#753 - Tim Kennedy - What Went Wrong With America?

27:03That's hvmn .com slash modern wisdom. One of my favorite books has just been turned into God. You don't need to turn it around each time. Okay. It's lucky not you. It can stare at you. Ah, yeah, it's more ash. So one of my favorite books has just been turned into a movie. Churchill's Ministry of Unjentalmanly Warfare. You know this? I do know it. So have you seen the trailer for this? No. So do you know who Alan Richards is? He's the guy that played, yeah. So Jacked out of his mind, Henry Cavill is in it. It's directed by Guy Ritchie. Also Jack Jack out of his mind. Directed by Guy Ritchie. So it's going to be sexy.

27:36It's going to be cool. And I can't wait. But as you know, true story. You've read the book. Yeah, of course. This is why this is like this sort of renegade spirit is so cool. So the beginning of World War II, the British being the prim and proper gentleman. I mean, a walk on a bow tie, go out to a tee with a real numb crumpets. Exactly. Spinning spinning a cane. Yeah. At the beginning of World War II, Winston Churchill realized that the only way that we could beat the Nazis was to play dirty. And there's a quote from one of the other high ranking officials in the British government that said, if this is what it takes to win, then I am prepared to lose.

28:14That's what he said. That there was a degree of... Hang that guy. I don't know who that is, but they should hang them in the street. So I think, you know, this was really the inception of guerrilla warfare being used at scale for advanced military. And that's the beginning of special forces. Yes, correct. Yes. Yes. For both the US and the UK, although it doesn't separate. In the Canadians. Yes. Like this is the beginning of it all. So it's very, very familiar. So, but just thinking about that, thinking about, okay, so there was like the British sensibility of doing things right was so powerful.

28:50It was such a compulsion that the guys in power would have rather, there is a tendency of leaning toward, this is so unethical, to them it was like fucking siren gas or fucking mustard gas or something. It's like we're blowing up bridges, we're using, they created the limpid mine in that book as well. And they're doing it with anacid balls wrapped in condoms. And it's just, it's fucking great. I can't wait for this moving through this right now, though Chris. 100%. So, history always repeats itself. There's a great book called The New Rules of War. And currently, America does not have the appetite to do what it takes to win the wars that we have to win.

29:36But we can't even call them wars, right? So we're currently fighting cartels, syndicated criminal groups. We're fighting wars via proxy against terrorist organizations and proxy nations, so not direct state on state conflicts, but rather like state versus this group of people that are living in this area of this other country. There'd be finance by one of our enemies. That's war though. If our enemy is financing a bunch of different groups and militias to fight us in these really inhumane ways, we're at war with that country, but America can't recognize that. And the things that we would have to do to win this war and this new kind of way, we're not capable of doing the drone warfare, the AI that we're having to use to be successful in Ukraine.

30:26Americans are, wait a second, so that drone is going to go kill a human and it's making its decision on its own. Yeah, it has to because once it leaves this point of departure, I can't receive any signal from us because it's been blocked and has to be able to be making those decisions by itself. Similarly, like if you go down to the Mexican border, we're not just fighting immigrants. That's not what this is. We are, we are, you're an immigrant. I'm an immigrant. Literally every single white person in this whole entire country is an immigrant. With that said, there was an immigration process for us to come here.

31:01We are fighting cartels that are not just smuggling people, smuggling terrorists, smuggling drugs, and smuggling guns, they're smuggling in ideas. And we're at war on that border. That that's for a country to be a real country, it has to have a sovereign border. There's literally an amendment in the constitution saying that we have the right to defend ourselves and our borders, but we're not. And we're being invaded. What's happening on the US -Mexico border at the moment? Spent some time down there, and give me the, I think was it in December, 300 ,000 potential immigrants was stopped. That was the number that would stop.

31:39Yeah. Yeah, but the good way is the number that nobody talks about. So 300 ,000 people were stopped and then let in. How many weren't stopped? How many just got in? Is it more than 300 ,000? What do you think? Oh yeah, 100 % no, it's more than 300 ,000. So like the number of people that we caught is gonna be a small fraction and then of the number of people that made it across without being stopped when you look at the vastness of that border. And where the wall is, where our ports of entry are, where the river is, it is porous beyond belief. You can, I've crossed that border like 25 times in a week, both sides, like, you know, like, I'm on the Mexico, you know, like my phone says, welcome to Mexico.

32:24to go like it's gonna cost you $10 a day to be here. Welcome to the International Program, invite the Verizon. And then I come back and I was like, hey, welcome back to the United States. I'm like, they can do this all day long. So the ones that we're catching, the ones that we catch compared to the ones that make it through is a very, very small fraction. The ones that really don't want to be caught, the way the cartel will push a bunch of people that they know are gonna get caught. Because if you just think of the, okay, I'm the commander. I have X number of resources. I have a hundred troops at my disposal.

32:55Of course, I want to do counter -interdiction. So I want to stop drugs, I want to stop human traffickers, I want to stop sex and slavements, I want to stop weapon smuggling. As I'm at the river in Del Rio, and I have a thousand immigrants cross at one time. How many of my hundred soldiers do I need to use to deal with those thousand people? All right, so I've one guy receiving right, I'm going to put them into lines. I'm I make some choke points. I funnel them into a specific area You some concertina wire to make sure like I have an orderly way 50 guys maybe 75 guys right? So now I have 50 to 25 guys left for me to use and I have this entire area That I have to be covering but the moment those people start coming across the river There's the same time that five guys jump into the river with bundles on their back And then another five miles up the river two boats get pushed across with a bunch of middle eastern and eastern in Eastern European guys that are being smuggled and trafficked across.

33:52And then five miles down the river, there's a bunch of young girls, they're 11 or 12, they're going back into Mexico that they kidnapped in El Paso. Okay, what? The whole thing's coordinated. Tell me how to distribute my remaining 25 guys. Also the thousand that start coming across, the cartel dudes are just going to grab a couple of little girls and throw them in the river. They're going to grab a baby and drop it in the drink. They're gonna take a dad just trip them with a kid on his shoulders and they're all drowning Do you want my soldiers to jump in with body armor to start swimming after them?

34:23This is the reality every single day across the whole entire river and it is the largest border in the world In the world is our border on our southern border Canadian Canada to the north gigantic border Mexico border to the south stop those Canadians coming in that's the important thing that no one's talking about those I got hopes for their next election now. So can you explain, you know, for the people who haven't been down to the Mexico border, what is it all demarcated in some form or another is the some type of or is the elements where it's literally just this is a piece of land and you can wander across.

35:05A lot. Texas has mostly private land. So the border is on somebody's ranch. Right. Fantastic. Yeah. Hey guys, welcome in. In some cases, but I mean those ranchers, the cartel charges will say like a ticket. So if you want yourself and your family to come across your

35:33Ecuador right now Kind of spicy cartels took the whole entire thing over I'm sure if you saw two weeks ago They're like they were killing news hosts in the news station while they were on the street killing a bunch of people in the street and targeting government officials and judges and it was happening like in real time live on the news So you have legitimate asylum seekers that are on the run from cartels. They move through Central America and they come up to the Mexico border. They pay the cartels to allow them to cross or they pay them extra to facilitate them coming across. This is an endless cycle of revenue for the cartels.

36:18like it costs them nothing to produce. They don't have to smuggle in drugs. They don't have to kidnap anybody. People are just walking to them and they on the south side have created barriers where you can't cross without permission. And if you don't pay them, they'll kill you. So there's, in some cases physical barriers and in some cases psychological barriers where you know if you point this part, but this pointed departure, you'll be executed without a wristband. like your ticket. I could show you what those wristbands look like. Those wristbands color coordinated kind of tell you I got a round trip, I have multi -trip, I have single direction, I'm allowed to go through this area.

37:01Super sophisticated. Super sophisticated. All color coordinated and across this on the southern side all agreed between this cartel that's working with this group, with this carto with these traffickers and it's unstoppable the way that we're currently trying to fight it, fighting it. It's just we're not going to win. What is a way that would make it stoppable?

37:31So in the Chinese built the Great Wall. They recognized that any barricade without observation isn't a barricade. So I can build a wall, but if there's not something there observing that thing, it's not really a barricade because I can do whatever I need to do to get over that barricade and there's nothing to stop me. So there's like all problems, there's not a single solution. Unfortunately, the wall creates choke points. It forces people to go through specific areas and in those specific areas, we can set up to interdict those people. Now, there's a misconception that there is this barrier stopping people from crossing.

38:19There's not. And additionally, there are ports of entry. There are legal places where anybody to include people like Mexicans can just walk across the border. They can walk up and say, Hey, I'm going to be working. Here's my visa or I'm going to be working at this ranch. My mom lives across the street. and some of those borders, when they were set, some families lived on this side, some families lived on this side, and they'd been going back and forth all the time. But there are so many hundreds of thousands of people that have flooded these areas that it creates a humanitarian crisis, and it creates this logistical problem of how, as we the United States government and Department of State, how do we process this number of people?

39:03We can't, which is what exactly what the cartel wants. And the surges that happen from the executive level, so in the White House right now, they change some policies and the word gets out that it's open borders. Everybody comes and everybody's coming. What was the word that got out that made it seem like it was open borders? You get money when you cross. You know, we'll give you a couple thousand dollars. We'll give you a bus ticket to the inland We'll throw you on a plane and bring you to the city that you want to go to well Instead of you if you're an asylum seeker when during the Trump era for example if you came in and you were caught An asylum seeker that just crosses they'll then just On the inland be like hey, I'm looking for residency here If they're stopped on the border, they'll claim that they're asylum seekers.

39:58Well, we would make that person wait either at the country of their crossing or their country of their origin for their case, for their asylum case to be heard. Now they get a date, come back in like six months or 12 months to your court hearing for you to learn about the process of your asylum case. So there's only motivation for everyone to come here to the border and then to get an automatic pass in. Because there's no penalty. That's right. It's like universal asylum. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to a thousand and six.

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41:10No questions asked. Right now, you can get a 20 % discount off everything site -wide, including all of the products I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus .com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom checkout that's live m o m e n t o u s dot com slash modern wisdom. What's happening with these detention centers? That was a big news story a couple of years ago. They've always been there. Like there are more detention centers and larger detention centers during Obama than there were Trump. That's kind of a play of numbers though because so few people tried to cross during Trump because they knew that they're going to be kicked back to their country of origin.

41:51Just a couple of days ago in New York, did you see the video of the immigrants that were attacked in the NYPD officers? Oh, this is horrific. The police were trying to deal with a small problem with involving a bunch of immigrants and the immigrants attacked the two police officers, the two police officers end up grappling on the ground against a couple of them. And then the whole entire crowd came up and started soccer kicking the police officers. And it turns into like this. I mean, it's a hard video to watch. I'm actually about to post it today because I wanted to get some more context as to like what was the initial call?

42:27Why were they there? Like they were there doing the right thing. They were actually crimes being committed and they were there to like try and keep the peace as good police officers. and then it was escalated not on their end, but on the illegal's end, and then they ended up getting like skull stomped. This is foreshadowing of what's gonna be coming. Like this is just a tiny little taste. Like those are just immigrants. Those weren't even bad actors that were trained and are hoping for an opportunity to do America damage, because tens of thousands of them came into this country over the past couple of years.

42:59Did you see that video of a bunch of people on a plane refusing to sit down because someone was being deported. Yeah. And it turned out that that person had been involved in gangland shootouts in all manner of fuckery. Yeah. So 10 days ago, live news near Eagle Pass, another common, Texas, yeah, another common smuggling point. This news host is talking about all the immigrants coming across and this guy in pretty decent English walks up behind. and he goes, you don't know who I am, but you're gonna know my name. And he'll be like, what is going on here? Facial recognition ties this guy to 82 % that he is a multi -time terrorist that was in Gitmo.

43:47And he just walked across the border. He's live on television as his terrorist just walks into America and is bragging that everybody's gonna know his name. That was almost two weeks ago, a week and a half ago. What would you do? What would you do to try and fix this problem? You've mentioned that you need to have presumably more staffing, more funding to be able to train people up to be able to do this. Yeah. So this isn't a border state problem. This is a nation, this is a national problem, right? So the governor of Texas is using state resources. He, he approved Operation Loan Star, which is using Texas National Guard soldiers to protect the border.

44:25So he is using tons of text of state funding to protect the Texas border. It's not just the Texas border. This is America's border, but a whole bunch of, you know, most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas are bearing the burden of this immigration humanitarian crisis. But the other 36 states are kind of, or the other 46 states are just kind of like hanging back, and you're like, hey, sucks to be you guys, But then we bust a couple of bust loads up to them. They're like, oh my God, we're like being overwhelmed. I'm like We sent you 500 of them. Do you know what it's like when you have 300 ,000 that just came across your border that are in your country?

