Evan Hafer joins Joe Rogan to dissect precision disciplines—archery, pool, and martial arts—highlighting their mental rigor, from Rogan’s 84/90-pound bow training to Hafer’s "projectile meditation" and Plumley’s Medal of Honor humility. They contrast extreme dedication (like Mark Twite’s climbing) with modern chaos, including Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sulfuric acid orders post-2018 indictment and AI’s exponential leap, like ChatGPT-5 outpacing human expertise in surgery or law. The episode warns of a coming "white-collar apocalypse" where AI could reshape—or eliminate—human labor, while Rogan and Hafer debate whether superintelligent systems might see humanity as a liability, echoing Skynet’s dystopian potential. [Automatically generated summary]
But that's the wrist straps a little bit more involved.
But I love having them.
I've been using the wise guy.
I've been, ever since our last hunt, I've been only using the wise guy.
And I'm used to it now.
It took a while.
I was like hammering the trigger for a little bit.
Like, after the thing is, it's like with archery, once your form breaks down and then you try to compensate because you're tired, like I think I should just limit myself to one hour.
I've got my wife is redoing this little garden house in the back, so she won't let me shoot at it anymore because she's afraid I'm going to put an arrow through her little hut that she's making.
She's actually doing all the work, too.
She's got like a tool belt on and she's out there hammering away.
It's like there's not enough, there's too many people running around with zero physical challenges, and they're so soft.
Like, there's a giant percentage of our population that is so soft.
And if like if there was like a, if the world went nuclear, we lost everything, and then it was like hand-to-hand battles, every country could invade America if we run out of bullets.
Once we run out of bullets, every country can fuck us up.
I think the origin of it comes from San Francisco, Seattle, right?
All the, we'll say the left-wing, left coast, all of the wokeism.
Yeah, because that also drove most of what I would say is the third and fourth wave.
Because there's one, two, three, four basic waves in coffee.
Third and fourth wave are the most recent.
Fourth wave would be considered single origin, very lightly roast coffees.
And you've been to these coffee shops.
You know what they look like.
It takes you 15 minutes to get a cup of coffee.
They typically won't even talk to you.
They look down at the computer screen, but it's going to be decent cop, right?
So if you go first wave, which is going to be like Folger's, Maxwell House, that's like been around for 100 years.
That's a commodity coffee.
It's going to have Robusta.
It's going to be darker roasted.
That's going to be first wave.
And then second wave would be experiential.
So it'd be more like Starbucks.
It's kind of second wave would be experiential, dark.
And then third wave would be more artisan, micro lot, single origin.
And then fourth wave is kind of a mix of the best in third wave that really activates your senses in the sense of like, now they're doing anaerobics.
So they're using things from like wine and beer and they're developing all these different profiles.
But that artisan craft, the genesis in like San Francisco and Seattle from third wave, they took on identity politics and then drove it through the trade.
It's pretty impressive.
So it's so weird because if you go anywhere, you can get amazing cups of coffee.
You're just going to like wade through the wokeism to go get it.
I had a cup of coffee from Starbucks, which I rarely go into, but it was up to my family.
And it was so bad.
A cup of black coffee.
It's all a drink.
I don't put anything in it.
I was like, this is like not drinkable.
It tastes like shit, which is like everybody throws a bunch of cream in there and a bunch of sugar in there and you get your caffeine and it tastes like what you like.
But if you just try to just drink coffee at Starbucks, it is such a bad product.
But if you're going to put cream and sugar in it, nobody cares because they're like, I just need something that's going to serve as a caffeine vehicle for my cream and sugar.
Because I was a comms guy back in my previous profession, my previous life.
And it's so funny because when you talk about communications and just technology in general and you start analyzing like, you know, frequencies and spectrum analyzers or whatever, whatever you want to talk about, people's eyes would just glaze over in the tea room.
And I'd be like, all right, well, you guys want to go blow some shit up?
Like, why don't we shift the topic?
Because you guys don't want to talk about this.
I know you don't want to hear about it.
So in cross-training, it's just you try to keep people awake, basically.
They're the same type of people that don't like to do cold plunges or don't like to do certain things that you're not going to feel an immediate benefit.
It's going to suck while you're doing it.
So you put it off.
Like you've got to have a mindset that there's some things that suck that will make the things that are exciting way better.
Well, the good thing is if they're not accepting of an idea, maybe you should re-examine that idea and maybe figure out like, why am I, maybe I should figure out a better way to make this idea acceptable.
You know, because there's ideas where I'll start it off and it's just like, oh, this ain't going anywhere.
And then I'm like, there's got to be an angle in here.
And then I'll find a whole other angle.
I'm like, ha ha, now I have it.
And then I have to find an angle.
Like, what if I was a woman and I was watching this and I'm looking at this fucking meathead on stage and I'm like, okay, like, I got to figure out a way to get them to understand that just because I look like this doesn't mean I'm a bad guy.
Like, let me work this into your head first and then explain it from my perspective.
I know that you can craft a joke because you've been doing this for forever, but is there a certain amount of pleasure that you get now from bombing sometimes?
I was talking to my daughter about it, and she said, because girls don't do things like this.
So we kind of want to see what's going on in a man's mind that makes him, it's such a mystery.
You know what I'm saying?
Like it's such a mystery.
Like most men can imagine a scenario where there's a bunch of people that did some horrible shit in a room and you just go in there and fucking kill all of them.
Most men, most men can say, oh yeah, there's a place.
There's a place.
Like if someone did something and I knew they did something and they're in that room and they need to go, they need to go.
Most women can't think like that.
They don't think like that.
It's not inside their head.
And then there's the darkness of it.
Like these aren't men that are doing something to someone who deserves it.
They're just doing it to vulnerable people.
They're just evil creatures who just want to go out and hunt vulnerable people.
And I think women want to know that there are men like that out there that are so different than them so they can put it in their head.
