Evan Hafer, a former Global War on Terror operative, exposes Afghanistan’s normalized sexual exploitation of boys (bacha bazi), combat’s psychological toll—including PTSD and suppressed emotions—and the hypocrisy of U.S. leaders like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who sent troops under false pretenses while veterans face untreated trauma. Psychedelics like Ibogaine and psilocybin, dismissed by mainstream medicine, offer veterans real healing, contrasting with failed VA pharmaceuticals, while Rogan critiques government secrecy, citing unaccounted Pentagon billions and CIA’s covert history, including JFK’s Bay of Pigs backlash. Their debate on hunting’s ethics and discipline—from Hafer’s moose preference to Rogan’s axis deer near-miss—underscores a broader frustration with modern detachment from effort and survival instincts, questioning whether society’s comfort has eroded its connection to primal truths. [Automatically generated summary]
You assume everybody, every man is basically like an American male because that's at 26 or 27 years old.
You know that there are cultural differences for sure, but I'm telling you, I was in Kuwait for the first time early on, and I The Kuwaitis like to hold hands.
You're walking around holding another man's hand, and you've never really done it, probably since you were a kid, maybe holding your dad's hand when you're like three or four years old.
And in Special Forces, they tell you, you know, you have to work with the cultural differences.
And they're just talking in general.
They're not specific because they don't know where you're going.
And you're going to have to work by, with, and through the host indigenous force.
So you have to accept some of the things, the cultural differences, and just go with the flow.
So as a new Green Beret, you know, as, you know, SF guys, you're just walking around holding another man's hand.
You're so freaked out about it.
You're like, oh man, oh man.
Yeah.
What the fuck does this mean?
Like, you know, you're questioning all your reality, like, oh my god, you know, and then after a few years, you know, time and repetition and war or whatever, somebody goes to hold your hand, you're like, get the fuck away from me.
Oh, yeah, there's a lot of things you give up, right?
You're...
You're taught in SF, drink the tea, eat the food, you know, do everything that they do.
Yeah, just completely assimilate.
And honestly, like, a lot of that is really good because it does teach you to be a lot more open as far as listening to what they're going through from their tribal plights.
Yeah.
What are they going through from a combat experience?
What do they need?
And you want to build rapport.
That's what you want to do.
But rep after rep in a war zone, you kind of get fatigued with that.
And then you're like, yeah, let's just get to the dirt here, man.
I was living and working with the Afghans, and I went from Iraq, and I did the invasion with special forces from the south, and I did multiple rotations in Iraq, both with SF and then with the agency when I went over there.
And then when we shut down Iraq in 2009, I turned around and basically went to Afghanistan in 2009. So I went from Iraq to Afghanistan, and I went from Afghanistan, kind of finished up my CIA combat, I guess, experience, and then went back to the States to do a training thing.
But by the time I got to Afghanistan, I had lots of time in Iraq.
I had like four years on the ground.
Afghanistan was way different, but I was living and working with the Afghanis.
I was eating with them.
And your job is to not only train, assist, and advise, build rapport, but you're trying to figure it out.
So you need to be on the ground with them, living, eating, breathing, sleeping, like the whole thing.
And What we call the chow hall facilities aren't the cleanliest.
You're trying.
You're working with them.
You institute different things.
Soap and water is a good thing.
And it doesn't really matter.
You're still going to get sick based on the water.
Where is it coming from?
What type of well source?
There's lots of different variables, obviously.
But, dude, I didn't have a solid shit for two years.
And I just kind of got normalized to the point where, you know, you're...
It's such a gross thing to think about.
Man, you could not trust a fart, ever.
I got this great story.
So I came in off the gun trucks, and I'm tired.
I went into the embassy, and I had a meeting with somebody in Kabul.
And I had this like titanium mug that was like the size of a toilet bowl.
And I'm filling it up with coffee.
And I haven't slept for, I don't know, let's say 20 hours at a time.
I'm fucking dirty.
And I'm filling up this coffee toilet bowl basically because I'm getting ready to go into a briefing.
I had an Arabic linguist, and he was a younger kid.
You know, he was blonde hair, blue eyes, a Mormon kid.
And he literally joined the army at 18. You know, two years later after going to the Defensive Language Institute in Monterey, California, you come out and you're speaking Arabic, basically.
And young kid, blonde hair, blue eyes, good Mormon kid comes out and he's with us.
And the Kuwaitis kept talking about how they wanted to take him camping.
And we're like...
Why do you want to take that dude camping?
What's so special about that guy?
And you're like, after a while, you realize that's not what they wanted to do.
They were talking about it in either a joking way or a serious way, but that's the first exposure.
The Afghanis, we had to have, depending on Where we were in their barracks living situation like you had to put really hard restrictions like You know no, but fucking guys for the majority of this because This is a health issue.
We weren't like it's not like we were we were putting Bibles on their beds or something I just say hey, this is really unhealthy you guys are gonna spread a bunch of different diseases to one another and like we've got a mission to to accomplish here and And every SF guy, every guy that's been in Afghanistan knows what Man Love Thursday is, and it's kind of a thing that they do.
Socially indoctrinated in the children, like the sexual exploitation of children.
So it starts early and then it moves into the adulthood.
Bacchabazi is a real thing, and it's dressing up.
boys to look like girls and they have some Afghanis when I say some I don't know how pervasive it is but it's very it's a big percentage and the adult male stuff that's like one sub-segment of their culture but it's the sexual exploitation of children that when you find that out that's when things really turn for you psychologically you're like This place is really
fucked.
And it's very pervasive.
It's very...
You know, if you go back and you read The Kite Runner...
When I read The Kite Runner when I was in Afghanistan, I realized that it's not only the story about this kid, but it's also the story of Afghanistan.
It's very...
those stories run parallel because children are sexually exploited regularly and it's mainly the boys from what I understand to the point of which I was driving out on this op I guess from Kabul to Jalalabad and when I first got to Afghanistan I used to see these truck drivers and I thought you know my dad was a truck driver and
It's really cool these truck drivers take their sons out with them on the road.
That's such a really cool cultural thing.
And my interpreter turned to me and was like, those aren't their kids, dude.
Kandahar and different areas, they'll have parades and they're on display as to, this is my harem, and they're proud of it.
And that was one of the most disturbing things that we would talk about specifically between the departments, between Department of State, CIA, and the military.
When you're out with the guys from a tactical and combat role, you see them and you interact with the way they are from a tactical level.
Every day.
And you'd bring this up to management, and they would say, ah, that doesn't...
What do you mean?
That doesn't happen.
That doesn't happen.
Or they pretend it doesn't happen.
But if you were on the ground in Afghanistan during the times I was there, honestly, from, you know, 2001, we'll say, to the time that we pulled out, everybody uniformly would agree with what I'm saying.
If you spent some time in Afghanistan, you knew that was happening.
It also makes it harder For you not to want to change the entire government system where you want to completely rewrite the entire DNA of the cultural infrastructure.
This is the thing that people didn't want to talk about in Afghanistan that we talked about regularly, which was these are very what we feel are distinctly wrong.
These are very wrong things.
Things from an American support, tactical and strategic intervention, like we should not encourage this whatsoever.
And it made it very difficult at times for us to trust with the State Department or somebody else was saying.
But I mean, this goes back to Iraq and honestly trust in policymakers and the State Department and their entire position, either politically, philosophically.
So when you're hearing about this, one of the things about child molesting is that if these kids are growing up in this culture where they're going to be an adult and they're going to do that to kids as well, which has probably happened to all these guys, right?
You're not going to fix that with all these people alive.
The culture gets to a point where it's so fucked It's like, how can you ever fix that?
How many generations would it take before the scars of all those people being abused wears off and normalizes and people can be normal again?
People can be like what we would consider a Western civilization, like London or New York.
What we feel is the morally appropriate cultural boundaries.
That's like how many generations would it take?
And there's lots of different things that you can talk about because the history of Afghanistan is, we'll say, post-80s and Soviet intervention.
And then, you know, with the Taliban pushback or the Mujahideen and like they've completely destroyed the education, the progress and evolution of Afghanistan.
I mean, they had decades of war.
Then you had basically a failed state with Taliban and extremist control.
I mean, as the Taliban moved in, fundamentally, it's an evil organization.
There's a soccer field in Kabul where the Taliban used to stone women to death because they weren't wearing their hijab.
The rule of a woman would be raped and she would be accused of infidelity on her husband and they would stone her or they would beat her with a stick and they turned the soccer field into a place where they could have public displays for execution.
It was completely insane.
When you think about it from where we're coming from and then where we're going and we're trying to nation build, which I have fundamental disagreement with that as well, but...
You eliminated the educated portion of your population.
You swung to a very extremist, fear-based religion, and then it was all based on the Quran as far as their education system.
So they completely separated the women away from being able to evolve.
They treated them as beasts of burden.
You had to be an Islamic extremist to be acceptable.
It was a completely hegemonic theoretical state or hegemony as far as like it's the theocracy ran everything and it was very extremist version of Islam.
And as we came in, and I wasn't there in 2001. I came there much later.
I came there in 2009, was my first real rotation there.
It had been seven years, but really, it was almost like going back in time.
It felt like you were going back in time like a thousand years.
That's one of the things we were talking about in camp, that when you hear about Socrates and all these ancient cultures, the Spartans, all these people that had boys, and you see what's going on in Afghanistan, you realize how old a culture Afghanistan is.
It's like one of the oldest civilizations in terms of the way they behave.
It's almost like they never caught up with the Western world.
I think it was...
Michael Shermer might have wrote a paper about this.
He wrote an article about how Islam's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment.
And that it essentially maintains the same values and the same cultural values as when it was created.
And when you think about, like, Alexander the Great, Alexander the Great who was gay, right, who conquered much of Afghanistan and giant swaths of the world...
He probably like his army and his behavior and what he probably stained that area was like a type of behavior.
I think that you had portions of the world were culturally cut off from being able to evolve at the same rate as some of the other places within the Middle East.
And those tribes essentially haven't had the opportunity to evolve because they've been very isolated.
I mean, you look at Afghanistan, it's an extremely isolated area of the world.
And if you go back to the 70s, it was relatively progressive, somewhat secular.
And then the Soviet intervention, the collapse, the failed state led to the rise of the Taliban because they had eviscerated all of the intellectual and the economic class.
And in order to succeed or live there, you had to completely capitulate to the theocracy and the fascist state.
So you had to go back in time to live.
You had to grow a beard.
And when I say this, is it everybody is 100%?
No.
I'm saying, like, this is the way people live.
They lived under tyrannical rules that...
Provided zero opportunity for, you know, if you had girls, sorry, they're a piece of burden.
They treat goats and donkeys better than their girls, their children.
The homelessness of children in a war zone is so heartbreaking.
Like, it is...
It strips away at the goodness in your soul, watching desperation.
And when you see homeless children every day in these cities that are dirty, starving, and there's really not a lot you can do because you have a war to fight.
And you not only think about it from the homelessness position, you think about the exploitation position.
Like, these kids are so fucked.
They're homeless.
They don't have parents because maybe their fathers were either, you know, killed in the war.
Their mothers can't...
They can't afford to keep them.
And they continue to have more kids.
And especially if they've been raped, then there's a cycle of...
Not only exploitation and violence, but then it's also, it keeps them down economically.
So you have massive amounts of children that were homeless and exploited, and they're starving.
And it's, you know, from my perspective, when you live in that environment, and you can't think about it.
You have to shut that stuff out.
Because if you think about it, it's like opening the door of the submarine.
Time and repetition, which is one of the big problems, I think, with the GWAC community, at least what we've had in the last 20 years.
I mean, there's lots of different compounding factors that I think contribute to the acceleration of veteran suicide, which I want to launch into some rant about the issues that I think we're all faced, but it's definitely something that I'm extremely passionate about.
We've talked about this a bunch of times in this podcast, but I'm really hoping that something's going to change with RFK and about psychedelics and veterans.
I really, really am hoping that they open their eyes to this stuff.
