#2358 - Chadd Wright

3h 0m
Chadd Wright is a retired Navy SEAL, endurance athlete, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a cofounder of the Three of Seven Project, a health and self-improvement program for the body, soul, and spirit.

https://www.3of7project.com

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Runtime: 3h 0m

Transcript

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I do too, man. I chewed tobacco

Speaker 1 pretty much since I was about 13 years old. But you know, as you get older, you start to try to optimize everything because

Speaker 1 the world tells you everything's going to kill you.

Speaker 3 Is chewing tobacco going to kill you?

Speaker 1 Well, you know.

Speaker 3 I've heard people getting mouth cancer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the main thing is mouth cancer. And mouth cancer is a pretty nasty form.
All forms of cancer are pretty nasty, but mouth cancer can really screw you up. And I think it's the,

Speaker 1 you know, like the

Speaker 1 chemicals that they spray on the tobacco when they're growing the tobacco.

Speaker 1 So I don't know, maybe if you grew tobacco organically and then you chewed it,

Speaker 1 it wouldn't give you mouth cancer? Probably makes sense. I don't know.

Speaker 3 Well, I was just reading something that 100% of California wines that they tested had glyphosate on them. 100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, believe it.

Speaker 3 Which is just nuts.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 yeah, that stuff is everywhere. I mean, it's never going to go anywhere because, you know, when I was in the Navy, I lived in Virginia and we moved out to a rural community.
And

Speaker 1 they grew corn and soybeans primarily in the fields, and nothing else would grow in that dirt.

Speaker 1 Like, you could walk the rows of those crops, you know, and there would not be a single weed growing in the field. Nothing would grow except for the genetically

Speaker 1 modified

Speaker 1 seed or whatever they put out there. You know what I mean? And how long does that stay in the soil? Like, does that ever come, can you ever get that out of the dirt so that other things

Speaker 1 could or would actually thrive there again? I guess after many, many years you could.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's many, many years. I had Will Harris from, he's from Georgia, White Oaks Pastures.
You ever heard of that guy?

Speaker 1 I actually listened to that episode that you did with him, man, because I've ordered a pile of meat from them. He's great.
He is. That was a great episode.

Speaker 3 And it's a great episode to...

Speaker 3 educate people on like how much time it takes to take an industrial farm and convert it to regenerative agriculture. It's not easy.
It's a long grind, super costly, not nearly as profitable.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he did it over a course of 20 years. And we have two jars of soil out there that he gave us.
And one of them is a soil from his neighbor's farm, which is an industrial farm.

Speaker 3 And the other one is his. And his is like a dark, brown, rich, alive soil.

Speaker 3 And the one from his neighbor's farm is just pale and dead, and they have to spray shit all over it and use industrial fertilizer.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's ugly, man.

Speaker 3 And then it's gotten so far that like to turn it around and try to feed all the people that we have established here in this country in places where nobody's growing food, it's like it's almost impossible.

Speaker 3 It's almost like they're stuck with this system of industrialized farming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's

Speaker 1 being here in Austin, you know, I don't go to the city much. I live on 700 acres in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Speaker 1 And I I come here to the city, and you know, you see the result of packing so many human beings into one area. Yeah, how are you going to feed them people?

Speaker 1 Other than the way that we figured out how to do it, I mean, how you going to feed them?

Speaker 1 I don't know, man. Walking around the city, man, it's just coming from where I live.

Speaker 1 And don't take this as negative. I mean, people love cities.
There's cool stuff in cities, right? Like, people get a lot.

Speaker 1 But me, when I come from where I live, you know, I, dude, where I'm in the woods every day for hours and hours. I don't go to town hardly ever.
I'm a squirrel hunter.

Speaker 1 I have a little mountain cur, and you know, we go out and squirrel hunt for hours every day.

Speaker 1 But coming to the city, it's like the air burns my nose. It's like I've been coughing all day today.

Speaker 3 You really notice it?

Speaker 1 I notice, I can smell it. It smells.
Now, we're staying right in downtown. The smell reminds me slightly of Lagos, Nigeria, which it's 100x in Lagos.

Speaker 1 It literally burns your eyes and your nose to breathe the air there.

Speaker 1 But even in Austin, I can kind of smell this sour,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 and then I'm looking at these poor people, man, like these people laying on these park benches and all this stuff. And I'm like, it just

Speaker 1 makes you think, it makes you wonder the human's propensity to stoop lower than an animal.

Speaker 1 Like, we have the propensity as human to stoop lower than an animal.

Speaker 3 In the worst case scenario.

Speaker 1 In the worst case scenarios. Yeah, I mean, I understand there's so much that goes along with the story that

Speaker 1 all of those people have. And it was funny, I saw a lady sitting on the edge of the sidewalk today.
She was smoking crack or something. And now, my wife's in recovery.

Speaker 1 And I said, it's just mind-boggling to me, me being a man of the country, to see the human's propensity to stoop that low. And she looked at me and she said, well, I've done it.

