The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1247 - Andy Stumpf

00:00:04.000 Four, three, two...

00:00:08.000 Hello, Andy.

00:00:10.000 What's up, Joe?

00:00:11.000 What's going on, buddy?

00:00:12.000 We're here drinking CBD water.

00:00:14.000 I've never had CBD water.

00:00:16.000 GT's Kombucha sent us some CBD water.

00:00:24.000 Yeah.

00:00:41.000 If you have a dream catcher, most likely you have cats, right?

00:00:44.000 I think you have to have one.

00:00:46.000 It's part of the program.

00:00:47.000 Yeah, it's a package deal.

00:00:49.000 You know what I saw yesterday that is really rare?

00:00:52.000 I saw a dude who was dressed up like a Native American who was not, in fact, a Native American.

00:00:58.000 That's a risky move in this day and age.

00:01:01.000 Yeah, I'm not going to go there.

00:01:03.000 When we were kids, you could be an Indian.

00:01:06.000 Like, if you could play cowboys and Indians, you could be an Indian, and it'd be like, oh, okay. 0.93

00:01:11.000 Yeah, no problem.

00:01:12.000 He's the Indian.

00:01:13.000 This guy's the cowboy. 1.00

00:01:14.000 Normal shit. 1.00

00:01:16.000 Today, they will fucking come for you. 1.00

00:01:18.000 That day's gone. 1.00

00:01:19.000 Today's over.

00:01:20.000 Yeah.

00:01:20.000 What happened?

00:01:22.000 I'm not smart enough to answer that question by a significant margin.

00:01:26.000 But some things have taken place.

00:01:28.000 I mean, during the time that you were serving, from 2001 to 2019, where we're at today, I mean, there has been a significant change in outrage culture in this country, in entitlement, things that people think that they can get offended by and not offended by,

00:01:46.000 things that are important and not important.

00:01:48.000 We're in the strangest time.

00:01:51.000 The beauty of that is most of the time I was serving, so it paid zero attention to any of it.

00:01:56.000 The disaster part of that is when you come off the off-ramp, you know, out of service, and you go, what happened?

00:02:04.000 What happened to the environment that I left?

00:02:06.000 But, I mean, I went from Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up, where it could well be the origin of outrage, culture, and social justice warriors, to the military.

00:02:17.000 To back out of the military.

00:02:19.000 So I had very different optics when it comes to perspective, where I started and then what I was seeing when I came out.

00:02:26.000 Well, that's the take that I always see from people that are in the military or have been in the military, is their understanding of what's important and not important is so much different, because it's truly life and death.

00:02:39.000 Not all the time, but I think if you are exposed to that environment enough, it'll recalibrate your perspective of what's important and what's not.

00:02:48.000 Yeah.

00:02:48.000 Did you ever read any Sebastian Younger?

00:02:50.000 I did.

00:02:51.000 Did you read Tribe?

00:02:52.000 Tribe is a great book, yes.

00:02:53.000 I read that off your recommendation, actually.

00:02:55.000 Did it speak to you, like, in terms of, like, your own personal experience?

00:02:58.000 It made complete sense.

00:02:59.000 I probably would have used different terms in different places throughout, but the concept that he was talking about absolutely made sense.

00:03:06.000 I mean, so the SEAL team is one of the, whether or not people live up to this, an argument could be made, but one of the key tenets is, you know, the brotherhood, which is just another way of talking about a tribe.

00:03:15.000 Yeah.

00:03:17.000 I just felt like it was really interesting to me, like that book, the most moving part of it was how connected these people are when they're together and when they're at war and what that brotherhood is.

00:03:30.000 That camaraderie means to them and how they feel disconnected when they're back in regular civilization and they get depressed.

00:03:39.000 It's like their life had been led at such a high vibration, intensity, so much on the line.

00:03:48.000 It means so much.

00:03:49.000 Everything means so much.

00:03:50.000 There's so much dedication, so much commitment.

00:03:52.000 And then to go back to the regular life is very, very difficult for a lot of people.

00:03:56.000 Yeah, I don't think it would be unfair to say that some of the people that I served with, I probably have closer relationships than I do with my biological family.

00:04:06.000 Even probably, I've shared, I don't know, it's not that the things that we shared were important, but the value and our connection was so tight.

00:04:18.000 Honestly, tighter than my definitely biological family and potentially even my wife as well, too, and my own kids.

00:04:23.000 Don't tell her that out loud.

00:04:25.000 I think she understands it.

00:04:26.000 She gets it.

00:04:26.000 You're going to get in trouble, bro.

00:04:28.000 Well, I only get in trouble for my wife on days that end in Y, so nothing's going to be new about that.

00:04:33.000 But I think she also understands that because I certainly have struggled.

00:04:37.000 I struggled quite a bit for about the first 18 months I got out of the military.

00:04:42.000 And I look back on it now and I think two pieces of it.

00:04:45.000 One, I went from seeing those people that I share those experiences with on a daily basis.

00:04:50.000 So there's that...

00:04:52.000 Everything you have in common.

00:04:53.000 We talk about stuff the same way.

00:04:55.000 I just know the ins and outs of those people, and then I became detached from them.

00:04:57.000 I used to have what I thought was a job that had an immense amount of purpose, and then that was gone, too.

00:05:03.000 So I lost a little bit of my identity and a little bit of the purpose.

00:05:07.000 At that same time, like I said, I come off that off-ramp of being in the military, and I'm looking at the world.

00:05:11.000 It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

00:05:13.000 People are arguing about things, and Yeah, I think.

00:05:35.000 Well, especially in your situation, you were wounded, and although you wanted to continue serving, you physically weren't able to anymore.

00:05:43.000 I was for a while.

00:05:44.000 So I got hurt in February of 2005, the 14-year anniversary was earlier this month.

00:05:52.000 And it took me about...

00:05:54.000 Two years to work my way back to where I would become operational again.

00:05:58.000 And I did one more deployment after I got hurt.

00:06:00.000 And then at the tail end of that deployment, that was just the end of it.

00:06:03.000 My body wouldn't tolerate it anymore.

00:06:05.000 And this is because of the metal fragments?

00:06:07.000 Or what is it totally?

00:06:09.000 Was it nerve damage?

00:06:12.000 So I got medically retired, which is not based off of any one instant, hopefully.

00:06:17.000 I mean, people who get an IED strike and they'll become a quad amputee or a triple amputee.

00:06:23.000 That's one incident that they're going to get retired for.

00:06:27.000 For me, it was more the culmination of a lot of things.

00:06:29.000 So the gunshot wound obviously didn't help.

00:06:33.000 And then the operational history of exposure to Explosive blasts, the concussive forces, all of those things just kind of added up.

00:06:42.000 I went through a 30-day protocol where they baselined me and took a bunch of tests and basically came to the, you know, they write out a massive document of all the things that they were able to at least document.

00:06:54.000 Like for me, I can't get an MRI because I still have metal in my body from ferrous metal from the round that clipped a piece of rebar on its way to me.

00:07:02.000 Oh, wow.

00:07:03.000 And it clipped my sciatic nerve on the way in, and they're concerned that if they image me, or what I've been told by the doctors, if they image me, it might react again with my sciatic nerve.

00:07:10.000 Just pull a piece of metal by it, and I'll be right back where I was.

00:07:14.000 I had drop foot for about six months.

00:07:16.000 And drop foot is when your foot just stops working?

00:07:19.000 Totally hangs.

00:07:19.000 I could always push down, but I couldn't lift it up.

00:07:22.000 That's a thing that's happening now in MMA quite a bit.

00:07:25.000 It's happened several times.

00:07:26.000 Guys get low calf kicked, and there's something about chopping at the nerves behind the leg that guys' legs are just, their foot's going limp.

00:07:34.000 It happened to Michael Chandler.

00:07:36.000 It happened to Henry Cejudo.

00:07:38.000 Are they recovering from it?

00:07:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:07:39.000 I mean, it's in the middle of the fight.

00:07:41.000 So they get kicked, and then the leg just stops working, and they can't stand on it.

00:07:46.000 Their foot just literally doesn't react anymore.

00:07:50.000 So frustrating.

00:07:51.000 So for me, I got shot in the hip, high up on my left-hand side, but by the time I made it to the hospital, my single complaint was my ankle.

00:08:00.000 I didn't remember falling on my ankle, I didn't remember hitting my ankle, but it felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and just beat it into powder.

00:08:09.000 Yeah.

00:08:27.000 And for me, it never came back.

00:08:28.000 I'm hoping that, obviously, for the fighters, it eventually comes back because I had dropped foot for six months to a year.

00:08:35.000 I eventually was able to start dorsiflexing my foot again, but I still can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down on the side, the far left-hand side, and as it wraps over the top of my foot, it's completely numb.

00:08:47.000 And is this because of the actual damage to the nerve or something touching the nerve?

00:08:51.000 They don't know.

00:08:52.000 That was an interesting part of being hurt as well is talking to people who have decades of medical experience and having them look at you and go, I don't know. 1.00

00:09:02.000 Fuck. 0.99

00:09:02.000 Especially without an MRI, right? 0.99

00:09:04.000 Because they can't.

00:09:04.000 They can't.

00:09:05.000 Because they're worried about it being pulled out.

00:09:07.000 Same thing why the concussion history that I have, it's an estimate based off of operational history because they can't throw me in that same machine and image my brain.

00:09:16.000 Oh, whoa.

00:09:17.000 It's spitting magnets.

00:09:18.000 Right.

00:09:19.000 And there's metal all over the left-hand side of my pelvis, and I don't know how much it would have to move, but if it just clipped that nerve again...

00:09:27.000 I mean, it was probably one of the more difficult times in my life.

00:09:31.000 My leg felt like it was on fire 24 hours a day, which I could ignore during the daytime, but where it got me was at nighttime.

00:09:38.000 I would lay down in bed...

00:09:39.000 And it just felt like I had dipped my leg in gas and put a lighter onto it.

00:09:44.000 So I was on high dosages of gabapentin and neratin, which are central nervous system suppressors.

00:09:51.000 So I started feeling the cognitive effect of that, so I backed myself off of that.

00:09:55.000 Wasn't in a great phase of my life, so I was, of course, washing those down with massive amounts of alcohol, taking three to four Ambien, staying awake because my tolerance to all that stuff was so high, and the last thing I ever want to do is go through that again, so I'm going to stay away from the spinning magnets.

00:10:12.000 Jesus.

00:10:13.000 Because, I mean, it might be a quarter of an inch, and I'd be exactly right back where I was before.

00:10:17.000 And there's no way they can go in and pull those fragments out?

00:10:22.000 So I'm laying in the hospital in Baghdad.

00:10:26.000 And the night that I got hurt, many other people got hurt.

00:10:30.000 Eight people got hurt on that particular target.

00:10:33.000 I was one of the least injured.

00:10:35.000 There were people who immediately flown into surgery.

00:10:37.000 A guy almost lost his arm.

00:10:39.000 A guy took a...

00:10:41.000 He was right next to an explosive blast that literally peeled back the layers of his ballistic helmet.

00:10:45.000 He was conscious but blind.

00:10:47.000 We're good to go.

00:11:11.000 He says, all right, we're going to take a look at this.

00:11:14.000 I'm going to basically stick my finger in the hole.

00:11:17.000 I was like, let's take a pause here, sir.

00:11:19.000 Can I have some pain medication?

00:11:21.000 So he comes out and just juices me with morphine.

00:11:24.000 First time I've ever had it.

00:11:25.000 I wish I would have taken it in the field.

00:11:27.000 It did almost nothing.

00:11:33.000 We're good to go.

00:11:58.000 Is there another option?

00:11:59.000 He's like, oh yeah, totally.

00:12:00.000 The body will encapsulate it in calcium, and as long as it's not touching a bone, you're probably going to be fine. 1.00

00:12:05.000 What the fuck, man? 1.00

00:12:06.000 Why didn't you lead with that option? 1.00

00:12:08.000 Right, well, did they think they were going to be able to get them all out, though, if they did go in there and start slicing away?

00:12:13.000 I don't know, and I don't know what benefit...

00:12:15.000 It would have had.

00:12:16.000 I suspect it would have caused more damage than the actual injury itself.

00:12:20.000 My hip is fine.

00:12:22.000 I still have never had a surgery.

00:12:24.000 I've still never broken a bone.

00:12:26.000 The only thing they ever did was put a gauze pad on my leg, and when the scab fell off, I could start taking a bath again if I wanted to.

00:12:32.000 Wow.

00:12:33.000 Yep.

00:12:33.000 They just left everything in there.

00:12:34.000 Jesus.

00:12:36.000 That's crazy.

00:12:37.000 It's all covered in...

00:12:38.000 It was bizarre.

00:12:39.000 Wow.

00:12:40.000 So if you do have an injury now, is it a lot of guesswork?

00:12:44.000 Like if something's wrong with your leg, do they have to go in there with a scope?

00:12:48.000 Since you can't get an MRI, what if you blew your knee out?

00:12:51.000 They would have to rely on imagery technology that doesn't revolve around magnets.

00:12:56.000 Wow.

00:12:57.000 So most likely, I'm not too...

00:12:59.000 I think they gave me a CAT scan in the hospital, so that I don't think is magnet-based, and then two-dimensional x-ray.

00:13:05.000 Well, it's interesting, too, because some of the therapies they're using on people for TBI is...

00:13:11.000 Magnets.

00:13:11.000 Yeah.

00:13:12.000 But I don't think they're as powerful as an MRI. I mean, you can't even wear earrings in those rooms.

00:13:17.000 Yeah, with an MRI. I had heard about some kid who accidentally died because he had an oxygen tank in the room and they turned the machine on and the tanks slammed into him and crushed him.

00:13:25.000 Yeah, I've heard about the TBI magnets.

00:13:28.000 That I think I would be fine with because I don't think it has the power that the huge machines do.

00:13:33.000 Right, right.

00:13:34.000 Yeah, it's like a low-frequency magnetic pulse.

00:13:38.000 Kat Zingano, who's a UFC fighter, she essentially had been hurt really bad in a fight with Amanda Nunes, and she got hypothyroid condition from that fight.

00:13:50.000 Her thyroid wasn't functioning correctly.

00:13:52.000 She was gaining weight like crazy. 0.99

00:13:54.000 Her motor skills were all fucked up, and they fixed her with that. 0.99

00:13:58.000 And that was from the brain injury? 0.99

00:13:59.000 Mm-hmm.

00:14:00.000 Yeah.

00:14:01.000 For a fight, she won.

00:14:03.000 Which is crazy.

00:14:04.000 I mean, she was hurt really bad in the first round, stopped her in the third round.

00:14:07.000 She won the fight. 1.00

00:14:08.000 She beat Amanda Nunes and, you know, really suffered some significant brain trauma from that fight.

00:14:14.000 There is a...

00:14:15.000 I don't want to say there's a rash of...

00:14:19.000 There's suicides in the SEAL team specifically.

00:14:22.000 Obviously, the number 22 is thrown out a lot when it comes to veteran suicides, but that's...

00:14:26.000 What is it, 22%?

00:14:28.000 22 veterans a day, the commissioner said.

00:14:31.000 The number that is often touted, I'm hesitant to say that number is accurate because if you look at how it was derived, it wasn't...

00:14:39.000 They could have done a better job of getting that number.

00:14:41.000 And I don't want to say inside of the SEAL teams that there's a suicide issue, even though I do know a few people that have committed suicide, and they were the ones that I would least expect it from.

00:14:53.000 But they were also the ones who had quite a bit of Yeah.

00:15:07.000 Yeah.

00:15:13.000 And I know countless times where I either did something dumb or was just standing in the wrong place or had a hard parachute opening and I cracked my head against the metal risers and your head hurts for the rest of the day.

00:15:26.000 And I've seen the change in behavior in some people and I know the stuff that's tied to it as well, the low hormones, all of that stuff.

00:15:37.000 That is happening, I think, at the highest levels in the military, probably military-wide, but specifically those people who are kind of more on the front leading edge of combat operations.

00:15:46.000 And I think as a country, we're in a total unknown area because we're in a sustained period of war longer than we've ever been as a nation, and nobody knows the outcome of that.

00:15:57.000 And people who I would have never guessed would make the decision to take their own life, I'll get a text and, hey, you know, so-and-so just went out into the woods.

00:16:08.000 And no other external injury, no other marker than obviously something happened in the geometry between their ears that caused them to make that decision.

00:16:17.000 And I suspect it's from the repeated exposure to the brain injury.

00:16:22.000 Yeah, it's something that people are just starting to understand over the last couple of decades.

00:16:26.000 I mean, obviously, there was a focus of that concussion movie, and I don't know if you saw that Bob Costas was actually pulled from football, and they had told him that he'd crossed the line.

00:16:38.000 The announcer?

00:16:39.000 Bob Costas?

00:16:39.000 Yeah, they pulled him.

00:16:40.000 They pulled him from doing, what event was it?

00:16:43.000 Was it from the Super Bowl?

00:16:44.000 I don't think so, yeah.

00:16:46.000 Because he was talking about traumatic brain injury and the realities of it.

00:16:50.000 And they said, you crossed the line.

00:16:51.000 He's like, I crossed the line by talking about reality?

00:16:54.000 In an honest and open perspective.

00:16:55.000 Yeah, that's not cool.

00:16:56.000 I mean, that's what he does.

00:16:57.000 I mean, that is Bob Costas' entire hook.

00:16:59.000 But, I mean, he's a brilliant guy.

00:17:02.000 But this problem was so poorly understood just two decades ago.

00:17:07.000 So everyone's just sort of coming to this realization that...

00:17:11.000 I mean, according to Dr. Mark Gordon, who I've had on, who works with the Warrior Angel Foundation, Andrew Marr's setup, where they're helping all these veterans that have traumatic brain injuries, and I've had Mr. Gordon on several times.

00:17:26.000 He says that you can get traumatic brain injuries from things that don't even remotely knock you out.

00:17:31.000 He's like, people get them from doing moguls when they ski.

00:17:34.000 They get them from jet skis, bouncing around on jet skis.

00:17:39.000 I mean, you can get it from a minor car accident.

00:17:41.000 You can have a traumatic brain injury. 0.98

00:17:43.000 And for guys like me that got hit in the head for years, who knows what the fuck is going on in there?

00:17:49.000 And for professional fighters, it's almost inevitable. 0.93

00:17:53.000 For football players, it's even worse.

00:17:56.000 For football players, they did some crazy study, and I know we quoted it, and I don't remember what the numbers was, but it's some insane number, like in the high 80% of people from high school on through college and into the professionals have TBI. Or CTE,

00:18:12.000 or some signs of traumatic brain injury.

00:18:15.000 I'd be surprised if they didn't. 0.99

00:18:17.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.98

00:18:19.000 It is interesting to, like I was saying, so when I got medically retired, they sent me to a medical facility called NICO, which is attached to Walter Reed, and it's the best care that I ever received, because it's a civilian facility. 0.99

00:18:31.000 It's called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

00:18:34.000 We did a lot of work with them back in the day for the UFC. The UFC raised a bunch of money for that.

00:18:39.000 Really?

00:18:39.000 Yeah.

00:18:40.000 Well, the money was well spent because I went there and I probably would not have been medically retired had I not because I left with literally a 150-page dossier.

00:18:50.000 But it's interesting tying it back to TBI because I spent a lot of time as a requirement talking to psychologists and psychiatrists.

00:18:58.000 And the TBI-PTS... In the military, it gets interesting because it seems like they're treated as different issues, and I'm probably misquoting the number a little bit.

00:19:08.000 I think there's 13 recognized symptoms of both, but there's an overlay of like 11. So I can't remember any of the symptoms off the top of my head, but you could describe one and it could apply both to TBI and to post-traumatic stress.

00:19:23.000 So it gets even more muddled on how are you treating somebody for a brain injury?

00:19:29.000 Are you treating somebody for a post-traumatic stress?

00:19:31.000 Are you lumping everybody together?

00:19:34.000 Because I see a lot of people, specifically a lot of veterans, getting stuck in that world where...

00:19:39.000 It's a lot of focus on PTS, but the reality is it could just be from the trauma received over a career or nearly two decades for most people to make it to retirement.

00:19:49.000 It's really hard to tell.

00:19:50.000 Well, apparently blasts are a big one, right?

00:19:53.000 Like blowing down doors and things like that.

00:19:54.000 Yeah, it hurts.

00:19:57.000 And you brace yourself, the impact of just the air, the concussive force of it is just devastating for your brain.

00:20:04.000 The human brain apparently is just so much more delicate and sensitive than anyone could have ever guessed.

00:20:09.000 Well, a concussive blasts are a tough one because they travel.

00:20:11.000 So if you're internally in a building, Jesus.

00:20:26.000 Yeah, it's...

00:20:29.000 I thought I had a good hiding spot more than once and did not have a good hiding spot.

00:20:33.000 You're sitting there just like, oh, that hurt.

00:20:37.000 More than one occasion. 1.00

00:20:38.000 Or you're working with a bunch of assholes who take all the good hiding spots. 1.00

00:20:41.000 God damn it. 1.00

00:20:42.000 Just turn around and just ball up. 0.99

00:20:44.000 And there's not really much you can do about that, right?

00:20:48.000 I mean, if you have to blow down that door, someone has to be there to detonate.

00:20:52.000 You have to be close enough for it to activate, right?

00:20:56.000 How are they doing it?

00:20:57.000 Wirelessly?

00:20:58.000 They might be doing it wirelessly now.

00:20:59.000 When I was in, it was called Nonel, or a shock tube.

00:21:04.000 So you put a charge wherever, a gate, a door, a wall, and you basically have to attach an initiator to it because the charge isn't going to go off by itself.

00:21:15.000 So you need a highly reactive charge to set off an explosive that is less reactive.

00:21:19.000 You keep them separate, obviously, for safety, except for the main breacher.

00:21:23.000 He probably has at least one hooked up so he can be really fast.

00:21:26.000 But then you just extend that flash tube and they come in long reels.

00:21:31.000 I mean, you can get 30, 40, 50 feet.

00:21:33.000 And each charge, mathematically, we do math on it to determine the minimum safe distance of every charge and it's written on the charge so you know how far you can get away.

00:21:42.000 But sometimes you're in a situation where, like I said, you think you got an awesome hiding spot and the guy lays out the flash tube and he's getting ready to fire it off and you realize that you're staring directly at the charge and you have nowhere to hide.

00:21:57.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:21:57.000 And they're not going to wait on you.

00:21:59.000 So it's turn around, cover up into a ball and eat it.

00:22:03.000 Is there a best way to eat it?

00:22:06.000 Open your mouth and cover your ears.

00:22:07.000 Really?

00:22:08.000 Yeah.

00:22:09.000 Open your mouth.

00:22:10.000 It's instead of overloading your sinus cavities and your ear canal so you can cover your ears and open your mouth.

00:22:16.000 It helps.

00:22:16.000 If something's going to go off really close to you.

00:22:19.000 Open your mouth and cover your ears.

00:22:22.000 Yep.

00:22:22.000 What's the difference between opening and closing the mouth?

00:22:25.000 The effect of the wave.

00:22:27.000 My understanding that contained pressure inside of your body as opposed to giving it an avenue to escape.

00:22:33.000 Jesus Christ.

00:22:35.000 One of the things they're realizing apparently about concussions is that even just getting hit in the chest can give you a concussion.

00:22:41.000 From the rip of the head?

00:22:42.000 Yeah, because you get hit in the chest and you're like, I didn't even get hit in the head.

00:22:45.000 But just getting hit in the chest makes your head snap and it makes your brain swoosh around inside your head and that's what gives you an injury.

00:22:53.000 I just remember earlier on, I mean like in the mid-2000s, it wasn't...

00:22:58.000 The only question was, does your head hurt?

00:22:59.000 Like, that was the beginning of whether or not you might have sustained a concussion.

00:23:02.000 And then, obviously, learning much more now and where we're at, it's like, yeah, you may not have even had any sensation in your head, but...

00:23:11.000 It's kind of crazy when you think about how long people have been studying the human body and this is just something they've really got a real understanding of in the last couple of decades.

00:23:19.000 I don't even know if I would characterize it as a real understanding.

00:23:22.000 I think they're farther along than they were two decades ago, but I think the amount we know versus the amount that we don't know is much more weighted on the amount we don't know.

00:23:31.000 Yeah.

00:23:32.000 I went to a high school football game recently.

00:23:35.000 Because my daughter was doing this cheerleading thing, and I watched these kids collide with each other. 0.99

00:23:39.000 And I'm like, ugh!

00:23:41.000 Me! 1.00

00:23:41.000 A fucking fight commentator, you know? 1.00

00:23:44.000 And I'm watching this, and I'm like, get out of there! 1.00

00:23:46.000 Stop doing it!

