Joe Rogan and Evan Hafer critique blind trust in experts, citing COVID-era conflicts of interest, while contrasting it with nuanced debates like Eric Weinstein’s "theory of everything." Hafer links fulfillment to hard work via Black Rifle Coffee’s veteran-owned ethos, while Rogan praises his mug’s dual utility. They debate cats’ predatory role (1.4B–3.7B birds killed annually) and dogs’ loyalty, pivoting to Rogan’s comedy club and desalination tech—like MIT’s solar-powered device. Cocaine’s "vampire" effect on fighters and veterans, including TBI risks, fuels their critique of woke culture’s stifling free speech, especially in sports like jiu-jitsu. Hafer warns of foreign policy failures (e.g., Iraq WMD lies) and systemic propaganda, urging focus on sovereignty over ideological distractions. [Automatically generated summary]
What if my parents were, you know, like, what if they got IQs and their IQ tests were really low?
Well, I mean, isn't it possible that someone who's not that bright has a super smart kid, like, they give them enough vaccines and the kid comes out a genius?
He published this theory, and he's putting it out there for people to judge.
And I don't know how it's been received.
I don't know.
But how would I know?
I mean, I would never understand who's...
One of the things that I've learned during COVID, this whole trust the experts thing, suck my dick.
Okay?
That's nonsense.
There's a lot of these people that are fucking full of shit.
And bought and paid for and I don't trust just the experts anymore.
I trust some experts.
I trust if I can understand what they're talking about and I know where maybe their conflicts lie, I can see, well, why would they be ignoring certain studies but highlighting others?
Oh, there's a conflict of interest.
Oh, there's some money involved.
Oh, maybe there's a revolving door and they can get into some nice agency or some corporation after they're done with the agency.
I can kind of look at that, but it takes time.
With this shit, what he's talking about, I have no idea who the experts are.
I have no idea.
He's literally talking about a theory of everything.
That debate, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, that thing was so good, because I just love watching those guys intellectually eviscerate people, because it's hilarious to me.
I do, but it becomes a bit of an intellectual rap battle.
And that's what I don't like about it.
I just feel like it's beneath those guys.
And when I see guys like Malcolm dunking on people, I'm like...
Shouldn't we just be discussing the data?
Instead of trying to invoke an emotional response from someone, I understand why you would do that if you were fucking with someone, if you wanted to have an argument with someone, but what is this publicly for?
Why is it public?
Well, it's public because we're trying to understand who's right and who's wrong.
I want to know why you think the way you think.
There's clearly many different schools of thought when it comes to many cultural things, and people are fiercely opposed to the other side.
I want to know where you're coming from.
If you're dunking on people, like, now I do know where you're coming from.
I don't like that.
Because, like, first of all, it's not anything that funny.
If you're going to do it, be good at it.
Be fucking funny.
And also, it's not necessary to this argument, this discussion.
You should really be talking about why you really believe what you believe.
And what you think is wrong with this opposing opinion.
Like, I love that forum for two people to take a topic.
I used to watch debates.
I think...
PBS used to do a series on just, you know, they'd take one topic and they'd chew it up and they'd figure out where's the crowd before and then where was the crowd after.
And they're fascinating because when people are going from opposing points, they're going back and forth if they stick to facts and they don't get personal.
Because that's when it actually starts to get, like, really?
Now you're just kind of being personal.
You're degrading the actual conversation.
You're not going...
It's not a fight.
It's not, like...
From my perspective, you look at it, it's kind of like watching a match, where you're watching two guys go back and forth, hit for hit, and seeing guys like Jordan and Douglas Murray or some of those guys really flex, it's pretty funny to me.
You know, because, like, sometimes when people believe a thing so much, they haven't ever looked at the thing the way someone who doesn't believe in the thing looks at it.
When you got that much power to not only debate somebody on a subject with an encyclopedia of information and be funny so you can be charismatic, you can be logical, you can keep a measured tone...
So Buckley's the conservative and Gore Vidal is the...
And they aired these, I think it was on NBC? Is that what it was on?
ABC or NBC? Oh, yeah.
But it got huge ratings.
Like, they were losing in the ratings, and this was kind of a Hail Mary.
Have William F. Buckley as the leading conservative, and Gore Vidal, who's this wild liberal.
And so they were moderated on ABC. ABC. News coverage of the Republican National Convention in Miami.
So this is 1968. They're fucking great, man.
Because one of the things that people are learning through podcasts when you talk about guys like Eric Weinstein or guys like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harrison, people want to hear people talk.
The people that are above that 85 IQ, you know, what is it, 84% of the population?
The people that are above, those fucking people, they want to hear how interesting, intelligent people are discussing ideas.
And you don't see any of that shit on TV. Except Bill Marshall.
But even Bill Marshall, there's a lot of people talking over each other.
It's an hour.
Everything's got to fit in an hour.
It's on HBO. Which is why I think he's doing his own show.
Isn't that interesting when you think about Bill Maher and his kind of outward appearance from his political point of view, which is typically going to be left, and then guys that go on a show and they have this really complex, interesting conversation, but for a bunch of people, they won't even watch Bill because he's left.
They won't even watch, so they're going to stick in their echo chamber.
They're going to continue to kind of...
Propagate out speaking points from either platform.
And they're never gonna go out and watch different things just based on a person's political view.
Yeah, joining a political party or being in a political party like ideologically in your head is not good for you.
It's bad for like there are a lot of things that people who are on the right Believe that I agree with and there's a lot of things that people on the left believe and I agree with and And I refuse.
I refuse to be a part of this left versus right thing.
I think it's stupid.
I think it's bad for us, and I think it's a trap.
I think it's a really dumb trap in America.
And Bill Maher says a lot of really wise shit, and he says a lot of shit about culture that goes against the ideology that he's a part of.
He's as deep in the Hollywood system as is humanly possible.
He's a political host on a show on HBO. I mean, that's like deep Hollywood.
You're balling out of control and there's a lot of pressure to keep that going and to appease the people that would make those decisions and to also be as marketable as humanly possible to everybody out there in the world so that you can maintain this job.
I mean it's unwitting or witting essentially extortion to a certain degree because you're saying if you don't cooperate you're gonna be on the streets.
But it's a tyranny that like if there's one person or one group that has the overwhelming part of discerning who makes it or who doesn't make it they have the ability to choose who's the rock Yeah, yeah.
And then every little piece of that was put together perfectly from the way that his face was contorted to the level of breathing that he was participating in and then as he falls down.
Do you know there's people that keep it together most of the time, but If something goes sideways, there's like a little switch that you see go off in their head.
And here's the thing that I think people should put in their heads.
Does everybody remember?
Let me speak to people that live in Los Angeles because this is where it gets rare.
Does everybody remember the lines outside the gun stores?
Do you remember during the riots there was lines outside the gun stores?
Listen to me kids, keep that energy.
Keep that energy because that didn't go away forever.
That was just a couple of years ago and the weirdness of life, the weirdness of the way the world works, some shit could pop off Anywhere and everywhere.
That's real.
That's a real possibility.
We all saw what just happened in Israel.
It's a real possibility that some shit could pop off.
And to bury your head in the sand and pretend that that's not possible, that doesn't help anybody.
Do you think it's part of the cultural differences between people, just in general, between red and blue and people?
What I would say is, the question is there's people that are really individual, they want to take accountability, and there's other people that are like, I want to bury my head in the sand.
There's a weird denial of possibility that comes along with not wanting preparedness.
And it's one of the rare times, when I look at someone like Mike Glover being labeled a terrorist, it's one of the rare times I go, well, there might actually be a conspiracy to keep people weak.
They might want to look at people like that as resistance to authoritarianism, and they want to squash that.
It's one of the rare times where I don't look at it objectively.