45:11What would I do? I would finish the wall. I would Make certain areas impassable. That's Constitina wire. That is armed guards. That is This may not horseback the epic photo of those Border Patrol guys that he was actually using his leads and they thought it was a whip because people are idiots and they actually don't know how to write a horse.

45:37Sensors, drones, we have the solutions. This is a fixable thing. We just don't have yet again the appetite to do what it takes to close that border. Once the border is closed, we open the ports of entry, Department of State funds and Department Department of State is doing the best they can with the very restricted resources they have. So imagine like the White House is telling the Department of State, hey, you have to be to be doing this. And Department of State is like, we don't have the resources and we don't have the means to facilitate this number of people. Then the White House is like, hey, everybody come over here.

46:09And Department of State is like, we can't. So these ports of entry have to be opened. And the systems have to be fixed for us to be able to process more people in a more strategic way. Didn't someone rip down a ton of raiza wire? Wasn't that a big deal like last week, two weeks ago? So the federal government is, there's competing efforts at the border right now. So Texas is saying the border is closed and the federal government is saying no, the border is open. So the federal government is coming down to the barricades and the barriers that Texas has put up and said, you can't have those that goes against federal law.

46:47And Texas is saying, no, you can't do that. Think this is Texas land and we are close in the borders. So if you're not going to close the American borders, we're going to close the Texas border. Yeah, they're literally like federal law enforcement is coming in and doing the opposite of what the Texas law enforcement is doing. Wild. Yeah, that's conflict. Brian Callan told me that he tried to trick you into believing that he was asleep. And you stood over him and said, do you know how many people have tried to pretend that they're asleep as I've stood over them? Yeah. I love that guy. But he did get up and he did go to the water with me.

47:31And then he did wrestle with me on the Southern coast of France in the sand. Yeah. Yeah, and I sort of like leg writing him from behind and put his face down to the sand and while he was like trying to and Infectively trying to get away from me. I was like drawing hearts And his face is like this and like drawing hearts and this is awesome What a great what a gem of a human for the people who haven't Almost no one really that's listening who will have been in any kind of kinetic armed Encounter what's it actually like to be in a firefight? What's the sense of that like what just like describe what's going on fear chaos and arki?

48:12I mean, it's like It is so not like the movies, you know, it's like John Wicks just like doing like some cool artistic violent ballet and they're it's it's um Smells like shit it, the smell of human flesh being burnt, whether it's a bullet going in it or an explosion from an IED or an RPG, the diesel from a humvee or RG33, the smell of gunpowder from a 50 -cal machine gun, those are all hard smells. And then when there's over pressure from a machine gun or a bomb or a grenade or an AT4, it of course kicks up the dirt. And but it's the fine dirt. It's not like the heavy good soil like on farmland.

49:08It's like the gross moon dust dirt. Human skin. Yeah. Yeah, and so you get these really weird, not natural smells mixed with very earthy smells. And smells are a trigger for a lot of people's memories. And that earthy, with mechanical, with burning thing are like really overwhelming sensations. That's the smell portion. And then there's like what you're seeing. And the fog of war could not like fail to express how hard it is to see what you're seeing. You know, you heard that expression in the fog of war and people trying to remember back to battles and they have a really hard time explaining what they're seeing.

49:56It's because I don't think your brain can process what you're seeing. You know, your brain can't process, like your friend just got blown up and he's burnt over here and there's a guy up there that's shooting a bullet at you that's from a machine gun position that's going to kill you. You know, and like the vehicle that you're just in is like shredded with a bunch of, wait, those holes in the front of this vehicle weren't there a few seconds ago. And that's what that sound was. And but your brain's trying to process this all the time, all the while like adrenaline, adrenaline cortisol is just exploding through your body.

50:28It's it's war as hell and the fog of war are apt expressions to try to in a succinct way say it's fucking chaos. So it's not it yet chaos is the right word that there's no degree of pause or control in what you've just described but presumably that's what tactics and preparation are for. Yeah. It's to allow you to be able to wrangle what's going on and actually have some sort of process that you guys are moving through. Yeah. I mean, that's why we do tens of thousands of reps of an emergency reload of my rifle, right? The bolt locks to the rear. I feel the bolt. I feel my magazine giving lighter as I'm shooting.

51:11And then I literally feel against my chin. The bolt lock to the rear. And I feel the little catch. Stop that bolt from traveling back forward because the followers pushed up the the bolt lock by the follower of the magazine. So I know my guns empty. I drop the magazine. I insert a new magazine. I drop the bolt. I re -grip the gun. I find my sight and I press the trigger and all that happens in less than a second. My brain shouldn't can't do that. Like I can't cognitively think about doing that process, but I've practiced it, you know, 10 to thousands of times that it just happens. And when we start maneuvering and we have a group laying down suppressive fire while another group is flanking or we have one group move up to an oversight position to start laying down suppressive fire while another element goes, like these are all rehearsed responses to known problems.

52:04And that's why the most elite units on the planet have so much time to train and so many resources to facilitate them training, Go ambush Delta Force. Go give that a whirl. Real bad plan. You're all going to die. Send as many people as you want and just know that you're not going to get any of them back. Cool. Go deal with Steel Team 6 on the water. That's a good idea. Go kidnap an American and drag her into the desert and then use a cell phone and see how that works out for you. You know, these are all stories of CO Team 6, like dropping into North Africa and going and rescuing this beautiful blonde NGO worker and killing literally everybody on the ground, true stories.

52:50And it's because they've done it thousands of times, thousands of reps, thousands of jumps, thousands of time rounds on down on the range. So when that chaos happens and you're scared and you're full of fear, you're just doing the thing that you've always practiced to do. And if you do it, you'll live if you don't, you're going to die. So I understand the moving things that you have to do from system two deliberate thinking into system one automatic thinking. That's what you did in the UFC, right? Someone throws a punch you don't think, oh, that's a left jab. I'm going to like slip. Yeah, I'm going to move a little bit.

53:26I'm going to move. I'm going to move. It just happens. But presumably in a firefight, it's not just reaction and response, there's this sort of system one thinking where you're just doing the things, reloading the weapon, but then there's also the, you need to use some cognition too. So what about that pulling in and pulling out thing? How do you utilize a little bit more of the analytical brain if you've just caught us all in adrenaline? Well, those systems and those processes are built within the military combat unit. So while you have the fighters, you also have the, you know, we'll just use a special forces ODA, you know, you know, you have operational detachment, alpha, it's like the 12 man 18.

54:12Right. Within that team, you have two guys per job. There's four main jobs, which are the eight men that do the body of the work. The other four guys are leaders in some form or fashion. and each of them take a certain piece of the pie on the leadership role. Like, is that one for each two? No. So the team sergeant, he's kind of running the eight guys. He's the, the E8 that is like the battle hardened. He's the most senior NCO on the ground and he's feeding the information to the 18 Bravo, the weapons guy, to the communication guy, to the engineer who's going to be launching and mortars and rockets and to the medic who's making sure like all the team and their foreign fighters are all working in use.

55:01And then you have the Intel guy who's feeding information and helping the team sergeant, but he's also feeding information to the team leader, the team leaders on the phone talking to command, getting maybe some air support. He wants some fixed wing fast movers or he's looking for some rotary wing support or he called an AC 130. So they're all reacting, but they're reacting in their piece of the pie. And some of those reactions are that team leader, the captain. If he picks up the 240 machine gun and hops up on top of the back of the hum V, and he's like, I'm the warrior. Oh, you know, like, sir, you're fired.

55:41That is not your job. Your job is to go get on that radio and to call higher and get a support. Similarly, if that team sergeant isn't directing and coordinating the men to respond to, you know, the threat or the ambush in the right way that they've rehearsed in the plant, then like he's not doing his job. So each one of these awesome jobs has an awesome role and the individual responsibility of that person to understand that role and then to be able to execute that role in this hell that that is war during the fog of war is so freaking badass. And that's why you, it's one of the many reasons why I look to like the Marcus La Trelle's and the Andy Stumps and the Joccos and the Evan Haifers and you see them be like incredibly successful in business.

56:31Like of course they will. Because look at what they did beforehand in all of these different roles as they moved up the military ladder and filled every single one of the roles on the way up where like They'll go run a fortune 500 company or they'll go start a brand new one and you know and then bring it public It's all for you 100 a few hundred million dollars and here's my face of surprise You know like they can do anything. What do each of the full pez of people do? So you have the 18 Bravo He is a weapon sergeant and he's kind of responsible for basic security the initial He's like the warrior I was in 18 Bravo, so I'm being slightly biased here.

57:14They're the best. And so then the 18 Charlie, he's the engineer. So there's two of each of these. There's two of, there's a senior and a junior. Right. So the guy that's been on the team longer and then the team gets the junior guy and he's the mentor to him. He's showing him all the things that he needs to know and preparing that replacement. And the senior of each of those jobs is also looking at the four other roles like the 18 Fox, the the warrant on the team and the team sergeant and they're all kind of being positioned and trained to then fill the next roll above them. The engineer is the explosives the building is the bridge good to cross is this building stable for us to fight from if I'm going to be setting up the camp here's how I'm doing like the logistic resource of refits and refuels, 18 echo is the communication guy.

58:08So satellite communication, line of site communication, FM, all the things that we need to do, shoot move, communicate, medicate. Then leads us to the 18 delta, which is the special forces medic, and there's two of them. They're like a PA, like a slash paramedic. That's really, really good at trauma. In other news, this episode is brought to you by AG1. Nutrition doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to work, and that's why I've used AG1 every single day for over three years now. AG1 is literally the best in the world at providing you with a scientifically backblend of ingredients that helps to fuel your body.

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59:13Right now, you can get a year's free supply, vitamin D plus five free travel packs by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1 .com slash wisdom. That's drinkag1 .com slash wisdom. I was reading about some rumors of the number of soldiers that have been deployed. Perhaps it was in World War II, but it could have been one of the later wars who didn't find their rifle or purposefully find their rifle over the heads of the enemy. How much Truths in that. This truth to that. With this wild phenomenon called non -shoot snipers. So guys in combat arms, he goes to the only casualty producing school within the military sniper school, where they're actually just teaching a person how to kill another person, only casualty producing, because the only role that you have, or the primary role that you have to get spotting as well, is like in serving, feeding back information, but ultimately we're also teaching them a dude, how to take crosshairs, figure out how to take a bullet and put it into somebody and make a hole.

1:00:18You have lots of military schools. I'm about to go to one that's like six months long. And that is not a casualty producing school. That's a leadership school. It's like lots of Ranger school, not a casualty producing school. That's a leadership school. Sephartek, that is not a casualty producing school. Even though you learn a ton about how to a shoot move, you can't medicate, that is how to rescue somebody. That is a hostage. You go to Sephauic, Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat. That is how do I do war in a combat area or in an urban area? So each of them building necessary skills within that special operations unit, but sniper school, teaching somebody how to make a hole in somebody far, far away.

1:00:59The no -shoot sniper comes from combat arms, goes to sniper school, goes to war, and can't pull the trigger. And it's not common, but it does, it happens. And, and this is just my personal opinion, I think it is, uh, for a couple of reasons, one is the, the equipment that we use, just like I can see you here, very, very close, you know, like I can see your skin, I can see your pores, I can see the vents on your neck. And like that's how intimate it is when you're looking through a 20 power optic. So it humanizes the target. Yeah. And I'm watching them breathe. And I know I'm gonna have a bullet flight of two to three So I actually have to be watching how you're moving.

1:01:38So I need to know where you're going to be in two to three seconds from now. So I'm like learning so much about you and how you move and it really connects me to you, which is one problem. And then the other part is the thing that we've known throughout all war which is some people just can't do it. It's not for everybody.

1:02:05Have you... Ever seen this movie, read this book, Mellow of Honor recipient. He was a conscientious objector. He would not hold a weapon. This is during World War II. He would not hold a gun. He said he wouldn't do it. It was against his faith. And during one of the island invasions in the Pacific, he rescued like hundreds of Americans and get shot, get stabbed, get blown up, and he just keeps going up this cliff and grabbing these Americans. And everybody, the base of the cliff has no idea who keeps lowering down these Americans. And they find out that it was this guy that they've been trying to kick out of the unit because he wouldn't fight.

1:02:52And not everybody needs to fight. There's a beautiful poem written about the warrior. There's a hundred men that go to war. Eight of them shouldn't even be there. They're just bags of blood. They're going to be running for to die. Ten of them are going to like, they're the men that are going to carry the war. They're the ones that are going to go out and fight. Then there's the remaining ten and then they're incredible. They're brave, they're courageous, they're leaders, but then there's the one, right? There's the one that's gonna bring all the men home and that's the, that's the Marcus La Trelle's.

