On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Evan discuss the recent New York Times article on Black Rifle Coffee and the controversy surrounding it, as well as how the company responded to the article and how they dealt with the backlash. Also, Evan and Joe talk about what it's like to be a Black Rifle Co-founder and how he's dealing with the fallout from the article, and what it means to him and the rest of the team behind the company. And, of course, they talk about how they handled the backlash to the controversial article and what they're going to do about it in the future. Joe also talks about how he and his co-founders are handling the backlash, and why they don't care what people think of them. Finally, the guys talk about why they think Black Rifle is the Starbucks of the Right, and how it could be a good fit for the company, and if they should be involved in the company in any way in the near and long-term future of the business. They also talk about their thoughts on the new Black Rifle coffee and how the article should be handled, and whether or not they would be interested in working with the company on a new piece on the next Black Rifle episode. Thanks for listening and supporting the show, and stay tuned for next week's episode! -Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, all day long! -Evan and Evan "The Joe Rogans Experience" by Night All Day, by Day, By Night, All Day All Day by Night Night, by Night by Night all Day by Day! - by Night - by Day All day by Night! by Night and All Day all day by Day and Night, By Day, All by Night. by Day - By Night by Day. -Night and Night! by Night... by Night? -By Night, Day and Day, all Day! by Day... by Day & Day, Day, Night, Morning, by Morning, All day, All By Day... By Night! -By Day, ALL DAY by Day? , All Day By Day! , by Night & Night, Every Day, and Night... By Day and Evening, by Anytime, By Morning, By Anyday, All-Day, By Sleep, by Sleep, By Evening, By Late, By Then, By Even Day, Through Night, Through Evening, Through Sleep, Through Morning, Through the Day, Throughout the Day...
00:01:07.000It was the weirdest dog pile I've ever watched.
00:01:10.000You know, I've tried to figure it out, and I haven't really spent a ton of time on it.
00:01:17.000Because, honestly, I've got better shit to do in my life than figure out what anonymous accounts and Twitter is saying what about me.
00:01:27.000But I think there's just such a mistrust with mainstream media, and that's bred this hyper-divisive gaslighting on both sides.
00:01:39.000And I think conservatives, at times, are also looking for the conspiracy inside the party, so they kind of spin themselves up a little bit.
00:01:48.000But it was such a strange scenario for me to be in because I think I've been so open for seven years as like who we are, what we do.
00:03:39.000I think if they're going to do the story, I'll at least give them the opportunity to be objective and then really take a look at the company from the inside.
00:03:49.000I had no illusions as to what type of position they might take or how they might misrepresent the company.
00:03:58.000It was, at least I'll give them the opportunity.
00:04:00.000So it's kind of a fool me once type scenario where it's like, hey man, fool me once, sure, not going to get the second time.
00:04:10.000I was like, I'll come or come on out and I'll take you to a veteran adaptive athlete shoot that we do.
00:04:17.000And you can talk to 30 plus wounded veterans and Black Rifle Coffee employees and maybe you'll get a true feeling as to what this company does and what it means.
00:04:33.000That never pulled through the article, which I thought was a little bit disappointing.
00:04:40.000There was a quick blurb about it, and it was representing veterans.
00:04:47.000They were talking about the shirt that he was wearing.
00:04:50.000They were talking about somebody that lost their legs in combat.
00:04:53.000Who gives a shit about what shirt they're wearing?
00:04:57.000But what I... The justification was, I feel like I have an ethical responsibility to represent the veteran community and really use what I call earned media to shed light on what I think are the most important issues of the post-9-11 veteran community.
00:05:16.000I'm fine with advertising my brand and marketing my brand outside of that.
00:05:22.000But if we have an opportunity with somebody like The Times to talk about what's happening in our peer group, like what's happening along the lines of the psychological and physical issues with all the veterans that we hire.
00:05:38.000I have 220 plus veterans that work inside the company.
00:05:45.000I felt it would be the ethically correct thing for me to do for the company and for the people there to tell their side of the story.
00:05:56.000I didn't have any illusions as to whether or not they were going to paint the company in a certain light, but I did feel it was really important to do that.
00:06:06.000I don't think that that pulled through.
00:06:08.000There's a lot of things that didn't pull through in the article that I would have loved to have had in the article, but They didn't.
00:06:16.000That's the way the journalist views the world.
00:06:18.000So I was surprised to see all the kickback from, I think, conservatives because now all of a sudden conservatives are reading and believing the New York Times.
00:06:27.000So what was the Times take on the company?
00:06:30.000Um, well, I think the first piece that I really wouldn't agree with is the tonality.
00:06:37.000And I know that's a general term, but their perspective on it was that I'm just a lucky guy.
00:06:44.000I got lucky and I met, you know, Matt Best and Matt Best was lucky in the fact that he was making, uh, viewed or watched viral videos and he and I just kind of linked up and we got lucky and And then it felt really exploitive in the first part.
00:07:03.000Man, I'll tell you, it's not been lucky.
00:07:06.000You know, I think luck is what you capitalize on after you put in a fuck ton of hard work.
00:07:12.000Well, I've known you guys for years, and I knew you guys when the company wasn't nearly as big.
00:07:17.000So I've seen the progress, and I've seen the work.
00:07:22.000I've gone to the place in Salt Lake where you showed me the fucking coffee roaster that you guys fabricated together and told me the story about it.
00:07:33.000Anybody who says it's luck doesn't know you or is willfully misrepresenting the truth in order to paint a narrative that they already had established before they started the article.
00:07:45.000They already had a narrative based on their readership and the way that they view the world that this is the way they wanted to view the company.
00:08:04.000I worked for the CIA for a number of years.
00:08:06.000I've seven and a half years deployed into combat zones between Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:08:11.000And starting this business and running this business for seven years is the single hardest thing I've ever done.
00:08:18.000The first two years of the business, I had a thermoresp below my desk where I was only sleeping four, four and a half hours a night to the point where my doctor was like, dude, you're going to kill yourself.
00:08:30.000If you don't start sleeping, you're going to die.
00:08:35.000And you always hear this in our subculture, which is, you know, we'll sleep when you're dead, you know, toughen up, you know.
00:08:43.000There's this drum beat through the community at all times, which is you just got to suck it up.
00:09:07.000I'm a very serious character when it comes to the majority of what I do.
00:09:12.000The first few years of this business were so challenging because I was carrying a rifle in Afghanistan for a living.
00:09:19.000That's how, you know, I put a roof over my head.
00:09:22.000This is what I was doing for not only the best interest of, you know, my professional endeavors, but also the strategic interest of the United States.
00:09:30.000So the first few years of this were brutal and When you distill it down to luck, it's disingenuous and it takes away all the hard work and the sacrifice that I had to make.
00:09:53.000So probably year two, two and a half, I hadn't taken any money out of the company because I am a capitalist at the end of the day, but capital means you're...
00:10:04.000Reinvesting the money that you make into the company to grow it.
00:10:09.000And I think that's a clear differentiation, which is individual wealth and capital are two totally different things, but we can unpack that later.
00:10:29.000I was running the company specifically on my personal credit cards, just trying to get this thing off the ground to the point where my wife didn't know why we were missing rent payments.
00:10:41.000You know, I'm coming home looking at my, you know, my kids thinking there's not only no money in the bank, but we have $36,000 of credit card debt and there's nothing left to sell.
00:10:53.000And I think that's the mentality that, one, you have to have in order to succeed, which is if you believe in yourself, you have to invest in yourself, and you've got to take risks, and you've got to push.
00:11:07.000I knew it was going to be challenging, but...
00:11:11.000Until you're there, it's a lot different when you're risking the lives, when I say the life and comfort of your family, than it is your life limb and your eyesight of the individual.
00:11:21.000The amount of stress and anxiety that that takes over years of compounding interest of investing in yourself...
00:11:30.000So that's where the article missed it.
00:11:34.000And not only to be that economically challenged for those many years, I've always been able to give back to veteran nonprofits every year.
00:11:43.000So I didn't take any money out of the company for two years, but I was able to give back over, I think over the first couple years, like $37,000, $38,000 back to veteran nonprofits.
00:11:56.000And when I tell people that, I'm a capitalist that concentrates what I like to do with philanthropy back to my peer group.
00:12:06.000I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand it and they don't get it.
00:12:11.000And there's no way for people to get a small snapshot in time and to really kind of comprehend what we're doing on a daily basis and why we're doing it.