00:23:47.000 It's just, to me, it's...

00:23:49.000 I don't know.

00:23:50.000 It's...

00:23:51.000 I guess people...

00:23:52.000 I get that people enjoy the game.

00:23:53.000 I understand it.

00:23:54.000 I mean, I think there's a lot of things in life.

00:23:56.000 I mean, I'm talking to you, the world record squirrel suit flying jump man...

00:24:00.000 When I talk about risk and reward, maybe you're the wrong person to discuss this with.

00:24:05.000 But, you know.

00:24:07.000 I think my risk versus reward structure is like, yeah.

00:24:09.000 Well, it's worked out for you.

00:24:10.000 So far.

00:24:11.000 You're here.

00:24:11.000 Today.

00:24:12.000 Yeah, I mean, you're jumping off fucking mountains with a flying squirrel suit. 0.99

00:24:15.000 If you're here, you've obviously got it nailed. 0.99

00:24:18.000 I'm on pause for the base jumping for the time being.

00:24:21.000 Did Mrs. Stump step in and... 1.00

00:24:23.000 Put the kibosh on it?

00:24:25.000 For the first time, she asked me to stop in June of last year.

00:24:29.000 But, of course, it was tied to a very close friend who did a jump, didn't go the way he wanted it to go, or anybody would.

00:24:38.000 She happened to know him.

00:24:39.000 And it really was the first time that I seriously considered giving it up.

00:24:46.000 I haven't touched a wingsuit since my buddy Alex died.

00:24:49.000 And he was my main base jumping partner overseas on most of the trips that I'd done.

00:24:55.000 And I'm not going to say I shepherded him into the sport, but I was there with him on his first jump off of a cliff in Italy, the first time he put a wingsuit on.

00:25:04.000 And that one stung a bit.

00:25:07.000 So it's on pause, potentially forever, as far as base jumping goes.

00:25:12.000 I'll still skydive, but it's a question mark on the base jumping side of the house. 0.99

00:25:17.000 You do such risky shit in the skydiving. 0.98

00:25:18.000 I was like, yeah, skydiving. 1.00

00:25:19.000 That's no big deal.

00:25:20.000 I'll skydive. 1.00

00:25:21.000 I'll jump out of a fucking plane. 1.00

00:25:22.000 That I would do with my eyes closed every day. 1.00

00:25:24.000 The high risk ratio on that one is we're all set.

00:25:28.000 What is the risk ratio on skydiving?

00:25:29.000 What percentage of those things go wrong?

00:25:32.000 It's incredibly low.

00:25:34.000 So you have a main parachute and a reserve parachute.

00:25:37.000 I don't think there has been a true double failure, meaning your main parachute malfunctions.

00:25:43.000 You cut it away properly and deploy your reserve parachute and have that also fail in 20-some years.

00:25:50.000 People die skydiving all the time.

00:25:53.000 Well, not all the time, because I guess the population of people that do it is...

00:25:57.000 Not huge, but I would say the vast majority of people who die skydiving, they kill themselves.

00:26:03.000 They make a poor decision.

00:26:05.000 And most people who die skydiving die under perfectly functioning equipment.

00:26:10.000 Really?

00:26:10.000 So the canopy size, the main canopy that you're flying, the wing over your head, the smaller it is, the faster it goes, the faster it descends, but also, quite frankly, the more fun it is.

00:26:20.000 But with fun, there's consequence.

00:26:23.000 So there are canopies that you can initiate a turn with.

00:26:28.000 And if you initiate the turn too low, you cannot pull the canopy out of the turn.

00:26:33.000 You will impact the ground at a high rate of speed regardless of what you do.

00:26:36.000 And if you get under that canopy with not enough experience, obviously your odds of making a bad decision are going to go through the roof.

00:26:43.000 So most injuries and fatalities, at least from the stuff I have seen, is from people making poor decisions under good equipment or choosing to execute an emergency procedure, which would be cutting away your main parachute and deploying reserve.

00:26:56.000 Either out of sequence or doing it too low where the reserve parachute doesn't have time to open.

00:27:00.000 To me, that's not a failure of the parachute system.

00:27:02.000 That's the failure of the individual who is driving that parachute system.

00:27:06.000 So if you have a main parachute and you jump out and you hit the main parachute and there's a malfunction, how do you cut it off to get the other one?

00:27:13.000 So there's two pillows, one on each side.

00:27:15.000 The right-hand side, you literally need to do this in the correct order, even though people have killed themselves by going backwards.

00:27:21.000 So you pull to full arm extension.

00:27:24.000 It's literally just a pillow with Velcro that has two cables, and the cables are what's actually holding the parachute on your shoulders.

00:27:30.000 If you pull that out, a three-ring release system, which is basically just a load reduction system, unwinds itself and your parachute's gone, and you're going back into free fall, and you just pull the other pillow.

00:27:43.000 It sounds worse than it is, and before I had my first cutaway, it was terrifying.

00:27:47.000 And then after you have four or five, you're like, okay, I got this.

00:27:49.000 You had four or five main parachutes fail?

00:27:52.000 I think I'm at about seven.

00:27:54.000 Jesus Christ, Andy.

00:27:56.000 Well, I've been jumping for 20 years.

00:27:58.000 I don't want to hear that, man.

00:28:02.000 I started jumping in 99. Statistically, I'm actually, I think, under.

00:28:07.000 I think it's like one in every 888 jumps, you'll have a malfunction or a gear failure.

00:28:12.000 Honestly, your first one is an emotional experience.

00:28:16.000 I would imagine.

00:28:17.000 What was the first one?

00:28:20.000 Deploying a parachute and just sitting there looking at it as it's – because they want to open and you can – I can tell now within an instant of trying to deploy my parachute whether or not it's going to open or not just by looking at the shape, by sometimes listening to it and just seeing how it opens.

00:28:36.000 Sometimes – I mean so packing a parachute people think is really difficult.

00:28:39.000 If you can fold a t-shirt, you can pack a parachute.

00:28:43.000 Sometimes, though, you just get off of a jump and you only have 10 minutes to make the next jump.

00:28:48.000 So you skip a few steps, or you rush through a few steps.

00:28:51.000 Is that what happened with you?

00:28:53.000 Potentially.

00:28:53.000 I may have skipped all of the non-essential steps and a few of the essential steps to get the parachute.

00:28:59.000 Really?

00:28:59.000 Yeah.

00:29:00.000 I was just rushing, and I didn't have a lot of experience, so I was stuffing the thing in there.

00:29:04.000 And when I tried to deploy the parachute, it was asymmetrical, so...

00:29:09.000 Sometimes it'll open and it'll start spinning and then you're flying with your back.

00:29:12.000 That would be considered an exciting moment, I would say.

00:29:16.000 So what happened with you?

00:29:17.000 What exactly went wrong?

00:29:18.000 It just came out asymmetrically.

00:29:20.000 The parachute wasn't opening.

00:29:21.000 Were you spinning?

00:29:22.000 No, I wasn't.

00:29:23.000 I actually was able to recognize just by...

00:29:25.000 It should come out.

00:29:25.000 It looks like a rectangle more than anything.

00:29:28.000 But if you look like a rectangle that's twisted, there's no way to fix that.

00:29:31.000 No way.

00:29:32.000 So just get rid of it.

00:29:33.000 And that's what I did.

00:29:33.000 I looked up and I said, okay, that's not going to work.

00:29:37.000 Reach, pull, reach, pull. 0.99

00:29:39.000 And your reserve opened so fast.

00:29:41.000 Like by the time...

00:29:42.000 I felt like by the time I had pulled the reserve handle, because I had a handle at that point, by the time I had moved my arm to three quarters of extension, it had fired off.

00:29:50.000 Wow.

00:29:50.000 Yeah.

00:29:51.000 Dude.

00:29:52.000 But the difference, and you're asking the difference, like, why is risk skydiving lower?

00:29:57.000 It's because you have time.

00:29:58.000 Thousands of feet.

00:30:00.000 Whereas base jumping, you might have hundreds.

00:30:03.000 Or if you're Really pushing the envelope, you might have sub-10 feet because you're flying close to the ground as fast as you can go.

00:30:10.000 Did your friend Alex, who died, did he die base jumping?

00:30:13.000 He died wingsuit base jumping.

00:30:14.000 Something that I was...

00:30:16.000 I mean, he was my main base jumping partner.

00:30:19.000 What is the difference between wingsuit base jumping and regular base jumping?

00:30:22.000 Regular base jumping, you just have a quick deploy parachute, right?

00:30:25.000 So you have one parachute system when you base jump instead of two because there is not time for a reserve to open.

00:30:30.000 So that is just taken out of the system.

00:30:32.000 Right.

00:30:32.000 So you pack your...

00:30:34.000 Primary or only parachute, very similar to a reserve.

00:30:37.000 It's designed to open rapidly.

00:30:39.000 It's designed to take a lot of load.

00:30:43.000 So base jumping is just jumping off of a static object.

00:30:46.000 Base stands for building, antenna, span, or earth.

00:30:49.000 So four types of object.

00:30:50.000 The addition of the wingsuit is really the only difference, which allows you to...

00:30:55.000 Like for myself personally, I'm not a huge fan of jumping off buildings and cliffs.

00:31:00.000 Without a wingsuit, because I don't like being from me to that flag when a parachute opens. 0.98

00:31:05.000 Because if it doesn't open exactly in the direction you want it to, you better be Johnny on the spot or you're going to have a fucking problem.

00:31:11.000 So to me, if you have enough altitude, you put a wingsuit on, in two or three seconds, the suit is mocking forward. 0.83

00:31:19.000 So then you're hundreds if not thousands of feet away from the object.

00:31:22.000 Then your parachute can open up however you want it to.

00:31:25.000 Have they made any improvements in the technology of this stuff since you first started jumping?

00:31:30.000 Huge improvements.

00:31:32.000 I mean, the first wingsuits were literally just fabric that had like the little thumb loops you'll find on like cold weather long sleeve shirts sometimes.

00:31:39.000 Seriously.

00:31:40.000 That's how you kept it on?

00:31:42.000 That's how they kept it on. 0.99

00:31:43.000 I didn't jump any of those goddamn things. 0.98

00:31:45.000 But, I mean, I think Patrick Day Gardin is how you say his name. 0.98

00:31:49.000 He was one of the first.

00:31:50.000 And they would just sit there and just, they would just jam their appendages and lock them out and use their entire musculature to sail this fabric as far out as they could get. 1.00

00:32:00.000 Fuck. 0.99

00:32:01.000 And then the suits now are unbelievable. 1.00

00:32:03.000 So each wing, like the wing between your legs and the wing between each of your arms.

00:32:08.000 So there's three of them.

00:32:09.000 They're totally independent.

00:32:10.000 They have a ram air opening, so the air rushes into that and makes the wings semi-rigid, so it reduces the stress on your body.

00:32:17.000 And their flight characteristics are insane.

00:32:20.000 You can get the suit flying faster, you can fly it flatter, you can float.

00:32:26.000 Everything about it is improved, except for the decision-making process of the monkey who's actually jumping it.

00:32:35.000 That's the original one, Jamie?

00:32:36.000 Oh, that guy's dead, for sure.

00:32:42.000 It says, uh, Manus, uh, Mickey Morgan wearing a batwing suit. 0.99

00:32:48.000 Is that ridiculous? 0.99

00:32:49.000 Well, who was the first fucking psycho that thought that this was something that they should try? 1.00

00:32:53.000 It could potentially have been it. 1.00

00:32:55.000 Look at this asshole! 1.00

00:32:55.000 Oh my god! 1.00

00:32:57.000 This guy's like, he looks like he's living in the 1800s. 1.00

00:33:00.000 When did they invent these fucking things? 1.00

00:33:01.000 I don't know. 1.00

00:33:02.000 I know one of these guys died going off the Eiffel Tower in an exhibition.

00:33:05.000 This is 1900 right here.

00:33:07.000 1900? 1.00

00:33:08.000 What in the fuck? 1.00

00:33:09.000 Look at that guy. 1.00

00:33:11.000 Strong.

00:33:12.000 You know what, man?

00:33:13.000 If you were living in 1900, you'd probably be like, listen, let's just get this over with. 1.00

00:33:17.000 Fuck living in 1900. Everyone has syphilis. 1.00

00:33:20.000 Fucking whiskey's illegal. 1.00

00:33:21.000 I'm just jumping off. 1.00

00:33:23.000 Look at that.

00:33:25.000 That is crazy.

00:33:26.000 Will you see that?

00:33:26.000 Yeah.

00:33:27.000 I mean, honestly, I'm not going to lie, I would probably jump that out of an airplane.

00:33:31.000 1895!

00:33:32.000 Oh, he's the inventor, Earl Stein.

00:33:34.000 He died in the first attempt.

00:33:36.000 Oops.

00:33:36.000 Oh, Jesus Christ!

00:33:39.000 He died in the first attempt.

00:33:41.000 Honor to a modern hero.

00:33:42.000 All right, settle down.

00:33:43.000 But here's the thing, Joe.

00:33:45.000 There's like 60-some people who are associated with the modern-day wingsuit and testing and evaluating to get it to this point.

00:33:51.000 Mm-hmm.

00:33:52.000 They're all dead. 0.87

00:33:53.000 All of them are dead. 0.97

00:33:54.000 Every one of them.

00:33:55.000 Jesus.

00:33:57.000 But that suit and the difference between that and where we are now, it's night and day.

00:34:03.000 But everyone involved in the creation of these wingsuits died in a wingsuit.

00:34:08.000 Yep. 1.00

00:34:09.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

00:34:10.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:34:11.000 That is not good.

00:34:12.000 Like, there wouldn't be a whole lot of black belts in jiu-jitsu if everyone who got to a certain point died.

00:34:18.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:34:19.000 It's hard to justify or rationalize the behavior for sure.

00:34:22.000 I'll be the first person to admit that.

00:34:25.000 What is it?

00:34:26.000 Like, what is it about...

00:34:27.000 Oh, this guy jumped with his dog!

00:34:29.000 That's Dean Potter jumping with his dog.

00:34:30.000 Oh, the poor dog. 0.99

00:34:32.000 So, the dog...

00:34:32.000 This is not the dog's fault.

00:34:33.000 The dog, I believe, is...

00:34:35.000 That looks like Switzerland. 1.00

00:34:36.000 This crazy asshole fucking owner. 1.00

00:34:37.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:34:38.000 So Dean was insane, right?

00:34:40.000 He was a world-class rock climber. 0.78

00:34:42.000 He's also dead from jumping a wingsuit.

00:34:44.000 He died in Yosemite.

00:34:47.000 Like I said, the technology advances.

00:34:50.000 I was not there the day that Dean died.

00:34:53.000 I've talked to people who have looked at it.

00:34:55.000 As to the conditions that led up to it, and one thing people generally don't want to do is place the responsibility on the individual making the choice, but from everything that I have seen, he made a choice to jump at a time when he should not have been jumping due to visual conditions.

00:35:11.000 So even though the suits are amazing, really the only thing that doesn't seem to be evolving is the person that's jumping it.

00:35:17.000 Most of the time, just like skydiving, it's just a human being making a very poor choice, to include Alex.

00:35:23.000 What is it about people, particularly people like yourself, that love these thrills?

00:35:30.000 What are you getting out of that?

00:35:32.000 What are you getting out of that other than this mad adrenaline rush?

00:35:36.000 What is it?

00:35:37.000 What motivates you to keep doing that?

00:35:42.000 So if I look back at it objectively...

00:35:45.000 I think when I initially started pushing hard down that path, I was trying to replicate a headspace or a feeling or a sensation that I had in my old job.

00:35:57.000 So if you want to talk about clarity of thought, and I think we might have talked about this the very first time that we sat down, stripping away all ancillary bullshit that has absolutely no meaning, but for me at least, I spend 99% of my time worrying about things that have no impact whatsoever.

00:36:14.000 Right.

00:36:15.000 So you sit on a helicopter, pick the battle space that you're in, and you get a five minute warning.

00:36:20.000 And you really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage.

00:36:25.000 And then you get a three-minute warning.

00:36:27.000 And then you kind of stop worrying about whether or not you just had an argument with your wife or you just sent off some snarky email.

00:36:33.000 Then you get a one-minute warning and a 30-second warning.

00:36:35.000 And the closer and closer and closer you get, everything is gone.

00:36:39.000 And it is still to this day the sensation and state that I have been in that is by far – I had no question about my purpose and I had the utmost clarity that I've ever experienced in my life.

00:36:56.000 And you get used to operating in that headspace of just being in the moment.

00:37:00.000 The first one to three seconds in front of you, nothing else matters.

00:37:04.000 I'm going to solve this problem and move on to the next one.

00:37:06.000 This problem and move on to the next one.

00:37:08.000 Well, then I lost that ability to do that. 0.91

00:37:10.000 And it sucked because I liked operating in that headspace because it helped me deal with all the other bullshit in my life because it reset for me my what matters and what doesn't matter ratio. 0.90

00:37:21.000 I was able to get rid of like, I would describe it as just the white noise in my head. 0.94

00:37:24.000 Or another way I'll describe it is, Like Jamie's got a bunch of levers that he can push up.

00:37:29.000 I think, and I'm included in this, I think most people are pegged out at a 10 almost all the time. 0.96

00:37:35.000 They're fucking white-knuckling through life.

00:37:37.000 But if you can get into that state where you have that clarity of purpose, clarity of focus, I felt like it pulled everything back to a 3. And so that state helped me in things that had nothing to do with that activity and it lasted for a long time. 0.98

00:37:52.000 So when you're base jumping and you're standing on a cliff and you're scared out of your mind and you can't talk because your mouth is so dry and you have a P ring on your suit, which is why you always get dark suits so people can't see your P ring.

00:38:06.000 Every alarm bell in your body is telling you, don't jump.

00:38:09.000 And I had the same experience.

00:38:11.000 I wasn't worried about checking count.

00:38:13.000 I wasn't worried about what was going on in life.

00:38:14.000 I was just living in that moment.

00:38:16.000 And it helped me be a better dad.

00:38:20.000 It helped me be a better...

00:38:22.000 Husband.

00:38:23.000 It helped me be better at any business decision that I need to make because it allowed me to pull all of those stereo levers back down.

00:38:29.000 So it's less for me, and I can only speak for me, it's less about thrill-seeking because I get that all the time.

00:38:35.000 Like, you're an adrenaline junkie.

00:38:37.000 I'm an adrenaline enthusiast.

00:38:39.000 I certainly enjoy that, but I actually like what I get from the activity more than the activity itself.

00:38:45.000 What do you think is going on where people are pegged at 10 all the time with nonsense and that something that's life-threatening can bring it back to a 3 and offer clarity?

00:38:55.000 I mean, there has to be something that you've discussed or thought about in depth.

00:38:58.000 I just think it helps you...

00:39:02.000 Control-Alt-Delete your hard drive a little bit.

00:39:06.000 It helps by not having, like when I'm standing on a cliff right before I get ready to jump, there is absolutely nothing that I am thinking about other than where I want to be in the next three seconds.

00:39:19.000 By being able to focus on something so singular, and maybe I don't meditate, but I've heard people talking about it.

00:39:26.000 By being able to clear your mind, it helps them deal with everything else.

00:39:29.000 I think there might be some connection there.

00:39:32.000 But I just think that The removal of the noise that bombards everybody all day long, even for a little bit, helps you.

00:39:44.000 You have iPhone and headphones for sure, right?

00:39:51.000 Have you ever noticed when you're listening to it, you listen at the same volume level, but then it doesn't seem to be as loud?

00:39:56.000 So what do you do?

00:39:57.000 You click it up a notch, right?

00:39:58.000 And then you get used to that volume level, and then you click it up a notch.

00:40:01.000 And then you get used to that volume level.

00:40:03.000 Receptor downgrade phenomenon.

00:40:04.000 Your body gets used to it, so it adapts to it.

00:40:06.000 But if you pull that stimulus out and leave it at that high volume, but listen to it like two weeks later, it's going to blow your ears out.

00:40:14.000 It'll seem loud.

00:40:15.000 It's not gonna blow your ears out, but it's gonna seem much louder than it would if you slowly just incrementally started adding that volume.

00:40:21.000 So there's something in there that is allowing me, and I'm not recommending that anybody pursue therapy via the directions that I do, but there's something in there that's allowing me to...

00:40:33.000 Instead of add and add and add and add, that activity allows me to detach, and then when I come back to it, I realize it just feels different for me.

00:40:43.000 I don't know if that's a good description of the mechanism, but that's the best that I can probably describe it.

00:40:49.000 Well, I know a lot of veterans come back and really get involved in martial arts.

00:40:55.000 Martial arts apparently is good for along the same lines, the same sort of noise reduction.

00:41:01.000 Yep.

00:41:02.000 Especially jujitsu when someone's trying to strangle you and you're fighting for your life and they're mounting you and trying to lapel choke you.

00:41:07.000 I'm familiar with this now.

00:41:09.000 Yes, you're doing it now.

00:41:09.000 I'm six months in.

00:41:10.000 Yeah.

00:41:11.000 I don't know what you're talking about, being strangled or choked or having a huge person lay on your chest and just trying to breathe.

00:41:17.000 Oh, my God.

00:41:19.000 He's lying about being 220. He could have said 219. I'm not even sure.

00:41:23.000 He's lying.

00:41:25.000 I'm 200 pounds. 1.00

00:41:26.000 He's fucking 18 feet taller than me. 0.99

00:41:28.000 There's no way. 1.00

00:41:28.000 It doesn't even make sense. 1.00

00:41:31.000 Well...

00:41:32.000 I don't have enough experience with jiu-jitsu to truly speak about the long-term benefit, but what I can say is this.

00:41:40.000 If I stop base jumping, what I will replace that activity with is more jiu-jitsu.

00:41:46.000 Because what you just described, when you're simulating murder in your pajamas, and somebody is trying to choke you to death, you are not thinking about anything else.

00:41:57.000 About anything else.

00:41:58.000 One thing that I do do that's weird is I have songs playing in my head.

00:42:02.000 Well, you also probably have a few more reps than most people, so you can have that capacity for songs in your head.

00:42:08.000 But they're weird songs, like Christina Aguilera, I Am Beautiful.

00:42:11.000 Like, sometimes that'll be playing if I'm rolling.

00:42:15.000 But the song, it's almost like, it sounds strange, and I never talked about this before, but it's almost like a mantra.

00:42:23.000 Like, I'll play certain parts of the song over and over again in my head so that I can think about that instead of the actual training and the actual strangling.

00:42:34.000 But you also have...

00:42:37.000 I don't want to use the term mastered because I don't know if you could master it, but where you are, you are at a...

00:42:43.000 Like when you roll with somebody, I was talking with somebody about this not too long ago.

00:42:47.000 When I roll with a black belt, the outcome is preordained, right?

00:42:52.000 Unless they bought their black belt at Macy's and they're pretending.

00:42:55.000 In which case, I don't know.

00:42:56.000 I still don't know enough.

00:42:57.000 It might be preordained.

00:42:58.000 But the difference in what I'm thinking about versus what would happen if you and I rolled and what you are thinking about...

00:43:05.000 It's going to be massive.

00:43:07.000 So I don't have the hard drive space to sing Christina Aguilera.

00:43:11.000 And you probably don't even remember half of the things that you do when you roll or how you think about it because you have experienced it so many times.

00:43:20.000 The weirdest thing about jiu-jitsu and training, and you could say this about striking as well, is sometimes things happen and you didn't even think about doing them, you just did it.

00:43:29.000 Those are the weirdest moments.

00:43:31.000 There's sometimes where you'll kick somebody.

00:43:33.000 Someone will move and you'll move and then before you know it, you're like, wow, I didn't even think about throwing that and it lands.

00:43:41.000 It's like your brain recognizes, oh, I know what happens here.

00:43:45.000 You step to the left and throw that left kick and it just lands.

00:43:49.000 You just There's nowhere to go.

00:43:50.000 And then the same thing happens with jujitsu.

00:43:52.000 Like sometimes there's a scramble and in the scramble all of a sudden you're choking somebody.

00:43:56.000 It's like this movement happens and your body just falls into place.

00:44:01.000 I'll let you know if I ever experienced that particularly.

00:44:04.000 Well it doesn't happen all the time.

00:44:06.000 There's moments where, particularly if you do a lot of drilling, which I don't know how much drilling you're doing, but it's one of the things that I... It made me way better.

00:44:14.000 When I first started training with Eddie Bravo, one of the things that we did a lot from white belt to blue belt time was a lot of drills.

00:44:22.000 A lot of drills.

00:44:23.000 Just constant drilling.

00:44:25.000 And drilling is...

00:44:27.000 Overlooked and underappreciated because sparring is so fun.