I look at decisions like that and go, oh, you like weak people.
You only want weak people.
You don't want people to challenge you once you get into power.
You don't want people to say, hey, that's against the law, or hey, this is not the way we're supposed to be operating.
You want people to just comply.
And when no one's armed, people comply.
And when everyone's armed, it's really hard to get people to comply.
Especially if they're kind of in agreement, if there's a large percentage of us that are in agreement, like, no, you can't listen to all my phone calls.
You're just a person.
Whether you work for whatever fucking agency, if I'm a guy who works at a tire shop who doesn't do anything wrong and you want to listen to all my phone calls, what?
You're just a person.
Look, if you find a guy who you know is fucking wearing a suicide vest, is about to walk into a wall, you know something's going on, yeah, listen to that guy's phone.
And if you've got a chain of terrorists that you're studying and you need to listen to their phones, fuck yeah, listen to their phones.
If a guy just likes to can peaches, and he owns a couple of 9mms in an AR, you want to listen to his phone?
Wait, did you see where, this was last week, or maybe the week before last, they were talking about how they had TSA air marshals following people that were in DC. Not even at the Capitol, but they were in DC during January 6th.
So they'd just been following these people around the United States.
Yeah, they were saying they don't have the resources over the Thanksgiving travel period to staff the security needs from the, like, airlines because they had people that were air marshals, I believe, and I'm scrolling through this, following people that were just in D.C. They weren't even, like, implemented in anything.
I mean, I think there's a level of intrusiveness in the government that is just...
At some point, we have to say it's unacceptable.
Like, I think...
I mean, obviously, this is a long podcast.
We don't need to, like, take down the temperature just yet.
But I think...
Man, I don't quite understand why they want that level of surveillance activity around people that quite literally might have only been in D.C. during that time period.
We'll say that the highly motivated people that will live their life with virtue and courage and pursue all of what I would say is Western philosophic principles...
I think we collectively can be trusted with that responsibility.
But then you have that other piece that's saying, I don't want to have anything to do with that.
I'd rather have a safe, secure existence without any accountability or responsibility.
I 100% agree.
That's why, and this isn't like, it's not meant to be like over complimentary, but I think that's so, this show and other people, like you and Jocko and Cam and Jordan, whomever else that's kind of out there in the ecosystem, you guys are putting really good information out into the world saying like, I was to reference your podcast with Lex that you did maybe like a year ago.
He was asking you straight-up advice.
Like, how do you make yourself better?
How do you be a better person?
You're answering, saying, hey, this is what worked for me.
Well, you're obviously successful.
You should be propagating that out into the country, into the world, having men and women and everybody else saying, fuck yeah, I'm gonna take more accountability.
I'm gonna be more responsible for my life.
I'm gonna live radically free because that's fucking cool.
That is what people who live in cities don't like.
If you're living in a city and you're in an apartment building and you're an urbanist, so you have a scarf and you're going to get your latte and maybe you're getting an Uber or you're hopping in the subway.
Yeah, it's almost a prescription for what I would say is, if you want to live within the safety and in the sanctuary of an urban environment where you've got everything mapped out to you, so you've been indoctrinated under a system of, like, bells and whistles, that conformity means everything in academia, which is don't stick out, you know, like...
Be on time, be best in class, make sure that you're hitting all your bells and whistles when you move directly into that urban area where you're also working from 9 to 5 or whomever, you know, or whatever.
It's like 60, 70 hours a week, but everything is laid out.
It's very lockstep conformity all the way through.
Dude, I have zero interest in doing that.
That sounds like a prison to me, to be honest with you.
Well, that's what's fascinating is that these people that we're talking about that live in these urban environments that have jobs like that and are not interested in physical health and are going to restaurants and doing all the things, those people are the most fucked up.
They have the most health problems.
They have the most mental health problems.
I'm just guessing.
I'm just guessing.
But I know a lot of people that live in urban cities that are on SSRIs.
I know a lot of them.
There's that 15% of the people that have 85 or below IQ. What percentage of the people that live in cities that live like that are on antidepressants or some sort of psychoactive medication?
So when you think about the numbers, depending on how much overlap there is, there's 50 million people between, you know, below 85 and then that are what you would say is clinically depressed and or on some type of psychological drug, right?
I... I've had a lot of time over the last, I would say, couple years to try to turn the bolts on this to figure out what it is that makes me happy or creates more endurance or energy or whatever it might be.
And there's this...
Eudaimonia.
Have you ever heard of this principle?
It's like this old Greek term that they would use to define happiness and fulfillment through hard work and accomplishing your goals and objectives.
So it's essentially being happy in establishing very difficult criteria for yourself and then adhering to it.
And it's older than the Stoics.
And I realized I was like, oh, that's that's kind of what makes me tick.
I love Just grinding myself into moon dust like we're talking earlier.
I was like I'm running this whole machine in the red all the time, right?
It's like I'm 5'7", 160 pounds.
So it's like I got to work to put out physical energy to even keep up, you know in a special operations team or Or whatever previous profession that I've had, I've got to push this thing to the red to carry weight, to carry enough energy that I can accomplish a task.
And then when you're floating just above maybe an average IQ, you also have to run this thing in the red.
There's no, like, plus or minus 5%, dude.
Like, I have to get in and grind myself into moondust every day, and I've got to wring this sponge out of it.
If I don't, well, I'm going to be just average because I'm average.
But you found ways to use the way you think about things and figure out a path in life.
I think the difference between a guy like you and these people we're talking about is some people are just looking for a place to plug in.
And I think that's where the despair comes from.
I think the despair comes from not having a real purpose, like not having anything you really built, or anything that you really feel proud of, or anything that you really feel like.
Like your company, like Black Rifle, is creative.
As well as like really great coffee and cool people and it's all veteran owned.
It's like something to be proud of.
It's like a real thing.
Like you go there.
People are smiling.
It feels good.
You've created this amazing business.
Like that's...
than someone who's in some corporate structure and you know there's fucking all these weird rules and laws and and social things you have to do in the office in order to get ahead right and you have to you know you have to learn how to play golf yeah even if you don't like even if you don't want to play you gotta play golf you want to make deals you gotta play golf
You gotta hit the links on the weekend and, like, suck up to some other guy that, you know, pleaded, front-docker-wearing, like, back-slapping guy that you're like, ah, man, like...
I used to, like, have that conversation with guys at the agency because there are people that just...
They weren't into the mission.
They...
To your point, it's like, my purpose, my mission, and kind of the way that I've laid things out...
I've always had to work for something bigger than just myself.
Like, I can't just be really selfish.
It doesn't even compute my DNA. I have to look at something from a bigger purpose, look at the mission, the goals and objectives, be somewhat altruistic, and then just fucking dive in.
Then you can be selfless in some of what you're doing, and you can kind of behave as a cog in the wheel, which I think is actually...
A really important piece to development is how many people have ever worked as just a number?
And creating value with a team with a bigger purpose, I think...
That's what guys in the military and guys from my background, as they transition out, they go through what I would say is an existential crisis because their life has meaning.
Their essence is clearly defined.
They're striving to accomplish a big goal and objective that takes complete intellectual and physical capitulation.
And when they get out, they're like, now we have all this freedom, 360 degrees.
Well, you have to lay your own life out.
You have to redefine your purpose and then drive in as deep as you can.
I think they go through a significant existential crisis.
Fuck up in school, big fuck up in school, you know, always getting kicked out of classes for making fun of things.
Never had any work ethic at all.
The only time I worked is when I like if I needed money to buy a car or something like that I'd get a job and I'd do that but I was in hell thinking like imagine having to do this for life like although I had a bunch of my dad was an architect so I had a bunch of construction jobs growing up and Those fucking taught me that I don't want to do that.
