Chadd Wright, a Navy SEAL and hospice observer, shares his near-death spiritual awakening after reading Matthew’s gospel—his pornography cravings vanished instantly, replaced by remorse. He recounts haunting "death reaches" and demonic barrack experiences in Nigeria, where olive oil prayers silenced terror. Wright dismisses commercialized Christianity but insists faith is a divine gift, not logic, comparing it to the Shroud of Turin’s unexplained 2,000-year-old image. Rogan contrasts biblical claims with science’s acceptance of the Big Bang, suggesting faith bridges unexplainable truths. Both agree adversity—like SEAL training or ultra-running—builds resilience, while fame risks distorting reality without humility. Wright’s YouTube channel, 3of7project, offers raw training insights, proving his authenticity beyond words. [Automatically generated summary]
And then it's gotten so far that like to turn it around and try to feed all the people that we have established here in this country in places where nobody's growing food, it's like it's almost impossible.
It's almost like they're stuck with this system of industrialized farming.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's being here in Austin, you know, I don't go to the city much.
I live on 700 acres in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
And I come here to the city and, you know, you see the result of packing so many human beings into one area.
Yeah, how are you going to feed them people?
Other than the way that we figured out how to do it.
I mean, how are you going to feed them?
I don't know, man.
Walking around the city, man, it's just coming from where I live, and don't take this as negative.
I mean, people love cities.
There's cool stuff in cities, right?
Like, people get a lot.
But me, when I come from where I live, you know, dude, I'm in the woods every day for hours and hours.
I don't go to town hardly ever.
I'm a squirrel hunter.
I have a little mountain cur.
You know, we go out and squirrel hunt for hours every day.
But coming to the city, it's like the air burns my nose.
It's like I've been coughing all day today.
You really notice it?
I notice, I can smell it.
It smells.
Now we're staying right in downtown.
The smell reminds me slightly of Lagos, Nigeria, which it's 100X in Lagos.
It literally burns your eyes and your nose to breathe the air there.
But even in Austin, I can kind of smell this sour, you know, and then I'm looking at these poor people, man, like these people laying on these park benches and all this stuff.
And I'm like, it just makes you think, it makes you wonder the human's propensity to stoop lower than an animal.
Like we have the propensity as human to stoop lower than an animal.
I tell people all the time, if you ever have the opportunity to go and see someone who is the best in the world at what they do, take that opportunity.
Whether it's a runner, a fighter, a kayaker, or a podcaster.
Like, it's so cool to be here and to get to witness what you do, how you do it, the level that you go to to make all this happen.
You're the best in the world.
Like, that's it.
That's so cool for me, man.
Like, if we don't talk here, but for 30 minutes, I got to see the best in the world do what he does.
And you were talking about like have a truck that will fucking, like, no matter what, will work.
Like, if they throw EMP pulses in the air and kill all the electronics, which is people don't understand.
Like every car everyone is driving has a fucking computer in it.
And if something goes on, there's some sort of a power grid failure or some sort of a solar flare that knocks out electronics, it could knock out your fucking car.
You have a brick now.
It's not going to work.
If you don't have a carburetor and you have a car, like a regular old school car, it's not going to work.
You know, Tucker Carlson, he drives like a 1978 pickup truck.
And like I said, my favorite part about driving the Land Cruiser is that it makes people smile.
I'm not a very funny guy, you know, so there's not many, I don't get many opportunities to make human beings smile, but I can drive this Land Cruiser and people look at it and point at it, and they're smiling.
I'm blessed enough in life now that I can eat ribeye steak.
I give away a lot of squirrel.
I don't kill all the squirrels that we tree either.
Really, since a young age, I was introduced to hunting with dogs, tree dogs specifically.
And there was something about a tree dog that just stirred this passion within me.
It is the only thing that has stuck with me from childhood, young childhood.
The first tree dog I ever walked to, I mean, I was, I didn't even know, I probably shouldn't even have been in the woods, but I followed my uncle to a coonhound tree down in a swamp.
And it just, even at that age, it just stirred something in me like, this is some sort of primal instinct of partnering with this dog in this chase.
And I've done it even up until now.
And it's just, it's a unique experience, man.
And the great thing about dogs, hunting dogs too, is the breeding aspect of it.
That's a lot of fun.
So not only do you have your best friend, you know, my little mountain cur, her name's Wendy.
She stays in the house.
She's my best friend.
We hunt every day together.
But now I get to breed her.
I get to select a mate.
And over the course, I'm hoping over the course of the next 30 years or so, I can breed in these specific characteristics of this type of dog that I value.
And so that's fun, you know.
Not only is the hunting fun, but the breeding is fun.
The training is fun.
Everything about it is fun.
And you take a group of guys out squirrel hunting, man, and it's a blast because you don't have to be quiet.
Look, man, you're just, you're out there in the woods on four-wheelers.
Everybody's got shotguns.
You know, you get to the tree.
Here's this dog just hammering a treat on this tree.
Everybody surrounds the tree and that squirrel gets nervous and he starts timbering out, going tree to tree.
And you got five or six guys with shotguns blasting away and everybody's cutting up and laughing.
So they partnered with an outfitter called G3 Outfitters, and they bought a tag, and for some odd reason, they selected me as their veteran that they want to take out on an elk hunt.
Now, I've always wanted the elk hunt, man.
I've just, you know, I've just never made it happen.
There's a lot that goes into it, as you know.
And so they're taking me to New Mexico.
They bought some tag from a landowner, and they're going to take me out there elk hunting.
There's a guy who explained this to me, that there's really two different, besides like Tule elk and Roosevelt elk, there's Rocky Mountain elk and then there's Yellowstone elk.
And the Yellowstone elk are an older breed that has a larger antlers, a bigger animal.
And you find a lot of those in Arizona and you find a lot of those in New Mexico.
It's most effective, most efficient way to hunt, but there's something about having to get inside, you know, 70, 80 yards, sneaking up, executing a perfect shot.
My wife, a couple years ago, bought me that RX-7 with the carbon fiber riser.
I always wanted a bow with a carbon riser because I remember hunting so many hunts in the southeast, whitetail hunts, walking into the stand and your hand just getting so cold.
And those parallel limbs and they're so short and compact.
You know, the old bows we used to shoot back in the day, the old Vipertex and all that from Hoyt and Matthews had the old SQ2s and Q2s and they were just long and unwieldy in the stand.
And, you know, you can make, like you said, 100-yard shots now with a compound bow.
Back then, I mean, there wasn't nobody shooting them bows at 100 yards.
But if I would have just laid there with that longbow and been patient and waited for him to stand up off his bed, I could have drew and shot him right there.
It's one of the things with those animals, like you're sometimes better off taking a long shot than a close shot because they hear that bow go off and they just duck and go.
I mean, they're not trying to duck under your arrow.
What they're trying to do is load up Their weapons or load up their legs rather get super low so they can launch themselves forward and get on.
They're just trying to take off as quickly as possible, and that means dropping down.
And when they drop down, arrows go right over them.
But this one was so fast within 10 yards, he was nowhere near the arrow.
His ass was over here.
The vitals where I aimed for was right here.
He was already over there.