00:12:23.000So, when the article comes out and you read their take on it, did you anticipate that there was going to be blowback?
00:13:07.000I have a good friend of mine who used to be a writer over there, and she was explaining to me what it's like to write there and what it's like when you turn a story in and how they change – she was explaining words that they changed and phrases that they changed and things that she was trying to depict that wouldn't let her.
00:13:22.000Yeah, and I think the first cut that I ran through it, you know, read it.
00:14:01.000I think some of that might have pulled through, but...
00:14:05.000Obviously I live it, so it's something I feel every day of my life, so I don't expect that to be captured within three days.
00:14:13.000I think it's misrepresentative to who I am.
00:14:15.000So I found out about this because I follow all kinds of people on Twitter.
00:14:21.000I follow right-wing, left-wing, I follow all kinds of people.
00:14:25.000And I started seeing some weird shit from right-wing people That were saying Black Rifle Coffee is shitting on their fans and throwing their business away.
00:15:12.000And how are people pulling this out of this article?
00:15:15.000And I think the way that they tied in a couple of the last paragraphs, which was, they were, what I was referring to in the last paragraph specifically was the conversation that's being referenced is the writer and I are discussing racial hostility in America.
00:15:34.000And last year, the company was recipient of an online attack from racist and anti-Semites.
00:15:47.000And because of my last name, because my last name is Jewish, they were targeting us for...
00:15:57.000And I was referring to that specific or those two specific people, which was, I don't want racists or anti-Semites buying my coffee, which I thought was, like, nobody likes those people.
00:16:10.000I don't even think they like themselves, to be honest with you, right?
00:17:31.000Listen, we weren't sponsoring him, but I wasn't making or weighing in on whether or not he was legal or ethical in his actions.
00:17:40.000I was just saying, hey, we didn't sponsor him because we had a lot of people that were flooding into the inboxes saying, you know, how dare you, and then the other side going right on.
00:18:09.000What a portion of the internet decided to say was we had somehow disavowed him by literally stating a fact, which was we hadn't sponsored him.
00:18:24.000There's no coming back from some of this in the context of you can't explain yourself in 240 characters or less because nuance is ultimately dead.
00:18:59.000The information that people get, the overwhelming amount of information that people get on a daily basis, almost like...
00:19:06.000Stops them from looking into anything deep, right?
00:19:10.000You you look you get the surface you get the headline Oh, and then next thing you know, it's That's that's the narrative.
00:19:18.000That's the narrative and and then it's shared Yeah, and then it's not only shared distorted picked up by the you know, we'll call it mainstream Twitter influencers is fact There's nobody's Nobody's checking to look at whether or not that's actually what I said.
00:20:17.000There's no justifiable room for racists or anti-Semites specifically, I think.
00:20:21.000And if you care about conservatism, if you care about it succeeding, you want to eliminate all the problematic ideas that are associated with it.
00:20:31.000Racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, all those things are associated with it.
00:20:36.000I should just tell people, when I went to visit you in Salt Lake years ago, You have a ton of folks you brought over from Afghanistan working at your factory when you saved their lives and brought them over to America when they were in trouble,
00:20:53.000when they were being chased down because they worked with US troops over there.
00:20:58.000Well, yeah, and who you're talking about is Wali Taslim and the other guys that are working specifically in our print and our facility in Salt Lake.
00:21:10.000He joined the army right after, and when I say that, the Afghan army right after our invasion in, I believe it was like October and November 2001, like right after.
00:21:21.000Right when the CIA and Special Forces invaded Afghanistan, Wali Taslim was one of the guys that joined up right away.
00:21:29.000So he went from a 16-year-old kid to he was, by the time that he left, I believe that was 2014 or 15. So he had been directly involved in direct action missions across Afghanistan for over 11 years.
00:21:45.000And he went from a private to a commander.
00:21:51.000And so when we talk about where the times might have missed some incredible, enlightening stories, talk about the Afghan refugees that used to be commandos that fought for us for over a decade.
00:22:03.000Wali Taslim has over 1,500 direct action missions.
00:22:08.000The guy has breached more doors for the United States than most of the special operations guys that I know.
00:22:15.000He not only did that, but he had to move about every six months for the last two years that he was in Afghanistan because he had been in multiple ambushes with his wife and family in his car.
00:23:44.000Uh, So it's extremely offensive for a combination of reasons, right?
00:23:50.000Which is, I have no place for, in my company or even in my own life, for discriminatory behavior in that regard, right?
00:23:59.000These are the guys that have been fighting to the left and to the right with us for over 20 years in these countries that we've been directly involved in clandestine and overt warfare.
00:24:12.000They've risked their lives, their limbs, their eyesight, which means the same as mine.
00:24:16.000And we owe them an incredible amount of gratitude.
00:24:20.000And it would be directly misrepresented if I placated in any regard that type of behavior in the company, because it's not who we are.
00:24:29.000And Wally is just one of a handful of guys that we continue to not only hire, but bring in and then We hired them an English tutor.
00:24:42.000We're putting them through the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.
00:24:46.000So we hire the attorneys that is required for that to walk them through the process.
00:24:52.000It's something that we're really proud of.
00:24:55.000And not only are we really proud of, it's a really rich and incredible story about how these guys have come to the United States and been successful within a veteran-owned and operated company That we were fighting together 10 years ago and now we're roasting coffee in the United States together now,
00:25:28.000And I think stories like that, the only way to tell a story like that is to just tell it.
00:25:36.000I don't think someone writing it is ever going to capture all of the fascinating aspects of it, all of the inspirational aspects of it, the human aspects of it.
00:25:57.000But also, like, when I see someone misrepresenting a company that I think is one of the most noble companies that I've ever come across, that the amount of time that you guys spent trying to help first responders, military, police, I know what you guys do.
00:26:14.000So when I see you misrepresented by conservatives, and I'm not even conservative, so I see that shit and I'm like, you fucking idiots.
00:26:50.000It's like so incredible on one end and then it's like the Wild West for trolls on the other end, right?
00:26:56.000They're like getting their gloves on and rolling out their keyboards and they're getting ready to hit it hard.
00:27:03.000And I think most of this doesn't really impact me unless it's a customer that's emailing me, which, to be fair, we really haven't had a lot of the customers even directly email us directly associated with this.
00:27:18.000Most of our customers are based on a direct interaction with our media that we put out on a regular basis, and they kind of know the company.
00:27:28.000It is strange for a certain percentage of the conservatives to jump on a bandwagon like that and ultimately label me or the company as anti-American, which is nuts.
00:29:56.000It's like human beings trying to interface with something that's devoid of emotion and it's devoid of context, it's devoid of social cues and the normal interactions between two human beings.
00:30:09.000Yeah, and I think, I was thinking about this the other day, that there's a lot of people that are, like, fear is a driving factor right now, right?
00:30:19.000You have a lot of fear that's floating around in the United States internationally because of, I think, the way the media portrays a lot of different events.
00:30:27.000You know, every year there's been some type of catastrophic thing that the media has been able to pick up and really escalate.
00:30:34.000But then you have these devices, right, where people are seeking emotion.
00:30:44.000But when your default emotion is anger, because it's a really easy emotion to default to, You can't get a connection of love or, you know, a meaningful emotion out of it,
00:31:01.000but it's really easy to make a connection with somebody online and default to anger, kind of get explosive and connected.
00:31:10.000I think there's a lot of people that are really just disconnected and they're searching for some type of human interaction and they're never going to get it from an electronic device.
00:31:23.000I think that right now we're in this really strange predicament as a country where people are feeling isolated and alone and they're connected to their electronic devices more than they ever have been.
00:31:33.000But it's a toxic environment if you're trying to connect with people in a, when I say a negative way, and then band together and then enhance that emotion once again.
00:31:47.000I know that's probably an oversimplification, but you're not going to be able to connect with a technology device.
00:31:53.000No, in this past year and a half, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, there's much more distance between people in terms like people aren't getting together as well.
00:32:03.000At least they weren't for a long time.
00:32:23.000I was like thinking about it, like if there was a...
00:32:26.000If you had an artificial intelligence that was trying to get human beings to abandon everything that makes you human, what better way than a virus that makes you scared of other people?
00:32:37.000What better way than forcing people into their homes, making other people actually dangerous to be around?
