In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with a good friend of mine to talk about what it's like living in Austin, Texas. We talk about how Austin is a great city to live in and how great it is to work here. We also talk about my recent knee injury and how I'm trying to get over it. I hope you enjoy this episode, it's a good one! -Joe Rogan and the Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast where you get to listen to some of the funniest, funniest and most authentic stories from the lives of the people in the entertainment industry. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends and family about what's going on in the world of comedy, comedy, music, and comedy! -J.R. is a standup comic, standup comedian, actor, and podcaster from Los Angeles, California. He's been in the business for over 20 years and is one of the most genuine and down to earth people I've ever met. -He's funny, smart, humble, and has a great sense of humor. -He also happens to be one of my good friends and a great friend. -I really enjoyed hanging out with him in Austin and we talk about a lot of cool stuff. - I hope y'all enjoy this one! -JOE ROGAN PODCAST! Check it out! -Jon Rocha and I talk about Austin, TX, Texas, and all the cool things going on here in the Austin area of Texas. -Jon Rogans Podcast. Joe ROGR Podcast -Jon and Jon Rogan Podcast - The Joe Experience -Jon talks about his life in LA, TX and his new life in Austin Texas, TX. Jon talks about moving to Texas and how he's going back to LA and what he's doing in LA and how much he's loving it here and how to stay in LA now and what's up in his new job in LA. Tom talks about how to get back in shape and what it s going to be here and what his plans are going to do in the future and what to do with his new house in LA... and much more! Joe talks about it all of things like that! (and much more!!) -Jon also talks about some other stuff... Jon also gives us a little bit of advice on what to expect in the next episode.
00:00:55.000It's a great combination, though, and it's a great size.
00:00:57.000You know, you were one of the people that early on got me thinking about Austin because you were always ranting about it, about how great it is here.
00:01:12.000We're on a flight last night coming back, and the Southwest person, who obviously lives in Austin, they stopped in Austin and flew to San Diego.
00:01:22.000And he's like, and everybody that is going home to visit in San Diego, please stay.
00:01:26.000Like, he said that over the intercom on a Southwest flight, and I was like, I like this guy.
00:01:31.000Well, it's like the secret's out, but the barrier to entry is high.
00:03:13.000So I'm going to give it a couple of months and really do all the knees over toes stuff and try to rehabilitate it without getting an MRI because I don't want to know what's going on in there.
00:03:21.000I just did six months of that program.
00:03:38.000It's not fun for the ego because the weight that you're doing for the squats in that style of squatting to have your knees over your toes is way less than if I was going to be a meathead and go and squat.
00:03:49.000You know, doing the lunges, it's trying to get that deep, deep forward lunge to get the knee all the way of the toe and then all the sled pulls and all the sled pushes and it's just like, golly, can I just do some athlete things?
00:04:02.000You know, I know it's healing, so I'm going to be a better athlete, but it's still not fun.
00:05:23.000And as he mauls me, like, we're in the cage right here at Onnit, and Satoshi is just beating me up, and then Roy McDonald getting ready for this fight, beating me up.
00:05:31.000You know, GSP's traveling in, and then obviously, like, Gordon, and the Sean G. Ribeiro team at Six Blades, not but three miles away.
00:06:23.000I just opened my gym in Cedar Park, so there was...
00:06:29.000Ten miles, Sanjay Ribeiro is the closest, you know, kind of big gym, and Six Blades, and that was on 183, so he was, you know, it's a 20-minute, 15-minute drive to him.
00:06:52.000In light of everything that's been happening, I mean, I've been screaming from every building I can get on that, you know, we need to prepare America for what is happening now.
00:07:02.000And so she dug response, like the company mission statement is to train and equip people to preserve and protect human life.
00:07:08.000With that in mind, we do everything from fighting, shooting, and medical to try and make sure everybody that comes to those courses, teachers, law enforcement, all of them get the basic fundamentals of really the things about saving life.
00:07:26.000And we have been, I mean, Sheepdog Response, we have, I think, 180 or 210 courses this year.
00:07:32.000And if you go to the website right now, it's like, sold out, sold out.
00:07:35.000Like, I can't, I'm not going to lower the quality of training because everybody needs to know the right things.
00:07:40.000As we look at Uvalde and the lack of training and the response and the broken systems and all the things that went wrong in there, you know, I'm like...
00:07:51.000I literally teach every single day what the answer is to all of this, and you can only train so many people in a year.
00:07:58.000I think you definitely can only train so many people in a year, and it's also taking a long time for people to come to grips with the only solution.
00:08:07.000You have to be able to protect yourself.
00:08:29.000And we shoot, we fight how to keep blood in the body, you know, like tourniquets, packing wounds, and then the biggest part is situational awareness.
00:08:39.000And that's all preventative actions where I see something that could be going wrong.
00:08:46.000But I'd prefer to go upstream to the root cause of what is causing some of this violence, you know, mental health and these broken young men, and try to fix the individual.
00:08:58.000So we don't, we have to do all these things with our schools.
00:09:01.000You know, I've been writing nonstop since these last shootings have been happening, you know, and like the four D's about how to make a school a hard target.
00:09:12.000We have detection, denial entry, you have deterrence, and then you actually have defend.
00:09:17.000So of those things, identifying what a problem is, and trying to deter from the outside, limited entry.
00:09:28.000You know, how our headquarters are set up, it's difficult to get in here, it doesn't look like a place I want to try and get in the you know, the the bushes are the landscaping is in a way where I'm not going to have access to the windows.
00:09:39.000In my building, when you come to the front door and you get let in, you're in a kill box.
00:09:44.000You get let into a lobby, and in that lobby, you can't get past the lobby.
00:09:49.000In the lobby, there's somebody that will let you into the next room, and you're stuck there unless somebody lets you in.
00:09:57.000The defend is obviously the last course of action where teachers or law enforcement are going to be protecting their kids.
00:10:05.000There's lots of different solutions to that.
00:10:07.000They have Cameras that can have pepper balls in them, lasers that can blind people, but ultimately it's the individual that has to be trained to be able to protect those children.
00:10:20.000And in that preventative model of going upstream to fix the problem, we can do two things at once.
00:10:28.000We can make our school harder targets and we can train teachers and we can get law enforcement to respond correctly while we start talking Really about what is causing these young men to be broken.
00:10:40.000So what do you think we can do about that?
00:10:42.000Because without that, you know, people think guns are the problem.
00:10:47.000And this is the narrative that we keep hearing.
00:10:50.000But there's more guns than there are people.
00:10:52.000So it's not necessarily a gun problem because the vast majority of people, the vast, vast, vast majority would never fucking do anything like this.
00:11:00.000It's a very, very, very, very small amount of people that are deranged and broken and would do something like this.
00:11:19.000It's more divisive than ever on social media.
00:11:22.000You get in this echo chamber with your own ideas, and those echo chambers, and they're crazy ideas sometimes when you're able to curate and editorialize the feed that you get back.
00:11:30.000So there are only people, like if I'm following, if I'm struggling, and I'm just following angry hate rhetoric, and that is just building.
00:11:39.000And so my thoughts are then magnified and compounded by other people reaffirming my own belief system.
00:11:46.000And in the algorithms, then they put in something that then enrages me.
00:11:51.000So it's like bias confirmation, bias confirmation, bias confirmation.
00:11:55.000Oh, and then here's something for me to interact with because they want us to interact.
00:11:59.000So, you know, the more emotionally driven we are in social media, the more we participate in it and the longer that we're on it.
00:12:06.000So those algorithms are really just dangerous.
00:12:10.000Hollywood, where, you know, I love Matthew McConaughey, and I love his position, and I love him as an actor, and I love what he had to say, and I love that he wants to protect schools and children.
00:12:20.000You know, but like, how many movies has he been in where he had people on their knees and he executed them in the face?
00:12:25.000You know, you can't be on this moral high ground and then be a hypocrite.
00:12:48.000You know, he's an action star and he's a great actor and I really love what he had to say and how we all do have to come together and find solutions.
00:12:57.000You know, but if like Liam Neeson is out there being, you know, hey, we should get rid of guns, but I'm gonna take the next 10 million dollar contract for Netflix to be in the next action film, and my kill count's gonna be 110, oh man, I don't know if you can be in that position of moral authority to talk to me about what you should be doing with firearms.
00:13:14.000Yeah, you don't hear Keanu Reeves talking about what we should do about firearms.
00:13:17.000No, he's a great example of somebody that, you know, morally and ethically really walks the line of truth and integrity.