00:44:31.000 So if you and Jamie were both learning together, you would do a few drills.

00:44:34.000 Okay, here's how you do the arm bar. 0.94

00:44:36.000 You're going to secure the arm.

00:44:37.000 You're going to swivel the hips, throw the leg over, and tap.

00:44:40.000 Good.

00:44:41.000 Okay, now your turn.

00:44:42.000 You do it over and over again.

00:44:42.000 That's fun.

00:44:43.000 That's fun.

00:44:43.000 Okay, now spar.

00:44:44.000 You're like, all right.

00:44:45.000 But take it easy, guys.

00:44:45.000 Work on the technique.

00:44:46.000 Yeah.

00:44:47.000 It's like, take it easy, guys!

00:44:49.000 Work on the technique!

00:44:50.000 But if you can spend more time drilling and less time rolling, you'll be way better at rolling.

00:44:56.000 The whole idea is to just carve these paths in your mind.

00:45:00.000 And then when you see someone who hits a perfect Iminari roll, that is not the first time they've done that.

00:45:07.000 There's...

00:45:09.000 There's so many super, super high-level guys now that you could watch on YouTube and you can watch them execute these techniques.

00:45:17.000 And the thing that you're seeing more than anything is how fluid everything is and how easily everything flows.

00:45:24.000 Because there's so much efficiency in their movement because they've done it over and over and over.

00:45:29.000 But drilling is everything.

00:45:31.000 And it's the thing that people do the least of.

00:45:33.000 So I go, when I'm home, I go five days a week.

00:45:36.000 And I go to the, so you met Travis today.

00:45:39.000 Awesome.

00:45:39.000 He's the owner of SBG Kalispell, which is where I train.

00:45:44.000 I mean, I couldn't have planned it better.

00:45:46.000 It's like four miles from my house.

00:45:47.000 That's amazing.

00:45:48.000 In the middle of, well, not the middle, the northwest corner of Montana.

00:45:51.000 To have that there is unbelievable.

00:45:53.000 How far are you from Bozeman?

00:45:55.000 As the crow flies, maybe 200 and some miles, but the drive there is like an L. It's not straight.

00:46:01.000 You go through the mountains, duck the grizzly bears.

00:46:04.000 Have you seen any grizzlies since you've been moved there?

00:46:07.000 No.

00:46:07.000 No?

00:46:08.000 They're fucking everywhere. 1.00

00:46:09.000 They're waiting for you. 1.00

00:46:10.000 I don't leave my house.

00:46:11.000 I just hang out with myself, have conversations, and go to jiu-jitsu.

00:46:16.000 But I'll do an hour, and a lot of it is just drill-based for that hour, and then there's an open mat afterwards.

00:46:22.000 Oh, okay.

00:46:23.000 So I feel like I'm getting a good mix of both.

00:46:26.000 And for me, I'm at the phase...

00:46:27.000 I'm such in the alphabet phase.

00:46:28.000 I'm like A, B, B. We'll put letters together into words later.

00:46:33.000 And when I roll, I just tell myself...

00:46:36.000 Maybe just focus on the fundamentals.

00:46:37.000 You don't need to create new techniques.

00:46:39.000 That's true.

00:46:40.000 And I try to relax and use zero strength.

00:46:43.000 Because I'm bigger than most people that are there.

00:46:46.000 And I've heard enough times that if you rely on your attributes early on, what's going to end up happening is you'll have success early and then you're going to nosedive.

00:46:54.000 And so I'm just trying to go the other route.

00:46:56.000 Just be as calm as possible.

00:46:57.000 Use as little strength as possible.

00:47:00.000 And just tap early and tap off.

00:47:02.000 It's my favorite move.

00:47:03.000 Yeah, another good thing to do is work off your back because you're a big guy.

00:47:06.000 That's where I started.

00:47:07.000 I actually asked, I said, can you just teach me the worst position ever and I'll try to build up from there.

00:47:13.000 And I don't care about offense, I'd rather learn defense.

00:47:15.000 That's very intelligent of you.

00:47:17.000 That's something a lot of people don't do and I certainly didn't do.

00:47:19.000 I was just trying to choke people quick.

00:47:21.000 Like, what could I do?

00:47:23.000 I don't have much success choking people.

00:47:26.000 But if you can get really comfortable with your defense, it's the most important thing.

00:47:30.000 Hickson Gracie has always said that.

00:47:32.000 He's like, the most important thing is to be safe.

00:47:35.000 He's like, I'm always safe.

00:47:37.000 He goes, no matter where I'm at.

00:47:38.000 Hickson would have real high-level black belts start on his back with a fully locked-in rear-naked choke.

00:47:47.000 Really?

00:47:48.000 And then he would defend.

00:47:49.000 And then he would always tap them.

00:47:52.000 I mean, honestly, to me, that's like holding a 45-pound plate out, letting go, and it just hovers.

00:47:57.000 I mean, it's beyond my understanding how they're able to do that.

00:48:00.000 Well, there's levels.

00:48:01.000 You know, there's levels to everything.

00:48:03.000 It was eye-opening when I started.

00:48:05.000 I'm like, oh, yeah.

00:48:06.000 I got this.

00:48:07.000 I know, right?

00:48:08.000 I'm like, this is obviously a simple recipe.

00:48:10.000 Go to gym, tap people out.

00:48:12.000 There's nothing in between.

00:48:13.000 I got this. 0.99

00:48:14.000 And then after, like, my first 20 minutes, I'm like, oh, shit. 0.99

00:48:17.000 It's humbling, man. 0.99

00:48:18.000 It's so humbling.

00:48:19.000 I actually think that's one of the best parts about it.

00:48:20.000 Like, I love...

00:48:22.000 So my body tells me I know who I'm going to have a really, really tough role with, and they're probably going to beat me, and I can feel it bouncing against my ego.

00:48:29.000 But if I just go roll with that guy over there, I bet you I'll be successful.

00:48:32.000 And I feel that inherently, and I'll just go roll with the person I know who's probably going to beat me.

00:48:37.000 Because I love that choice.

00:48:39.000 One, something that protects your ego, and something that keeps it in check.

00:48:42.000 Because it is humbling. 0.99

00:48:44.000 And I've been a dumbass. 0.98

00:48:45.000 I should have tapped earlier before, and I'm sitting there. 0.98

00:48:48.000 They completely have me locked in.

00:48:50.000 But I'm going to try to muscle my way out of this, and then my arms soar for three weeks.

00:48:53.000 Right.

00:48:53.000 Well, it's actually important to do both, believe it or not.

00:48:56.000 It's important to be humbled, for sure.

00:48:58.000 It's important to have a realistic perspective of your abilities, but it's also important to tap people.

00:49:05.000 I always tell people that one of the best ways to get really good is to strangle blue belts. 1.00

00:49:10.000 Get people that have a little bit...

00:49:13.000 A little bit of technique, and then they have a little bit of understanding of what's going on, and just put the choke to them.

00:49:19.000 But also drilling.

00:49:21.000 But then, you know, you have to roll with people that are legitimately far better than you just for a perspective enhancer, to understand how quickly someone can close the distance, how quickly someone can take advantage of an opportunity, and then also the feeling of being set up two,

00:49:37.000 three steps in a row.

00:49:38.000 Like one of the things, like when I roll with John Jack Manchato...

00:49:43.000 He's a multiple-time world champion.

00:49:46.000 And you'll see, especially over time, the many, many, many times of training with him, you'll see he's setting you up several steps ahead.

00:49:54.000 If he's sweeping you to the left, he's sweeping you this way.

00:49:59.000 He's expecting you to base.

00:50:01.000 And when you base, he's going to adjust.

00:50:03.000 And when you adjust to him adjusting, he's going to grab your leg.

00:50:07.000 And then, boom, you're on your back. 1.00

00:50:09.000 You're like, fuck! 0.99

00:50:10.000 It's like he already saw the path, and all you're thinking of is, oh, don't let him sweep me. 1.00

00:50:16.000 But he's sort of trying to sweep you. 0.99

00:50:18.000 I mean, if you just give in like a bitch, he'll sweep you, but he's really wanting you to base. 1.00

00:50:23.000 And then when you go to defend the base, then he's going to trap you. 0.99

00:50:25.000 And then when you go to try to adjust for the trap, whoops!

00:50:28.000 He's got your leg and you're on your back. 1.00

00:50:30.000 And then his knee's on your belly, and you're like, motherfucker. 1.00

00:50:32.000 And he saw the whole thing so many steps ahead. 0.99

00:50:35.000 I mean, it's a beautiful art form.

00:50:37.000 It really is, because...

00:50:39.000 I always say about the guys that I know that are some of the best guys in the world, they're so different than what you'd expect.

00:50:45.000 They're really like nerd assassins.

00:50:47.000 Because they're really smart.

00:50:49.000 Because you're thinking almost like...

00:50:51.000 It's like kinetic chess.

00:50:53.000 You're thinking about all these moves.

00:50:55.000 It's just that you can get your chess pieces to move better than other people's chess pieces can.

00:51:00.000 It's like chess, but you can make your chess, if you do a lot of box jumps and plyos and you do heavy-duty strength and conditioning routines, you can get your chess pieces to move better.

00:51:12.000 You can give your chess pieces more endurance.

00:51:15.000 You can prolong your ability to train and roll.

00:51:22.000 It's been great.

00:51:23.000 And like I said, in those moments where you're getting choked or I can't breathe, it's the same type of focus.

00:51:31.000 It is the singular goal in your life to not get murdered.

00:51:35.000 And I feel, for me, it's been crazy healthy.

00:51:38.000 I can't speak to the larger veteran community, but I can absolutely say for me, it's beneficial.

00:51:43.000 I think it's beneficial for a lot of veterans.

00:51:45.000 I talk to a lot of them that train, and a lot of them get super addicted. 0.99

00:51:51.000 They're there five, six days a week, and wrapping up their elbows and their wrists and taping up their fingers, and they don't give a fuck. 0.99

00:51:57.000 They just want to keep going. 0.98

00:51:58.000 They'll literally roll like this with one arm because their shoulder's blown out.

00:52:02.000 I'm like, you're not going to take time off?

00:52:03.000 I'm just going to work around it.

00:52:05.000 Work around it.

00:52:06.000 Which is not always good because eventually... 0.72

00:52:08.000 I know a lot of guys who've reached a point where they maybe could have rehabbed something and now they have to have surgery because they've kind of blown it out to the point where it's fucking dangling.

00:52:18.000 How much do you still roll? 0.96

00:52:19.000 Very little.

00:52:20.000 Really?

00:52:20.000 Yeah.

00:52:20.000 Is it by choice?

00:52:21.000 Yeah.

00:52:22.000 I've had...

00:52:23.000 I think?

00:52:41.000 And I got Regenikine on that.

00:52:43.000 I did some spinal decompression and I relieved all that.

00:52:47.000 Then I tore some meniscus and I had some shoulder injuries. 0.89

00:52:50.000 The shoulder injuries were really bothersome because it was also fucking with archery.

00:52:57.000 And I was really worried about not being able to... 0.99

00:52:59.000 Don't fuck with archery. 1.00

00:53:00.000 Yeah, I love it too much. 1.00

00:53:02.000 And so I rehabbed those almost 100%.

00:53:05.000 My left one's still a little wonky, but I'm ready to roll.

00:53:08.000 I'm going to train with John Jock either this week or next week, and we're going to do a podcast.

00:53:12.000 So I'll get back into it once that happens.

00:53:15.000 So when did you start Jiu-Jitsu?

00:53:17.000 96. Okay, so substantial period of time.

00:53:20.000 With that amount of time off that you essentially had to take, what impact would that have for you?

00:53:25.000 It'll have a little bit of impact on my timing, but luckily, during this entire time, I've worked out very hard.

00:53:31.000 So my body's physically in very good shape.

00:53:35.000 Like today, I ran the mountains for the first time in like six weeks since my meniscus injury, and it seems to be...

00:53:42.000 100%.

00:53:42.000 I mean, maybe not 100%, but no pain at all.

00:53:45.000 And I ran a good, steep course where it's, you know, like heavy-duty running in the hills, and I was getting cysts, like recurring cysts, because where the meniscus tear was, there was some, you know, it was loose, and so, like, as I'm pounding, 0.98

00:54:00.000 the blood would pool up, and then it would, you know, swell up, and I had to get it drained, and they'd stick this fucking fat needle in there and suck all this puss out. 0.99

00:54:08.000 It was nasty. 0.99

00:54:10.000 So I got exosomes and platelet-rich plasma six weeks ago.

00:54:14.000 So from then, I waited the six weeks, but during that time period, I mostly did that echobike, that rogue echobike, because it's not impactful, so it doesn't put the pounding on the knee that was causing the cysts. 0.98

00:54:29.000 But fuck, man, does that thing build your cardio up. 0.98

00:54:32.000 Oh, it's designed by Satan. 1.00

00:54:33.000 It's amazing.

00:54:35.000 Tabatas, 20 sprint.

00:54:37.000 Yeah, 20 second sprint, 10 second rest. 1.00

00:54:39.000 Fuck, those are incredible. 0.99

00:54:41.000 That bike will give you everything that you are willing to take. 1.00

00:54:44.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:54:45.000 It really will.

00:54:46.000 So I'm really pleased with myself that I didn't allow myself to get out of shape. 0.98

00:54:49.000 Because when I ran today, I was like, fuck, it's been six weeks. 0.99

00:54:52.000 This is going to be brutal. 0.99

00:54:53.000 It wasn't brutal.

00:54:54.000 It was normal.

00:54:54.000 Because I've been doing the echo bike.

00:54:56.000 So it's maintained my cardiovascular level, which was always my weakest point.

00:55:02.000 And so your knowledge and experience base in jujitsu.

00:55:05.000 And I ask because, like I said, I've been at this for six months.

00:55:08.000 I'll take a week off for travel and I'll go back to a class and I feel like I have a massive disconnect between knowledge and getting my body to work.

00:55:15.000 And I suspect it's because I'm thinking too much.

00:55:18.000 Whereas, like I was saying, you have the ability to listen to Miley Cyrus in your head or whatever her name, Christina Aguilera.

00:55:24.000 I like Miley Cyrus too.

00:55:25.000 Awesome. 0.99

00:55:27.000 People are into weird shit. 0.99

00:55:28.000 I'm not going to put a value judgment on that. 1.00

00:55:31.000 Whereas I don't.

00:55:32.000 So for me, if I take time off, I really, really struggle with it because I can't connect the dots.

00:55:38.000 Well, it's definitely, there's a difference though.

00:55:40.000 The pathways get sharper when I train more.

00:55:43.000 Like the last time I was doing like serious training was over a year ago.

00:55:46.000 And when I was doing it, like after a few sessions, the pathways sharpened.

00:55:52.000 And like, you know, you clinch up, there's less hesitation, there's more of an understanding of what's got to take place, there's more of like a familiarity with training.

00:56:01.000 Yeah. 0.92

00:56:01.000 But you know, as you get older, you know, I'm 51 now, the thing that happens is your fucking joints and your body does not want to hold up to this continued stress. 0.92

00:56:11.000 So you have to really be careful about when to train and how hard you train. 0.94

00:56:15.000 Like my friend Eddie Bravo is going through that right now.

00:56:18.000 He has a fake disc now in his lower back.

00:56:22.000 He had to have his disc replaced with a titanium articulating disc.

00:56:27.000 He had knee surgery.

00:56:29.000 He had shoulder surgery.

00:56:31.000 And now he needs wrist surgery.

00:56:32.000 This is all within a couple of years.

00:56:35.000 And he's a couple of years younger than me.

00:56:37.000 So his body is hitting that point where this...

00:56:40.000 Years and years and years of strain and pull and choke and resist and base and push.

00:56:48.000 Your body just doesn't want to do that all the time.

00:56:51.000 So you have to be smart in terms of how much stress and how much recovery you put on.

00:56:56.000 I think you also have to be really smart about working on your flexibility and working on your recovery, whether it's through cryotherapy or sauna use or massage.

00:57:05.000 But rest, too. 0.98

00:57:07.000 You can't train like a fucking wild demon six days a week when you're 50. You just can't. 1.00

00:57:13.000 You might get a couple of days in hard, but you also have to understand, like, flow rolls.

00:57:18.000 Flow rolls are giant.

00:57:19.000 It's the same thing with flow sparring. 0.96

00:57:21.000 Like, I remember some of the best gains that I made as a kickboxer with training with guys who I knew I could trust to not fucking brain me. 0.73

00:57:29.000 Like, that we would tap each other.

00:57:31.000 And so then you're carving pathways...

00:57:34.000 But you're not taking the kind of abuse that you take if you're just going into...

00:57:37.000 Because sometimes sparring...

00:57:39.000 It's not really sparring.

00:57:41.000 You're fighting.

00:57:42.000 You're fighting people in the gym.

00:57:43.000 You just get together and you're lacing up your gloves.

00:57:45.000 You're tapping gloves.

00:57:46.000 They say go.

00:57:47.000 The bell goes off. 0.99

00:57:48.000 And you're fucking full blasting each other. 0.99

00:57:51.000 And it's more common than not. 0.99

00:57:53.000 Especially in the early days.

00:57:55.000 I kind of find that to be the case with two white belts going off saying... 0.92

00:57:59.000 Because you got to do the blood circle to make sure nobody's going to get hurt by the freaking momentum bouncing around the gym.

00:58:04.000 It's like, hey, buddy, you want to just work on that technique?

00:58:07.000 And they look at you and go, uh-huh. 1.00

00:58:08.000 I'm like, oh, fuck. 1.00

00:58:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:58:10.000 They're just trying to kill. 1.00

00:58:11.000 Yeah, they're trying to kill you. 1.00

00:58:13.000 Yeah. 0.88

00:58:13.000 Yeah, there's a lot of that. 0.88

00:58:14.000 It's really uncomfortable when someone does that to you, too. 0.98

00:58:17.000 You're like, God damn it. 0.98

00:58:18.000 Do I have to do this with you? 0.99

00:58:20.000 You know, like, sometimes you could choke them quick and they'll calm down.

00:58:24.000 Yeah.

00:58:24.000 And sometimes it just makes them more amped up, you know, depending on the human.

00:58:28.000 I feel like I need to focus on my chokes now. 0.93

00:58:29.000 It's not my strength.

00:58:31.000 Now, are you mostly going Gi?

00:58:33.000 Are you going no Gi as well? 0.96

00:58:35.000 I do more Gi than no Gi only because it happens to work with my schedule.

00:58:40.000 So Mondays and Fridays.

00:58:41.000 I love doing, or I have loved doing the no Gi stuff that I have because it's so quick. 0.91

00:58:45.000 Yeah.

00:58:46.000 And I find that I rotate through a lot of the different positions and I find myself working out of other problems more than I would in like a normal five minute just open roll.

00:58:55.000 Mm-hmm.

00:58:57.000 And I realize how limited my offense is because I like holding on to the pajamas and basically holding on to a freaking doorknob on somebody's collar.

00:59:05.000 It makes sense to me now when I've heard you talk before like, yeah, go ahead and wear that sweatshirt.

00:59:09.000 Now I'm like, ooh, I don't really want to wear a sweatshirt.

00:59:11.000 Someone wearing a tie.

00:59:13.000 Someone wearing a tie. 1.00

00:59:14.000 I'm like, I'll kill you with that tie. 0.99

00:59:15.000 I get a hold of that tie. 1.00

00:59:16.000 You're a dead man. 1.00

00:59:17.000 You've got a noose around your neck. 1.00

00:59:19.000 A zip-up hoodie.

00:59:20.000 I'm like, oh, man.

00:59:22.000 First, obviously, I'd rub that zipper across your neck, but then you're getting choked with it. 1.00

00:59:25.000 Well, how about a leather jacket if you're fucking with someone in the street and someone's a judo player? 1.00

00:59:31.000 Someone who knows judo and you've got a thick-ass winter coat and they can grab that shit and brain you with the world. 1.00

00:59:37.000 They'll just drive your fucking head into the concrete. 1.00

00:59:40.000 It's been cool, man. 1.00

00:59:41.000 I wish I had found it earlier.

00:59:43.000 And I wish I hadn't been so hesitant to try it earlier.

00:59:46.000 And the reason I was, 100% reason I was, is because of my own ego.

00:59:50.000 Yeah, but the thing is, it doesn't matter when, I wish I had done it earlier. 1.00

00:59:55.000 Fuck all that. 1.00

00:59:55.000 You're doing it now. 1.00

00:59:57.000 That's what's important.

00:59:58.000 It doesn't matter when you start.

01:00:00.000 The thing about jujitsu is once you're on a path, just enjoy the path.

01:00:04.000 Don't think, God, I should have started when I was eight. 1.00

01:00:06.000 Well, you can't unless you have a fucking time machine. 0.99

01:00:08.000 And if you did, goddammit, I would not want to go back and be eight years old and know everything I know now. 0.99

01:00:14.000 It'd be like watching a movie for the 100th time. 0.94

01:00:17.000 You'd be bored out of your mind. 0.99

01:00:18.000 Well, I'd fuck it up. 1.00

01:00:20.000 I'd probably wind up homeless.

01:00:21.000 No, your stock portfolio would be amazing because of all the knowledge.

01:00:24.000 Maybe, right?

01:00:24.000 Yeah.

01:00:24.000 We'll be like, Apple.

01:00:26.000 These fuckers are going to figure it out. 1.00

01:00:28.000 Buy Apple at three. 1.00

01:00:28.000 Let's get some Amazon stock going. 1.00

01:00:31.000 You'd kill it on that.

01:00:32.000 I know. 1.00

01:00:32.000 People would be like, what? 1.00

01:00:33.000 A book thing?

01:00:34.000 An online book thing?

01:00:35.000 Trust me.

01:00:35.000 Don't worry about it.

01:00:36.000 Put it all in there.

01:00:36.000 Put all your money on Facebook.

01:00:39.000 What's Facebook? 1.00

01:00:40.000 Fuck you talking? 1.00

01:00:41.000 You know, David Cho, he painted Facebook. 1.00

01:00:44.000 He did, like, murals for Facebook in their studio, and they paid him in stock.

01:00:48.000 Oh, wow. 0.97

01:00:49.000 And he got fucking hundreds, hundreds of millions from that. 0.98

01:00:54.000 And he's just balling all over the world on his Facebook stock. 0.93

01:00:57.000 They don't seem to be doing too well these days, though.

01:01:00.000 Facebook stock?

01:01:00.000 No, not the stock necessarily, the company.

01:01:02.000 I keep seeing them in the news for the wrong reasons.

01:01:05.000 Yes, that's a really interesting point, right?

01:01:07.000 I've been focusing a lot on what these people are doing in terms of social media and in terms of...

01:01:17.000 You know, what impact this has on our elections, on our culture, how they're being influenced.

01:01:25.000 How about privacy?

01:01:27.000 Yeah, we booked that woman, right?

01:01:28.000 Renee, what is her last name again?

01:01:31.000 She's got a phenomenal podcast with Sam Harris called The War of Information.

01:01:37.000 And it's either The Information War or The War of Information.

01:01:41.000 The rest of us.

01:01:42.000 Duresta.

01:01:43.000 Renee Duresta.

01:01:44.000 And she studied this.

01:01:46.000 She studied these Russian troll farms and the impact they have and these fake accounts online.

01:01:53.000 And what they'll do is like, for instance, they set up two rallies across the street from each other.

01:02:00.000 One was a Texas Pride rally and one was a Muslim rally.

01:02:05.000 It's a classic pairing.

01:02:06.000 And they do it across the street from each other on purpose so that they'll interact with each other.

01:02:10.000 So that people get there...

01:02:11.000 There's no one organizing it, because there's no real person on the ground, because they're doing everything from Russia. 0.93

01:02:16.000 And this is just one example.

01:02:18.000 They do a lot of things with Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter.

01:02:23.000 They were pairing them against each other.

01:02:31.000 Black pages that were supporting anyone but Hillary.

01:02:34.000 This was their message.

01:02:35.000 Anyone but Hillary. 0.86

01:02:36.000 Hillary Clinton does not support the black community.

01:02:39.000 We should vote for Bernie Sanders.

01:02:40.000 We should vote for Jill Stein.

01:02:41.000 We should vote for anybody but Hillary. 1.00

01:02:44.000 And what they were basically trying to do was weaken the support that the Democrats traditionally have from the black community.

01:02:50.000 And they were doing this through these pages.

01:02:53.000 And there was not that many pages when you find out there's like 80 pages or 100 pages they were running.

01:02:57.000 But then you find out the amount of interactions that they had with them.

01:03:00.000 Millions and millions and millions of interactions.