00:33:20.000Make a disease that's invisible, that transmits through the air, and people have to stay away from each other, and there's no cure, and everybody's panicking.
00:33:30.000And then spread a bunch of misinformation about how it spreads.
00:33:33.000It spreads on surfaces, and it'll last up to two weeks.
00:33:37.000And you spray everything down with Lysol, and everybody's in a panic.
00:33:40.000And then, because people are scared, So many people – there's a giant percentage of our population out there that has never experienced any adversity.
00:33:50.000They do not know how to handle stress.
00:33:52.000They don't know how to handle being uncomfortable.
00:33:54.000They don't know how to – so as soon as anything that comes their way that they can bark at, anything, they're in this state, this constant state of being perturbed.
00:34:05.000And then anything that comes their way, well, fuck black rifle cars!
00:35:23.000Over the whole pandemic, when Bill de Blasio, this fucking dipshit mayor of New York City, he made this video about bringing the arts back to New York City, that this is how we're going to revitalize the city.
00:35:36.000This is a city that has been economically crippled by his policies, right?
00:36:01.000And it's a video where it's like the most uncoordinated dancing.
00:36:07.000With the worst music you've ever heard and he's standing there talking about we got to bring back the arts and it starts here We're gonna have street performances and these people are dancing and it's it's and I just wrote how the fuck is this real?
00:36:19.000That's all I posted because it came across my face and I was like I gotta I just I'm gonna post this That was the only thing I posted other than like reposting interesting articles See if you can find it because it's so it's so dumb That's I think that's the great thing about...
00:36:36.000Not the great thing about the pandemic.
00:36:55.000I start to look and think about individual liberty.
00:36:58.000And I start to think, why would you ever want to forfeit your freedom to one of these idiots that has control over what you or your family or your business does?
00:37:09.000Because if we've learned anything in the last year and a half, is it...
00:37:13.000These people can't be trusted with a squeezy bottle.
00:37:18.000We can't trust them with the keys to the car.
00:37:21.000I wouldn't give them a 98 Cutlass with 180,000 miles to watch.
00:37:26.000Most of them are so fucking incompetent that I wouldn't trust them to wash a dish.
00:37:33.000It amazes me when I look around and I'm like, why are you guys so interested?
00:38:08.000Month after month in 2021, as you see the city come back to life, culture will lead the way.
00:38:13.000Open culture is another step towards a recovery for our city.
00:38:17.000We're launching with 115 street locations in all five borders and it brings stages to our neighborhoods and culture to the heart of our neighbors and give artists, cultural institutions and creatives a place to showcase their talents as they recover from the pandemic.
00:40:26.000Vaccines that allow people, like this is one of the things we're finding out about what they're calling breakthrough cases.
00:40:31.000So people who are vaccinated can still get COVID and they can still transmit COVID. This recently happened at the Comedy Store.
00:40:39.000A vaccinated comedian gave COVID to like 12 different fucking people at the Comedy Store.
00:40:44.000Some of them vaccinated, some of them not.
00:40:47.000That situation where the vaccine just kind of protects you from serious damage, but protects you from really being badly hospitalized or death, but doesn't stop you from getting the virus, can possibly lead to more potent viruses.
00:41:07.000So these people that are saying, oh, it's these unvaccinated people that are responsible for the variants.
00:41:14.000Well, there's actually scientific papers that point to the very sort of environment that we're creating by having so many people vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn't kill off the virus.
00:41:29.000It actually can lead to more potent viruses.
00:42:00.000It's wild because they've somehow managed, and when I say they, meaning the political elite and then I think their established media representatives, have somehow managed to turn this into a political issue, right?
00:42:18.000It's dangerous for any politician to play in that game where they're using something as meaningful and quite possibly dangerous for the country as political posturing or virtue signaling, right?
00:42:32.000And you see it all the time because you see these guys are wearing their masks for the camera, but then they take them off.
00:42:36.000AOC just got busted doing that yesterday.
00:43:36.000They're going to find a reason to continue to use that.
00:43:38.000If they can figure out a way to force you into carrying papers, into carrying something that lets you enter businesses or lets you do this or lets businesses open, as soon as you give politicians power, In any kind of power that didn't exist previously,
00:43:56.000historically, they don't relinquish that power.
00:44:01.000Well, I think that's the history of lawmaking and political power in the United States.
00:44:07.000And I think that's why I tend to be bucketed in conservatives, because it means smaller government to me, right?
00:44:16.000There's multiple reasons why people classify themselves as that.
00:44:21.000But I look at things and I look at the preservation of individual liberty.
00:44:26.000You know, how do I preserve more of my freedom because I feel like I'm a responsible adult and I feel like I'm going to raise responsible adults and I feel like I spend most of my time around responsible adults.
00:44:40.000I don't—it's such a disconnect in individual philosophy when I find people that are actively looking for ways that they can forfeit their individual liberty and hand it over to somebody where they feel like they have a better interest in running their life than they do.
00:45:00.000And I understand the balance between, you know, we have to have certain laws and regulations that protect people against, you know, overt dangers.
00:45:09.000But I also understand your statement where I think politicians and I would say lawmakers and government bureaucrats have a really hard time relinquishing control once they have it because it feels good.
00:46:40.000Because when you give people freedom, you let people do whatever the fuck they want to do, they actually find ways to succeed and grow and thrive.
00:46:48.000But as soon as you put the boots to them, As soon as you tell them, you have to do this or you can't do that.
00:47:42.000I don't know what the numbers are, but I know that most people who get vaccinated, when they do have the disease, they have a better time of it than the people who are unvaccinated.
00:47:51.000But where are the people out there calling for people to get healthy?
00:47:53.000Where are the people out there calling for people to lose weight?
00:47:56.00078% of the people in the ICU for COVID are obese.
00:48:31.000All you hear is, take this vaccine that doesn't even prevent you from getting the disease, or you can't go to the sauna or wherever the fuck you want to go.
00:50:09.000But it struck me, there's one chapter in the books that I was reading about how the U.S. cavalry, they were putting the Native Americans on reservations for their protection.
00:50:23.000And I'm not trying to equate this in direct correlation, but this was part of the narrative.
00:50:28.000Because they were saying, we want to put you guys on reservations to protect you from the settlers.
00:50:37.000So we want to put you guys on this 400 square reservation, 400 mile square reservation for your protection.
00:50:44.000And they're like, dude, we want to be free.
00:50:47.000I don't know what you're talking about.
00:50:49.000And they go in and they trace the over a thousand miles that Chief Joseph led his tribe through Idaho and Montana and then up close to the Canadian border.
00:51:02.000But I couldn't help but think about...
00:51:25.000Us, not us as a country, how we need to be pushed to ask more questions and we deserve more answers.
00:51:32.000We have to hold skepticism, I think, in a very high regard and we can't beat it down.
00:51:38.000I think anytime that you question authority, it's a good thing, especially as a society, because it also says that you have a healthy society.
00:51:47.000If you have this complex narrative moving up from underneath, I think, the groundswell of information from people, you can have these complex discussions, but you also have to have very good answers to what's going on.
00:52:02.000I think you've got conflicting information that's being politicized and it's being gaslit by both sides of the media, which I don't blame people for being pissed off and confused because Man, I'm confused.
00:52:17.000The CDC releases something, the president will say something else, some random governor somewhere that I've never heard of will say something else, and you're like, what the hell is going on?
00:52:27.000Yeah, that's why I listen to Crystal and Sagar, because they typically know what the- Well, they typically know what's going on, and they're a great example because that show Breaking Points, you got Sagar, who's on the right, and Crystal, who's on the left, but they're good friends, they get along well, and they're both super honest and objective,
00:52:45.000rational and intelligent, and they can discuss all the finer points of these issues, honestly, openly, and it's why they're thriving.
00:52:56.000It's why CNN, like some of their shows, they get 100,000 views in the key demographic.
00:53:39.000The people that are pro-2A and libertarians and anti-vaxxers and all these other people have banded together.
00:53:47.000And he was labeling literally people that are exercising their constitutional rights in a legitimate political party in the United States as an extremist.
00:54:36.000We want more of the responsibility for you, your business, your family, and your community.
00:54:42.000We want more of that because you can trust us.
00:54:44.000That's basically the narrative that I find across the board to a lot of people that are professional politicians and professional bureaucrats.
00:55:14.000It's even progressing in a worse, if that's a way to describe that, it's progressing in an even more negative way for people to monetize, which is a different conversation, but that's their entire monetization strategy.