He was two feet away from it, and he didn't start moving until that arrow was 10 yards away from it.
And these animals are, you'll like, you'll sit on the top of a hill and look down on a field and you might see 600 Axis deer wandering around this field.
It's a great, if you have a rifle, it's a no-brainer.
It's like you're 100% going to get a deer.
But if you've got a bow, I mean, I went out there with Cam Haynes and Remy Warren and Adam Greentry and all these just like bona fide killers who like world-class hunters.
There's a place in Virginia called the Great Dismal Swamp.
It's about 110,000 acre continuous block of land.
That's what's left of it.
It's eat up with bears.
I mean, I would take my coon dog down the swamp bottom.
We called it the run.
And during springtime, when them bears were out with cubs, I couldn't even hardly run my coon dog up and down through there.
There were so many bears in there.
And them sows would get, they would get, you know, mad at us for being in there and start popping their teeth and making racket.
I took a young man with me down in there one time, first time he ever been coon hunting.
I was hunting a dog called a leopard cur.
And I cut that dog loose in there and he went down in there, oh, boom, slam, treed.
I thought, all right, this is good, because coon hunting can be rough.
We walked down in there and I had this young guy with me.
He had the rifle.
We got up to the tree and I walk up to that dog and leash it up.
And I'm fooling with the dog, getting it leashed back on the tree there.
And he said, what is that?
I said, what are you talking about?
He said, stop and listen.
And I stopped and that dog quit barking for a second.
And all of a sudden, I could hear bark raining down on the leaves above my head because it was summertime.
About that time, about a 300-pound black bear comes sliding down out of that tree like it was on a fireman's pole.
Landed, I'm talking about that junker landed right in the midst of me, him, and the dog.
And he's standing there.
He's just frozen because he'd never been coon hunting before.
He's got the gun.
He's just frozen.
And about the time that bear hit the ground, I snapped the leash off of that dog because the dog was my only chance to run this bear out of our vicinity.
And these cur dogs are real gritty.
They won't back up.
I mean, they won't back up from nothing.
They're like a game cock, man.
And that dog tore out after that bear, ran him out.
I looked over at that boy.
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I said, were you just going to, you've got the gun.
You know, if you get them and they've been eating like a dead moose and, you know, they've been feasting on that for a couple weeks, and then it's rotten, and they just, they stink, and it's not good.
My friend Jesse, who owns this restaurant out here called Dai Douay, what is Jesse?
He runs a school that teaches people how to shoot hogs, how to butcher them, how to cook them.
And, you know, he likes old, ruddy, old hogs, and he really knows how to do it correctly.
So this is it.
This is a new school of traditional cookery.
So Jesse will take people and he'll take them out there, teach them how to hunt, teach them everything about it, how to stalk an animal, how to dress the game, how to cook it and prepare it, and what the cuts you're looking for.
Like, I don't know, man, it just gives me the daggone chills thinking about it.
And the crazy thing is, is the type of person I used to be, I would have thought, you know, going and sitting with someone who's dying is a waste of time.
Like, I got other things to do, right?
You do, too.
We got busy lives.
Well, This man, he mentored me hunting and everything, working, all that.
His name was Don Tidwell from the time I was about 13 to the time I left to go become a Navy SEAL.
Well, I did my whole Navy thing.
I got out, I reconnected with Don for a while, but then I started this company now that we have 3 of 7 Project, got busy.
I have a curse from my military service.
I have this unique ability to be able to forget you ever existed.
When I get on some sort of mission and you're not part of that anymore, I can forget you ever existed.
And so I lost touch with him because of my own selfishness and been doing this thing for the last four or five years.
Well, his wife called me and said, look, he just wants to see you one more time.
He's got pancreatic cancer.
He's got maybe two weeks left.
He just wants to see you one more time.
Good night, man.
Took a lot of courage for me to go show up in front of him and sit down with him and say, Mr. Don, I'm sorry I haven't been the friend to you that you deserve.
Will you forgive me?
He's laying there dying.
He looks back at me and says, son, there's nothing to forgive.
I mean, just like.
And then from that point, I'd go sit with him twice a week for eight or nine or ten hours, just sit right there by his bed.
I'd read the scriptures to him.
He only had a third grade education.
We read about the gospel and we read about the resurrection and we read about creation.
And, you know, we don't, the first thing that you learn, I think, when you sit with somebody that's dying is that death is the great foe that sits above mankind and scoffs at our wisdom.
You get what I'm saying?
He said that death is this great foe.
It is the enemy that sits above us and mocks the wisdom of man.
Mr. Don had built basically an empire within the community he lived in.
He had made millions and millions of dollars as an entrepreneur, couldn't read or write.
But he still had to succumb to this process that's coming for all of us.
Like, I don't know, man, that was like, that just hit me.
Like, we think, we want to look up at the sky and we want to explain how the cosmos began and we can't even solve our own biggest problem.
At the very least, what it does is improves your performance radically as an older person.
Improves your physical performance.
What people would be capable of naturally with no supplements 20, 30 years ago.
It's a very different world today.
Very, very, very different.
And with all the different modalities, all the different things you could do, like hyperbaric treatments, NMN, supplementation, red light therapy, cold plunge, sauna, all these different things radically change the composition of your body and your overall metabolic health.
Radically changes it.
And then with hormone therapy and all the other different things that you can do, I mean, it's just because of science and because of people figuring these things out, it's a radically different world than it was in the past.
He's a guy from Harvard that we've had on the podcast a few times.
That's his primary study.
They're treating aging as a disease and trying to figure out what different types of medication, what different types of therapies, what's the root cause of the cells aging and not reproducing correctly.
But yeah, man, just sitting with him makes me contemplate these things.
And for me, obviously, because of my worldview being shaped by Scripture, it makes me go to Scripture and bounce these questions off of the scriptures, you know.
And even I think it was powerful too because, you know, I'm sitting with a man who's important to me, who is bearing this burden of death.
And by the way, he bore it well.
It was amazing to me that I could go and sit with him and he would talk to me and take time to spend with me even in the midst of this terrible process that he was going through.
I told him, I said, you could have just laid there on this bed and not said a word to anybody and nobody would have blamed you.
You know, it's scary.
He couldn't sit still, you know, because he was in so much pain.
But then, you know, he had these same questions that I'm thinking, like, why does this have to happen?
You know, and then for me then to have to go and search the scriptures and then come to him with the scriptures and share the scriptures with him to, you know, give him some of the answers that he had.
You know, it's like I would read a scripture to him and he would say, because again, Mr. Don had a strong faith in the message of what we call the gospel, but he didn't know all the other stuff because he couldn't read.
So I would read a scripture to him and then he would say, read another one.
Read another one.
And it was the wildest thing, dude.
I've never seen anything like it before.
I've been following the Lord Jesus for 13 years now.
I was reading these words off of the page, not even explaining them to him.
I was just reading him these scriptures.
And they were manifesting like power in him.
Like you could see, you witnessed a change in his expression and his attitude.
It was like these words I'm reading are manifesting power and hope and like literal energy.
Like I would come over and read the scriptures to him and he would been in bed for the last four days, wouldn't get up for anybody.
I'd read the scriptures to him and then next thing you know, we'd be out on the porch.