00:14:28.000So like video games was a way that I could just sit there, throw on, you know, The pressure cuffs on my legs or ice something while I would sit there and relax.
00:14:38.000And what kind of games would you play?
00:14:40.000I loved first-person shooters, you know, Call of Duties.
00:14:56.000You know, shooting definitely and training and dry firing and practicing is that cathartic process like really scratches that itch of wanting to drill and train.
00:15:07.000What I experienced was afterwards I actually had more like pent up energy, you know, because I'm doing like these all these intense things, but it's this artificial experience that I mean, like jerking off compared to going with your partner and having an amazing intimate experience.
00:18:27.000It has been a nonstop attack on The vernacular verbiage that we use in every forum, in every opportunity, in Twitter, on Instagram, it's telling you, it'll populate sometimes, ask you, would you like to add your pronoun?
00:19:52.000I think it's a small amount of people that are doing it, but the problem is it's like it undermines the all the goodwill that people have towards like these group of progressive minded folks It's the small amount of people that want to come force compliance They want to force people to behave and think a very certain way.
00:20:11.000Yeah, I mean back to mental health I think with Shooters, you see a reoccurring theme.
00:20:20.000These young broken men are missing serious masculine elements of who they are.
00:20:26.000When you look at them, and I'm profiling, I'm generalizing here, you see a very similar young man every single time.
00:20:34.000He's weak, he's frail, and he's broken.
00:20:36.000There's nothing more dangerous than a broken, not healthy masculine figure.
00:20:42.000You know, testosterone's a beautiful thing.
00:20:44.000And one of the great things about the military is, you know, they enhance and they build all of this kind of ability to do very efficient violence.
00:20:56.000You know, but they also show you how to control it and how to manage it and the vertical of the chain of command and when is it appropriate.
00:21:04.000You know, here's your rules of engagement.
00:21:09.000By this process, this arduous refiner's fire of shaping a human into a weapon, that you have a healthier thing.
00:21:19.000You have this healthy, beautiful, masculine thing that is very, very different.
00:21:25.000If you look at me and all of my friends in the special operations community, these are healthy, great men that love their wives and they love their children and they love America and they love And like the warrior society and the warrior culture is like this nice balance of,
00:21:43.000you know, they're fit, they get great nights sleep, they are very good at violence.
00:21:49.000I mean, Jordan Peterson, you know, himself said, like a good man isn't a useless man.
00:21:54.000A good man is one that is capable and strong and powerful, but knows how to control it.
00:22:01.000And when you look at these young broken men, You see the same trend over and over again, and they are missing these important moments that shape them as men.
00:22:12.000And then they have testosterone, and they have strength, and they have violence, and they've never known how to channel it.
00:22:36.000The incels and the people that just never have these experiences where they learn how to channel their aggression and learn how to harness their discipline and learn how to...
00:22:53.000And this whole, I think, you know, there's like, it's become a disparaged term, like, to be a man.
00:23:00.000But that's a really important thing to learn how to be, like, when you see someone who holds their shit together and stays calm under pressure, and you're like, wow, you admire that person.
00:23:15.000It's just we are so goddamn comfortable in this country and we're so accustomed to it and it's been accentuated by the comfort that people experience from being able to talk shit on social media.
00:23:25.000So you have this very distorted perception of what's acceptable in terms of how to communicate with other humans.
00:23:32.000I was in Ukraine a week ago, and the men there have been hammered for resistance, you know, being on the border of Russia, obviously.
00:23:41.000They've known what was coming for a generation.
00:23:44.000And they have been training relentlessly for the past 20 years.
00:23:51.000And the young men that you can walk down the streets of Kyiv and Maripool, Dnipro, and there is not a fat human in sight.
00:23:58.000You know, there is not a just a complacent human anywhere to be seen.
00:24:05.000Every single person there has been hardened, not just in body, but also in mind.
00:24:11.000And then, you know, I flew from there to Amsterdam, Amsterdam direct back to LA or back to Austin, which is cool that we have a direct to Amsterdam now.
00:24:19.000And the moment the plane lands, I get off.
00:26:02.000Yeah, and I was working, and then I came back, and I was like, is this, because the border has like this moon dust all along the Del Rio River, and so I was like, is this just, because I was outside, you know, running and chasing people, so I'm like, is this just moon dust in my sinuses,
00:26:19.000And I kind of had like a headache, and I never lost my taste of smell, or smell, and I was like, I'm going to take a test, and I got a positive.
00:26:29.000And then I put on a sweatsuit and I got on my assault bike and I burnt a thousand calories in an hour, which was pretty rad.
00:26:36.000And then I came in and the worst part of the whole experience was like, I went to my wife and I was like, well, I don't have to go to work for a couple of days.
00:27:15.000Yeah, with 20-something deployments overseas, I've never seen anything like Afghanistan during the fall of Afghanistan.
00:27:24.000I don't know who was at a strategic level not anticipating that the Taliban, every time that we moved an inch on the ground, that the Taliban would not move an inch on the ground.
00:27:37.000So myself and all of my peers, all my colleagues, fully forecasted what was going to happen.
00:27:43.000So as soon as we started collapsing that ground, there was no doubt in any of our minds that every inch of ground that we gave up was ground that the Taliban was going to take.
00:27:54.000So when we gave up Kandahar and Bagram, the two strategic military bases, that means that we just gave up the rest of the country.
00:28:02.000And We, having been at war there for 20 years and, you know, multiple trips over there, we have lots of friends that deployed with us there.
00:28:13.000You know, Afghans, the Afghans have a special operations unit called the Commandos.
00:28:18.000Our interpreters are obviously from Afghanistan.
00:28:22.000So, they live in Afghanistan, but they work for us.
00:28:26.000These people have security clearances.
00:28:28.000They love the idea of democracy and freedom.
00:28:31.000They love the idea of a free, independent Afghanistan.
00:28:34.000They want their daughters to be educated and...
00:28:39.000Those ideals that philosophy does not align with the Taliban.
00:28:43.000So as Taliban start taking over Afghanistan, are my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends, and asking me to go contracting companies saying, hey, I'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy.
00:30:22.000She runs the Independence Fund, which is a military veteran nonprofit that takes care of severely wounded veterans and give them chairs like track automatic track chairs.
00:32:09.000And 10 days later, we moved 12,000 people out of Afghanistan.
00:32:14.00011% of everybody that left the country during the evacuation, me and three of my friends on the ground, and 12 of us total in the Middle East moved.
00:32:25.000Everybody remembers, you know, people hanging on to the landing gear of aircraft and falling to their death, like that, that was peak Afghanistan withdrawal.
00:32:34.000And that is, that is when we got there.
00:32:39.000So when you say that it was like nothing you had seen in 20 years of being deployed Yeah in what in what way?
00:32:48.000I mean Taliban's gonna Taliban so they are definitely doing their thing, but it was it was the the desperation of the people trying to Find a way to live so at each of these gates is A NEO operation.
00:33:05.000It's a non-combatant evacuation operation.
00:33:08.000It's a military operation if a NEO takes place.
00:33:12.000They keep calling it a NEO, but that's if the military ran it.
00:33:15.000And if the military ran it, you would see, you know, a special forces unit with a big, like the Ranger Regiment or 82nd Airborne that come in.
00:33:23.000They'd build this huge exterior perimeter.
00:33:26.000They'd control the ground strategically.
00:33:28.000Then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are coming in and planes are coming out.
00:34:47.000The Taliban, if there's too many people, they'll just take a magazine and just dump it into the crowd to move them back or to crowd control them.
00:34:55.000They'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people.
00:34:58.000The women, they would float babies like you're at a baseball game with a beach ball.
00:35:04.000They would float the baby towards the gate in the hopes that a Marine or a soldier would reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety.
00:35:15.000And when that didn't work, the moms would take the babies and they'd try to throw them over the walls.
00:35:21.000Well, guess what's on either side of the wall?
00:35:25.000There's fucking Constantina wire on both sides of this wall.
00:35:28.000So these babies would land in the wire.
00:35:32.000And we're in the middle of moving, you know, hundreds of people at a time, like smuggling them past the Taliban, and I'm stepping over a baby in water, or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt alive by the Taliban.
00:35:46.000You know, one of the teams, as they went out into Kabul, And they just missed it by seconds.
00:35:51.000They're going to go pick up this woman that was a journalist for one of the Afghan news organizations.
00:36:18.000So when I said a level of desperation I've never seen before, this is, I mean, this is like, no American, no American can imagine that type of desperation.