I was talking to Marcus Capone and he runs Vets, which he's the guy, his organization is the organization that takes the guys to Mexico to do Ibogaine.
And Marcus is a retired SEAL. I was talking to him yesterday, actually.
And...
I'll go off on this, which is, you know, we as a subculture from the Global War on Terror community, the veterans, we're under an epidemic of suicide and depression.
And the VA has not been a help to us, especially the warfighters, like the guys that we have rogered up time and time and time again.
They've gone overseas, we've done the bidding for the country.
We've watched our friends get killed and fucking torn in half in very ultra-violent ways.
We've been exposed to overpressure and chemicals and all these other things.
And then we come back, and within the VA system, their answer is, here's your pills, here's your retirement, shut the fuck up.
And it's not working.
Marcus and I were talking about this yesterday.
He was on antidepressants for seven years.
Seven years, like, antidepressants and they weren't working.
And he, just by chance, his wife, I believe, said, this might work.
We need to go to Mexico and do Ibogaine.
This might work.
So here's a guy that went, did it one time, has never been on antidepressants since.
I don't know exactly what the protocol is as far as like you have to get off and then you have to get back down there.
I know that most of my friend group now, they've done it.
And...
They have an extremely high success rate.
Vets has done 1,000 former warfighters, and they have an extremely high success rate where they're eliminating pharmaceuticals.
So they'll go down, they'll do it one time, maybe they've done subsequent sessions, and they have this really high success rate.
And this is part of the- Better than anything.
Yes.
This is part of the issue.
Yeah.
We're under an epidemic of veteran suicide, like, more so than we ever have.
And the worst thing about this, too, is it's also affecting our family and our kids.
Like, our kids are four times higher to commit suicide than our peer set.
So it's not just the GWAT veteran community.
Now it's our families and our children.
You have something that has such a proven track record to help heal vets.
And we can't do it without breaking the law.
We have to leave the country?
It's insane.
So, you can send me to Iraq under false pretenses, and, you know, you can have Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all these, like, orchestra of fucking idiots can send us all to Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
We can go fight the wars, come back, And now we have to break the law to go fix what's wrong with our heads or, you know, our emotions or not only our psychology, but, dude, we're broken.
Like, we've been beat up and kind of shoved in a closet and then we're sedated and told to shut the fuck up.
And, meanwhile, you know, Wolfowitz and Bremer and all these other guys, they get to walk around and provide, you know, public speeches about how fucking great they are because they're, you know, strategically important, whereas my peer set, we're under an epidemic of suicide, our kids are committing suicide, the VA's no help to us, and we have to go break the law.
True.
It's like you get to go flip a fucking coin and paint some paintings and you think that everything's okay?
My close friends have done either ayahuasca or ibogaine, neither of which they would say is a good time, all of which have said, all of which, 100%.
And they've come back and been not only fundamentally changed but better.
And these are, you know, my business partner, Jared Taylor, he's gone and done Ibogaine.
And then multiple other people that probably don't want me to talk about them on the podcast, guys that have been on 15, 20 different pharmaceuticals can literally scrape them off their dresser and, into a garbage can the day they get back.
And the fact that we aren't trying to evolve this section of the medicine, I know that Stanford did a study I'm not exactly familiar with all the data associated with it.
But the fact that we aren't leading the charge as a country to come up with dynamic, out-of-the-box solutions...
For the guys that have gone overseas and done the hard and courageous tasks for this country and they come back and they can't get help and we're not pushing the envelope?
That's a crime.
I mean, I've got lots of issues with Iraq at this point, right?
I mean, it's fundamentally...
I've told this to people.
Like, Iraq is with me every day, right?
Afghanistan was a part of my life, but Iraq fundamentally changed me for the rest of my life.
And, you know, war is such a strange and surreal circumstance because it changes you for good, it changes you for the bad, and I've looked at this a lot.
And I looked at life experience like a radio wave, almost like a band where you have highs, you have lows.
And most people, we'll call it 90 plus percent of the United States, their frequency only gets so high and only gets so low.
And it basically stays within, we'll say, a fairly small band within the center.
Combat, what happens is you go really high and you go really low and it forces you outside of social norms on a second to second basis.
And then you do that over and over and over again.
And so one person might get in a car wreck in their life and that goes really low.
So it's a really high adrenaline dump and it goes really low because they have an injury.
That's like one thing.
Well, going out in a combat zone multiple nights a week, sometimes you're doing multiple targets a night.
You might be getting the rough equivalent of an adrenaline car wreck.
The rough equivalent of a car wreck from an adrenaline dump and a high and a low.
You might be doing that three or four times a night.
And then you're doing that night after night, week after week, and it fundamentally changes you because you have to chop all of this down because if you get too ramped up and too chaotic, you're going to lose control and you won't be able to complete your mission criteria.
If you get too low...
You also won't be able to achieve your mission criteria.
Your survival instincts kick down, so it chops your ability to feel all the way down to a normal person's bandwidth because it's a survival mechanism.
This is just my own assessment.
So, from a combat experience perspective, the first time you feel it, and I'll tell you, the first time I was in an ambush, I was losing my shit.
I mean, anybody who tells you they're not fucking scared, they're either, like, fundamentally flawed, they're like Travis Pastrana, he doesn't have, like, a fear portion of his brain, or they're just lying.
Like, you're scared out of your fucking mind.
Like, going north, like, driving north into Iraq, you're looking into the deep, dark abyss of the unknown, and you're like, what the fuck?
Am I gonna be a coward?
You know, am I gonna live?
Am I gonna die?
I mean, our casualty...
Projected casualty rates was that we were going to lose most of our ODA. So you're stepping into a situation where you're going, okay, well, I know out of this six-shooter that I'm going to play Russian roulette with, there are four bullets in this.
And, and at this point, you know, the full insurgency hasn't kicked off that we're hunting Feta Yeen.
These guys weren't the most sophisticated cats on the planet.
They weren't that good.
So, but we end up pushing through and then consolidating at the end of this.
And fundamentally, this changed my tactical experience in combat forever because my team leader, who I respect and love, he was killed two years later.
He's one of my best friends.
He was my best friend.
He turns to me and he goes, Hey man, if you don't have a solution to the problem, just shut the fuck up.
And so now I'm alone in a car with another guy and the CIA chief.
And the entire Iraqi army in Mosul, Iraq, is essentially pursuing us through the...
I mean, Mosul is the size of Los Angeles, and I started at the north end of Los Angeles, basically, and had to work my way to the southern end of Los Angeles being shot at.
Whew!
And, um, and I'm trying to sort through the problem, man.
Like, I got a fucking map sheet, and you don't know, I mean, this is, this is Mad Max and the fucking Thunderdome, and Mosul was one of the most fucked up cities in Iraq.
Like, it was, it looked like going back to Stalingrad in different sections of this place.
It was a complete shit show.
And I'm alone with my, you know, the guy I was with.
And I'm trying to navigate through the city and help the driver.
We're being pursued from literally north to south.
Yeah, being shot at.
And we're going, okay, right turn, right turn, right turn.
And, I mean, I have, like, the dragons are at...
The bumper.
They're gonna fuck it.
They're gonna pull me out of this car and chop my fucking head off.
Like they're gonna turn my car into Swiss cheese.
They're gonna fucking chop my head off.
I'm dead.
We're dead.
And I brought up Kiowas.
They were on station.
We had a really good relationship with these guys.
And I was like, hey, this is me.
I'm in a black BMW. And I'm moving from north to south.
And the helicopter came back and said, oh, I know who you are.
You got everybody following you.
Not all checkpoints are created equal, and for whatever reason, they decided they were going to kill us that day.
You don't have time.
You're not going to sit around and be like, why do you guys want to kill us?
Well, we're just good guys.
You're just going to keep moving.
I had to work my way all the way south.
Yeah.
To a bridge.
And I had like one last, one last fucking Hail Mary, man.
Like we had to get across, we had to get across a bridge into a place called Diamondback.
And I didn't have a QRF because they couldn't pin us down a quick reaction force.
And, um...
Like, the Kiowas, like, they saved our life, because they had the roads blocked off on the bridge, and I was basically smoking in it, like, 100 fucking kilometers an hour.
And the Kiowas came down and, like, literally dropped their fucking skids on the front of the car and panned around, like, we're gonna kill all you fuckers.
I looked over at one of the guys I looked over and like flipped them off and it was like you Dead you know and then Like like parting the seas like Moses or whatever they've moved the fucking cars and we we drove back in that was it so bookending my point of that conversation was I was losing my shit my first one right and I came back and I was talking to Kiowas and they were like,
bro, we didn't know how bad this was because it sounded like you were ordering a pizza.
But everything, everything in between was like...
Rep after rep after rep after rep was like, calm down, keep your shit together.
And one of my really close friends, this guy Jeff Kirkham, my first team sergeant, awesome fucking guy, one of the most tactically relevant people in my life.
He's like, psychology is more contagious than the flu.
So when you start losing your shit, it infects everybody else around you.
Become a, you know, even if you don't feel like it, even if you're, you're wigging out, man.
Of course.
Internally, You can barely keep your shit together, but what you do is you're like, okay, but I gotta project this, because if I infect everybody else with my chaos, I'm injecting more chaos into the equation, and we're all going to run the possibility of dying because of this, because of my actions.
You can't, but if you're around a bunch of dudes, they're surgeons and stoic, and there's no flexion, what I would say is like, in the time and repetition in the community, I mean, there's a default emotion that is acceptable.
It's, you know, anger.
Right?
So, anger, and when I say joy, it's like joy from gallows humor, typically, right?
But it's like, you have to, everybody becomes a stoic.
Like, this guy, he's a Shia, supposedly Shia cleric.
You know, if you know Iraq, you've got 60% of the country is Shia.
It's typically going to answer Iran.
You've got 15, 20% is up north.
It's the Kurds.
And then you've got the rest of the Sunni.
And we're like, this guy's not going to fucking work with us.
And this guy's a real piece of shit.
And he's already spinning up a militia.
He's going to be a problem.
No, no, no, no.
And we're like, okay, you're the big brain on Brad.
You're the PhD, man.
Sure.
So we acquiesce.
And years later, I don't know how many guys died before.
Going into...
Going back into Najaf trying to find this fucking guy.
I don't know how many.
I mean, it was a whole basically surge push or probably a division to try to go find this guy.
But we had the opportunity to kill him right there.
Like, literally, we could have...
Like, he had less than 40 guys on the compound.
We could have, like, gone out and got him right, like, that night.
And...
And then he became a problem.
And not only did he become a problem, it was like the decision makers were so poor at that point early in the war.
It started to really affect me in the sense of like I was still bought and sold.
But I started to really think these guys might not know what the fuck they're doing when...
It was like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Brennan.
When they de-Bathified Iraq, so after we invaded, they did this thing called de-Bathification, which was basically they fired the military and everybody that was involved in the bath party.
And once again, we're in the team room, and we're watching CNN, and it's Rumsfeld talking about we're de-Bathifying Iraq, we're firing everybody.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Everybody in the team room was like, what the fuck?
You guys are going to create the insurgency.
It was on the ground, that moment, that second.
I wanted to throw a fucking brick through the TV. I was like, these guys are paint-by-numbers creating an insurgency.
They have no fucking clue what they're doing.
And that was that moment, which is fairly early.
Where I lost a lot of confidence in the decision makers.
But, okay, you know, the question is, why'd you keep going back?
Well, because you want to try to search for...
Meaning, and you're trying to find the actual purpose.
Like, what is the purpose?
Like, are there WMDs here?
Like, are there, you know, like, legit direct traces back to 9-11?
Are there things that we're doing that are going to directly affect and protect America?
And then I was like, well, I think time and repetition in thinking that you're dead for that long and then searching for not only some, some, what I would say is good in the war itself because there is good.
You have your buddies and You have the camaraderie.
You have the adrenaline.
But you also think you're gonna fucking die every day for years on end.
And that's not...
Fundamentally, it turns out it's probably not good for you psychologically, I guess.
And so I went to Afghanistan thinking, well...
And I went to train Afghanis for a force up there.