00:55:30.000I have a thought, and I think that news should be free.
00:55:34.000I think not only should it be free, I think it should be subsidized.
00:55:40.000By the people so that the salaries of all the people that are working in these news organizations, there's no incentive whatsoever to sensationalize stories and that there should almost be like some sort of overview.
00:55:58.000Like how would you use some citizens overview where they make sure that people don't sensationalize things in order to get people hyped up so they click on you know if it bleeds it leads has always been the thing with the news but if they could figure out a way to distribute the news completely objectively with no commercials with no no financial incentive just give people information let them know what the fuck there's a real problem when information in terms of like what's going on in the world is It can be distorted and it could be magnified
00:57:44.000And that's one of the arguments for the January 6th invasion of the Capitol.
00:57:49.000Like, that whole thing, because he was like, you need to make a strong statement and go up there and show these people.
00:57:56.000A lot of people are like, well, you know you have these people eating out of the palm of your hands, and you kind of ask them to go do something wild.
00:58:12.000Yeah, I think leadership comes with a profound amount of responsibility.
00:58:17.000And I also think that you can't take responsibility for everyone's actions, right?
00:58:25.000So it's one of those things where there has to be a clear delineation between what's reasonable and what's a realistic expectation, which is...
00:58:32.000No reasonable law-abiding citizen thinks it's okay to penetrate a federal building, for instance.
00:58:38.000And that's happened both on the left and the right.
00:58:49.000Portland is like some crazy socialist fucking island.
00:58:52.000It's like the Soviet Republic of Oregon.
00:58:53.000They're trying to fuck that city up so bad.
00:58:57.000But that's the thing, I think, when you also see this, because people saw this lawlessness happening throughout the entire year, and I also think that the media directly contributes to...
00:59:08.000Gaslighting and then pulling people up in this context of spinning them up on both sides.
00:59:33.000And that's the other issue that I think directly contributed to it, which is people saw nothing happening for a year.
00:59:40.000So then there's an expectation that this is okay, or there's somehow this is permissible, which I think every logical person, and well, we had that conversation about logic.
01:00:44.000If you really think you're going to take over the government with skateboards, bonking people over the head and throwing Molotov cocktails, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, it's one of the things that's happening in this country that these people don't understand what they're doing.
01:00:56.000They think they're going to cause some sort of Chaos to the point where they're going to overthrow the government.
01:01:03.000They're going to overthrow this country and burn it to the ground.
01:01:06.000This is a narrative that gets expressed over and over again by the more radical people amongst us, that the United States is unfixable and we need to burn it to the ground and start from scratch.
01:01:25.000It's irresponsible of people that continue to propagate that narrative, too, because I've definitely seen it in different YouTube forums or channels or whatever it might be.
01:01:39.000And from both sides, when you think about how far this country has come...
01:01:47.000And, you know, if I go on my pro-America rant here for a second, which is we built something so incredible that we should be so proud of everything that we've done in the last couple hundred years and that we're continuing to evolve the system and make the country better.
01:02:04.000But when I look at the country, I'm like, this place is fucking incredible.
01:02:27.000It's awesome and I've spent the majority of my adult life outside of this country by the way like in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and It's nothing against those countries, but I love this one.
01:02:38.000It's so fucking beautiful and amazing that we should be like high-fiving each other going guys This is free.
01:02:48.000I'm not saying it's not perfect, right?
01:02:51.000But just the fact that we can go out and protest and say a bunch of crazy ass shit together and people don't like stuff us in a closet in the middle of nowhere for just expressing our ideas.
01:03:05.000That's an incredible evolution of any country to be able to do that.
01:03:11.000Now, when you look at 50 states varying in the way that they look at their population and the way that we've got different cities in these different states, they've got different laws, they've got all these combined United States that are so fucking weird that...
01:03:27.000We should be so happy and appreciative of where we live.
01:03:32.000And that's where I am because I think of this place every day where I'm so fortunate.
01:03:39.000And I don't look at it as a negative in any regard.
01:03:44.000And I think there's a section of our country that looks at it, that narrative of the flag, right?
01:03:51.000And you've heard this, where the flag is seen as negative by a certain portion of the United States.
01:03:56.000And I'm like, that flag is something that we should all be really fucking proud of, man.
01:04:01.000We've been able to evolve our circumstance as a nation and build this big, crazy, beautiful place that's so fucking cool that...
01:04:11.000We should be celebrating that flag on a regular basis.
01:04:14.000We should be celebrating the people that serve our country on a regular basis.
01:04:20.000So it wears me out with this narrative, and I get really pissed off and a little bit angry when I hear people trashing, especially United States citizens, when they start trashing the United States.
01:04:30.000But as I just said earlier, we should be skeptical and question power, but we should also be really fucking proud of where we're at as a country.
01:04:40.000The reason why they can say the things they're saying about the United States being this horrible institution that needs to be burned to the ground is one of the very beautiful things about the United States.
01:05:14.000There's people who will say, Jimi Hendrix sucks, and you just go, okay, you have the freedom to do that because we live in this amazing place.
01:05:21.000That's like my line in the sand, is Jimi Hendrix.
01:06:24.000It's one of the beautiful things about this country is that you have the freedom to express yourself.
01:06:27.000And there's a lot of people that think things suck and then as they get older they realize why they thought those things suck and they change their opinion.
01:07:15.000And my take on it has always been, like, there's millions of veterans in this country.
01:07:19.000And if you really get to a point where you start calling for a civil war, and you think that you're going to fucking overthrow this country, the veterans are going to come out, and you're going to have a real fucking problem.
01:07:59.000If you want to know what tough is, you guys are headed on a one-way road to being classified as a terrorist organization.
01:08:08.000Once you do that, you're going to meet tough.
01:08:10.000You're going to meet at about 2 o'clock in the morning in a flashlight while you're in your parents' basement with a muzzle at the end of it.
01:08:18.000You're going to meet a person that is actually really tough.
01:08:22.000They've been trained for decades to do things that are very hazardous.
01:08:27.000And I just kind of laugh at the narrative because I think about my buddies and I over the last like couple decades and And I think about how we were just kind of like bumbling idiots at times, but I knew some bad motherfuckers.
01:08:44.000Like, straight up some of the hardest dudes you'll ever meet.
01:08:48.000And you've had a couple of them on the show, like Dakota Meyer and Marcus Littrell and these guys, right?
01:08:57.000And I was talking to somebody, it was like my previous profession was I was like, if anybody were to step into my life, just get a snapshot, like if we were to switch brains or bodies for like five minutes,
01:09:14.000just a normal day at the office for me, they would go into fucking cardiac arrest.
01:09:18.000They'd be like, a normal day at the office is me going through Mosul, Iraq, which is basically like Mad Max, wearing a burqa in the backseat of a thin-skinned vehicle with a belt-fed machine gun trying to hide from ISIS so I don't get my head cut off with a couple other guys as we're trying to sneak around and look for ISIS. We're just playing cat and mouse.
01:09:47.000And I'm like, dude, at any point in time, my job was looking like an Arabic woman in the back of an old Corolla with a belt-fed machine gun with a bunch of people that wanted to kill me every second of every day.
01:10:03.000And then you got a bunch of dudes that are like, oh my god, we're so tough.
01:10:06.000I'm like, man, you couldn't handle five seconds in my life on a normal day where my beats per minute weren't going above 56. And what's amazing is it's because of people like you that people like that get to express themselves in these ridiculous ways.
01:10:22.000They don't understand that you have given them the freedom because of your dedication and sacrifice.
01:10:28.000You've given them the freedom to exist in this land and be ridiculous.
01:10:50.000And some people, they feel disenfranchised and they want to go right to the old cheese.
01:10:54.000Because they're like, the fucking old cheese is just like me.
01:10:57.000I want blue hair and old cheese and shitty music and I'm wearing Doc Markins and I want to fucking burn it all down.
01:11:04.000I mean, that is what it is when people are rebel.
01:11:07.000It's like they don't feel like they're accepted in any other way, you know?
01:11:13.000I mean, that's a lot of what's going on today, is there's a lot of people that are disenfranchised, they don't feel accepted by the modern mainstream world, and so they're filled with pain, and they're filled with heartache, and they're hurting, and they want to burn it all down because they think that's the solution.
01:11:30.000Well, I think a lot of it is just because they're not living up to their full potential, right?