00:36:56.000So everybody that was watching on television, they saw...
00:37:04.000Curated, controlled information is way worse on the ground.
00:37:09.000So what looked like this assemblance of an assembly line of planes taking off and planes coming in, what that is inside a controlled environment, you know, that was in on the base, outside, if you if you know,
00:37:25.000if you go 1000 meters outside of the wire, it is just Chaos, anarchy, apocalyptic level madness.
00:37:35.000You know, like really, really, really total Taliban experience out there.
00:38:01.000He lost 20 something pounds in the 10 days that he was there.
00:38:05.000And, you know, he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just because he didn't have any enzymes left in his stomach to break anything down.
00:38:12.000You know, when you're running out the wire to grab a family and come back in, You don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over, but you still see it.
00:38:24.000And that's the thing that tortures my mind is I still saw it all, but I didn't have the time to address it emotionally, think about this dead body I'm stepping over, because I'm really busy trying to get to this family.
00:38:37.000Then we get to this family and I confirm we had to be really judicious in how we confirmed who the people were.
00:38:45.000If I brought back one person that wasn't the right person to bring back, I would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission.
00:38:53.000If I bring back one radical terrorist that's not escaping but trying to get to the United States, And everything would be for not.
00:39:02.000So we had a really deliberate Department of State, Department of Defense approved manifest that would go officially through the government.
00:39:09.000They would submit all their paperwork.
00:39:11.000They would have, you know, digital versions of it.
00:39:13.000So I would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to meet me.
00:39:18.000And then once I met up with them, They would have a far recognition signal that would be not to like give up the tradecraft, but they'd have a way to let me know that that is the right person and that then would come face to face and then they'd have another thing like a secret word that they had to sneak into a sentence.
00:39:38.000And then they have to give me their documents and the documents have to be real and it has to be the right person and the same ones that were submitted.
00:39:49.000Why are these other 40 people with you?
00:39:51.000Like, oh, it's it's like it's my cousin and, you know, and her family and it's, you know, my brother and his family and it's like, they gotta stay.
00:40:04.000Like, you're coming with me, and they're staying.
00:41:05.000And that's, that's the that's the tough catch 22 position that we're in.
00:41:13.000I can only imagine the frustration that so many people like yourself who've been over there must have to how this was all handled.
00:41:24.000That they should have known what was going to happen if you just decided to pull out the way they did.
00:41:33.000But yes, I mean, the level of frustration.
00:41:38.000I've never seen anything in it like it in my lifetime in the military, where there was that many, many men and women from the military, so active and unified, and we have to do something, you know, the I'm never going to forget my countryman's response to Afghanistan and Ukraine,
00:42:13.000You know, helping us buy buses to position out in Kabul.
00:42:17.000Like, we literally bought buses that we'd put in intersections to have people meet there, and they would bring that bus onto the air base.
00:42:24.000And none of this would have been possible, you know, without the UAE and the Crown Prince and the Sheik, without their generosity, and then without the American people just stepping up.
00:43:27.000You will always see people doing good work and helping.
00:43:31.000And I really take this, I don't know how that works really in the brain, but I didn't focus on I saw all the soldiers from the 82nd being so brave, and I saw all the Marines on the walls,
00:43:47.000you know, protecting all of these people trying to come in and trying to find the right people.
00:43:53.000I mean, they're children, you know, they're 18, 19, 20-year-old young men and women that volunteered to serve, and then here they are thrust into this apocalypse-like scenario, and they're just so incredible.
00:44:41.000But when the bomb goes off at the end of August, that was what we knew going to be the end of us being able to be effective in going outside the wire and grab people and bring them back in.
00:44:58.000The base just was going to get locked down.
00:45:23.000So Save Our Allies found these people, confirmed who they were, got them approved from the government, and then put them on a plane and flew them out in 10 days.
00:45:33.000But after the bomb happens, and we are limited in our ability to be effective.
00:45:39.000And this list is growing and growing and growing this that is when like my soul just starts dropping out the bottom.
00:45:47.000Because the list grows and my end, we're not bringing anybody else in.
00:45:52.000So Sean G our ground force commander Listening to him tell Sarah, she's like, well, what's the point of us still making this list?
00:46:27.000They are in the control of the Taliban if they're alive So we're still actively working like we have been so we have now moved 17,000 people total out of Afghanistan, so we've moved another 5,000 people since Afghanistan became fully under control the Taliban and How do you get them out while it's in control the Taliban?
00:46:51.000We're very sneaky So it's 5,000 people covertly.
00:49:43.000You can see other instances where we did it poorly, like Dunkirk, like had the...
00:49:51.000If the Englishmen not stood up and hopped on private-owned boats and crossed the channel, there's a good chance that all of Great Britain would have fallen to the Nazis.
00:50:17.000It's got to be a strange feeling to be you to have experienced so many of the things you've experienced and then to come back here and see all these people that are just blissfully ignorant of what's going on in the world while there's stuff in their face with Krispy Kreme donuts.
00:50:39.000Yeah, it's kind of insulting a little bit.
00:50:44.000You know Memorial Day just happened and And I think about all of the amazing men and women that have fought so bravely for this country.
00:50:53.000And I'm like, ah, so what are we doing to make sure their sacrifice was worth it, right?
00:50:59.000Are we really moving forward the ideals that it is to be an American?
00:51:04.000And I think being American is a beautiful thing.
00:51:07.000And the ideals that this country were founded on are beautiful, powerful things.
00:51:10.000And, but then it, It's not appreciated and totally taken for granted.
00:51:21.000And I don't think there's any way to really educate people on what's happening unless you physically expose them to it or unless they make a concerted effort to educate themselves.
00:52:22.000I would love to be able to put numbers, but there's no way for us to assume or guess the type of atrocities and the number of them that happened outside.
00:53:39.000And it's not being discussed publicly.
00:53:41.000No, because it's, it's not comfortable to talk about, like mental health.
00:53:46.000It seems like all these things that we should be talking about, we don't want to talk about because they're like kind of bummer topics.
00:53:52.000But they have to be, you know, we have people left in Afghanistan, and we have some of the people that we got out of Afghanistan that are trapped.
00:54:01.000In these lily pad countries that can't make it back.
00:54:04.000I'm not even saying they have to come to the United States, but we have to do something with them, right?
00:54:08.000I personally escorted a couple hundred into Albania.
00:54:15.000George Soros' son, I got to meet him, and he paid.
00:54:21.000These were all, I think they were employees or they're on an internship program in Afghanistan, but a lot of them were Afghan-Albanian dual citizens.
00:54:34.000George Soros Jr. paid for these guys to be brought back to Albania.
00:54:40.000So I took a plane full of a couple hundred people and flew them into Albania and this is one of the wildest things.
00:55:34.000And, like, this is happening all around us as, you know, bombs going off and, you know, you hear gunfire and things are burning.
00:55:42.000We're starting to destroy all of our sensitive documents and we're just collapsing down this base.
00:55:47.000I get on the—we pack a C-17 full of people, a C-17 wrap closes— I have to get on a military C-17 because my plane out, which was a private jet that we had set up as our emergency evacuation,
00:56:29.000I'm not there in any military capacity.
00:56:31.000I'm fully there as a civilian working for an NGO, an approved government nonprofit with authorities all the way up and down.
00:56:43.000I get on this military C-17 and the ramp closes.
00:56:46.000And as that last little bit of Afghanistan light finally leaves my vision, I turn around and I see these 400 people sitting on the floor of a C-17.
00:56:59.000They've never been in aircraft before.
00:57:01.000They've never left Afghanistan before.
00:57:06.000And, you know, I'm thinking about all the people that we left it behind.
00:57:09.000And the way that you leave a combat zone is way different than the way that we take off from like an airport, like this nice gradual slope, the way military planes take off or land, it is like full power straight up and they start doing like these maneuvers to make sure that they don't get shot at the sky.
00:57:31.000So all these people on this plane are freaking out.
00:57:36.000And the old women who are exhausted and dehydrated, they start passing out.
00:57:40.000And just so people get an understanding of who these people are that we're bringing out, I'm like, hey, I need a doctor.
00:57:49.000You know, some Americans, some Afghan doctors, there's like an orthopedic surgeon, there's a vascular surgeon, and so they all just come in and that's who's on these planes.
01:00:15.000In one of the military bases, the two kind of big ones were Kandahar and Bagram.