01:03:03.000 So comments, likes, shares, and then people are – this message that they think is coming from people from their community is actually coming from Russia, and it's actually a calculated attempt to sow dissent and to sow this conflict in America.

01:03:19.000 And the idea is – And it sounded so crazy to me, because I wasn't really paying attention to it that much, but the idea is that they're trying to make us fight against each other about everything, so that it fucks up democracy.

01:03:34.000 So the idea is to undermine it.

01:03:36.000 I would say that they've achieved that goal, whether or not they're responsible for it or not, but it certainly seems like we're trending in that direction.

01:03:40.000 It does.

01:03:41.000 I can't remember a time where there's more conflict and more outrage and more people willing to jump into the fray, regardless of whether or not they're informed.

01:03:52.000 What do you think about the people who keep calling for violence?

01:03:54.000 It drives me crazy, because it's people who don't understand violence.

01:03:58.000 I was going to say the same thing.

01:03:59.000 I see the people who most often doing it are the ones that are the least experienced or familiar with what violence actually looks like.

01:04:05.000 Well, there was a lot of that from Russia as There was a lot of fake Antifa pages.

01:04:09.000 There was a lot of that.

01:04:10.000 There was a lot of that where they were telling people that the only way to get people to understand is through violence and that you must be willing to do whatever you can by any means necessary and violence is good if it achieves the desired result of peace and prosperity and making sure that progressive ideas get pushed forth. 1.00

01:04:27.000 It's fucking crazy because people who don't know what violence is, it's like, here's one that people say, they'll say to a martial arts person, like they'll see someone like John Jones, like, if I was John Jones, I'd just fucking kick everybody's ass. 0.99

01:04:39.000 Like, no, you wouldn't. 1.00

01:04:40.000 No, you wouldn't, okay?

01:04:42.000 You know, and all the problems that John Jones has been in, one thing you should notice is, never been in a fight, there's no street fights out there with John Jones, you know what I mean?

01:04:50.000 I would bet he is the least likely person to engage in that activity.

01:05:14.000 I bet you're right. 0.99

01:05:16.000 Either they hire someone to get you back or they get you back on their own or they wait for you to not remember it and then they come around the corner and fucking brain you with a baseball bat. 0.99

01:05:25.000 This is what people do. 1.00

01:05:26.000 People don't like getting fucked up. 1.00

01:05:28.000 If you kick someone's ass, they're gonna remember it. 1.00

01:05:31.000 And this idea that you're gonna be able to suppress people... 1.00

01:05:34.000 By attacking them and hitting them with bike locks and not letting them speak at universities that you're protesting at.

01:05:43.000 It's madness.

01:05:44.000 And it's so confusing because it's not indicative of what I always thought of when I thought about left-wing people.

01:05:51.000 I thought they were peace-loving people or well-educated. 0.99

01:05:54.000 Instead, you're getting these people from their fucking computer. 1.00

01:05:57.000 They're calling for violence. 1.00

01:05:59.000 You don't know what violence is.

01:06:01.000 Well, the thing is, too, from what I've seen, it didn't start with the bike locks, right?

01:06:04.000 It started with, you know, shout this person down.

01:06:06.000 And then it's like fistfights.

01:06:08.000 And then they're throwing rocks.

01:06:09.000 And then it's bike locks.

01:06:10.000 And now I hear people, you know, get your guns.

01:06:13.000 And it starts to rise to that level.

01:06:15.000 I'm like, okay.

01:06:16.000 Yeah.

01:06:17.000 You people need to calm down.

01:06:20.000 Because the theory of, we need a revolution in this country, like, let's pump the brakes, homeboy.

01:06:26.000 Yeah.

01:06:27.000 Well, first of all, here's what we need.

01:06:29.000 We need camaraderie.

01:06:31.000 We need to be nice.

01:06:32.000 This is more important than anything.

01:06:33.000 We need to be calm with each other.

01:06:35.000 This idea that yelling people down stops anything.

01:06:38.000 You're just going to make people yell louder on the other side. 1.00

01:06:41.000 That shit does not work. 1.00

01:06:42.000 That's not how human beings operate. 1.00

01:06:44.000 If you want human beings to appreciate your perspective, find the things that you agree on and work towards...

01:06:53.000 Work towards a better, more loving way of interacting with each other.

01:06:58.000 This is possible while disagreeing.

01:07:00.000 And this is one of the most important things I think that we could ever express in terms of how to communicate with each other.

01:07:06.000 You don't have to shout people down.

01:07:08.000 The best way to do it is to try to figure out the points that you can agree on, find out what you disagree on, and find out why you disagree on it.

01:07:17.000 And you're always going to get bad actors, right?

01:07:18.000 You're always going to get people that are in there That they don't care, they're not reasonable, they just want to win.

01:07:24.000 But there's a giant problem with that kind of communicating because it's so absolute.

01:07:30.000 It's my way or the highway.

01:07:32.000 That's where violence comes from.

01:07:34.000 That's where real physical conflicts, that's where they come from when there's no way to negotiate and there's no way to communicate outside of that.

01:07:42.000 I just think it's...

01:07:43.000 I don't know.

01:07:44.000 Bizarre is not the right word. 0.98

01:07:45.000 I think it's sad that the vast majority, from, again, my opinion, what I see is people who are identifying with shit you can see on a street sign. 0.99

01:07:53.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:07:54.000 Like, left or right?

01:07:55.000 Right.

01:07:55.000 Like, you're telling me that as a species, that's as nuanced as we can get.

01:07:59.000 You want to completely define yourself and your ideology and your beliefs by something literally you can see just driving your car.

01:08:05.000 Turn left.

01:08:06.000 Turn right.

01:08:06.000 It's just...

01:08:07.000 I don't understand it.

01:08:08.000 I don't...

01:08:10.000 It's the exact opposite world to go back to getting out of the military and just kind of entering into the world.

01:08:16.000 I'm like, what's going on?

01:08:17.000 It makes no sense to me.

01:08:19.000 It makes me extremely uncomfortable.

01:08:20.000 I hate hearing people calling for violence.

01:08:24.000 I know, and especially calling for violence when it's not necessary against Americans. 0.90

01:08:29.000 What you had to deal with in the military has to be the most intense form of violence.

01:08:36.000 Of conflict that's available on planet Earth.

01:08:38.000 The most intense form of conflict is war.

01:08:41.000 That's the real conflict.

01:08:43.000 That's real consequences.

01:08:44.000 You've suffered them physically.

01:08:46.000 You've seen countless friends suffer them physically. 1.00

01:08:48.000 That's the real shit. 0.99

01:08:49.000 So when you're seeing people from universities, from these coddled environments, and these people with a really completely ignorant perspective as to what the actual consequences of violence are, calling for it, it's just bananas. 1.00

01:09:06.000 On one hand, I'm glad that they haven't experienced it because I can tell that they haven't just by the way that they're acting.

01:09:12.000 And I'm glad that they didn't have to do that.

01:09:14.000 But on the other one, it's a tough pill to swallow because I just don't understand.

01:09:22.000 War is a...

01:09:26.000 It's about as high consequence as you can get, for sure.

01:09:28.000 Like I said, it resets your perspective, and the last thing that I would ever want to see is that here on the streets of the U.S. Like, I just, I can't even imagine how destructive, well, it would destroy our country, for sure, but I also don't, I can't figure out the route out of where we are.

01:09:46.000 So people are calling for violence, right?

01:09:47.000 You've got other countries trying to incite Get groups together.

01:09:52.000 What's the navigable route out of that?

01:09:55.000 Mushrooms.

01:09:57.000 Okay, I hadn't considered that route.

01:09:58.000 It's the only way.

01:10:00.000 I honestly don't know.

01:10:01.000 I'm hoping that things don't have to come to a head.

01:10:04.000 I'm hoping that we don't have a Kent State or some horrible event in this country where protesters and And the people that oppose them get into some horrible, deadly, violent encounter.

01:10:17.000 Because so far, other than Charlottesville, that time that guy ran over that woman with a car, we're seeing most of this violence being at least somewhat contained to fisticuffs, right?

01:10:28.000 And the professor that hit that guy with a bike lock, and there's a few other instances of people getting knocked out and punched and hit with sticks.

01:10:35.000 We haven't seen mass violence. 1.00

01:10:37.000 Shootings and murder, but goddammit, that shit's close. 0.99

01:10:41.000 Especially when they're doing rallies and people are like, you know, let's do an open carry rally and everybody show up in their operator-chic apparel with... 1.00

01:10:50.000 I look at the pictures of that, I'm like, okay, you have a lot of stuff. 0.95

01:10:54.000 First off, that's on fucking backwards.

01:10:56.000 I'm like, okay, you have all the tools, but you obviously don't practice with them. 0.97

01:11:01.000 But the danger of just...

01:11:03.000 You know, what's the next step?

01:11:04.000 First, we're just going to, you know, we're going to wear all of our stuff.

01:11:06.000 All right, well, if it started at fist and then went bike locks and then went show up with your Civil War gear.

01:11:12.000 Right.

01:11:12.000 What's the next step after that?

01:11:14.000 Shooting.

01:11:15.000 Yeah.

01:11:16.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:11:18.000 I don't want to get involved in that.

01:11:19.000 I mean, I... Well, you picked a good spot.

01:11:23.000 Where you're at in Montana. 0.94

01:11:25.000 Where I live does not suck. 0.93

01:11:27.000 Yeah. 0.93

01:11:27.000 Hang out there and move in once the first few rounds have been fired. 0.93

01:11:32.000 The dust starts to settle.

01:11:33.000 The problem is I would want to come off the bench.

01:11:35.000 Of course.

01:11:36.000 The problem is if that happens, and I guarantee you I'm not the only one that feels like that, I'm going to get involved.

01:11:42.000 And it's going to be a serious problem for those individuals.

01:11:45.000 Because...

01:11:47.000 I'd give my military career a C across the board average.

01:11:50.000 There's absolutely nothing spectacular about my career.

01:11:54.000 I've done more than some way less than others, but I've sacrificed enough that I'm not going to allow those people to tear us apart.

01:12:02.000 But it's the last thing on earth that I want to do.

01:12:04.000 But if they put me in that position, I know that myself and many other people are in that same boat are going to get involved.

01:12:08.000 And I don't know if that's going to help the problem, but it's going to get ugly pretty fast.

01:12:13.000 I just don't remember a time where the country's been so divided.

01:12:19.000 I don't know whether it's because of social media and because of the Russian influence on social media compounded with having Trump as a president, people that feel like they're disenfranchised and they don't feel like they're...

01:12:33.000 You know, you hear about this all the time in regards to income inequality.

01:12:38.000 People feel disenfranchised.

01:12:40.000 They feel like the system has failed them.

01:12:41.000 And that's why so many young kids are favoring socialism.

01:12:44.000 And why so many young kids are moving towards that.

01:12:47.000 They think that anything's got to be better than watching these fat, rich cats with all this money controlling the world.

01:12:54.000 And that the only way to get out of that is revolution. 0.99

01:12:56.000 But damn, you know, like... 0.99

01:12:58.000 There's a lot of people that are not those fat, rich cats you're positioning yourself against. 0.99

01:13:03.000 They're just normal, regular Americans who happen to be conservative.

01:13:06.000 And conservative does not always have to equal racist.

01:13:11.000 It doesn't always have to equal white supremacy.

01:13:13.000 It doesn't always have to equal all the negative connotations, you know, religious fanaticism and all these different things that people always attach towards conservatism.

01:13:22.000 It doesn't have to mean that.

01:13:24.000 It could just mean people who are prudent with their finances, who are, you know, they're cautious with the way they think.

01:13:32.000 They're more conservative in their values and their ideals.

01:13:35.000 That's not a bad thing, necessarily.

01:13:38.000 But we've got it lumped into these two groups, left versus right.

01:13:42.000 And there's very little gray area.

01:13:44.000 It's the tyranny of or.

01:13:46.000 Yeah.

01:13:46.000 It's like, it's as if there's only two choices.

01:13:49.000 You're either left or right.

01:13:51.000 Yeah.

01:13:52.000 Where's the and?

01:13:53.000 Whereas you trend to the left and you also have some values that are associated with the right.

01:13:59.000 I think we need to evolve.

01:14:03.000 I think we need to evolve the way we communicate with each other first off.

01:14:06.000 I think there's so much yelling on social media that people engage in on a daily basis.

01:14:12.000 I mean, I jump into these little social media spats and watch these people going back and forth with each other.

01:14:17.000 I'm like, how do you live your life?

01:14:19.000 That has got to be so stressful.

01:14:21.000 You've got to be freaking out every time you check your phone. 0.95

01:14:25.000 Who's calling you a cuck? 0.77

01:14:27.000 Who's giving out your home address? 1.00

01:14:30.000 What kind of crazy shit are people doing? 0.99

01:14:32.000 It's so nuts right now. 0.99

01:14:33.000 I'm glad I'm late to the game on that stuff.

01:14:35.000 I'm so late.

01:14:37.000 I have two teenage boys and a 10-year-old girl.

01:14:40.000 We've had some social media issues with them.

01:14:43.000 If I grew up...

01:14:45.000 With the tools that they have, I would not be sitting here with you today. 0.99

01:14:50.000 If I had had, when I was 15, the ability to broadcast my idiotic thoughts to the world, I would be... 0.91

01:14:57.000 I tell my kids, too, you guys are growing up in a time, in my opinion, that is so much more difficult than the time I grew up in. 0.98

01:15:05.000 Agreed. 0.99

01:15:06.000 If I had a problem with you, I'd be like, Joe, I would talk shit to your face, or I'd have to find out what your phone number is, or mail you a letter. 1.00

01:15:14.000 Mail you a letter. 0.99

01:15:15.000 And then by the time it showed up, I wouldn't be pissed at you anymore, so it would defeat the purpose.

01:15:19.000 I mean, I've seen it firsthand, you know, responding to stuff.

01:15:24.000 People, they're just watching, and then they dive in, you know, and like...

01:15:29.000 Screen grabs.

01:15:30.000 Next thing you know, I'm at school.

01:15:33.000 Like, hello, Mr. Stumpf, however you would like to show you this.

01:15:36.000 I'm like, oh my god.

01:15:37.000 Oh my god.

01:15:38.000 But I get it at the same time.

01:15:40.000 And I recognize the language that they're using.

01:15:43.000 I'm like, oh yeah, that was me, but I was just talking to you.

01:15:45.000 Right, right.

01:15:46.000 I don't know how to.

01:15:47.000 It's very difficult for me.

01:15:50.000 You got it coming.

01:15:51.000 I think your daughters are younger than my sons.

01:15:54.000 It's Rough.

01:15:56.000 Yeah, it is rough and it's something that no one has done before.

01:15:59.000 Here's the thing, like if you're in your 40s or in your 50s or whatever and you have a kid today, you haven't done that.

01:16:05.000 You didn't grow up with the internet.

01:16:07.000 The internet didn't even exist until I was a grown man.

01:16:10.000 I didn't get online until I was in my late 20s.

01:16:13.000 That's when it existed.

01:16:16.000 And these kids that are 10 and 11, they have phones already and they have Snapchat accounts and they're...

01:16:22.000 You know, and then there's, you know, one of the craziest ones is kids taking naked pictures of each other.

01:16:27.000 Because this girl got arrested for child pornography. 1.00

01:16:30.000 Yep.

01:16:30.000 Because she was taking pictures of her hoo-ha and sending it to boys.

01:16:35.000 And she was 15. And so they were arresting her for distribution of child pornography.

01:16:41.000 And I'm like, hey, hey, hey. 1.00

01:16:43.000 Stop with the fucking word of the law, you assholes. 1.00

01:16:46.000 Do you really think this girl's a child pornographer? 1.00

01:16:48.000 No, she's a slut. 1.00

01:16:50.000 This is... 1.00

01:16:51.000 We grew up with kids like this.

01:16:53.000 Sorry.

01:16:53.000 I don't mean to slut shame.

01:16:54.000 But I mean, for lack of a better term. 0.68

01:16:56.000 Yeah.

01:16:56.000 You know, for comedic intent, I had to use that word.

01:16:59.000 She's just a young girl.

01:17:00.000 It's probably misguided.

01:17:01.000 But the point is, we all knew girls like that and for whatever reason had this desperate need for male attention.

01:17:09.000 They just didn't have a platform.

01:17:11.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:17:11.000 They would just flash their tits in the hallway or something like that. 0.99

01:17:14.000 I mean, there was always girls that would do that. 0.99

01:17:15.000 I never had that happen.

01:17:16.000 You never had that happen?

01:17:16.000 No.

01:17:17.000 I knew girls that would do that. 1.00

01:17:18.000 It was always like...

01:17:20.000 You're an East Coast guy, though.

01:17:21.000 I was a West Coast guy.

01:17:22.000 They're different over there?

01:17:23.000 I would have to assume so, given we don't have the same shared experience.

01:17:26.000 I think they're more savage on the East Coast.

01:17:29.000 Because they're the children of immigrants, you know, or the grandchildren of immigrants. 0.99

01:17:33.000 And this is my theory on...

01:17:36.000 This is my take on America in terms of immigration, right? 0.93

01:17:40.000 It's like... 0.99

01:17:41.000 The people that moved here from somewhere else, they moved here from Europe and there were wild fuckers who was like, you know what? 1.00

01:17:49.000 I don't have a picture of this place. 0.99

01:17:51.000 There's no YouTube video for me to watch, but I'm going to take a chance and I'm going to get in a fucking boat with my family. 0.99

01:17:56.000 I'm going to travel across a goddamn ocean. 0.99

01:17:58.000 For weeks. 0.99

01:17:59.000 Yeah.

01:17:59.000 And then I'm going to get to the other side, and they're all in these weird communities of people, like, you know, my grandfather would always talk about how racist people were against Italians, and then there was a lot of that against Irish, and all these, like, immigrant communities on the East Coast, and then what happens is they would get in their car,

01:18:16.000 and they would go, fuck this place, let's go west, and they would keep going until they got to California. 0.84

01:18:21.000 And I think that's why California is, like, one of the most progressive places, because it's the furthest away from where people landed, and So the people that wanted to get the fuck away from them, they got as far away as they could. 0.99

01:18:33.000 And the even smarter ones came to Montana. 0.53

01:18:35.000 And then there's some people in the middle that went, why are we traveling?

01:18:39.000 Let's just stop right here.

01:18:40.000 Especially, like, you go to places like...

01:18:42.000 I mean, there's a lot of places that are fucking amazing that are, like, in the middle.

01:18:46.000 Flyover states, yeah. 0.73

01:18:47.000 I mean, you know, you call it flyover states, but, I mean, there's a lot of great spots in Texas.

01:18:52.000 You know, you go to Austin, you go, okay, why are we moving?

01:18:55.000 Yeah.

01:18:55.000 Why don't we just stay right here?

01:18:57.000 Like, this is fucking great. 0.97

01:18:58.000 Like, do we really need to go to Santa Monica? 0.99

01:19:00.000 No.

01:19:01.000 We can just stay right here.

01:19:02.000 San Antonio is pretty cool, too.

01:19:03.000 I was down there with Dudley twice in the last month, and it's a pretty cool town.

01:19:08.000 I've never been.

01:19:10.000 Well, I shouldn't say town.

01:19:11.000 I think it's the eighth largest city in the United States.

01:19:13.000 Is it really?

01:19:14.000 San Antonio is?

01:19:15.000 I'm pretty sure, yeah.

01:19:17.000 Wow.

01:19:17.000 That's crazy.

01:19:18.000 I did not know that.

01:19:20.000 You don't know about that?

01:19:22.000 Jamie's not buying it.

01:19:22.000 I was told that it was the eighth largest.

01:19:24.000 By San Antonio president and mayor?

01:19:26.000 No, actually Evan from Black Rifle.

01:19:28.000 Oh, there you go.

01:19:29.000 Head of tourism for San Antonio.

01:19:32.000 I think San Antonio is like the fourth in Texas.

01:19:36.000 So it's like Dallas is number one, Houston, Austin, San Antonio.

01:19:41.000 So fourth in Texas.

01:19:42.000 That doesn't really make sense that it would be eighth in the country.

01:19:44.000 I think it might be with actual size.

01:19:47.000 Oh, like land.

01:19:48.000 Miles or something like that.

01:19:49.000 That's exactly what I meant.

01:19:50.000 Oh, I get it.

01:19:51.000 I get it.

01:19:52.000 So Alaska is the biggest state in the country in terms of distance that you could travel.

01:19:57.000 Have you been there much?

01:19:59.000 Alaska, we go there, or the last time I was there, I had some interesting experiences actually the last time I was there.

01:20:05.000 That's where we do our cold weather training.

01:20:06.000 So the only times I've been there was for work, which...

01:20:10.000 I had fun, but it was also not enjoyable at the same time. 0.71

01:20:12.000 Those are real savages.

01:20:14.000 Those people live around wild animals.

01:20:16.000 There's only like a hundred of them.

01:20:19.000 We would go to legit Kodiak Island.

01:20:21.000 What, Jamie?

01:20:22.000 Number seven, as far as population.

01:20:24.000 Is it really?

01:20:25.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:20:25.000 Damn! 1.00

01:20:26.000 Yes! 1.00

01:20:27.000 1,469,000.

01:20:30.000 So it's actually bigger than you thought.

01:20:31.000 Wow, it's bigger than Phoenix?

01:20:33.000 It's bigger than San Diego, just under Phoenix.

01:20:34.000 Oh, Phoenix is six.

01:20:35.000 I see.

01:20:36.000 That's crazy!

01:20:37.000 It's just past Philly.

01:20:40.000 Philly's number five after Houston.

01:20:43.000 That's nuts, man.

01:20:44.000 There's not more than 1.5 million people in Philly, though.

01:20:47.000 That doesn't seem right.

01:20:48.000 That doesn't seem right.

01:20:48.000 This number for San Diego seemed very low as well.

01:20:51.000 I thought it was in the threes.

01:20:53.000 I don't know what they're counting, actually.

01:20:54.000 I just Googled it. 1.00

01:20:55.000 Assholes. 1.00

01:20:56.000 Top largest city for assholes. 1.00

01:20:58.000 New York is only eight million? 1.00

01:21:01.000 What?!

01:21:02.000 Los Angeles? 1.00

01:21:03.000 Okay, shut your fucking mouth. 1.00

01:21:05.000 Los Angeles, 3,900,000. 1.00

01:21:09.000 Los Angeles has 20 million people and who knows how many Mexican folks.

01:21:15.000 They don't have any idea how many people have snuck across the border.

01:21:18.000 They literally have no idea.

01:21:20.000 It's just pure guesswork.

01:21:24.000 Like, who's doing these censuses?

01:21:26.000 And who are they talking to?

01:21:29.000 Would they have traffic cameras that are judging based on the amount of cars that are driving past them every day?

01:21:34.000 They don't really know.

01:21:35.000 I think it's a guess. 1.00

01:21:36.000 It's a fucking guess. 0.99

01:21:37.000 They probably have one place where they have a video camera up where they can capture a certain amount, multiply it by a magnitude, and then extrapolate that over, like, I don't know. 0.99

01:21:47.000 Actually, it's probably scientists.

01:21:49.000 They're probably pretty good at guessing. 0.99

01:21:50.000 We're probably retarded. 0.83

01:21:51.000 I don't know on that one. 0.91

01:21:53.000 I shouldn't use that word.

01:21:53.000 I think our take on it, though, is really essentially based on how many people are registered in this area, how many people we absolutely know, and then how many people have pushed into this area from other places.

01:22:10.000 What's up?

01:22:11.000 It's the number 38 TV market somehow.

01:22:15.000 What is?

01:22:15.000 San Antonio.

01:22:17.000 Oh.

01:22:17.000 So I don't know how it fits in that number that way.

01:22:19.000 It's very strange how they're counting.

01:22:22.000 They don't have TVs.

01:22:22.000 They've moved past TVs.

01:22:23.000 Maybe they're just reading books.

01:22:25.000 Maybe it's number one for book reading.

01:22:27.000 I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not the case.

01:22:32.000 Well, it's, you know, I don't know, man.

01:22:35.000 It's an interesting thing, like population, because when you fly over the country, you look down and you go, wow, look at all that spot that people could live in.

01:22:42.000 Like, are we really overpopulated?

01:22:44.000 You know, but then...

01:22:45.000 In certain areas, and in others, not so much.

01:22:47.000 Well, in others, you just fly over and there's nothing there forever.

01:22:49.000 Like, I drove from Vegas to LA, and there's some spots where you drive from Vegas to LA, where as you're driving, you go, okay... 0.99

01:22:58.000 What the fuck is here? 0.97

01:23:00.000 Who are these people that live in these weird little Nevada towns that are off of the 15? 1.00

01:23:09.000 Not even the towns, man.