Like he'd get out of bed and we'd go walk out on the porch.
I'd have to help him walk, right?
And his wife kept saying, you're the best thing for him right now.
I'm like, no, you don't understand.
It's not my presence for somehow I'm reading him from these scriptures and it's like manifesting some sort of power and hope in him.
And it like would give him energy in some way.
And I can't explain, I've never seen it happen like I've never witnessed that before, you know?
And I would read these scriptures to him, Joe, and he would say, yeah, I understand that now.
And like, we're reading complex things.
Like, we're reading about the resurrection, like the bodily resurrection of all the saints at the second coming of Christ.
And, you know, he asked me one of the questions he asked me, has anybody ever really explained to you what happens when we leave here?
You know, because he's wondering these things.
Like, I'm about to depart this tent, buddy.
What's about to happen?
And I'm like, well, the only answer I can give you, Mr. Dunn, has got to come from these scriptures.
And I would read these complex scriptures to him, 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
And he would under, like it would make sense to him in his mind more than my mind could comprehend the truth of what I was reading.
Like that was what was wild.
This veil between this realm and the next realm was getting thin.
And he was taking in the truth of this word and processing it logically at a level that I can't process it because this veil for us is still so thin unless you hit that DMT, right?
Like when I'd sit with him, like every couple hours, I'd get up and go check in with his wife or something.
And we had a camera in the room with him.
And we could watch what he was doing.
And when I would walk out of the room, you give it a few minutes and you would see him start to look above him.
And he would be reaching like this for stuff above him.
And like, we didn't know what he was doing.
We never even asked him.
I wish I would have asked him, like, Mr. Don, what are you seeing?
Like, what are you reaching for?
Well, then back when I would come back in the room with him, he would stop doing it.
And then toward the end there, he had a stroke.
He was paralyzed.
His whole left side of his body was paralyzed.
And so he was just, you know, he couldn't sit up or do anything.
And then finally, at the very end, when he passed away, he literally sits up out of, he sits up erect out of his hospital bed, reaches both of his hands straight up like this, and then lays back down and departs the tent.
I don't think, I don't know what her, you know, how her worldview is in terms of what happens after this, but she's just sitting here showing you saying, hey, this happens.
We can't figure out why.
We can't figure out what's going on.
Obviously, for me, when I see that happening, when Mr. Don sits up in the bed, even though he's literally paralyzed by a stroke, he sits, it's an impossibility.
He sits up in his bed and reaches both hands in the air and then lays down and departs the tent.
What do I, I have to believe that like his transportation had arrived.
And the thing is, people have this arrogant assumption, and this is a lot of based on academics and science and this belief that we have all the answers to reality when we don't even really understand consciousness.
We don't.
Consciousness is a massive mystery.
So this idea that we've got it solved, and when I hear people say, when you die, that's it.
It's over.
Like, how do you know?
You're just saying this.
You're just saying this.
That is as much of a belief system as any religion.
This belief in something that you have no evidence of whatsoever.
But there's so many anecdotal stories of people with near-death experiences, including Sebastian Younger.
And just an amazing, interesting, very, very intelligent guy.
And the last time he was on the podcast, he was telling us a story about he had a medical emergency, some sort of, it was like an artery burst, right, Jamie?
Something inside of his abdomen, and he was bleeding out on the inside, and he was dying.
And he got to the hospital and had this near-death experience, that like very, very vivid experience, interacting with his father, like just beyond anything that he would have ever comprehended, and came back with a completely different perspective on life and death and like what this is and where that there is something else.
There's something out there.
And people that have had near-death experiences or died and been resuscitated, they come back with the same fucking story over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
There's different interpretations of what they're seeing, but it all fits within the same framework.
It all fits within a framework that this is, there's something there.
And I don't even need all these signs and wonders.
Like, I don't even need all that, man.
I mean, it's great when you get the opportunity to witness things like I got to witness with my friend, Mr. Dawn, and just see his faith and see that the word manifest power in him.
Like, it's great when you get to see it, but you can get too carried away with all that stuff, too.
You know what I mean?
It's like, I don't know, man.
You know, I'm wondering, Joe, if the Almighty ain't calling you.
I think a lot of people are wondering what the Almighty is doing, what he's working in you.
See, Scripture is dripping with something that's called election.
A lot of people get mad about me talking about this, but this truth that we will never choose God, the Almighty.
We will never choose to believe.
As a matter of fact, scripture actually says over and over again, the whole message of the cross is foolishness.
It's foolishness.
I mean, seriously?
Some dude died on a cross.
What does that represent to man?
That represents weakness.
That represents defeat.
That represents death.
You're gone.
The message of the cross is foolishness to man.
We will never choose to believe in the message of what we call the gospel.
That is that Jesus Christ died on the cross according to the scriptures.
He was buried and that he rose again by his own power according to the scriptures.
That's foolishness.
And the only way that we can or will ever believe that, like truly place our faith in that and everything that's contained in that statement right there, because there's a lot there, you could literally spend the rest of your life meditating on that right there, the gospel, the what was done on the cross and by way of the resurrection of Christ.
You would never get to the end of it.
You would never comprehend everything.
You would never search it to its bottom.
You will never believe that.
And the only way that you can believe that is if the Almighty, in His grace, basically makes you alive spiritually.
Because these things are spiritually discerned.
They're not logically discerned.
They're foolishness to man.
These things must be spiritually appraised.
And so the Almighty, by his grace, makes you alive, literally spiritually alive, so that then you can discern the truth of not only the gospel, but everything, the totality of what is contained in Scripture.
It's called the doctrine of election.
And so when I say, I wonder if the Almighty's calling you, what I mean is I wonder if you are one of the Almighty's elect.
Like, I literally, on your behalf, I begged the Almighty to basically make you alive spiritually so that you could have discernment and be able to appraise these things that are in scripture that have seemed like foolishness for so long to you.
You know what?
They seem like foolishness to me for a long, long time, dude.
Can I take you back while we're in the middle of this?
I'd like to take you back to how you got on this journey of being a podcaster and then to that.
Because I want to know, like, what is the transition from the seals to becoming this guy who's very outspoken on YouTube and starts putting these videos out and things get interesting?
And then you very, very religious and spreading that in your YouTube as well.
Like, how did this whole journey get started for you?
Well, I decided I wanted to become a SEAL because I wasn't really good at anything else in life and I, you know, didn't want to go back to school and all that stuff.
That's a whole long story, but I decided I wanted to do that.
I finally, I went to join the Navy.
They disqualified me, sent me back home after boot camp, wouldn't let me go to Buds, told me I never would be able to become a SEAL because I had a pericardial cyst on my heart, seven centimeter cyst on my heart.
You can look it up, Research Navy SEAL Paracardial Cyst.
You can read the whole medical journal.
I'm the only one.
Came back home, paid for my own heart surgery as a civilian, showed back up in the Navy less than a year later, made it all the way through SEAL training unscathed.
Made it through SEAL training, all this and that good stuff.
I had a very colorful career.
Started off real good.
Got real bad.
I mean, I've been through it all.
I've been in SEAL training at the end of our Bud's prep phase.
You know, I was awarded the Hard Charger Award.