01:00:19.000I think it was Bagram, the general, the Afghan general that ran Bagram base, American forces in the dead of night loaded all of their people and the stuff that they could carry into the planes that they had, left the base.
01:00:34.000He woke up to an empty base with Taliban just driving onto the most strategic piece of land in the whole entire country.
01:00:45.000And the Taliban just, like, walk into the arms room, open the door, and start grabbing ARs off the racks that the military had just left there.
01:00:53.000Night vision, PVS-31s, you know, Taliban's like...
01:02:29.000Who thinks that we should enact legislation to protect schools and spend money to be able to harden our schools and address mental health and like everybody raises their hand, not a single hand to stay down, right?
01:02:40.000And then you're like, who thinks that it's a great plan for Russia to be able to take land that leads up to NATO countries?
01:02:51.000Loving NATO or like Ukraine, don't like Ukraine, think that they're corrupt, any of it.
01:02:56.000Like everybody is like, yeah, I don't want communism at my door.
01:02:59.000And then you go, well, who thinks there's a problem with immigration right now?
01:03:03.000And I mean, obviously, in Texas, every Texan is gonna be like, bro, there's a crazy problem.
01:03:09.000Like everybody generally is like, yeah, I think the immigration system is broken.
01:03:21.000So in the middle here are just a bunch of people with a lot of issues that we all agree need to be fixed.
01:03:29.000And then I guess we can't have a conversation because we are so divided about what the best solution is.
01:03:35.000I think there's a giant percentage of us that are in the middle, but there's enough people that are so crazy on either side that you choose to say, that crazy, I just can't tolerate, so I'm going to join in with this crazy.
01:03:48.000I'm going to side with Antifa because I think the Proud Boys are gross.
01:03:58.000They tend to decide to side with one of the tribes, even though they probably have a conglomerate or conglomeration of ideas that they've adopted from sort of both.
01:04:09.000Maybe economically they're more conservative, but socially they're more liberal.
01:04:14.000Most people are kind of in the middle.
01:04:17.000And I think one of the things that happened during COVID is that people were sort of alarmed by the way some of the governments handled things, particularly the way Canada handled things, the way some of the states handled things.
01:04:29.000And it made people lean towards whatever side was going to impose less restrictions on them and respect freedom more.
01:04:44.000People got the fuck out of California because they're like, I don't like where this is going.
01:04:48.000And I need to be someplace where I feel like I'm not going to be restricted in my actions by a government that really doesn't have a good idea on how to protect me anyway.
01:04:59.000And they want to infantilize me in some sort of a way.
01:05:03.000Yeah, I just released this documentary called No Help Is Coming, and it addresses that specifically.
01:05:15.000As Trudeau and Gavin Newsom just landed in California and had a thing last week, and there's pictures of them together, and you're looking at the draconian level Legislation that is happening in Canada and California similarly and then the number of people that are just running for their lives.
01:06:26.000And I've always thought it was important, but I realize how important it is once I've moved to Texas because it's not just that Texas gave you more freedom.
01:06:35.000It changed the way people behaved during the pandemic as opposed to California where people are still afraid.
01:06:47.000There was a level of anxiety that existed already there.
01:06:50.000I mean, there's so many people in California that are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and they're freaking out already and they're not doing jack shit with their body.
01:06:59.000There's sedentary lifestyle and they're seeking to mitigate some of the problems that come with that with pharmaceutical drugs.
01:08:42.000Especially around mental health right now.
01:08:44.000Trying to learn about suicide and depression and anxiety and the type of prescriptions that are being prescribed post and during COVID. The things that I'm seeing...
01:09:04.000We're in a really dangerous moment where we either turn a corner and start making good decisions about being individually responsible about our health and mental and physical health.
01:09:18.000Or, I think we're going to have some really serious repercussions.
01:09:21.000You know, we're seeing it already, like the insane rise of suicide and substance abuse.
01:09:27.000I mean, the veteran community right now, they're not even reporting the data of veteran suicides and active duty suicides because they are so high and they don't want people to know about them.
01:11:09.000Two days ago in Washington, D.C., we did a ruck around the mall in Washington, D.C. I did a post.
01:11:15.000I said, hey, come out for mental health.
01:11:17.000We had 100 people just show up to go for a walk.
01:11:21.000Um, with, you know, 40 pounds on their backs and, um, I tried to kill them all in a good healthy way.
01:11:27.000So they couldn't kill themselves, you know, and all of those things like community and sweat and friendship and laughing, like those are all really great things for humans to experience.
01:11:36.000And none of that has happened for the past couple of years.
01:11:40.000And heaven forbid that we talk about it.
01:11:42.000Yeah, it's the unthought of consequences of the way they enacted measures to supposedly protect us.
01:11:50.000And the thing that you just said that's very important is the amount of overdose deaths and the amount of suicides, how much it ramped up.
01:11:58.000And in many places, per age group, it far surpassed the people that were dying from COVID. Especially with young people that aren't as susceptible to COVID, but were just as susceptible to suicide.
01:12:16.000By 2030, 23 times more people will die of—veterans and soldiers—will die of suicide than died in the whole entire combat time of the past 20 years.
01:13:27.000You know, I think I'm a pretty healthy person, but there's no doubt that they'd be like, just to piss Tim off, like, 1-800-BE-A-SNITCH. I've looked into your Instagram comments before.
01:14:26.000There's somebody writing in perfect English, whether that's a Russian bot, a China bot, or an actual just crazy troll.
01:14:32.000And they have, you know, they have dedicated meme pages and, you know, saying outlandish wild things, you know, like that Matt Best is anti-2A or that, you know, Tim Kennedy hates freedom.
01:14:44.000Yeah, they were saying that Evan was anti-2A. I had to have him in here.
01:15:04.000In that confirmation bias, where you have this kind of preconceived notion, and then you go out and look for anything that supports your wild ideas.
01:15:15.000You know, if I think the number 17 is my magical number, I can go out and I can find the number 17 on a freeway sign.
01:15:24.000You know, I knew that's my magic number, right?
01:15:25.000And then I'm driving down the road, I turn left into a residential area, and I look down at my speedometer.
01:15:30.000I'm at 17. And so you start getting this belief, and it is the most dangerous thing in confirmation bias, especially when it has crazy ideas, like anti-freedom ideas, or hating a specific person, and you're looking for reasons not to like them.
01:17:00.000But it's that kind of shitty detective work that you're talking about avoiding.
01:17:06.000Because people are human and humans have egos.
01:17:09.000And egos lead you to make decisions that aren't rational or justifiable, but they support your initial assertion, which if you say, turns out I was wrong, now all of a sudden people go, well you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
01:18:17.000Or I could be a psychopath and I could, you know, block all of those people that disagree with me and then only follow all the people that agree with me.
01:18:25.000And, you know, I'm getting weird articles, but I'm like, oh, but that's an article that supports this crazy idea that I have.
01:18:33.000Yeah, and most people aren't very good at managing that stuff.
01:18:36.000They only just subscribe to or click on links that they're interested in, that support their initial assertions, that support their confirmation bias.
01:18:48.000And that's a giant problem with people because they don't get taught that.
01:19:56.000Or I could go back to my own gym and, you know, be in the big fish in my super tiny little pond and never adapt or never grow or never learn anything new.
01:20:08.000And when you do that intellectually, Where this is what I think and this is what I know, but I'm never going to subject myself to anything different.
01:20:22.000It's more common for people to do that than it is for people to seek out new ways to learn and humble themselves with new information.
01:20:31.000And jujitsu, it forces you to do that.
01:20:34.000I mean, it is really, really fascinating the changes that have taken place in Jiu Jitsu.
01:20:40.000Essentially, I mean, Jiu Jitsu has always evolved, right?
01:20:44.000There's like the 10th Planet system that used flexibility and the closed guard and rubber guard in this really weird and interesting way.
01:20:52.000And then there's a lot of people that did that and they would try these moves out on people and they would have no idea what the fuck they're doing and they'd be tapping before they knew it was too late.
01:21:18.000I might be a black belt in jujitsu, but when I train with Gabe Tuttle and he explains to me all the ashigurami positions and all the different ways to counter, I'm like, holy shit.
01:21:27.000This is like starting from scratch almost.
01:21:30.000It's like I understand how to do a heel hook.
01:21:32.000But just the subtle variations on how to defend and when you're safe and when you're not safe and how to set up two, three moves in advance because you're knowing that this person is going to try to get out of it by going this way.
01:21:45.000So you're stopping this and then you're implementing that.