01:11:37.000When you're pushing the machine, and I like to tell people this, it's like, I'm pushing my machine at 150%.
01:11:43.000I can't get any more out of this brain or this body.
01:11:48.000I'm redlining basically 24 hours a day.
01:12:51.000I was talking to one of my buddies and he was telling me, he was like, well, you know, he was asking me, I was telling him, is it going on your show?
01:13:00.000He was like, well, what are you guys going to talk about?
01:13:06.000And I was talking to him about this story about how I was like, man, maybe I'll tell him this story about how he took fan boats out in the middle of the jungle in the Philippines trying to get into a gunfight.
01:14:09.000But really all I was doing is just like taking these fan boats up this river into the middle of nowhere and then performing a big show of force on every one of these ambush sites trying to pick fights with the Filipino terrorist cells that are at the Abu Sayyaf.
01:14:26.000And at the same time, in the evenings when we'd come back, We're good to go.
01:14:53.000One of the coolest trips I've ever done in the Army because we're completely unrestricted.
01:14:59.000All we were doing is trying to get in a gunfight.
01:15:02.000But when I think about how fucking cool that was that the American taxpayer paid for me to go to the Philippines to try to get in a gunfight with a bunch of terrorists while I was singing karaoke till like 3 o'clock in the fucking morning, taking fan boats into the middle of nowhere,
01:15:30.000Like the years that I was doing it, I always try to tell people, I'm like, I should be thanking you because I had so much fucking fun throughout those years doing incredible things.
01:15:42.000That people would say were a little bit dangerous and- A little bit?
01:16:26.000It requires all sorts of different personalities and different, but the fact that we have the freedom for you to choose what you want to do, like you're not being drafted, you enlisted.
01:16:37.000You had the choice to do this, you sought out adventure, you sought out your life's purpose, whatever calling you had to join the military, and the fact that we live in this amazing experiment in self-government, That you have the freedom to do that.
01:16:54.000We have to protect those freedoms at all costs, whether you agree with them or not, whether you agree with people's choices or not.
01:17:02.000You have to protect their ability to make those choices because it is the foundation that this country was founded on.
01:17:10.000That concept, this idea of freedom, there's so many people that think it's frivolous, it's not important, it's not...
01:17:18.000It's not the main thing that we should be focused on, but it is the thing, it's the literal structure that allows this country to be so fucking amazing, is that you can choose what you want to do.
01:17:31.000You can find the thing that everyone's different.
01:17:34.000You're different than me, I'm different than Jamie, we're all different.
01:17:36.000There's people next door that are totally different than us.
01:17:40.000Find your thing, and this country allows people to find their thing.
01:17:45.000But you gotta allow everybody to find their thing, as long as they're not fucking with your thing.
01:17:49.000As long as someone's not interfering in a malicious way with other people's happiness and ability to live a purposeful life.
01:17:59.000That is what we should be concentrating on.
01:18:01.000Giving people as much freedom as they can to discuss things, to participate, to choose their path in life.
01:18:09.000And as soon as you see something, anything that comes along and inhibits your freedom, you should be very, very wary and very cautious of that thing.
01:18:32.000Because of this, do you think that Your political or individual ideology, do you think that you fit into a political party in America today?
01:21:21.000I'm very conservative in that I believe in discipline.
01:21:24.000And I believe that if you give people a way out of things, and you let them weasel their way through things and find excuses and find scapegoats and reasons why they're not successful and reasons why things are fucked up, they'll do it.
01:21:37.000They'll do it because it's human nature.
01:21:38.000It's human nature for people to seek comfort and to seek escape and to seek excuses.
01:22:12.000So I'm in this weird both-way world where I see people that are trying to enact programs to absolve people of student loan debt, and I'm like, fuck yeah, I'm in.
01:22:23.000I see programs where people are trying to fix inner cities and provide community support and provide ways that you enact programs that help people get out of bad situations, and I'm all in on those, too.
01:22:41.000Do you think that there's a lot of people right now that feel like they're politically homeless?
01:22:47.000I think there's more people in the center than there are even on both sides now.
01:22:51.000Because I think one of the things that happened during the Trump administration and during the pandemic, that a lot of people did not feel like they belong on one side or the other.
01:23:01.000But they're in communities where you have to support one side or the other, or you don't feel like you have a tribe.
01:23:09.000And everybody wants to be a part of a tribe.
01:23:11.000And it takes real courage to stand out away from your tribe and say, I don't agree with that.
01:24:20.000Versions of soda water and we can't come up with yeah, you know more than two parties I think we run each different state yeah, and I think When we look at that the two-party system Like one of the things that continues to break my brain is How do we dig our way out of this two-party system?
01:24:41.000From your perspective have you thought about this?
01:24:42.000Yeah, like how do you dig your way out?
01:24:48.000They got it locked up I mean, they really do.
01:24:50.000I mean, one of the things they did when Ross Perot came along, the Commission for Presidential Debates, they decided you have to have a larger percentage of the vote in order to participate in the debates.
01:25:00.000And even then, they've still figured out a way how to lock people out.
01:25:04.000Like, they locked Tulsi Gabbard out of the debates.
01:26:29.000The former first lady, the former presidential candidate, the person that wields probably the single most influential female politician in America, came out and called a military officer a Russian asset.
01:26:45.000Every person in America should have been like, let's put some money in that jukebox and hear another song.
01:26:52.000Yeah, everybody who supported her should have hit the brakes.
01:28:50.000They try to smear her name by saying a Russian asset.
01:28:54.000Look, if you think that Russia would rather have her in place than Hillary Clinton or all these other fucking lifelong politicians, that's a hilarious notion.
01:29:08.000Well, and she was one of the only people, because I've been asked this question a lot, right?
01:29:12.000She was one of the only Democrats to vote down a piece of legislation that was going to require the VA to hand over medical records from veterans when you're doing a background check for firearms.
01:30:05.000Even though I don't agree with everything she has politically, I don't agree with Dan Crenshaw 100% of the time either, but I do consider him a friend.
01:30:12.000I respect his opinion, but I don't have to agree uniformly with every one of these people.
01:30:19.000I agree wholeheartedly across the board with everything you just said.
01:30:22.000It's like having a complex discussion and a debate And then being able to disagree with people politically, and also respect them, and also befriend them, that's America.
01:30:39.000The idea that there's two sides, and there's a blue side and a red side, and the red side is enemies with the blue side, and the blue side's enemies with the red side.
01:31:01.000We're supposed to be able to communicate about things without thinking of the other side as being evil.
01:31:08.000And that's the crazy thing about the purity tests that each side wants to put people through.
01:31:17.000And then you have this chunk in the middle, which, you know, I consider myself, you know, right of center most of the time on most issues, you know, depending on the issue.
01:31:34.000It's a fictional narrative where people will agree in total with everything the far left or the far right will do.
01:31:45.000And then to a certain degree, I think you have those extremes holding the center hostage in America because they're loud, right?
01:31:53.000They're kind of loud and a little bit obnoxious and everybody's like, oh man, that's like that weirdo that comes to your Thanksgiving party.
01:31:59.000You're like, dude, I don't really like that guy, but I mean, he's there.
01:32:02.000I guess I got to tolerate him for a while.
01:32:05.000Which is probably a bad analogy, but the center in the broad percentage of Americans, we just love the country.
01:32:23.000And we can have a complex discussion about issues, and hopefully two or multiple parties will come away with a greater understanding of the way that this person thinks, and maybe respect or politely disagree or not respect that person's opinion.
01:32:38.000But I think that's what makes this country so incredible.
01:32:42.000In my neighborhood, for instance, my neighbors are very liberal.
01:33:51.000I'm just wondering out of, you know, curiosity.
01:33:54.000I was like, yeah, but, you know, if you go and get some training and, you know, you can legally own and possess firearms, like, I think it's a great thing.
01:34:01.000They're like, yeah, I actually agree with that.
01:34:03.000You know, it took me about two seconds to...
01:34:05.000Of inarticulate debate to be like, yeah, I think a firearm's a good idea.
01:34:10.000They're just like, that's a really good idea.
01:34:12.000Don't you think that changed during the pandemic?
01:34:14.000That's one of the things that really accelerated it.
01:34:16.000Yeah, the lines outside the gun stores in LA were hilarious.
01:34:19.000I'd be driving by going, you're a little late!