01:23:11.000 So I used to fly a bunch from San Diego out to Prescott and then kind of do that loop.

01:23:17.000 Havasu in the Vegas area.

01:23:21.000 Miles from anything double-wide trailer.

01:23:24.000 Yeah.

01:23:25.000 Just dirt roads.

01:23:26.000 But then at the same time, because you're higher up, you can see the geometric patterns.

01:23:31.000 It's just chunks of squares, and there's two double-wides five miles away.

01:23:37.000 I don't know.

01:23:38.000 Sand people. 0.99

01:23:39.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:23:39.000 I saw one where this guy had this setup, and they had a fence around his house, and then he had a fucking antenna. 0.99

01:23:46.000 Like one of them big-ass ham radio antennas? 0.99

01:23:49.000 Yeah, he's just talking to aliens.

01:23:50.000 He's just communicating with the alien race.

01:23:52.000 Or fellow alien researchers who are out there looking for.

01:23:56.000 Yeah, I'd rather go into houses overseas than make entry into that man's house.

01:24:02.000 Phew! 1.00

01:24:03.000 Yeah, probably less pathogens.

01:24:05.000 Less...

01:24:05.000 Who knows what's in there?

01:24:06.000 Yeah, less likely to get beamed up to the Starship Enterprise, too.

01:24:08.000 That, too.

01:24:09.000 Right?

01:24:09.000 That, too.

01:24:10.000 I just wonder, like, how a person winds up in that double-wide trailer miles away from Barstow.

01:24:17.000 Like, how do you... 1.00

01:24:18.000 Like, what path do you get from being a baby coming out of your mama's vagina to one day being holed up, sniffing bath salts, you know, smelling your own farts. 1.00

01:24:28.000 Thinking nailed it. 1.00

01:24:29.000 Yeah.

01:24:30.000 Counting how many bullets you have in case...

01:24:33.000 The aliens come to get you.

01:24:35.000 Fortunately, I find a lot of those people either have a lot of guns or a lot of bullets, but not both at the same time.

01:24:41.000 You'd be surprised how many.

01:24:42.000 It's like, wow, you have a lot of guns.

01:24:44.000 Where's your ammo?

01:24:45.000 I got a box of it over there.

01:24:46.000 I'm like, okay, cool.

01:24:48.000 Someone should do a trailer park tour of this country for a documentary. 0.98

01:24:54.000 What happened?

01:24:55.000 How'd you get here?

01:24:57.000 Was your family from here?

01:25:00.000 This is not a good community.

01:25:01.000 We've got to get you out of here.

01:25:02.000 Yeah.

01:25:02.000 What's your escape plan?

01:25:05.000 There is no escape plan.

01:25:06.000 You're 200 miles away from the nearest city.

01:25:09.000 You're surrounded by desert, and you have a trailer out here.

01:25:12.000 Like, what's going on, man?

01:25:13.000 I always think, but where do you go for groceries and how often?

01:25:16.000 You eat rabbits that you find in your backyard.

01:25:19.000 Sometimes, probably. 0.99

01:25:20.000 I'm like, dude, if you went to the grocery store and you came back, damn it, I forgot the milk. 0.98

01:25:25.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:25:25.000 Yeah, I don't know. 0.98

01:25:26.000 You find a javelina and suck his dick. 1.00

01:25:28.000 That is not a solid picture. 1.00

01:25:32.000 Have you been to Alaska much?

01:25:34.000 I've only been a few times.

01:25:35.000 Where'd you go?

01:25:36.000 Went to Anchorage.

01:25:38.000 Me and Ari Shafir did some salmon fishing.

01:25:41.000 Had a great time doing that.

01:25:42.000 And then we did two shows up there.

01:25:43.000 And then I've been hunting on Prince of Wales.

01:25:48.000 We did some Sitka deer hunting.

01:25:53.000 Blacktail.

01:25:53.000 Barklow from Sitka ran, not when I went through, but he ran the cold weather facility on Kodiak Island.

01:25:59.000 Oh, okay.

01:25:59.000 For like 15 years.

01:26:00.000 Kodiak can go, fuck itself with those goddamn gigantic, huge, humongous bears. 1.00

01:26:05.000 Oh, that's what I'm saying. 1.00

01:26:06.000 We had some interesting experiences.

01:26:08.000 That's where we did our cold weather training.

01:26:09.000 Did you run into bears?

01:26:11.000 There are always bears around, but also having a machine gun helps with that.

01:26:15.000 That does make you feel better.

01:26:16.000 It makes you feel better, but not when you're sleeping at night.

01:26:19.000 Ooh, we camped?

01:26:20.000 We would do snowshoe just deep into the back.

01:26:25.000 You had to do your cold weather training, so getting your dry suits on and swimming through the surf at nighttime.

01:26:30.000 Oh, wonderful.

01:26:30.000 Which is an ice cream headache over and over and over again as the ocean breaks over your head.

01:26:34.000 It's pretty bad.

01:26:36.000 And the cold weather immersion test is there where you have to get into the water with just a pair of shorts on for five minutes and just then rewarm yourself.

01:26:43.000 So they get you to a point of hypothermia right to the edge?

01:26:47.000 I think, as many things are in my old job, there is an aspect of learning and there is an aspect of tough it out.

01:26:55.000 And you combine the two. 0.76

01:26:57.000 It sucked, and there was a reason that they wanted it to suck, but they were also trying to teach a lesson. 0.91

01:27:02.000 But God forbid they just teach the lesson, so they make you suffer to ingrain it, probably. 0.82

01:27:07.000 So one day you wake up, and on the board, like a little whiteboard that has the list of gear you need, it just says shorts, running shoes.

01:27:14.000 And I'm like, okay, this is February in Kodiak.

01:27:17.000 What are you talking about?

01:27:18.000 Like I said, shorts, running shoes.

01:27:21.000 Get out in the Ford Econoline van.

01:27:23.000 So we all get out there and they drive to the beach where seawater is freezing at the edge.

01:27:30.000 And they say, okay, go out.

01:27:31.000 You have to completely submerge yourself.

01:27:33.000 Neck deep water, five minutes.

01:27:34.000 And the timer starts.

01:27:35.000 Oh! 0.60

01:27:36.000 The timer starts when the last person submerges their head.

01:27:40.000 Oh, God.

01:27:41.000 So you might be first?

01:27:42.000 You might be like an overzealous fellow?

01:27:43.000 You could rush out there and be all fired up, and you're just going to get seven and a half minutes is what you're going to get.

01:27:48.000 So you go and you sit there, and it hurts for a minute, and then you're numb.

01:27:53.000 The worst thing about it actually is rewarming.

01:27:54.000 It feels like you're just getting pinpricked over and over and over again.

01:27:57.000 Yes, that's actually Barklow.

01:27:59.000 Oh, that is Barklow.

01:28:00.000 Look at him, standing up there on that rock.

01:28:02.000 Well, Barklow has a great rewarming drill that we actually played on the podcast before for Sitka, where he takes their gear and jumps into a lake.

01:28:11.000 So that is the test that they're doing.

01:28:13.000 Yeah, and then rewarms himself with basically all Sitka's gear and figures out how to get your body back.

01:28:20.000 What I thought was interesting that I never really considered was that eating food actually ramps up your body heat because you have to burn off the calories.

01:28:27.000 Yep.

01:28:28.000 Your body starts processing the food actually is good for elevating body temperature, eating food, especially if you can get hot food, of course, but just eating.

01:28:35.000 So the drill he was doing actually had much more, I would say, educational benefit because they would take them there with all of their gear.

01:28:44.000 Their gear list would say, Whatever they were wearing.

01:28:46.000 Plus, bring your tent, your sleeping bag, and all your stuff.

01:28:49.000 Because we're going to put you into the water, and then you need to survive your way out of it.

01:28:52.000 They would have to erect a tent.

01:28:55.000 They would have to get their sleeping bag out.

01:28:57.000 All after being in the water for five minutes, which is exactly what a survival situation is going to look like.

01:29:01.000 For us, we went in there, got back into the van, and I sat in a hot tub and drank beer for the rest of the day.

01:29:06.000 So, I got the understanding of what it feels like to be hypothermic.

01:29:10.000 See, they have to push their head underwater.

01:29:12.000 That guy right there is either screwing everybody or was the first person to complete it.

01:29:17.000 Now, Wim Hof does so much of this cold water submersion stuff and he actually enjoys it and loves it.

01:29:24.000 Do you think that there's a way that you could use his methods and get through that with less pain?

01:29:30.000 Potentially, even though all of the skills that I used in Kodiak, I did not ever use a single one of them operationally.

01:29:40.000 I used his breathing method in the cryo-tank.

01:29:43.000 That makes sense.

01:29:44.000 That makes sense, but those arctic conditions, I don't know, at least in the modern theaters of war we're engaged in, I don't know where the applicability would be.

01:29:52.000 So it might be a little bit of a benefit versus time expended to teach the guys that stuff.

01:29:58.000 You know, because unless it's, we're talking like Korea, probably farther in the northern, you know, latitudes.

01:30:05.000 I mean, it's, like, the training was amazing.

01:30:08.000 Like I said, I didn't use a single bit of it.

01:30:10.000 Right, but it's something, well, it's also building mental toughness and determination.

01:30:15.000 And that's why I said there's an aspect of learning and there's an aspect of just this is going to suck.

01:30:20.000 Hey, you guys, guess what?

01:30:21.000 You're going to do a 20-kilometer hike into the backcountry in snowshoes.

01:30:24.000 There is no end state to this.

01:30:26.000 There's no target you're going to do anything on.

01:30:30.000 You're just going to go out there and you're going to do it and you're going to survive out there and it's going to suck for three days and then you're going to come back. 0.98

01:30:35.000 You just embrace the suck.

01:30:37.000 Or you learn how to pack your backpack better. 0.85

01:30:39.000 Or you learn how to move better over that terrain.

01:30:41.000 Or you learn how to navigate in that environment.

01:30:42.000 So there's always an essence of it, but it just happens to be that there's usually a pain component with it as well.

01:30:48.000 A lot of military training is like that.

01:30:50.000 There's an essence of pain compliance and then the actual learning technique as well.

01:30:55.000 Yeah, it's the learning technique.

01:30:57.000 I mean, it is really, you're learning a technique to manage your mind under sucky conditions.

01:31:04.000 I mean, that is a technique as well, right?

01:31:06.000 So, I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this recently.

01:31:10.000 I'm of the opinion that really the only thing that I learned how to do when I was a SEAL was to enhance my ability to learn other things.

01:31:21.000 You're selecting for people, and to get to that point, you've got to maintain control of your emotions, whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're cold.

01:31:28.000 So there's that essence of self-control, but then they require so many different skill sets and so many different things that the selection process is looking for, and then at the end of it, teaching people how to become better learners.

01:31:41.000 And then you just refine that over and over and over again over a career.

01:31:46.000 It's the ability to learn is probably the biggest takeaway that I have from my time in the service.

01:31:51.000 I think that's the best thing you could ever really learn, is learning how to learn.

01:31:56.000 Learning how to learn correctly, learning how to actually pay attention to what someone's teaching you and absorb it and follow the steps rather than fuck it up with your own ego and your own insecurities or whatever it is that's going to...

01:32:07.000 We're good to go.

01:32:26.000 Yeah.

01:32:45.000 That's another thing that freaks me out is climbing.

01:32:47.000 Did you do much climbing?

01:32:48.000 I was a lead climber up until the point where I don't have a use of my ankle anymore because of the nerve injury.

01:32:53.000 Oh.

01:32:54.000 And it's funny is I'm actually, I don't like heights.

01:32:57.000 Did you free solo at all?

01:33:01.000 As long as I wasn't more than three feet off the ground, yes, I'm totally comfortable free soloing and moving laterally but not vertically away from the ground.

01:33:08.000 Did you see Al Connals?

01:33:10.000 I watched that movie three times in a row.

01:33:12.000 And here's the thing.

01:33:13.000 I know he's alive.

01:33:14.000 I know he was on your podcast.

01:33:15.000 I listened to it.

01:33:16.000 And in the final scenes, I realized I was sitting there white-knuckling my recliner.

01:33:21.000 Like, my hands were sweating.

01:33:23.000 I'm like, I know he lives, but it still freaked me the fuck out.

01:33:28.000 Wow.

01:33:29.000 I mean, that guy...

01:33:30.000 Yeah, he's something.

01:33:31.000 But you know what's interesting about climbing is you get...

01:33:33.000 The more exposure you have, the less it bothers you.

01:33:37.000 So lead climbing is interesting, especially if you are placing your protection as you go.

01:33:42.000 You're saying league or lead?

01:33:44.000 Lead.

01:33:45.000 L-E-A-D. Oh, lead.

01:33:46.000 Like someone's in front of you.

01:33:48.000 You're on a rope.

01:33:49.000 As a lead climber, you are probably setting the ropes, at least in my old job, you're setting the ropes for the people who are going to follow.

01:33:54.000 Okay.

01:33:55.000 Most of the time, when you see people, well, not most of the time, but one of the disciplines would be there's bolted routes that go up a rock.

01:34:02.000 So you can just bring carabiners and put the carabiner through that, and you loop the rope through it, and you're good to go.

01:34:08.000 Mm-hmm.

01:34:08.000 Another aspect would be is you don't use the bolted in stuff and you basically carry on your climbing harness a rack of gear.

01:34:14.000 So as you're holding on to the rocks, you're trying to wedge a block or a stopper in or a cam system that it rotates to be smaller.

01:34:22.000 And then as you release, it opens up and if you pull against it, it locks itself into the rock.

01:34:27.000 So you're setting your own protection.

01:34:30.000 How much do you trust those things?

01:34:49.000 And you're starting to get emotionally involved in the situation that you're in.

01:34:53.000 And you set a piece of pro.

01:34:55.000 And it's rattling around a little bit.

01:34:57.000 So I don't know.

01:34:58.000 We don't know how good that one's going to be.

01:34:59.000 But we're going to keep climbing.

01:35:00.000 And then the next piece of pro you set.

01:35:02.000 Not the most awesome piece.

01:35:04.000 Because you're worried about the one beneath you.

01:35:06.000 And you don't want to fall.

01:35:07.000 So you get it in there.

01:35:08.000 And then you just keep climbing.

01:35:09.000 So sometimes it's awesome.

01:35:11.000 And sometimes it's terrifying.

01:35:12.000 And then you've got to think that if you do fall, all that force, if one pops and then the second one pops...

01:35:19.000 You've got a lot of distance.

01:35:20.000 Well, you've got to think it's double the distance.

01:35:22.000 If you're 10 feet above the last piece of protection you put in, you fall the 10 feet to the protection, then the 10 feet past the protection, and then it pulls on the pro.

01:35:32.000 So it's actually double the height that you are above it.

01:35:36.000 It's not...

01:35:37.000 I've been probably more scared out of my mind.

01:35:41.000 Actually, the scariest I've ever been...

01:35:44.000 You lived in Boulder, right?

01:35:46.000 Yeah.

01:35:47.000 There's a climb there called the Bastille Crack.

01:35:49.000 It's in one of the national parks.

01:35:51.000 And I was there with a buddy.

01:35:53.000 And it was just me and him and a world-class climber.

01:35:58.000 And I was at the East Coast Command at the time, so budget was no option.

01:36:02.000 I had the newest, shiniest stuff.

01:36:04.000 I'm like taking plastic off of climbing gear to go climb this rock.

01:36:07.000 This guy pulls up in a van with a Marlboro hanging out and, you know, tennis shoes that have laces probably on one of the shoes and an old pair of pants.

01:36:18.000 And he's climbed like every mountain ever.

01:36:20.000 So it's me and my buddy.

01:36:21.000 We're climbing our way up.

01:36:22.000 I'm leading this pitch.

01:36:24.000 So you switch.

01:36:24.000 One guy will climb.

01:36:25.000 He sets an anchor.

01:36:26.000 The other person comes up and they pick all the protection out.

01:36:28.000 So you can just switch and then the other person leads the way on the next one.

01:36:32.000 So I'm like halfway up this pitch and... 0.99

01:36:37.000 I can't move because I'm losing my shit. 0.92

01:36:40.000 I'm like 15 feet above the last piece of protection that I just put in. 0.99

01:36:44.000 I'm convinced that I feel my feet slipping off of the rock.

01:36:48.000 I have my hand jammed into the rock and then you make a fist to prevent it from falling out.

01:36:52.000 You can actually see Alex doing that in Free Solo as he's climbing up.

01:36:56.000 They'll slide their hand in and then they'll manipulate the shape so it pulls.

01:36:59.000 And as my world is collapsing on me and I'm just sitting there, I've got full sewing machine leg just sitting there just shaking, I hear a voice just over my shoulders like, hey man, just put the piece of pro right there. 0.89

01:37:11.000 And I look over and this professional climber is right next to me with no rope, in his fucking tennis shoes, smoking a cigarette, which is what he was using to point to where I should have placed the next piece of protection.

01:37:26.000 Cool, calm, and collected. 0.98

01:37:27.000 And I almost fell off the rock because he scared me so bad.

01:37:29.000 I was so freaked out at what he was doing that I almost fell.

01:37:33.000 I'm like, you need to get away from me immediately.

01:37:36.000 He's like, yeah, no problem.

01:37:37.000 And just scurried up the rock in tennis shoes.

01:37:40.000 Tennis shoes?

01:37:40.000 Tennis shoes.

01:37:41.000 But you're not supposed to use tennis shoes, right?

01:37:43.000 I don't think it mattered. 0.71

01:37:44.000 I think the guy, like, he was a partial, complete monkey. 0.71

01:37:48.000 He just...

01:37:48.000 When you're around world-class climbers, I mean, they can hang on an edge that is like...

01:37:52.000 A couple pieces of paper.

01:37:54.000 And the Bastille crack is not a difficult route, so I'm sure there was one right next to it.

01:37:58.000 And he just, as I'm freaking out, he's just sitting there just, hey, buddy.

01:38:04.000 And I didn't know he was there.

01:38:05.000 I literally almost fell off because he talked to me.

01:38:08.000 Smoking a cigarette.

01:38:09.000 Yeah, he was ashy.

01:38:11.000 He's like, put a piece of pro right here.

01:38:12.000 Get away from me.

01:38:15.000 That's a different kind of, but I guess it's one of those things where it's like you just get better at it.

01:38:20.000 After a week of climbing, you will not feel bad about walking up to the edge and just standing there. 0.98

01:38:25.000 Alex Honnold was telling us a story about one time he was free soloing and he was halfway up and he, well, he was in the middle of this journey up this fucking mountain. 0.63

01:38:34.000 He realized he didn't bring any powder, so he didn't have any chalk with him. 0.82

01:38:38.000 So his hands are sweating and he's just climbing with no powder.

01:38:42.000 So he met a guy halfway up, these guys that were using ropes and they were doing it the right way and he's doing it with no ropes and he goes, hey man, can I borrow your chalk?

01:38:52.000 And the guy gives him a chalk bag and he goes, I'll leave it for you at the top of the mountain.

01:38:55.000 So he takes the chalk bag, passes these guys, see ya, and just keeps going, and then leaves the bag for the guy at the top of the hill. 0.99

01:39:02.000 I'm like, what in the fuck, man? 0.99

01:39:03.000 How could you start something like that? 1.00

01:39:06.000 And apparently he said that once you start climbing, you are committed to climbing.

01:39:10.000 It's harder to climb down than up. 1.00

01:39:12.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:39:15.000 There's not enough money in the world that would make me attempt the stuff that he does. 1.00

01:39:19.000 And if I was a climber, if I was feeling like I'm kicking ass... 0.95

01:39:23.000 Feel my hand. 0.98

01:39:24.000 Feel my hand.

01:39:24.000 Sweaty?

01:39:25.000 Feel my hand.

01:39:25.000 Just talking about it.

01:39:26.000 I sweat like a pig.

01:39:28.000 Dude, I'm telling you, I was watching it white knuckling.

01:39:30.000 And if I was a climber and he passed me and was like, Hey, do you mind if I borrow your chalk?

01:39:35.000 I would finish that climb and never climb again.

01:39:37.000 Yeah, Billy, I'm done. 1.00

01:39:38.000 I would realize that I am a complete and utter bitch in comparison to what he is. 0.98

01:39:43.000 If that's what's possible, and I'm sitting here struggling, I'm out. 0.99

01:39:47.000 You're also built wrong for it.

01:39:49.000 I think the thin, wiry guys, it's the way to go.

01:39:52.000 He also has these thick-ass fingers, man.

01:39:55.000 His fingers are just used to just grabbing.

01:39:58.000 But he also said that he had gone through a series of injuries for the first time in his life recently, over the last few years.

01:40:05.000 Yeah, that was in the movie, actually.

01:40:07.000 Like a compression of his discs and then a really bad strain on his ankle.

01:40:12.000 And he was told to take six months off since we just started climbing in a cast.

01:40:18.000 So it's a different kind of human.

01:40:19.000 I mean, he also lives out of a van. 0.98

01:40:22.000 I mean, he's a world famous guy who's living in a van, traveling around, just fucking climbing rocks. 0.78

01:40:28.000 Did you have him on after he had completed that climb? 0.72

01:40:32.000 Yeah.

01:40:32.000 Okay, so he had been successful and they were just probably editing the project?

01:40:35.000 I had him on earlier, like years ago.

01:40:38.000 Yeah.

01:40:38.000 And then I had him on again recently.

01:40:40.000 Okay.

01:40:41.000 Yeah.

01:40:42.000 The guy I would want to talk to is Jimmy Chin, the photographer who is capturing all that.

01:40:49.000 Oh, he's up there with him, right?

01:40:50.000 And that's the thing.

01:40:52.000 I would want to talk...

01:40:53.000 Well, and he talks about it a little bit, more so in the promos for the film, but how sketched out he was to actually be involved and sit there and film, and how much of a burden he felt to stay out of the periphery and not get engaged in the headspace and make Alex do something different because the cameras were there that would,

01:41:13.000 of course, cost him his life.

01:41:15.000 I can't imagine the pressure of doing that, or just...

01:41:20.000 I wouldn't do it.

01:41:21.000 Like, if a buddy of mine was like, hey, will you come film me?

01:41:24.000 I would say no, because I would be so afraid of just watching them peel off.

01:41:30.000 Can you imagine if you were up there filming and you watched a guy fall?

01:41:36.000 That would be rough.

01:41:37.000 And they're, of course, good friends.

01:41:40.000 Look at that.

01:41:41.000 Look at this guy. 0.99

01:41:42.000 Yeah, this dude is a savage. 0.94

01:41:44.000 He's got his hands on the camera only.

01:41:47.000 Well, he's got a bunch of stuff.

01:41:48.000 So you see his foot, his left foot, and then he's kind of secure down there.

01:41:53.000 He's got that carabiner.

01:41:54.000 He's got one going to his harness.

01:41:57.000 He's actually got two ropes going to his harness.

01:41:59.000 So he's kind of angled in there.

01:42:00.000 There's like a triangle.

01:42:01.000 But he's a world-class climber in and of himself.

01:42:03.000 Well, he also has a giant-ass camera bag. 0.59

01:42:05.000 Look at that big-ass bag hanging from his hip. 0.94

01:42:08.000 Look at that position he's in, too. 1.00

01:42:10.000 Oh, fuck all this, Jimmy. 1.00

01:42:12.000 So that's how they get into position for a lot of it. 1.00

01:42:15.000 He's Jumarring. 0.93

01:42:16.000 Instead of climbing the rock, he's got basically ascenders that will allow you to push it up, and then they lock on the rope.

01:42:21.000 So he's got one leg in there and one arm, and he's kind of Jumarring. 1.00

01:42:24.000 We use those a lot of the times as well, but he's a world-class climber in and of himself.

01:42:28.000 Yeah.

01:42:28.000 I kind of think you'd have to be, right, in order to...

01:42:31.000 To be able to capture that?

01:42:32.000 Yeah.

01:42:32.000 Yeah, the team that I think they put together was like five to seven world-class guys, but there's a movie of him called...

01:42:38.000 Yeah, no thanks.

01:42:39.000 What is that?

01:42:40.000 What is that guy doing?

01:42:41.000 He's hanging probably 3,000 foot over nothing, focusing on capturing the shot.

01:42:46.000 Oh, my God.

01:42:47.000 I would be focusing on the urine streaming down my leg.

01:42:51.000 Yeah.

01:42:52.000 Oh, my God.

01:42:55.000 Soaking your socks.

01:42:56.000 Oh, God.

01:42:57.000 Like, I couldn't do that.

01:42:58.000 But I could go to the edge of that cliff and zip up my suit, absolutely no problem, and send that off there, and I bet you he would want no piece of that.

01:43:05.000 It's so bizarre.