01:21:50.000Yeah, and then John Danaher, he's sitting there And he's like the wildest on the spectrum brilliant nerd and he's like going through these steps and I'm on the mat and I know I'm about to drill it but I want to run off the mat and go grab a video camera and record it so that I can and then write it down so I would have any chance of remembering all of the details that he put into it.
01:23:15.000Well, John is a cheat code, as Gordon Ryan puts it.
01:23:18.000He's like, where do you find one of those?
01:23:20.000Where do you find a guy who is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, a legit super genius, who then falls in love with jujitsu to the point where he's sleeping on the maths and teaching classes all day long?
01:23:37.000So because he's injured, he can't compete himself.
01:23:40.000So he pours all of his brilliance into other people because he's got an artificial hip, and he needs an artificial knee, and he's really fucked for playing rugby when he was younger.
01:25:03.000In jiu-jitsu, but he's also a great fighter like he understands how all of it works and putting it together Best spoke for a single person is pretty neat.
01:25:14.000Yeah, he knows he also coaches people in striking which is wild.
01:25:19.000Yeah, like Gary Tonin I was like well who's Gary's striking coach like John's Gary's striking coach too.
01:26:39.000As soon as this knee has gotten to the point where I'm comfortable that I can push it, I'm going to get back on the mat.
01:26:44.000I do my conditioning in their morning class time and we set up our bikes and our rowers and our skiers so we can just by osmosis watch technique as they're doing it.
01:26:57.000So I'm like on the skier, just like this creep, just staring I'm staring into your eyes as I'm just going.
01:27:04.000My heart rate's up in the yellow, you know.
01:27:49.000For me getting better in jujitsu, if I just did MMA and I'm not, you know, no gi and gi, slightly different techniques, the way I'm going to position my hip for a camora is going to be different.
01:28:13.000The only thing that I would think would be difficult to transition back and forth between the two would be Muay Thai and boxing.
01:28:19.000The Muay Thai boxing thing I think would be difficult because the stances are different and the fear of leg kicks.
01:28:27.000You can't go heavy on that front leg and move in when a guy could just sidestep and chop your calf.
01:28:35.000If I want Lama Shako footwork and I'm only doing Muay Thai, But that footwork is really, really useful in MMA. But I'm just doing MMA in Muay Thai.
01:28:45.000I'm never going to get the good footwork that I need to be a good boxer.
01:28:49.000And I'm not going to get the good head movement, because the head movement in Muay Thai is way different than that in boxing.
01:28:54.000And I'm not going to learn how to put my shoulder in the right position to protect my chin, where I can keep my lead hand low, unless I do just boxing.
01:29:02.000So if I want to take those very unique elements of boxing and then integrate it into my striking style, I do have to train that thing individually and then implement it into my style.
01:29:37.000Well, first of all, there's a lot of things like when guys are in the 50-50 or when they're diving on heel hooks and their face is right there and someone just smashed.
01:30:15.000You know, the All-Army Combatives Tournament, which is like this arduous, a hell of a tournament.
01:30:19.000Three days, first day's grappling, second day's Pancraes, third day is MMA. And, uh, violent, violent Pancraes fights with high-level fighters.
01:32:52.000So making soup is when I take that back mount, you know, I just take their face and I push it into the ground.
01:32:58.000You know, like, I only need an inch for me to break his orbital socket in his nose on the concrete.
01:33:02.000You know, and then, like, once those teeth and a little bit of, you know, the cerebral spinal fluid drips out of the nose, you know, and a little bit of the blood and gum and saliva, like, that all gets mixed in front of this guy's face before the darkness slowly closes in.
01:33:22.000Imagine that, wearing a winter coat, fighting a judo guy in the street.
01:33:26.000Satoshi threw me, Olympic gold medalist, just threw me to the ground over and over and over again.
01:33:36.000Danaher, he's like, how beautiful, because I was on the receiving end of it, he said, how beautiful is it For how effective it is that he can just take somebody and put them on the ground.
01:33:46.000And I was like, yeah, it's really beautiful.
01:34:59.000Back to leg locks on the ground, I was teaching a course in New York, a sheepdog response course, and there was a couple black belts that were in the course, and we're fighting for guns and knives, they're rubber guns and knives, and I'm in half guard, and I take, you know,
01:35:14.000he had the weapon, the gun, in his arm, in his waistband, He was covering it with his arm, and I pulled it out the back.
01:35:45.000As he's having this piece of plastic hit him in the face, then he like...
01:35:51.000Finally opens his eyes and the realization that I'm tapping him in the face with a gun that as he's diving for a leg lock, you know, how dangerous, you know, sports jujitsu is to combat jujitsu.
01:36:02.000That's why I love that combat jujitsu.
01:36:06.000Well, it's definitely opening up people's eyes that were just straight-up jiu-jitsu players that took a chance and didn't want to do MMA, but said, let me see what happens when you add slaps.
01:36:14.000But you see guys who excel at that, like guys like Wagner Rocha, who's a jiu-jitsu black belt, but also an MMA fighter.
01:36:25.000And so he gets on top of guys and smashes them.
01:36:29.000Yeah, it's just like there's a lot of positions that aren't really effective unless you make this agreement where you're not going to slap or strike.
01:36:49.000Yeah, it's like, as soon as you make an agreement with that, there's a great video on Glory Kickboxing's Instagram page of this dude, I forget his name, this Russian guy.
01:37:02.000Like, real high-level guy who fought Badr Hari, fought a lot of guys, but he's fighting this boxer.
01:37:08.000And it's a boxing versus Muay Thai fight.
01:37:12.000And it's hilarious to watch, because this is it.
01:38:06.000Halio Gracie, Hoyler, told me as we're talking about jujitsu evolving, he said, my dad would say that if somebody can touch your face while you're doing jujitsu, that you're doing jujitsu wrong.
01:38:56.000But there's reality to MMA that you need to know if you're a jiu-jitsu guy because you have this distorted idea of what you can and can't do.
01:39:05.000I love having our jiu-jitsu gym, Gracie Humida Cedar Park, is in our Sheepdog Response building in Cedar Park.
01:39:13.000So you're always reminded as the Special Forces guys walking by, as this Marine Recon guy is walking by, as this Navy SEAL is walking by.
01:39:23.000They're all good level fighters, MMA. They also do jiu-jitsu.
01:39:27.000So when you're out there, Jean-Claude Bedoni is teaching the evening class, super talented black belt.
01:40:00.000I mean, one of the things we learned from the early days of the UFC was, with all things considered, if you only know one sport, if you only know one art, jujitsu is pretty fucking effective.
01:40:12.000It wasn't until everybody else learned jujitsu that jujitsu became a very important aspect of it, but not the primary aspect.
01:40:19.000Remember the early days of the UFC, all we thought about was jujitsu.
01:40:22.000Everybody was just scrambling to jujitsu schools.
01:40:25.000Law enforcement, if you're in law enforcement and you don't train jiu-jitsu, shame on you.
01:40:33.000You have to go and learn it because it is a superpower.
01:40:36.000And this is why I tell them, like, a trained person touching an untrained person, that untrained person has no choice over what I want to do with their body.
01:41:14.000It's almost like you're really helpless.
01:41:16.000And I didn't, you know, when I first started doing jiu-jitsu, I had a very distorted idea of what my abilities would be.
01:41:22.000And I think that that's a lot of people.
01:41:24.000I think a lot of people are like, oh, I'm a good athlete, I'm strong, I'll be fine.
01:41:28.000And then you find someone who's your size, who just fucking throws you around like a rag doll and strangles you at will, and you're like, oh, shit.
01:41:36.000Like, this is fucking different, you know?
01:41:39.000But then there's also, like, the other thing.
01:41:41.000Like, I had a friend of mine who was a jiu-jitsu black belt who took an MMA fight, and I knew he did no striking.
01:42:15.000They're just trained really hard and they happen to have never competed or only competed a couple of times.
01:42:21.000And you could run into that guy in a fight and that's a terrible place to be, to be butt scooting towards some guy who's trying to literally separate the muscle from the fucking shin, you know, or separate your thigh meat with his shins.
01:42:46.000Whatever it is your modality is, if you don't do that thing hard, you don't train that thing hard against a fully resistant opponent, then you're not going to be good.
01:43:55.000You know, whatever theater that we're traveling to...
01:44:01.000Ukraine, Afghanistan, the military and special operations, you know, they train that skill set, the basic fundamentals so much that you can take these guys and put them anywhere, and they perform at such a high level.
01:44:27.000They're still able to do whatever the mission is.