01:34:21.000You guys should have been here years ago.
01:36:31.000It's like ARs have been demonized in the news to the point where people look at a magazine that has X amount of bullets and they go, why do you need so many bullets?
01:37:58.000The name is an homage to the thing that kept me alive.
01:38:02.000It was literally the wall between life or death.
01:38:06.000And now, it truly is one of those things that I find this connection not only to my past and what I've done in my past, but it's also a hobby.
01:38:50.000That's the debate as to like even for me to say certain things like I love America and I love guns They're like, oh You're one of those guys.
01:38:59.000I'm like, oh you mean I'm just I'm in love with freedom and I'm in love with like Doing the things that are completely legal and oh by the way I think you should be really proud of where you were born in your city your state and your country I think it's pretty amazing I So the box magazines and round capacity,
01:39:18.000we've kind of gone down the rabbit hole on these things multiple times.
01:39:21.000I'm like, why do you want to restrict what people are doing with no justifiable data that can tell me why I should not be able to have this?
01:39:33.000Well, I think for a long time, people thought it was a preposterous conversation to say that a well-armed militia, like the right to keep and bear arms, a well-armed militia, like, wait a minute, you're going to overthrow the government?
01:39:48.000You really think you're going to overthrow the government?
01:39:49.000Like, people thought that was really preposterous.
01:39:52.000But I think there's a lot of people that paid attention to what's going on right now in Hong Kong.
01:39:57.000And they realized, like, oh my god, Hong Kong was just taken over.
01:40:01.000Essentially taken over by China in this really crazy open way.
01:40:22.000But it's these guys in Hong Kong waving the American flag, hoping that America is going to step in and do something to stop them from taking over.
01:40:48.000Lando Venato fights with the UFC. Had it on his Instagram and I screenshotted it.
01:40:53.000It's these guys protesting in Hong Kong because China is taking over the country and they're enforcing the same sort of draconian laws that they have in the rest of China on Hong Kong, which until the 1990s was a British colony.
01:41:09.000Be the America Hong Kong thinks you are.
01:41:32.000But the thing about every single civilization that's ever existed, all empires fall.
01:41:39.000And if we're in the process of this empire collapsing, and I'm not sure if we are or aren't, but I don't think anybody really recognized that Rome was falling before it fell.
01:41:49.000I don't think anybody, any of the ancient civilizations that are no longer in power.
01:41:53.000I think the sign was, I think you might even addressed it, was like Romans started concentrating on their genitalia and that was like one of the signs.
01:42:02.000It was like you guys are fixated on arbitrary items versus like fixing the state.
01:42:16.000I think, well, an example, and I don't know if this is a great example, is, you know, in Afghanistan, we're pulling out of Afghanistan, obviously, after 20 years, which I completely and wholeheartedly agree with, by the way.
01:42:31.000Is, you know, the average education level in Afghanistan, the Taliban fighter that we were fighting, I think was the equivalent of like second grade education, right?
01:42:43.000And the average weapon system was an AK-47.
01:42:47.000And so when you have the narrative out there that is like, okay, well, why is an armed society a good society?
01:42:56.000And the government should actually be...
01:43:00.000It shouldn't be in fear of its people, but it should respect the people.
01:43:30.000And that's one of the things that I continue to come back to is this sanctuary of our ideology of freedom, which is this is part of the American fabric, which is power to the individual and freedom to the person.
01:45:46.000They would have to want to do that job.
01:45:48.000It's not just would they be able to do that job.
01:45:52.000They have to want to dedicate themselves to that kind of abuse, that kind of scrutiny, that kind of microscope on their life, and distortion of all aspects of their life.
01:46:02.000I mean, think about what the New York Times did to distort just a fucking coffee coffee.
01:46:27.000Like an impeccable background and a person who knows how to communicate and a person who's charismatic, where people can resonate with that person.
01:46:35.000They say, this guy, this woman, this person, this person represents how I feel.
01:48:16.000Sometimes my opinions, I'm thinking them up as I'm saying it, and I haven't really even put so much thought into it, and they think that's irresponsible.
01:48:26.000And there's an argument for that, but that's what I do.
01:48:39.000And they go after you because that's their job.
01:48:43.000Their job is to write stories that are going to get a lot of views.
01:48:46.000So if the New York Times has gone after me, or any other people have gone after me, Well, they're putting a billboard on the car crash, right?
01:49:10.000It's like I broker in entertain, inform, and inspire, right?
01:49:13.000Because I think I have an ethical responsibility to...
01:49:18.000The veterans at Black Rifle and the veteran community to not participate in negative dialogue.
01:49:25.000The problem is that there's a disconnect from this small gray thing that is bouncing around in my head and this fucking open hole that makes noises.
01:50:54.000And, like, one thing that I've kind of gone through, you know, like, around and around in the last, like, seven years is, like, one thing is, like, man, I'm not going to be intimidated or bullied by some weird group of people on the internet.
01:51:08.000I'm having such a great time, like on this ride, because we have such a finite existence here, that there's no way I'm gonna let a group of negative people pull me into the muck and the mire of their negative existence.
01:51:23.000It's like, one of my friends sent me a text, he's like, ah, if you wrestle with pigs, you're gonna get dirty.
01:51:30.000I'm not gonna do it, because I'm trying to have, for a combination of reasons, right, which is I have an ethical responsibility to my peer group of the people that have sacrificed their lives for this country.
01:51:46.000And for me, specifically, to go out and fucking push it.
01:51:51.000Like, I get up every morning and I'm like, hell yeah, dude.
01:51:56.000I'm alive and I'm gonna get every fucking second out of this day And I'm thinking about guys that I served with that don't have the opportunity right now to see their kids.
01:52:09.000I get to see my four-year-old, my seven-year-old.
01:52:12.000Every morning I get to play with them and it makes me a better dad.
01:52:15.000Because they're a constant reminder that they're not there to see their kids.
01:52:21.000And it's a constant reminder for me to go out and be a good CEO or boss of the 500 plus people that work at Black Rifle and to care for people.
01:52:32.000To be a good human and to be Responsible for my emotions.
01:52:39.000Because the other thing that I like to tell people is that psychology is more infectious than COVID. You spread negative shit, it's gonna spread everywhere.
01:52:49.000But if you're positive and you're motivated and you're plugged in, you're connected and you're having an experience with people that's positive, you're gonna spread that.
01:52:59.000And I owe it to the entire peer group of post 9-11 and all the veterans out there to just fucking push every day to be as positive as I can to plug in and be connected and have real experiences and to make a positive impact in people's lives versus contributing to negative horseshit that's just like arbitrary and spinning out of control on these like random platforms.
01:53:27.000And kudos to you, because I've been listening to your show for I don't know how long.
01:53:34.000You have done so much for so many veterans.
01:53:38.000Their mental health, giving them a person to listen to that is giving them a broader perspective on life.
01:53:47.000And I'm not trying to placate to the crowd.
01:53:49.000I'm saying, dude, you have helped a fuck ton of guys that I know.
01:53:52.000Like, so many guys that I know are like, man, I went down and did ayahuasca because Joe was talking about it on one of the shows and I am 100% recovered.
01:54:02.000I no longer have to climb into a bottle to go to sleep.
01:54:05.000I no longer have these visions and nightmares.
01:54:11.000So what you're doing with your platform and the interconnectiveness specifically related to, you know, my peer group, like, man, you're spreading positivity.
01:54:23.000So for me, I'm replicating part of that.
01:54:26.000I'm saying, you know what, I can do incredible positive things and I can be a direct impact on the people that have been physically and mentally altered by these wars.
01:54:36.000So when I roll out of bed, I'm like, okay, well, I'm not checking in on every JRE, but, you know, there's a few, right?
01:54:43.000I'm just trying to fucking plug in and be positive.
01:54:45.000And I think you're leading by example.
01:54:49.000Does that connect with you that you're a leader on a whole different level?
01:55:02.000But I think to speak to what you were saying earlier about interacting in a negative way with people and getting dragged into the pig slop, the thing about it is that you're not helping those people either.
01:55:15.000Those people that are negatively attacking you and negatively reacting and They need love too, man.
01:55:22.000They all need attention and a lot of those people are good people.
01:55:25.000A lot of those people who say bad things are good people.
01:55:30.000They're lost and they're bitter and they're angry and they're jealous and they're sad and they don't know what the fuck to do with their life and so they say negative shit because negative shit gets people to react.