01:43:06.000 Yeah.

01:43:07.000 If he's shooting Alex, who's shooting him?

01:43:09.000 Dude, good question.

01:43:10.000 Is there a third pair?

01:43:12.000 There's another guy.

01:43:13.000 There's Mikey.

01:43:14.000 Mikey shooting Jimmy.

01:43:16.000 In the Free Solo movie, I think they had a team of like five to seven people.

01:43:20.000 They had long lens, they had people up there, they had remote cameras.

01:43:24.000 I mean, it's a whole...

01:43:25.000 They obviously had drones flying around.

01:43:27.000 Yeah.

01:43:28.000 Well, there was a film that, you know, besides this film, the recent documentary, which I think is called Solo, right?

01:43:35.000 Free Solo.

01:43:36.000 Before that, there was also a late night, one of those news shows like ABC World News Tonight or something like that.

01:43:43.000 They did a whole piece on him.

01:43:44.000 And they had this one guy who was a, you know, world-class climber and said, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when he falls.

01:43:51.000 Every innovator in the wingsuit world is dead.

01:43:55.000 Yeah.

01:43:56.000 It's...

01:43:58.000 I mean, I say that and I would totally agree with that, but I also understand why he's doing it.

01:44:03.000 I mean, the end state for all of us is predetermined, and I would suspect, having never talked to the guy, that he would rather meet his end like that than at 80 years old as a geriatric.

01:44:14.000 Yeah, I would imagine.

01:44:15.000 Yeah.

01:44:17.000 Maybe.

01:44:17.000 But that doesn't ease the burden on the people around him.

01:44:19.000 And that's the piece that was the toughest for me when it came to Wingsview Bay.

01:44:24.000 Look at him there.

01:44:25.000 It's insane.

01:44:26.000 What is wrong with that, man?

01:44:27.000 But meanwhile, he's such a nice guy.

01:44:29.000 When you talk to Alex in real life, he's a sweetheart.

01:44:33.000 You root for him to quit.

01:44:36.000 Look, man, you already did it.

01:44:38.000 Stop! 1.00

01:44:38.000 I have yet to hear him express desire to do so, though. 1.00

01:44:41.000 He's not quitting.

01:44:43.000 You know, I mean...

01:44:45.000 I don't know, man.

01:44:46.000 Everybody's built different.

01:44:47.000 That's the thing, you know?

01:44:49.000 Yeah.

01:44:49.000 We're all...

01:44:50.000 I don't mean physically. 0.56

01:44:51.000 I mean, the way your brain ticks.

01:44:53.000 Everyone just has a different thing going on, you know?

01:44:56.000 I mean, what leads you to what you do?

01:44:58.000 Like, what is it about you? 0.88

01:45:00.000 Sometimes you look at your path in life and look at where you are right now and you go, what the fuck led me to be in this spot where I'm... 0.98

01:45:09.000 2,000 feet above the ground with my foot jammed into this wedge looking up and there's another 4,000 feet to go. 0.95

01:45:16.000 And I got a chalk bag.

01:45:17.000 You got a chalk bag.

01:45:18.000 You got a chalk bag and the sun goes down in four hours.

01:45:21.000 Good luck.

01:45:23.000 No, thank you.

01:45:24.000 Not enough money in the actual world.

01:45:27.000 Yeah, my hand's sweat talking about it too.

01:45:28.000 And like I said, I knew he was alive.

01:45:30.000 I knew the result and it still freaked me out.

01:45:32.000 I think that it's one of the more interesting things about all paths in life.

01:45:37.000 It's like, what is it that leads someone to decide to be a surgeon? 0.98

01:45:42.000 What leads someone to decide to be, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the fuck you want to do. 0.93

01:45:47.000 What leads someone to decide to want to climb mountains? 0.88

01:45:51.000 The way human beings vary and the way human beings find comfort in whatever path they choose, whether it's you doing wingsuit jumping or...

01:46:00.000 Like some people, public speaking is so terrifying for them that the idea of doing stand-up is just horrific.

01:46:08.000 Like I've had friends that come to see me at the comedy store and I'll be talking to them right before I go on stage.

01:46:14.000 And they're like, do you have to prepare?

01:46:15.000 I'm like...

01:46:16.000 I'm alright.

01:46:16.000 Don't worry.

01:46:17.000 I've been doing this.

01:46:18.000 I can do it.

01:46:19.000 I do it all the time.

01:46:19.000 So I do it because I've done it so often.

01:46:22.000 I can just go and do it.

01:46:23.000 Whereas if they had to do it for the first...

01:46:24.000 I mean, there's a look on a person's face when you see them go on stage and they've never done it before.

01:46:30.000 If you go to open mic night, you can see it.

01:46:32.000 The sheer panic and terror in their face.

01:46:35.000 But you're like, meanwhile, there's no consequences.

01:46:38.000 What is going to happen?

01:46:39.000 People are not going to like you?

01:46:40.000 They're not even going to remember you, man.

01:46:42.000 Boo.

01:46:42.000 Yeah.

01:46:42.000 You get off that stage, you're fine.

01:46:44.000 He might fall to his death from a fucking giant mountain that he didn't have to climb. 1.00

01:46:50.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:46:50.000 Like, that's real consequences. 1.00

01:46:52.000 But for him, I mean, for some people, the other.

01:46:54.000 Like, the public speaking thing would be more terrifying than that.

01:46:57.000 I was going to say, put him in that environment.

01:46:59.000 Like, Alex, you're not going to climb today.

01:47:00.000 You're going to do a five-minute set at the Comedy Store.

01:47:03.000 I think Alex would be fine doing it.

01:47:05.000 I think he's doing a podcast now.

01:47:07.000 Didn't he say he's doing a podcast?

01:47:08.000 I think so.

01:47:09.000 I'm pretty sure he said he's doing a podcast now.

01:47:11.000 Did you tell him he should start one?

01:47:12.000 Probably.

01:47:13.000 Because I think you've spawned thousands of podcasts.

01:47:17.000 Well, I spawned a bunch of good ones, though.

01:47:19.000 In a positive way.

01:47:19.000 I say that.

01:47:21.000 It's amazing to me the influence that you have.

01:47:25.000 It is unbelievable.

01:47:26.000 The number of people are like, I started this because I heard Joe talk.

01:47:29.000 I'm like, okay, cool.

01:47:30.000 It's uncomfortable.

01:47:31.000 I don't think about it, because if I did think about it, it would freak me out. 0.99

01:47:35.000 I mean, I've said so much stupid shit, the fact that anybody would listen to me about anything. 1.00

01:47:39.000 There's thousands of hours of me talking out of my ass. 1.00

01:47:43.000 Why'd you decide to start one in the first place? 0.99

01:47:45.000 Just for fun.

01:47:46.000 Just for fun. 1.00

01:47:48.000 Just to fuck around. 1.00

01:47:50.000 I was a little disenchanted. 1.00

01:47:52.000 Had to come back to LA from Colorado and I didn't want to, but it was just one of those things.

01:47:58.000 And when I was starting it, it was really just a goof.

01:48:03.000 I'd always wanted to do something like that because my friend Anthony Cumia, he was from Opie and Anthony, he had a setup in his basement and he would do this thing, he would call it live from the compound from his house.

01:48:15.000 He had a green screen and he built a set in the basement.

01:48:19.000 I was like, wow, if he could do that.

01:48:20.000 I didn't have the money to do anything like that at the time.

01:48:23.000 But I was like, but if he could do that, maybe I could figure out how to do something like that.

01:48:26.000 So I just started off slow with webcams and shit like that and stumbled my way through it.

01:48:30.000 I personally believe that Jerry, number one, should be put into a digital time capsule and saved forever. 0.60

01:48:36.000 It's one of my favorite things on YouTube.

01:48:38.000 It's terrible.

01:48:40.000 It's amazing how bad I was.

01:48:42.000 It gives normal people like me hope.

01:48:43.000 You're like, yes!

01:48:45.000 Yeah, well, you get better at everything.

01:48:48.000 You know, you really do.

01:48:50.000 And I've gotten, I mean, just in the last few years, I've gotten so much better at listening to people and understanding and trying to see things from their perspective and trying to ask questions that get them to expand on their ideas better.

01:49:06.000 It's given me an insane education.

01:49:10.000 In a bunch of ways, not just in terms of gathering information, but also in terms of how people react to that information.

01:49:17.000 And, you know, human psychology and how human beings react to controversial subjects or, you know, how they forgive people for mistakes, too.

01:49:28.000 That's an interesting one for me.

01:49:29.000 There's some people that have such an unwillingness to forgive people and they have no empathy or compassion.

01:49:36.000 Those people are confusing to me. 0.99

01:49:38.000 Because I'm like, look, I know you fucked up. 0.98

01:49:40.000 I know somewhere... 1.00

01:49:40.000 Oh, for sure. 1.00

01:49:41.000 Maybe it's not digitally recorded like other people's fuck-ups, so you think you're safe, but you fucked up. 1.00

01:49:47.000 So you're being a hypocrite. 1.00

01:49:49.000 When someone gets busted, it's really interesting. 0.98

01:49:57.000 There's just so much opportunity.

01:49:59.000 And one of the things that I was talking about with Jack Dorsey from Twitter...

01:50:02.000 I was going to bring that up, actually.

01:50:04.000 One of the things I was talking with him about was how everything, like literally from here forth, will exist forever. 0.77

01:50:11.000 And, you know, we're going to have to figure out a way to recognize that someone from, you know, 10 years ago when you were a 15-year-old kid and you made some crazy fucking tweet, you're not that same person now.

01:50:24.000 And you can't just break...

01:50:25.000 Like, didn't that happen with people, with athletes recently? 0.98

01:50:28.000 They were giving them shit for stuff that they wrote when they were teenagers? 0.98

01:50:32.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:50:33.000 But there was some big case, right?

01:50:34.000 Wasn't there something recently where a Heisman Trophy winner, they were giving him a hard time for some of his past tweets?

01:50:41.000 Yeah, I was going to say, it comes up maybe once every other two weeks.

01:50:45.000 You know, and they want to make it like the guy just said it yesterday.

01:50:48.000 Yeah, I've heard you talk about it.

01:50:50.000 There's no path to redemption for those people.

01:50:52.000 That's a real problem.

01:50:53.000 And I think there should be a path to redemption for virtually everyone who's not murdering or raping people.

01:50:58.000 You're not stealing.

01:50:59.000 You know, people make mistakes.

01:51:02.000 We're all human.

01:51:03.000 We're all super flawed.

01:51:05.000 Yeah.

01:51:07.000 To deny that seems like a real...

01:51:10.000 It's going to be a real problem in terms of progress in the future.

01:51:14.000 And I think that's one of the things that we were talking about earlier in terms of people disagreeing with them on the left or the right.

01:51:20.000 We've got to figure out a way to communicate with each other more civilly.

01:51:26.000 And to approach people...

01:51:28.000 Instead of approaching someone's actions and who they are like they're the enemy.

01:51:33.000 Instead of that...

01:51:34.000 Look at them with the most compassionate or forgiving view possible and look at the things that you have in common rather than the things that are inexorably separating you.

01:51:45.000 I would like to think that most people actually do that.

01:51:48.000 I think that, unfortunately, extremism is winning in the country, and the vocal minority just has a much larger megaphone or microphone than the non-vocal majority.

01:51:59.000 I think most people do that, but I don't think the people that do that waste their time posting about it or just filling the narrative so it looks like there's only two positions.

01:52:10.000 That's a good point.

01:52:11.000 I would love to see some return to moderation.

01:52:15.000 Extremism in any shape, I feel very uncomfortable with people who go to any length like that.

01:52:20.000 I think people are getting more and more upset at it.

01:52:23.000 And I think as people recognize it's more and more preposterous, there's more and more pushback and resistance. 0.98

01:52:32.000 What's really interesting with progressivism is that People are getting in trouble now for things that seem like there's something, like Martina Navratilova just got a bunch of shit from people calling her transphobic because she was saying that she didn't think that biological males should be competing with biological females and that there are people who identify as transgender who keep their penis And compete as a man. 0.98

01:53:01.000 And her position was like that. 0.96

01:53:03.000 Or compete as a woman, rather.

01:53:05.000 Her position was like that.

01:53:06.000 Listen, that's not a woman. 1.00

01:53:09.000 That's a man.

01:53:10.000 And they have an advantage.

01:53:11.000 And she was citing all these instances.

01:53:14.000 And so she got... 1.00

01:53:16.000 All this shit from people. 0.99

01:53:17.000 So then she said, I'm going to step back and I'm going to research this. 0.99

01:53:20.000 So she stepped back and researched it and then came back and said, no, I've looked at all the data now.

01:53:25.000 She probably came back harder. 0.99

01:53:25.000 She did come back harder. 0.99

01:53:26.000 And now they're attacking her and calling her transphobic.

01:53:29.000 Like, listen, this is not transphobia.

01:53:30.000 This is a real thing that you're going to have to address when you're talking about physical activities, when someone identifies.

01:53:37.000 Look, if you want to identify as a woman or identify as a male, I think we should all support people doing whatever they want to do as long as it's not hurting anybody.

01:53:44.000 Totally agree.

01:53:44.000 But when you're talking about Yeah.

01:54:04.000 If you decide that you're a woman and you want to enter into a fucking weightlifting competition and you weigh 220 pounds and you're beating all the other women by like fucking insane numbers like there was a few world champion weightlifting winners that are women that are actually biologically male so they're winning weightlifting competitions Just like, 0.99

01:54:28.000 what the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

01:54:30.000 Like, this is crazy. 0.99

01:54:31.000 This is not a matter of whether or not someone should identify with something, but you're talking about making it fair for actual biological women. 0.99

01:54:40.000 Like, there's a reason why women don't compete with men. 1.00

01:54:43.000 It's because physically they're not as strong.

01:54:46.000 So, and obviously there's some exceptions, there's some weak men, there's some strong women, and there's some sort of a spectrum, and you find yourself somewhere on it.

01:54:53.000 But if you're allowing biological males to compete with biological females and just say, oh, he identifies as a woman, let him in.

01:55:02.000 Yay, we're all being very progressive.

01:55:04.000 And then you look at the results and you go, wait, he just broke all the world records first time in.

01:55:08.000 Like, what?

01:55:09.000 And everyone's like, yes, amazing.

01:55:12.000 What a wonderful woman. 1.00

01:55:13.000 Girl power. 0.99

01:55:14.000 Like, that's not girl power. 0.73

01:55:16.000 You're monkeying with biology here.

01:55:18.000 This is crazy.

01:55:19.000 So what's the road out of that?

01:55:22.000 People getting upset in time, time of these instances, enough of these things happen, enough discussion, where enough of the actual reality of the facts and the data are shoved in everyone's face enough that The new generation comes to some sort of a rational understanding about what is and is not fair,

01:55:44.000 as opposed to where people are now, where they just, no matter what, they're scared to not push this progressive agenda, and they're scared of the blowback of Martina Navatilova, who is an LBGT hero, right?

01:55:57.000 Yes. 0.99

01:55:58.000 She's a fucking hero. 1.00

01:55:58.000 She was a lesbian woman who was a world champion tennis player, and now the left are attacking her. 1.00

01:56:05.000 So they're eating their own in a spectacular fashion, where you have these trans people who don't want to look at reality, and then people that support the trans people because they don't want to be considered in any way, shape, or form anything other than the most progressive of progressive. 0.92

01:56:20.000 And it's nonsense.

01:56:21.000 I think you're right, though, in the generational fix to it.

01:56:24.000 I think that's true of a lot of the stuff.

01:56:26.000 I get asked all the time, school shootings, right?

01:56:29.000 It's like the topic of the day.

01:56:30.000 I don't have a solution for it, but I know it's not going to be overnight.

01:56:33.000 It'll be generational in nature, just like it crept in generational in nature.

01:56:37.000 I think a lot of these problems, people look for a light switch solution where the solution in and of itself is the exact opposite of that.

01:56:44.000 Yeah, I think you're right.

01:56:45.000 I don't see any solution to that either.

01:56:47.000 And I think there's a lot of positions that people feel like they're supposed to take.

01:56:52.000 And if you're on the left, the big position that you're supposed to take is gun control.

01:56:58.000 Get rid of the guns.

01:56:59.000 The guns are the problem.

01:57:00.000 Look at all these people shooting people with guns.

01:57:03.000 Yep.

01:57:03.000 Guns, guns, guns.

01:57:04.000 And all the mass shootings, what do they have in common?

01:57:06.000 Guns.

01:57:07.000 They all have guns in common.

01:57:08.000 And they want to take away guns.

01:57:10.000 And then there's the people on the right, and they're like, I've never done anything wrong with my gun. 0.99

01:57:14.000 You're not taking my fucking gun. 0.99

01:57:15.000 And then there's this fucking unstoppable battle between these two sides. 1.00

01:57:21.000 And that there's a lot of factors. 0.97

01:57:23.000 Like, what happens to a human that leads them...

01:57:27.000 To get to this state of mind where they're able to go into a school and shoot it up.

01:57:31.000 Like, what is that?

01:57:32.000 What could possibly be going on?

01:57:34.000 How do we stop that from ever taking place?

01:57:37.000 These people have to be in some sort of insane pain.

01:57:40.000 There has to be something unbelievably wrong with their life, that they're capable of doing this.

01:57:45.000 How do we stop that?

01:57:46.000 How do we look at that as like, if this is our global community, if this is our national community, how do we stop this from happening in our national community?

01:57:55.000 I don't know what the answer to that is.

01:57:56.000 I think there's an answer to stopping school shootings and not to oversimplify anything.

01:58:03.000 I would say there's a couple key issues.

01:58:05.000 One of them is location, the other one is motivation.

01:58:07.000 You can solve the location issue.

01:58:09.000 Like if we as a country were legitimately interested in stopping school shootings, how many have ever occurred at a school where the president's children go?

01:58:19.000 Zero.

01:58:20.000 Why?

01:58:23.000 Because it's defended, right?

01:58:25.000 They actually take a proactive approach to it.

01:58:27.000 They're going to have layers of security, defense and depth.

01:58:31.000 They're probably going to have somebody looking out the front door or a system looking out the front door, controlled entry points, entry and exit points.

01:58:38.000 You're going to have a metal detector.

01:58:38.000 You're going to have security staff on site.

01:58:40.000 So you can control the location aspect.

01:58:43.000 And I go to...

01:58:46.000 Every time I'm at my kids' school, or unfortunately, or fortunately, every building I've ever been in, I'm viewing it from a pseudo-tactical perspective at least.

01:58:53.000 So I'll go walk around my kids' school.

01:58:57.000 There's issues that I see from a perspective of somebody who would want to exploit that from an aggressor's perspective.

01:59:02.000 But they could all be solved.

01:59:03.000 But that doesn't solve the second aspect of that, the motivation.

01:59:07.000 Because I have absolutely no answer as to why a 17-year-old kid would think that a solution of any kind would be to kill their classmates.

01:59:18.000 I don't understand that at all.

01:59:20.000 And although people...

01:59:22.000 It's funny, like...

01:59:24.000 At every shooting, surprisingly enough, there's two things, a gun and a shooter.

01:59:28.000 And the vast majority of the time, I hear people talking about the gun.

01:59:32.000 I think we've got to balance that conversation and talk about the motivation.

01:59:36.000 Yeah, 100%.

01:59:36.000 And also psych medications.

01:59:39.000 You've got to talk about that.

01:59:40.000 The rise in psych medications has got to be correlated with the rise of school shootings.

01:59:45.000 I mean, the amount of people that are on psych medication, and I understand that correlation does not equal causation.

01:59:51.000 It's not necessarily that the medication is forcing them to do this.

01:59:54.000 I don't know what study has been done on what is the effect and is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication?

02:00:05.000 Is there some sort of a connection between taking certain types of psych medication with certain biological makeup that allows you to have this Diffusion of reality.

02:00:16.000 Some weird thing happens to them where they're capable of horrific things, horrific actions.

02:00:22.000 How much of that is monkeying with human neurochemistry?

02:00:25.000 I don't know.

02:00:26.000 That's why I think the location portion, it's not that it's an easy solution, but it is solvable.

02:00:33.000 But isn't the problem funding?

02:00:34.000 There's no money to pay for teachers.

02:00:36.000 They don't have money to secure schools.

02:00:38.000 It depends on how serious we want to take it.

02:00:41.000 If we really wanted to stop it, what I'm saying is there are ways that can stop it.

02:00:46.000 I'm not saying those ways are easy.

02:00:47.000 I'm not saying that those ways are cheap.

02:00:49.000 But there are concrete things.

02:00:51.000 Just looking at a structure from being vulnerable to an assault, there are things that could be done.

02:00:56.000 But that doesn't solve the school shooting problem.

02:01:00.000 It changes the address.

02:01:03.000 Right.

02:01:06.000 Right.

02:01:14.000 Right.

02:01:32.000 Which, again, I find myself in the middle of that.

02:01:35.000 I don't agree with either of those positions because it's more nuanced than just the gun and the shooter.

02:01:42.000 It's the combination of all those things.

02:01:43.000 But I don't even feel like we're having a conversation in this country.

02:01:46.000 I feel like a lot of people are talking.

02:01:48.000 I don't think anybody is listening.

02:01:50.000 And I go to the schools in the neighborhood where my kids go to school.

02:01:57.000 I don't see a single change that they have made.

02:02:02.000 I think you're 100% correct in that there doesn't seem to be any real, there's no real plans to stop this stuff, and I don't think anybody has a real answer.

02:02:15.000 And that's one of the reasons why it's so confusing to people, because you could dwell on it and roll it over in your head all day long, and there's nothing that stands out as obvious.

02:02:24.000 Like, hey, there's a fire, go pour water on it.

02:02:27.000 That's obvious.

02:02:28.000 There's no solution like that.

02:02:29.000 And the low-hanging fruit, the metaphor for the school shootings would be, there's a gun, go pour water on that.

02:02:35.000 But the more nuanced and complex problem is actually the human being behind it.

02:02:39.000 And I see people, they just, well, that's too difficult, so I'm going to throw my hands up and give up.

02:02:43.000 But also, too, I think it's important to point out that actually, thankfully, it's incredibly rare that it actually happens.

02:02:52.000 And it's funny because you look at the stats and you start digging into where the stats come from and Two groups of people, and I'm sure you see this across a variety of topics, will take the same study and derive two different sets of numbers.

02:03:04.000 There's school shootings, and then there's shootings that happen at schools.

02:03:08.000 And you can make one number look bigger and one number look smaller.

02:03:12.000 Like if you wanted to include the number of people who commit suicide in a school parking lot, which at a national level is considered a school shooting, Right.

02:03:42.000 Yeah, I saw that when Ted Nugent debated Piers Morgan on television.

02:03:46.000 He was talking to him about gun violence and the actual numbers, and he was saying, well, these are the real statistics, and this is why the numbers are so high.

02:03:54.000 How many of these, when you're including gun violence, how many of these people are, like criminals, are being shot in the act by police officers?

02:04:01.000 How many of them are people defending their home from a break-in?

02:04:04.000 How many of them are...

02:04:06.000 Suicides.

02:04:06.000 And once you get through that, you get to the end of it, then you get to gang violence.

02:04:10.000 How many of them are responsible?

02:04:13.000 How many deaths are attributed to gang violence?

02:04:15.000 How many deaths are attributed to, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different factors.

02:04:21.000 Then you get to these mass shootings.

02:04:23.000 So the mass shootings, it's a relatively small percentage, but that doesn't give anybody any comfort for anybody that's suffered.

02:04:31.000 Of course.

02:04:31.000 And again, it doesn't excuse it.

02:04:34.000 It's just, thankfully, it happens infrequently.

02:04:39.000 I wish the number was zero.

02:04:40.000 And I think the answer to getting it to zero will be generational because it grew generationally.

02:04:46.000 I think it will go away generationally.

02:04:49.000 But how does it go to...

02:04:50.000 What fundamental changes have to happen in the way human beings exist that we stop...

02:05:03.000 It would be a terrible world if we said, hey, we're just going to have to accept that people are never going to evolve socially, emotionally, whatever it is that's causing people to lash out the way they do.

02:05:16.000 What a horrible world it would be if we say, no, people are just going to be like this forever.

02:05:22.000 We're not just flawed, but flawed and ruthless and cruel and violent and awful, and that's just the way people are forever.

02:05:29.000 I mean, I think there's improvements you can make on both sides, right?

02:05:32.000 So there's a gun and there's a shooter.

02:05:35.000 I couldn't be a more vehement supporter of the Second Amendment.

02:05:39.000 I completely and utterly support it, but I'm anti-irresponsibility.

02:05:44.000 And there's a lot of things that we could do as a nation.