Speaker 1 I said, that's good.

Speaker 1 Man, my woman is so good, brother.

Speaker 3 She came out of it.

Speaker 1 She came out of it, right? I mean, by the grace of God.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm glad you didn't come visit us in L.A. I would have showed you some real shit.
Dude, this is nothing.

Speaker 1 I went to L.A. one time

Speaker 1 with my buddy Jesse Itzler. He took me out there when all this stuff started.
I got out of the Navy. He said, Chad, he said,

Speaker 1 he asked me to come coach him, teach him how to run a long ways. I said, all right, I'll come out there.
And me and Jesse became fast friends. He said, I'm going to take you out here to L.A.

Speaker 1 He said, I'm going to take you on a few of these interviews with these people. He said, but I want you to realize.
That if you decide to do this,

Speaker 1 your life will never be the same.

Speaker 1 And I I said, all right, let's go.

Speaker 3 You mean like do a podcast? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Jesse's an interesting guy.

Speaker 1 He's one of my, he's one of my biggest mentors.

Speaker 1 He's a close friend.

Speaker 3 I like that dude a lot. I had him on.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I enjoyed talking to him. Yeah, I love him to death, man.
But he, yeah, he took me out there. And L.A.
was, yeah, it put me back really

Speaker 1 that some of the places that we went were very similar to some of the areas that we deployed to. Just the smell and the sights and, you know, the way people were living.
It was wild, man.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a chaotic environment, and you get used to anything. And people that live there get used to it.
They don't know what real peace is like.

Speaker 3 You know, like when I would tell people why I like mountain hunting, I'd be like, man, it's like a vitamin that you didn't know you needed.

Speaker 3 You get out in there in the mountains and you smell that clean air and you just feel it.

Speaker 3 Your whole body just goes, ah.

Speaker 3 This is so much better. This is so much better to live like this.
It is. I just don't get a chance to do it that often.
You know, I don't live in it like you do. Living in it is the ultimate.

Speaker 3 You know, if you could live in it and then go visit other places, that's way better to live in nature.

Speaker 1 The noise, too.

Speaker 1 The noise,

Speaker 1 I don't think that people who live in the city have become acclimated to all of the constant noise. Yeah.
It's never quiet.

Speaker 1 But when I enter into that environment, like that noise is doing, it does something to me. Like the traffic and the constant humming.
And

Speaker 1 it just,

Speaker 1 I feel like

Speaker 1 I begin to hold this tension within me.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it's doing to me. I don't know, man.

Speaker 3 It's sensory overload.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I guess you can become accustomed to it.

Speaker 3 Well, people in New York City have to become accustomed to it, and they actually like it. They like that feeling of sensory overload.
But everybody that I know that likes that is fairly unhealthy.

Speaker 3 I don't know any like real fit, healthy, active people that really enjoy that environment.

Speaker 1 So why do you,

Speaker 1 why, why, I understand you love what you do, but I mean, you could build a studio somewhere out in the,

Speaker 1 out in the mountains somewhere.

Speaker 3 We're going to probably do that. We're going to probably build a studio on a ranch next.
That's the next move. I want to have like a tactical course out there.

Speaker 3 Bass fishing lake and have it set up and do fun shit with guests, too.

Speaker 1 Because people are going to come see you, man. That's what I think.

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Speaker 1 I mean, what you've done, man,

Speaker 1 is so cool. I tell people all the time, if you ever have the opportunity to go and see someone who is the best in the world at what they do, take that opportunity.

Speaker 1 Whether it's a runner, a fighter, a kayaker,

Speaker 1 or a podcaster. Like, it's so cool to be here and to get to witness what you do, how you do it, the level that you go to to make all this happen.
You're the best in the world. Like that's it.

Speaker 1 That's so cool for me, man. Like if we don't talk here but for 30 minutes, I got to see the best in the world do what he does.
And how cool is that, man? Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1 And like the hospitality that you have, you know, given me since I've been here, it's just next level.

Speaker 1 And that's what you see when you get to witness the best in the world do whatever it is they are the best at.

Speaker 1 You just get to see this whole other level of proficiency, of skill, of technique, of mastery. And that opens up your mind

Speaker 3 into like what's possible. Yeah, this, I mean, you can go back and watch the beginning episodes of this.
It was terrible in the early days.

Speaker 1 I'm a podcaster too, man.

Speaker 3 I know you are. I watch your show all the time.

Speaker 1 I've got like 400 and something episodes out and same here when I first started.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was awful, but it's so much fun. I love it.

Speaker 3 I love it. I found your show because of a video that you did on your Land Cruiser because I'm a Land Cruiser nut.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And you were talking about like have a truck that will fucking, like, no matter what, will work.

Speaker 3 Like, if they throw EMP pulses in the air and kill all the electronics, which is people don't understand. Like, every car everyone is driving has a fucking computer in it.