And when I went to train those guys, it was, hey, if I can train Afghanis to take on the war, maybe I can protect 18-year-old kids from getting their fucking legs blown off.
Maybe I can protect the 20-year-old kid from Nebraska from getting fucking RPG stuffed through their face.
And I was older, and I was also willing to die.
So the kids, when I say the kids, you know, 18, 20 years old, like, man, it's not...
It's not fun to watch those.
When I say that, that's an understatement.
It's so heartbreaking to watch a kid that's never been to fucking combat die.
It changes everything in your life.
Yeah, and so you go from, you know, Iraq to Afghanistan, you know, and I'm watching all this stuff unfold, and there's, like, there's, and I don't want to say it's all negative, because there's, you know, there were things that were very positive, but...
I'm so jaded by the time I get there that I'm like, well, if I can save some Americans, I'll save some Americans.
And, you know, if not, at least this will be an interesting experience.
And then, you know, there's a laundry list of other things we can talk about.
Not only do I not have any respect for those guys, I have a profound amount of hatred for their arrogance.
Because I'm in my 20s.
I'm not making excuses, but there's plenty of guys like me that were not only hook, land, and sinker, and I still would.
I'd still sign up for this country.
I think service is a remarkable courage and service back to our community is something we have to cherish.
Like we do.
But when you have an orchestra of idiots that are manipulating the courageous men and women of our country to go into these wars based on a neocon pipe dream, and there's no consequences, you know, you can pull out of Afghanistan and leave billions of dollars of equipment.
Who the fuck got fired?
But if I made a mistake, if me and my buddies made a mistake, we fucking...
We lost our lives.
We go to jail.
Like, we lost our clearances.
And I'm not trying to sound like a whiny bitch.
I'm just saying, like, no consequences for these guys.
Nothing.
You know, they get to go paint paintings and they think it's okay.
Imagine no consequences for lying about weapons of mass destruction.
And has there ever been a large-scale investigation as to what led them to either believe or to push the narrative that there was weapons of mass destruction?
Well, I think if you read, I mean, there's a lot, I think there's a lot of like, there's a lot of books out there, obviously, and whether or not you have to kind of sort through the actual documents and figure out like where these guys were at.
And I've spent a little bit of my life trying to understand from their perspective.
And I honestly think big part of it is the guys who are making the decisions.
Their hubris, their utopian belief that they were going to be able to rebuild Iraq like Houston.
You know?
Like, oh, it's an oil country, you know?
And, you know, they really believed that if they didn't rein in this rogue nation of Iraq...
That Iraq was going to eventually contribute to terrorism.
And you had guys that were so consumed with their intelligence when it flipped to not only hubris, but they didn't have wisdom.
They had intelligence.
Wolfowitz is a smart guy.
He's not an idiot.
The problem is he's not wise.
These guys weren't wise men.
There's a difference between having a high IQ and having the experience and repetition, seeing death and destruction, seeing people's lives fucking torn apart, and then understanding something from reading a book or thinking about it from an economics perspective.
And, you know, I think Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, They had this belief that they could do anything they wanted to validate this.
And they did.
They had to data mine information and pull and pluck from different analysts that agreed with them.
But most of the intel community didn't agree with them.
They're like, we had defeated the Iraqi army to the point when I say defeated it.
Like, if we go back to the 90s, we say Desert Storm was 91. And then from that point forward, you can basically say, you know, HW to Clinton administration, Clinton administration with the economic sanctions, and with the integrated bombing campaigns that they had led throughout the 90s.
We had essentially...
Stuffed that guy back into a hole where the only thing he could do is sell oil in the black market.
He had a fascist state where he and his family had complete control out of the country, but he wasn't going to be a threat from an international terrorism perspective.
That's just false.
It's not only false, but it is patently false.
And they had to mine the data to validate it.
They had to lie.
They had to sift through and find and pick and pull the pieces of information.
And they really thought this was going to be a fucking cakewalk.
And they were listening to these assets like Chalabi and some of these former Iraqi exiles.
And they're listening to these guys.
By the way, we're also manipulated by the Iranians and paid for by...
Iranian intel guys, they're Iranian assets.
They're listening to these people and they were living in their own echo chambers, validating this idea that it was better for regime change, for the international, not only the international economy, but it was going to be a stable petroleum-based country where we could integrate democracy into And none of these guys were Erebus.
None of these guys actually understood the Middle East.
Not one.
They didn't have any combat experience.
They didn't really have any combat experience from the long-term, low-intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare perspective.
They were given not only the information, but most of the information they were given was saying, this is going to be much more complex than you think it's going to be.
And they denied...
Not only the opinions, but the information, and they went ahead with their fucking plans anyway.
Rumsfeld chopped, single-handedly dictated how many people were going to participate in the war.
Like, he was dictating how many divisions it was going to take, and he's like, actually, I think you could do it for half that.
Like, he was like trying to negotiate how many guys that Tommy Franks was going to use to invade Iraq.
Tommy Franks didn't have the balls to say actually I need two more divisions so a lot of this is just like fundamentally These are professional politicians and bureaucrats drinking their own piss like I was saying earlier You know like you can drink your own piss once or twice before your kidneys start to shut down and it'll fucking kill you right?
These guys are all sitting around In their echo chambers, talking to the same types of people, defining how they were going to send servicemen and women to Iraq, and they were wrong.
Not only were they wrong, but they were told otherwise by lots of different people to include...
I mean, Tony Blair had a lot of different issues with this.
Colin Powell essentially sold this and got the dominoes to fall on the entire thing.
Because they knew that Colin Powell was so respected that if he sat in front of the UN with Tenet, who was the director of the CIA, right behind him and held up this little thing of VX or whatever it was, that they could push it across the line from the international community.
I mean, these guys were crooked, man.
And not only were they crooked, they were so fundamentally wrong.
Yeah, they go after Trump for fucking two years on, you know, Russia collusion.
It's like you spent seven trillion dollars in thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And you're saying you're going to put this guy through the ringer for two years because there might be some dossier that was paid for by the Clintons.
Like, who's the criminal?
And so for me, I get all wound up when it comes to this because rep after rep, year after year, My two closest friends in the world were literally one torn in half by a EFP, which was a direct Iranian manufactured shape charge You know my other friend was turned into fucking moon dust and I mean, these are my two closest friends in the world.
guys I grew up with in the army I spent every fucking day with and since then I've had obviously more friends but I mean those are the two closest friends in the earliest part of the war so So I'm so directly affected by this because it fundamentally changed who I was forever.
It gave me a profound amount of mistrust in my government.
You know, and the decision makers, I don't believe...
I actually don't believe what they're telling me anymore.
I have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the people that are pulling the handles in government.
And I have to go to my peer set, and what I tell people is, man, my currency is courage, right?
It's like, that's what I broker in.
So my friends that have gone through the GWAT, which I'm extremely happy...
For all these GWAC guys that are getting appointed to these positions, you've got Pete, you've got Tulsi, JD, they fundamentally know what war is, and when you have decision makers that have never been to war and their kids will never go to war...
Cheney's kids never went to war.
W's kids never went to war.
And none of these guys, by the way, they're all Vietnam era guys.
I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative than I am to go, oh, we need to invest and put more time, money, energy into creating more chaos and destruction in the American service members lives or the lives of other people.
You are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks.
Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years.
Drive around.
There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.
And it's visible.
Our economy has degraded.
The suicide rate has jumped.
Public filth and disorder and crime have Exponentially increased, and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.
I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that?
unidentified
Well, it's not my concern.
Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
I'm running for President of the United States because I think this country's in a lot of trouble.
I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.
And as President of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities, we're going to secure our border, we're going to get this economy moving again, and we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.
Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth.
We can do both.
And as President of the United States, we will secure our border, we will support our military, we will revive our economy and stand by our values, and we will also lead the world for freedom under my administration.
Bizarre like his face doesn't move did you have Botox at 80 like what the fuck is going on like you're weird I think they have low IQs and they're pushing that thing to the red That's why they're actually so afraid to do anything because they're like I have they're like I'm really pushing this thing I've got like a hundy like a 105 but my parents were rich So I went to Yale if I break outside of my box actually people are gonna know that I'm a fucking retard so right Well,
I do also think that if you're that ambition, you have ambition at that level, and you're so driven to become the alpha that you want to be the president, the amount of work that's involved in that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for reading.
Doesn't leave a whole lot of room for watching documentaries and having important in-depth conversations with people, expanding your understanding of the world.
It's very narrow.
They're basically actors.
Most of these people exhibit a lot of the traits that I see in actors.
This desire to morph oneself, to please the people around you.
The saying the things that you think people want to hear because you want to get ahead.
It's all very similar.
They're actors.
And the fact that these actors can rise to a position where they can actually dictate what these military veterans do and don't do when they have no knowledge or experience in this.
The fact that that's a real thing is fucking crazy.
And so they only want you to pay attention once a year when they're going to try to get everybody galvanized around a couple little stupid things and then get them out to the voting booth, but not too many.
We don't want a lot of complex thought out of the voters.
We don't really want them to think about too much.
Right.
We still got a national deficit that we gotta increase, and I gotta line the pockets of all my buddies, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
We don't want them to get in too far.
Don't start talking about the reserve, or don't start talking about any of that other stuff.
Didn't have the ability to do that or if she did nobody brought it out of her I was hoping I could I really was I was hoping I could have a conversation with her there's all this talk now that the reason why she didn't do it is because of Progressive people in her party the pushback right which might have some truth to it But for the record they offered me two very specific days And in different places in the country to travel and then go do it and do it for an hour.
I said I didn't want to do that.
And especially after Trump had done it.
Here, in three hours, I'm like, this is the only way to do it.
And Elon said it best.
He said, he goes, you can kind of bullshit someone for an hour.
And it was all motivated by the pharmaceutical drug companies and the profits.
And they were terrified that someone's going to come along and somehow or another put a notch in this little thing that they've created, which is a devious little thing that they've done, where they eliminated all sorts of other remedies.
They cut out all these generic drugs that possibly could have been used to help people.
They denied people the use of monoclonal antibodies.
They pushed the fucking shit out of this one thing so they could make money off of it.
And they did it in collusion with the media.
No one acted like a journalist.
No one looked at the excess deaths.
No one looked at the instances of myocarditis in young people.
No one looked at any of that.
There was no journalism.
It just showed everyone that the whole system is bought and paid for.
It's all corrupt.
You could find out who a person really is, is to listen to them talk for long periods of time.
It's the only truth serum we have left.
And even that's not 100% effective, but it's pretty good.
Your brain knows bullshit.
You ever met some guy?
And he's dating this girl that you know, and there's just something about the guy.
He's shaking my hand.
He's being nice to me.
And I'm like, I don't trust this motherfucker.
Something's gross about this guy.
And then you find out he's a piece of shit.
But it's always this thing.
You feel something.
If you talk to someone long enough, there's patterns in the way they talk, the way they think.
The way they consider things, whether or not they can admit that they're wrong, or whether or not they can tell you why they changed their mind.
How did they form their narratives?
Like, what bad paths were they on, and what personal correction did they make, and how long did it take before you got to a better place?
You learn about people when you hear them talk for long periods of time.
You can't fake personal growth.
You can't fake stuff you've learned.
You can't fake flaws that you're willing to expose to people so that they could perhaps see them in themselves.
You can't fake that.
And all those people like Mike Pence, he's got zero of that.
You can't sit that guy down and have a real conversation with him.
And Dave and I were talking about this, and when you can just be authentically engaged with people, Where you can just be yourself.
And that's part of the issue with, I think, a lot of vets and why they connect really well with vets is because you can just authentically engage with people and say, this person knows I'm a little bit broken.
This person knows that I've probably done shit that I'm not super proud of.
And they know that I've got a dark sense of humor.
But I can like just kind of open, I can open my heart and just have a real conversation with somebody.
And these artificial bullshit conversations that we have throughout our day with people we don't give a shit about or these like, you know, inauthentic, unreal, you know, veneer people.
It's like, I have no interest in having a conversation with a fake person.