You know, everybody selected me.
The instructor Cadre said, you're the one that's going to make it.
I was actually the only one to ever receive that award to make it through that training pipeline.
Everyone else they had selected up until that point all quit.
But they selected me not based on my physical abilities, but based on the fact that I had had a dang heart surgery just to have a chance to toe the line to try something that everybody quits anyways.
After that heart surgery, when I went in the first time, I could barely pass the physical standards test that I needed to pass to get the SEAL contract.
If I would have went straight through and wouldn't have had that heart surgery, there's no way I would have made it.
I wouldn't have been able to meet the physical standards once I actually got to Buds.
There's no way.
But when I had that heart surgery, and then I finally got to where I could, you know, okay, man, at that point, I wanted it so bad because I had to go through all that.
You see what I'm saying?
I didn't want it that bad until I had to go through all that pain and fear and have my chest cut open and all this crap.
But man, when I came out the other end of that, like I said, man, I was like a game rooster, man.
It was like you look into the eye of a game rooster and he's got one burning hot desire.
It's to fight.
I mean, you a man appreciates combat sports.
You ought to go watch a cockfight one day.
I mean, just, that's what I had.
I just had this burning hot desire for this thing.
Nothing was going to stop me.
Made it all the way through.
Man, I had a lot of ups and downs in my time in the teams.
So I get back in the platoon, get ready, deploy again.
I'm keeping my wickedness under control, you know, outwardly, but it's still all there, man.
Well, we go up to Tunisia, North Africa.
The Arabs attacked the embassy up there when all that Benghazi and that stuff went down.
That happened all over North Africa.
So we went up there, re-secured the embassy.
We came back, we left there and came back to Germany to rejock our equipment because that mission was over in Tunisia.
Came back to Germany to rejock and then we were going out to Nigeria.
And while we were in Germany, the only way for me to tell you this in just simple terms is we were staying in a barracks that was inhabited by some sort of demon.
And that was the genesis of my conversion, of me being made aware that, okay.
There were me and a guy in one room and two other guys in a room across the hall there.
Okay.
Well, I'm laying in bed and all of a sudden I'm jolted awake by something that hits my door.
And I lay in bed for maybe 30 seconds and while I'm laying there listening, I can hear some strange voices echoing up and down the hall of this building that we're in.
And so immediately I get up, open the door, walk out.
Nobody's out there.
Walk around.
Nobody's in the building.
Go in my buddy's room beside me.
They're both passed out.
But it scared me, dude.
I was like, what on earth is this?
It scared me.
And these things, these things would, like the oven would be turned on, like these bumps and noises.
But more than all of that, there became this oppressive feeling of like evil in this place.
And the guys that I were with, that I was with in there, they started getting freaked out about it too.
We called our senior chief, who had been staying there before us.
It was just like an old empty place that guys would come and stay in for a few nights before they left out.
We called our senior chief.
We're like, hey man, did you have any strange experiences in this place?
He was like, oh yeah.
Yeah, there's something in there.
And so, but like I remember walking into this place and there was a stairwell.
I would walk up the first flight of stairs and then there would be a second flight that cut back and there was like a landing up there because we were staying on the second deck.
And like I would, you know as a hunter, like how you have that sense when something is like staring at you.
Like you would, I would feel this thing staring at me up there on that landing and I would fully expect to turn around and see some sort of something up there.
And I never saw it in physical form.
We started doing this research online about, you know, looking at these forms and stuff about this place that we were, you know, in and finding all kinds of other stuff about it.
I'm like, well, whatever is going on here, I can't sleep at night.
Like, I don't want to be in that place because it's literally scaring me that bad.
And the sanity check was the dudes I was with were getting freaked out too.
And like, I wish I would have talked to them and written down the things that they were specifically experiencing.
It was just literally a dab of all of, I don't even know where that fits into the whole experience.
I don't even know where or how that fits in.
I don't even know what this thing was or why this thing would have been attached to a place.
I don't understand that, man.
And again, I'm not big on this whole spiritual warfare thing.
But after that happened, all that happened, no more nothing in this place, I said, I have got to get my hands on scripture and figure out more about this figure, Jesus, who I heard this man praying in the name of, right?
Because obviously there was some power being wielded there by the name of Jesus in prayer.
And so I did.
I got my hands on a Bible.
I started reading in the book of Matthew.
I began, again, through this, this was obviously the experience that the Almighty had chosen to call me out of darkness into the marvelous light of his truth.
Open the Bible.
I had seen the Bible before.
I had heard it read.
I had even read it before in the past, but it was never anything that meant anything.
I couldn't understand it.
You know what I mean?
Like, what the crap is this trying to say to me here?
I began to read in the book of Matthew, and I began to, well, for the first time in my life, I realized how all of that applied to me as the hopeless, wicked, ugly, depraved human being that I like my mind was awakened to my own state.
I didn't realize how ugly and depraved I was.
Like when I passed up on my friend and he killed himself, like I didn't think nothing of that.
I just had this revelation of who I was and why I so needed something to save me from that.
And when I had that revelation, literally by the grace of God opening my, making me spiritually alive, able to discern the scriptures, when I had that revelation, I read about Jesus, his life, his death, why he died according to the scriptures, his resurrection, what that means for me.
I, it changed everything.
Like literally, I was made a new creature overnight.
It's the greatest miracle that God the Almighty could ever work is taking somebody like me who was literally so useless, making me alive, making me a brand new creature, waking up the next day and being
completely changed in how I see the world, how I see myself, how I see the words on these pages, how I see the creator of the cosmos.
That's a miracle.
Like nothing else that I have experienced in life produced that amount of change nearly instantaneously.
And I'll never forget walking down into the little platoon hut like the next day after having this revelation of the gospel and what it means for me and who I am.
But what I realize is that if I could possibly depart from this faith that I have in the Almighty, if I could possibly even depart from that faith, what would I have?
This is the fascinating aspect of this that an atheist needs to take into consideration.
What you're talking about had a real result.
This belief in faith.
faith has had a real transformative result on you as a human being now if there was nothing to this if this is all nonsense and there was a method that you could use just some sort of a way of viewing the world that would instantaneously change the way you see yourself and see Everything.
Wouldn't that method be explored and wouldn't that be taught?
Like, if this is the thing that brought you to who you are now, that's a real thing.
Regardless of whether or not anybody wants to believe in Jesus Christ or believe in the resurrection or believe in the gospels, it works.
Like this, that's the thing about Christians, like real Christians, and I've been very fortunate to meet a bunch of them.
I had a weird journey in religion myself because I went to Catholic school when I was in first grade and it kind of ruined me.
They were horrible.
This nun, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember anybody from when I was six years old, but I remember that bitch.
She was so fucking mean, man.
And just the experience, the way they treated children, it was so fear-based.
You have the problem with it going from ancient Hebrew to Latin and Greek and to all these different languages.
And then you have the problem with spiritual narcissism.
So you have the people that are the conveyors of the message who take on these powers themselves that are above normal men and control people by, you know, before Martin Luther came around and made a phonetic version of the Bible, very few people could read and very few people could read Latin.
They didn't know what it said.
So you had to rely on the priest to tell you everything.