1:03:33That's the Dakota Myers, that's the extraordinary, that's the Andy Stumps, you know, like you know some of these guys. That takes it Andy this morning. Yeah, great human. This is Andy's. It's nice, I'll read you. Yeah, yeah, by stole it from him. Oh, right, you actually tuck it off his back. No, no, he lay down and set it down and I took it and I put it in my bag and then I left with it. Right, so if Andy's looking at you thinking, that's a familiar look in the dance. Yeah, I was just sure if it was his or Denver's, but I'm like 90 % sure that I was his. Okay. So like 90 % that I stole this. But it's nice.

1:04:06It is nice. Is there anyone you've mentioned Marcus Latrell, Dakota Meyer? Is there anyone that you have heard about or you served with that you wish their story would be better known? Is there someone or the incidents that you wish that you could sort of bring to public light more? Yeah, give me some Roy Benavides All right, you're not gonna believe this one. Okay, Roy Benavides. He's in Vietnam. He's a Texan and He he's sitting on a Ford base and he listens to a special forces ODA. He's a special he's a green beret getting a gunfight He's like, whoop, this sounds bad Hella copter goes in to try to get some dudes.

1:04:49He gets scuffed up, comes back with a bunch of bullet holes and Roy runs up to the helicopter. He's like, hey, I'm going to go with you. Take me back in there. He throws a bunch of guns and ammo in there. The helicopter takes on his own. On his own. Flies him back to where the ODA has almost all been massacred. He goes, starts leading the remaining men that are all busted up. All of them are wounded. Most of them are dead. He gets them to start fighting back the Vietcong and starts pushing them back. He gets all of them in together and they start Surviving for a little bit helicopters are trying to come get them out through the course of that I think he gets like 70 80 or 90 bullet wounds fragmentation from grenades and bayonet wounds.

1:05:27He kills a dude with a rock kills a dude with a bayonet There's a portion where one of the helicopters is trying to take off but it has so much They overload it with the wounded and dead He's running around alongside of it with a machine gun providing support with his body and a machine gun laying down supporting fire as this helicopter is trying to take off. Helicopter comes back again. He gets the last remaining bits of equipment. He gets the last few men back onto the helicopter. He's the last guy to come. He gets jumped. Get stabbed with the band. That takes the band out. Kills the dude. Kills a couple more dudes.

1:05:58Hopps in the helicopter and falls over. They they the helicopter lands. He's covered in blood. He's covered in mud and they're like this dude's dead. They throw him in a dead body bag so they can throw him in the morgue. And as there's dipping the thing up, he goes, and he spits in the doctor's face. He couldn't talk. He'd been so wounded. There's nothing that he could do besides spit on this dude, to let him know that you're still alive. He's like, oh my God, Roy Benavite is still alive. That's a good one. You know, shoe garden Gordon, black hawk down. No. Okay, I'm gonna do this without crying.

1:06:33Okay. Good luck.

1:06:37You're familiar with the black hawk down, Battle of Mogadishu, they're in there to get this.

1:06:44The plan was for Delta Force to come in on top of this building. The Rangers come up to create a security perimeter around this building while they find the bad guy inside, move him to the vehicles and they all drive out together. That was the plan. Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face. guys get in, they get the bad guy, Rangers arrive, helicopter gets struck by an RPG in the tail, helicopter crashes. This then begins this horrific battle against a bunch of different terrorist organizations all trying to kill the Rangers and Delta Force that are now trapped in issue.

1:07:28And it's a, I mean, this is a fight. 30, 40 to 1 odds and ratio between terrorists to American operators. Shugart and Gordon are two special forces snipers that are in a helicopter providing overwatch. One of the helicopters that gets shot and crashes is getting overrun by all of these insurgent militia terrorists. They see on the ground that this helicopter, that some of the people inside of it survive the crash. And they see small arms fire, they see flashes from these guys trying to protect themselves. They get on the radio and they're like, general, we like permission to go in and protect these guys.

1:08:13If we don't get down there, they're going to get overrun. We can see everything. The general's like like negative, you do not have permission, you cannot be put on the ground and like understood. Why did they not give permission? So they call again five minutes later. They're like, if we don't get on the ground right now, everybody in the helicopter is gonna die. The general's like, no, denied, you cannot go down there. You see better than we can that there is no way for us to get you out. If you go on the ground, it's just gonna add to the problem. It's two more people. They get a third time, sir.

1:08:44with your permission, please allow us to get on the ground. We will fight to the helicopter. We will create a perimeter, a security perimeter around these guys, and we will protect them until we get a time to get these guys out. The general's like, I don't know when that's going to be. If you go on the ground, I can't send the rangers to you. I have no more helicopters to send to you. I have no resources to go and rescue the people in that helicopter. And, um, Durant, an amazing book, The Pilot, that was in the helicopter. Um, he tells in his book, the most dangerous time to be taken captive is like the first few minutes.

1:09:22There's like this bloodlust, this like rampid rage, so the helicopter crashes, right? And like, think like you're an insurgent, you're a terrorist on the ground. We got him. We got him, right? Like you're rushing in, you're just killing everything. It's like, there has to be this lol if anybody has a chance to survive. So Shu -Ru, Shu -Ru, Shu Art & Gordon, talk the general after three efforts into putting them on the ground. These two Delta Force Special Forces snipers from my, from like the school that I went to, it's the best sniper school on the planet. These dudes fight from their infall point to the helicopter and they kill literally everybody.

1:09:58Like if there was anybody within 200 meters that was holding a gun, they went on the ground leaky, a blood and dead. They get to the helicopter and this is all explained in Durant's book because he was the one that survived. He was the one that they went to rescue. He was the one that they ultimately gave their life to save and they did just that. They grab him, they drag him out of the helicopter, they bring him into the building and then they go back out to the helicopter. They give him an MP5 and they say anybody that comes in behind us, stop them because is we're gonna fight to slow, cause they're like this big, huge surge, like you've seen where it riots kind of start getting that energy and people start pulsing.

1:10:39Fever. Yeah, so that fever is there and they're just trying to keep it at bay. And they run out of rifle ammo. They run out of, they start acquiring weapons off the ground and they run out of that ammo. And they end up with pistols and they're like bare knuckle fighting these guys and shooting the remaining pistol rounds as they have before ultimately they're both killed and they save his life and Shugart and Gordon knew and I That's the this is the this is the hard one They knew they're gonna die Like there's not a there's not a way that you're sitting in a helicopter like that and are like We'll survive this When that question is, there's no greater thing than to lay your life down for another service, right?

1:11:33Here we are, full circle. They knew that they were going to die for the chance to save a dude. I've asked myself this question a thousand times. It's like, what would I do? And I don't know. Sugar and Gordon. Pretty rad, men. I could go on for hours telling these stories because if you if there's a part of you that is lacking purpose Sometimes you can find inspiration from somebody else's purpose and There I mean there's been times where I'm like looking at Israel like do I have to go over there? Is this where I really need to go? And Those questions of like should I be there is? Am I just another pond of these large strategic influences?

1:12:24Should I be at the Mexico border? Should I be in Ukraine? Should I be in Afghanistan?

1:12:31But maybe that purpose is just to be part of something that's bigger and better than yourself. And then the answer is yes. Here I am, send me like an IZSX -8. Well, get back to talking to Tim in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. You're a denocene system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that helps to curb cravings, improve your brain function and regulate your appetite.

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1:13:36That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. It was a story that you had when you run out of ammo as well. I seem to remember hearing that from you. Yeah, that's not a great plan. If you're in the military, as best you can, never being a gunfight and run out of ammo. That was an Earth -Gone Valley Afghanistan in 2008. We got blown up and we... They couldn't get ammo resupplies into us. The gunfight was so intense. We have RG33s, we had a home visa, we had supporting special forces commandos that were with us. We ran out of ammo. Like, that's wild. That's a gunfight. How long was that firefight? Three days in, a couple of days out.

1:14:26So maybe five days, cumatively of gunfighting. What do you mean in and out? So we're moving a group of check special operations into this firebase called firebase anaconda. And we had to go through this valley to get to firebase anaconda. And the topography was really advantageous for the Taliban. And like everything was kind of stacked against us, but we had to get this unit in there because firebase anaconda had been isolated. If you Google firebase anaconda, they have I think two or three times been overrun by the Taliban, like climbing over walls and they're fighting for their lives. Who the fuck chose to put this thing there?

1:15:06That's a great question. That's a stupid idea to put it in this like spot. They're also surrounded. They're close enough where foreign fighters are easily, easily that area is easily accessible to foreign fighters. It's just like the perfect storm and the worst place to be ODA 782. They'll shout out to you guys because they held that base better than anybody ever has throughout the whole entire G1. and it's my two best friends in the world, their old ODA. But we were trying to get the check special forces to Firebase Anaconda and you had to pass through this valley and that's where we got blown up and attacked and ambushed and then we had to fight for a while.

1:15:46And then once we got to Firebase Anaconda, you know, we had scuffed up, you know, we killed like 300, 400 foreign fighters and Taliban on our way in, like that really, like we kicked the Hornets nest. So then all of the other organizations were sending I mean, all of their people, cause then they knew that we had to leave, cause our job was to bring those guys in. We left, I put this in my book, and I can't remember it off the top of my head now. We left with a couple hundred trucks, and we arrived with like a couple dozen. That was crappy. So, if you're in a situation like that where you need to be fighting for five days straight, like you can't be awake and functioning well for all of that time.

1:16:33So you're trying to grab 30 minutes of rest whenever you can. I don't remember trying to get rest. I remember being underneath a humvee and I woke up. And I don't know how I got underneath that humvee and I don't know how long I've been underneath that humvee. and I heard like, so there's somebody like shooting towards you, which is like, and then there's somebody shooting at you, which is like, the snap. And then there's, why is this snap? The snap is the bullet crest, like coming past you. Right. It pushes the yeah. Yeah. And then there's bang, and that's like the bullet is so close. You hear the bang of the rifle, you hear the pop of the supersonic, and then you hear literally the 115 grain or 250 grain thing going, sss, pass your face.

1:17:32And I'm laying there and I hear sss, as it goes past this humvee and hits something metal in my vicinity and I wake up. And then I was like, ah! And I had over pressure sickness, so I was like, should he my pants move? A pressure sickness. Something where it's like being concussed. And it's not being concussed. It is being concussed. Okay. So like a bunch of small concussions from explosions and IDs and RPGs and 50 cows and AT4s, like all the things that we're shooting at them, all the things that they're shooting at us, all of those things go with air. And that's happening around your head. So that sucks.

1:18:11And then we're at altitude and then I'm sleeping underneath a humvee Which would probably not a great place while shitting yourself. Yeah, while you're shitting yourself I smelled I bet That was pretty stag Anyway, so yeah, I don't know when I slept. I just like occasionally would wake up and when I Was writing that scars and stripes and I went back and I talked to a whole bunch of people that were there with me One of my friends, Mike, he died in 2019, Afghanistan. He was with me. He saved my life that day. Mike global. I walk up to a door. I don't know how he knew this, because I walk up and I'm about to push the door open.

1:18:52And as soon as I touch the handle of the door and it's a push door, he shoves me. And he and I always like, we're kind of physical. We're almost always gonna fight over something stupid. I got mad at him because he was carrying a pistol through a village and he wanted a pistol kill. and I was like, you're sitting on a machine gun. Why would he be holding a pistol, put your pistol away and we ended up fist fighting the team sergeant Kim over and separated. So we're always like really rough. So he shoves me and I fall back and I'm like getting ready. We're in the middle of a gunfight and I'm about to start a fist fight with him because he shoves me and the whole door starts getting shredded by machine gun fire.

1:19:25There's a PKM on the other side and I don't know if he heard the bolt drop. I don't know if you heard the selector switch, the safety getting pulled. I don't know if he just had like an intuition if there's six cents divine intervention. He shoves in the whole Door just starts getting shredded might go bull and

1:19:47Hero I was everybody learned about him. There's another multiple tours, you know countless lives. He saved more people he rescued like Hero Um, Mike English, I can't even say his last name because he's still in. But uh, the fog of war, um, when I went back and talked to all these guys, they remembered a whole bunch of things that I didn't remember. And we, in some cases, the things that we remembered were in conflict of each other. I thought it happened this way. No, it didn't happen that way. That's right. Like there were a bunch of women and kids that got hurt after that door got shredded because when that door got pushed open I saw a machine gun barrel sticking out of this tiny little window and I take a grenade a frag grenade and I throw it through that window the grenade goes off and A few seconds later I hear a bunch of women and children screaming now a few seconds later Can be anything in the brain and war right that might have been ten minutes But I remember it being like very shortly after like it was a response to my grenade And on the outside of the building, my friend Mike K was on a big heavy machine gun pounding this compound where he saw a bunch of surgeons fighting out of it, specifically that room where those women and children were.