That is the best thing that I took out of moving to Texas, from moving to LA. I have way less of those conversations.
I have almost none of them here.
My conversations here are like with normal people.
They're normal.
So many people are infected by the rhythm of Hollywood, which is just about people trying to become successful.
And the way you become successful in Hollywood is you get chosen.
Because you have to go on auditions.
That's the primary, right?
The number one top of the food chain, well, I guess rock star.
Rockstar and movie star are number one and number two maybe interchangeable Maybe they're the same same if it's a ten like biggest stars in the world.
It's movie stars and rock stars and movie stars Everything you do is about your relationships with people, and whether or not people think you align with them politically, and whether or not you support the right causes, you wear the bow tie at the Oscars, you act proper, you do all the things that you're supposed to do.
And if you do all the things you're supposed to do, then you get into the club.
And if you don't do all the things you're gonna do, then they're not gonna use you.
They're gonna use Daniel Craig.
They're gonna use this guy.
They're gonna use that guy.
They're gonna use Dave Bautista.
They're gonna use The Rock.
There's so many guys that want these roles.
And there's only so many good roles.
Especially if you're gonna be a male movie star.
So no one can color outside the lines.
And Dennis Quaid is one of the rare few male movie stars.
Who just fucking completely gave up.
He's like, I support Trump.
I'm a Christian.
I sing gospel music.
Like, fuck you.
I quit.
And he did this Reagan movie.
It was a Reagan movie.
It's about a 1980s president.
They wouldn't let him advertise on certain social media networks because they said it was during the time of the election and it could affect the election.
What was it?
Was it Facebook?
That's insane.
Was it YouTube or Facebook?
One of the social media outlets kept him from advertising this movie, which is a great movie, about Reagan, where he plays Reagan.
That's the thing with this whole social media, you know, censorship, demonization, like the way that they've...
They honestly, and I want to say they, like, there's a big group, and you, I mean, you were talking about it the other night, even with your show, with the Trump show, and then it's not trending, you can't even find it.
The firearms community on YouTube deals with this all the time.
You know, the guys that have the huge YouTube channels from a firearms perspective, they're demonetized, they have to upload multiple times, they're in like a constant battle.
People obviously want to watch and they can't increase their reach or they get demonetized and they're constantly screwed with over and over and over again.
And that's the way that I think a lot of us have felt we've been living under the thumb of our social media oligarchs that are deciding whether or not our information is agreeable to their political opinion.
This lady who's a bigwig at YouTube sits down across from me and we start talking.
And I said, when it comes...
So we get into this conversation.
It's a very friendly conversation.
Nothing problematic at all.
I don't think she even knows who I am.
And this is a long time ago.
So this is like...
2015?
14?
So my podcast is not that big.
It's not that big at all.
I can tell you exactly when it was.
When did Sam Harris and Douglas Murray have a conversation?
When did The Strange Death of Europe come out?
Tell me about that.
That's Douglas Murray's amazing book that has been proved now to be absolutely accurate in his assessment of what was going to happen to Europe with Muslim integration.
Essentially, the guy nailed it.
And him and Sam Harris.
Okay, so you have two public intellectuals who are having a conversation about cultures and about the What is different about these Islamic cultures and their desire to impose Sharia law, like at least in certain areas.
So they're having this conversation and it gets labeled as it gets flagged off this guy's account.
So I find out about this video because this guy has an account and I don't remember where he posted it, maybe Twitter, but he said, I got flagged on YouTube For having this in my playlist as something that I watch, like not even something he hosts on his channel.
So I asked the lady, I said, why would someone get flagged for a conversation?
She goes, it was hate speech.
Just like that.
Just like that.
It was hate speech.
I go, do you remember the conversation?
Because I watched the conversation.
I don't think it was hate speech at all.
It was definitely hate speech.
But it's between two public...
And then my wife just clamps down on my neck.
Because she sees I'm fucking...
I'm rabid.
Now I'm like, it's two public intellectuals having a conversation about a real thing that's happening in the world.
And there's no hate speech in that.
There's no slurs.
There's no degrading of people, a generalization of people.
There's no racism.
They're talking about real cultural differences and how they're going to affect Europe.
And this fucking lady just, it's hate speech.
The arrogance of the way she said it to me, and she was a big executive.
And then I was like, oh boy.
I was just boiling.
I was boiling.
And thank God my wife grabbed my leg.
She fucking...
She grabbed the shit out of my leg.
Because I was ready to go.
Because the lady was going to engage with me.
And I was like, okay, this is a podcast.
You're fucked.
You're fucked.
You're just lucky there's no cameras here.
What you're saying is absolutely crazy.
Like, who are you to make that distinction?
And do you have any idea how that affects us culturally when a person like yourself who lives in this fucking San Francisco, this whole bizarre tech cult bubble, that's what you live in.
And you want to impose this crazy leftist perspective on everyone in the world to the point where you're not even allowing two world-renowned public intellectuals have a public discussion about this in front of an audience.
You have to be able to have those conversations even if that person's wrong.
Like if someone wants to get on YouTube and tell the world why Sharia law is better, I think they should be able to do that.
Let them do it and let someone counter it and let them have debates.
And Sam Harris has had a bunch of debates like that.
You can watch them online.
They're amazing.
Let people figure out who they agree with.
And if you just shut down discourse and say that it's hate speech, and you're defining hate speech as no slurs, there's no, like, we gotta kill all these people, there's none of that.
There's no hate in this conversation.
You're saying hate speech is disagreeing with a narrative that all leftists must ascribe to, regardless of any objective assessment of the facts.
Sitting down and looking at it and go, you know, I don't think I agree with this aspect of it.
Like, I think that, like, telling women that they have to wear a hijab everywhere, you're not giving them the choice.
Not giving someone choice is just fundamentally bad for the race, for humans.
Anything outside of a meritocracy in the context of being able to evolve a conversation based on the best idea wins.
And when you're chopping out 50% of your population and saying they're beasts of burden and where they belong is just essentially for- Basket of deplorables.
I had, like, a tiny little, like, belt-fed machine gun that I'd have to wear, because I'm a small guy, right?
I'm a hundred and fucking sixty pounds, and so I would often be the woman, because I could, I could be the fucking, I got a feminine frame, man.
Yeah, I got, you know, birthing hips, of course, but, uh, You know, I could get a little saw, which is a squad automatic weapon, a little belt-fed machine gun, a couple frags underneath a hijab, and I could sit in the back seat.
Isn't it wild, though, that that religion, the absolute most suppressed religion, suppressive religion when it comes to women and gays, are the ones that the progressives are so vehemently defending?
That's the one they defend over all religions.
A leftist will accuse you readily and quickly of being Islamophobic.
It's a great thing to shut you down.
It's a great pejorative.
But no one ever accuses you of being anti-Christian.
No one.
It never comes up.
There's not even a word, right?
You can have Islamophobic.
Is there a Christianophobic?
I've never heard it.
What is a word, like a disparaging word for someone who is prejudiced against Christians?
But I think that's so funny because when I listen to academics, you know, I'll pull up a YouTube and I'll go down a rabbit hole on a certain thing and I'll listen to an academic and then half of them, I shouldn't say half of them, like a good portion of them, they're talking about things they've never actually experienced.
So, for me, I've lived in the Middle East.
I've lived in Jerusalem.
I've lived and interacted and been in these cultures and seen them in a very vivid way.
And when I say this, tactical and combat experience, specifically in these countries, it's very vivid.
And part of the problem with this differentiation, let's go back to it, but this differentiation between the decision makers and the people actually implementing the tactical execution on the ground is that there's a huge disconnect from the reality.
They don't have the wisdom To understand what it is.
And what I used to tell people is I was almost like a zookeeper.
Where...
I would usher, depending on the person, I would usher them through the fucking zoo so they could see what's going on, but they would see it from afar.
And there's this very clear differentiation between the people in charge, and most of them shouldn't have been in a combat zone, specifically in the agency.
They should not have been in a combat zone.
And when you unpack the agency and you look at...
You have paramilitary guys and they're more than qualified to be there.
And then you have like the cocktail circuit guys.
And they're just trying to get their combat tour so they can get promoted to another fucking spot.
But they actually have no business being there.
Meaning, they need guys like me to keep them alive.
There's a very famous, infamous case officer from Coast back in the day, and I was on the ground there.
Not in Coast, in Kabul at the time.
And she was being groomed to be the assistant director.
There's a great book on it called Double Agent, but I was on the ground when it happened.
And she had this asset that she was trying to get in, which is an agency asset that she was trying to get into a basin coast.
Once again, this person has no...
They should not be here.
They should be in Germany going to a cocktail party, like, pretending like they're really cool because they have high intellect, but they have no context to you.
Going down to the basis of reality, and these are, like, rules of the jungle.
Like, this power is the only language they speak.
Like, you can't...
Intellect your way out of this thing because a fucking bullet is a bullet a bat is a bat like it will win over your articulation every time if you want to win a debate and You just put an axe handle through somebody's fucking head.
That's how you win right that's like it doesn't matter it doesn't matter so like they bring in this asset and she's like oh you know this His asset is the guy.
He's going to give us the coordinates to Bin Laden.
We've been working with him for a long time.
He's an amazing guy.
It's his birthday.
He wants us to bring him a cake.
So she bypasses all the security systems, bringing in a guy from Pakistan.
So she gets him, because he's like, I don't want to go through any security.
I'm your trusted guy.
I don't want to go through any security.
So she tells security, stand down.
She doesn't tell anybody about it.
She brings this guy in through the gate, like blows him through.
Now the security guys, mind you, are like, what the fuck did you just do?
They're running down to this situation to try to get ahead of it.
He steps out and he looks like the Michelin tire man and fucking clacks off.
But that's a perfect example, and I mean, there's like multiple different examples of...
There's a different cadence mindset and capability associated with what I would say is the paramilitary guys versus the case officers, the spies.
They're just totally different guys.
And...
They tried to intermingle because of capabilities and more importantly promotions to try to get people like promoted, which is another reason why some significant things have to change over there.
And I turn around, and I'll tell you exactly what I said.
I'm like, what the fuck are you doing?
As I turn around, I'm like, give me that thing.
And I called her some very rude things, right?
So I'm like, what the fuck are you doing?
Don't take your pistol out.
I go, if both of us are dead, then think about it.
But I'm gonna keep this.
You just don't have it anymore.
So I gave her back.
I actually gave her back the empty pistol.
I was like, listen, if both of us are dead, feel free.
Take one of our guns.
Take both of our guns.
I don't give a shit because I'm dead.
But I get back in and the chief of base at the time pulls me in.
He's a fucking super good dude.
And he's like...
He calls me and he's like, hey man, I heard you had quite an exchange with somebody and, you know, we don't really appreciate, you know, this and, you know, I might have to send you home.
And I was like, did she tell you what she did?
He's like, no, I just thought she got in the car and you told her like, you know, you fucking dumb, whatever, and give me your gun.
I was like, no.
She racked her slide into the back of my head and he's like, oh God, get out of here.
Yeah, and more importantly, that's not their job, right?
They're collection people, and I'm defending them to a certain degree because they're very high IQ, their selection criteria in their course is very difficult.
Like, when you go into a combat zone and when it's a very complex, because there's different...
Different areas in combat zones, and some of them are more dangerous than others.
You can't have some of those people there.
It's too dangerous, man.
You've got to have collection people that are on the military side that can handle themselves unilaterally.
And you can't have your regular humdrum spy.
This isn't Jason Bourne.
They're not competent.
And more importantly, that's not their thing.
It's the thing of proficient artisans in combat collection in the art of war and that is a very subset niche profession of guys that are Extremely competent and very dangerous.
If they only knew the bureaucratic steps that it took to get into it, where it's just so much paperwork and interviews, and it's like, who is this guy?
So, I mean, out of all the guys, like, I had such a unique...
Ride in history in times, right?
Where, you know, looking out the window, kind of just being a passenger in history and then being able to talk to some of these guys.
And I would sit down and I would always find like the older guy that's in the, you know, we have like dining halls where the agency has their own separate dining halls and bars and shit like that.