When people started being able to translate these things into different languages, it's wonderful, but also something's probably missing.
You know, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a scholar.
He's the guy who wrote that book, DMT, the Spirit Molecule.
He did these slow drip studies, these FDA-approved studies on DMT with people, with patients.
I think they were trying, they were writing something down.
One of the things that I learned from Wes Huff, Wesley Huff, who's a biblical scholar who's been on the podcast, he told me that the book of Isaiah, when they find it, they found a version of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls that is identical word to word for a version of it that they found a thousand years later.
Not only that, but what about the content of Isaiah?
What about Isaiah 53 as it describes the suffering servant, how it literally outlines the life and death of Jesus Christ, and it was written, what, 400 years before the crucifixion?
Like even the content of Isaiah, not only the accuracy of the translation and the accuracy over that span of time when you compare copies, but even the content of it.
How did this prophet write this thing about this person?
And it was fulfilled perfectly, literally to a T by the person of Jesus Christ hundreds of years later.
Oh, it's crazy.
So, and by the way, man, like, I'm not telling you or anyone listening to this, what we call testimony, like what the Lord's given me experientially in life to share with other people.
I'm not telling you this to convince you of anything.
Like, there's nothing that I can say to convince you in the truth of the gospel.
Like, I truly believe that.
There's no words that I can use.
There's no logic that I can apply.
There's nothing that I or anyone else can say to convince you of this.
And it goes back to what we started off in the conversation with of these things must be spiritually discerned.
And it is by grace, God's grace, that we are made alive and able to discern the truth of these things.
That's a hard thing to accept, man.
Like, that man is totally depraved.
And I can't say anything to convince anyone of the truth of these scriptures.
But the scriptures are dripping, literally dripping with that very fact.
That's the interesting thing about the scriptures.
They leave nothing for man.
Like, it's almost the single thing that separates what's contained in the Holy Scriptures from other religious philosophy.
We, God's people, the whole purpose of our existence is for us to be presented to Jesus Christ as his own people who will glorify him for all of eternity.
It's to glorify the Son.
The whole saga that was determined by the sovereign and immutable will of the Father, it can be changed.
The whole saga, the only purpose of it all is to present this, I can't say this word real well, peculiar, peculiar people to the Son as a bride, an offering, to glorify the Son for all of eternity.
The whole saga is to lift up and glorify Jesus Christ.
You are entered by what Scripture calls the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of God who comes and dwells in you.
And that is the entity that makes you spiritually alive and gives you the ability to appraise the Scripture's essentially spiritual things because before that it's foolishness.
Well, they used to dismiss it because they used to say they did a carbon date on it and it was only 500 years old.
But they've since made some revisions to that.
There's a lot of people that believe because of the wear of the cloth, the age of the cloth, and I think they've done subsequent tests that place it around 2,000 years old, which is really fascinating.
The other thing that's fascinating is they didn't even know what the image completely was until someone took photographs of it and then looked at the negatives.
And in the negatives, then you get this image of Jesus.
Not just Jesus, but with the scars and the markings on his back, the part of his body where he's pierced, the piercings on the wrists.
And they really do believe that this thing is 2,000 years old.
And the other thing that's strange is they have no explanation as to how that image was created.
They think that image was created somehow from some sort of a burst of energy.
It's not stained, it's not dyed, and it's not something that's easily reproduced, especially if you think about the timeline.
If this is supposedly a forgery, like, how would they make an image that would only show up in a negative?
And what would be the motivation to fake this in this manner?
See if you can get some photos of what it looks like, Jamie.
You know what's interesting to me about the body of Christ, the physical body, like is being transposed onto that shroud, whether it's real or not.
Have you ever thought about this?
If you think about going back to talking about death and why do we have to die?
Why is it a necessity for all humans?
Well, the scripture tells us that for human, the reason that we must die is because of sin, right?
That started with the very first sin of man and woman in the very beginning, right?
Because scripture tells us that man was created to exist eternally in the beginning, the human physical form.
But when man sinned, a lot of things happened.
Death, that's the moment, scripturally, that's when death entered the equation.
So this sin is a big problem.
Like that is the genesis of death entering the equation and becoming a reality for all men.
I wonder a lot what happened when that sin caused death in man.
It's almost like it changed man's genetic makeup.
It's almost like man was created in the beginning to exist in a physical body eternally, meaning he had perfect genetics, right?
He could exist, nothing decayed.
He could continue on for all eternity.
He also had the ability to be in the presence of the Almighty.
In some way, the human brain could interact with the Almighty.
But when sin entered the equation, it's almost like man's genetic code was marred and death entered the equation and we began to age.
And it even, when I think about it along those lines, it's totally theoretical, by the way.
That's how we inherit our sinful nature is because the result of sin actually changed the genetic makeup of man's physical body.
And therefore, by necessity, he now has to die because he ages.
And also, we lost our ability to perceive the Almighty and to actually converse with him.
We lost something in our brain.
That's why I wonder about that DMT stuff.
We lost something in our brain that originally allowed us to see into this other realm and converse with this almighty being.
We lost the ability to do that because of sin.
Which brings me to the body of Christ.
The interesting thing about the body, physical body of Jesus Christ, he was the only man, according to Scripture, who ever fulfilled the law of God completely and perfectly, which means his physical body, his literal physical body, was not affected by sin, which is the thing that is causing all of us to die by necessity.
And I just wonder if that physical body, if the body of Christ, if Christ would have grown to maturity, which he did, which went about when he started his ministry, was full adult maturity, I wonder if he would not have been crucified,
if he could have lived in that physical body forever, if the aging process would have stopped and he would have never had to die because the effects of sin were not upon him.
The curse was not upon him.
And it makes me think about that body because They took his body off the cross, laid it in the tomb.
When we die, our bodies begin to go through decay very quickly.
You've seen that, killing animals.
You kill something within a few hours.
It starts to get kind of blowed up, stiff as a board.
After about a day, it stinks, all nasty.
He died.
They put him in that tomb.
He was there for three days.
That body didn't decay.
The spirit then re-entered that same body.
And that body, that same body, rose up and eventually ascended into heaven.
He took that body with him into this other realm.
It just makes me wonder what the human body was like in the beginning when we were created perfectly with this mental ability to interact with this other realm, converse with the Almighty, the absence of sin.
How on earth did we go through 3.5 billion years of evolution and being shaped by our environment?
And here we are after 3.5 billion years and we can't stay around for more than about 75 years and everything around us can kill us.
Like, if I think about, again, country boy logic here, if I think a 3.5 billion year long process of an organism being shaped by its environment, I would like to hope it would produce something a little better than what we are today.
And then you have to think of how long humans have been around in this form, at least according to science.
They believe it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 to 500,000 years based on the fossil evidence.
It could go further or back, probably go further back eventually.
They'll probably figure it's like six or seven.
But there's a timeline.
There's a timeline when Homo sapiens existed and when they didn't exist before.
And then there's a bunch of different forms of human.
There's a bunch of different hominids, a different bunch of, there's, you know, there's Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, there's a ton of them.
So what we've been able to achieve in this very, relatively speaking, when you think about 3.5 billion, which is a number that you can't really comprehend.