Like, you and I had very, very similar backgrounds.
Like, my dad was, he was a logger, so he was up at 3, 4 o'clock in the morning every day.
Like, I saw this dude just work his entire life, and he was so committed and so disciplined.
Like, I never saw my dad inebriated.
I always saw him with a lunchbox.
He worked in the woods my entire life.
But I wasn't good at shit, which is also good.
I like to fuck around with my buddies and I like to do interesting things, I guess, for that, like try to jump motorcycles or whatever kind of random shit you'd come up with.
But as I got into the military, I was like, oh...
I'm good at this.
I'm really good at this for some reason.
I can run fast.
I can shoot well.
I can put together semi-coherent sentences.
Shit, I can be good at this.
This is something I can steal the phrase, accelerate your life or whatever.
I can accelerate my life.
It was fun, dude.
I could jump out of planes and learn different languages and spend most of my life out of the country.
But it was the same kind of evolution.
It's like I found this thing that I was really good at.
I loved it.
And I could just go chips in on it.
And it built layers of confidence and allowed me to just build the confidence to say, well, you know what?
If I was good at this, I could probably apply this to other things in life.
The way I built Black Rifle and why I did was like...
My mission statement when I transitioned out was to transition out of government service and live a happy and fulfilling life.
That was it.
It didn't have anything to do with, you know, money or goals or any of those things.
It was how do I define happiness?
How do I define fulfillment?
And then as we grew the company after about the first year, it became really evident that I could not only do something because I had this beautiful family that I loved, like my kids and my wife, and they're giving me so much power and endurance.
What if I built this really cool company where you could leave the family that you love and go to work in a company that you love and then it would become a flywheel.
It would just get faster and faster and faster in your life and create more happiness, more fulfillment.
What if I could scale that and give that to other people?
And so far, I mean, it's fucking worked.
I feel so happy and I feel so...
I'm so grateful.
I'm just so grateful for the things that I've been able to do over the last 10 years.
I tell this to people all the time.
Go to my refrigerator, pull milk out for my kids.
There's not a morning or a day that doesn't go by where I don't thank my customers.
They've given me this opportunity.
They've given me this opportunity to make crazy art and amazing coffee and build this culture of people that I love.
That bull that you killed, Paraphors, like that thing was so cool to watch because I watched the entire thing and I'll recite it from my position because I couldn't really see you.
Very well, because you'd moved off.
And I'm looking at him from across.
I was on one spur, you were on the other, and there's a little valley in between us.
But we were probably, I don't know, a thousand yards away.
And I'm watching you through my binos, trying to figure out what you're doing, because I could see the bull.
And then he got up, and I couldn't tell if you were winded or not.
But then all I heard, like, I saw him tear ass up the hill and then tumble down.
They're fucking smart as shit when they smell you.
Their senses are so good.
They're always tuned in to what the fuck is going on, and the only time you catch them slipping is when they're hungry, they're tired, or they want to fuck.
And we caught him when he was tired.
He decided to take a nap.
And I was like, okay, buddy, you just fucked up.
And I creeped in with my socks on.
I creeped in for half an hour.
I was moving so slow because his head was kind of turned sideways.
It is a wild parasite that changes the way you think.
And one of the things it does is, parasites are so fascinating.
Hijack another body and get it to do different things so they get inside a rat the rat gets infected with Toxoplasmosis and it rewires the rat sexual reward system the rat now becomes sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine It also completely removes any fear that the rat would have of cats So that the rat goes towards the cat and The cat kills the rat and eats the rat.
The only way the parasite can reproduce is inside the cat's gut.
So the cat, which is seemingly unaffected by this parasite, is just making it inside of its body.
And then when it gets out, it affects all the creatures around it.
It probably does affect cats too, but cats are so crazy anyway.
He was so nuts that when I had to fix him, he was like, I guess he's like, when I got him, a friend of mine had these cats under her apartment.
And her and her boyfriend captured these cats, these little kittens, and she goes, you want a kitten?
And I had a cat already.
I'm like, oh, give my cat a friend.
And so I get this fucking cat.
And the moment I see it, it's a tiny little thing.
It's a tiny thing.
It's hissing at you like it's a demon.
And I pick it up and it instantly starts purring.
Purring loud.
Like a foster kid who's finally been hugged.
You know what I mean?
Just purring.
And I was like, oh, this poor little dude.
So to get him accustomed to me, I had to stay in one of the bedrooms in this house that I was renting just with him.
So I brought some books in there, I brought his litter box, and I brought cat food, and I just hung out with this fucking cat for like days in this room.
And I had to do it that way because every time I would leave when I'd come back in, he would literally Climb the walls, just hissing and jumping and clawing at the drapes.
It was wild!
And then I would corner him, and I'd touch him, and he would start purring it.
And then I'd pick him up, and I'd start petting him, and then I'd just sit there, like, reading a book.
And I did it for days to get this cat comfortable with me.
And it worked.
I was the only one he was comfortable with, though.
Anybody else who came over the house, you could not pick him up.
You try to pick him up, he would fuck you up.
Like, he'd bite you, he'd claw at you.
But with me, he was cool.
It was weird, but he was only cool.
I had to slowly approach him.
His name was Jack Dempsey, because Jack Dempsey was a hobo.
So I thought it was a good name for him.
So I'd pet him, and then he'd immediately start purring.
Then I could pick him up.
And he was like, you're the only one.
I'm like, it's okay.
As long as it's just me.
You and me, buddy.
We're good.
So I had to get them fixed.
And he must have known that my intentions were different than before.
And so he wouldn't let me pick him up.
And I had to get him into a laundry hamper.
That was the only one I was going to be able to carry him.
So I cornered him in the bathroom, and he's hissing, he's jumping from the tub to the sink, and I'm like, dude, calm the fuck down.
It's just me.
Calm down.
So then I get a blanket, and I throw the blanket over him, and I wrestle him, and I stuff him into this fucking hamper.
And I bring him to this guy, Dr. Craig, who was an amazing guy.
He wound up dying later in a car accident.
It was one of the saddest fucking things.
He was the coolest vet ever.
He was the coolest.
And I brought him in and I go, hey man, I don't even know if you could do this.
But he's spraying in my house now.
He needs to get fixed.
But he's wild.
And he's like, how wild?
I go, look how I have him.
I got him in the hamper.
He's in the fucking hamper.
It's like bouncing around.
So they had to hold this cat down somehow or another and anesthetize him, put him out, and then they had to fix him.
But my dog is an amazing dog, but he's dumb as shit, too.
And so I just got him back from the hospital.
I'm going to send this to you, Jamie.
So you can see these pictures.
I just got him back.
So we came home the other night, and Marshall had eaten chicken food that was outside on gravel, but he didn't bother to differentiate between the gravel and the chicken food, so he ate about two pounds of gravel.
One of the things about bows, for people who don't know, unlike firearms, which are essentially, like, if you have a, like, a SIG P365, that's what that gun is.
Like, if you got that gun five years ago, like, they made a comp version of the 365, so they put compensation in the barrel, which makes it a little better, a little easier to shoot.
That's the...
They make, essentially, the same kind of gun with small improvements for years and years.
Like, if you buy a five-year-old gun, it's still a top-of-the-line gun, right?
Bows, somehow or another, through engineering and these fucking wizards, they make them better incrementally every year.
They really do.
Like, I noticed the difference between last year's bow and the year before.
Like, the moment I shot, I was like, wow, this is smoother.
And one day, just for...
The fuck of it.
I picked up the previous year's bow.
And I was noticing a difference.
I was like, oh, this doesn't feel as good.
The draw cycle's not as good.
The release doesn't feel as smooth.
But it was better than the year before.