And I sat down with a guy one day, and I was just like, hey, man, what's your story, you know?
And he was telling me he was an anthropology professor at the University of Washington, and he was finishing his PhD, and he was crossing the McKenzie Traverse in Canada, and he did it in era-appropriate clothing and a canoe and the whole fucking thing, right?
I'll never forget him describing this to me because I Didn't know I didn't know any of this is so it's part history part just agency history and I He goes, my first job was I flew to Angola.
And I just had a suitcase full of money.
And they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere and they're like, go kill Cubans.
You know, it's a proxy war, right, between South Africa and the Soviets and the Cuban by proxy.
They were both supporting the Communist Revolution in Angola.
So we were pushing back, from the state's perspective, we were pushing back against the Soviet intervention, which was driven from the Cubans.
So you had a huge Cuban intervention.
Which is something most people don't realize.
And I just thought it was fascinating because it was the first time I'd heard about it.
And here's this guy that his job was, here's a bag of money.
Go kill Cubans.
That's your job.
Pretty cool.
Well, he's a professor.
So he'd go back to, you know, whatever university and go, okay, kids, I know I've been out on a dig, you know, and I've been building, you know, atlatls in Australia trying to do this, but really he was in Angola hunting Cubans.
So I guess with a guy like that, if you can find a guy who's willing to wear era-equivalent clothing, would you say an era-correct clothing, and make his way through a trek that was most likely going to kill people in the 1800s?
You know who did something like that?
He didn't do the whole thing, but Rinella, the way I met him, he had a show before Meat Eater.
It was called The Wild Within, and I got really addicted to it.
Very unusual dude and like one of the very best guys to explain hunting like I saw a debate that he had it was like a I think it was a book that he had released and he was doing one of those talks they do at bookstores and this guy was a vegan and the guy in the audience was a vegan the guy got upset with him and the Rinella handled it so perfectly they're just the way communicated with the guy and explaining his perspective and you have a different perspective and I'd love to have a conversation with you and Didn't do it with any bullshit.
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Ted Nugent's like, ah, you pussy, grow another vagina.
But Rinell is like the perfect answer to people that objectively, they look at it, they go, wait a minute, I do eat meat.
Like, I am a hypocrite.
I am hiring a supermarket hitman.
Like, why am I upset at this man who not only hunts his meat, but cooks it and writes cookbooks and cooks it on television.
And like, this is the same thing.
Like, what are we doing here?
This is so stupid.
And then you get the people that really believe that you shouldn't eat anything but plants, and my problem with that is I think plants are smart.
I think they just move real slow, and I think they have a way of interacting that is noticeable and measurable.
I think there's probably a consciousness to plants.
I think life eats life, and I think that's the only way it survives, and I think that's just the way it goes.
That is just the way it goes.
And you can choose to just eat plants, but I don't think you're going to be as healthy.
I think it's too hard.
I think people can kind of survive on vegan diets and do well on vegan diets.
There's athletes that are on vegan diets.
I don't think they hit peak performance and thrive.
I think that's all people who are consuming nutrient-dense meats.
Meats and fish and eggs those are the people that when you look at athletes the Predominant that the best athletes in every sport are all consuming protein.
They're all consuming animal protein There's so few that are vegans that that hit elite status and maintain a lot of them get injured when they switch to vegan, too There's just so much in there's collagen and b12 and fucking there's so many different aspects to different amino acids you You can have this ethical thing in your head, and I get that ethical thing.
Like, I don't want to see a thing suffer.
I think plants suffer, you just don't feel it.
I really do.
I think there's a communication with them that's probably similar but different to the way we feel about animals getting killed by other animals.
I think it's just a part of this whole process.
I mean, they've shown that you can take the recordings of beetles eating leaves and play recordings of beetles eating leaves near a tree, and the tree will experience distress to the point where it changes the profile, the flavor profile of the leaves.
It releases chemicals, these phytochemicals into the leaves that makes it disgusting for the bugs.
And they do it with giraffes, like when giraffes eat, I think it's acacia trees, when giraffes eat acacia trees, the trees downwind all become disgusting to the point where the giraffes will starve because they won't eat it.
They change their flavor profile to protect themselves.
Well, I think that's so interesting because you can see it with Paul Stamets has when the fungi is talking and communicating and the health benefits to fungi and different plants.
I think any time you have this edict where no meat, no plants, no...
I think that's just another version of religious extremism.
If you were just to say, what makes sense?
Morally, what am I going to have to coalesce from me?
I don't want to be a hypocrite, so I hunt.
That's the way it is.
We eat a ton of wild meat.
I'm not a hypocrite.
We eat meat.
I love fish.
I love fruits and vegetables.
But...
I think if you're making this determination where there's no meat, this is the only thing I'm going to eat, well, one, that's a lot of time, effort, and energy that you're spending specifically on your diet constraints that could be allocated to being a better dad.
I think their ethics, the morals, their perspective is that I want to live a life with the least suffering possible.
I think that's noble.
I really do.
I think the problem is life eats life.
And I think that's the real problem.
And I think the problem is if you're buying just vegetables in the store, boy, you need to take a good look at monocrop agriculture because it's fucking bananas.
You know, there was a...
Taylor Sheridan in Yellowstone, there was a scene where Kevin Costner was talking to the hippie lady who's trying to, like, shut down ranches and shit.
I forget what her thing was.
But he was explaining how if you're on a vegan diet, you want to kill the most things, become a vegan.
You have no idea how many things have to fucking die to make monocrop agriculture.
It's a bloodbath.
They kill everything.
They kill groundhogs, ground squirrels, you fucking name it.
Ground nesting birds, fawns, everything gets gobbled up by combines.
It's an enormous industrial operation.
It's not natural.
So now you're limited to organic plants, okay?
So if you're growing all of your own food and, you know, you're growing a lot of soybeans, a lot of different things, like if you grow hemp, if you're in a place where you can grow it legally, hemp is actually a really good source of protein.
It's actually got a really complete amino acid profile.
You can, you know, you can survive, you can do it that way, but if you're a regular vegan, if there's a person that, like, I get vegan pizza at the supermarket, shut the fuck up!
You're contributing to this mass slaughter of small animals.
I thought it was fascinating, like from a wide variety of reasons, but more importantly, so I went and got some vegan cheese and he was like, tried it.
I was like, okay, it's not bad, but I mean, dude, it's a lime.
laundry list of ingredients associated with making this which seems pretty insane to me versus what's the ingredient on a good cheese?
So I went out to the 80th anniversary for the Normandy invasion, took a bunch of dudes out there.
And my kids and I are out on this beach, and I'm taking my pocket knife out, and I'm just chopping the oysters off the rocks and eating oysters straight out of the ocean.
And then you wind up becoming one of those people.
You have to say what they say.
If you're not politically aligned with them, you're going to lose gigs.
You change your behavior.
I see it with so many comics.
They're really good comics coming up.
They're like, wow, this guy's gonna be good.
He's really good.
He's getting better all the time.
And then they get a fucking show.
They get a show and then they tone everything down and everything gets softer.
And everything, you know, you start seeing some, like, bullshit jokes in there, like, oh, you decided to cover this joke, cover this subject, just for, like, street cred, progressive street cred.
And, like, you see it happen.
You're like, ah, you got called into the rocks.
The sirens.
They call you into the rocks.
That's what it is, man.
They call you into the rocks.
You stop being you.
You stop being you because they dangle that carrot in front of your face.
It's fine in the context of, I think, being a conservative, because I don't necessarily say, like, I'm a Republican.
I'm like, I just believe in less government.
Like, I don't like bureaucrats at all.
I have a high degree of skepticism on anything that they say, and I typically will question anything an elected official will say.
So, for me, I'm like, I don't care if the guy next to me is going to vote for, you know, whatever...
I care about, like, what are their ideas?
Why do they think a certain way?
What are they doing?
What kind of a human are they?
And what is the character of the individual?
Am I going to disagree with them?
Yeah, but who the fuck cares?
Like, it's kind of fun.
Like, it's kind of fun to disagree with people and debate them and have a different opinion versus being in an echo chamber where people all agree and they're all kind of lockstep in their belief system.
It's kind of fun to have some wingnut Talking about socialism half the time, you're like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Bootleggers, the mafia, criminal organizations that were organized crime that went on to do a bunch of other horrible things inside our country, and they were built up with money because alcohol was illegal.
The moment alcohol stopped being illegal, you still have these people with all this money now.
You fucked up.
Now they're organized gangsters, and now, you know, okay, alcohol's legal now, so they're just gonna sell it legally.
And they have millions and millions of dollars for a life of crime.
You've already done that with the cartel.
You've got to do something.
You've got to do something.
And you probably also should legalize drugs.
I don't think you should take drugs.
I think coke is probably terrible for almost everybody.
They are in for a world of, like, ultraviolence they've never actually felt before because, you know, obviously this is a very capable ultraviolence organization.
They have fucking no clue if we organize these Tier 1 units against them.
This is gonna be...
What I would be doing if I was down there, like, I know all those shoe boxes in my fucking, you know, my walls that I'm gonna have to collect up.
I thought about this for a long time, where I'm like, if they turned loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of, like, erase the problem in about two years.
He said we make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.
You're gonna get people trying it they wouldn't try it before.
You're gonna get people that use it irresponsibly, just like you get people that drink irresponsibly.
I think that's the situation that we find ourselves in if we're gonna give people personal freedom.
They're gonna make bad decisions.
You know, you can buy a Corvette, right?
You can go to the Chevrolet dealership, buy a Corvette right off the lot that goes zero to 60 in four seconds.
And you're flying around corners.
You could be a fucking maniac and kill people in a Corvette.
Or you could just enjoy it on the highway and be responsible and say, wow, what a great car.
This thing's awesome.
I love it.
And you don't cause any problems for anybody.
Both things are possible.
That's what's going to happen if we make drugs legal.
You're gonna have people try those drugs that probably shouldn't be trying those drugs.
You're gonna have people get addicted to those drugs that maybe wouldn't have gotten addicted if those drugs weren't available to them, especially if they weren't legal, if you could just buy it somewhere.
But if you don't rip the fucking Band-Aid off of this, like, infantilization of society and let people know that there are things out there that They're telling you you can't do, and the people who are telling you you can't do them haven't even experienced them.
And when it comes to things like psilocybin and psychedelics, if you haven't experienced them, you really shouldn't be talking about them.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
You can't possibly know.
You can't know.
And if you have experienced them, then you're probably going to agree with me.
You're probably going to agree that there's some serious benefits to it.
Fifty!
God, I thought it was a lot more than that.
At least 50. I had read something that was in the hundreds.
I spent all of my life with a top secret security clearance.
Most of my life.
From my 20s to my 40s.
And my personal experience with them, this is before we went public, but...
My personal experience with them was my problems were rep after rep, cycle after cycle of combat after relatively high stress scenario after scenario after scenario.
And I was having a really, really hard time Trying to directly connect with love.
I actually could not connect with that experience.
It was really difficult.
And my wife and I, we were going through this ongoing debate and dialogue with it.
And she's like, you need to try it.
And we tried it.
It fast-forward probably 20 years of talk therapy for me personally.
And it gave me this direct connection with this feeling that I hadn't felt for years.
And this is the feeling, and this is my point with vets, and especially from the combat vets.
The guys have got rep after rep after rep with overpressure and explosions and a lot of violence.
Is that they lose context with this really important feeling that you have to have, which is you have to have direct love for your family, for your spouse, for yourself.
And if you've killed that...
By all of the things that you've done, you've built a scaffolding, this artificial scaffolding on top of this, it creates a callus, and you've got to be able to break through that.
From a psychological perspective, an emotional perspective, it accelerates that back, and you can kind of reset.
You really can.
I can't imagine...
I was thinking about this, my dad's like 80 years old, right?
I'm like, man, he's got lung cancer now, and I'm like, gosh, if he could coalesce around...
Killing ego and past and try to understand himself from a different more introspective way this would take decades maybe of talk therapy or A session where you could really accelerate your growth as an individual.