You say it, but it's too big.
It's too big to really wrap your head around.
Think about the behavior characteristics that you can breed into your dogs in a short period of time.
I have a golden retriever and I have a spaniel, this little puppy that we just got.
And both of them also descended from wolves.
And it's ridiculous.
They have zero killer instinct other than squirrels, my dog Marshall, who kills squirrels, and turtles.
But he's not a wolf.
He's some sort of a new thing that we've created through selection and breeding and over time.
It's a totally different animal, just like we are.
We are a totally different animal than Neanderthal, a totally different animal to ancient man.
We're just different.
We're different in some way.
You could see it.
It's like, there's a lot of mysteries.
The big one is the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years.
That's a crazy one.
One of the things that I always wonder when you're reading, particularly the really old texts, When it gets into like the Dead Sea Scrolls, when it gets into the Old Testament, and even stuff that's before that, it's like, what were they trying to remember?
Because you got to remember, before this stuff was even written down, it was an oral history for about a thousand years.
What was the original story?
And that's where I think the truth is.
I think there's truth.
I don't think these people were making up myths and fairy tales.
I think that's a silly way to think about it.
I think it's much more likely that some immense events had happened over the course of human history, and these people were trying to document it with whatever limited ability to express themselves that they had at the time.
There's something there.
It's just the problem I always have with all religions is man, the tongue of man, is human beings and our desire to we use hyperbole, we exaggerate, we change times, we change, we write things that make ourselves look better than we should.
History is written by the winners.
It's very difficult to know what was the genesis of it.
What was the original thing that they were trying to write down?
I'll tell you what, Joe, I should just let you talk the whole dang podcast, man, because you are so good at just summing stuff up and getting to the root of questions and things.
And, you know, like, like, you know, you talked about that whole, that, that transition from just like living it out to have a better life to all of a sudden like placing your entire hope in this message of the gospel.
Like, that's that transition that I was talking about that you can't choose.
You know what I mean?
Like, so you're summarizing all of this so well, man.
And it's interesting to me, too, that, you know, the Almighty has these plans for each of us, his sons and daughters.
And he leads us each along this path to the ultimate revelation that we are searching for.
But every path looks different.
And it's so interesting to me to get to hear you speak this way because he led me along this path that involved this spiritual warfare.
What was I?
I was a warrior.
Like I understood warfare.
I understood encountering an enemy.
And that's the story I told you.
You know, he kind of led me to this ultimate revelation and to this regeneration along the lines of that.
I have to believe that and I have to hope that he is leading you along this path, specifically the way you're experiencing it, because that's how your mind works, man.
Like you're a master.
You are intelligent.
You understand things.
You want things to be somewhat logical and orderly.
And, you know, like the Shroud of Turin thing or, you know, any of these other artifacts or the Dead Sea Scrolls or something like, like I can do without knowing about all that and be just fine.
But according to the way the Almighty made you, maybe you can't do without all that stuff and be just fine because you're different than me.
Because if you're too busy and your life is too overwhelmed with obligations, and I have a lot of them, but fortunately for me, a lot of my job gives me time, gives me time to think.
A lot of what I do.
And a lot of these conversations give me time to think.
And talking to different people with different perspectives, different life experiences, And what they're trying to figure out because we're all trying to figure out what is the purpose of this?
Like, what am I doing here?
And some of the most miserable, anxiety-ridden people that I know have no belief system.
Some of the most miserable, anxiety-driven people that I know are atheists.
And some of the most angry and bitter and attacking and condescending and atheists.
You know, people love to point out the hypocrisy in the body of Christ, the visible church, Christians, people who proclaim to be Christians, the hypocrisy of Christians.
And I would agree with you 100%.
There is a lot of hypocrisy.
And a lot of what the visible church does is makes what they want to make out of the scriptures in order to control people.
You know, when you think about a rock star, you think about someone who's selling out an arena, right?
You think about a preacher, you think about like a Joel Olstein type character, unfortunately, because they're more popular than any of the other ones.
And so that becomes, that's a far, it's on the far spectrum, a fringe figure.
You know, Rolls-Royce's, private jets, expensive suits, all of it's fucked.
None of it makes any sense.
None of it seems remotely Christian, right?
To amass billions of dollars in enormous plots of land and have huge houses and you're flying around in $65 million planes.
Well, you know, when people like to point out the hypocrisy of Christians, like, I get what you're saying, man, like, and how religion is used to control people in some ways.
You can make anything out of anything.
But here's the thing.
Here's how I would respond to you as a Christian.
Yes, you are right.
I am a hypocrite.
I am a liar.
I am a cheater.
Now, I'm not really a thief per se.
I don't steal.
I covet people.
The things that they have.
The things of this world.
I hate.
I do all of those things.
That's the point.
Like, in that realization of who I am, that revelation is the foundation of my clinging to Christ.
There is a remnant in me that leads me to do things that I don't want to do.
And the things that I want to do, I don't actually do.
Now, not 100% of the time.
Like, that's not my desire.
But when I do those things now, the difference is my response to them.
So, like, I told you how wicked I used to be.
Well, you know, used to be if I had an argument with my wife, you know, maybe I was rushing out the door and maybe I yelled at my wife and I went out and got my truck and went to work.
The rest of the day, I would be justifying my yelling at my wife.
She deserved to be yelled at.
Screw her, man.
Like, she's in the wrong.
Now, when I do those things, I yell at my wife, I walk out the door.
It's the same thing that I did before, but I do it now, and I get in my car and it crushes me, dude.
I'm like, I can't believe I just did the thing that I know I don't want to do, but I did it anyways.
It's my response to those things.
The most, I think, accurate way or picture to describe this, remember I told you I woke up the next day and like my desires had changed?
The most accurate way I've heard this described is if you had two plates of food, you know, you had a plate of the finest food and then you had a bucket of garbage.
You turn a pig loose into the room.
The pig is going to go and stick his head in that bucket of garbage and eat that garbage before he eats the food off of that fine plate.
Because he likes the smell of garbage.
He's attracted to the taste and the smell of that.
We have pigs at the house.
Like, this is what he would do.
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He would go eat the garbage before He ate the good stuff.
And so that pig, he's eating that garbage, and there's this good stuff right here next to him.
And he's not even ashamed that he's eating that garbage because he's a pig.
If you had the power to snap your fingers and to turn that pig into a man, that man would then lift his head up out of that garbage and he would look around him and he would be ashamed that he had been eating that garbage.
And he would depart from that garbage and go to the finer food.
Right?
That's what he would do.
That's the transition that I tried to describe to you earlier how I was changed overnight.
It was like I no longer desired garbage more than I desired the fine things that the Lord has offered to me.
My desires changed, right?
I see what you're saying.
But we still go back.
Like there's a remnant of that pig in us.
And every now and then we want to go back and eat that garbage, but we're ashamed.
We don't want anybody to see us, and we're ashamed, and it upsets our stomach, and we respond to it differently.
And that's kind of the change and tying this all back into, well, why aren't Christians perfect?
They say they preach all this stuff.
As a preacher or as a teacher, the closer you preach the true literal word of Scripture in terms of standards, the closer you get to that standard that's portrayed by Scripture, the more of a hypocrite you are going to become because you can't meet it.
What you're saying, though, this is what I was getting at.
What you're saying is one of the best examples of the power of being a Christian.
What I'm talking about is the general perception of people on the outside that don't really maybe don't, maybe hang out mostly in secular circles.
Maybe they have a bunch of friends that are atheists.
And they see religion as this big scam.
And because the most popular versions of religion for a long time is televised religion, you know, that's when you think about people's exposure that aren't religious to religion, what do they, they hear about scandals, they hear about, you know, the pedophilia in the Catholic Church.
They hear about money that's being inappropriately spent.
And so the versions that they get are like, oh, this is just bullshit to control people.
And they don't hear enough about genuine transformation stories and like why this is valuable and why it's also valuable to intelligent people because this has always been this is a misconception or at least a narrative that's pushed out that it's for dull-minded people.
It's for dull-minded people that can't make sense of the world.
It's too much confusion to them, so they need a structure.
Yeah, I mean, you read in, I think it's 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the Apostle Paul is writing, like, hey, I didn't come to you with these wise words, like, trying to convince you of anything.
I simply have preached to you this gospel.
And notice that not many of you who are considered wise, like, were able to believe this because it's literally foolishness until you're made alive.
And it was, it's funny, it was by the Almighty's sovereign, immutable will that he chose the cross as to be the story of redemption for man.
It's funny that he chose the cross and he did it for his own good pleasure.
He chose to destroy the wisdom of man by a message that is seemingly foolish.
It's so backwards.
He chose to destroy man's wisdom, our natural man's wisdom, right?
All the great things that man has done and known and discovered.
He chose to destroy all of that by this foolish message of the cross for his own good pleasure.
Because man in his wisdom did not know God when he came here in the body, in the person of Jesus Christ.
They actually killed him.
So he said, I'm going to destroy y'all's natural wisdom with this message of foolishness.
The most fascinating thing of it, but I always tell people, look all that, look at it, but also know that if you live that way and if you believe that, and if you follow those teachings, you will have a better life.
There's something to it.
There's a reason why people have been doing it.
There's a reason why true Christians are some of the nicest, most compassionate, friendliest, charitable people that you'll ever meet.
There's something to it.
There's something to it.
The origin of it all, there's truth in the origin of it all.
It's just trying to figure out what it means.
And then the translations, even the translations in English that you're reading, the way they communicate is so different than the way we communicate today.
So you have to realize the evolution of human discourse over thousands of years, the way we phrase things, the way we describe things, the way we talk about things, is all very different.
So you have to get scholars who understand the original way they talked about these things.
Thousands of pages of very confusing scripture, where some of it you're reading, you have to read it three or four times and you just got to go, okay, what exactly is he trying to say here?
Because you can read it in a way and you're like, this is contradictory.
If scripture is contradictory, it is not from God.
Right.
It cannot, by nature of what we know about the nature of the Almighty, what's revealed in Scripture to us just about his nature, his attributes, right?
It's one of my favorite things to study, the attributes of the Almighty, which we cannot even begin to grasp the fullness of it.
But some of his attributes have been revealed to us.
And so if that is his word, it cannot contradict itself because that would go against what we know of as who he is.
And again, this is probably the interpretation of man.
You know, and this is where it gets problematic.
I mean, it is ultimately fascinating that you have something like the book of Isaiah, where they found an older version that they didn't even know existed.
It turns out to be a thousand years older, and it's verbatim.
And I think ultimately, too, I think something that you could add to that, Joe, is if what I'm saying is correct in terms of what I believe about scripture, ultimately there has also to be some divine influence over the preservation of those scriptures.
It's the only way, right?
It would be the only way for the scriptures in their original language to be truly the word of the Almighty to man.
The complete revelation of the Almighty to man.
Like there has to be some divine influence for that to happen.
How did it, you know, we like to kind of the and here's another thing, man.
It all involves faith.
It does involve an aspect of faith.
Like, you know, because we look at the letters in the New Testament who were mostly written by the Apostle Paul.
And the only way that we can trust that, okay, this is the literal message from God to us, but it's coming through a man, like, how does that happen?
Well, we have to believe that, again, the Almighty is influencing man through the power of his Spirit in the man to write the things that the man wrote.
You know, That's why this belief in the Holy Spirit and of the believer actually being possessed with the Spirit of God is so essential.
Well, you know, what is like truth, I don't even know that truth can come from man alone because everything that we have experienced is so influenced by our upbringing, by our perspective, by our memory, by so many factors.
That's why I hate, dude, I hate seeing these guys, these former military guys attacking each other, man, about he did this and he did that and he didn't do this and he didn't do that.
I'm like, I mean, some guys might flat out be, you know, telling a fib, you know, I get that, right?
You know, that's not good.
But man, so many people are recounting experiences that they've had in their life and their service and whatever it may be.
And like all of that is shaped by their unique perspective and the way that their mind works.
And, you know, it's like I can't attack a dude for that.
You know what I mean?
So if we're saying that the Bible is truly the perfect revelation of God to man, then we have to understand that the source of that, all of that, did not come from man in some way.
You know, I talked to my buddy about that while I was sitting there with him, you know, as he was passing away.
And, you know, scripture describes when you leave your physical body here on earth, you know, your spirit basically goes into the presence of the Almighty immediately.
But in that state, you're unclothed and you don't want to be unclothed.
And like I was, I'm having all these, I lost my train of thought there on where we were going with that.
But yeah, man, I forgot the original question, but it pertained to something a conversation I had with him.
Well, that's where the skeptical person steps in and says, well, this is ridiculous.
It's all based on, you have to believe in faith because logically it doesn't make any sense.
And so this is the problem with that is that you're making this assumption that the human mind is flawless and that it could perceive truth regardless of your learned experiences, regardless of what you know about the world.
You could see truth even if it's a completely unique thing.
You could know that it doesn't exist.
Like, there's no way.
There's no way you know.
And if it is a puzzle, what greater puzzle than you have to believe something that defies logic?
Like if you're going to demand faith of someone, you would deliver it in a way that the only way to buy into this is that you have to get past your logic.
You have to abandon it.
and you have to believe something that you've been told is impossible.
My wife sent me a YouTube video or something the other day.
Apparently, they saw something with one of these telescopes or something that they look into the cosmos with that has completely destroyed all their evidence of their theology behind the Big Bang.
They're finding, they think that some of what they were interpreting as the initial signals of the Big Bang are not that.
Not only that, but the origin, the birth of the universe is far older than they think it was because they're finding galaxies that are far too large and formed, that are so far away that they would have had to form far quicker than they thought was possible from the moment of the Big Bang today.
So this has extended, in some people's eyes, the birth of the universe to 22 plus billion years old instead of 13.7 or whatever it is.
So they think it's possibly even older.
But then there's also questions like the Big Bang itself might not be correct.
You might be just interpreting the signals of this part of the space, part of the universe.
We just can't see yet because we don't have the ability to see further than what the James Webb Telescope can do.
So as we develop better and better tools, with each iteration, you're going to have a much deeper understanding of the vastness of the universe itself, which may ultimately be infinite.