01:44:29.000That's the argument that's like missing about the police, is that the police don't train the way special operations train, but yet they're involved in combat scenarios on a regular basis.
01:44:42.000Yeah, so what we're experiencing right now is a byproduct of what society has forced police to become.
01:44:47.000They're demonizing military training for law enforcement.
01:44:51.000And then obviously we just experienced defund the police.
01:44:54.000And nearly every large city has seen a crazy rise in crime.
01:44:59.000And the ones that these large cities that defunded their police, to include Austin, you know, we've never seen homicides like this.
01:45:07.000You get in the Chicago's and the Boston's, you're just like crazy.
01:45:12.000And how does it make any sense that I'm going to provide this group that I want to protect us with less training and less funding, but then still want them to be a better product to be able to protect us?
01:45:28.000And then the people that they're protecting, I'm going to disarm.
01:45:32.000So the people coming to save them are untrained and unprepared.
01:45:37.000It's creating this disastrous situation.
01:45:40.000It's not like, I want to prevent rapes from happening, so me as a good person, I'm going to chop my penis off.
01:45:47.000Like, that's the dumbest argument you could ever make.
01:45:50.000Like, that's not going to prevent rapes.
01:45:51.000It is going and empowering people or preventing consequences for a rapist to try and rape somebody.
01:45:57.000You know, it's not cutting the genitals off of every man.
01:46:28.000We've been emasculating the law enforcement for a while.
01:46:33.000You know, we want a kinder, softer, gentler, you know, and I get they're dealing with mental health and we can have specialists that can come in and deal with somebody having a mental health crisis.
01:46:46.000But we still need men and women that will run towards the sound of gunfire and know what to do.
01:46:55.000We have been weakening them and we have been making them ill-equipped to respond to that.
01:47:03.000And then I think Uvalde is a great example of not properly trained with broken systems that are not ready to do the right thing.
01:47:13.000And we will have more of that unless we get them the right training, and we get our schools to become hard targets, and then we go upstream to the origin, the genesis of these problems, which is mental health with the individual.
01:47:26.000If we don't do those things, then it's never gonna be fixed.
01:47:30.000I think everybody agrees that the problem is a mental health problem, ultimately, because there's only one way you could ever do something like that.
01:47:43.000I believe it is a large cultural shift.
01:47:48.000You know, the nuclear family where, you know, mother and father are loving their child and trying to make that person be a healthy, adjusted human, that has been demonized.
01:47:58.000So with a broken family comes often a broken person.
01:48:05.000Masculinity, it's been attacked nonstop.
01:48:07.000And, you know, we've demonized any kind of masculine attributes.
01:48:12.000You know, let's in every way try to feminize men.
01:48:17.000And a feminine man is a dangerous thing when it comes to violence.
01:48:25.000Now, on the spectrum of being a man, we have very feminine men, and I love them, and they're fine, and I'll take care of them.
01:48:32.000And that there's nothing wrong with that.
01:48:34.000But a broken one is a dangerous thing.
01:48:37.000Any broken thing, especially one that's capable of violence.
01:48:43.000One that's capable of violence, who feels like the world has abandoned them and they want to leave a mark.
01:48:47.000Bullying, cyberbullying, social media, video games, movies, all of...
01:48:53.000When I say it's a cultural shift, it has to be this large effort of all of us being like, okay, these are not things that are healthy for...
01:50:14.000It's really, I mean, as somebody that runs a training company, I'm always looking for not just anecdotal examples, but data for me to be like, okay, what was a good thing that happened?
01:50:23.000What was a dangerous thing that happened in the AAR of, I want to AAR every shooting, an after-action review.
01:50:30.000I want to look at the things that they did right and the things that they did wrong.
01:50:33.000I want to sustain the things that they did right, and then I want to make sure that we address the things that did wrong so we, in training, have a better system.
01:50:42.000And we're trying to do that with shootings, and it pops up for a second, like there was, you know, a shooting at this mall in San Antonio, and somebody in the parking lot, it was, the guy gets out of the car, he's walking towards the mall, and somebody spots him,
01:50:57.000and ends up confronting him, and was concealed carrying, and stopped this guy from doing this active shooter.
01:51:37.000And so when you get down to, like, what is actually happening with guns, like, there's a lot of socioeconomic problems that are contributing to this.
01:51:45.000There's a lot of cultural problems that are contributing to it because you have these communities that have never been fixed.
01:51:50.000They have the same issues that they've had for decades upon decades because they've been ignored.
01:51:56.000Billions of dollars to help foreign countries.
01:51:59.000We don't spend a fucking nickel to try to fix all these really damaged and fucked up inner cities where people are growing up with this heightened sense of despair.
01:52:09.000Everyone around you is either involved in crime or affected by crime.
01:52:14.000There's drug dealing and violence and gang violence.
01:52:17.000This is your reality, and the only way to get social cred is to become a shooter, to become somebody who's capable of doing the horrific things that you're seeing all around you.
01:52:28.000And then, if I'm looking for an argument for me to say how dangerous firearms are, I just automatically grab gun violence in its entirety and don't understand or break down.
01:52:39.000I don't take that one extra minute to go a layer deep to understand what the real numbers look like.
01:52:45.000But I'll just take that that those mass aggregates and be like oh yeah look look at all this like no man like 65% of that's suicide and a lot of this is gang violence a whole bunch of it is law enforcement yeah it's lame it's a lame blanket to throw over gun violence you know mass shootings are fucking horrific but you know what's also considered mass shootings when they talk about the amount of mass shootings is when gangs get together and shoot at each other that's a mass shooting because there's more than one people shot and there's more you know it's just But
01:53:15.000the bottom line about all of it is we keep looking at one aspect of the problem, which is the amount of guns.
01:53:24.000We're not looking at the mental health aspect of it.
01:53:26.000You hear no legislation or no programs that are being implemented and put into place to try to reach out to people and help people that have been bullied, that are filled with despair, and they feel like their life is over before it's even begun.
01:55:08.000If you're on the north side of that rock, the current from the south side of the rock through the breakers, I mean, there's some powerful current.
01:55:17.000You know, I swam for about 45 minutes.
01:55:19.000I mean, that's a mile and a half at least.
01:55:22.000And so I'm just treading water in the fog, butt-ass naked.
01:55:26.000And thank God somebody saw me walk into the water.
01:55:31.000And Morrow Bay is like a retirement city.
01:55:33.000And so I'm assuming, I'm just imagining, I never knew who it was.
01:55:37.000This old woman went and called the Coast Guard.
01:55:40.000And the Coast Guard boat, this is one of the earliest chapters in my book, is describing, like this is kind of, 9-11 happened very shortly after that and woke me up as to, I need to do something.
01:55:52.000And this Coast Guard boat comes up and this captain has his legs dangling off the side of the boat.
01:55:58.000He's like, hey, what are you doing down there?
01:56:02.000My arrogance as a young man, our frontal lobe, not developed, clearly at this moment.
01:57:44.000And if you didn't get rescued by the Coast Guard and the fog didn't lift...
01:57:51.000Yeah, I don't believe in God or whatever I do, but I know there's no way to describe why I'm not dead.
01:57:59.000When you go through my life and you read moments like this, you're just like, this is not possible.
01:58:07.000You know, from Afghanistan, you know, just this last August to Ukraine to combat tours, you know, getting blown up in Afghanistan and, you know, multi-day gunfights.
01:58:16.000Periods of time where I'm like crawling on the ground trying to find a magazine that has bullets in it because I've run out of bullets.
01:58:21.000When you start going through this, you're just like, this is...
01:58:24.000But moments like that, you know, God's pretty rad.
01:58:30.000Do you think you're fortunate or do you think that there's really like a plan out there for you?
01:58:37.000Do you think that you are doing enough good work that somehow or another this is either predestined or you're just making the best out of it as it goes along and you decide that it's predestined?
01:58:54.000Yes, I mean, back to confirmation bias, right?
01:58:56.000Like, I can have my beliefs and I'm looking for examples that support that construct.
01:58:59.000But I think objectively, if you take a step back and you look into every religion, you know, and if we're looking at karma, people that do good and you see good that comes back to them, however that happens...
01:59:15.000I believe that I know what I'm supposed to be doing here.
01:59:17.000I'm supposed to be equipping and training people to be able to preserve and protect human life.
01:59:26.000You're also making people better humans.
01:59:28.000And that, I think, is as much of a part of it as anything.