And so last year's bow, I was like, how are they going to top this?
That's where I'm at because I had mine set way too tight and I would be...
Essentially, it'd be pulling and pressing on the release slow, looking at it kind of like a firearm trigger, saying slow pressure, build the pressure, straight back, no deviation.
And I'd go through this entire shot process from the rifle that I was incorporating into the bow.
But I'm taking too much time on the back end really building into my thumb release versus when you're ready...
Do you concentrate on breathing through your nose and trying to get more oxygen as you're going through the thought process or do you just open your mouth?
It has a strange effect because I don't get hardly any anxiety ever for anything really like unless I'm in a car wreck or something right where it's I'm not trying to do that but the elk hunting for some reason you you get in front of this animal and You get ramped up.
I'm always talking to myself like, what the fuck?
It's not like the swords on this thing's head are going to come after you.
Why are you doing this?
Why is your body doing what it's doing right now?
So I have to have this whole process of calm myself down, breathe through my nose.
And then once I get into the shot, it's fine.
But building into that shot for some reason, you start going, I need to wear a heart monitor and just watch to see how high that thing gets as you're moving in on a stock on the animal.
Because As you're building into that moment, there's that time before you can settle into that position where You're questioning, like, why am I so, so ramped up right now?
I don't exactly know why.
So then you have to dial everything back, pull everything back into perspective, focus on what you're doing.
And then once you have a task, and the task is there, then it seems to just settle down and get right back into the moment.
We were on this one ridge, and on this other ridge was this big bull that was running these cows.
He was the king of the mountain.
You could see by his body, this is an old bull.
And he's running these cows.
But he's way over.
You've got to go down and all the way up.
He's way too far for us to...
And we're out in the open.
There's no way you're going to plant a stalk on this bull in the position that he's at.
Especially with the way the thermals are all going up.
So we start moving down this canyon, and as we're moving down this canyon, the bull just randomly decides to run his cows down into the bottom, and they're realizing, oh shit, this can happen.
And so as that's happening, I stop myself from getting ramped up.
Completely stopped it.
I just recognized it was possibly coming because I see him making his way down this ridge, and he's going right to where we're going, and we know that there's a pond down there.
So if the pond is where he's going, he's going to go to get a drink, and he's going to come right down through this bottom, and that's where he's going to be at.
And I stayed calm the entire time.
I never let myself ramp up.
I never got ramped up.
I mean, I was probably above normal heart rate, but I was pretty fucking calm.
And then he came right out to 62 yards.
It was perfect.
He was right out there.
It was perfect.
Everything went, drew back, whacked them, watched them go 30 yards and pile up.
And it was watching the whole thing play.
And at the end of it, then I was like, that was pretty calm.
I stayed pretty calm in that one.
Like, for whatever reason, I never got, I stopped it as it was happening.
It sounds nuts, but the way he described it and the studies that he shows, there's enough evidence to point to that, at least for some people, that's a very beneficial way to eat and live.
But I think really what it is is This thing of eating only meat, I think for sure meat's very nutritious, but I think a big factor in that is that you're just cutting out all the crap.
And if you just eat only meat and organic vegetables, I don't think that's bad.
So it's more than 2000. When you think about all the different pieces of information that you've cataloged in your head with all these different interviews, I can't imagine the information that you've put out, too, just in terabytes as far as the volume is concerned.
Now you've got interviews with Elon, from Jordan, from all these different people.
That's so much information.
How much do you think that you've been able to just store in your head?
So, engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean and then powered by the sun.
That's fucking amazing.
This is where science is incredible.
of the device allows water circulate and swirling eddies in a manner similar to much larger.
Hmm, what's that word?
Thermo haline circulation of the ocean.
The circulation combined with the sun's heat drives water to evaporate leaving the salt behind the resulting water vapor could then be condensed and collected as pure drinkable water.
In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device rather than accumulating and clogging the system.
That's amazing.
And then also, couldn't you just recapture the salt and use it?
Produces about four to six liters of drinking water per hour and lasts several years before requiring replacement parts.
One of the things that Gary Brecco is saying that I found What was shocking was that some Himalayan salt, like you always think of Himalayan salt as super healthy.
He said, no, some of it has mercury in it because some of it, the way they mine it, if they get too close to certain areas that contain mercury, it can be contaminated with mercury.
And he was recommending Celtic salt over Himalayan salt.
Senor Lechuga, you know, Half Face Blades, they did a combo with Senor Lechuga, and they put out this, it's like, it's got dried tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, It's got, I forget what the hot is, but it's also got truffles.
It's fucking so good.
And it's hot.
It's got like real, Senor Lechuga is, so we did three.
We put together three different sauces that I love that are like a collection.
And one of them is the Half Face Blades version.
So Half Face Blades, by the way, awesome company.
They make fucking amazing knives.
And he's actually making me a set of chef knives and a couple other knives with the antler shed from the big bull that I killed with you two years ago.
You know, when all these comics came out with me, we moved out and we found out that we could perform in Austin.
And for comedians, like, performing is like a drug.
It's like, you can't perform?
Like, LA shut everything down for so long.
And then The Grapevine got out, like, from November 2020. We were doing shows here, totally irresponsibly, indoors.
And they were like, what?
They're doing comedy indoors in Austin?
This is crazy.
They packed shows and put them up on Instagram.
People were like, what the fuck?
This is nuts.
And so many comics started moving here.
And then I realized what we missed about L.A. We missed about the Comedy Store was that was home base.
In that you need, like, comedians need a community.
You need, like, a home club.
You need where a bunch of comics hang out.
You fuel each other.
Everybody inspires each other.
You know, when you're seeing these guys like Brian Simpson going up and murdering, he's doing all this new material, and Shane Gillis is going up and murdering, and Tony Hinchcliffe is going up and murdering, there's, like, a feeling in the building.
Like, there's an excitement to the building.
And that's what I wanted to create here.
I wanted to create a real home for For these comics.
And I also wanted to create a real development platform.
I think that's a key part of comedy clubs that's missing from these places that just want to make money.
Because you could take your Sunday and Monday and just bring in headliners and pack the house and make a lot of money.
Or you can do open mic nights and develop talent and have these people have a real opportunity to get up at the best comedy club on earth for their very first time ever and go up and do a couple of minutes of jokes and see if you can get a laugh and you never know.
You might be good.
You might have it in you.
You might be that fuck up in school that they always told you you're going to be a loser, but you have a funny way of saying things and you go up and maybe you have some insight that other people, maybe they would Be too scared to say or maybe they wouldn't notice it or maybe you'd point something out you never fucking know and the only way You get to develop talent is if you have some sort of a place for people to perform that aren't any good that are just starting out So we set aside two nights for that Every Sunday and every Monday we have open mic night and we also have people that
work there are aspiring comedians all the door people they all had to they all had to audition with their act So the town coordinator, Adam, had to go and watch them perform.
And there was this giant audition for door people.
For people to get jobs at the club.
So there's this feeling in the club like everybody's coming up.
Everybody's coming up together.
When everybody's doing good, Ahsan, who's just a fucking amazing dude and hilarious comedian who's at the club all the time, he said, whenever something happens with the door people or anybody else in the club, everybody always says, we up.
So that environment, that's what I wanted to create.
That was the goal.
But it's way better than I thought it could be.
It's like, I had an idea.
I was like, let's just do it the best we can.
And turns out, you got some Spotify money.
You can throw in a problem.
You can make it really good and have it set up where the comedians get paid really well and everybody gets taken care of and you feel really good about it and it's a fun place to work and it's a good environment for everybody.
I mean, it was me because I financed it and it was my idea, but it was also, we all need a spot, and if one of us can do it and put it together, I'm a good person to do that, because that's what I like to do.