But if I was at a truck stop and there was some fucking shady dude that came into the bathroom after me and he was like waiting outside and it didn't look like he needed to use the bathroom, I would be 100% on guard.
Like there's people that will just randomly kill people just for a thrill and get away with it.
And I think there's way more of them getting away with it than they'd like us to know.
Like here's a good example.
In Austin, what is the actual number of people who have bodies that have been found in Lady?
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But it was very clear that he had been planning this a long time.
And there was also a possible connection to him and some murders from the Pacific Northwest that he knew the people, people died in a kind of a similar way.
I think that would probably stop him from doing it.
But her take was that there was all these places.
What is the term I'm looking for where they incinerate shit, like a power plant, like a coal plant?
There's a term.
I can't remember what it is.
Anyway, they're releasing an incredible amount of toxins in the atmosphere.
And a lot of the shit is coming down in rain.
It's getting in the ground.
All the ground around there is all polluted.
Everything's polluted.
And so what her take is that all these people have suffered chemical pollution.
And a lot of that chemical pollution leads to all sorts of weird psychological disorders and psychosis and all kinds of shit, depending upon the levels of exposure.
Yeah, we contacted the police, and the police eventually realized this is not a good thing.
And they moved them all.
But they moved them to different parts of town.
And so then you would drive to like the more industrial areas of town that didn't, like, our place was like semi-industrial.
There was a bunch of warehouses, but there was also a bunch of like foot traffic businesses, restaurants, and stuff like that.
And so they moved them out of there.
But if you go into the deeper industrial places where they have factories and stuff, they were there, like whole blocks of them where you just have campers laying out and just open meth smoking.
These people are just full-on meth heads that had just started a community of fellow meth enthusiasts with campers.
And a lot of their campers didn't even run.
They could just get it to the spot wherever it was, and then they would steal power.
You know, every now and then, a dude would die because he didn't know how to do the wires right and he'd get cooked.
It was like if we left at night and someone broke in, it would take fucking forever for cops to show up and do something about it.
And so I was like, you can't just, you just can't have these guys knowing that like famous people and high-profile people are going to be at that spot.
And you've got like open meth smoking right in front of the place.
Like this is too crazy.
They're too unpredictable.
You know, look, I don't care if you live in your truck.
If you're a guy who's like, you've checked out of society essentially and you're just like playing pickleball all day and you live in a camper, who cares?
Go ahead and do that.
But once you start engaging in meth smoking and then it's always theft.
Theft comes with meth smoking.
And there's a lot of break-ins in the area.
And it got to a point where the cops had to do something.
I love like when people drift over into like crazy to where their level of commitment and their passion like translates directly into nothing else exists in their life where they're willing to live on dog food to do the thing that they they love.
And there are all these other people that have that thing where their pursuit of passion around that specific profession or product or whatever it might be.
They're so committed to it that it takes over.
It's all consuming.
Like, I've seen it because when even when you go play pool, I'm like when we were in Vegas a couple of months ago, they're like, oh, we're going to play Pullman Come Out.
He's going to be there till like six o'clock in the morning.
I'm not going to do that.
And Green Tree was like, he was.
He was there until like six o'clock in the morning.
He played for eight hours straight.
I was like, yeah, I could see the writing on the wall.
You definitely never achieve full perfection, but to be really good requires this level of laser focus and concentration and an understanding of what's going on.
I mean, you're taking a stick and you're hitting a ball into another ball with pinpoint accuracy into a pocket that is on my table, it's four and a quarter inches.
So you've got the cube, the ball, the object ball, which is about that big, and then you've got that much space on each side, just a tiny little space on each side.
And you got to slip it through there.
Oftentimes, like eight feet away, seven feet away, six feet away with English.
So you're putting spin on the cue ball, which imparts a throw on the object ball.
So if I put right-hand spin on the cue ball and I hit the object ball, I have to calculate for the fact that it's going to throw the object ball slightly to the left because of the right-hand spin, because it clings to the ball a little bit.
So all this is playing in my head.
And then I have to have it at a speed where once the cue ball then collides with the object ball, pockets it, then it's got to go one, two, three rails for perfect position on the next ball.
And I have to have an angle.
I have to make sure that I have an angle for the following ball.
And you don't want to be trapped on the rails.
You want to be off the rails.
Like all these different things.
You can't think about anything else.
Your mind has to be clean.
It cleans your mind.
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So if you've gotten, I'm sure you have, like professional coaching players, yeah, coaching guys who've come out like the best in the world have come out and played with you.
So when you play with these guys, is it one of those things where they instantly humble you in the context of you start feeling, I'm really confident in my game, and then you step in?
If I spent eight hours a day playing every day, I think I could play at a professional level.
I wouldn't be able to beat the best guys.
I would never be able to beat the Koping Chungs and the guys that are at the very top top because those guys have been playing eight hours a day for decades.
I've watched a bunch of that online too, because it helps you understand angles like as you go into a rail, because the angles change depending upon how much English you put on it, how hard you hit it, whether you hit it with follow or draw.
There's a bunch of different parts of the cue ball that you can contact with that radically changes the way the ball moves around on the table.
So it's like you're calculating so many different things.
There's geometry involved, there's touch and feel.
There's all these factors that come into play when you're playing really well.
So that explains why archery is also somewhat of a fascination then, because you have very similar aspects to archery and pool that directly translate.
That's like why those things snap together real well for you.
I can like spend an hour on that thing just like trying to get the blow.
It's a perfect lob in there.
And it's like I used to tell people, I'm like, I'm just a projectile enthusiast where I love hitting center mass of whatever target.
I'm still a six-year-old kid with my BB gun, right?
It's like at the end of the day, now my tools are much more advanced.
And I've got the millions of dollars of government-funded training behind me.
So I'm a little bit more effective at hitting what I want to shoot at.
But it still has the same exact feeling.
Like if you're six years old, hitting a pop can with your BB gun or ringing a piece of steel at a mile with a rifle or hitting a, you know, the heart of a foam elk in your backyard.