01:59:31.000Is that in doing that, in training and equipping people to take care of themselves and to protect life and training people in martial arts, you're making better humans.
01:59:55.000You're a really bad, horrible person for a while, you know?
02:00:00.000You've talked about it many times, and anybody that knows me, I carry a ton of shame and humiliation over periods of my life, and when I talk to somebody that knew me back then, I'm like, oh, man.
02:00:11.000Every young man is just filled with ego and anger, and you could go and take that anger and channel it in the worst ways possible and ruin a bunch of people's lives, or...
02:00:24.000You can find martial arts and become an inspiration and help a lot of people and become a better human being.
02:00:31.000And that's what's happened to both of us.
02:00:33.000And it's happened to countless people that we know.
02:00:36.000Every fucking manly man that I know has had anger issues and has had ego issues and has had all these things that we call toxic masculinity.
02:00:47.000All these things that befall so many men because there's a long history of men Fighting in wars, protecting families, hunting and gathering, and needing to have this ability to perform violence and this ability to be aggressive.
02:01:05.000And with no channel of that, you can get off the fucking rails pretty easily.
02:01:21.000He and I trained together when he was a purple belt.
02:01:24.000When he first came to the United States, First time that he had his crappy little visa and walked into the pit and was at slow kickboxing, just mopping the mats with all of us.
02:01:37.000At the time, we would have to drive from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara to train with the closest purple belt.
02:01:50.000Glover was the boogeyman for like six years because he couldn't get into the United States.
02:01:54.000For six years, he was the scariest guy in the 205-pound division that wasn't in the UFC. And I was always keeping an eye on him.
02:02:00.000I was always like, when are we going to get Glover into the UFC? And then he got into the UFC and I don't know if Kyle Kingsbury was his first fight, but it was one of his first fights.
02:03:17.000That upper arm snap is fucking horrific, man.
02:03:20.000There's something about that one, when they get the Kimura, ugh.
02:03:24.000I did it standing in combat to a guy that tried to grab some stuff off my kit.
02:03:30.000And the Kimura is like the best technique to defend.
02:03:33.000If somebody's trying to take stuff off of you, like law enforcement, it's one of the first techniques that they should learn about how to keep their weapon on them, right?
02:03:41.000Lock the wrist, reach over, grab their own wrist, bring their wrist back behind their head.
02:03:46.000In a snap, I break literally every bone in his whole entire arm and dislocate his shoulder and his collarbone snaps as his face hits the wall and it breaks all the bones in his face.
02:03:59.000I have grenades and flashbangs and knives and a gun all on my body armor.
02:05:56.000I don't know if it's like John Hackleman, old school, you know, we'd hit boards sometimes, you know, we'd hit bags without gloves sometimes.
02:06:04.000I know boxing coaches right now are like, don't listen to Tim, you know, keep your gloves and wraps on, but like...
02:06:47.000And I probably had 20 or 30 fights on Indian reservations, kind of pre-real sanctioning, before states were allowing MMA. What was the logic?
02:07:18.000So I was like, I don't, I can't grab like this, you know, and I definitely can't punch like this, so I'd rather wear, you know, I have big hands, I'd rather wear like a medium-sized glove that I just have to force my hand in.
02:07:28.000I'm wearing a smaller glove so my hand can get into different angles and I definitely can grab a lot easier.
02:08:03.000It's just weird that you can kick someone in the face with your shins, you can elbow someone in the face with your elbows, no covering or protection at all.
02:08:12.000Those things are both much harder than your hands.
02:09:35.000In that eight-man tournament, he's a killer.
02:09:38.000That fight, mopped the mat with Jason Mayhem Miller.
02:09:41.000You know, I just crushed him on the ground, knees to the head, soccer kicks to the head, you know, he's trying to fight off his back, and I'm just like eating his legs up.
02:09:49.000He shoots a crappy shot, you know, a little snap down on the north-south, you know, as he's belly down, just dropping knees to the sides and top of his head.
02:09:57.000One fight, you know, then fast forward two years.
02:10:01.000I think we're the same person, slightly different rule set.
02:10:06.000And it's proper MMA. And I lose a split decision.
02:10:11.000But you see us in almost the exact same positions with the same...
02:10:14.000But I just wasn't allowed to do damage in half the positions.
02:10:55.000I think much more realistic is like, if you can have a basketball game, and you can have it on this big-ass fucking basketball court, why can't you have two guys stand in the middle of that big-ass basketball court, mat that fucker up, everybody gets a clear view.
02:11:18.000I would chase, you know, like Luke Rockhold.
02:11:20.000You watch that fight, we're in the big cage, and I'm chasing him around the whole entire fight, and he's just like peppering me with good footwork and outside strikes, you know, and then we get to the little cage with Melvin Menhoff and Robbie Lawler.
02:11:31.000Both of those fights were in little cages, and you watch how that fight went down.
02:11:33.000You know, like I just, like a pit bull on top of him, and I just mauled him.
02:11:37.000And totally different like you you give Robbie an extra five feet of circumference like that dude's gonna be blasting me from the outside in that Southpaw with that nasty cross the whole entire fight.
02:11:48.000Yeah Yeah, it's crazy like people forget that you had this long career in like so many you fought in so many organizations Before you got to the UFC was running from the UFC and You're running from them?
02:13:22.000You know, I won on every measurable matrix, but I had a big, swollen, closed eye.
02:13:26.000And Greg was there, and Greg was like, you know, you really missed real key moments in preparation and kind of how you executed your game plan.
02:13:35.000And I was like, Yeah, you're not wrong.
02:13:38.000He's like, you need to be in a real fight camp.
02:13:58.000The real professional big fight camp and Jackson and I are just really Similar to Dana her now like I really just really appreciate that that intellectual approach to martial arts and You know wasn't just fighting it wasn't you know sweat and staff on the mat it was like hey,
02:14:16.000let's take a moment and think about What we're doing here as a martial artist mmm, so that just really jived with me.
02:14:23.000Thank God for those camps Thank God for people like Dan Lambert to dump a ton of money into a place like American Top Team.
02:14:31.000Where would the sport be if it wasn't for those outliers, those people who decide?
02:14:36.000I don't know what kind of fucking headaches are involved in running something like Jackson Winklejohn, but it must be nuts.
02:14:43.000You're dealing with a hundred savages.
02:14:46.000You got Russians coming in here and guys coming in that are kickboxers and guys coming in that are wrestlers and everyone's beating the shit out of each other and you're trying to see what cream is going to rise to the top.
02:15:00.000My jujitsu gym is like proper, traditional, like everybody wears white gis, except you got one day where you get to wear your competition blue gi if you want, but it's a white gi gym.
02:15:12.000Bowing at the beginning of the class, bowing at the end of class, and everybody's checking fingernails, everybody's got deodorant, you know, it's like a really nice, clean...
02:15:33.000So I listened to a couple of interviews of him recently and...
02:15:36.000You know, he's my era of MMA and some of my peers from that era have struggled with TBI and CTE and, you know, you hear it and how they talk and they struggled being entrepreneurs.
02:16:05.000He had, and back to issues, he was like talking specifically about issues.
02:16:09.000I know the Hawaii party system's weird because you kind of just have to be, like only one party's going to be voted, so you have degrees of one party.
02:16:16.000And, you know, he had just talking about issues.
02:16:19.000I was like, Alright, BJ. Yeah, he's got a very good grasp on the problems in Hawaii.
02:16:25.000He thought about it for a long time before he ran, and when he was on the podcast, he was talking very specifically about problems that they face, and why those problems exist, and what he thinks he could do about it.
02:18:48.000You never know what people are going to ask you, you know, like whatever hot button topic they're looking for a soundbite.
02:18:53.000So, you know, the night before her and I are just kind of running through all of these ideas and these problems and it's something that I wish all Americans did more frequently.
02:19:54.000They're special forces base and you know teach some some human intelligence courses and do like this exchange of information they Eastern European Eastern Europe they had some different tactics than we used so like this cool cross-pollination of ideas and tactics and tradecraft and then I come back and I bring those back to my unit and some of those stay and but those relationships are built you know when we left Ukraine That training,
02:20:24.000those relationships and those contacts don't exist.
02:20:26.000So, you know, us coming in now trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to help you guys?
02:20:36.000How difficult is that to then go to somebody that you're at the gym with all the time and you talk to and you're like, dude, I just got this new thing.
02:20:50.000I think we were all the way up to 2016. So the agreements that the US government has with those countries, there's lots of different levels of them, what kind of participation and collaboration we're going to have.