I like to help people.
I like to blow people up.
I really do.
I love to have people on that I think are talented and let the world know about them.
When I talk about things, whether it's on my Instagram or on the podcast, 99% of the time, I have no affiliation with those things.
I just think these are good things.
People should see these good things.
I don't think, oh, I should get a piece of that.
I just think these are good things.
These good things should make more money.
This business should be bigger.
This comedian should be more popular.
This musician should be known.
People should read this book.
These are good things.
Just put good things out as much as you can.
So that was my idea with this comedy club.
Just...
Get great comics, pay them well, and have a place where people can go where they know that they're gonna be able to work on their act, everyone's phone's locked up, so that people aren't distracted and they're not filming things, and just having a good fucking time.
Enjoying this.
Let's just work together and fucking all get better together and have a real home base.
And I had the ability to do it, so I said, it's kind of my obligation to do it.
The universe put me in this place where All of a sudden, I moved out of LA. All of a sudden, I'm in Texas, and all these other comedians come out here with me.
I'm like, who's going to do it if I'm not doing it?
I have to do it.
So we just went and did it.
And with a fucking grab of...
Ron White grabbed me by my shoulders when he got off stage.
The first time he got on stage, he hadn't done stand-up in like over a year, I think it was, or close to it.
And he grabs me by my shoulders.
He goes, whatever the fuck we got to do.
unidentified
He goes, you're going to open up that club, and we're going to do this.
It's like how crazy cult leaders are and what type of personality that person is and what happens to people.
I love those mockumentaries that a few people have done around cult leaders, and I think there's a series on Netflix that went into like a three-part episode.
Well, it's just like you were talking about before, while 15% of the people have an IQ lower than 85, and some people just want to be led.
There's a bunch of people, a bunch, who are really lost and never develop the tools to be, Personally responsible for themselves.
They never developed the ability to be autonomous.
They never developed the ability to have their own thoughts and the objective analysis of all the information and coming up with a rational conclusion.
They don't have people around them that could bounce these ideas off, that they respect, that they can go, what about this?
And that person goes, yeah, but you have to also consider this.
And you're like, yeah, you do, right?
Hmm, okay, so what is really going on?
Like they don't have that in their life and so some fucking dude comes along and he's wearing Speedos and he does yoga and he tells you he can give you the knowing and you can be in touch with God and you just fucking you buy into it and it's it feels better than being by yourself and you're hanging out with all these people and everyone's cooking together and you're doing yoga together Seems good.
Everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than them, and especially if it's a cool community where everybody's nice to each other, and you're all connected to God, and you're all part of this movement of spreading love and hope throughout the world.
To be, like, the best version of me that I can be.
And if that also...
If part of that is talking about the things that I've learned, then I do that.
But there's no part of me that says, like, I need to be a leader.
There's no...
I don't...
I think you could really fuck your head up if you start believing that.
And I think that's where the cult starts.
That's where the cult starts.
The guy goes, I'm a leader.
I need to teach these people.
They need to follow my way.
It's like...
Probably not.
Maybe you need a leader, too.
Maybe everybody needs to work together.
Maybe that's a better option.
I think the whole leader thing is there might be people that you admire or you see them as someone who is a great example of how to live life, like whether it's Jocko or many of these people that put that out there.
Jocko is one of the best examples of it.
He's written books about extreme ownership.
There's valuable, valuable lessons in that kind of stuff.
But I think even with guys like him, it comes natural.
He is just telling you what he learned.
This is real.
This is what you need to do.
If you want to get ahead, you've got to fucking take accountability for your own life.
You've got to embrace your fuck-ups, embrace your failures, figure out what you did wrong, regroup, get back after it.
Those are super valuable lessons.
And you can call him a leader because of those lessons, but really what he's leading is an example of an excellent life.
And that is the best thing that we do for each other.
We lead by example.
So you can see a guy who, like, I was hanging out with this friend of mine who's this very wealthy guy who owns all these businesses, and one of the things that I was super inspired by is how nice he is to everyone.
To everyone.
Everyone he meets.
He's super friendly and engaging, but genuine.
I'm with him all the time, so I know if he's turning it on or turning it off.
It's never off.
He doesn't have any time for negativity.
He doesn't use email, he doesn't fuck with social media, and he's a multi-billionaire.
He's just running his life with a smile on his face and genuinely engaging with people.
That guy's a leader by example.
That's a beautiful way to live your life.
If you can do that, you can be very successful but never turn into a tyrant.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
Because most people, they take the easy way and they turn into a tyrant.
Everybody around them is walking on eggshells.
They yell at people.
You always hear about that with talk show hosts.
You always hear about that with people that are leading a sitcom.
They just yell at everybody, shut the fuck up and listen to me.
I'm the star of this show.
You know, that kind of shit.
You always used to hear about that, especially before the internet.
Yeah, and I mean, some of the best leadership examples that I've had in my life were guys that were bad, toxic leaders.
Because you're like, God, I do not want to be even close to that guy.
And, you know, I've had just the, I guess, the fortunate opportunity to serve under some really incredible people and with amazing people that just inspire you through action.
And, like, one of those guys I've had a really close relationship over the last few years is Johnny Morris, the founder of Bass Pro.
And one of the guys, he brought out one of the guys that plays in his bar there in Branson, Missouri.
And he shot an elk.
We were tracking it.
Johnny's out there tracking it.
And he's like, hey guys, you guys want some water?
And he runs down and grabs everybody some water because we're putting in some miles.
He's driving the truck with us and stuff.
I mean, the guy's...
I don't know how many stores that he's opened.
I don't know exactly what his individual wealth is, but he's humble, he's incredibly kind, and he's always there to offer an opportunity for somebody.
We went out to one of his places in Arizona.
He just sat with me for A full day, just talking about brand.
He's sitting on the couch in his slippers.
We're going through brand and brand moments and how important those can be and how important it is for your customer.
The customer came up.
A thousand times.
Like, how important this is.
And it's like those little pieces that I can pull away from incredible leaders, people that inspire me, or whatever it is.
It's not only the good people that you can find where they're authentically engaging with you, but it's also the flip side of that where you're like, this guy is incredibly successful, and there's another person that's very toxic, and they're not engaging people in an authentic way.
It's like when people have alcoholic parents, you know, they're in and out of jail, always getting arrested, and those people wind up being super disciplined.
Yeah, I think that's where, especially if you're in a combat sport, definitely from my subculture of the people that I grew up with in the military, we're always concerned about brain injury, TBI. I think one of the most positive benefits that Right.
Right.
Right.
I know that it's one of those things that I've tried very hard to just eliminate out of my life because of that.
I've lost too many friends to suicide specifically.
One in particular that was my best friend just about a year ago.
And I guarantee it was because of the mix of chemicals with the TBI. Guaranteed.
It's very, very similar in the veteran community because guys will come out, they're redefining themselves, trying to find purpose in their lives.
They get depressed because they're dislocated from their tribe, the people they've been emotionally, physically, psychologically more connected to than sometimes their family.
And then they are dealing with overpressure and or they've been blown up guaranteed because even on internal breaches and explosives on targets, you're going to be exposed to the overpressure from the explosives.
You're going to have some type of impact on your brain.
Like I would say guaranteed if you came out of the special operations community.
And then they switch, and I've seen it.
There's too many examples for me to list, but I've seen it directly impact in a negative way because they switch to alcohol, and then they find themselves in the bottom of a bottle, and it doesn't get better.
It doesn't improve their life in any way, shape, or form.
There's an interim band-aid for it.
It might make you feel better for a short amount of time, but after a while, it puts you into a spiral.
And I've seen it happen too many times to count.
And it affects you.
I mean, it directly affects me every day, whether it's the war itself or the post-effects of war itself.