And Roger Penrose thinks that not only was there not just a Big Bang, that there's a continual cycle of these things that happen for eternity, that there's never been a beginning.
You know, that kind of goes along with my theory of at the fall of man, literally marring man's genetic code and how that has just kind of progressively gotten worse over time.
It's possible, but it's also possible that their interpretation of time was different because they didn't understand calendars.
You know, what they considered a year was not what we were talking about.
We're talking about a completely different thing.
We have such a limited understanding just of human civilization.
I mean, there's new findings constantly that are completely throwing a monkey wrench into the timeline of human history.
And some of the biggest ones are happening in Egypt right now, where they're finding structures through tomography, through the use of satellites.
They're finding these structures underneath the pyramids that go down two kilometers deep.
Very controversial stuff, but they've repeated it over and over again.
There's these cylinders and there's coils that seem to be wrapped around these cylinders.
They're hundreds of meters deep, and then there's more structures underneath there.
They're like, well, what is this?
Like, who made this?
Like, explaining the pyramids themselves is impossible.
They try.
They pretend.
People are just smarter than you think.
Okay, maybe.
But also crazy that you've got this fucking thing that's, what, 17 acres in its footprint, 2,300,000 stones, some of them cut from a quarry 500 miles away, placed hundreds of feet in the ceiling.
Some of them are 50-plus tons that they've moved into these positions, cut perfectly.
You can't even a razor blade in between of them, set to perfect north, south, east, and west.
And now you find out there's structures underneath them that might go down two kilometers.
We might have a completely fucked up understanding of human history.
Yeah, it's, you know, there's a lot of speculation around.
I'm sure you have had somebody on to talk about this period of human history in scripture where it talks about essentially these angelic beings basically pro-creating with women, human women, and creating some sort of hybrid race, men of renown with special knowledge.
And it would seem that something like that, when you look at the example and all of the stuff you just talked about with the pyramids, they were getting special knowledge.
Joe, that's so impactful for me to hear you say that because I have to share this with you, of course.
I've told a few of my close buddies and friends that I was coming on the show today to have a conversation with you.
And it's amazing people's response when you tell them that you're going to come and sit down to the mighty Joe Rogan, the most powerful man on the internet.
I've heard you called that.
Dude, don't be offended by any of that.
This is what people say.
And, you know, I had so many people tell me, now, Chad, when you go sit down with Joe, you better just stick to what you know.
And I'm sitting here like, buddy, I don't know a whole lot.
Like, when you really get down, like what you said, man, like you're not, you're not attached to your ideas.
And they're not, a lot of times they're not even your ideas.
They're just, you just think about things deeply and you ask these questions.
And when you live that way, you do, you do come to the realization that, man, there's very little that I actually know when we define the word or the idea of knowing something.
And even scripture tells us any man that thinks he knows anything hasn't known as he ought to know.
In other words, as soon as you think you have the answers to most things, you are totally backwards.
You haven't known.
The ultimate form, I think one of the ultimate forms of knowledge or knowing is realizing that you really don't know much.
You've got to be able to, yeah, man, it's people's perspective of what you've built here and what you do and what you've accomplished, I think it's just so skewed, like just based off of some of the conversations I had.
And, you know, my trajectory has been very slow, which is good.
It's healthier for you.
You get it better.
Like, you can deal with it.
Because the worst thing that ever happens is like a 20-year-old kid becomes super famous.
You're just fucked.
You're fucked.
You're not going to be able to handle that.
You're going to be off the rails.
It's just too weird.
The world is a totally different place.
Everybody knows who you are everywhere you go.
Everyone around you needs you.
So you have all these talking heads around you that are kissing your ass.
Your perception of the world is completely distorted.
You never had to truly develop your character.
You've got untold wealth in your teens.
You can't handle that.
Nobody can handle that.
No child stars ever make it out and seem normal.
They're all fucked.
It's like cement where you mix it wrong.
There's not enough waters, not enough sand, whatever it is.
The formulation's wrong.
You're never going to fix it.
You're never going to fix it after the fact.
It's already formed.
And it's a tragedy.
But to get fame slowly, as long as you're always working on your character, and one of the things that will keep you sane when you're going through fame in particular is voluntary adversity.
I know you're big into ultra running and that kind of voluntary advert.
I saw you took up jiu-jitsu recently, too, right?
That looked fun.
It's fucking tiring, huh?
For a guy with the kind of endurance that you have.
Isn't it amazing how tired he is?
It was rough, dude.
Bad rough.
Yeah.
Jiu-Jitsu is humiliating.
It's humbling.
But there's a lot of power in that humbling.
It makes the rest of your life so much easier.
It really does.
Jiu-Jitsu was a huge factor in my sanity and my ability to stay sane through everything.
I'm getting humbled all the time.
I'm exhausted all the time.
Dudes are strangling me all the time.
so that kind of conflict was so overwhelming, but yet also positive and helped me so much with character development, my understanding of myself, and what I was able to accomplish if I worked hard enough.
It allows you to navigate the weird waters of fame so much easier.
That's really impactful to hear you say that, Joe, because I think that is and has been my exact same experience, you know.
And I've been kind of public for the last five years now, and it's been kind of slow, but again, it kind of went big there for like within two years.
Like the YouTube and stuff blew up to the point that I'm nowhere, obviously, on the level that you experience in your life, but you can't go out in public without somebody's going to stop you.
In all these comments and all this stuff, you know what I mean?
But like continuously choosing to do these challenges that, like, I don't even know if I'm going to be able to do it.
Like the Yukon race, the Yukon 1000, we didn't finish that.
We went 435 miles and David started having circulation issues in his lower body because he's paralyzed.
Blood doesn't flow very well.
And like his leg is usually the size just of his femur, you know, or his bones.
And by the third day, his legs were the same size as my legs.
And he started to develop these pressure sores on his butt, which is very, very dangerous for people who are paralyzed just from sitting in that kayak for 18 hours a day.
But like we didn't, we didn't complete that.
But we were out there like truly in the, in truly in wilderness, like struggling against not only the miles, but just the environment.
Like I love to hear all these hippie people talk about Mother Earth.
It's like Mother Earth will freaking kill you, son.
I have to have something, you know, on the micro level daily.
On the macro level, I have to have maybe two things, big things a year that I look at and I'm like, I don't know if I can actually finish that or not.
You know what I mean?
And then it forces me to train, to learn, to prepare, to plan.
That's when you get, if we want to move toward mental toughness and how this kind of preps you and keeps you going through life, like that's where all the mental toughness is really built is through the training process.
Like on race day, you shouldn't be getting any more mentally tough on race day.
But your brain is just a muscle like any other muscle in my experience.
Yeah.
If you stop exercising it and people want to act like there are people out there, maybe like me or like David Goggins or these people that have become so mentally tough that we're just good.
Like we should be able to show up anywhere, anytime and perform and just crush everyone.
That's not how it works.
Like every one of us, we have to prepare and train and train day in and day out and go through the process in order to perform.
That's a never-ending thing.
But people want to believe that you can just become mentally tough and then possess that and perform for the rest of your life.
They want to believe that because they don't want to do the work that's required to actually perform at a high, high level.
You know, it's almost like an out that people want to take or believe in.