02:21:07.000And sometimes some special operations can even come to the United States and go to our special forces.
02:21:14.000Like they can go through our training.
02:21:18.000And they can, as if they're earning a green beret, go through every single phase and learn how we plan and how our tactics are.
02:21:26.000These are really good allies that we're going to be aligned with forever.
02:21:59.000What's fascinating with me about her is how the left is completely ignoring her, although she was a Democratic congresswoman for eight years, but the right has her on everything with full total respect knowing she's a Democrat.
02:22:15.000Like, one of the things that's been very strange about this whole polarization between the two-party system in America is Is how the right will allow people to come on that they disagree with and talk to, and they'll talk to them respectfully, and they don't attack them.
02:22:30.000Whereas if I watch a person who's a right-wing person who gets on CNN or MSNBC, they're getting attacked.
02:22:39.000There's never a civil discussion where you're allowed to agree to disagree, or have a discussion about why you disagree.
02:22:47.000I think it has a lot to do with the reason that you end up being...
02:22:51.000My beliefs and my ideas, I'm always looking for...
02:22:57.000An opposing or a conflicting idea which will either make my beliefs more sound or I'll have to take a second look at them because there's something wrong with it.
02:23:10.000And somebody like that is naturally going to be subscribing to, you know, maybe more conservative ideals than over here where like this is my belief system and I don't, as an isolationist, like I don't, with my ideas, I don't want anybody to disagree with me.
02:23:26.000But I also, with Tulsi and Bill Maher, is it Bill Maher?
02:24:13.000You want to have mental health problems.
02:24:15.000That's the center of mental health problems in this country.
02:24:18.000What's unique to me is that I think probably what happened was the response from Donald Trump.
02:24:27.000The response to Donald Trump being president, he was so polarizing and he attacked people in a way that was so non-presidential and the way he would behave was so non-presidential that that's just his thing.
02:24:40.000When someone comes after him, he comes back at them even harder.
02:24:44.000But when you're the president and you do that, it just gets everybody's panties in a wad.
02:24:49.000And he's just fucking taking gallons of gasoline and chucking it on the fire.
02:24:54.000And so when they got rid of him and they got him out of there, they're like, we gotta make sure this never happens again!
02:25:01.000Meanwhile, it's going to happen again.
02:25:04.000But this polarization has hardened them.
02:25:09.000The thing with Trump, because of Trump's behavior and the way he communicates, which I just think is a terrible way to communicate as a president.
02:25:17.000But if you're his supporter, you love it.
02:25:26.000And I understand that he's right about many things.
02:25:28.000There's a crazy video that's out there that shows all the things that Donald Trump predicted if Joe Biden gets in office and how all of them have taken place.
02:29:51.000I wish it was so much more about the issue than the individual, where we could talk about all of the issues and find the candidate that has the best solution for those interviews.
02:31:39.000I'm sure you've seen the interview where they asked her, what do you think about stopping Congress, members of Congress, from trading stocks?
02:31:47.000Can we just do term limits and not let them get rich while in office from how they vote?
02:31:56.000There should be some measures that are put into place.
02:32:00.000But the problem is then we'd get even less qualified people that want to be president and less qualified people that want to be congressmen.
02:32:05.000If they didn't think that there was some sort of financial incentive, there's zero financial incentive.
02:32:10.000All you're doing is being a civil servant.
02:32:56.000So he was a journalist with Fox News that got blown up in Ukraine.
02:32:59.000And a couple of journalists that were with him died, and he was horrifically injured.
02:33:05.000Our organization, Save Our Allies, was the group that went in and found him, rescued him, saved his life, and then got him out of Ukraine and into American-level medical care.
02:33:20.000He's currently in Bamsey, like right here in San Antonio.
02:33:23.000And first, it is so cool that journalists...
02:33:27.000Are brave like that to go and to go you know to go into Kabul to go into Ukraine to go into down to the border and to see what is really happening down there It's like you know a little nod to them and but that guy no painkiller after he is very very seriously injured his family haven't seen the wounds so like I'm not gonna explain them But,
02:33:52.000you know, tourniquets on for hours, and he has to make it through all these checkpoints.
02:33:59.000And they're able to get him out of Ukraine and save his life.
02:34:04.000And like that ground team from Save Our Allies that was so creative and how they literally went into the front lines, grabbed this journalist, you know, dead bodies around him, got him medical care, and then got him out of the country before he died.
02:34:27.000As much as we want to talk about people that are fat and lazy and soft in this country, there is a large number of fucking incredible human beings that are here.
02:34:39.000You know, I talk about wanting America to be more healthy and fitter and stronger and individually responsible and able to secure a school, you know, be able to protect your kids.
02:34:51.000I fully believe that, that we need to be better and we're the weakest that we've ever been.
02:34:56.000But I'm like surrounded by, in the military, in my position there, I'm just surrounded by the best and most brilliant men that ever existed.
02:35:08.000And the guys that I work with at Sheepdog Response, their heart as servants, teaching teachers, teaching law enforcement, teaching civilians that just want to be better mothers and fathers to be able to protect themselves and their families.
02:35:22.000Is it that they've dedicated their whole entire lives to this idea?
02:35:25.000They'll teach 14 hour days, they'll come back into the office, start cleaning all the weapons, start cleaning the mats, mopping, sanitizing, you know, to do it all again the next day.
02:35:35.000It's so humbling to see how many great humans there are out there and we so often just like focus at the bad at the expense of the good never being recognized.
02:35:48.000Well, I think for a lot of people, they're just surrounded by the bad, and that's what they look to as a benchmark, unfortunately.
02:35:55.000They don't have access to the type of people that you're around.
02:35:59.000And if they did, they would judge themselves in comparison.
02:36:02.000It's just a thing that people do automatically.
02:36:05.000You imitate your atmosphere, and if your atmosphere is filled with beasts, and these guys are just putting in the work every day, and if you want the kind of respect that they get from you, you got to put in that kind of work too, and rising tide lifts all boats, and everybody gets in it together,
02:36:21.000and you come out of the other end, you're better because of that, because, you know, iron sharpens iron, and that's just how it goes.
02:36:34.000The scars and stripe this book the whole reason like we dropped it right now is in this editorialized curated existence where you know Instagram I'm using a filter to make myself look good That whole book is about failure and struggle and every single one of the mistakes that I ever made You know it is not this self ejaculating Memoir of like why I'm this amazing person it is all the reasons that I'm not and You know,
02:36:58.000it's all of the reasons why it is normal for us to struggle.
02:37:03.000It is normal for you to not be able to deadlift that 500 pounds unless you have conditioned yourself and failed and pushed yourself so your body adaptation is able to do it.
02:37:14.000And we think exclusively physically when we talk about adaptation, but your soul and your brain and the total human condition is all Part of it.
02:38:27.000They need to understand that it's a benefit.
02:38:29.000You have to look at those failures and go, you have fuel now.
02:38:32.000You have fuel, and you can decide to ignore it, and you can decide to wallow in the shame of loss, or you can be far better because of this, because there's nothing that motivates you like humiliation.
02:38:54.000But I will look at you walking into a Krispy Kreme and making another conscious decision about what your lifestyle looks like, where I'm gonna have to pay for your healthcare in a few years.
02:39:20.000They don't understand that they should park towards the front of the parking lot underneath the light and that they see somebody with their window down, the engine off, and they're sitting there smoking a cigarette with the backed in and they're looking at everybody walking through the parking lot.
02:39:31.000Maybe that person might try to mug you as you get out of your car.
02:39:35.000And it is these complete new ideas to them and watching their brains start Firing, seeing these things for the first time, explaining why profiling and generalizing when it comes to protecting your own life is useful,
02:39:51.000and how the sixth sense is a real thing.
02:39:55.000You know, like that feeling where, did that guy look at me weird?
02:39:58.000In society, we're like, okay, no, no, I'm not going to look at that guy and make any assumptions about him because it's culturally rude or inappropriate, and I'm going to talk myself out of this, and then that guy assaults me.
02:40:12.000Now, this poor woman's been raped because she talked herself out of it.
02:40:17.000You know, and we can train and we can sharpen, we can dish in.
02:40:20.000And it is the most beautiful and magical thing to watch these people, teachers right now, just flooding, clamoring to us.
02:40:33.000You know, I launched Apogee Strong and Apogee, our school, to address what's happening in schools and what's happening with our young men and women.
02:40:41.000And seeing parents walk in and being like, I get to be involved in what happens with my own child's education?