1:21:07So for 10 years, I lived with like, I'm the one that hurt these people that had been used as body shields by the terrorists. And he for 10 years had assumed that he was the one that had hurt everybody and he was living with that for 10 years. We both did, right? Like, it's war. That's... How do you think about that? That's certainly one of the things, you know, when people hear stories like that, especially if they're not familiar with collateral damage and the imprecision that happens especially when you're going house to house, especially if the terrorists are using civilians as body shields or if you're just going door to door with things as families and people in that.

1:21:50Yeah. How do you think about collateral damage in that way, the fact that, you know, there's someone who didn't do anything wrong that is in the midst of two people trying to kill each other? Yeah. Obviously, America wants no collateral damage. You go back to World War II. you launch a surprise attack against us and Pearl Harbor. And we fight you all the way back to mainland and take every single island that you used to own and then make it ours. And then we tell you to surrender and you don't we drop a nuclear bomb on you. Then we tell you surrender and you don't and we drop another nuclear bomb on you.

1:22:36And we tell you to surrender. And if you don't, we're going to drop another nuclear bomb on you. like that's winning a war. That's that's winning a war in a way that we can't we don't have the appetite to win wars anymore. The moral equivalency of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Taliban and Al -Qaeda and ISIS, they intentionally use civilians as shields, They intentionally use hostages as shields. They intentionally manipulate the battlefield for The moral consequence of the fighting force that has to fight against it They want to hurt our souls. They want to hurt the civilians because if the civilians get hurt by us as we're trying to be strategic and targeting The bad guys not that not we don't want any Collateral damage at all.

1:23:27We want zero, but they make it so it's impossible for us to be successful without any form of collateral damage. And that's exactly what they want because that continues, it's another spoke in the wheel of their propaganda machine. So then they say, like, look, all these women and children were hurt because the Americans or the Israelis came in here. No, no, you did that on purpose. You were hiding a rocket launcher at a hospital. You were hiding a bunch of arms in a school and then you put all the kids in the school and you wanted us to target it. And then you leaked out information that those weapons were in the school and that, and then you also leaked that information that high level leaders were there at the specific time.

1:24:05So of course we targeted that time to get the high level leaders and the weapons, but then you put kids in there. Anybody that tries to conflate this moral equivalently between like the Hamas and Israel's response, you can just separate them in this one specific idea. One group of them are hiding behind civilians, and they use that as leverage and opportunity to create more propaganda. The other group is doing everything in their power to limit civilian casualties and any form of collateral damage. And the line of departure between those two could not be more clear. Anybody that says anything else is ignorant and totally doesn't understand it or is so in confirmation bias trying to support the set of beliefs that are not based on fact, they cannot be more dissimilar.

1:24:50And shame on anybody that conflates those two. I was speaking about the Nagasaki bum blast. Do you know the forgotten Highlander by Alistair Erkart? No. Dude, I got to get this book for you. It's my favorite nonfiction sort of real -life story. So this guy is a Scottish dude who goes to Singapore in World War II. Japan enters the war. He gets captured by the Japanese. And for the next four years goes through more than I think pretty much anyone that I've ever read about. So this guy is put in forced labor for the best part of two and a half years. He's made to help build the bridge over the river Quai.

1:25:35He's basically permanently got every tropical disease, including dysentery for all of this time. He's being mistreated. Then one of the camp guards tries to rape him. So instead of allowing him to do that, he kicks him in the nuts and runs away. He then gets locked in a tin box in the middle of the sun to basically just cook to death Doesn't die then after that gets put onto one of these Japanese hellships Which doesn't have the Swiss cross on the side that gets torpedoed by an American submarine doesn't die finds a small piece of flotsam and floats in it has to fight a Japanese soldier in the water one in like a little bucket and the other on this piece of flotsam doesn't die But then it gets recaptured, put back to work, gets knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki, still doesn't die, and then for 50 years keeps quiet by order of the British government and finally writes this memoir to bring the Japanese to account for the atrocities that they went through, because we had the Neuronberg trials, we had this sort of call to arms for what Germany had done, but the equivalent thing didn't seem to happen in the same way for the Japanese.

1:26:44Yeah, the book is outrageously good. It's called the forgotten highlander outrageous. I mean, yeah, it's really good And other thing as well. I remember this is great is it World War II the front lines it's on Netflix at the moment So they used AI to colorize and make 4k all of this sort of archive footage Which is very strange because you're not used to seeing Olden timey war in a more vibrant sort of real way. It's always archive footage has this, it gives you a sense of distance by it not being a sharp, right? You were talking about the sniper is able to see the face, the expressions of the person and it humanizes them, it's really humanizes the story.

1:27:27That's right, I can handle this. It's pretty rough, but it's also fascinating because it's so much more immersive. If the Japanese hadn't decided they were going to surrender, the US was basically preparing the largest land invasion in history. That's right. And they were, I think there was still unsure about whether or not Japan was actually going to surrender because it was like we will fight to the last man when it tried. And person behind every single blade of grass would be a Japanese soldier or a civilian with a sword behind every blade of grass in Japan in the mainland. So America, when we looked like why would we drop two nuclear bombs, that would have cost that cost fewer lives than it would have been millions.

1:28:14That's right. So like, wait, dropping two nuclear bombs saved millions of lives. Yes, it did. Try to explain that, you know, like, what kind of 2024? What's it like to be shot? Have you been shot? I have. Okay. What's it feel like? Yeah. Well, so I've never actually been fought Sean war and

1:28:35And for me protecting, it's a really weird thing seen a barrel pointed at you and then seen the flash. I was obviously in body armor and I was being really particular. So I like rolled my shoulders back and I was holding a standing like this and I pulled my chin back because I didn't want any like slag or things coming up into my neck or into my shoulders and my arms. I have seen friends get shot in the war and I have obviously shot people on like the receiving end of In a gunfight So one of my friends had a Round go through like his groin and it missed his like for more artery but his like ball started like swelling up.

1:29:26So like a little bit of slag, like a little bit of, I think trapped. Like went up into his not sacs. So they started like bleeding in there and like started getting really, we had air, we had air vacuum out. But he didn't realize that he'd even been hurt or hit until like he had a gigantic set of balls. You know, like he was still like, that wasn't like that. Yeah, like what is going on down here? and they're in band of brothers, there's this amazing scene where this guy, this grenade goes off and he looks down and he sees that he's bleeding blow the waste and the medic runs open and he's like, oh, shoot, and he cuts him up, cuts his trousers open, he's like, hey bro, you're good.

1:30:13Like, hey, your dick and balls are still good. Stay with me, you got the will to fight now. You're like it was like this essence of when you think about warriors Like they're warriors in every sense and their manliness and that masculinity are very much Yeah, I'm twined with their their their psyche. You take blow -knife if if best. Yeah possible. Yeah But to the bullet question like I'm mostly like I get I got hit you know like what the fuck Do you see this? You know like they didn't even recognize that there's a bullet hole in their arm I'm trying to use my arm, it's not working. Well, I guess you've got this cascade of hormones that caught us all, the adrenaline, all the rest of it.

1:30:54So it's just like, I don't know. That's why I was so interested to work out how much pain versus how much surprise there is. I have this sort of idea, I snap my Achilles, which is the most traumatic injury that I've had. Pretty nasty injury, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the first thing that I felt wasn't pain, it was surprise. I was like, did I, why is my leg not? And I thought to myself, I wonder how many people, you know, we think about your final moments on this planet being you, thinking of your loved ones, or you in pain, or you in fear, or you in whatever. I think surprise will be up there as one of the leading emotions that people pass away with.

1:31:35Did I just get fucking, I hope so. That's a great way to go. You know, when I'm hunting, I try to be a really ethical hunter and I even try to be on the left side of surprise. The animals just sitting there eating grass. That's before it has chance to be surprised. What was that? Oh no, there's nothing. It can't even figure out what it was because it's just blackness now. I can't think of a time where I was hurt. Even in the fights in the UFC, cut wide open, this was Robbie Lawler, this was you all Romero. So this was Jacques Raysouza. You know, I got one from Luke Rockhold right here. And after the fights, the UFC fight doc, he'd come to stitch me closed and I mean, he'd walk in with like a local and like, I don't want that.

1:32:30He's like, I'm serious, so my face closed. And I'd never let him give me any form of painkiller. I wanted to feel it, but I didn't really feel it. And then in the cage, I definitely didn't feel it. It sounds like a really hard thing to do, but your body is just producing so much. And also, I mean, there's a bit of me that wanted to feel it. Like, I made this mistake. I wanna remember this mistake, like the purpose of pain. I'm writing a book right now called The Purpose of Pain. And the lessons that we learn from pain are, I think the most important lessons, emotional pain, you're like, I bat out of my league.

1:33:07I'm like, hey, that crazy Latino girl, that's like an 11. I'm totally gonna be with this one. And then she tries to stab you at night. You're like, maybe you batting out of your league bro, like go with the seven. And similarly, I touch a stove and I burn my hand. I know that not to touch the stove again. You know, like I think back to all the mistakes and the humiliation and the shame that I made is a young man and now as I'm hoping to be an improved man, I'm like, I don't wanna do that again. I don't remember what that embarrassment felt like. You've worked quite hard to try and, you know, we've spent a good bit of time together since I've been not enough by the way.

1:33:45Yeah, I know. That's your fault. It is my fault. But I passed my driving test finally because there's no license equivalency, but that means I can drive up and see you up north. You spend an awful lot of time trying to do everything the way that you want to do anything. Whether it's with alcohol, with training, we did a session. He came up to me in Roca. I hadn't done any cardio work in quite a while and it was a pairs workout of That was gonna last maybe 30 minutes or something in four stations three stations He came up to me and he pointed your finger in my face and you said There's one thing that we're not gonna be that's last That was quite motivating and my point being Do you think that you're a good man now because you have this backdrop of?

1:34:31Not believing that you were a good man when you think about you, who do you see? Do you see the old Tim, are you still paying reparations? How do you think about that? I mean, what is it? We'll get philosophical, like what is a good man? I think a man should always be judged by his actions. And obviously, if you look back to periods of my life, my actions were not in support of being a good man. I mean, even some of the motivations of when I was going overseas, like all these idealistic things about hey, you can go and make a place a more stable and sovereign nation. You can give them democracy.

1:35:11Like those are really great ideas, but there was also a 25 year old version of Tim that was like, I want to go and get in a fight. You know, like I want you to say something so I can knock your teeth in. Like I'm happy to be a bouncer at the door for the opportunity to do violence. All of those obviously are not great characteristics. And so even though I was doing good things, I was looking for an opportunity to do bad things. Now, if we are what we do, what are the things, like if anybody were to take a step back and look at their life and you're spending eight, 10 hours a day working at a job that you don't love to go back to a woman that you don't appreciate, to be around kids that you don't wanna feed and nurture and be intentional with, are you a good person?

1:35:55I don't think so. But you could have that exact same situation where you're working eight to 10 hours a day to be the best provider you possibly can for the woman that you love that you know she needs to, that you wanna be able to support and provide for and put good food on the table for the kids that you love to support them going to club sports or to a private school or to get them out of this crappy public education theorem. And like the only thing that changed there was the action still the same, but the purpose was different. Yeah. And so now for me, my purpose and my actions are in alignment.

1:36:31Yeah. And they didn't used to be. And now I very much try to have those things be complimentary. It sounds like you led with action and then allowed the intention to kind of catch up to that. Yeah. The wheels were always spinning, but the car wasn't always pointed in the right direction. Yeah. I think that's an easiest way to do it. One of my friends, Alex, talks about, I felt much better about myself when I started judging myself on my actions not on the thoughts that I had. And I think that that's a really good first step, especially if someone is unsure about how virtuous they might actually be deep down.

1:37:07Well, maybe they're cowardly or maybe they're untrustworthy or maybe they don't fulfill their potential or maybe they shy away from hard things or whatever it might be. The first place to start, I think the easiest place to start is to just change the things that you do and then allow intention to catch up after that because Dude, it's so hard. It's so hard to change our sense of self. You know how long have you worked at it to try and basically, you know pay recompense, you know this kind of like Life of Fladulation like self -flagulation in in service of something to be like and finally maybe I'm a good man Yeah, but I think it's way easier to start with action than it is to be like I think I'm a good man And then this is going to go ahead because you're always not gonna know.

1:37:54Yeah, I could not agree with you more when People are asking and I get asked all the time man. What should I do? I like do anything just start You know like cool. You want to be a police officer? Well start developing the characteristics that make you good one start learning grace and different cultures joins you Jitsu, start shooting, learn what it means to be like somebody that wants to protect somebody and sacrifice a portion of themselves for the expense of themselves for the benefit of another. Like these are things that we have to have and somebody that is a servant. Who you want to go into the military?