I've talked about this a few times where it's like, Iraq is with me every day of my life.
Whether I like it or don't like it, I've just dealt with it.
And now I'm just trying to do the best that I can to make sure that, one, the machine is 100% capacity, and two, that I can be an example for other guys to say, you know what, I don't have to.
I don't have to be in a social circumstance and have a drink.
I can reach out to a friend if, you know, even if you just reach out to people now and again and just say, hey, what's up?
And I think that's one of the reasons why fighters and military guys...
Find each other a lot and there's a huge percentage of veterans that get into jiu-jitsu and some of the things after after service They're looking for a community.
They're looking for a tribe.
They're looking for something physical And and I see a lot of parallels between that mmm makes sense.
Yeah I would think military guys like jiu-jitsu and martial arts would be an automatic makes sense and complete makes sense to help you transition and And also just a great thing to keep your head in check, keep your mind right.
Martial arts, particularly jujitsu, is a really good one because there's no head impacts.
And, you know, you can keep your mind right.
The problem with sparring, like, if you get into striking sports...
You're getting damage, believe it or not.
Even if you're light sparring, you're getting popped.
You're getting jabbed.
Every now and then someone hits you with something a little stiff.
You see stars.
It happens.
It always happens.
I can't remember a time.
You have to have really good training partners when it comes to striking where you really trust them that they're not going to hit you hard.
And even then, sometimes accidentally they hit you hard.
Like, you zig when you should have zagged, you run into something, it just happens.
But with jiu-jitsu, you cut that down, way down.
Like, the amount of head injuries and impacts and concussions in jiu-jitsu is tiny in comparison.
Every now and then you accidentally collide heads.
Or you accidentally catch a knee to the head and you get knocked silly.
That does happen.
But for the most part, it's like the safest way to engage in combat sports.
And also, it's one of the rare ones...
Well, you could do it with a buddy, and you could both go full blast.
And you don't have to worry about killing each other.
Because if you're going full blast in gym kickboxing, I mean, you're going to fucking break your brain 100%.
And I know a lot of guys have done it, and I used to do it.
We used to go to war.
We didn't spar.
We beat the fuck out of each other.
We hit each other full blast all the time.
And it was all just about having good defense and being able to move around away from shots.
But you know that real shots were coming your way, and you got dinged up a lot.
And if you're doing that, like, forever, all throughout your years, like, Jerry Quarry is a good example.
Jerry Quarry was a boxer who fought Muhammad Ali on his return when he took those three years off.
And Jerry Quarry was, like, notoriously tough.
Just tough.
Just would eat fucking punches.
Well, his brother was like him, too.
And I think his brother only had, like, one professional fight.
They were just always sparring in the gym.
His brother wound up with brain damage just as bad as Jerry.
Horrific brain damage.
Just from the gym.
The gym fucking counts, kids.
If you're listening out there and you're sparring and you're fucking tuning up on your friends and you guys are beating the shit out of each other, That counts for the rest of your life whether your coach is telling you that or not those sparring sessions if you're going in there and you're getting dropped and you're getting rocked and you're rocking people and dropping people you guys are giving each other brain damage a hundred percent and I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine who Was a professional fighter who is now dealing with one of his friends
who's suicidal and Who used to be a professional fighter and they were talking about the sparring sessions that they had.
They were talking about, jeez, maybe we shouldn't have been beating the fuck out of each other all those years.
Because they would go to war.
And in the early days of MMA in particular, now they're a little bit more sophisticated about it and they're much more aware of preserving yourself.
Like there's certain guys like Max Holloway doesn't even spar.
He just fights.
He says, I know how to fight.
I don't want to get beat up in the gym and go into a fight compromised.
He goes, I want to go into a fight 100%.
So I don't even spar.
He just does drills.
And, you know, he's one of the best alive.
But then there's guys like Sean Strickland that spar constantly.
It seems like the guy was just obliterated drunk and he thought the guy was trying to rob him, but I think the guy was just shit-faced and he was looking for his keys or something.
What was he doing?
Says he was arrested.
Oh, he hit a curb.
Okay, so he was driving drunk.
He stomped out a girl.
Oh my God.
Oh, a security guard saw him stomp out a girl.
He jumped into his car and drove off.
Security followed him.
He hit a curb, completely shredded his tire, drove on the rim for a while, then jumped out and tried to hide at Sean Strickland's house.
So it's like he's behaving like a wild, young contender, but he's the number one guy on Earth.
I mean, listen, it's hard to say.
Look, people can say what they want about that Adesanya fight.
Oh, Izzy wasn't himself.
Dude, he wasn't himself because he got clipped with a bomb of a right hand by Strickland in that first round.
Strickland connected with a picture-perfect right hand, rocked Izzy, and then hit him with, how many shots did he hit him with afterwards?
Eight, ten clean shots to the head, left hooks, in the clinch?
I mean, of course he wasn't himself after that.
You get hit like that in a fight, you're fucksville for the rest of those...
I mean, he probably doesn't remember those rounds.
He fought five rounds compromised.
Who knows how dinged up he got?
Only he knows.
Only Izzy knows how bad he got hurt in that first round.
But when you get rocked that way and your legs give out and you go down like Izzy did, that's a concussion, kids.
You got rocked.
That's a real getting rocked.
That guy did that.
So you could talk all the shit you want, you know, because Strickland seems like he's got this awkward style and people think he's not as good as he is, but you watch him tune dudes up, you're like, that guy's a motherfucker, man.
You know, he spars more than anybody in the UFC, and they put a mouthpiece that measures how many times you get hit.
He gets hit less than anyone.
Seriously?
He's got phenomenal defense, man.
Holy shit.
Phenomenal defense.
His distance management is off the charts.
And it's because he's constantly sparring.
So, like, that's what he does better than anybody.
It's not like they're making statements like these are affidavits.
These are my real beliefs on things.
No.
They're saying things in a way that's either ironic or sarcastic or it's a parody or whatever, but it's very funny.
And it's very funny and uses outrageous language and uses what people would think is problematic stereotypes and all kinds of shit like that.
And there was a lot of liberal comedians that would walk that line and be really good at it.
You know, they would say something racist from the perspective of a racist person and make fun of that person, but also make fun of the way that person's talking about things and the way that person's talking about things are also funny.
And you could do that.
Now you can't do that anymore.
Because now those people are so...
The left has moved so far.
It's so far into this weird world of Narnia, where gender transition surgeries are cool.
Like, yeah, you should be supporting trans kids.
Like, what are you saying?
The fuck are you saying?
Support Ukraine.
Like, are you sure?
Did you go over there?
What are you saying?
What are you saying?
Free Palestine.
Free Palestine from what?
Okay, what do you know about it?
Tell me what you know.
Are you just jumping on every fucking bandwagon that the left wants you to jump on, or have you really looked into this shit?
How much do you know about Israel?
How much do you know about Hamas?
How much do you know about the history of the region?
Very little, but you got a fucking flag on your Instagram bio because that's the fashionable thing to do.
It's moved so far in that direction.
What are your pronouns?
Put them in your bio.
Okay.
You don't even have your pronouns in your bio.
This kind of nonsense and compliance has led them into this weird world where you can't do proper humor anymore.
Yeah, now they're like kind of, they woke themselves out of jobs.
They woke themselves out of one of the most cherished aspects of movie-going times, which is going to see a great offensive movie, like the Farrelly Brothers, like something about Mary.
You're labeled as something that you're not, obviously, just because you want to have a different opinion.
There's no ability for people to have a constructive conversation, be objective, bring in facts.
They've got to make it personal.
They've got to go really deep into these obscure philosophical conversations that don't make sense.