I think that's for GWAT vets and for vets in general.
I think that's what they're missing.
This key component is being able to retouch with their emotional strength and be able to balance these things out where you can evolve and live your life.
You've said it before.
I don't know if you said it on a show, but do you think Society would benefit from it?
You know, I think people that are really fucked up and having a hard time with schizophrenics, people, you know, I don't know.
I think it's probably dangerous for you.
I think it's probably a bit of a stress test for your psyche.
You know, you hear about these stories like the guy from Pink Floyd that dropped acid and freaked out and never came back.
There's those stories.
Like we hear those stories of guys who just go out there and kind of you lose them.
I've kind of seen it with some people.
I've seen one kid who was just smoking a ton of weed and just lost his mind and became schizophrenic.
And you don't know.
Did he have a tendency towards schizophrenia already?
Did he fall prey?
Was it just his unique biochemistry and how he interacted with weed?
Was it just inveterate weed?
I mean, he was every day smoking weed constantly.
What is it?
What caused him to crack?
You know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I don't have that problem.
And I think it's very beneficial.
And I don't like when people tell me that because someone has a problem with something that I shouldn't do it.
I don't agree with that.
I think you should be allowed to take chances as a person.
I think if you want to do BMX jumps and fucking do flips on your bike, you should be allowed to do it.
You want to do jujitsu and have grown men try to kill you?
Go ahead.
Go do it.
Do whatever the fuck you want to do.
I don't think anybody should be able to tell you what you can and can't do.
But why does that change?
When you talk about substances that someone puts in their body.
Well, because those people could do those and then they could commit crimes, but those are already crimes.
Like, you already go to jail for those crimes.
So if you do something violent because you're on a drug, you're going to jail because you did something violent.
There's a crime, you committed that crime, you go to jail.
So we already have laws that address all the problems, and you're assuming that more problems would occur.
We don't know that.
We don't know that more people won't chill the fuck out and won't have a dramatic decrease in violence across the country.
Imagine that.
Imagine you have a few people that lose their fucking mind but you have a dramatic increase in consciousness through the entire country where people develop like a mushroom culture and people start like micro dosing all the time and people get way more comfortable with talking to each other way more creative way more like community oriented and love oriented That's not a bad thing.
That's a real possibility with something that exists right now.
There's a happy pill.
It's out there, and it's illegal.
And God made it.
God made it.
And it's probably the source of most religious experiences.
There's probably some sort of a connection to a lot of those religious experiences and what was probably some sort of a psychedelic adventure that they went on.
And who's to say that that's not even how you talk to God in the first place?
We don't know because it's been held back from us.
It's been kept from us like we're a bunch of babies.
It's something that human beings have used for thousands and thousands of years.
The Greeks used psychedelics to start democracy, and yet here we are in the greatest democracy the world's ever known in 2024 with full access to the internet, all the data that's available, all the anecdotal stories, and it'll get you locked in a fucking cage.
I do agree with you when people say, if you make cocaine legal, people are going to die.
Unfortunately, I agree with you.
But if you don't make cocaine legal, people are also going to die.
I don't know which one is more.
And I don't know if it was just real cocaine versus cocaine mixed with a bunch of other horrible shit, if the real cocaine wouldn't kill as many people.
I don't know how many people are dying just of cocaine and how many people are dying of fentanyl-laced cocaine.
I bet it's way more fentanyl-laced cocaine.
So if you have just pure cocaine and the same amount of users, you're going to get way less deaths.
So that's a net positive.
Then you take taxes from that sale of that legal cocaine and you use it to sell rehabilitation centers where you give them Ibogaine.
Give people the ability to break addictions.
It's possible.
People do it.
They go to Mexico, kick opioids.
People do it all the time.
My friend Ed Clay did it.
That's how he got into it.
He started his own clinic because he went down there because he had a pill problem.
You get an injury.
You're doing jujitsu.
You're always fucking hurt.
These guys get a disc problem and their arms all fucked up.
They take a little pill.
You feel better.
But then you need three pills.
Then you need four.
Now you're fucked.
And now there's nothing to help you other than Ibogaine.
And that's illegal.
So you make that legal too.
So with those two together, who knows?
You might have way less deaths.
And then you would have taxes that you could take from that stuff and use for all sorts of things.
It would be horrible for taxes from cocaine sales to fix the schools.
But what if that's what did it?
What if that's what did it?
And what if the exact same amount of people buying cocaine are still buying cocaine?
What if that is the fix?
And what if...
Responsible use of drugs.
All kinds of drugs.
Sure, don't drive a car when you're coked up.
Don't take heroin and fly your plane.
No.
Responsible use.
Just like responsible use of alcohol.
Why is that so crazy for us?
Why is that so alien?
Because we've been turned into babies.
We've been turned into babies where you're allowed to take pharmaceutical drugs that make you high as fuck.
Whether it's high as fuck on Adderall or high as fuck on opioid, that's fine, but you can't go out and get yourself some mushrooms.
That's just crazy.
And for these people that are the ones in charge that are making all the money from these decisions to keep up with this insanity in the internet in 2024, in this tide of change, I feel the same way about them as you feel about those poor cartel members.
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Like, you probably should be doing something else.
You deter everyone from actually focusing on the opium.
You focus on terrorism in the Taliban.
And then you allow it to flourish.
And...
The dirty secret nobody wants to talk about from that perspective is that we as a country have dealt with a lot of shady opium dealers, like drug lords that were essentially exporting opium.
And if they weren't part of the Taliban and or if they were anti-Taliban, you'd do business with them.
Freedom has to be sacred across the board, which freedom comes with accountability, which means responsibility.
And that's the problem is that when freedom, I think when you can distill it down and you can create control, then you can create profit.
So power, control, and profit, those things like they directly have this confluence where people in power obviously manipulate that and they'll restrict our freedom.
And if COVID taught us anything, it taught us that we can't forfeit freedom to low IQ power hungry bureaucrats that want to affect our life because they're stupid.
So why would we ever...
Give away our freedom to a bunch of stupid bureaucrats.
The way they talk about things is the way you have to talk about things.
And to think, if anything, this election was a giant fuck you to all that.
Where everyone was like, fuck, you guys are fucking crazy.
We see where this is going.
You're going right off a cliff and you're running.
And if anything that showed you about that, the Harris budget, which has spent a billion dollars, 580 million of it or something like that was for staff?
Hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're just pipelining campaign donations into ads, and it's like loading up their money guns and just shooting it into space.
You don't change the definition and make it ultra-super-nuanced so that it fits in your little excuse box of why you didn't fund gain-of-function research.
The fuck you didn't!
That's what you did.
That's what it is.
And when Rand Paul was confronting him with it, that was like one of the craziest moments.
I oftentimes think of Dick Cheney as a guy sitting back in like a high back leather chair in a big black tile office that's completely shiny with a white cat on his lap, like just petting it.
That's the way I think about that fucking guy.
Like, fuck that guy.
Like, how these guys...
To keep flashing back to this, but it forever fucking changed me, right?
Where I'm like...
These guys fucked up so many people's lives.
Like, countless.
Countless lives.
And the fact that they still think they have public trust with zero accountability?
Like, you might as well have painted, if you would have been a NASCAR driver, he would have had a Lockheed Martin fucking jersey on right then, at that point.
Like, if you just look at that thing, and then you look at, like, when I say things, right, it's just, like, you look at this thing, and then you do a direct comparison.
Like, I want people from another country that are poor to make their way here and make a better life.
I want that.
I just want to be scanned.
I want to know who the fuck is coming over.
I want to make sure they're not cartel members.
I want to make sure they're not terrorists.
But I'm all for people that want a better life, because I would do it.
I'd be a complete, total hypocrite if I said I lived in Guatemala in some village, and there's no power, and I found out that I could walk to America, and if I did it, it'd take three days, and then I could get a job in the fields, and then I'd make way more money, and I could send money home, and everybody could have clean water.
I believe in it, like, I believe in a meritocracy, right?
It's like, may the best idea prevail, may the hardest workers prevail.
The problem is, is when we export all of our manufacturing to China, when we have, like, South America, we have a border crisis.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, I'm a coffee guy, so I think about coffee all the time, and I think about Nicaragua, El Salvador, like all of the South American, Central American countries that grow coffee.
And I talk to the farmers, and all we have to pay them is 5 or 10 cents more a pound, depending on the coffee.
And most of the time, when I'm talking about coffees, I'm like, yeah, no problem, 10 cents more, who cares?
What that allows them to do is build schools, pay a livable wage, all the things that they need to do to be successful in Guatemala, Nicaragua, wherever we're talking about.
So I think about this, like, okay, so we're exporting these manufacturing jobs to China.
And if we're just concentrating on economic policies in this hemisphere, where from a national security perspective...
If we're exporting jobs to South America, we're creating economic opportunity and mobility in South America and Central America.
We're creating jobs, economic stability, generational wealth, and we're also solving one of the issues that we're having, which is a border crisis.
It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me to say, hey, we want to export, and I know this started with the Nixon administration, and you have essentially slave labor, which I'm 110% against, which I don't think in any way, shape, or form we should support economically.
So if we're to export and look at this from a manufacturing and industry perspective, from this hemisphere, how do we...
Align ourselves around strategic stability.
How do we protect against our border crisis?
How do we still import?
Because I mean, I know Americans love their cheap goods.
Like they love their shit.
You know what I mean?
They still want to have this decreased labor cost.
I think investing in South and Central America is just not a bad thing.
If we're not going to invest in America because of the cost, then we have to invest in this hemisphere.
Well, it makes sense that if you want to make the world a better place and you want less people trying to sneak into our country, one of the best ways is to make their country better.
And if it's not made by slaves, the cobalt that's in it, there's a real high chance that it came from someone with a fucking stick poking it into the ground and digging it out for you.
We should be making our phones in America with American minerals.
They're a source for people that get paid a fair labor wage.
They get health benefits.
There's OSHA. People check on things.
Make sure that regulations are in place.
Make sure that people get...
Make sure that they're making enough money to make a living, to live, a livable wage.
You have to do that in America if you want to do it legally.
The only reason to do it somewhere else is so that you can do something legal Because it's legal there, but it's not legal where you live.
It shouldn't be legal to have people working in another country for you for fucking 15 cents an hour.
It's just, it's too crazy.
It's too crazy that you just, you cross this dirt path, and now you're allowed to be a piece of shit?
Like, it seems crazy.
But if you're doing it the right way, and you're paying people well, and you're allowing people to, like, thrive in a place where there was nothing before, yeah.
You can give people a pathway to do a lot of different things.
Economic success opens up a lot of fucking doors, especially with education, especially with safety, with schools, with better communities.
People have money.
There's not so much tension.
Yeah, it's good.
It's good to have a thriving industry.
It's good to have a thriving economy.
It's good for everybody.
It's just not good for everybody, everybody.
There's always going to be people that suffer in every kind of economy, in every kind of situation in the world.
There's going to be people that suffer.
And like we were talking about on the way here, some of it's just luck.
That's one of the most important things about having some success in this life, you know, is having the humility to understand that you just got lucky as fuck.
I think I'm particularly lucky because I grew up before the internet was at all.
Like, how old are you?
47. So I'm 10 years older than you.
So when I was...
Like, no, I think I was 27 when the internet became like a normal thing to have in your house.
And you had a dial-up.
And you turn on America Got Mail, or you got mail.
You've got mail on AOL. So from that point on, the fucking world changed so wildly and so quickly that we weren't even really noticing it while it was changing.
And now here we are.
Here we are in 2024 where it seems like the most chaotic, the most weird.
When you think about, obviously, I'm super interested in the military-industrial complex, but when you think about, we had, we'll say, 50, 60 military-industrial contractors at the start of 9-11, and then now we're down to five.
And we think of $860 billion of annual data associated with the defense budget, which has gone up since our height in the world on terror, or the war on terror.
And we have five big companies that are basically taking 50% of that 860, and then 50% of that is profit.
And how is it happening?