1:38:26Learn another language. If you are not planning your future, somebody else is going to be planning your future for you. So if you don't know what your purpose is, sometimes you can just start doing things that will make you a better person and those things will give you purpose. And that's okay. Sometimes the cart is before the horse. And that's okay. You know, like I didn't know as a firefighter EMT first, then I went to the police academy to come a police officer, you know, to go and hunt down serial killers and then 9 -11 happened. And I enlisted in special forces. And then from there, I went to other specialty schools to go to special units.

1:39:02And then from there, you know, like I started these gigantic NGOs that go and rescue people over the planet. And now I'm working within in the military and a military capacity, and like my official role to like save soldiers and help with recruiting and to talk about messaging and clearly communicate how great of an organization it is and how wonderful it is to be part of this organization and to do something impactful that means more than yourself. And if you take a step back, you're like, I mean, he's always kind of been going in this direction. The wheels were always spinning. It was spinning perfect.

1:39:33And now that there is momentum and a little bit of experience and plenty of failure. Now there's, we're starting to see positive impact. But man, it took 25 years. Yeah, it's a slow, you know, to chip away at whatever sense itself and to adjust the course. It is like moving a freighter. Yeah. It's one half degree every single year. And you're like, right, okay, and finally, I can actually get this thing to swing around. Are there any, you mentioned that memory before of I thought it was the grenade and he thought it was the machine gun. That's obviously something that's played on your mind. Are there any other memories that sort of a common recurrences for you, or someone who got away, someone who didn't?

1:40:18Yeah. Oh man, we could go. We could spit hours talking about this, Chris. There's a squirtor out of a house in Iraq. What's that mean? So you go to this building and you like attack this building and it was a bomb maker, this like this IED the bomb maker's house. And I was myself and this other colleague of mine were on one side of the house, and we see this guy running down this road. Now, we were fairly confident that that guy came from this building. And if he came from that building, he's a military age man outside during curfew and came from a target house. Does he fall within our engagement rules?

1:41:01Yeah, he does. This is like peak war. This is like we're 100 % ROIY able to shoot that guy. We didn't. We go to a follow on target and we get in a pretty good fight. Clearly that guy, and this is assumption. I don't know this, but I think this guy went and told them that we were coming and they they got ready for us to come. That weighs on you. Like that was my fault. Like why don't I just press the trigger and shoot this guy in the back at night. I see your eye twitching. It's a hard question. And it's not a question that I wish my son is ever asked, but like that's the question that I was asked.

1:41:44I mean, you go back another 10 years, a 19 year old firefighter EMT. There's a school van, this missionary van that's driving on the 101 and just north of San Luis, Bishop of California, just south of a taskadero, California, the driver falls asleep, maybe 70, 80 miles an hour, and the car spins and tumbles out of control. And these women and children in this 15 pack van are just launched out of every single window. And when my fire truck arrives on scene in the middle of the night, you know, I grew up in this area where it's very kind of agricultural. When we roll up, the dust was still settling.

1:42:25And through the emergency lights and the headlights, it created like a horror film kind of aura. You know, like the dust, you can't see everything. But man, I can still smell the fall dry grass. And I can still smell the no moisture in the soil. That was like hanging in the particulates in the air. And I can still hear, you know, we shut off the siren as we roll up on the scene. And I don't know how we didn't run over people because bodies were everywhere. And thank God we didn't. We get out and I can hear, I see what we call walking wounded. There's people wandering around, holding their arms, they're like dislocated and broken.

1:43:07You see these compound fractures, the sky like holding this leg. And then we hear like the moans of a child, not the screams of a child that has hurt, but the pain is so serious they can't even cry anymore. That's a different sound entirely.

1:43:25And that truck, we just go to work. I'm a young firefighter EMT. I don't know anything. You know, I graduated from EMT school and the Fire Academy six months ago. And I had this really senior paramedic an engineer, his name was Tom Wei. And we start working on all these people and you know, we're trying to stabilize these people and we're trying to triage. Who's gonna be evacuated first? I remember I hear Tom get on the radio and he calls to station number one because there's two fire stations in a taskadero. He's literally like just send everyone. You're like, if they can get on a truck, if they can get on an ambulance, get them here every volunteer, every paid cold firefighter, send everyone.

1:44:07You got 15 people, let's just say it takes four or five people per body, you know, you need a lot of firefighters and paramedics and EMTs. So I start working on this little girl. She's 11 maybe, and everything on her was buzz hurt. I couldn't see a inch of her body that wasn't broken. And I'm strong. I was a professional athlete at this point already. And I can't remember telling myself, like how do you touch this girl without hurting her? Like how do you help her without causing more damage? Like she's not breathing right? It was like this raspy inhalation with broken ribs. And Tom way comes over and Tom goes, I have this Tim, go find someone else and he just pushes me and it like launches me and I go and I start helping, I start helping triage and separating and segregating the people that are gonna be immediately transported and the ones that have to be evacuated directly to the hospital.

1:45:17And I thought that that girl died my whole entire life until four years ago. And I thought Tom in his wisdom wisdom was trying to save a young man from the failure of saving this little girl's life. The last sentence of this chapter in my book when I found in the research of this book that that girl survived was fucking Tom Wei. That guy not just saved me but he saved that little girl. And I play back, had I stayed there, had I been that stubborn boy that I knew that I was and I I tried to save that girl. I would have killed her. But fucking Tom Wei, he comes in, he saves this 11 year old broken girl.

1:46:02And I go off and I do the thing that you'd expect an 18, 19 year old guy to do, which is like, you know, grab people and carry them to ambulances, you know, I'm like, Harry and - You're a blunt tool. That's right. Yeah. And maybe I lived with that for 25 years of I killed that little girl. I get home that night. I'm covered in blood. You know, and I walk in the front door and I remember my dad he comes to the door and he's like Keith Agasson who is the captain at the time He had called my dad and said hey Tim had a real tough call tonight Just make sure he's okay, and I walk in the front door and I was like hey dad.

1:46:45I'm gonna go take a shower Or I'm gonna go to bed and my dad's like Why don't you go take a shower before your mom sees you? And I'm like, no, I'm fine. I'm just going to go crash. I'm covered in blood and mud. And I was going to go fall down on my bed. And I didn't realize I couldn't walk. I couldn't breathe. And I was crying. I actually never said anything to my dad. I was just trying to move past him to go to my bed. You know, talk about like emotional and mental overload and my dad recounting this to me. He's like, you never said anything to me that night. I just tried to move you to the shower to get you cleaned up and then lay you down.

1:47:19And this is the first time that I ever personally experienced, you know, post -traumatic stress. And in my family, we'd experienced lots of different forms of death and trauma, but this was something that was like, very me. And I remember like they said, I had to go to, you know, a group trauma class. I was like, I don't need to go to that. My dad's like, bro, you're going to go to that. then yeah you've been working with a lot of veterans at the moment on this stuff what's the current state of veteran mental health what are you seeing in them and what about yourself as well yeah the um it's been really hard after 20 years at war there's a failure I think there's a a feeling of failure.

1:48:15It's a G -Wat, global war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa. Now we're standing on the back side of it and we're the reason that we're there is questionable. The actions that we took while we're there is questionable. Support of the people that you were fighting on behalf of is questionable. Yeah. The people coming home that should be receiving us as servants to this country are looking at us like abominations, you know, like we're broken things. It's the same in Vietnam to some degree as well, right? Yeah, very, very, very similar. I was just talking to a Vietnam vet about it. He's like, man, I'm, it's like I'm right there with you.

1:48:53I'm living through all this again. That's what he said exactly, almost verbatim. He said, man, I know what you're feeling.

1:49:02And so there's regret and yeah, they're struggling. Active duty is struggling. Young men first coming back from deployments are struggling and then men that want to go into deployments but then missed it because time means really hard. Unit will deploy and you arrive to the unit and your unit has already gone. That unit then gets, has some casualties and returns. The guy that didn't go has a ton of survivors guilt. Even though they didn't survive, they missed. They missed. They missed. This is guilt. Yeah. But I mean, that's the same thing. It's the same thing. And those guys are also dealing with a bunch of...

1:49:39Like they didn't actually experience any trauma, but they didn't even get to contribute. That's right. And it just eats and it eats it their soul on it. You know, it's it poisons that the vessel. It's just to interject that. Have you got any idea why survivor guilt would exist? like adaptively, evolutionarily, what is that there for? Is it that you've seen other people pay a price that you should have paid and you're concerned about not carrying your weight within the tribe? Do you think that's what it is? Yeah, evolution, if we'd look, I should have been stronger, I should have been better, I should have been more equipped, I should have been more capable, all of those things are responses to survivor's guilt.

1:50:28And if you weaponize that, then in a tribe, if the tribe's warrior goes to a battle and he comes back, they do okay or maybe they could have done better and he comes back and he has like, I wasn't fast enough, I wasn't strong enough, I couldn't throw my arrow, or I couldn't throw my spear far enough, I couldn't shoot my arrow far enough, all those things forces him and motivates him to come, to become a better person. So I think there's some elements of that. So survive the guilt. Yeah, a lot of it.

1:51:03And we've done a really terrible thing in America, which is told people that there's easy fixes to hard problems where you can take a pill and you're gonna be better. You can be take a pill and you're gonna be less fat. You can pick up your phone and you can have food delivered. It's just a lie. And when it comes to mental health and physical health, those things seriously overlap. When people look at me, I think often as I'm a crazy person because I work, you know, how you do anything is how you do everything. Well, I do everything this way so I can deal with all of the stuff that I've seen and I've done.

1:51:42You know, like I work out every single day because I need to stay healthy. I eat clean. I sleep well. I'm all like the litany of all these millions of little things that I do to make sure I'm a healthy version of myself is so I'm also a mentally healthy version of myself. One of my friends I was just visiting a couple of days ago, you know, he starts going through divorce, he stops eating well, stops exercising, starts drinking a little bit. Like you see the the writing is on the wall and every single one of those steps, it's just one decision. Any one of those things is okay, but when there's 10, 12, 14, 16 of them, and they're all compounding, creating more depression and more instability on the mental health side.

1:52:26He can't cope with it any longer. And then he's like fantasizing about suicide and this easy exit. And he's trying to make a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And we see it time and time and time again. The only way that you can stay on this side of right is being faithful and intentional on all of these little tiny things. So yeah, I'm spending a ton of time on in this area, trying to encourage, man, go outside. Go ride motorcycles, go be with your kids, grab your wife, take her on a great date, and have a great night with her, and then have a great night's sleep, and then wake up with a smile on your face, and go to the gym, and then go hop in sauna and then go hop in a blue cube and do like some legit cold water immersion.

1:53:13Um, and every single one of those things just makes you, you know, your coat of armor gets a little bit thicker and a little bit stronger. And I'm, and of course, there's chinks in my armor like, like, I have days that I struggle and, uh, but like, I also watch these arrows just like, bink, pussy, you know, try to launch another one. And I try to give this armor to other people because like it's a really great feeling when you don't, when you're not living your life in fear and you're not struggling with depression and you're not, you know, it's so freeing to be sovereign. What are the US Armed Forces getting right or wrong with the post operation treatment and care for veterans?

1:54:02Yeah, they're realizing it's a total human optimization, right? Like, it's not, hey, I'm gonna put this guy in counseling. That sure absolutely helps, but I'm also gonna give them access to great gyms. I'm gonna get them access to dieticians. I'm going to, like, we're gonna be revamping the whole entire CZC loan, the former CAC, the senior and listed advisor, the joint chief of staff. He just recently really tired. He has this great program where he's gonna go across all of the department of defense and he's a freak athlete, special operations guy, tier one level dude. He's going to all of the different departments and changing how they view food.

1:54:41So if you walk into a chow hall or the Air Force calls it a dining facility, there's not a fast food aisle where you can walk up and I want a cheeseburg with fries. That's not an option anymore. It is right now. You can get spaghetti and meatballs. balls. No, like go get a chicken and a salad fatty and like the soda pops gotta go. All the sugary sides, the desserts gotta go. All that fried stuff gotta go. Like there's gonna be some powdery faces about it, but like that's what you have to do. That's so they're doing lot a lot of things, right? The military gives a ton of really great tools to a person.

1:55:25They teach them leadership, they teach them communication, they give them grit, you know, they give them the tools to make quick critical decisions. We also now recognize that we give them bad habits, you know, we give them addiction to caffeine, we give them addiction to nicotine, we give them bad sleep habits. We put them in places just like Native Americans when we put them in the worst plot of land in the planet and hope that they do okay. You like you take a soldier and you drop a soldier into a not hospitable place. That soldier is going to Climateize and compensate. Yeah in a place that he's in like have you ever been to clean?