I think part of it is, like, I truly do believe that there's part of this that's I think that we're in the middle of this information operation, and I think people wittingly and unwittingly are participating in this crazy, chaotic narrative.
And they're saying, but this is what we need to do.
Actually, what you're doing is you're just directly relaying propaganda.
That's what you're doing.
And you're trying to cause cultural divides, and they're trying to divide us, they're trying to make us argue, because they're the ones that directly reap the benefits of all this chaos.
Yeah, it's laid out by Yuri Bezmenov in the 1980s.
And people who haven't seen that, go watch this video.
It's on YouTube.
Former KGB defector, Yuri Bezmanov.
It outlines how Russia has invaded our education system and what they're doing to try to destroy our culture.
And whether or not you believe in that shit or not, just listen to what he's saying and see what's happened.
He is outlining exactly how it would take place.
He's off by about 10 years.
But he outlined it in terms of how many generations it would take for a complete moral decay and a complete Complete, like, an erosion of our faith in the democratic process.
And all of it's laid out.
All of it's laid out exactly what you see.
And that's the enemy of comedy.
You're gonna fucking fall in on that.
Like, you can't be funny.
And you can't be funny and be involved in this fucking chaotic war.
I was watching a jujitsu coach.
Online, they were talking about whether or not he supports trans women competing in women's division.
And he was saying, of course I do, because I'm not a Nazi.
That's what's so offensive about calling someone who doesn't want a biological male with a mental disorder to compete against women.
In a jujitsu match, that's why it's so offensive to call anybody who objects to that a Nazi, because there are Nazis.
Like, no, I think biological males have a massive advantage, and I'm not going to live in your Narnia world and pretend they don't, because it's fucking stupid and it's dangerous.
And that's the reality of the world we're living in right now.
There's a bunch of people that, whether willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, they've given into this what percentage of it is put out by our enemies, what percentage of it is really effective psychological warfare through manipulation of social media algorithms and through use of bots and troll farms.
If you don't believe that it happens, you're living in a fictional reality because they're either participating in it or they're taking advantage of it.
That's their job, by the way, because there are strategic threats, whether that's militarily or economically.
This is their goal.
And when you're controlled by one party in China, it's a communist party.
They've got a long term look and how they can directly affect and ultimately degrade what we believe is Americans because they benefit from that.
They want the position that we have.
So if people don't believe that, you're just living in a false reality, period.
And if you are one of those people, maybe you don't have an 85 IQ, maybe it's 89, maybe it's 90, maybe you're just gullible.
You can get sucked into thinking this is the only way to think, and if you see it magnified in your social media algorithm because of China, because of Russia, and because of these troll farms which we absolutely know exist, it shifts the narrative.
It shifts the way people discuss and think about things.
It shifts what's acceptable.
When people start going against the grain, they get attacked by all these trolls.
It fucking puts the brakes on a lot of discussions.
And that's the only way that we're going to move the ball forward, and I hate using sports analogies, but that's the only way we're going to be able to move things forward is if we can get out of what I would say is the idiot circus participating in these nonsense subjects versus, hey, guys, we have to maintain our sovereignty.
We have to maintain what we would call our principles internationally.
Why?
Why is that important?
Why should we be thinking about these things?
And I think these are real questions that we can be talking about.
A good one is, why is our national debt where it is today?
Why do we have $33 trillion in debt?
What is the debt service going to happen for our country, the individual taxpayers?
How does that look like?
What does that look like 10 years from now?
Versus whether or not we're arguing who's male or female or how many pronouns you have, I think we should be talking about those things.
Whether you realize it or not, whether you're overconfident, Maybe your own ability to navigate waters, and you're like, it's not affecting me.
It's affecting culture.
And if it's affecting culture, it's gonna have an impact on you.
It's gonna come towards you.
You're gonna have to push back against something that you wouldn't have to push back against.
Some real nonsense shit.
You know, and if you go against it, you're a Nazi.
Like, this whole men using the women's bathroom.
Like, listen, I'm not an anti-trans person, but if you don't believe that there are certain male predators that are sex offenders that wouldn't take advantage of the ability to wear a dress and then all of a sudden be able to go into any woman's room they want, well, they definitely do.
And you don't have a way of discerning who's a legitimate trans person that has gender dysphoria that really just wants to be accepted as a woman and who's a sick fuck who just wants to go watch women's shit because those guys are real too.
And if you don't agree with that, if you don't say that those people are real, now all of a sudden you've created a whole category of sexual predators that prey on women that have a Willy Wonka golden ticket.
Now they can just go into women's spaces.
They can go into women's locker rooms.
They can go into women's anything.
All they have to do is say they identify as a woman.
Give them a hall pass and then you can monopolize the conversation and the country around quite literally small, meaningless things versus saying, you know, these are big strategic threats to our way of life.
And there are people outside of this country every day that are looking to undermine our entire premise of what we've built over the course of the last several hundred years.
I mean, I don't even necessarily say that I believe in this and it's not a feeling.
It is what it is in the context of spending most of my life overseas and working against these intelligence agencies.
You know what they're capable of and you know what they're doing.
They love this.
They love this chaotic, weird conversation that we're trapped in, arguing about all of these different things, because at that point, we're taking our eye off the ball.
They love the fact that we are trapped in this endless cycle of wars of occupation where we spent trillions of dollars.
They love that.
You know why?
Because it degrades our long-term military viability in some of these regions.
And then China can snap up ports and economic influence, and they can start building their power.
And we, as a country, if we don't focus on those things, if we don't really try to focus on what is culturally important to us, what are we really going to protect?
Freedom of speech.
Good for instance in this is, we were talking about it in California, like comedy is one of the last places where you should be able to say what it is that you want to say.
And I'm saying everywhere we should be able to do this, and we should absolutely protect it.
But if comedy is under attack from people wanting to cancel comedy because of jokes, that's a problem as a country, as a society.
I think, here's my honest, you know, everybody starts a conversation by saying, here's my honest opinion.
But my assessment in this is I think that we have forfeited portions of foreign service to the left in the context of Woke-ism, politically correct, like the act of maintaining your sovereignty in the context of military and then economically is not politically correct.
You can't broker in...
In that rhetoric and then implement a strategic long-term goals and objectives that are going to meet and exceed what we have to do to maintain America and ultimately America's power overseas if you believe in it.
You just can't because it's not politically correct.
If you believe that all nations are created equal and all political ideologies are equal, that's just wrong.
It's not.
Communism is a dogshit ideology.
I think that it should have been flushed down the international toilet a long time ago.
It's so dangerous to start dabbling in these things because it's a failed ideology.
You have to flush it down the toilet.
It has to go away forever.
And then you have to evolve past that at a certain point.
But when you've co-opted our academic institutions and you've indoctrinated generations of the academic elite, and then they've worked their way into foreign service and they've worked their way into the intelligence apparatus.
Now they're going out and they're not willing to implement at the same degree that they might have been able to in the 1960s and 70s in the context of zero-sum game.
We are here to win.
That's what we do.
And you got to play by the rules of nature.
Which is things will die.
And when I say that, ideologies have to die.
Like they do.
When they're failed and they're bad for freedom, which I tend to believe in radical freedom, when they're bad for individual liberty, when they're bad for freedom, they gotta fucking die.
They want to stop at problem number seven and go, well, it's really important that we share wealth and economic...
You know, disparity is wrong, and we should all have money from the state and equal money, and we should all share, and billionaires shouldn't exist.
Okay, okay.
How do you make that happen?
How do you take the money from the billionaires?
Who do you give it to?
Who gets to decide who gets what?
Do we vote on where the money goes?
What about those people that are under 85 IQ? Are they voting on this too?
They're going to vote for free Twinkies for everybody.
Free Twinkies and Mountain Dew.