02:05:47.000 That would improve safety via responsibility.

02:05:51.000 I mean, look at the stats on the percentage of American gun owners that don't own a safe.

02:05:56.000 It's over 50%.

02:05:58.000 Yeah.

02:05:58.000 Which speaks to access.

02:06:01.000 And what sucks about any improvements that we make, you'll never know about it.

02:06:05.000 Because you're never going to know about the school shooting that you stopped, really.

02:06:08.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:09.000 Right.

02:06:09.000 Because it doesn't make the news.

02:06:11.000 But that doesn't mean – my default position is we can do better.

02:06:14.000 Right.

02:06:14.000 There's ways that we could...

02:06:16.000 I think that the reasonable gun legislation that already exists, there's ways that we could improve communication interagency.

02:06:23.000 Like the Aurora shooter is a perfect example.

02:06:25.000 It took a pistol and killed five people the day he got fired and injured five police officers.

02:06:29.000 He shouldn't have had the gun. 0.55

02:06:31.000 He was a convicted felon.

02:06:32.000 His felony did not show up when they had the background check for his job, but it did show up for the background check, I believe, for his concealed weapons permit.

02:06:42.000 Oftentimes I see it where there's this disconnect between agencies not sharing information.

02:06:46.000 Very much like the military, civilian military infrastructure prior to 9-11.

02:06:51.000 Agency didn't want to talk to the FBI and the NSA because budget and relevancy and this is mine and that's yours and this is my rights. 0.96

02:06:58.000 We'll get the fuck away from me. 0.56

02:06:58.000 I don't want to share information. 0.56

02:07:00.000 I think we could do better on the regulations that are in place.

02:07:03.000 I'm not saying add any more, but maybe let's figure out a way where we could share information or at least make sure we're living up to the letter of the intent and the letter of the law.

02:07:12.000 On that side of the house.

02:07:13.000 And then on the other side of the house, you had a pinned tweet for a long time, and I'm going to totally murder this when it comes to exactly what it was, but something along is, we don't have a gun crisis, we have a mental health crisis.

02:07:26.000 I'd say we have a mental health crisis disguised as a gun crisis, or a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.

02:07:32.000 And just like we can do better on the firearm side of the house, we can do better on the mental health side of the house.

02:07:37.000 And I just see people throwing their hands up and attacking the low-hanging fruit because I think the mental health side of the house is a more difficult issue than the firearm issue.

02:07:47.000 I think it's the most difficult issue.

02:07:49.000 And I think everyone that I know, including myself, has had bad moments in their life and has struggled.

02:07:56.000 And the struggle, especially mental health struggle, struggle with depression or being unhappy or anger or any of the things that keep you off of a healthy baseline, those moments in life vary wildly in how people experience them,

02:08:16.000 to what level people experience them, what impact they have on them, and whether or not they can recover from these things.

02:08:23.000 Yeah. 0.68

02:08:39.000 What the fuck is going on where we let people get to that point without stepping in and trying to help? 0.97

02:08:46.000 And do they have anybody that even notices? 1.00

02:08:48.000 Do they have anyone around them that knows that they're this fucked up and this far gone? 0.96

02:08:52.000 We all like to think that that could never happen to us, that we could never get to a point where we're so despondent and filled with anger and hate and fear and self-loathing that we want to do something horrific. 0.93

02:09:05.000 But every person who does something horrific is a human being.

02:09:09.000 And the difference between you and them might be genetic, it might be environmental, it might be life experience, but they are a human being, just like you and I, and something horrifically went wrong in their life to the point where they are in this position where they show up at that school shooting in Illinois just a couple days ago.

02:09:27.000 Some guy got fired.

02:09:29.000 Yep.

02:09:29.000 Went back to work and just shot everybody up.

02:09:32.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

02:09:33.000 That guy worked there for 15 years. 0.99

02:09:35.000 Like, what is it when someone gets to a point where this is what flashes in their mind as a solution?

02:09:43.000 Go back with a gun.

02:09:44.000 Make everybody pay. 0.97

02:09:45.000 I felt it myself.

02:09:47.000 That feeling.

02:09:51.000 Overseas, when I lose close friends, the first absolute feeling you have is an anger that I don't have the vocabulary to describe and all you want to do is burn the world to the ground.

02:10:03.000 But it was fleeting and I didn't do it.

02:10:06.000 And I just don't know how we provide the barrier for people if they can.

02:10:09.000 And when it comes to mental health, I mean, somebody with more horsepower between the ears than me is going to need to solve that problem because I don't understand it.

02:10:18.000 But I do understand that feeling.

02:10:22.000 But what I needed was time.

02:10:23.000 And I don't know how to provide that.

02:10:25.000 Well, you also had...

02:10:27.000 Character and discipline and a lot of things that many people lack in your ability to mitigate these horrific feelings and this severe depression and anger.

02:10:39.000 Some people don't have those mental health tools.

02:10:43.000 They don't have those tools.

02:10:44.000 I mean, you're already a seal, right?

02:10:45.000 You're already a guy who's endured more than most human beings will ever in terms of physically and emotionally and how to get through that hump to become one of the elite operators in this country.

02:10:56.000 Just having that as a baseline.

02:11:01.000 You have the tool set to endure more than most.

02:11:07.000 Some people are just not capable of handling any real adversity.

02:11:11.000 Anything bad that comes down the pipe for them, they just fall apart.

02:11:16.000 And I think for many people, there's a real extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life.

02:11:23.000 There's an extreme feeling of a lack of meaning, that nothing they do matters, that they don't matter, that no one cares about them whether they're there or they're gone.

02:11:34.000 People either mock them or disregard them altogether, and they want people to know who they are, and that's one of the reasons why they do these things.

02:11:42.000 I can see that for sure, but Again, if I'm being objectively honest about myself, I did have those tools.

02:11:50.000 And probably the only thing that prevented me from acting out in that moment is that I didn't have access to the individuals that I wanted to act out against.

02:12:01.000 And I mean, like I said, I understand it.

02:12:05.000 I don't have a solution for it at all, but I understand it.

02:12:09.000 Yeah, well you would be able to understand it more than most in coming from that place of having lost friends and being in that intense and also being in this environment where people are shooting and killing people on a regular basis and you're directly a part of that and directly connected to it.

02:12:25.000 It makes violence so much more tangible.

02:12:28.000 Well, I mean, at the same time, I don't want to paint a horrible picture.

02:12:32.000 There's a ton of misconceptions about what I used to do, right? 0.99

02:12:35.000 And it comes from books and movies and TV shows because in 60 minutes, all that happens is bullets whizzing by your head and shit blowing up. 0.91

02:12:43.000 The reality is you're not exposed to violence that often overseas. 0.98

02:12:46.000 You are over a long term, I guess, in the aggregate.

02:12:49.000 But it's not as bad as people...

02:12:52.000 It's not as bad as people, I think, often would maybe want to romanticize it as being bad, because then they can maybe excuse away behaviors that come from that.

02:12:59.000 Does that bother you about movies, when you see movies about...

02:13:02.000 If my wife was here, all you'd have to say is, do you enjoy watching a war movie with your husband?

02:13:07.000 She'd be like, oh my god! 0.97

02:13:09.000 She just said, get out of the room. 1.00

02:13:10.000 Get out of the room because I can't do it.

02:13:12.000 It drives me nuts, but it also sets bad expectations.

02:13:16.000 I mean, I had some of the best times of my life overseas as well, and it wasn't all about loss, and it certainly wasn't all about loss of life.

02:13:22.000 There'd be whirlwind periods of time where that happened, and there'd be other periods of time where we're just training people.

02:13:28.000 You know, or we're going out and actually meeting leaders in the city and having meals with them.

02:13:34.000 And then, yeah, that night you might get your stuff on and go banging for a night.

02:13:38.000 But at the same time, it's a mix of all of those things.

02:13:43.000 I'm grateful for the experiences that I have from my military service.

02:13:48.000 Probably the best day of my life was the day I got shot.

02:13:50.000 It changed my perspective of who I thought I was.

02:13:54.000 It forced me to lift my head up and think about the future more than just the job that I had because my ability to do my job was thrown into my face.

02:14:02.000 I thought I was, well, one, once I realized I wasn't going to die, I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do the job I've always wanted to do for the rest of my life.

02:14:10.000 So I started thinking about the future.

02:14:11.000 Again, I would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn't been shot.

02:14:16.000 And when it happened in that moment, it was the worst day of my life.

02:14:19.000 And I look back on it, and it probably wasn't the best day of my life, but perhaps one of the most meaningful changes in direction for me as a human being.

02:14:28.000 So there is positive that comes out of that negative.

02:14:31.000 It's not all bad.

02:14:33.000 I think I got more positive, more good than bad from 15 years at war.

02:14:40.000 It's interesting that that does happen, right?

02:14:43.000 That some bad moment in your life could lead to a greater life overall.

02:14:49.000 Yeah.

02:14:49.000 Complete shift in perspective.

02:14:51.000 I had never thought about anything in my life except an insatiable desire to be a SEAL. And then I became a SEAL. I'm like, this is awesome because it was pre-911.

02:15:01.000 So we just worked out, drank, and then worked out and drank.

02:15:06.000 And then 9-11 happened.

02:15:08.000 And my world went from conceptual to practical.

02:15:11.000 And it was way different than I thought it was going to be because I'd watched the same movies.

02:15:16.000 Right.

02:15:16.000 And then you get over there and you're like, oh, whoa, this is substantially different.

02:15:22.000 And it built and it was a lot of the things that I thought it wasn't going to be.

02:15:27.000 And even more than I thought it possibly could be in some of those directions.

02:15:32.000 But I don't know.

02:15:35.000 People, I think, often paint war or the experiences associated with war as solely negative.

02:15:43.000 I also, just like when it comes to the conversations and being on the extremes, I would love to pull that more back into the middle and actually have a conversation about it.

02:15:50.000 I think amazing changes can come from people in those environments.

02:15:54.000 What is it about war movies that drive you the most crazy?

02:15:58.000 The fact that almost everything in them is inaccurate.

02:16:01.000 Almost everything? 0.69

02:16:02.000 The biggest thing that drives me fucking crazy is when grenades create a fireball. 0.96

02:16:09.000 Really? 0.97

02:16:09.000 Well, yeah, because it happens in like every movie. 0.97

02:16:11.000 They throw a grenade and a 55-gallon drum of gasoline explodes.

02:16:14.000 Right.

02:16:15.000 And people go flying backwards and cars flip over.

02:16:17.000 If you throw a grenade, it goes pop.

02:16:19.000 And it puts some dust up in the air.

02:16:21.000 And if you're waiting for the fireball, you're going to be there for the rest of your natural life.

02:16:24.000 It's just not going on.

02:16:26.000 And they're not that effective.

02:16:27.000 They're fun, don't get me wrong, but they're not that effective.

02:16:30.000 I did not know that they'd only create a fireball.

02:16:32.000 No.

02:16:33.000 I've never seen a grenade go off, obviously.

02:16:35.000 I'm sure Jamie can pull one up.

02:16:37.000 It just goes, poof!

02:16:37.000 It's dust.

02:16:38.000 I think I've seen one in a video.

02:16:40.000 I'm sure for a moment, like the momentary explosion, there is a flash.

02:16:44.000 But other than that, it's literally just dust flying up in the air.

02:16:46.000 What is the best military movie that's the most accurate or the least offensive?

02:16:53.000 Navy SEALs starring Charlie Sheen.

02:16:54.000 Really?

02:16:55.000 No, not at all.

02:16:56.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

02:16:58.000 I almost fell down. 1.00

02:17:03.000 That fucking guy probably fooled more people into coming to the SEAL teams than anybody else. 1.00

02:17:07.000 Really? 1.00

02:17:07.000 Oh, my God. 1.00

02:17:08.000 Really?

02:17:09.000 Yeah.

02:17:09.000 I mean, he's fallen through skylights with MP5s and handlebar mustaches.

02:17:13.000 You know, there's snipers calling himself God.

02:17:16.000 I can't see anything.

02:17:17.000 I'm switching to starlight, blasting people through a concrete wall.

02:17:20.000 They're doing freefall jumps.

02:17:22.000 They're in submarines. 0.99

02:17:23.000 Like, that's an entire 30-year career to do all that shit in 60 minutes. 0.99

02:17:27.000 You take that expectation. 0.99

02:17:29.000 You come to the team.

02:17:30.000 You're like, God, I'm kind of bored right now.

02:17:31.000 So is that the word?

02:17:32.000 There he is.

02:17:33.000 Charlie Sheen.

02:17:34.000 Bang, bang, bang, bang.

02:17:35.000 Look at him.

02:17:36.000 I'm gonna run, boys.

02:17:37.000 Yep.

02:17:38.000 I'm gonna make it.

02:17:39.000 And he's got the requisite...

02:17:43.000 Scarf around the neck.

02:17:44.000 You have to have one of those. 1.00

02:17:45.000 So, what kind of asshole wears a red scarf in an environment where there's no red? 1.00

02:17:49.000 He's got green utilities on from Vietnam wearing a red chamal. 1.00

02:17:54.000 This is so hilarious. 1.00

02:17:56.000 Especially when you know Charlie now, like such a fucking psychotic partier. 0.99

02:18:01.000 So, apparently, they came to the Bud's compound and did a little bit of training with the guys. 0.99

02:18:06.000 I guess there were some bathroom breaks and they just were like, Alright, you guys ready for some more PT? Oh, really?

02:18:11.000 Yeah.

02:18:12.000 That makes sense.

02:18:13.000 I'm obviously hearing that 18th hand, but I want to believe it's true. 0.70

02:18:16.000 Well, you know who I hear trains diligently and really hard, and takes it super seriously, and is like, one of the most humble guys you'll ever meet is Keanu Reeves.

02:18:25.000 That doesn't surprise me.

02:18:26.000 Yeah, it doesn't surprise me either, but I heard some people that had interacted with him when he was training for...

02:18:33.000 John Wickham.

02:18:33.000 Yeah, including my jiu-jitsu instructor, John Jock Machado, my friend Higa Machado, John Jock's brother, and a bunch of other...

02:18:41.000 He worked out with a bunch of other Machados, in fact.

02:18:43.000 I think Carlos as well.

02:18:45.000 But, you know, he really wanted to learn actual jiu-jitsu, so he really did train with them.

02:18:49.000 Yeah, he did real tactical courses.

02:18:51.000 And so his tactical proficiency shows in that movie.

02:18:56.000 And so to get back to stuff that bothers me, it's the 72-round pistol magazine.

02:19:01.000 Yeah.

02:19:03.000 Because I'm counting.

02:19:04.000 I'm like, that's 15, oh, 25, 30. Or the shotgun that has 48 rounds in it.

02:19:10.000 So I can't do it.

02:19:11.000 I'm like throwing stuff at the TV. My wife just points. 1.00

02:19:14.000 She says, get out. 0.99

02:19:15.000 I can't do it.

02:19:19.000 So Sicario, I love Sicario.

02:19:21.000 There's a scene at the border that has one of the most blatant just errors in the movie.

02:19:27.000 There's a guy pointing a gun.

02:19:29.000 He's supposedly a CIA agent.

02:19:31.000 He's pointing a gun out the windshield and you can see that the bolt to the rifle is locked to the rear.

02:19:35.000 Oh no!

02:19:36.000 Which means the armor on set handed it to him, you know, clear and safe.

02:19:40.000 And he just went and they filmed it and nobody caught it. 1.00

02:19:42.000 And I saw that movie and I'm like, turn that shit off. 1.00

02:19:45.000 I can't watch it anymore. 1.00

02:19:46.000 Of course, yeah.

02:19:47.000 It ruins it for me.

02:19:48.000 Now, why don't they fix stuff like that? 0.97

02:19:50.000 You would think that you're making a movie about military or about guns.

02:19:54.000 The real gun nuts are going to notice that. 0.99

02:19:57.000 But they probably didn't catch it in the editing process.

02:19:59.000 It's so fast.

02:19:59.000 It's probably up there for three seconds.

02:20:01.000 But if you know...

02:20:02.000 I mean, you look at a gun and if it was your primary tool for years, you're looking for certain things all the time.

02:20:11.000 Yep, here we go.

02:20:14.000 For someone who doesn't know, though, it looks super serious.

02:20:17.000 Well, that's why they're still watching the movie and I left.

02:20:20.000 Yep, bolt to the rear.

02:20:23.000 See that?

02:20:24.000 Walk to the rear.

02:20:26.000 Go ahead and pull the trigger there. 0.88

02:20:27.000 Go ahead, son.

02:20:31.000 Obviously an empty magazine. 0.99

02:20:32.000 Yeah, hey, silly. 0.94

02:20:34.000 So nobody caught that in the editing process is what it is. 0.99

02:20:37.000 How the fuck did they not see that? 0.58

02:20:38.000 Now, don't you think they digitally could have moved that forward? 0.99

02:20:40.000 They 100% could have moved it because he didn't fire in that scene anyway. 1.00

02:20:42.000 Yeah, just push that bitch up. 1.00

02:20:44.000 Just Photoshop that sucker. 1.00

02:20:46.000 I mean, they can use... 1.00

02:20:48.000 You get angry, right?

02:20:49.000 It makes sense.

02:20:50.000 Hey, man, in a way less significant thing, I get crazy when I watch people play pool in movies that obviously can't play.

02:20:56.000 Oh, I can imagine.

02:20:57.000 Drives me nuts.

02:20:58.000 Yes.

02:20:59.000 Drives me nuts. 0.99

02:21:00.000 Like, if I see someone, like, it's supposed to be some pool hustler, and I see they have a bullshit bridge, and they're gripping the... 0.97

02:21:06.000 Like, you can see things in movies, like, my friends who smoke cigarettes say they can tell when someone doesn't smoke. 0.67

02:21:12.000 Oh, for sure.

02:21:13.000 Yeah, because when you smoke, there's just, like, a casual, relaxed way that you're holding the cigarette, and the way you're drawing it, but when someone's, like, never smoked before, and they're like...

02:21:24.000 Yeah.

02:21:24.000 They've got this weird thing to do and like, oh, that guy doesn't really smoke.

02:21:27.000 I'm like, how the fuck can you tell? 0.98

02:21:28.000 Because I smoke. 0.99

02:21:29.000 It's like another thing that bugs me is you watch any tactical scene where they're like moving down a hallway and it's like, why is your gun pointed at your buddy's face?

02:21:39.000 Like, that's not cool.

02:21:41.000 Why are you aiming?

02:21:43.000 And then the way that they make entry into rooms, it's like, awesome.

02:21:46.000 I like to play Russian roulette with my life as well.

02:21:48.000 It just drives me absolutely bad.

02:21:51.000 What about Zero Dark Thirty? 1.00

02:21:55.000 That movie fucking sucks. 1.00

02:22:00.000 What sucks about it? 1.00

02:22:02.000 You know what drove me crazy?

02:22:03.000 How much time do we have?

02:22:04.000 That redhead lady was yelling at all those train killers. 1.00

02:22:06.000 I was like, I don't think they'd listen to her.

02:22:09.000 There are some creative liberties that are taken in that movie from soup to nuts.

02:22:17.000 Was that person, the lady who yelled at those guys, the woman who was in charge, was that a real human in real life?

02:22:23.000 It was based off of a real human, for sure.

02:22:25.000 A lot of the things in that movie were based on real events.

02:22:28.000 However, if you're trying to get tickets to get people's seats...

02:22:32.000 They're butts in seats.

02:22:33.000 You've got to glamorize stuff.

02:22:35.000 So a lot of people, because in that movie, the source drives up in the vehicle and detonates himself.

02:22:41.000 That actually happened.

02:22:42.000 That killed a bunch of people and koused. 1.00

02:22:47.000 As long as you look at it as entertainment, that movie's okay.

02:22:50.000 If you look at it with a refined eye, like, are they doing this correctly?

02:22:55.000 No. 0.97

02:22:56.000 They're all gonna die.

02:22:58.000 I mean, it's, it just, we would need another four hours to literally go down the list of things, but it's just, things are compressed, things that would never happen happen for the sake of creating an entertainment.

02:23:11.000 An intoxicating or emotional scene on camera.

02:23:15.000 And it's tough to watch.

02:23:17.000 Because I'm sitting there, I'm like, get out of the door, get out of the door, get out of the door! 0.99

02:23:19.000 I'm getting anxiety watching these damn movies. 0.99

02:23:22.000 Because you don't hang out in front of open doors unless you want to get shot. 0.99

02:23:26.000 Now, how many different things were fucked up about that movie? 0.91

02:23:30.000 Only the things that were after the opening scene. 0.69

02:23:35.000 So the whole movie's a disaster?

02:23:36.000 Yeah, it's just...

02:23:37.000 I don't want to talk about it anymore. 1.00

02:23:39.000 A dumbass like myself, I'm like, that's a good fucking movie. 1.00

02:23:41.000 Seems pretty realistic. 1.00

02:23:42.000 Well, think about it from entertainment.

02:23:44.000 It's a great entertaining movie.

02:23:45.000 You get asked the same question about the movie American Sniper or Lone Survivor.

02:23:50.000 They're all based around certain things that have been enhanced to make it more entertaining.

02:23:56.000 Yes.

02:23:57.000 And I get it.

02:23:58.000 They're there to make money.

02:23:59.000 They're not there to tell historically accurate tales.

02:24:01.000 Do you know Marcus?

02:24:02.000 Marcus?

02:24:03.000 I do not know Marcus well, but I do know Marcus.

02:24:05.000 I know him.

02:24:06.000 I don't know how he felt.

02:24:08.000 I don't know if you'd ever say.

02:24:10.000 He was involved with the making of it.

02:24:12.000 Yeah, but I mean, I'm sure they only listened to him so much, you know?

02:24:16.000 Yeah.

02:24:17.000 Given how I can, again, having not been there, and I can only imagine how horrific that incident must be for him to deal with on a daily level, I would bet he wasn't very involved.

02:24:28.000 I would almost rather them, if that was me, I think I would almost rather say, you know what?

02:24:33.000 Just make the movie that you want to make.

02:24:35.000 Because I don't want to sit here and explain exactly what happened and recreate these scenes and talk about how this person died over here.

02:24:43.000 Just go to town.

02:24:45.000 Is there any movie that you've ever seen about war where you go, that makes sense?

02:24:50.000 First 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is unbelievable.

02:24:54.000 Not for accuracy, for capturing the essence of what it feels like.

02:24:59.000 And the switch between utter fear to excitement to joy to anger in the matter of a second.

02:25:08.000 Another movie that does a good aspect or a good job of capturing some of those aspects, I would say, is also Black Hawk Down.

02:25:15.000 Not for accuracy.

02:25:17.000 But to capture the chaos of how a plan can come unraveled and just how chaotic it can be.

02:25:23.000 And that's how sometimes you can feel so helpless, but your only solution is to drive into the problem instead of moving away from it.

02:25:30.000 So those capture the essence of it well.

02:25:32.000 From a technical perspective, I honestly cannot think of a single movie that does it justice.

02:25:41.000 Wow.

02:25:41.000 It would have to be like a 50-hour movie, though.

02:25:44.000 Of course.

02:25:45.000 I mean...

02:25:47.000 Black Hawk Down, I think, was a multiple-day incident, and that movie is 90 minutes.

02:25:51.000 So they get rid of all the boring BS stuff that is actually what you do the vast majority of your job.

02:25:57.000 If I look at my career, probably greater than 95% of my career I spent training, and 5% I spent in combat.

02:26:07.000 Really?

02:26:07.000 Yep.

02:26:08.000 And that is average.

02:26:10.000 I would say there are people who are maybe a little bit higher and people who are a little bit lower.

02:26:13.000 But you're not going to spend more than, at most, maybe 10% of your career in combat, even if your job is directly tied to combat.

02:26:22.000 Because you've got to train.

02:26:23.000 You've got to plan the missions.

02:26:24.000 I mean, our normal planning cycle was 24 to 72 hours.

02:26:28.000 Sitting in front of PowerPoint, considering whether or not I should hang myself or blow my brains out because we're arguing over the font that we're using to submit for mission approval.

02:26:38.000 Really?

02:26:38.000 Oh, you're studying the weather.

02:26:40.000 You're studying the terrain.

02:26:41.000 I've had slides and mission briefs sent back not be approved because I didn't orient the helicopter the correct direction on the slide.

02:26:48.000 They're like, hey, you need to fix this and then resubmit it.

02:26:51.000 Like, if you wanted to shut down the average day military...

02:26:54.000 It wouldn't be through a kinetic act.

02:26:56.000 You would need to put some type of code into Microsoft Office, and we're done.

02:27:00.000 Because we operate on Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Office.

02:27:05.000 We'd sit there, and we'd plan, and we would brief, and we'd submit for approval.