01:55:41.000Negative shit gets a response and negative shit is a form of currency in this country in this weird climate.
01:55:48.000And I think if you engage in it and feed it, you just spread it.
01:57:10.000But that's also why I'm so successful is because I've taken a lot of fucking chances.
01:57:15.000And because of those chances, I've put myself out there, and I've taken a lot of lumps, but I've also succeeded in a lot of ways because of that, because I'm willing to take it.
01:57:27.000I'm willing to take the chances, and I'm willing to put myself out there.
01:57:30.000And that's the secret to this show, is that The people that listen, I think, no, I'm not a bad person, even though I make mistakes.
01:59:12.000I'm not always good at it, but whatever I'm trying to do at that moment in my life, I'm trying to do my best with everything, whether it's martial arts or being a dad or doing a podcast or doing stand-up.
01:59:29.000And I feel like if you can follow those principles and just use those as a guide and always try to improve upon the way that you interface with life, the way you interface with other people, the way you express yourself out in the world,
02:01:35.000I want people to see the you that I know, the you that I knew when you were just starting your company out, when the company wasn't gigantic.
02:02:21.000What I go to work for every day and when I focus on what's important and what's the most meaningful and impactful thing that I do, it starts with my family.
02:03:15.000And then I have to go in and I have to be, well, first I have to be present and connected with my wife.
02:03:21.000I have to be present and connected inside my company.
02:03:25.000You know, those people depend on me directly impacting their lives in a positive way.
02:03:31.000And I have to be present and connected when the product comes out.
02:03:35.000I have to be present and connected on all those things that actually make the whole fucking machine work.
02:03:41.000But I think the most thing that I'm quite literally focused on in trying to make an impact, like my legacy is not something that I'm thinking about on a regular basis.
02:03:53.000You know, you get like really heady, sophisticated executives that are like, oh, my legacy is this.
02:04:45.000And if I'm not out there spreading positivity, if I'm not out there directly connecting, and not only connected in, but emotionally connected in an authentic way, I'm not doing my best.
02:04:59.000And I'm not serving my community and being a direct impact In how we can encourage and make each other better.
02:05:31.000Go out and I can raise money and I can create capital so I can go out and directly impact because I can take that profit and I can turn it into something good.
02:05:44.000That's why I call myself a capitalistic philanthropist.
02:05:49.000And I can go out and I can buy, you know, ATV wheelchairs.
02:05:52.000I can sponsor different events where these guys can come out and shoot, you know, 3D foam targets and we can have a social event.
02:06:00.000But those guys fire me up and they connect me into my peer group every day where I know I can have a direct impact.
02:06:33.000That has nothing to do with this injury, but I know that there are thousands of people right now that have mobility issues that I can help.
02:06:44.000Because I sell brown water, caffeinated brown water that is interconnected to turn what I do every day into something that I'm extremely passionate about, which is I can make a direct impact into every one of those service members' lives by not only being a positive psychological influence,
02:07:07.000by being a leader in the community, and then, two, turning my profit into something that is incredibly impactful into their lives.
02:07:17.000I have no lack of motivation ever because I have an ethical responsibility to the peer group that I served with for the last 20 years that When I get up and I try to make a stupid video on the internet and roast coffee,
02:07:38.000I know that I'm going to turn a percentage of that profit into something that is going to be directly impactful into their lives.
02:07:48.000And that's what fires me up and motivates me.
02:07:51.000I'm not trying to create a sarcophagus of gold for myself.
02:08:01.000I care about putting on an adaptive athlete total archery challenge with a bunch of guys and getting my friends together and seeing them interact socially and high-fiving and talking shit.
02:08:17.000You know, while shooting a piece of, you know, foam that looks like a deer in the middle of nowhere.
02:08:52.000And that's why it's so important to me, I guess, like, When I talk about the company, I'm like, dude, what people get wrong is they just don't get it.
02:09:03.000What they don't get it is, this isn't about me.
02:10:19.000And in trying to stick things into these very confined boxes.
02:10:25.000You limit your own potential as media.
02:10:31.000You limit your own potential in how you interface with the people that read your newspaper or whatever you're doing, whether it's a podcast or a book you wrote, you're limiting it.
02:10:43.000You're limiting it because you're not being honest.
02:10:46.000You're just trying to force things into some narrow perspective.
02:10:51.000That's a problem with the New York Times.
02:10:53.000It's a problem with the Washington Post.
02:10:54.000It's a problem with a lot of publications today.
02:10:56.000They have this idea of expectation, much like I was saying, like if I thought too much about how many people are listening to this show, if I changed who I am because I was worried about the impact or the fame or the...
02:13:29.000If you want to have a good film, you have to have good guys and bad guys.
02:13:32.000And bad guys sometimes do horrible things.
02:13:34.000And we have a really complex fantasy series like Game of Thrones.
02:13:39.000And you have this guy who is arguably one of the greatest warriors in any television series of all time.
02:13:45.000That kind of question is fucked, because you're conflating that guy's personal morals and ethics, the ethics of society in 2021, United States of America, during the Me Too movement, with a fucking barbarian in a world that doesn't even exist.
02:15:27.000Yeah, the reason why that movie's good is because you're watching that guy jerk off in front of those two girls while he's pulled them over, and you're like, what the fuck is this?
02:15:36.000I showed that to one of my cop friends the other day.
02:15:40.000I was like, hey man, so is Bad Lieutenant kind of like your script or what?
02:15:43.000He's like, what are you talking about?
02:15:44.000Like, you've never seen The Bad Lieutenant.
02:18:23.000I don't think he's the greatest joke writer of all time.
02:18:27.000He doesn't have the greatest specials that people can watch.
02:18:30.000But in terms of people that I've witnessed that have hit RPMs that I didn't think were possible...
02:18:37.000Like, so funny that, like, comedians would sit in the back of the room and watch him and watch him perform and be falling down the ground, pounding on the floor laughing.
02:19:23.000And he was also like the first truly honest comedian.
02:19:28.000Like honest about his own flaws and his life and just...
02:19:32.000And figured out a way to do it in a way that was just fucking brilliantly hilarious that changed People's perceptions of things and then number two is Sam Kinison and it was only for a short period of time Sam Kinison is like He was the greatest for like two years,
02:19:50.000And then he just did too much coke and fucked too many strippers and it's just didn't write anymore he just went crazy because Sam Kinison had a heavy-duty brain injury.
02:19:59.000He was hit by a car when he was like a little kid, and his brother Bill wrote a book called Brother Sam, and it's all about Sam and his life and growing up with him, and he documents this moment where Sam got hit by a car and had a serious brain injury and then was a wild motherfucker afterwards,
02:20:31.000Hit by a car when she was 15. One of the greatest, if not the greatest female comedian of all time, one of the top 10 greatest all-time comedians was Roseanne Barr, for sure.
02:20:43.000Keep going down the line is probably Bill Hicks because Bill Hicks changed the way people looked at comedy.
02:20:49.000He introduced complex concepts like psychedelic states and government propaganda and war and all sorts of other things to the conversation of comedy that hadn't existed before.
02:21:05.000But the guys that are alive now, the guys that I like to go see, is Chappelle, Bill Burr, Louis C.K., Chris Rock when he was active.
02:21:49.000And if it happened today, if he got busted today, like if people came out today and said, Louis C.K. jerked off in front of me, he'd have been like, You know, in comparison, like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and all these real monsters.
02:22:30.000I'm like a novice comedy comedian follower.
02:22:34.000I've been like this forever because that's part of the reason why we make the dumb shit that we do because all of us, we like to think that we're funny.
02:26:03.000It's a sign of the era in which he evolved and came up in, and he developed this style for The Tonight Show and David Letterman and these specials where he could do.
02:26:18.000And as a stand-up comedian, he's very, very respected.
02:26:41.000Yeah, I saw Gotham had a clip on their Instagram page real recently where he dropped in.
02:26:48.000He just popped in out of nowhere, wasn't even supposed to be there, just showed up, Jerry Seinfeld with a blazer on, telling jokes, trying out new material.
02:26:55.000Okay, you got to explain this to me, which is, so a well-known comedian, can you just drop in and bump people and get on?
02:27:08.000Some comics, for a long time, thought that it was part of their right of being successful to be able to just show up and go on at any time they want.
02:27:55.000And a lot of my friends who are comics would get really furious at that, and it drove them nuts.