It's the same, dude.
It translates and it like pulls you into something that's like pure, I guess.
It is pure and it's also a really good mind exercise.
Just like, you know, when you work out, you're cleaning your mind.
There's a lot of what working out is, it's not just physical, it's mental clarity.
You relax the mind.
You calm the mind through hard exercise.
And there's something where you're calming your mind through shooting.
Because it requires so much of you, everything else just gets the fuck out of the way.
Bills, this, that, you know, oh, I got to call that guy.
I don't want to call him.
Fuck, I got to deal with this thing.
Oh, that's falling apart.
This deal sucks.
It all goes away.
It has to go away.
If it doesn't go away, you miss.
And then you go, fuck, why did I miss?
You miss because you're distracted.
Like, let's focus.
Put the fucking arrow on the knock.
You know, put it in there, draw it back, center it, calm, relax.
At that moment, like at that moment, there is nothing else in your fucking head.
There's nothing.
And then And it goes in there, you get this, this nice burst of happiness when you watch that fucking arrow just drop right in exactly where you want it to.
So you got to figure out what are they doing different?
Why are they better?
And keep getting better.
Like there's hunts that I've been successful on recently within the last few years that I know that if I had that same hunt eight, nine years ago, I probably would have not been able to make that shot.
Right.
I wasn't as good then.
So I've gotten better.
It's like, I think everybody needs something that you can't master, that is hard to do, that cleans your mind.
I think people need stuff to clean their mind.
And I think that's why so many people are running around all fucked up because you're looking at social media all day.
So that gives you anxiety.
Your life is not satisfying.
So that gives you anxiety.
You don't take care of your body.
So that gives you anxiety.
You have all these things competing.
And you're stuck in traffic.
That gives you anxiety.
Everybody's just mentally all fucked up.
And so you go to a doctor and the doctor says, well, you know, obviously you're dealing with depression and I can prescribe to you this or that or the other.
And then you're on Lexapro or whatever the fuck you're on.
And that's the road they go down.
And this is a bad road.
It's not a road where you're going to improve your life.
And there's other ways to do it.
And I think there'd be a lot more happy people in this world if you found a thing.
It doesn't have to be archery.
It doesn't have to be pool.
It doesn't have to be jiu-jitsu.
It doesn't have to be pistol shooting.
It just has to be something that's hard to do.
That you are on this quest to make these incremental improvements.
And through that focus of incremental improvements, you improve your human potential.
You improve your ability as a person to do difficult and to handle situations.
So I always tell people: if you do jiu-jitsu, you'll be much happier because the stresses of life are nothing compared to a dude who's trying to literally break your arm.
He's on top of you and you're defending and then you get out of it and then you get him or he gets you and then you have to tap and you go over again.
That is so hard to do that like regular life becomes like a breeze.
It becomes a breeze.
It makes everything jiu-jitsu people are some of the most relaxed people I've ever been around in my life.
They're all friendly to everybody.
They're never talking shit or causing drama or problems.
Yeah, they I think there's something about getting the shit kicked out of yourself too, right?
So like there's something about facing someone, which I don't do jiu-jitsu just as a caveat to that, but being able to like face another person in a scenario and then compete against them.
My opinion is, like, if you look at Cam Haynes' sons, I mean, he was rough raising his kids.
He talks about that.
But those kids are exceptional.
They're fucking exceptional.
You know, one son's a ranger.
The other son broke the world chin-up record.
And, you know, he runs marathons with jeans on.
And he's fucking got two savage kids.
And why?
Well, look at the environment they grew up in.
They grew up with a dad who's supremely disciplined.
And just by being in his presence, you realize like, oh, I can achieve a lot more than other people can if I'm just willing to put in that work.
And for a lot of people, that's that feeling, that feeling of like this, the anxiety of the struggle and of grinding it out.
And like that scares them and they don't want to do it.
And so they come up in excuses or they retreat into other things and they distract themselves.
And if you're a parent that does that, you create a weird environment for your child because your child is sort of imitating you as a leader and you're a fuck up and you're always making excuses and you get fired a lot or you sleep in a lot or you do things that like are not admirable.
And then that child, you know, fuck life, man.
You know, whereas, you know, his kids are probably like, Jesus Christ, dad's a fucking animal.
Like, I want to be an animal too.
And then you see how people respect his father and they go, oh, okay, I want people to respect me like that too.
You know, you hear a lot of people talk about him when he's not around.
Like, well, I want people to respect me.
Well, there's only one way to do that.
You have to be worthy of respect.
It's only one way to get there.
It's a fucking long road.
Good luck.
Start going.
And you're not going to get any satisfaction for a long ass fucking time other than the fact that you're on the path, that you're on, you're involved in the process and you're on the journey.
And it's like, it's overused, but the level of endurance in courage, when it's like that trait alone, just trying to understand courage, like who has it, who doesn't have it, and then the level of commitment to a mission or something bigger than yourself.
It's the thing that I think about, I'd say, a huge percentage of the last several years, especially as I get a little bit older, right, a little bit further away from the GWAT.
And I was with, I'm doing a documentary on Earl Plumley.
You know who that is?
No.
So he's a Medal of Honor recipient, former Green Beret.
We were at the UFC fight with Elliot Miller and Earl Plumley.
Earl Plumley is an incredibly humble guy, like just an amazing human.
Like you can sit here and talk to him.
You'd never in a million years know that this guy had earned the Medal of Honor.
Never.
Because one, he's never going to tell you.
Two, he's going to ask you a hundred questions about you and be way more fascinated with that.
And three, we were having this conversation.
He's like, man, it belongs to the guys.
Like, I didn't do anything.
Like, it belongs to the guys.
Like, the guys, any of the guys, if they wouldn't have been shot, would have done the same exact thing that I did.
And I was like, man, that is an incredible statement from a guy that's sitting here.
And so this documentary follows his path from joining the Marine Corps, which was literally where the judge, you know, those old stories of the guy that was like forced by the judge to join the military or jail.