When you think of this triangular effect between the military-industrial complex and, okay, you have the revolving door between the Pentagon, so every star that comes out of the Pentagon goes back into the military-industrial complex with X amount of years of disassociation, blah, blah, blah, it's okay.
Then you go back to the military industrial complex.
So you go into like Lockheed, Raytheon, one of the top five.
Then you have congressmen and senators that are making decisions specifically related to the budget in the military, the defense budget.
They're lobbying to increase defense spending.
But then they also have factories that are related to like the F-35 or some big military contract where they're making 40, 30, 40, 50 percent in profit.
So they're the guys that are lobbying to increase the defense budget.
Their campaigns are being paid for by the military industrial complex.
They're directly increasing the military budget.
It's a self-licking ice cream cone.
It's insane.
It's completely insane.
And the fact that we don't have any strict firewalls and separation from an And I'm not against people creating jobs in their state.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying the fact that there are not strict firewalls between the fact that you're going to directly profit and or your campaigns are paid for by the people that you will lobby to go in and increase the taxpayer's liability.
I was thinking about this the other day.
I was like, if the taxpayer had an itemized...
Look at where their taxes go.
It just came out annually or once a month or whatever it is.
And they looked at what they were paying for.
I'm pretty sure they might have a more vested interest into how much they're paying, what they're paying for and saying, you know what, maybe we shouldn't be asleep at the wheel.
Maybe we should probably pay a little bit more attention to this.
Okay, let's imagine you're paying 40% in income taxes.
Then if you live in California, you pay another 14.4, I think it is, something like that.
And then I think it's another 1% if you live in the city of Los Angeles.
So now you're down to 30, what, 34%?
What do you get there?
Somewhere in the high 30s.
So then you have sales tax on everything you buy.
You have property tax.
You have insurance.
You have whatever your house costs.
You don't have a lot of money left over.
And the government doesn't even have to tell you what they're spending it on.
Like, you probably get less than they do, if you really think about it.
If they get 40% in it, let's just say you don't have tax shelters and all that good stuff.
But if you pay 40% in income taxes and then after all the shit, like after all property tax and state tax and this tax and sales tax, how much did you get?
What did you get?
How much money did you actually get?
I bet the government got more than you got, bitch.
Despite having trillions of dollars in assets and receiving hundreds of billions in federal dollars annually, the department has never detailed its assets and liabilities in a given year.
For the past three financial years, the Defense Department's audit has resulted in a Opinion, meaning the auditor didn't get enough accounting records to form an assessment.
But even then, from a transparency perspective, does it not shake out for us?
Because if we're saying, hey, we're going to spend, I don't know, let's just call it $100 billion on black fund experimental technology to maintain our strategic hegemony.
Yeah.
Do you think that we would all be like, no?
I mean, it's better than not passing a fucking audit where you're like, I don't know where it goes, man.
Look, if Area 51 exists, and now we know it does for sure, it was a real base.
They said it wasn't a base forever, and then during the Obama administration, they had to expand the boundaries because surveillance equipment and binoculars and telescopes were getting better and more sophisticated, and they were filming things that were flying around that shouldn't have been filming.
So they expanded the boundaries.
They had to say that Area 51 existed.
Right, right.
What was that?
Where'd you get the money?
What'd you do?
What are you doing down there?
Why do people say you have UFOs?
What the fuck are you doing?
Why do you have a base in the middle of fucking nowhere that's built into the side of a mountain?
Why are you guys acting like this is an Avengers movie?
So my theory is, like, it all goes back to the Bay of Pigs.
It's all Bay of Pigs.
It's all Cuba.
It's all Bay of Pigs.
And so I'm looking at it from a paramilitary CIA perspective and thinking about it from Alan Dulles, which obviously, like, he's in charge of the Warren Commission after Kennedy fired him.
So I'm giving everybody a kind of a summary explanation.
Yeah, Dulles Airport, which is the Dulles brothers, the single most two powerful fucking people in Washington, even during the Truman administration.
But either way.
So...
What happened, I think, was...
So, Operation Zapata, which is also George H.W. Bush's first oil company that he supposedly left fucking Connecticut and went out after his Yale tenure after World War II, and was like, I'm gonna be an oil guy and start fucking Zapata oil.
Yeah, of course, right?
Even though it's dad's best friend with Alan Dulles.
Operation Zapata, which it turns into the Bay of Pigs, and Kennedy gets read in on this.
He says, yes, let's go.
And then when it comes down to the day, like, I mean, you've built 1,400, let's say, you know, 1,200, 1,300-man force that's a CIA former Cuban exile army.
You've built it, and Alan Dulles has been the main architect behind this.
You've got all these guys, so let's even go back.
These are all OSS World War II guys that...
Let's create a clear delineation between what they're doing and what they think the president is doing.
The president's like, yeah, yeah, he's elected.
Fuck that guy.
We're the agency.
That's the way Alan Dulles actually ran things.
Half the time, he wouldn't even brief the president on what he was doing.
So he puts together this thing, clears it through Eisenhower.
Eisenhower says, yes, let's go take those fucking Cuban commies out.
They put together a 1100 man force.
They've been training on this.
They've got secret bases in Guatemala.
They've got all these paramilitary CIA guys.
They're ready to take the beach.
They're expecting air support because without air support, that changes the entire tactical equation.
Like, if you don't have air support, there's a lot of things you just don't fucking do.
Period.
So, the morning of, Kennedy denies air support for the Bay of Pigs.
So, the morning of.
So these dudes are taking the beach.
These are hardcore, like, CIA-trained paramilitary guys, Cuban exiles, and World War II hardcore regime change combat veteran.
Like, these are the hardest motherfuckers on the planet that we have.
He pulls air support.
He left 1,100 guys on the beach to die, basically.
These guys all get rolled up, so they lost about 60 guys.
2406 is the name of the brigade.
60 guys died.
A thousand plus got put in Cuban prisons.
Now you got an axe grind.
You just pissed off the entire CIA paramilitary organization.
I don't know if I'm the president.
I don't know how I don't end up with a moonroof, to be honest with you.
Like, I just pissed off the guys that are actually in charge of, like, assassination, paramilitary, all of the dirty deeds around the planet.
I fire Alan Dulles for this catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs.
I've got a thousand plus guys that are in prison in Cuba.
I've got the entire former OSS, hardcore anti-communist, anti-Castro organization of the CIA pissed off.
If you don't think they're not going to tee a guy up like some pro, you know, commie Oswald guy in a, you know, in a multi-story building in Dallas, if you don't think you're going to end up with a hole in your head, you're crazy, to be honest with you.
That's the way I'm looking at this.
So they end up getting these guys out, but man, he pissed off a lot.
A super capable guy means opportunity intent.
Means, opportunity, intent.
Which is now, you left me and my buddies on a beach in Cuba.
And you have a collection of people that are thinking this is a zero-sum game.
This is a Cold War.
If you're weak on Russia and you think that the guy's going to bend his, you know, he's going to bend a knee to the bear, you've got a lot of, you've got this confluence of interests where...
Dick Gregory, who is a stand-up, he's a lot more than that, too.
He's an activist, but like a real one.
You know, not in any way some sort of a social value grifter, which I think a lot of people gravitate towards activism because it gives them a chance to be really shitty because they're right.
He was a brilliant guy.
But it was also a guy who, like, was a truth seeker back when it was really hard to get to the truth.
This guy had to acquire a copy of the Zapruder film when In Time Life got a hold of it, apparently, like, right after the assassination.
But it's not if you just go in center mass, but this dude's doing it for a headshot, 140 yards.
And he's probably never shot anybody before.
He's a 20-year-old kid that they just somehow or another Operation MKUltra mindfucked him into shooting at him, or he's on some crazy medication, or China, or who knows?
Anything and everything to save the nation at any point in time.
So you have guys that are baptized in extreme patriotism and their belief is that they are doing things for the best of the nation.
And that if they have an elected official, they can't be trusted.
They can't be trusted.
And these are guys that are...
I went out to Omaha for the 80th.
These are...
It's so interesting for me to think back on this because these are guys that are World War II vets that, like, they saw everybody die.
You know, I mean, the Soviets lost tens of millions of guys in World War II. They were defeating fascism, which is, you know, they were defeating the Nazi Party, you know, the Japanese Army, and they've seen thousands of men die.
And they're serious guys.
They're not lighthearted.
They're not full of love.
These are guys that are baptized in ultraviolence to the point of which this is a zero-sum game and we have everything to lose and nothing to gain by being nice.
And nobody will get in our way to being able to maintain the sovereignty of the nation.
Once again, I'm not justifying it.
I can just get into the mind of them because if I'm jumping into Nazi-occupied France in, you know, 1940X, because a lot of the OSS teams went in there, and I'm watching my friends get fucking mowed down by Nazi machine guns,
and I'm killing Nazis, and I'm moving my way to overthrow Hitler and now I feel like Stalin is the next thing that I have to defeat but the American public just doesn't understand Like, I'm 1945, man.
I have been quite literally baptized in blood, and I'm not going to let it happen.
Now, you think about a high-intellect, type-A-driven, ultra-violent guy that may be semi-coherent based on their copious consumption of alcohol.
They're fucking serious guys and they think that we're going to die in a nuclear holocaust.
Right.
And everything, the means justifies it.
It's a very MacLevelian.
I don't necessarily, once again, I'm not trying to say that like every evil deed is justified.
I'm just saying like, I've seen the beaches of Normandy.
I understand greater than a lot of people with combat and the direct psychological and emotional effects, what it'll do to people.
And I can kind of see myself going like, hey man, if I'm a 26-year-old guy that just went and fought the Nazis and I think that the big bad bear is coming after me, man...
That feeling of the big bad bear coming after us got lifted with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the fall of the Soviet Union.
All that stuff went away.
The fear.
When I was a kid, that fear was everywhere.
You know, I've talked to so many people that are like my age or around my age that remember being a child and being worried about a war with nuclear bombs with Russia.
It was constant.
It was in the air.
When Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table and said, we will bury you.
I watched that video on YouTube just like a month ago, and it's still scary.
The two fucking banging his shoe.
And when he said, we will bury you?
Was that a direct quote or was that propaganda?
That one feels fishy.
I bet that's one where it's like a little bit more slippery than we will bury you.
That was a direct response to when we agreed, we have this mutual agreement between the Soviets and Khrushchev wasn't Khrushchev wasn't actually a Stalinist.
He was making very big reforms in the Soviet Union.
And so he felt betrayed by the U-2 spy missions that were taking place after they shot down the U-2 spy plane in Russia.
And because we lied...
He was like, bang, bang, bang!
And I'm fairly certain that's what that whole thing was about because I think Khrushchev was a man of honor.
Threat widely attributed to Khrushchev in Western press was reported to have been made at a send-off reception to Poland's Gamuka in Moscow, November 1956. According to Time Magazine, Khrushchev was overheard to say at the final reception, For the Polish leader, if you don't like us, don't accept our invitations and don't invite us to come to see you.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.
It's always been fascinating to me because I think about the Russians and how many tens of millions of people they lost in World War II. Yeah.
And I think about...
Very empathetically how they got fucked.
They really did.
You know, I think...
And I'm not saying we did anything bad.
I'm just saying, like, what we did was we delayed the invasion of Normandy and we felt like...
A lot of people think this was that we were trying to soften up the Soviet Union because we felt that they were a follow-on threat in World War II. But...
We delayed the invasion intentionally, essentially, to let a lot of Russians, millions of Russians, essentially die on the Eastern Front.
And...
When you really think about it, when, you know, from, you know, those men, from my context in, you know, combat, from how I think about combat, how I think about death, like, those guys had a significant axe to grind, because they're like, we need fucking help.
We need you to open up the Western front.
I'm not validating Stalin, because once again, I think he's a complete piece of shit.
But, yeah, as a Russian population, knowing that we delayed opening up the Western Front to go and take over, essentially, Hitler, Nazi Europe, because at that point, obviously, it wasn't just one person.
Yeah, we have a significant amount of mistrust with you guys because we lost, you know, 20 million people plus the civilian population.
I mean, some estimates of 30 million fucking people.