1:56:03To be a fun experiment for you. So if you drive one hour north to Fort Hood now Fort Kavaos It's a gigantic army base. That's one hour north of Austin The city that's just adjacent to it is called Colleen. It is the most depressing place on the planet there's car dealerships that target soldiers with 25 % interest rates for their, you know, 2019 Mustangs, you know, there's strip clubs, there's storage facilities that the, you know, soldiers about to go into employment, he has to put his stuff in storage and they're like, oh, but you don't have good credit, that's okay. It's a parasitic industry that's built up around the base.

1:56:44Yeah, to take advantage of young men that don't have experience or a fully built brain. Yeah. Wow. That's wild, man. That's rough. Yeah. Yeah. It's um, I was talking to Michael punky Higgs. Do you know Michael? No, I don't know that name though. So he was master chief wherever wherever they master sergeant, whatever those are two very different things. One's the Navy, one's the Army, one's amazing, one sucks. Okay. I can't remember which one it is. I feel like one of them Is that not the guy from Halo as well? Anyway, he has been doing psychedelic treatment, but he just sort of took me through a bunch of different challenges.

1:57:23And there was a lady that I'm friends with and her husband's been struggling PTSD post as a veteran. And I began, is the particular substance that they were using. And her husband had been battling alcoholism on his side for a long time. He's been trying to cope and back and forth to all the step program, all the rest of it. and they heard this episode, this is maybe three years ago now, and she said, would you be able to put me in touch with Michael and sure enough we did. And the husband went and did this treatment. And as far as I'm aware, this is like a rough psychedelic. It's 24 hour, incredibly deep, very extensively painful.

1:57:58And it does resets to the brain that are more powerful than most other, pretty much anything. And now he's back and he's flourishing and all the rest of the stuff. But it's like it's not, it's not a one -stop shop for everyone. It's not, I would just throw loads of drugs at them and they'll fix it, change the diet, change the friends that they've got with them. It's this global omniproach. Yeah. The army or the DOD as a whole is allowing psychedelics for, I mean, which is wild. You know, we're so slow to get there. I have a bunch of friends. I've never personally experienced any drug. And, but I have a ton of friends that have, you know, traveled outside of the United States because it wasn't allowed here in the United States and deal with some really serious trauma, Vs.

1:58:45I could have those deluxe and they came back transformed to ins. I mean, they were like broken, depressed, suicidal, alcoholics, womanizing, broken men in every way, shape and form. And they come back and like, easy, you know, like I literally want to be around you all the time. And now they're like back to the amazing young man that I remember 20 years ago. What do you wish if there's someone listening that has served or just someone that's suffering with sort of trauma in their past? Would you wish that more people would hear or realize? You're not alone. You know, there's everybody that has served in some form of fashion, especially in war, is carrying baggage, emotional trauma.

1:59:27And you're not alone, not just at other people experiences, but other people care about you. I think that's a big thing that everybody needs to know is like you feel so alone and isolated when you're in these really low moments. It's just not true. You know, like if you go, if you're gone, Michelle Young, this stunning, beautiful staff sergeant army just come in a suicide a couple of weeks ago. She's supposed to be in Las Vegas with us a week. She's been in this community. She's a fitness influencer. She's like blonde and just like bikini supermodel. She came in a suicide two weeks ago. And her daughter had her 12th year birthday, says, she's a single mom, honey, I'm so proud of you.

2:00:08I love you, happy birthday. A couple of days later, she came to suicide. What was she going through that she felt so alone? And she had to have, right? Unbeknownst to her, there were thousands of people that know her and support her and wanted to be there for her. But she felt alone and it's just not true. So everybody listening, like the thing that I want them to know is they're not alone. The other big part is that individual responsibility part. Like we're saying, sometimes you can just start doing little things and tiny little steps that happen consistently over time. When you're in that moment of crisis, you put a little bit of time and space between you and a bad decision, just a little bit.

2:00:52And you wake up in the morning and you walk outside, we've been here in the rain, you I want to go outside and run in that rain so bad. I want to see the sun come up tomorrow. I can't wait to go see my four -year -old tonight on the ice. I can't wait to go home because I'm making pulled pork sandwiches for the family. It's going to be dynamite. I can't wait to get weird with my wife. All of the things I can't wait for are because of a bunch of little decisions, making me look forward to tomorrow. Even if I go home and I pull a cork tonight and I pull a couple of drinks and I start thinking about the mistakes that I made, the friends that I've lost, even that one bad decision or a few of those bad decisions can't hold up to all of the other things that I've done right.

2:01:37There's momentum. That's right. And I want to carry that momentum into life and into hope and into another day. The problem is that the momentum goes in both directions. Right. It doesn't just go when things are going well. while it also continues when things are going poorly. And that's the escalating spiral that people find themselves in. And I say there's no easy solution. But if you are really in crisis, like 911, there's a phone number 988 now. You just pick up the phone, hit 988. And it's like the 911 for you being in a bad unhealthy place. The risk to yourself. That's right. You pick up that phone.

2:02:15If you're a veteran, you literally just press the number one. and it takes you to a veteran that specifically wants to know you and know about you and is trained to talk to you specifically. Wow, we've never had this before ever. Like this just happened this year. Pick up the phone, hit 988 and it goes to a mental health hotline and if you're a veteran, you press one and it goes to a veteran to talk to you. Wild sick. Speaking about bad decisions, what was that story of ISIS making a credible threat against you. Yeah, what are a bunch of cowards though? So this is like peak caliphate, you know, ISIS is taken over northern Iraq and they're starting to gain ground and they're capturing people and art and American arms and they're selling it on the black market and like a bunch of land that we had fought for we were losing to ISIS.

2:03:09They were also trying, you know, they had radicalized a whole bunch of mosques in the United States. And I get a call from the FBI saying that ISIS was trying to recruit somebody locally to find me and my family and where we lived to come and kill us. And I was like, let's just say it, can you say that again? And I was like, yeah, they're trying to find somebody locally to kill you and your family. I was like, that's fucking sick. That's such great news, dude. I've been traveling all over the world. What you're telling me is that these idiots are going to come to my house in Texas. So I call my friend that works for Fox News.

2:03:53He's like, hey, man, can you put me on live? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, all right, check it out. So my address, so I get live on Fox News. And I say my address live on Fox Television. I was like, you can send absolutely anybody that you want to my house to try and kill me in my family. Just know that you're never going to get them back. I'm going to kill them all. How did this go done with your wife? She was so mad at me. Yeah, she was like, I'm out. She like pop smoke just for like a day, but then she came right back because you know, I got the goods and no, not really. She was really mad.

2:04:25But not it wasn't surprising that they of course, they're so tough when there's like 20 of them and they're attacking a village that's unarmed with a bunch of little girls. But they don't even like deal with one man that would like stand up. When I say be that somebody, in every situation, it always only takes one person, fierce contagious, but so is courage. You know, when one person stands up and is like, no, this is wrong. And then somebody else is like, yeah, there's something off about this. I agree with that guy. And then it just like a tidal wave of courage just spontaneously combusts amongst all these people and they're like fuck no you can't do this You know I had hundreds of people being like we'll sit up on your street all night long You know we're setting up rotating guards and it's like I don't want that man.

2:05:15I need a bonus kill Like what do I gotta do? It's a bonus kill. Oh, yeah, so When you go out remember you're speaking to a muggle. Yeah, when you go outside of the continental US and fight abroad You are oh -conous right. So like getting fighting and killing a terrorist in Afghanistan. Right. That's just like a war. Oh, Kona. Yeah. Oh, Kona. But if you're in the United States and let's say you were in Kovina at your Christmas party and this terrorist that has been radicalized walks into this Christmas party and plans to kill everybody because they think Christmas is bad because it has to do with Jesus, you know?

2:05:59And they're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. And you're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Konas killed. Right. Sick. Have you got one? No, no. Ruin it. Yeah. Loser. And was there any, was there ever any more comeuppance about that? Nah, the FBI was pissed at me for a little while. The news was pissed, my wife was pissed. But you were excited. I was, I was well armed. I was hopeful. Yeah, you immediately went on whatever it is like big guns .com and got more. No, I don't need anymore Yeah, hope's not a plan. It's just a pan out to be anything Super funny story. I was in the usada The United States anti -doping pool because I was a professional athlete and I was driving home during this period And I see this car and I kind of lived in this area that there's not a lot of through traffic So I see this car, you know, following them, makes a turn, makes a turn, makes a turn.

2:06:52Like five turns later, they're on my street and they slow down as I turn in my driveway. And he pulls up in front of my house. And by the time, you know, he puts his vehicle into park, he has a gun. It is face. Right. You would have shot the Usada guy. That's right. I have a reception. Usada! I was like, All right, let's go get my piss. I imagine that there's a lot of athletes that would have probably quite liked to have shot the Usada guy. Yeah, they were. They should. John Jones would have probably been able to shoot the Usada guy. That would have been a solution for him. I don't think he needs any more drama.

2:07:29What a talented athlete though. Biofire, have you heard of this? So it's a smart gun that was invented by a guy who started working on it after the Aurora Theatre shooting. Fingerprint and facial will recognize and only friends if the right person's what do you think of smart guns? Lane why? Oh, they're stupid. I don't want that. Um, so can my wife shoot my gun? You add users to the profile. Yeah. Uh, who controls that profile? Just you supposed to just you like safes that I'm only supposed to access unless the FBI calls the manufacturer and gets permission to gain access to my safe without a subpoena or warrant.

2:08:13That happened this year. probably not as secure as that. You got subpoenaed to... No, I didn't. This was something that happened this year. I'm just giving an example of if anybody else has... So this second amendment thing, nobody gives me authority to this inherent right for me to protect myself and my family. The government is not saying that I get to protect me and my family. This is my God -given right to protect me and my family. This is not somebody has access to a program to give me the tool to protect my family. I just have this right and I have should have access to any tools that I deem Necessary to protect myself my family my property and even more by extension freedom So against the tyrannical government by over government overreach, you know, it's it's not just like hunting sports and Me and my family this is hunting sports me and my family and if the government gets too big and gets too nosy into my life This is what happened in 1776, like we were pretty cool until we weren't cool.

2:09:13And then you guys started asking too much of us and then we said no, and then we killed all of you. That's it. I know this is a hard thing. It's a very difficult day for me. I've survived two July fourths since I've been here. I actually wore a t -shirt that said happy, treason day, ungrateful, colonial. Yes. I wore that on July fourth last year. Yeah. It's a hard thing to wrap yourself around unless this is what pumps in America, should be pumping in Americans blood. It's like we are rebels. We have always been rebels. You cannot tell me what to do. There's nothing that you can say to me. Every single one of those beautiful amendments and that fantastic one of the best pieces of words ever put together in history is the Constitution.

2:09:55And it says that those are our God -given rights. And nobody has a right to control those. The freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, like overreach to you come into my home, like do process, the right to bear arms, all of those things are my rights. So like, no, I don't want a system, I don't want a fingerprint, I don't want fake or facial recognition. I want a cannon. And I want a Gatlin gun, mini gun attached to my motorcycle. And I want a tank and I should be able to have it. I'm pretty sure the black rifle guys have got a mini gun attached to a Tesla. We did that. Is that you?

2:10:34No, no, that was Matt and Jared. Right, but you've played around with. Yeah. Right, okay. We were trying to talk Elon Musk into building a Trebuchet that would launch a Tesla. At what? At anything. An enemy. Oh my God, this is ridiculous. The security Tesla. Yeah. Awesome. I mean, any electric vehicle should just be launched into the stratosphere. Except Tesla's, because they're pretty fast. They're pretty cool. Yeah. Talk to me about the state of the American education system. This is something you're spending a lot of time thinking about and assessing at the moment. Well, we'll go to the genesis of it, which is as an employer and as a senior non -commissioned officer, me looking at the people coming to work for me in either one of these occupations, and looking at this population of this generation and being like, You're dumb.

2:11:29Like you literally are an idiot. You have, you can barely read. You have no way to collaborate. You have no creativity in you. Like there's not even a speck of genius in there. And there's no grit. There's no teamwork. There's, you've, you've been taught how to be a consumer. You've been taught how to sit there as a lemmean and go through some systems and processes of like sit here, use this pencil, use this paper, write this way, do this thing, you get this grade to take this test to then say that you have passed that level. What, how is that applicable to real life? How can somebody go through public education and then think that they're going to be usable in the real world as a creator, a designer, a teammate in any form or fashion in any industry?

2:12:22They're not. They've not been taught anything useful. They don't have a balanced checkbook. They don't have to change a car tire. They don't have to fill up a car. They don't have to They know nothing about the rule. They don't have to Do a spreadsheet for a profit and loss statement like the second graders in in our school Take a product they design the product They take the product to market they market the product and then they go back to the school and they give a presentation about the performance of that product in the market. So we had this adorable little girl take a bunch of mason jars.