He literally has that.
And it starts, he goes into, you know, the Marines, and then he's a force recon Marine, and he had gone through all the selections, and then he got out of the Marine Corps, joined the Army, and we follow his story through the eyes of his peers and his leaders because we wanted to see from his perspective, what do other people say about him through his entire journey?
Not the story from his perspective.
One, he'll never tell it the way that it probably needs to be told.
Two, what were the choices that he made throughout his professional life that made the man that was capable of such an incredible act of courage that it warranted the highest medal, you know, oh, literally earned in the United States military.
And that single word, courage, how do you build courageous people is a fascinating, it's quite literally, it's such a fascinating subject.
It's like keeping up, stepping back in, this commitment to something greater than yourself, and then making these thousands of choices in your life every day as you wake up, step forward, step back into the fray, and like make the active decision to be better.
And it's like, it's such a fucking fundamental thing of being able to, any, any part of your life.
If you don't get up in the morning and like commit yourself to something, I'm not a motivational speaker, but it's how are you ever going to get better if you're not committing to something like being a better dad or a better husband or better, you know, better at your profession.
And then committing to this evolutionary process takes not only a huge amount of commitment, but mental and physical endurance.
It does.
And I'm never going to get tired of trying to figure this out because obviously it's like my peer set, I was having this conversation with Jack Carr and I ran into the airport.
We ran into each other at the airport on the way down here and we were talking about love that guy.
I like Jack and I were talking about, because, you know, the Navy SEALs, obviously, they've got a lot of positive PR over the last several years, but this, the special operations community has got so much just, I don't know, airtime, right?
But there are all these other people in the military throughout generations of warfighters that have gone out and done these incredibly hard jobs.
And I found this story of the Parchi, which is the USS Parchy, which is the most decorated submarine and ship in Navy history.
They have nine presidential citations.
It's the most decorated group of men in the U.S. Navy, like in modern history.
It's a Cold War-era nuclear submarine that was modified and ultimately tasked out by the CIA to go out and do collection.
And they were the guys that hundreds of feet down, they would land on the bottom of the ocean.
And the Soviets had these military communication lines that were basically hard lines that would go under a bay so they could communicate back and forth.
And they felt like they were secure.
And one of their jobs, which is I've never been able to see anything declassified, but the stories that are out there, these guys would land on the bottom of the ocean, send out divers at hundreds of feet.
And these guys would hook listening devices on those lines hundreds of feet down, like in cold, dark water.
Can you imagine, dude?
Like you're out in 400 feet or 300 feet of water, pitch black, you can't see anything.
And your job is to go and put a listening device on a Soviet communication line in 1986 or whatever it was.
And you're in enemy territory.
So if you get discovered, you're dead.
And none of these guys, that's the incredible thing.
None of these guys have ever said anything about it.
And then eventually he took her to the sites where he could, he explained to everybody when he thought that his life was in danger and then he was getting fired.
When things started getting sideways, like people need to know about this, he took her out there and he showed her.
But he didn't know that she was fucking some other guy by that time.
It's like a lot of my friends will come by that I haven't seen for years.
And she always has the same kind of like eye roll.
It's like, okay, you guys are going to be up till like two in the morning, like drinking at the kitchen table, talking shit about everybody that used to work with.
That's right.
It's like, and it's so dramatic, right?
It's like it's such a sewing circle at times with people.
And it's all the same people are the same regardless of your profession.
And they're on a date with some guy and they're trying to impress him and they start telling about what secret covert things they're doing that's totally illegal.
There's a lot of people that want to pretend they're that person because it's so hard to become that person.
But you can convince a lot of people that don't know any better that you are.
That was a big thing with martial arts.
Big thing with martial arts.
It was especially in the 80s.
So in the 80s, when I first started, no one knew anything.
It wasn't like today.
Today, if you get in a street fight, if you're a high school kid and you get in a street fight with another high school kid, there's a high likelihood that that kid knows how to leg kick.
He might know a blast double.
He might know an arm triangle.
You might get fucked up.
Like they might know how to fight.
Back then, no one knew how to fight.
It was very rare.
There's like one kid who knew how to box.
It was always the wrestling team, which were the most dangerous people.
Those guys were the worst.
Those guys were the hardest motherfuckers in the school, always.
And I didn't even realize that until I started wrestling.
I was like, I'm amongst these fucking elite killers, and they're just walking around with everybody like they're normal.
And you realize the level of commitment and dedication involved in being an elite high school wrestler, just a high school wrestler.
It's fucking off the charts.
These kids were going to camps all through the summer.
They would get sent off to wrestling camp.
They were training year-round.
And I just hopped in on my sophomore year.
I did one season of wrestling.
And I was like, this is crazy.
Like the level, I had no idea.
I was hanging around with these people.
I thought they were normal people.
They're like kids that were like little soldiers.
Like all of them, thick-necked little fucking soldiers.
And you realize, like, wow.
I like open my eyes.
Like, Jesus, there's these people around.
And they were never even considered martial artists until the UFC.
Nobody really understood unless they actually did wrestling how helpless the average person is with an elite wrestler.
You have no chance.
Like, it's not like maybe you'll be able to hit him before he takes you down.
Nope, no chance.
He's going to shoot on you.
He's going to fucking, you have no chance.
You have zero chance.
But there was always a bunch of guys who were pretending they were martial arts experts.
Was, oh, it was a really common thing.
And then you would talk to him, like, where do you train?
What do you do?
And it was always some guy who like learned some misthere was one guy.
This guy actually wound up getting arrested for murder.
And he's in jail right now.
Yeah.
He had lied to everybody and told them that he was a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
And he was even teaching people, and he knew almost nothing.
And this is like in the early, early 2000s, I guess, like the late 90s, early 2000s.
And it was just starting to catch on.
Like people are just starting to understand the depth of martial arts because of the UFC.
But it hadn't really gone mainstream until about 2005.
And this guy was telling everybody he was a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
And then Eddie Bravo trained with him.
And Eddie came back to me.
He's like, man, something's wrong.
He goes, this guy is terrible.
He doesn't know shit.
And he's like, and I was like, really?
He goes, yeah, I think he's a fake.
I think he's a fraud.
And he wound up confronting this guy.
And then the guy wound up, he was banging some guy's wife and wound up luring the guy back to his karate school and killing him.
There's a guy on Instagram that documents all these guys.
It's Mick Dojo Life on Instagram.
It's a fucking great page because it's all people doing bullshit, fake martial arts, like death touch, like people that can touch your forehead and you go limp and fall to the ground.
And you get all their, their students become like brainwashed and they go along with this whole facade.
And I kind of half-assed, still trained and fought a few times while I was also doing comedy, but I didn't have the commitment that I had before.
I had a series of events that led me out of like wanting to compete.
And one of them was recognizing brain damage, recognizing it in other people, recognizing it in friends, and then laying in bed with headaches after sparring sessions, going, okay, where does this lead?
And I don't, I'm not even making any money off of this.
And then there was a guy that I hurt really bad in a tournament.
I knocked this one guy out when I was 19 in California.
I was competing in the Nationals, and I KO'd this guy, and he never got up.
They had to take him on a stretcher, and he was on a stretcher for half an hour, and then they took him to the hospital, and it freaked me out because I was like, that could have easily been me.
It easily could have been me.
And that one bothered me because I was like, what am I doing?
Like, why am I doing this?
Like, I'm trying to win the national championships.
I'm trying to be in the Olympics.
I'm trying to do these things.
But I'm like, okay, but where does that lead me to teaching?
Do I really want to?
I was already teaching at the time, but do I really want to teach for a living forever?
I'm like, I don't think I do.
There's not, you know, and then recognizing that the martial art that I had picked, Taekwondo, had a lot of flaws in it.
It was really good for kicking, but it wasn't the best overall martial art.
And when I started kickboxing, I really realized that.
And then I started getting into Muay Thai and I realized the power of leg kicks and what the devastating impact it has on your mobility and like one or two leg kicks and you're so compromised.
I was like, oh, this is, there's so many levels to this.
So I was like kind of half-assing martial arts like the last year.
Not nearly as committed.
Like I was all in all throughout my high school years, all in until I was 21.
And then from 21 to 22, kind of half-assed it.
And then I didn't start doing jiu-jitsu until years later.
I'm going to take a nap here while you're freaking out.
But it was also, I wanted to do it for my own mind.
I wanted to just like be, I want, I was so in my own head.
I was just, it was, I was so in my own, like, what I'm going to do.
I wasn't thinking about all these other external things until that one knockout.
That's when I really started thinking about what could happen to me.
Because I had gotten really lucky where I never really got hurt in a tournament.
Never got dropped, never got knocked out, never got really rocked.
But I did it to a lot of people.
And then I was like, this is coming around.
Like, it's only a matter of time before I get whomped.
It's just, it happens.
It's just going to happen.
I'm going to fight some national champion guy, and I'm going to zig when I should have zagged, and I'm going to catch a heel to my fucking jaw, and that's going to be a wrap.
Well, I started seeing brain damage in other people, specifically when I started kickboxing, because I was training at boxing gyms, and I started seeing guys who were starting to say fucking each other.
There's like a slurry aspect to the way they talked.
There was a labored thing to their speech.
There was something about them.
And then I would see it degrade over time.
You know, like I really started getting involved in sparring and boxing when I was about 19.
And that was also around the time where I started losing my enthusiasm for Taekwondo because I just realized the no punching to the face thing in tournaments was so limited.
It really fucked you up because it gave you this illusion that you could pull things off where all the guy would have to do is jab you in the face.
You're like, oh, okay.
Like at this distance, you can't do the thing that you normally do in a Taekwondo tournament.
You have to be much more aware defensively.
So I had to recalibrate my offense and my tactics.
And so then I just, I started doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing.
And I saw so much brain damage.
I saw so much like unreported brain damage, just weird stuff.
Guys would tell you the same story.
They just told you like five minutes ago.
They tell it to you again.
And I was realizing, oh, these guys can't remember.
They just said this thing five minutes ago.
It was like they were stoned, you know, and they weren't.
They were just starting to exhibit the beginning signs of brain damage.
Yeah, well, the first time, the first time I went on stage, I was more scared than I had ever been fighting, which I thought was crazy.
So I started fighting before I could really be scared.
I started fighting when I was 15.
Those like the first fights that I had.
So you were scared, but you didn't, you were so stupid.
You didn't know what could happen to you.
And I was really lucky that I had a really good school.
The school that I trained at was super technical.
That was the guy who I trained under, this guy, Jae-hun Kim, he trained with General Chae Young-yi, who was like the founder of Taekwondo.
And so it was like, the technique was perfect.
Like you had to have perfect technique.
Like if you did anything sloppy or anything like kind of, they would correct you.
Like you had to have it down.
And they emphasized a lot of heavy bag training, which a lot of schools didn't even have a heavy bag, which I thought was crazy.
Like we would go and do these things where we'd have our team would go and train with another team.
Like we would travel to New York and there was like another, an instructor that was friends with our instructor and they would bring the competition teams to compete against each other.
And we'd fight in a gym.
So it was like these unsanctioned fights that you would have.
And you'd find people that were roughly your weight.
And these guys didn't have heavy bags.
And you'd go to their gym.
They have like a strip mall type gym.
And there was in their Dojang, they didn't have a heavy bag.
I was like, this is crazy.
You guys don't train with heavy bags?
And it didn't make any sense to me.
They had kicking paddles and a bunch of different things, but they didn't have anything that would improve thrusting techniques and stabbing techniques, which is like you need resistance.
You need a heavy bag.
And so our instructor was adamant about like, if you can't hurt somebody badly with one kick, you're doing the wrong thing.
These techniques were originally. designed for war.