And you guys opened up Normandy, came through, and then you're telling everybody that you won.
You're the reason you won World War II and you're not even giving us any validated credit.
They had invaded Japan before we...
We dropped the bomb and the Japanese were just as terrified of the Russians as they were the Americans.
However, I can see from the Russian perspective going, man, we sacrificed millions of people to defeat the Nazis.
And you guys are basically giving us no credit.
So I think back and I'm like, man, 1945, like where these guys were at because they're all about my same age.
We went to combat roughly the same age.
And there were a lot of people that were debating all of these issues back then.
1945, 1946, they were talking about not only Stalin, but Patton was talking about like we need to just keep going.
So I keep thinking about myself and, like, those guys, I think about myself a lot of times, too, where, you know, 20-plus years after the fact, like, this is 1968. Yeah.
This is 1968, man, from our war.
So, from 1945 to 1968, give or take, you think about all these GWAC guys that are being appointed.
It's kind of a cool revolution, but 68 was a very important year in American history.
I think 24 was a really important year in American history.
I think when people look back at history with these great moments of change, I mean, think about how, you know, people look back at the Reagan administration, like when Reagan got elected.
What a landslide.
Like, they look back at those days.
Like, we look back at, like, these historical moments.
But I think this one is crazier than any of them.
This guy gets kicked out.
They try to put him in jail multiple times.
He gets shot at.
He says, fight, fight, fight.
And then he wins.
He wins in a landslide when they were all saying that it was a close race.
And the whole thing is just wild to watch.
It's like, this is nuts.
Like, this show's nuts.
If you're watching this show on TV, like, these writers are fucking amazing!
Whatever they're doing, keep doing this.
This show's crazy.
There's twists and turns.
You got your crazy billionaire character who doesn't even seem real.
Doesn't even seem real.
This guy's making rockets and electric cars.
There's no way.
He buys Twitter because he wants to save free speech.
You might be stupid, and you might have been protected from that stupid by these network shows.
If you want to exist online, and you don't like criticism on Twitter, or you think there's disinformation on Twitter, community notes on Twitter is the greatest fucking thing that's ever been created.
Because people get to look through the community notes and find out, oh, that is bullshit, and here's why it's bullshit.
Or, oh, that actually is true.
Even though it sounds crazy and people are protesting, it's actually true.
That's fun.
That's good.
We learned something.
If you can't handle that, well, you can go wherever.
The new Oculus is fucking cool, and you've got to wonder where that's going to be, because...
When I first tried the very first Oculus, it was kind of cool, but kind of crude in a way.
And with each new version of it, it's much smaller now.
It used to be we had a cable, and the cable was attached to the ceiling on a wire so that you can move back and forth with all these wires connected to you when you have the Oculus.
So you had to be plugged into the computer, actually.
But now you're not.
Now it's just on your head.
And now, it's fucking resolution.
It's pretty goddamn good.
And it's weird.
Like, you do things like you can go to a comedy club, and you sit in the audience, and there's all these other people in there, and there's a comedian on stage.
It's fucking strange.
There's all these little online games you can play with other people, 3D shooters and shit, and you get goggles on, you feel like you're in the game.
It's real weird.
And most people are kind of freaked out by it.
So I don't think it's...
Like, they went with that whole meta thing.
They thought everybody was going to dive into the metaverse.
But I think...
There's this uncanny valley between you put the goggles on and you're in the world and you feel uneasy.
Yeah, I bumped it up because I went to those 125 grain heads, but my bow went from 80 pounds to 84 with the new one, and then it kind of made up a difference.
So the 25 grains, it was basically the same kind of speed as with the last one, which I had a 450 grain arrow.
So there's like a, I think there's probably like a number you shouldn't go below.
I don't know what that number is.
You know, like grains.
Like some people, they'll hunt elk with like a 300 grain arrow and a lot of people are like, don't do that.
Don't do that.
You can get away with it because they're like, well, my daughter shot an elk and it was a pass through and she's got a 50 pound boat.
I have fresh arrows for hunting, but they're the exact same setup for practice.
So that's why I like the sever or something like that, because the severs, you can pin them, and then I can just shoot the shit out of those and then just not use the pin.
That's why I like them, because I can shoot the same exact weight and dimensions, and I know the flight characteristics are going to be the exact same, versus...
They actually have different flight characteristics, because the way that they're put together is not exactly the same, and I believe in the fact that it's like, hey, man, if you got to...
A slight fin on the front, and it's a different fin on the back, even though it's only an inch, you still have to be 100% consistent to maintain the same flight characteristics.
Yeah, that's why when guides get real nerdy about what helix, like what kind of helical you have on the veins, and what kind of twist you put in your veins, and you have to have a single bevel blade that twists for the broadhead in the exact same direction.
Don't get a right twist with left veins, then you'll get all fucked up.
But their idea is that you're trying to get the broadhead to spin through the animal.
There's something to single bevels because of the cut, the way the edge is cut.
So, for people listening, single bevel means the edge angles in on one side.
Double bevel means it comes together as a point.
Right?
So think of a blade, but a blade with only one side that you can, you know, you see like where the steel is ground down to the edge.
The other side doesn't have that.
So the idea is that that creates this angle and that when you're spinning, your arrow is spinning because the helicals of your vein, it goes into the animal's body cavity and the bevel in the broadhead accentuates that spin.
And it continues that spin through the body causing like a whirlwind of trauma Inside the animal and that it, you know, it almost affects, acts as multiple blades because it's kind of spinning around.
It's not just cutting a straight line, it's twisting.
But the question is like how much twist and is it more effective to have like a four blade thing, like a tooth of the arrow, like one that you could, you know, those are...
I think it does a little, because there's a guy named Lusk Archery, and he does these tests on these things, and he actually shoots them into ballistic gel, and you can see them spin.
It's going to do so much more trauma than something that's just a slit blade that, let's say you do hit that rib cage and it does slice and only hit one lung because it deflected off of it and it doesn't spin at all and now you lost the animal.
Right.
Whereas you get a mechanical, it goes in there, it creates this massive fucking hole.
It does all this trauma, going through two and three quarter inches of trauma going to the animal.
The odds of that animal surviving are gone.
If you get them in the body cavity, they're gone.
And I've seen people hit people with really good shots with small broadheads and not do much damage to the point where the animal runs off, they have a hard time blood trailing it.
Even if the animal dies 30 minutes, 60 minutes later, you might have a hard time finding it, especially if you bumped it.
And so I'm just trying to create the data and put it down into...
What works for me, and I don't have any sponsorships, which allows me to be fairly empirical in the way that I'm actually selecting the criteria.
But I also don't have the reps these guys do either, so you have to kind of rely on their data and then collect all of it and then kind of put it in one case, if that makes sense.
But I find that with wind in particular, the balance that I would get from that Equivalizer, I can get from the, I'm using a cutter stabilizer with a 15 inch front bar and a 12 inch back bar.
Yeah, the slight downward thing with when you're pulling back, there's something about the slight downward angle of it that it lets you hold better with the same amount of weight.
I think it's a mindfuck that a lot of people put their head into that you're going to get target panic and that you can't control your emotions during the shot process to the point where you could command trigger.
But that doesn't make any sense to me.
It doesn't make any sense from, like, I can understand the psychological aspect of target panic, but I have a feeling that it comes from two different things.
It comes from buck fever, which is like you're freaking out, you never shot a buck this big before, oh my god, he's right there, and you're like, ah!
But that's an experience thing, and you have to learn what that is, and if you do it a bunch of times, then you get to the point where, like, oh, I know how to control myself.
I know what this is.
And the more often you do it, like, if you can go on a couple of pig hunts and then go on an elk hunt, You're way more in the groove.
You're like right there.
You know what to do.
You know how to do it.
And you could touch the trigger off 100%.
Cam does it every goddamn time.
I think it comes from the target archery community.
Because I think those guys are staring at these fucking little tiny X's from 20 yards and they got to shoot 30 of them in a row.
And I think you get mind fucked.
And that's why those guys have hinges and all these crazy and 40-inch fucking stabilizers and V's that come out the back.
And we were talking about this, that I think the difference between bow hunting and target archery is like the difference between doing free throws and playing basketball.
If I hadn't seen any one of these before, and something comes in and it's got giant pointy things on its head, and I'm trying to be completely blank slate, and I've got this other fuzzy thing that I can't really see its claws and teeth, I'd be like, my god, I'm way more afraid of this thing with swords on its head.
And my uncle, my great uncle, he's like 80 years old, complete crazy person too, taught himself how to fly back in the day.
He came back from World War II. He was a Navy ship guy.
Taught himself how to fly.
He would fly around this Piper Super Cub, and back in the day, you get a bounty for cougar tails.
So he had a walker hound, and he would put him in the front seat of his Piper Super Cub, and he would fly around looking for tracks, land his plane in the middle of fucking nowhere, kick his dog out.
So he'd tell me these stories, and I mean, I hunted with this guy forever.
Pull out his snub-nose 357 like a gangster and reach underneath the logs and start pulling the trigger once he found the right fur between the cougar and his dogs.
I mean, you think about the different groups of people that live these extreme lives, and how many people are at the coffee shop with blue hair that are totally oblivious.
And they think hard work is like, you know, I'm dealing with my trauma, and I'm going to Starbucks today to protest.
This is the difference, is over here, you think this is...
One, it tastes different.
Two, there's a definitive meaning you're associating with it.
So there's no way that you can tell me that there's not a psychological nutrient connection between those two where it makes something more meaningful and beneficial specifically for you.
There's just no way you can tell me that it's not better.
You know, we both had our trials and tribulations elk bow hunting, and it's so difficult to do that the people that do it well, the people that are successful, you know how hard it is to do.
You're like, God damn, you pulled it off.
Hunting elk with a bow in the wild is a real thing.
The problem with the public land thing is the public.
This fucking...
I have so many friends that have terrible stories about guys winding elk on purpose, blowing elk out.
They're all competing against the same packs of elk or the same groups of hunters are competing against the same elk groups.
It's crazy.
These herds of animals are getting winded on two and three sides because people are moving in trying to get them.
Right.
The ideal situation would be that...
I think the ideal situation would be...
You know they're trying to do that American...
What is it called?
The American Serengeti Project?
They're trying to rewild a whole section of the country.
They're buying up land and they want to bring back buffalo and bring back all these animals.
If everybody, at one time in their life, Could have some sort of a hunt where someone shows them how to do it, someone takes them out, they get an animal and they cook and eat that animal.
If you're a meat eater, I think at one time in your life you should try to do that.
I think that may be the solution for people to understand what it's all about.
Just one time in your life.
Or even go with someone when they're doing it.
One time.
Just know what that's like.
It ignites a little part of your DNA that you didn't even know was in there.
There's like a little part of us that for tens of thousands of years, the only way we survived is hunting.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of years just baked into our DNA. And when you're in there and you're in those woods and you got that rangefinder and that elk is 52 yards away and you see him walking through the bushes and you know you got a window.
And there's like a part of your DNA that just goes, yeah, this is what we're doing.
This is what we're doing now.
Lock in.
Lock in.
Get the animal.
Bring it back.
There's like some crazy, like ancient primal code.
And I tell people it's the same thing when you catch a fish.
When you catch a fish, it's like, oh, oh, oh.
This excitement that you catch a fish, that's built into your code because now you're going to live.
You're going to live.
You got food for your family.
It's in there, a human reward system.
And that's how we're supposed to get food.
We're supposed to appreciate the food because it's hard to get.
That's what it's supposed to be.
unidentified
It's not supposed to be going to the supermarket and look, the ground beef is $5 a pound and fucking...
How can you think that this is a better way where you're caging an animal, filling it full of hormones and supplemental nutrition and corn and all these things, and then you're putting a bolt through its head?
It's also one of those things that, like, if you haven't experienced it, you really don't understand it.
And when you're trying to explain it to people, they're looking at it from, like, the cartoon Disney version of Hunters and the movie version of Hunters where they're all cocksuckers.
Dude, we should wrap this up because we've got to go meet Cam for dinner.