2:13:01She went and bought kinetic sand and then she went and bought toys that were themed. She took a loan from her parents for a couple hundred dollars and she built a bunch of these mason jars. Some had astronauts and like space things in them. Some of them had like mermaids and fish in them and she used blue sand. and some of them were like green sand and brown sand with dinosaurs and she sold them for $25 at the farmer's market. She made a couple thousand dollars. She pay her parents back the few hundred dollars that she took home from. And that went from. Yeah. And then she went back and briefed her PNL on the performance of her products.

2:13:36She. She's nine, right? And dude, I would do for a 20 year old that could do that. She's a nine year old. And I argue that that the presentation from that nine year old is a thousand times better than anybody than any resume That's come across my desk in the past five years nine year old In that same time frame in this project We had a kid that went to his parents ranch and he he would spend hours in the afternoon collecting Antlers and horns from all the different wild exotic animals that they have on the property and he was building furniture with them So he made like a lamp and he cut them and put screws on them so you could use them as Hardware for like dressers.

2:14:20Right. I was thinking that you were gonna say that a nine -year -old had tried to construct a chat That might be a high -risk thing to sit on. I'm not sure how yeah really like really cute usable things and of course his dad helped him and He took this and sold those things launched an e -commerce market and we're selling them online on Facebook marketplace He was selling them on, he had like three or four different online ways for him to sell it and Made a few thousand dollars and then we had this other kid that went and took sticks and He thought that that stick looked like a gun and then he tried to sell that stick as a gun and he sold no sticks And he went back and he he saw his two classmates that made thousands of dollars that put effort into their products And then he sat there and barris and his parents were mad and And it's perfect because that kid just learned the best lesson he could possibly learn, which is failure and what it looks like to have effort and discipline and intentionality.

2:15:20And somebody that actually practices the process of what we are teaching them about how to launch a product. And in his embarrassment, then motivated him to go and do better on the next release. And but he learned that lesson at nine. I learned that lesson at 35. So, Socratic and Project Driven Learning. Socratic, this is not new, Socrates, this idea that this learner driven environment, you take a bunch of young people and you allow them to lead the education process. So they're making millions of decisions in a day. What chair they're going to sit on, what pencil or pen they're going to use, what kind of paper they're going to use, if they're going to be using an iPad to be taking their notes.

2:16:05Ultimately, they have to perform. Like, here's the things that you have to do. If you want to go outside and play, okay, show me your work. You didn't do your work. You actually have to sit back down and do your work. They're pissed, right? Well, you're over there in the corner, bouncing on that little bosu ball, not doing your work, but Johnny is over there, and he sat down, he put on his headphones, started listening to work, music, and he knocked out his work, and he's already outside playing. So in a day, they're making all of these hundreds, if not millions of little decisions on their own.

2:16:35They're not being told where to sit. They're not being told how to do the work. They're given the tools, they're guided. So we don't have teachers in the studios. We have guides in the studios. And just like Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, all of them were guides. They were literally like mentors to these young learners trying to learn how to critically think. And three years ago, we opened school number one. Last year, we opened our online mentorship program When we recognize that this is working, we just need to give the keys of the castle to as many people as possible. Then from my partner Matt Boudreau, just a dynamite hard worker, like everything that you'd want an educator, realizing from the online mentorship program that the benefits of the brick and mortar environment that is conducive to learning, how do we give not just intellectually everything that they need, but then also physically like, hey, here's a space for you and your family and family is a key word here because we really do believe that the nuclear family is the strength behind a young person learning.

2:17:46Like if you think that you could take your kid and just drop him off and you're going to be given back the product that you want without you putting some form of effort and if you don't have skin in the game, if you send your children to Caesar, you will be given back Romans. I don't want a Roman, right? I want to be intimately involved in what my children become and nobody cares about them more than me. So as the online mentorship program exploded, this year will open and 50 new apigies in the United States. And then I promised next year, we're gonna open 200 more, and then the next year we'll open 500 more, and I will defund and abolish the Department of Education in the next five years.

2:18:33Like, it's gonna happen. What's the problem with what they're doing? They're not doing anything. And what are, when was the last time that you've seen an American school? The kids are not learning how to read. They are failing math. Are Asvad scores? I hate that I have kids on Hasvab. It's the military entrance exam. It's like your SAT when you graduate to see how you stand against all the other kids at your grade level on an equal plane field to get acceptance into college, except that those acceptance levels are difference per gender and per skin color. That's idiotic, but that's the way it is, not merit -based.

2:19:08That's a completely different conversation I'd love to have, but it's not the one that we're talking about right now. The test for kids going to the military, We were talking about how fat they were and how mentally unhealthy they are and also like their substance abuse and some criminal history. They're also dumb. The ASVAP scores have been dropping every year for the past 25 years. So the kids are getting dumber. You have a litmus test, you have a yardstick and measure it against the same thing. Yeah. That changes. But the difference. And it looks like this. And presumably the as -vab is being fucked with less than entrance exams for universities because those are more malice.

2:19:51And this is just a standardized testing that's given. The exact same test has been given to millions of kids at this point across this nation for decades. Yeah, for decades. So you've always got this barometer that you can measure this generation versus 20 years ago. So like, not good. Not good. This is a problem. And then, you know, when you look even here in Austin and Texas, Florida, they really are, I really hope that Texas does push through the school voucher program. Arkansas already did it. Florida is going to be doing it. The school voucher program is, so you, if you own land here, you pay property taxes.

2:20:30That property taxes pays for the school that is in your zip code. If your kids don't go to that school, it doesn't matter. You still have to pay for that school that you don't use. But what if you have kids and then you pay for those kids not to go to that school, you pay extra and then you pay the same amount as everybody else in that zip code for that school to exist that your kids don't use. So you're being, you're paying twice for education even though you're only using half of it. And the school voucher program is there's money allocated per child and that money is a tax credit that's given back to the parent so that they can use the money how they best want to for their child.

2:21:15Maybe it's to send them to public school. Maybe it's to send them to a specific kind of school because that kid needs a specific kind of education. Some of it like whether it's going to be Montessori or it's going to be Socratic or it's going to be like whatever the form is going to be it's going to be tailored to that child and the money's going to follow the child. It's been brought up in Texas multiple times and it's almost past multiple times. So the Apigee program, Apigee Strong Online, ApigeeStronger .com, our school here, Apigee Cedar Park, so we're a North Austin school. And we have, anybody can apply, like literally, we're taking applications right now for 2024 school year.

2:21:54And every corner of this building's magic. Like, there's giggles, there's laughter, there's joy, there's Harry Potter, there's comic books, you know, there's drawings on the walls, there's engineering schematics, there's new designed tanks. How well, what age should you take them up to? I mean, college. Right. And how well are the, I don't know why they've done this yet because of how short amount of time you've been around. We help perform everybody in every metric of measurement. Including college application. Oh yeah. Yeah. Our kids don't count everybody. They literally make everyone else look silly.

2:22:39So when you're at the university and you're in reviewing all of the applications and And you have, okay, this SAT score, this kid is coming from this school. He was here, she graduated with this GPA. They were involved in these extra curricular activities. Cool. And you're comparing that against all other kids in that same format. And then you get a packet. And this kid has been working, started his own business. He is a printist in this very specialized program. He has letters of recommendation from these Fortune 500 companies that he has been working for and advising and consulting. He also has higher scores than everybody over here and he has the same GPA as everybody over here.

2:23:36But for some reason, his essay is so dissimilar to everybody else over here because it's real and life experience. So it's the standardized testing that I think people have skepticism around whether it be... First, although should not exist. Standardized test. How does that help you? It is the equivalent of the Asvab that you need a barometer up against, you can measure everybody else in a way which is standardized. Or else it's like, okay, well, this person wrote an essay and this person did a piece of how many pieces of art is this essay worth? It's the reason we have currency. We have currency to make ease of exchange in comparison.

2:24:16But if the whole entire point of this entire organization is to prepare this population for the test compared to this group of people that is preparing the entire population to be constructive, contributing members of society, but then still perform the same on the test, which group of these two comparable groups, which one would you like to select from? Air B. Well, yeah, obviously that one. Obviously, right? If you can achieve the same, you still need the tests at the top to be able to. It's one, it's the easiest thing. And they perform at the same on the standardized testing. And I'm even arguing that they so surpass all other metrics, all the ways that you can measure their performance, they end up being not even comparable.

2:25:04It's like apples and oranges. It's like these useless kids and these extraordinary anomalies and these unicorns that like you can't hire and accept fast enough That's currently what we're experiencing And there's data because we're not the first school to do this. This has been actin here in Austin And started it actin academy Montessori. Just stand a fir. Yeah, you know, there's lots of heritage data like you see data to support this So it's not like I'm creating anything new. I did not create anything doing it in a different way. I literally just like I took a lot of the best of a bunch of different forms of education and then I made sure that family was the center and the nucleus of everything.

2:25:43Mmm. So like we go after the parents. Like if you think that you're gonna be part of the apogee family and you're not a hard working fit intentional father like you're joking yourself. We had thousands of people apply to open schools and we literally just like opened an Instagram or Facebook can we see a fat, fat bodied soft dude that's sitting there pulling a bud light next, you know? Imagine your kid not getting into school because of you. As it should be. That's interesting. It's interesting to think that when you go to, when your child goes to school, you go to school again as well. Yeah. Or at least care, at least like want to be,

2:26:33yesterday I laced up my skates, crabbed my hockey gear and hopped on the ice with my four year old and my eight year old. Do you know how long I've been on the ice? First, long as they've been on the ice. Right, do you suck? I suck. I'm terrible. But man, I can, what, that's not true. I'm literally better than every single dad there. Every single one of them. Because they're not on the ice. Because they're not on the ice. I was playing tag with my four year old on the ice yesterday. And of course, I'm like, I watched a bunch of YouTube things and there were specific drills I was trying to do was playing tag with my four year old, like how to, I'm skating forward to turn left and then skate backwards and then turn right and skate backwards.

2:27:19Like those were all specific drills that I looked up. So I went on the ice with intentionality, not just to play with my daughter, which I wanted to do, but also develop as a person and as a skater so I can in some way she perform at least show my kids that I want to be involved with them. And I was wearing half lacrosse gear. You know, I only cross gear. Because you fall over a lot? Yeah, because my kids play lacrosse. Right. Like I've never played lacrosse. I've never played hockey. But I'm going to do it because they're interested in it. You know, like if my daughter, please don't start, but wants to learn how to play the cello.

2:28:01Mm -hmm. I'm a fucking learn how to play the cello. What are the principles for raising kids that you've discovered that you think most parents don't realize? time. They don't care about their stuff. They don't care about how clean their houses. They don't care how the rest of the world views them. They care about how you view them. They care about the time you give them. They care about what meal you cook for them. They care about what games you were sitting there sharing for, you know, the first, um, it takes about 20, 30 minutes to get dressed, uh, to play hockey. Um, so my wife will leave first with whichever kid is going to be playing, get them ready, get on the ice and I show up with the other kid, 20, 30 minutes later.

2:29:00The first time that the kid that's playing scores a goal, the very first thing that they do is look up into the stands to see if dad is there. You know, my big girls, the first time that they went on stage for whatever their performance were, and they looked out in the audience, and I wasn't there because I was overseas. Do you know what kind of damage I did to those girls? You know, the AB test here of like me being here for every single one of them, and me being absent for every single one of them. I think God their moms are amazing and they're like those girls are just incredible and their resilience is astounding.

2:29:39But swimming upstream without dad that. That's right. Yeah, I remember I did a I was a swimmer in school and I've got like this memory seared into my mind when I won the backstroke at the end of this big competition. I looked up and dad was there. Crazy. So fulfilling. Yeah. There was an idea I came up with after I sat down next to Tucker Maxx at dinner about nine months ago or something. Oh, that guy. So he's a good guy. He's cut from the same cloth as you. So I'm going to take you through this now. So it's called the fuck you family. Okay. Fuck you money is a meme, but it's also a truth. There is an amount of wealth that you can achieve where typical restrictions and conventions no longer apply to you.

2:30:20You don't need to suck up to the gatekeepers, you don't need to do things that you don't want to do, in extreme situations you don't even really need to follow the law. Similarly, Fucky Freedom is kind of downstream from Fucky Money, but also can be achieved through cultivating a lack of resilience on other groups. There are no restrictions on where you can travel to and when and for how long. You don't need to show up to work on time or work at all. If you're sufficiently well structured, you don't even need to care about the state of the economy or the power grid or the wider world. But I've recently learned about another type of Fucky Liberation.

2:30:49one which is significantly cheaper, more accessible, more common, and maybe even more powerful. The fuck you family. Many fathers I've spoken to have told me about how their priorities were completely changed upon starting a family. All the previous status games they played seemed petty. The admiration and gamesmanship they used to play in an attempt to impress people in power or those with status seemed juvenile and shallow. Much of their anxiety around whether people liked them or thought they were cool evaporated. The only people they needed to care about impressing when I was sleeping in their house.

2:31:18to their kids, they were the coolest, richest, strongest, most heroic person on the planet, and that gave them a very powerful type of liberation. It seems to me that much of what young men get up to are surrogate activities until they finally find a family. This isn't to say that all fathers become placid soy boy hippies or that having kids new to your ambition, but it definitely seems to open up a new realm where they care far less about the flotsum and jetsum that used to occupy their lives. That's it, man, that's it. But that's also the definition of sovereignty, though. You know, I was like, I keep hammering this idea of sovereignty.

2:31:53Like, I am, there's nothing external that can touch anything internal. And internal is me and my family, the nuclear. There's no government body, there's no medical organization, there's nothing that can affect my family. And I love the, I mean, it's profane, but like this fuck you idea, it is, it's so to the point and it's so on the nose and it's so correct and there's nothing else that more important. I totally agree. Once you recognize this, that guy driving the fancy car that gets out, it's like, you know, he seems so pathetic. And the guy that's like, hey, I just got this new raise at work.

2:32:36You know, I just got this promotion. I'm like, I pity you. I feel sorry for you. The guy that's trying to build the brand and look so good online, to social media, he has a couple hundred thousand followers right now and I'm just like, I want you to experience that because that is indescribable. That I can't, that is a drug that can never, you can't have enough of. Like you'll never be satiated from the thing that you get from giving back to your family. What would you say if there's fathers listening who don't think they have that they haven't been fulfilled? How can they reconnect with the with their kids and that sort of sense of purpose for their family?

2:33:15Yeah, I mean, those little the little bits like it's not there's not a handle that you pull on all of a sudden You know like how many practices do you go to a week? How many games do you go to in a month? How many? Afternoons while they're doing homework have you sat there at the kitchen table with patients and grace and tried to help them? I'm like, what do you mean you don't know what five plus five is or five times five is? You know, like every one of those opportunities as an opportunity either hit or missed. And when you take a step and look at like there's thousands of them in a month and just start hitting more of them, one percent more and then two percent more.

2:33:57And fortunately, like if you've been a bad dad, all you can do is go up. Like all you can do is get better. I'll say quite a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I try really hard to be a good dad. And I go to my wife like last night, as we're having like pillow talk time, it's like how can I do this better? How can I be better? And she's like more time. Everybody wants you to do something for them, but we want that too. And how you allocate that time, I realize that you can't be you without doing these other things. You know, if the Bahamas kick off with this terrorist group that's taking advantage of Bahamas. Yeah.

2:34:39Like anywhere that there's money in tourism, there is criminal organizations that are looking for opportunities to take advantage of them. Okay. Okay. You know, Venezuela could pop off Central America, you know, even Peru with Ecuador and Venezuela and Brazil. Honduras are right. I'm going there next week. Yeah, it's fine. Fantastic. Thank you. You got my number tenet, yeah, Tim, you said the terrorist weather report came back negative for Honduras this week. I would like to tell you that your predictions were incorrect. I do enrolled. Oh, so there's a program called Steps, which is the state something.

2:35:16What does it stand for? It is the Department of States tracking of you as a tourist traveling abroad. So you get notifications from Department of State. You tell me about this before. It's literally like a weather report for like how dangerous it's like. It's an important thing to do. But that's before you leave. But then once you're overseas, they know that you're there. So they ask for like your travel dates. Like what day do you do a lot arrive? So then a person like me, when I go to department of state and I say, okay, how many Americans are currently in Israel that aren't so, that are tourists that need to get it.

2:35:50Because if you go to October 7th and we didn't know if this is going to go high and right? Like is Hezbollah gonna be coming? You said that you predicted it being more kinetic than it was. I thought it's still very kinetic, but you thought it was gonna be way worse. I, um, Israel, man, I know people get so mad at it. Israel's done a really good job keeping this not going full regional warfare. Hezbollah wants an excuse to come in. The, the, who these wants an excuse to come in, you know, like every single one of the pro -Hamas, Iran, Taliban, al -Qaeda. Every single one of those organizations has been looking for an opportunity and enough popular support for them to come in.

2:36:34Israel is doing the best that they can to target specific terrorist sets in Gaza that conducted the most heinous sets of rapes and murders and tortures and current. I mean, it's probably since the Holocaust. cost. This is the worst thing that we've seen happen to the Jews since Hitler was gassing them. And so Israel is doing it the best that they can with the really difficult situation that they're in. But I thought that the North border was going to kick off. I thought that the West Bank was going to kick off. I thought that Egypt would gotten a little bit spice on the South border. I thought Jordan would have gotten a little bit more.

2:37:16So I, The reason that we were there, of course, was to get Americans out, but like had it gone a different direction, which is this slow grinding war. Hamas wanted this to go kinetic. That's what they wanted. That's why they did it the way that they went. The reason they went out and raped everybody they could and tortured everybody that they could is because they wanted a overwhelming and overbearing response by the Israelis with an overbearing, overwhelming response by the Israelis would have given them a ton of propaganda to then go to all of the other nations and be like, look what Israel is doing.

2:37:54These disgusting murders that killed tens of thousands of us poor Palestinians trapped in here. You're the one who did this, but that's what they wanted. And now that it didn't happen, now they're kind of like crap. What we thought stuff to spending time with Vivek, you got to catch up with him recently. Do you have a little guy? Why? Because everybody has their beliefs. I have my beliefs. And I think I know why I believe what I believe, he can articulate why. I got a bunch of time with him. And he can explain not just the reason that he has those beliefs, but then he can also articulate what he thinks the solution is to the problem.

2:38:43That is a very different thing than what's currently happening in politics, right? Somebody goes up there, like Trump gets up there and he's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're like, they're spouting all this rhetoric. But who is walking up and be like, this is what I believe, this is why I believe it. This is the solution to the problem and I'm going to articulate the steps for us to be able to accomplish it. blown away by the depth of his understanding in a world that he's never worked in, which is the American government. It's crazy.

2:39:19Yeah, he verbally is incredibly fluent, like very, very cany communicator. I like some of the stuff I've seen on Twitter where he does his debate prep videos. Have you seen this? It's him topless doing like forehand smashes on the tennis court or doing burpees in his house because it debate prep and it's, you know, a counter signal against the fact that he is taking care of himself physically, which I don't think he can save much of the rest of the presidential race. Or Kennedy. Kennedy looks good. Kennedy's jacked. We had dinner with him. Yeah. And he's a big boy. Yeah. The, there are some rumors that Trump was looking to Kennedy as a running mate and I was like, what would that look like?

2:40:06I'm just so frustrated with American politics right now. But it's about to get more intense the next whatever nine months. Yeah. Why, why are you so frustrated?

2:40:23After Pearl Harbor, the leading general of the Japanese military is quoted in saying we have made the worst mistake possible. We have awakened, we have awoken the sleeping giant, which is the American people and we give them unity. An America united is like an insurmountable force. Nothing in history has ever experienced or seen what we can do and work together, from World One to World War Two. And then you see what happens when we're broken and divided it in fractured and when the Vietnam and GWT and our current economy and mental health and obesity and the broken family. And both sides like the Republicans and the Democrats are just fighting for portions of a pie and not even portions of a pie.

2:41:21They're fighting on these outlying groups of these radical ideas and playing into these fringe beliefs, but not even paying attention to like the core ideas that are America. And I would really like a United America. And I think we're way more united. There's like 5 % on either end that are pretty radical. Like no, you should not be cutting body parts off of pre -pubescent children because they think that they're a thing that they're not and they're born the wrong thing. you know, and similarly, like you should not go and kidnap a governor because she doesn't align with your political beliefs.

2:42:04Like from the far right to the far left, these are fairly obsolete groups. The other 90 % are like, man, I want to live my life. I want other people to live their life. You know, like, cool, you want to marry a dude, that's fine. You know, like, don't tell me what to do with my kids and don't tell me what to call you because like, that's my choice and that's my belief. So as long as your beliefs don't extend into my beliefs, or good, as long as your freedoms, you can have any freedoms that you want don't extend into my freedoms, because I should be able to have any freedoms that wouldn't want, I think most Americans are like that.

2:42:35But right now we're just being segregated and divided by ideas and these identity politics is just so petty and so pathetic and so divisive. If it's not... The thing that I keep on asking is like how How much of this is coming internally and how much of this is being motivated by out of country Actors. Yeah, the very least that stood on the sidelines cheering. Oh no, no, not the like they're they're they're pain, you know Millions of bought accounts that fuel the algorithms social media companies are also seriously to blame for this tech companies Google Facebook meta Instagram is wild that we can be like, what Twitter is kind of doing, okay?

2:43:27But besides them, YouTube, all of them, the way that algorithms work is they want conflict. They want people to stay into comment and to like and to share and to get enraged and get pissed and be like, no, you're stupid. You know, and then they say they need these community guidelines. But the truth is they want people to stay on there and use that medium longer. So of course, our enemies are sending their pumping funds and pumping resources and pumping fake accounts into those conversations to sway the idea one way or another while the tech companies are wanting that to be chaos and anarchy because they benefit from it because they get more money on the marketing dollar side.

2:44:11And all the while, the only people that are being hurt by it are the people. So that sucks. And internally in terms of the politics, it's just small land grabs and back biting. I found out I had a Dean Phillips on. He was the guy that founded, he discovered Belvedere vodka and then built it and sold it with his family and then did Tulenti Gelato as well and built it and sold it to massive exits. And he's now running for the democratic nomination up against Biden. And I spoke to him and he was telling me that current, current congress people spend more time raising funds, like 25 hours a week, just raising funds because it's an expensive game to be able to play, that they spend more time doing that than they spend doing anything else.

2:44:59Yeah. Our political system is broken. And the funds that they're raising are coming from packs and super packs and they're coming from lobbyists. You know, like I'll donate if you do this thing scratch back scratch back. Yeah, that all has to go away Elected officials being able to be in the stark market nope Elected officials with multiple more than two terms in office nope You know the the polices that have never had a real job in their entire adult life And they came in that make a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, but they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars There's a problem.

2:45:34You know, and the problem is our American political system. It's like, all of that has to go away. The, the, and if it doesn't happen, you know, we're our beautiful republic, I think is at jeopardy. Yeah, it's scary. It's crazy as well because obviously I moved over here and I have loved my time in America. It's so good. The culture is fantastic. The people that I found are fantastic. I love Austin as a city. And it seems like that is swimming upstream against structurally what's happening in education. I don't know anyone who looks at the American education system, even the most ardent supporter of the current thing and goes, yeah, we're really doing this right.

2:46:14No one thinks that it's happening well at the moment. And then the same thing goes when you look at politics. No one, no matter which side of the fence, because apart from maybe the people that are invested in continuing to keep that going the same way, looks at it and goes, yeah, this seems like a really good way to position a super powerful free nation. Yeah, exactly. Put that in my pocket. Exactly. Yeah. So it really does seem like putting all of the difficulties in the way of something that's supposed to be really great and just cattailing it and nerfing it and neutering it and shaving off the edges over and over and over and over again.

2:46:49But there's only so long that that can keep happening. Yeah. I'm more of like what I want to do with the tax code, which is take the whole entire thing, Dowsett and Diesel and then Burnett and then from the ashes we can build something new. That's what I want to do with kind of the education system, the political organization and American politics. One step at a time. Yeah, I mean, one fireball at a time. I don't think like the gradual steps of change are going to work right now. Of course there's big things. If you added term limits, if you added age limits, if you removed lobbyists, if you removed super PACs if you remove corporations being able to contribute if you're removed.

2:47:35The quid pro quo behind the scene deals. Is that something you see in your future? Would you want to make a you don't make a step into politics? That's not Senator fucking Tim Kennedy. Nope. Nope. There's a there's like a period of my life that I don't think could be understood by most Americans. There's leaving active duty and when I was fighting professionally also working as a contractor for government contracting, you know, those are hard things to explain. It will come public, you know, amen. Yeah, okay. That's interesting. Tim, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming through. Appreciate you.

2:48:24Thanks for being flexible for weird times. We're busy dudes. Always. Work out. Yeah, boxing. Swimming. Yeah. And some electric motorcycling. All of that sounds great. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff you do. The Constitution. I just referenced that first and then Tim Kennedy, anything with a verified thing. Anything else besides that is not me. All right. Tim's it. I appreciate you. Thank you, my. Take sure.