And you're supposed to be able to have devastating power in everything you throw.
That got lost a little when Taekwondo got into the Olympics or when it was on the path to getting into the Olympics.
And it became more of like point scoring.
They would try to hit you and run away, hit you and run away.
And it was a lot of like fast moving techniques that didn't have the same sort of devastating impact.
So where I got real lucky in where I trained is that they really emphasized power.
And so the school that I was at was very feared because a lot of the other black belts were like, the guys that I trained with were fucking really dangerous.
Like they were known for when they would go to a tournament, people would get scared because if these guys hit you, you're in trouble.
Like these were dangerous cats, you know, that were like just wheel kicking people into another dimension, turning sidekicking people and crushing rib cages.
And the kaching was the chains of the heavy bag because this 120-pound bag was flying through the air when this guy would hit it.
And the chains were going and rattling.
And then it would come down.
He would set it up again.
And he was seven, ten feet from me.
Like there was this like little ledge where you could sit and watch people.
And they had set it up like that.
So the heavy bag was set up right where people would walk in because it was a great recruitment tool because you would really get to see what people are capable of.
And the moment I saw that, I was like, I want to know how to do that.
Like, how do you do that?
Like, he was doing spinning back kicks over and over again, turning sidekicks, just folding this fucking bag in that.
I was like, that's crazy that a person could generate.
I didn't think a person could generate that kind of force.
And I trained with him a lot and I learned from him a lot.
He taught me a lot.
And he was an interesting guy, too, because he'd be like a real street guy.
Like he'd been in and out of jail, wound up having a substance problem.
But it was this funny dude from Chelsea, which is like a real hard, dangerous neighborhood in Boston.
And just a fucking killer, man.
A killer.
Just a killer.
And when he would compete, people would get so nervous.
It was crazy to watch because I started training with him and going to tournaments with him when I was a white belt.
So I was a white belt, and he was a black belt national champion.
And when John Lee would show up, you'd see people whispering like, fuck, John Lee's here.
You would see guys take these deep breaths because they knew he was in their weight class.
I could see how, I could see how this thing becomes super addicting.
And this is like your dirtbag life.
It's that same parallel we're talking about where this becomes the rock that you're climbing every day because this is the audience that you have to entertain.
It becomes about getting better, honing a craft, like, and ultimately succeeding with the crowd right in front of you.
And they're giving you the feedback.
That's very similar.
Like, you're either getting higher on the rock or you're falling off.
I've never like watching somebody that's great and then watching somebody that's in another dimension, like him specifically, because he's perfect.
Like it's just, it's absolutely perfect because it comes off.
It's unforced.
It's a conversation.
Like he's just having a conversation with the crowd.
Yeah.
Like it's so incredible to watch somebody that can be perfect in their delivery, but then be completely unassuming in the way that they're delivering it.
He was in the back room of the comedy store one night with this back bar, and we were hanging out, and uh, we were drinking.
This is back in Ron's drinking days, and we're having a couple of glasses of whiskey.
And then Ron starts telling the story about how when he was stationed in Hawaii, he goes, There's this place you can go, and you know, there's a bunch of hookers, you can get your dick sucked for like 20 bucks, man.
I was there every fucking day.
And he goes, Then all these years later, I was watching the news story, and all these trans vest-eyed hookers were getting rounded up in the very area where I used to go every day.
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And I realized, Oh my God, I got my dick sucked about a hundred times by men.
He would come visit us at the comedy store sometimes.
But I was talking to him on the phone.
He's like, man, I fucking love it here.
He goes, there's no Hollywood bullshit.
He goes, if I want to fly somewhere to work, I'm in the center of the country.
It's easy to get anywhere.
People are nice.
Food's great.
And he goes, you just not around Holly.
And I kept thinking, man, can I live in Austin?
Like, I always liked Austin and On it was out here.
So when I would come out here for work every now and then, and I'd always come out here and love doing stand-up here.
I was like, that planted the first seed.
And then when the pandemic hit, Ron was already here.
And when I came out here to look at houses and stuff, and this is in May of 2020.
So this is only a couple months into the lockdown, but I had already had enough.
I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
Like, I knew these cocksuckers in LA were never going to give up the kind of control and power that they had over people's lives.
They get off on it, those fucking weirdos.
And so I was like, well, at least Ron will be there.
Like, oh, hang out with Ron.
Like, even if I never do stand-up again, at least Ron will be here.
And then, you know, Ron was also the guy who convinced me that I have to open up a club.
I had a thought in my head, and I was thinking about doing it.
We talked about doing it.
And then Ron went on stage for the first time in like six months.
It was in November of 2020.
And then he grabs me by my shoulders when he got off stage because he murdered.
First of all, when he went on stage, they went crazy in this giant standing ovation because there was no indoor shows anywhere else near there.
It was like we were doing it at the Vulcan.
They had some shows they were doing at Cap City before Cap City went under, but they were like separating everybody by like 20 feet or some stupid shit.
Like as if the virus can't go through the air.
It was dumb, right?
Everything was dumb.
But the Vulcan was just like unhinged.
It was packed.
I was like, this is so crazy.
This is such a super spreader party.
And Ron went on stage and he had gone over his notes and material and wasn't even sure he was thinking he was retired.
He was talking about retiring.
I think I'm retired.
Did this one set and then he grabs me by the shoulders.
He goes, whatever the fuck we have to do, we're going to keep doing this.
Just he goes, you got to open up that club.
I'm like, okay, we're going to open up that club.
And then we started looking for locations like right afterwards.
So like Ron was a key force.
He's the godfather of the Austin comedy movement, like where this became like this big hub.
It started with Ron 100%.
Because I knew if he was here, if he was here, at least I'd have my friend.
We would drive 90 minutes to do five minutes for free.
Yeah, we would drive to Rhode Island to do stand-up for free.
We traveled all over the all over New England.
We did road gigs together.
Yeah, we came up together.
We had so much fun.