02:27:08.000 That's three days.

02:27:09.000 Then you'd go do an objective that would last for 10 hours.

02:27:12.000 Whoa.

02:27:13.000 Repeat the cycle.

02:27:14.000 I'm too ADD for that.

02:27:16.000 Well, you break up the tasks.

02:27:18.000 The last thing you would want is one person creating the entire plan.

02:27:22.000 Somebody's doing the communication plan, the medevac plan, the insertion plan, the route planning.

02:27:26.000 We don't ever really brief what we're going to do inside of the objective because that's kind of the soup and nuts that you train for at all times.

02:27:33.000 Everything is to get there and then, okay, that's actually our job.

02:27:37.000 But we focus on all those other things.

02:27:38.000 Then, primary, secondary, tertiary plan for each one of those things.

02:27:42.000 Phase lines for each one of those things.

02:27:44.000 None of that has ever shown up in any movie.

02:27:47.000 What doesn't show up in any movies is...

02:27:49.000 The vast majority of time, the intelligence is bad, and you hit what's called a dry hole.

02:27:53.000 You go to a building, you approach the structure, you breach the door, and the intelligence is wrong.

02:27:58.000 It's either empty or it's the wrong person.

02:28:00.000 That happens all the time.

02:28:02.000 It's not exciting, though.

02:28:03.000 So we pay the people money, they fix their door, and we go back and we try to find the person again.

02:28:08.000 None of that shows up in any of the mediums, because they're too compressed.

02:28:14.000 With all your experience in the military and your knowledge of what the real world in these combat environments is like, how do you feel when you hear people talk about We're good to go.

02:28:57.000 I'm glad that they live in a place where they have enough space to develop those thoughts because they're not under pressure because the military is doing the job that they should be doing.

02:29:08.000 There are, like I said, so many misconceptions about what the military does What we do overseas, how many countries we are in overseas, how deep we are into some of these countries, how forecasted and how forward looking the military is,

02:29:26.000 looking for emerging threats as opposed to just responding.

02:29:29.000 And all of that creates space.

02:29:32.000 So people can exercise their right to voice their First Amendment right of saying those things.

02:29:38.000 Does it frustrate you, though, that they don't have a real understanding?

02:29:42.000 I'm grateful that they live in a place where they don't have that great understanding.

02:29:46.000 Because, like I said, they have the space to be confused.

02:29:49.000 They're not pushed under a thumb. 1.00

02:29:50.000 They're not being told, you have to say this or it's going to be your fucking head in the square. 0.99

02:29:55.000 It is frustrating for me at times, but I balance that with... 0.99

02:30:01.000 That's what this country is supposed to be about.

02:30:03.000 You're supposed to be able to voice your dissent, right?

02:30:06.000 And I believe that the system will correct, and it does correct for itself.

02:30:11.000 There are people that believe that, but I think the majority of people, again, silent majority versus extreme minority.

02:30:19.000 I think those people are in the extreme minority, but they're very vocal.

02:30:21.000 I think most people are incredibly appreciative of what the military does.

02:30:25.000 But having said that, if you've never served in the military and you've never been in a combat occupation and then you've never applied that occupation for real, there's going to be a gap.

02:30:38.000 And there's going to be a gap in understanding.

02:30:40.000 And that's okay.

02:30:43.000 So it's frustrating, yes, but I'm glad that it exists, and I'm glad that they are not, and this country is not in a position where they are getting drafted and forced into that position.

02:30:51.000 I'm glad that it was me that did that and had to bear any weight or burden that came with that to allow them to have whatever opinion they want.

02:30:59.000 That's a great perspective.

02:31:00.000 That's a very healthy way of looking at it.

02:31:02.000 And I probably think it's probably the only manageable way of looking at it.

02:31:06.000 I think you'd go crazy otherwise.

02:31:08.000 And then what are you going to do?

02:31:09.000 Go to a rally and hold up another?

02:31:12.000 Because initially, I have to fight back the initial anger.

02:31:17.000 But eventually, give me a little bit of time and the hopefully relatively sane head is going to prevail.

02:31:22.000 And I had, you know, again, that night I got hurt.

02:31:26.000 It changed the way that I thought about things.

02:31:29.000 If I had never gotten hurt and I had never thought about my own mortality and I had never thought about – I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not what I did in the military hasn't had any impact,.0001.

02:31:40.000 I don't know if I would have thought about that.

02:31:43.000 If all I had ever done was just doing the occupation that I did, I needed that lifting of my head to have that perspective.

02:31:49.000 I did.

02:31:49.000 I don't think all people do, but I needed that.

02:31:52.000 I was going to say, I think that night in some ways helps me have the perspective I have now with those people.

02:32:02.000 How long is the average career of someone who's a CEO? Well, if you want to retire, you've got to do 20 years and a wake-up.

02:32:09.000 What's a wake-up?

02:32:10.000 Wake up the next day.

02:32:11.000 You have to do 20 years to the day.

02:32:14.000 So wake up the day after your 20th.

02:32:17.000 But they need to change the term also.

02:32:18.000 Retirement pay in the military should be, in my opinion at least, replaced with money that you are going to get paid until you find your second career.

02:32:26.000 You're not going to retire on $3,000 a month.

02:32:29.000 But if you want to make it to retirement, you have to do 20 years.

02:32:34.000 The only reason I get a retirement is because I was medically retired.

02:32:37.000 So they basically, I don't know how it happens in the system, but they put me in that category as essentially I've been made at 20 years.

02:32:43.000 Right.

02:32:44.000 What happens with most guys when they hit 20 years?

02:32:47.000 Do they retire?

02:32:48.000 It's hit or miss.

02:32:51.000 On the enlisted side of the house, they start throwing what at that phase of your life is going to be a lot of money at you.

02:32:58.000 They'll try to get you to re-enlist.

02:33:00.000 And I never took this money, and so I'm not exactly sure, but it's about five years of re-enlistment, and it's about $150,000.

02:33:07.000 Which is a ton of money if you're in the military.

02:33:10.000 And if you re-enlist while you're overseas, every penny of that is tax-free because you're going to get it in increments per year.

02:33:15.000 150 per year?

02:33:16.000 Total.

02:33:17.000 For the five years?

02:33:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:33:18.000 Damn. 1.00

02:33:21.000 Here's the deal. 0.99

02:33:22.000 It's a lot of money if you're used to having your head down and you're used to making 90 a year and you're in your late 30s and you realize, oh my God, I could buy a house with that money.

02:33:32.000 You'll take it.

02:33:33.000 And every year that you do over 20, they will add, I believe, one half of a percentage point to your military retirement.

02:33:40.000 So if you do 20 years in the military, you will get 50% of your base pay.

02:33:46.000 Which doesn't include the dive pay, demo pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, all the difference in money that I made.

02:33:51.000 I get the exact same retirement, which is totally fine, and I signed up for this as a person who was in front of a radar scope for 20 years.

02:33:57.000 We get the exact same paycheck at the end.

02:34:00.000 If you do 21 years, you get 50 and a half.

02:34:02.000 22 years, 51%.

02:34:04.000 So it keeps incrementally going up.

02:34:06.000 So some guys will go up to 30. Most guys, by the time they get to 20, and I will say this, it depends on what's going on in the world.

02:34:13.000 When it was peak wartime, 2000...

02:34:16.000 In 2007, 2009, not a lot of guys were getting out.

02:34:20.000 Most of the guys were re-upping because they wanted to strap the boots back on and go back overseas.

02:34:24.000 And they're like, hey, I'll re-enlist while I'm overseas.

02:34:26.000 Tax-free money.

02:34:27.000 I get to go do what I want to do.

02:34:28.000 It's a win-win.

02:34:30.000 But most people, as the operational temple has slowed, anecdotally, what I've seen is they are looking more towards the future, going to get out around 20. If not, they'll get out around 25 after they take that re-enlistment bonus.

02:34:41.000 And if you're staying in to your 30s, you're in for the long haul.

02:34:44.000 When you look at the news, do you pay attention to potential conflicts internationally and the things that are going on?

02:34:53.000 Yes and no.

02:34:58.000 I'm not looking at them to inform my opinion.

02:35:02.000 I'm just kind of curious as to what the news agencies are reporting, because having lived on the other side of that and doing things that will eventually make the news days, weeks, or months later, the news is generally behind on that cycle.

02:35:14.000 And the military does do a good job and has continued to do a better job of kind of forecasting those things and spreading out as much as necessary.

02:35:22.000 Yeah.

02:35:22.000 But do you see anything now, like, you know, I know Trump got a lot of criticism for saying they were going to pull troops out of Syria.

02:35:28.000 Yeah.

02:35:29.000 And when you see, you know, the debate about that or actions, possible actions against North Korea and all this kind of stuff, like, how do you, do you view this?

02:35:39.000 I mean, obviously you view this as a guy who has served and has been overseas.

02:35:43.000 Yeah.

02:35:44.000 But do you look at things like these are potential issues that are coming up and things you need to be concerned with?

02:35:50.000 The Syria and...

02:35:53.000 Well, the Syria one, there are guys from the community over there.

02:35:57.000 They've been actively engaged.

02:35:58.000 Iraq.

02:35:59.000 It's funny.

02:36:00.000 The news reported for a long time, we've withdrawn from Iraq.

02:36:03.000 All U.S. troops are out of Iraq.

02:36:05.000 No, they weren't.

02:36:06.000 We've always had a presence there since we invaded in 2003. And I can go...

02:36:13.000 Tit for tat on a lot of issues where the news gets it wrong, which is why I don't necessarily look at it for me to inform my opinion.

02:36:20.000 Syria, certainly any area where we allow a place for, and the only word I have for it is evil, to grow, it's going to happen. 1.00

02:36:33.000 The problem with the strategy that I see it is that actually – so we started in Afghanistan.

02:36:40.000 And again, this is my opinion, not the military opinion.

02:36:43.000 I can only speak for myself.

02:36:44.000 We went into Afghanistan.

02:36:45.000 We were incredibly effective.

02:36:46.000 So we cut the head off of that snake, but it spawned two more.

02:36:51.000 You go into Iraq.

02:36:52.000 You can argue whether or not we were effective, but then all of a sudden we started seeing foreign fighters coming in from all of these different countries.

02:36:59.000 And the tactics that we started seeing used in Iraq – like my first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003 – no, 2002 – Welcome to my show!

02:37:30.000 Where they had the ability to allow, again, for lack of a better term, that evil to grow, to learn, to come across the border, to engage American forces, then to flee into a sovereign nation we couldn't do anything about.

02:37:43.000 Then we started seeing that in Afghanistan.

02:37:45.000 But we got effective any time that these people would get together and have a large group. 0.96

02:37:48.000 We'd get effective at either capturing them or killing them.

02:37:51.000 So they realized they need to be disaggregate. 0.96

02:37:54.000 So now we've spread this.

02:37:55.000 I think the last stat that I saw was ISIS is in 64 countries.

02:38:00.000 And the problem that I see with the US military is that we're very, very good at going in and cutting the head off of the snake, but we're not good at creating and holding infrastructure.

02:38:11.000 And the timeline required to hold that infrastructure is well beyond the palette, I think, of most Americans.

02:38:16.000 And the best example I can point to is South Korea.

02:38:19.000 We still have bases with an American presence in South Korea.

02:38:23.000 That war ended decades ago.

02:38:25.000 We still have bases in Germany.

02:38:27.000 We have bases in Italy.

02:38:29.000 Now, we're not necessarily using them for the same purposes, but if we really want to control that area, we have to be prepared to stay there for that long.

02:38:37.000 And I don't think the U.S. military, one, has enough personnel to do that, and I don't think the American populace has the palate to allow that to happen.

02:38:46.000 Do you think that that's necessary, that in order to protect people from, whether it's ISIS or whatever, comes after ISIS? I mean, obviously ISIS is fairly recent, right?

02:38:59.000 They went to Al-Qaeda, to ISIS, to ISIL, and all that.

02:39:02.000 And whatever could be next.

02:39:03.000 So you feel like we have to maintain presence in that part of the world, period.

02:39:09.000 I think we should use the military as a measure of last resort.

02:39:12.000 I think that war should be a measure of absolutely last resort and I would love to see us evolve to a point where we use it less and less and less.

02:39:22.000 I describe it as you're standing at a dam and you can see a little spout coming out.

02:39:31.000 Do you put your finger in the spout Knowing that it's not going to fix the problem, but it's going to buy you time to hopefully have somebody come and fix the dam, right?

02:39:40.000 That's the option I would go for, versus just leaving it as it is and allowing it to continue to weaken the dam, or another sprout would come out.

02:39:46.000 My theory, that the military is really well served to provide that space, to put that finger in that sprout.

02:39:53.000 So yes, I think if we find an area where these ideologies are thriving, We have to do what is necessary to remove that ideology and hopefully destroy it.

02:40:04.000 Not resettle it somewhere else, but actually destroy it.

02:40:07.000 So yes, the short answer is, absolutely, if we find areas where we can squash this down, we have to go.

02:40:16.000 But I just hope that there's people smarter than me that have a much longer-term strategy.

02:40:21.000 Because all we're doing, in my opinion, is the finger in the dam.

02:40:25.000 And is there a longer-term strategy?

02:40:27.000 Like when you see all the global conflicts, I mean, is there a time that we could, I mean, it sounds insane to say that there's never going to be a time where there's no war.

02:40:35.000 It sounds like an insane thing to say.

02:40:37.000 I don't know if there's ever been a time, at least globally, not that the U.S. was involved, but I don't know if there's ever been a time where there hasn't been war.

02:40:43.000 I don't think there has.

02:40:44.000 I don't think there can be because, and I think we talked about this the first day I met you, there's X people and there's Y people. 0.98

02:40:52.000 They're not going to get along.

02:40:53.000 It doesn't matter what your belief is, you have an axis somewhere that has another belief.

02:40:56.000 And if you go to the extreme end of that belief, that individual may be willing to take action against you, violent action against you, for your belief.

02:41:04.000 And I don't think there's a way around that, because humans are just too diverse.

02:41:07.000 But is it possible that one day we'll move past this?

02:41:10.000 I mean, is there any plans at all to try to facilitate some sort of a peaceful world civilization where, you know, all nations kind of get along in some sort of a mutually agreeable way?

02:41:22.000 I mean, does anybody have some sort of 100-year plan?

02:41:24.000 Isn't that hilarious that that's a funny thing to say?

02:41:26.000 I mean, they didn't brief me on it, if it exists, but... 0.98

02:41:29.000 Isn't that fucked, though? 1.00

02:41:31.000 I mean, human beings are always going to shoot and kill each other. 1.00

02:41:33.000 We're always going to have war. 1.00

02:41:35.000 Isn't that fucked? 0.98

02:41:35.000 Since the inception of human beings, it seems like, at least at some level, and thankfully it's microscopic in comparison to the overall total, but it's happening. 0.98

02:41:45.000 I think it's happened since man has been walking on Earth.

02:41:49.000 And the only way...

02:41:51.000 That we feel today that we can protect ourselves is to have the more dominant, more powerful military and to make sure that we're the ones who get to dictate whether or not evil flourishes.

02:42:03.000 Yeah, I mean that's – I would want maybe a – I want the dominant ability of our military to continue to grow, but I'd like to see – and I think it's already moving in this direction – smaller, more surgical uses of it.

02:42:16.000 I just – the military, in my opinion, is not good at building infrastructure and holding terrain for a long period of time.

02:42:21.000 It's just not what we're designed to do.

02:42:24.000 It's not the design of the military, for that matter.

02:42:27.000 What is the overall view about getting out of Syria?

02:42:32.000 It probably depends on the people that you ask.

02:42:33.000 What about people that you talk to?

02:42:38.000 Both sides of the coin.

02:42:39.000 I will get answers from I think we're making a difference to we're wasting our time.

02:42:46.000 And I got that the initial invasion of Iraq, the initial invasion of Afghanistan.

02:42:52.000 One of the things that I enjoyed about the community I came from is that critical thinking is rewarded.

02:42:57.000 There's no attempt and people think about this.

02:42:59.000 You watch Full Metal Jacket.

02:43:02.000 Choke yourself with my hand and you get told what to do and how to do it and how much time you have to do it.

02:43:06.000 People think that critical thinking has no place in the military.

02:43:09.000 But where I came from, that's what we're looking for is people who are able to critically think.

02:43:13.000 So there would be – we would have political arguments, religious arguments, philosophical arguments in the team room and then – We're good to go. 1.00

02:43:38.000 From this is awesome to this is stupid. 1.00

02:43:40.000 You know what confuses me? 0.99

02:43:41.000 I've heard different opinions on Assad, whether Assad is evil, whether he's gassed his citizens, or whether or not he's a victim of propaganda or some mass smear campaign.

02:43:50.000 I'm like, whoa, this is way past my pay grade.

02:43:53.000 I've heard the same thing, and it's beyond mine as well, too.

02:43:55.000 It's frustrating, because when you don't know whether or not this is some propaganda, or this is a real threat, or whether it's something like The Saddam Hussein situation where, yes, he was an evil dictator, but also removing him might create a power vacuum like Libya.

02:44:11.000 Did create a power vacuum.

02:44:13.000 And Gaddafi with Libya. 0.60

02:44:15.000 I mean, Libya is a horrific example of that, right? 0.93

02:44:18.000 Yeah.

02:44:19.000 And I don't...

02:44:20.000 I don't know the long-term solution to those problems.

02:44:24.000 Like I said, I spend enough of my waking hours truly questioning whether or not anything that I was involved in made my family or your family or Jamie's family safer.

02:44:37.000 Did my actions erode what the rest of the world thinks about the United States of America?

02:44:45.000 And, I mean, I flow back and forth.

02:44:47.000 I think it had an impact in the moment.

02:44:50.000 I think it had an impact stopping the water coming out of the dam.

02:44:54.000 I think it was essential that it needed to be done.

02:44:57.000 But I don't know if any of that has an impact beyond that time period that it occurred.

02:45:03.000 How much does it help you in talking about this stuff to give you a perspective?

02:45:08.000 I know Cleared Hot, your podcast, you're very active with that.

02:45:12.000 Does that help you flesh these ideas out and have conversations about them?

02:45:16.000 One of the most cathartic things that I do is talk on the podcast about these topics.

02:45:22.000 And I'll do a mix between guests and Q&A. Guess what people ask me about?

02:45:27.000 They want to know about war and they want to know about that stuff.

02:45:30.000 And it forces me to sit there and truly Gauge the depth of my beliefs and then answer the questions for myself as to why do I believe this?

02:45:40.000 It is by far one of the most cathartic things that I have done is the ability to sit down and reflect.

02:45:45.000 And I mean, I'm pretty honest about, I mean, if people ask me about killing, I'll talk about killing.

02:45:49.000 If people ask me about mistakes, I'll tell you the worst mistakes that I ever made.

02:45:53.000 Parenting, relationship with my wife, military, fill in the blank.

02:45:59.000 So it's been huge.

02:46:00.000 And to be honest, I mean, you know this.

02:46:02.000 I owe the suggestion from you to starting that podcast.

02:46:04.000 I owe you a huge thank you for giving me that nudge.

02:46:08.000 Well, you're so good.

02:46:09.000 You were great on my podcast.

02:46:12.000 I just knew you would do great at it.

02:46:14.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:46:16.000 I probably have said to too many people, you should start a podcast.

02:46:20.000 But it's worked with so many, with Jocko.

02:46:24.000 Phenomenal.

02:46:24.000 And I bet you it's cathartic for him as well, too.

02:46:26.000 I haven't asked him about it, but I would suspect that it's the same thing.

02:46:30.000 Yeah.

02:46:31.000 He's a unique human.

02:46:33.000 He's an American treasure.

02:46:35.000 He should go in a time capsule right next to Jerry, number one.

02:46:39.000 He really should, man.

02:46:40.000 He's something special.

02:46:41.000 But it's also, like, in terms of motivation, he's a mindset alterer.

02:46:46.000 Like, you hear the way he discusses things and thinks about things, and if you can adopt those ideas and put them into your own head, you really can shift who you are and how you move through this world.

02:46:56.000 If you can adopt a fraction of his ideas, or it'll change your philosophy.

02:47:02.000 There are some people that I see go very, like, they seem to be searching and they just want to dive in.

02:47:08.000 It's like, you know, maintain some of yourself.

02:47:09.000 You should start a podcast now.

02:47:28.000 Well, you know, Goggins is another one.

02:47:30.000 You know, Goggins, just being a guest on this podcast, I know he hasn't started his own podcast, but one thing he did do is, if you listen to Goggins' audio book, in his audio book he has the book itself, which is read by another guy, and then him and that guy discuss various chapters in the book and discuss the real events that led to this,

02:47:52.000 these different things and how he felt about them.

02:47:54.000 So it's a podcast wrapped up in a book and it's excellent.

02:47:58.000 So much better than just reading chapter and verse.

02:48:01.000 All that additional information and all the breadth and depth that you can gather from that.

02:48:06.000 It's an incredible medium.

02:48:09.000 I think I told you this.

02:48:10.000 I had never listened to a podcast before I came on yours, so I didn't.

02:48:15.000 Well, we went a little crazy on that one.

02:48:18.000 I talked a touch about Guantanamo Bay, but I still would say the same thing.

02:48:22.000 I just maybe would have been more educated about the breadth and depth of your podcast.

02:48:28.000 I didn't realize...

02:48:29.000 And again, I'm a...

02:48:33.000 Fraction in comparison to other podcasts out there, but even the volume of response that I get to mine, it's unbelievable.

02:48:38.000 The number of people who are consuming this type of medium is mind-blowing.

02:48:43.000 Well, it's free, which is great, and it's also easy.

02:48:46.000 You get it on your phone instantly, so you could be in your car, your phone is Bluetoothed up to your car, and you say, oh, this is nuclear hot.

02:48:53.000 Bam! 0.98

02:48:53.000 You press play, it starts playing. 0.98

02:48:55.000 And because, you know, essentially, audio is not that...

02:49:01.000 It's not that big a file.

02:49:03.000 It can stream really easily over 4G, like instantaneously.

02:49:07.000 It's amazing.

02:49:10.000 And to have everything free and instantly accessible like that.

02:49:14.000 So if you're a truck driver, if you're driving long distances for work, or if you're traveling on a plane.

02:49:19.000 And you can scroll.

02:49:20.000 Pick a topic.

02:49:21.000 I mean, what do you want to learn about it?

02:49:22.000 There's a podcast out there for it, whatever it is.

02:49:25.000 For anything.

02:49:25.000 There's crime podcasts, and there's comedy podcasts, and politics, and technology.

02:49:31.000 It's never-ending.

02:49:33.000 There's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them, and they're all free.

02:49:36.000 It's an amazing medium, and it's also a medium with a very low gate of entry.

02:49:42.000 It's not difficult to jump over that gate or to get through.

02:49:45.000 Really, all you need is an account somewhere.

02:49:48.000 I've done a bunch of them just with my iPhone.

02:49:51.000 Just using the voice recorder application from voice notes from an iPhone.

02:49:57.000 Record it and then I'll send it to Jamie and Jamie will upload them.

02:50:00.000 Like we've done a bunch of them on planes. 0.97

02:50:02.000 Where just me and Tony Hinchcliffe have sat on a plane and we have a couple of cocktails and start talking shit into the iPhone. 0.97

02:50:09.000 Into the phone? 0.99

02:50:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:50:10.000 And then that reaches a million people.

02:50:12.000 Yeah, I mean, $400, you can start a podcast for $400.

02:50:15.000 Yeah.

02:50:16.000 You get a recording device and some way to gather the sound, and you're off and running.

02:50:19.000 Yeah, and there's so many people out there with unique perspectives, like you, like Jocko.

02:50:24.000 There's hundreds of them, you know?

02:50:25.000 It's just an exciting time, you know?

02:50:29.000 Exciting time for the medium. 0.97

02:50:30.000 Listen, we did sit fucking three hours. 0.97

02:50:34.000 How crazy is that? 0.98

02:50:35.000 It's almost 4 o'clock.

02:50:35.000 It always feels like 90 minutes.

02:50:37.000 I know.

02:50:38.000 Well, this is a time warp in this room, man.

02:50:40.000 There's something weird.

02:50:40.000 I think it's this table.

02:50:41.000 Something going on.

02:50:43.000 It seems to be it.

02:50:44.000 Andy, I love you, buddy.

02:50:45.000 Yeah, man.

02:50:46.000 Thanks for having me.

02:50:46.000 Appreciate you, man.

02:50:47.000 Andy's stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

02:50:49.000 Cleared Hot Podcast available everywhere.

02:50:50.000 Go get it.

02:50:51.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 18, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1247 - Andy Stumpf

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript