they laid out, they go, no, no, no.
This is a giant money-making scam.
The reason why it's never going to go away is that there's a large payroll of people that are making exorbitant amounts of money to deal with the homeless.
If the homeless problem was somehow or another solved, and I'm like, how much money are they making?
So he pulls up this fucking list of people in LA, and there's people on the list that make a quarter million dollars a year, and they're not doing a good job.
Obviously, the homeless situation is bigger and bigger every year.
I think the only way that I can think of is, one, you'd have to basically essentially outlaw homelessness and say, look, especially in a metropolitan, dense, populated area, you cannot have homelessness like this because One, you can't have people out here suffering like this.
That's fucked up.
It's not okay.
Number two, those people are a potential criminal problem, too.
Number three, it's a health hazard because you have all these populations intermingled with each other, but they're not going and getting healthcare and other things.
I mean, they can't take care of themselves.
So diseases are going to spread amongst these groups at different rates, not to mention there's a potential for superbugs to create and or medieval diseases to come back.
There was a typhus outbreak in L.A.
And that's because now you've got all these rats around the waste and the trash and all this.
Plus, and then you make the environment – Ugly, disgusting, unlivable.
And look, what you live around absolutely affects the way you feel, but it also affects the way you interact with the environment around you.
If you think you live in fucking barter town, you're going to act like it's barter town.
I fell on hard times and then all of a sudden believe people are trying to get them or they're bipolar to such a degree that they're harming themselves and others.
No, the only thing I can think of is you'd have to make it essentially illegal.
You would have to create a big ass camp and you would have to round these folks up, clean them up because a person that can't bathe themselves is a massive fucking thing.
Human beings want to be able to clean themselves, feel like they've refreshed who they are.
You gotta give them psychiatric treatment.
You gotta help them get off the drugs.
You gotta help them give them drugs if they need them for these things that are ailing their mental state, that are keeping them in this broken realm of suffering that doesn't allow them to actualize who they are.
Then you have to give them a work opportunity because human beings need to do something.
So in and amongst that, maybe it's just, to me, I think, oh, it's beautification.
Cleaning up all the graffiti, cleaning up the trash, giving someone something to do, pay them some sort of a small wage because you're covering all their, now you're covering their living quarters and all this stuff.
And you're giving them medication, you're giving them help, getting them off of drugs.
The state has credit unions and all these things.
You open an account in their name.
Now they're getting a bit of money for everything they go out and do.
Now if they want to at some time, they can go, okay, you're clean.
You're good to go.
You know what medications you need.
You're in the system.
Go take the money.
Go do what you want to do with it.
Or maybe integrate into the program and now you can help other people.
Maybe now you can start going to school.
Go into psychology and psychiatry.
Maybe then at some point you could be the person that's diagnosing this person, trying to help them out and get them off the street.
And you create this process that tries to get people from this position of being deranged and in the dirt to...
Able to have some kind of way of actualizing their life and making their own rational decisions.
Well, they've done something about it here in Austin, and I had a long conversation with the mayor about it here, and one of his points is that Austin only had about 2,000 homeless people.
And he's like, 2,000, maybe 3,000 homeless people.
And he's like, we can fix that.
That can be worked.
He goes, when it gets to the state where Los Angeles is, when you're dealing with several hundred thousand people potentially, I don't know what the real number is.
If you're even just considering the fact of that what you're doing with drugs and maybe prostitution or whatever is illegal, well, now the cops know where you are in your mind.
I wanted to, because we're running out of time, but I wanted to bring up this one thing that you brought up earlier, because I think there's, you made a really good point, but I think there's more to it.
When you're talking about people that want to avoid death, and that this is like a main component of our life, is like no one wants to die, you want to avoid death, you don't even think about it.
Do you think that because of the fact that we don't experience death the way maybe some primitive cultures did, that we have disconnected with it?
We don't think of it as this inevitable, unavoidable thing?
Instead, we think of it almost like something that's not going to happen to me?
And that, like, if you think about, like, the Spartans, when the Spartans would meet someone who was 30 years old, they would treat them with extreme distrust.
Like, how are you alive?
Like, how have you made it to 30?
They thought that person maybe was like a traitor or an enemy or a coward or someone who avoided conflict.
Like, how did you ever get to be this old and not get killed in battle?
We don't see a lot of death here.
And I think because of that, in most places, because of that, we don't have the same sort of resolve about the inevitability of death that I think some cultures do have.
But let's just say specifically in the West, like I said earlier, death is an abstract concept.
It's something that happens to other people in some faraway place that doesn't exist around me, be it war, famine, or even just natural causes.
We know people die, but we're never ready for it.
We never expect it.
And then when it happens, it's like, oh no, don't touch it.
Don't touch it or it'll get on you.
But the thing is, so a friend of mine, one of my best friends, his dad is, well, he's not in his best place mentally and physically.
And my buddy, he looks at it like, you know what?
I'm going to do my best for my father as much as I can.
And I'm going to help him in every way that is possible.
But he is going to die.
And he doesn't know when.
He doesn't know, especially because it could take all kinds of turns at places that he doesn't know and he can't necessarily expect.
But...
At the end of the day, we just sat down there, we looked each other in the eye, and I just said, look, whatever, whenever, however, just call me, and I'll be there.
And we'll take him, and we'll do what needs to be done.
If we're going to bury him on his own land, if we're going to do this, we're going to do that.
When the people that are of my tribe, of my family, of my things in life are there, when death greets them, I'll be there with them.
And when they're When their body is without life, I will not treat them as if it is something that I don't want to get on me.
I will hold that hand, cold as it may be, and I will know that this too is for me.
And in this moment, I will not let this person be, I will not let this person essentially be alone.
I'm not afraid of death, not my death, not other people's death, not death in general, because it's not like I'm so tough or cool or unafraid of anything.
It is just that I've accepted this.
I live my life in a way where death is beside me at all times.
I remember having to have an MRI for something, and I'm like, oh shit, you know, some heavy shit was going on.
And I told someone, I go, you know, the only thing I thought of at that moment was, you know what?
The only thing that matters to me is I refuse to die a coward's death.
That's it.
That is it.
I don't care anything else.
I will not die a coward's death.
I will meet death head on.
I will face it.
I will hold its hand.
And when I have to walk that way, if I get to go to Valhalla, if that's a thing that exists, that's where I'm going.
And I'm not doing it like a coward.
I'm going to accept it.
And there we go.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to roll over.
That doesn't mean anything else other than Death is here with me at all times and everyone else, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.
And the difference is I'm here to live life.
I'm here to face death squarely and accept it and then get everything I can out of being here.
That doesn't mean go crazy hedonistically.
I got to get it all in before I... No, no, no.
That just means I'm going to let the beauty of the world enshrine and enshroud me...
Because it's all I got.
And if I get to get reincarnated, cool.
If I go to some sort of Shangri-La, fine.
I don't know what any of that could be.
And I don't care if it doesn't exist.
I don't care.
I don't care if there's a heaven.
I don't care if there's a hell.
What I care about is living to my principles.
Being a person that is of honor and respect to those he interacts with and those that he loves and that are part of his life.
And beyond that, I just have to accept where I fail.
And what you're saying sounds noble and honorable and it's a great thing, but it also sounds incredibly rare.
And I think that's one of the unique things about this time is that people that are accepting reality, accepting the inevitability of their own demise and trying to live life by principles and by ethics and a strict code of honor.
It's rare because Genon, Nietzsche, Spengler have all seen and sorted out how we have, through the comforts and the malaise of modernity, found ways to divorce ourselves from all these things.
To not have to have it.
We live in a culture without honor at any point anymore.
Or when we have honor, it's this.
Exacerbated perversion of it where we come storming out of our fucking seat at the Oscars.
We slap a tiny comedian who we know the motherfucker has known for I don't know how long.
And then we rant and we scream in our seat after the fact.
Instead of meeting the man face to face, looking him in his eye, having a conversation with him, and allowing him even the opportunity to say, Hey man, I really didn't mean anything by it.
I thought it was a pretty simple, harmless joke.
Especially because it's still even in the vein of movies and acting.
And you know what?
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to hurt her feelings.
And I didn't know this was such a serious thing for you.
And that's that.
And you know what?
Allowing somebody to have that kind of humility or that...
Everybody loves to fucking throw around the word empathy all the time.
Nobody knows what it actually means.
That's empathy.
Empathy is not letting all of the digital world infiltrate your person and then you going and throwing out all this emotional attachment and taking it onto yourself so now you can be spun out of control and running around now having to see therapists 24-7 because you've now done something that the human body is not meant to do, which is try to interact with this simulacra As if it is actual reality for you.
Without all of the context of being a person, without social cues, without the emotional connection you have when you're having a conversation with a person.
I've seen people use things with coffee and coffee beans to smell and something to reset your nose.
But there's other little tricks for tasting.
You put a small amount in the glass, shake it, get it on your hands, rub it, smell, then shake it, smell, taste a little bit because as soon as that alcohol hits your tongue, if it's the first drink, that alcohol hitting your tongue is like, whoa, okay.
Now, move it all around your mouth, they call it chewing, and then swallow, and then let that all coat your mouth, and then try to get an idea, start picking things out.
And by the way, there's no right way to, if you think it tastes like, so last night, something we had, I was like, you know, the end finish on this is a bit like the smell of MDF or plywood in a Home Depot.
They're like, what?
I go, try.
Yeah, I kind of get that.
Okay.
Oh, it's toasted coconut.
Move to this, move to that.
And if that's the note that you come up with, that's the note you can come up with, right?
It's yours.
However, your memory of taste and smell is unique to you.
But yet, we've all eaten and tasted most of the same shit because we all live in the same country with the same cuisines.
Like, everything I do, that if it's got my name on it, I really got to stand behind it.
It's got Warmaster right on the fucking bottom.
That's my nickname.
This is me.
So, and then when it came to, all right, We need to pick our production up during COVID. So I said, here I am.
I got the time.
I'm here in the distillery.
So like the video you showed on one of your deals about talking about the whiskey.
No, that's, I mean, yeah, that's highlight stuff for that reel, but that's real shit.
I cleaned the floors, ran distillation runs, smoked grains, roasted shit, did mash bills, sat and worked underneath as an apprentice, a head distiller.
Who also was a PhD biochemist.
So we're talking about the aspects of physics and chemistry as well as just stuff that comes with whiskey making, you know, that hand done process.
And for me, this just lined up perfectly.
Not only did our normal Warbringer blend win a gold medal this year at World Spirits Competition in its pot still category, we have a vodka that we put out where...
Vodkas are basically all the same.
I don't give a fuck what anybody says to you.
If I make you a cocktail with Absolute or Russian Standard or Belvedere, you ain't gonna taste any difference.
I watched this video where they took cheap vodka and they ran it through a bunch of Brita filters and they said it's indistinguishable from expensive vodka.
By nature, vodka is supposed to be tasteless, odorless, neutral, distilled at I think over 180 and then cut down to 80 proof or whatever.
With us...
We worked with a mixologist, award-winning mixologist, Josh Goldman.
The idea was to create a vodka that would be the best well vodka to make the best cocktails.
And the difference is our PhD biochemist and the mineral formulation in the water.
So our mineral formulation in the water creates a different mouthfeel, a little bit of different interaction, brings out different aspects of what's in the vodka from the three different grains that are in it.
And that vodka, we put it up to the World Spirits Competition this year, and it won best varietal in the nation, best varietal in the world.