I mean, if you just had, should all the billionaires spend their money on free Twinkies and Mountain Dew, and you just left it to people who weren't billionaires to vote for, then yeah, fuck those people.
Who's gonna vote it in?
Should we take 90% of the money from people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet?
They don't want, like if you're starting off, you're playing a game, like the game's capitalism.
If you're starting off and you're 20 years old, 21 years old, and you don't make any money, and you're out there trying to find your purpose in life, and then you're seeing someone who's been playing this game for 50 years, and he's flying around in a fucking private jet and getting driven around at a Rolls Royce, you're like, fuck that guy.
Fuck him.
Fuck him.
He's too far ahead of the game.
But you're playing that game too.
If you're working and you're getting paid for your work, you're playing a game.
You might be playing a very low level of the game, but you're playing the game called capitalism.
And the more work you do, the more money you get.
The more effort you put in to figure out how to get more money, the more money you'll get if you're successful.
And if you're not successful, you'll at least get lessons on how to do it wrong.
And hopefully, you're going to figure that out because many people have, including that guy in the fucking Bentley.
Including that guy in the private jet.
He's just 70 years old.
He's been playing this fucking game for 45 goddamn years hard.
You know, he knows what he's doing.
And if you don't like that game, don't play it.
But for you to say that he shouldn't have that money, okay, what are you gonna do?
You gonna take it from him?
Who's gonna take it from him?
The government?
Armed people?
What are you doing?
Because that's the only way he's gonna give it up.
That's the only way you get to enforce people redistributing wealth evenly across everybody, including people that have done nothing.
And now you're going to get a lot of angry people and you're going to get a lot of resentment.
You know what pops out of something like that, those ideas?
Far-right ideologies, super far-right.
That's the rebound to this radical leftism.
You know, Steve Bannon was talking about that.
He was talking about Trump, like the people that are afraid of Trump.
He's a moderate.
He's a moderate in this movement.
And believe me, if you guys fuck with him more, someone else is going to come along that's going to resonate with these people that realize they're getting fucked.
And it's going to be just like what's happening in Argentina.
Where this guy gets elected and he's like, fuck everything.
Everything's gotta go.
Everything's gotta go.
And it's wild because people are very excited about that.
There's a groundswell of people that are really fucking fed up with this bullshit being implemented in all sorts of countries all over the world.
They're passing these wild hate speech laws in the UK, we were talking about yesterday, where you can get arrested if you have something on your phone that could be used to incite violence.
So if someone sends you a meme, it's a hilarious meme, that someone decides that meme could incite violence because it's offensive, they could arrest you.
This is wild, wild shit.
And this is the kind of thought process that leads us down a very bad path.
And also, you're going to get the haves and the have-nots like you had in Cuba.
You get the haves and the have-nots like you have in China.
China has kind of a hybrid system, right?
They allow some form of capitalism until you step out of line.
And they send you to the bodies exhibit.
It's wild how many young people are not getting this information.
I think many young people are getting it now.
They understand it now because of podcasts.
But still, they're outnumbered by the people that are just the zombies that are buying into this shit wholesale.
And they're out there.
And they're out there with these very strong opinions that are not very well researched at all, a lack of understanding of human nature, and also a lack of understanding of all the forces that have led them to this particular ideology in the first place.
We are, as a culture, being manipulated.
We're being manipulated.
And it's moving us further and further away from just sanity, just pure sanity.
They're trying to poison the roots of Western logic by completely rewriting what we would call the history of the world and the progression around physics and math.
And you name the thing that's under assault.
It's under assault today.
And I think, who benefits from that?
You just have to look around and say, who benefits from that?
Oh, our foes.
That's who benefits from this.
Not much has changed.
If you think...
2,500 years ago, we'll say Socrates was put to death for corrupting the youth, I think is what it was.
And I'm trying to recall it.
But he was out there on the street arguing and debating with people, talking about ideas.
And the Athenians were like, we got to get rid of this guy.
He's like, he's pressure testing what we're doing.
Like, we got to put this dude down.
And I think, well, that was 2,500 years ago.
So anytime the state deems information as a threat, we should probably be looking at that information and then really trying to have an open discussion about it.
That's the beauty of America, like freedom of speech.
But it's also why they're trying to crack down on the Internet.
The Internet has been the biggest force in not just relaying this propaganda, but also fighting against propaganda and letting people realize, like, hey, like these people that are supposed to be your leaders, they're compromised.
And they're fucking you.
And there's some things that they're doing now that they're just doing.
And, like, what is the economic consequence of the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent?
We spent more time trying to connect this fiction around Russian collusion for two years than we did investigating why there was a massive information operation internally to the United States that said there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Not one person went to jail.
Not one person stepped in front of Congress and had depositions around why did you say that there was weapons of mass destruction when there wasn't.
Not one person.
But we spent how many trillions of dollars on this war?
Well, I mean, these are hundreds of thousands of people.
I mean, my peer group alone is just thousands of people that are physically and mentally altered forever that spent, you could say, the best years of our life in a war under false pretenses.
And now, the long-term effects are coming back, and also the government doesn't want to pay for that bill as well.
Yeah, they were trying to deny Gulf War Syndrome, remember that?
When they were using depleted uranium rounds?
So these people were all getting radiation poisoning, and their children were born deformed, and they were having these massive problems, and they were trying to deny it, because they didn't want to pay for it.
They do when it directly benefits what I would say is the military-industrial complex and these wars of occupation.
I don't want to make it sound like I'm anti.
I think there's a difference between a war of necessity that maintains national sovereignty and a long-term war of choice for occupation.
A war of choice in occupation is an exercise in transference of wealth from the taxpayer into the military-industrial complex.
And that's, like, first-hand experience spending 2003 to 2009 in Iraq.
I mean, that's a lot of time.
Four and a half years on the ground and then another three years in Afghanistan.
Just seeing the expense from blood and treasure alone over the course of 10 years of deployments and understanding what the difference is between precision, tracking, and then killing terrorists and what we needed to do in order to stabilize a region and then long-term, massive wars of occupation.
We live in a bubble here, a very protected artificial reality.
When you get out into the most dangerous places in the world, that's where you see nature.
That's where you see the real rules of life, which is the only rules are those of physics.
Bullets travel at X feet per second.
You have a collective team trying to organize in a very chaotic environment, trying to survive.
But really, you strip every piece of what you know around rules, around what's right and wrong, Your morality is put into question.
Your mortality is at stake all the time.
And you see the real world.
It's eye-opening to the point of you...
You understand how great we have it in the United States and how beautiful this country is.
And you also understand how fragile life is and how brutal the world can be and how brutal humanity can be towards each other.
You know it can be gone like that.
I think being exposed to it for that long and then coming home, the things that I've been able to pull away from that are, this place is amazing.
It's beautiful.
It's something that we should foster and encourage and continue to pass down through generations because we're so fucking fortunate to have hit the birth lottery being born here.
Yeah.
I roll out of bed every day, man.
I'm like, this is fucking awesome.
I'm so happy to be alive.
I'm so happy to have all my fingers and toes.
And I'm so happy for the experiences of war because it's shown me what it's like to...
Understand my mortality, sometimes second to second, but for sure day to day for years on end and understand that we're only here for a short amount of time and we got to make it fucking count.
And we also have to be very grateful and gracious to what we have here for our freedoms and our country and our countrymen.
And the experience of war itself, that chaotic environment that's shown me Traffic rules don't apply over there, right?
It's like traffic lights and police officers and, you know, the things that we take for granted every day, going to work, you know, making our coffee, doing all the things that we do.
You strip all that away into just the law of nature.
It is wild.
It is forever life-changing, but you also understand this is what we're living in.
This is the actual consequence of what we're living in.
We're very protected in the way that we live life right now.