02:28:01.000And they'd be like, why don't you just fucking call?
02:28:03.000Because, you know, maybe they'd have a dinner date.
02:28:05.000Like, maybe they're supposed to go out with their girlfriend at 9 o'clock, and their spot's at 8. And then all of a sudden, this guy shows up.
02:28:10.000And he wants to do 40 minutes in front of you.
02:28:13.000And then your reservations are all screwed up, or whatever plans you had.
02:28:17.000Or, you know, maybe you had people that came to see you, and they could only stay for a certain amount of time, and then, you know, they thought they were gonna go see your 15-minute set at the Comedy Store, but instead, some famous person came and bumped you.
02:28:30.000Like, if I'm sitting there, and it's fucking Tuesday night, and I see what the lineup is, because you can see the lineup, and then all of a sudden, Dave Chappelle shows up.
02:28:40.000Like, if you're a comedy fan, You're excited!
02:28:44.000So I could see the perspective of the audience as well.
02:28:49.000And you've got to kind of eat it if you're one of those comics that is there and you thought you were going to get to go up, but then Chappelle just showed up, you know?
02:28:58.000But, you know, guys like Seinfeld, if he's going to show up, he's going to show up and just do 15 minutes, like legitimately.
02:29:13.000And comedy clubs will indulge it because it's amazing to have a guy show up That really wasn't supposed to be there, but is a superstar that sells out, you know, Dave Chappelle sells out arenas, you know?
02:29:26.000And if he just shows up and just wants to do 15 minutes or an hour, whatever the fuck he wants to do, you're gonna let him do it.
02:31:04.000We've got some other shows that we're thinking about booking too, but I don't know what the fuck is going to happen with all these variants.
02:32:09.000And I was like, how did I get so lucky to have these amazing daughters?
02:32:12.000And it's just like this amazing love fest where they're smiling and they're so happy and I'm so happy and it's just pure love and affection and it's just...
02:37:11.000And the other piece is, I think, you know, going back to even Iraq and Afghanistan, which I hate to keep connecting that, but I never miss a hug.
02:39:28.000And the perspective of a person that's constantly checking up to see what other people who they don't even know, what their opinions of them are.
02:39:43.000Yeah, especially comedians that are on the way up.
02:39:46.000They haven't quite made it to the point where they're financially free, where they're trying to get gigs or they're trying to get television shows.
02:41:38.000Like, it was real funny, like, right before Dave went on stage, you know, he looked at me, and we're looking at each other, and the audience is screaming, and he goes, Not a lot of motherfuckers who get to do this.
02:41:49.000And it was like, yeah, it just seems like a dream.
02:42:30.000Which is more difficult if you're filming a special, so you know that you're on camera, it's going to be released on Netflix or whatever it is.
02:44:01.000There was definitely one extra bit that I forgot to do that we edited in that was from first show Saturday night, but most of the special was the first show because I was so loose because I knew I had all these opportunities to do it, so I didn't feel tense.
02:44:18.000And it costs extra money to do it that way, but if you can afford it, I think that's the way to do it because you just want to make A show where people come to see it, make it feel as normal as any other show that you do.
02:44:52.000Outside of shows one thing I do do is I listen to recordings and I write so write out bits even though I've done the bits a hundred times I'll write them out just so they're just like Cemented into my DNA. They're just locked in Do you record yourself doing them to yourself?
02:45:26.000That way, if there's a new line, because a lot of times I'm in the middle of something and I have a new line, and out of nowhere it comes out, and that line becomes a whole new bit.
02:45:36.000So are you going back through and you're listening to every one of your bits from start to finish?
02:45:47.000But nothing happened that I need to review.
02:45:50.000But every now and then, like maybe every third show, some whole...
02:45:54.000A whole new subject will come up or a whole new interaction will come up, a new pathway to a bit, a new direction, and so I'll listen to that and that's one of the ways that it becomes new material.
02:46:12.000No, I was taught that by a guy named Mike Donovan.
02:46:14.000There was a stand-up comedian in Boston who was a big-time local comic who was a really good guy who was really good at, like, talking to open micers.
02:46:25.000And this is back in the day where he would bring a fucking tape recorder on stage, a cassette recorder, and record all of his shows.
02:46:31.000And I was like, you record all your shows?
02:46:34.000He goes, one day you might say something, and if you don't record it, you're never going to remember it.
02:46:40.000And that could be, like, a way better way to do your bit, or a new way to do your bit, or you might just have an idea out of nowhere that pops into your head, and you say it, and you're in the moment when you're on stage.
02:46:51.000A lot of times you forget what you said.
02:46:53.000And then you'll go back and listen, and you're like, holy shit!
02:46:56.000Like, out of nowhere, out of the gods, the muse, just bestowed upon you a new idea.
02:49:26.000Less than 20. Yeah, less than 20. Out of 330 million people in this country, there's less than 20 people that could sell out an arena.
02:49:39.000That seems crazy to me because I think when I look at comedians, there's probably, well, I mean, I guess there's probably 20 that are still active that I'm thinking about that I'm like, yeah, yeah, I would go and see them for sure.
02:49:52.000Guys that can sell an arena, you've got like Sebastian, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle.
02:50:49.000Like I saw that Netflix special that he did.
02:50:54.000Well, he's done a few, but there's one real recently when they did a scan of the crowd where you see him on stage and you see the whole crowd.
02:54:29.000And then we knew each other from back then, and we knew each other from the clubs, and then I was on episode one of Chappelle's show accidentally.
02:57:06.000Yeah, that guy, he came to El Paso a few years ago, and it was right after the Chappelle show, and so he was just kind of doing some small...
02:57:32.000Yeah, it was like three dudes, vets, and he was just like super cool, so nice and genuine, and everybody was like, dude, this guy's like the coolest guy in the world.
02:59:41.000Yeah, well here's the thing about Carson and This is the thing that you could apply even to like in a broad sense to our parents and our parents parents People haven't been around that long, right?
02:59:53.000You know we like to think that people been around for so long this is great history and there is there's like thousands of years of history and And that seems like a long time.
03:00:03.000But when you go from our parents to...
03:00:32.000They just got on a boat and made their way across the fucking ocean, across the Atlantic.
03:00:36.000They land on the East Coast, and they set up shop and move into these Italian neighborhoods and Irish neighborhoods and a bunch of criminals, a bunch of barbarians.
03:00:46.000They're wild people, just wild people.
03:01:12.000They were living under the rule of the King of England.
03:01:16.000Before that, they were running from barbarians.
03:01:19.000Before that, Genghis Khan was running shit.
03:01:21.000Before that, they didn't have gunpowder.
03:01:24.000It's a short period of time where human beings have been around.
03:01:28.000So when it comes to mass media, if you go to the Johnny Carson show or the Jack Parr show or something like that and you try to watch those things, you have a time machine.
03:01:39.000And you're literally looking back into an encapsulated moment in the history of the human race that wasn't that long ago but was so different.
03:01:49.000So different than the way we live today.
03:01:52.000Bell bottoms and they're all smoking cigarettes.
03:01:54.000Yes, the cigarettes is like the most shocking thing.
03:04:11.000I was like, hey man, can't we like, if we're going to invade a country, like wouldn't it be cool if we just had the entire, an entire section dedicated to servicing our needs?
03:04:40.000Yeah, that one day we're going to have artificial human beings that will do anything you want, so you're not even going to have to be nice.
03:04:49.000One of the things about men and women is that we have to be nice to each other.
03:04:55.000If the women are mean, you don't want to be around them.
03:04:57.000If the men are assholes, the women don't want to be around us.
03:04:59.000We have to figure out how to be nice to each other so we like to be around each other so that we could enjoy each other's company and eventually enjoy each other's pleasure.
03:05:08.000But if you don't have to, If you just have, like, some fucking robot that looks hot as shit, and you go over your, you know, your friend's house, and he's got some robot wearing lingerie that's, like, mopping up his floors.
03:06:04.000And then growing closer to each other by being nice to each other and recognizing that there's deep pleasure and satisfaction and love in having someone that really likes to be around you, and you really like to be around them,
03:06:20.000and you actually give each other love and companionship, and when you see each other, you want to hug each other.
03:06:24.000It's a beautiful thing, and some people never get that, man.
03:06:29.000From the cradle to the grave, they live their whole life without anybody really loving them and really wanting to fuck them and touch them and be around them.