We just had no money, no career, no even thought of one day having a career.
The goal was, I want to be able to make a living doing comedy because we knew that there were guys in town that were headliners that could, you know, grind out 100 grand, 50 grand, whatever it is a year, only doing comedy.
The idea of a career was like, no, we never even talked about it because everybody in Boston stayed in Boston.
Nobody left.
And other than like Stephen Wright and Jay Leno, there's like a few people that had kind of air quotes made it during that time period and left Boston.
The goal in Boston was just to be a good comic.
Was a real interesting thing because it was a real artist colony in the most unpretentious of ways because these guys were all coke snorting, whiskey drinking, psychopaths.
And a lot of them were big guys, like these big fucking football player-looking dudes who were just animals.
And they were just wild men, you know.
And they had this life that was so envious to me.
I was like, God, to be so free.
All you have to do is just tell jokes.
You don't have to ever show up at the fucking newspaper depot to deliver newspapers or drive.
I was driving limos and doing construction gig.
I didn't have to do any of that.
You could just do comedy.
And that was me and Greg.
We would just drive around just thinking, like, one day, imagine being able to make a living doing this.
That was the only goal.
And then we both wound up eventually.
He moved to New York for a bit, and I lived in New York for a while.
And then I moved to LA, and then he eventually moved to LA as well.
And it's like you watch combat sports and the consequences are so grave.
What they're doing, the dedication, this moment, you train for months and months for this one moment when this referee is like, fighter one, you ready?
In terms of like, if you wanted to have some sort of a disruptive event, that's the spot at the White House and you're having cage fights.
And I'm not even convinced that it's going to happen because with all the crazy shit going on in the world, who knows what happens between now and June when this is supposed to pop off?
Like, who knows?
Who knows what goes down?
Who knows what fucking happens with all this Epstein file shit?
It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper.
And so Rokana and Massey just released the names of these guys that had been redacted from the list.
Because the fear of, you know, we talked about this yesterday with Roger Avery.
The fear of these like literally demonic human beings that are running the world and don't give a fuck about human lives and enjoy watching people being tortured, enjoy watching people killed, participating in ritual sacrifice of people, and they do it in order to show that you're a part of a team.
We know that that has always historically been a real thing.
And it's been something that you look at in history, you go, God, it's so sick.
It's so twisted.
It's so disgusting.
And everybody wants to think, thank God that's not happening now.
But then when you realize like that might have been happening now.
Here's one of the craziest ones.
The day he was indicted in 2018, the very next day they ordered, he ordered 330 gallons of sulfuric acid.
How long have they been boiling bodies to get rid of them?
I mean, if you do have, for lack of better words, let's call it a service, where you allow rich people from foreign governments or whatever, you set it up.
I can give you whatever you want.
Like, what I want to do is I want to kill a hooker.
Like, I want to kill her.
I want to torture her.
And I want to, you know, get rid of the body.
Like, I want to do that.
Like, can you do that?
There was one where this one guy is saying to him, thank you for the torture video.
It's literally a part of an email.
The actual quote, thank you for the torture video.
Well, I think up until the Soviets invaded, I mean, Afghanistan was kind of like the crown jewel, right?
They referred to it as the Beirut of Central Asia because you had a very eclectic group of people, and Kabul was known as this beautiful city.
And obviously, post-occupation, the Soviets had killed hundreds of thousands of people.
And then with the buildup and the devastation of not only a military occupation of the Soviets and then us coming in soon after, obviously, with when the Mulas took charge, it basically went completely to the other side or the extreme and the Taliban.
And then us coming in.
They've had nothing but decades of war.
It's completely eviscerated any assemblance of intellectualism.
There's no infrastructure of technology or advancement.
The universities were essentially demolished.
So everything was ruined.
So you're talking about, I mean, at least several hundreds of years of advancement that just were eliminated in three decades.
I mean, you would, I would spend a lot of time just trying to understand the place, right?
And you would have leave an airfield where we have the most advanced technology in the world, right?
Like we're launching helicopters and jets and any and all pieces of technology you could imagine.
And you would drive into these valleys or from one place to another, and you would have horse-drawn carriages of two mules and they're carrying something in the background.
And it's like you have the same cars are on the road with a Toyota Corolla and you have a mule pulling an old Toyota Corolla or something, right?
So you'd have an entire society of like basically Amish, Amish-level people.
And then Americans right next door in an airbase that are launching the most advanced technology and warfighting capability in the world.
And so you'd see everything from point A to point B. You would encounter huge percentage of people are illiterate, like no schooling, no advancement for girls.
You know, the children were seen more as like a beast of burden.
And a lot of places they would actually value their sheep more than they would value their children.
So they would be looking for reparations or to get paid for quite possibly the sheep that you destroyed on target.
But their kids, not really.
So you had a really clear picture to what civilization was like 500 years before that or 1,000 years at certain times.
And you'd see it too, right?
Because you'd have Buddhist architecture, Greek architecture, and then you'd have the standard kind of Taliban infrastructure.
You'd have the Soviet architecture from their invasion.
You'd have all these different layers of military occupation.
I was up in this place called the Pangier, and the lion of the Pangier was this General Massoud.
And he was killed actually on September 10th before September 11th.
So he's part of the actual September 11th plot.
He was killed by a suicide bomber as they were trying to do a documentary.
And they brought in a camera packed full of explosives and killed him the day before, which ultimately was part of the September 11th attacks because they knew that Massoud was the connection to the U.S. invasion or the U.S. invasion would be involving Massoud.
And the Pangier is this beautiful, like it's incredible river valley.
And it's also part of where the Soviets would just get their asses handed to them because we had the Majadine was being funded by the CIA at the time, obviously, back during the Soviet invasion.
And they would ambush the Soviets on these windy mountain roads next to this river, and they would cut them off basically on the front and the back of the convoy and then destroy the entire convoy in between.
And they just shove all the shit that was destroyed in the river.
So the river would have rapids, and not all the rapids were made from rocks and natural, you know, natural occurring rapids.
They were made by like T-52s and Russian tanks and all this like this war material that was pushed into the river by the Panjieris.
And he's a really incredible guy when you read about him and all of his combat accomplishments against the Soviets.
But the Panjier Valley is such a beautiful place.
And we used to joke around about how, gosh, we'd love to come back here and go skiing or recreate in Panjier Valley because it looks like Colorado or someplace incredible and beautiful.
And at the same time, you're in Afghanistan.
So you're surrounded by just the chaos and the devastation of war with this one tiny little piece, this like little sliver in the middle of nowhere.
It's absolutely beautiful.
And some of the rapids are made by T-52s.
And as a whitewater guy, I was like, man, I'd like to kayak this.
If you were a person who was a wealthy person, that your desire was to go gun people down, like there are people that will provide you with that service.
Like there was a thing with the Soviets, or not the Soviets, with the Russians, where they're allowing people to kill pirates.
Like you would pay a bunch of money and they'd take you to where the pirates are and you go out in a ship and with a 50 cal just fucking blow up pirate boats.
You know, as much as I disagree with the way that they were running the war, it'd be hard for me to believe that a general just loaned some rich guy a couple of helicopters to fly around Afghanistan.
Well, it makes it makes sense because they were using desalination technology.
But it's just the volume is suspicious.
Yeah, they were buying.
Also, dude had to know he was going down.
Like when he gets arrested in 2019, in 18 rather, when he gets indicted, he had to know he was going down.
And if you know you're going down and you're trying to mount some sort of a defense, one of the first things you would have to do is get rid of bodies.
He's talking about how I don't think no one understands it.
And the way this is going to change people is he goes, this is very similar to the time where we were realizing people were hearing stories about, oh, there's a virus in China, but no one knew exactly what was going to happen, how it's going to literally change humanity, change history.
He's like, this is the same sort of stories we're getting from these AI labs.
He's like, he wrote this very long and detailed something big is happening.
And the article is written by this guy, Matt Schumer.
And I recommend it highly if you want to really fucking get the shit scared out of you.
It's terrifying.
And he starts this comparison to people stockpiling toilet paper and stuff at the beginning of COVID.
He's like, they don't really understand how big this is going to be and how this latest version of ChatGPT they're working on, ChatGPT-5, ChatGPT made it.
So they had ChatGPT make a better version of itself and they made this better version of itself.
And this better version of itself can think things out.
It doesn't just do what you ask it to do.
It thinks things out.
It calculates.
It makes apps like instantaneously that would take developers months and months, costs millions of dollars, does it in minutes?
It does it like, and perfect.
It goes through it, it runs it, it tests it, it makes sure it doesn't have any problems, it anticipates all the different uses for the app, all the different ways it could be done.
It's going to be applied to law.
It's going to be like there's all these guys that are working in coding that say, I don't really have a job anymore.
I just basically show up and tell this AI program to do these things, and it keeps getting better and better.
And he's like, the leaps are enormous.
The leaps and its capability and its intelligence level.
Well, it's going to be, I think it's going to be a white-collar apocalypse, right?
So when you think about just attorneys, just okay.
So if you have the ability to case reference any legal file instantaneously, instantly and form a case, why are you going to need paralegals and first-year attorneys?
Like when they used to think about professions and things that they would go into, they would have clear roads into, okay, these are professional work tracks that they can go out and find a job and whatever, accounting, legal, engineering.
But it's going to change the entire professional landscape for every generation from this point forward, basically entering the workforce.
He's like, Optimus robots, these robots that he's making, are going to be able to perform better than any doctor at any hospital, and they're going to be able to do it in your house.
They're going to be better surgeons than any surgeon alive, these robots that they're making.
And they're going to be powered by AI.
You're going to have a super genius robot in your house that can do your taxes, that can fucking do chores, that can perform surgery on you.
So it's going to be an entire rise of an economy that's going to be human-built versus AI-built, right?
So, I mean, there has to be, like, if you have a label organic or it will be essentially, I think, the same type of thing, where it's human-made versus AI-made.
It would almost have to bifurcate the economy into two different sections.
I think unless you're going on a deep dive, all this stuff is kind of esoteric.
All this stuff is happening.
You have to search it out and get an understanding of it.
Like if you use an AI program to enhance your life, like perplexity, it's really good.
I mean, perplexity is awesome for solving problems.
You could ask it questions.
I use it all the time when I write.
I set it up and I talk to it.
So I say, well, you know, what year did Cortez invade Mexico?
How did this happen?
How many guns did they have?
How many languages are lost in Mexico?
Like, I was going on this deep dive.
Amazing.
But that's the surface.
Like what they're talking about is levels and levels and levels of improved ability to the point where it's better at human beings, smarter than human beings, at everything.
It's certainly on the table, especially if they decide that we're too problematic or if you give us too much freedom, that's what causes all this chaos, which is true, right?
You give people freedom, you're going to have a certain amount of chaos.
You're going to have a certain amount of car accidents unless you have autonomous cars.
You're going to have a certain amount of school shootings unless you take away all the guns.
You're going to have a certain amount of school stabbings.
Let's take away all the knives.
I mean, you could, if you were in a running program designed to eliminate all problems in the world, you would break those problems down to one source.
Well, what are the problems?
You've got natural disasters and you've got humans.
And humans are the cause of most of the problems.
Natural disasters are relatively rare in comparison to human-caused problems.
Hard to say, because there's a giant competition with us and China and Russia.
And I don't know if they really can close this stuff off.
I don't think it can operate that way.
I think it has to be a sort of a collaborative effort.
One of the things that's scaring a lot of people that are whistleblowers in the AI space is that they are bringing in people from other countries to just facilitate these problems that they have and make it go faster.
So you've open sourced it, and then think about the Manhattan Project.
If that was just completely porous and there was an open door to any and all countries internationally, you just had the ability to come in and walk out with files come as you go.