Speaker 3 And if something goes on, there's there's some sort of a power grid failure or some sort of a solar flare that knocks out electronics, it could knock out your fucking car. You have a brick now.

Speaker 3 It's not going to work.

Speaker 1 If you don't have a carburetor and you don't have a car,

Speaker 1 like a regular old school car, it's not going to work.

Speaker 3 You know, Tucker Carlson, he drives like a 1978 pickup truck.

Speaker 1 And I go, why do you drive that?

Speaker 3 And he goes, because they can't shut it off. The government can't get it.
It's got no GPS.

Speaker 3 He's super fucking paranoid.

Speaker 1 Well, the newest vehicle that I have, and yes, Land Cruisers are my favorite. I've become close friends with Daniel at TLC 4x4, and he's done two for me, a 100 series and a 60 series.

Speaker 3 And they did mine, too, when they were in LA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man, they're just awesome. And like I said, my favorite part about driving the Land Cruiser is that it makes people smile.

Speaker 1 I'm not a very funny guy, you know.

Speaker 1 So there's not many, I don't get many opportunities to make human beings smile, but I can drive this Land Cruiser and people look at it and point at it, and they're smiling.

Speaker 1 And like that, just that's cool to me. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Especially 6D series, I think.

Speaker 1 There's like a core group of people who love those things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I slow down when I see one, I slow down, I check it out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but the newest vehicle that I have, and I'm a car guy.

Speaker 1 Now, I was poor most of my life. I'm still fairly poor.
But, you know, I got enough money I can buy the cars that I want now. And the newest car that I have is a 1997

Speaker 1 Dodge diesel truck. I have two 97.
I have an OBS Ford. It's a 97 with the Powerstroke diesel.

Speaker 1 I have a 97 Dodge Ram with the Cummins diesel because those are the two best diesel engines, undisputedly, that have ever been produced.

Speaker 1 I have the 100 Series Land Cruiser. Actually, the 100 Series is a 98,

Speaker 1 but I kind of gave that to my brother.

Speaker 1 So I can't count that. The 60 Series is a 84.
I have an 86 Toyota they call pickup. It's a Hilux.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I'm missing something, but I love old cars, man.

Speaker 3 But those old Toyotas are bulletproof. They never break.

Speaker 1 That's my squirrel hunting truck. Yeah.
It'll go anywhere. You know, why am I going to go spend $30,000 on a side-by-side?

Speaker 1 I can get in this Toyota truck and I can go anywhere you can go in a, in a

Speaker 1 side-by-side. That's true.
That's my squirrel hunting truck, man.

Speaker 3 So is squirrel hunting the most hunting that you do?

Speaker 1 I love

Speaker 1 it's I do it every day that I'm at home. I squirrel hunt every day.

Speaker 3 How much squirrel do you eat?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I eat squirrel on special occasions.

Speaker 1 I give away a lot of squirrel meat. You know, I'm blessed enough in life now that I can eat ribeye steak.

Speaker 1 I give away a lot of squirrel. I don't kill all the squirrels that we tree either.

Speaker 1 Really,

Speaker 1 since a young age, I was introduced to hunting with dogs, tree dogs specifically.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there was something about a tree dog that just stirred

Speaker 1 this passion within me.

Speaker 1 It is the only thing that has stuck with me from childhood.

Speaker 1 young childhood.

Speaker 1 The first tree dog I ever walked to, I mean, I was, I didn't even know, I should probably shouldn't have even been in the woods, but I followed my uncle to a coonhound tree down in a swamp.

Speaker 1 And it just, even at that age, it just stirred something in me like

Speaker 1 this is some sort of primal instinct of partnering with this dog in this chase.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I've done it even up until now. And

Speaker 1 it's just

Speaker 1 a unique experience, man. And the great thing about dogs, hunting dogs too, is

Speaker 1 the breeding aspect of it. That's a lot of fun.
So not only do you have your best friend, you know, my little mountain cur, her name's Wendy. She stays in the house.
She's my best friend.

Speaker 1 We hunt every day together.

Speaker 1 But now I get to breed her. I get to select a mate.
And over the course, I'm hoping over the course of the next 30 years or so, I can breed in

Speaker 1 these specific characteristics of this type of dog that I value. And so that's fun, you know.

Speaker 1 Not only is the hunting fun, but the breeding is fun, the training is fun, everything about it is fun.

Speaker 1 And you take a group of guys out squirrel hunting, man, and it's a blast because you don't have to be quiet. Look, man, you just, you're out there in the woods on four-wheelers.

Speaker 1 Everybody's got shotguns, you know, you get to the tree, here's this dog just hammering a treat on this tree.

Speaker 1 Everybody surrounds the tree and that squirrel gets nervous and he starts timbering out going tree to tree and you got five or six guys with shotguns blasting away and everybody's cutting up and laughing.

Speaker 1 I mean it's just a blast, dude.

Speaker 1 But that's my thing, you know.

Speaker 3 That's a funny thing.

Speaker 1 I like to hunt whitetails.

Speaker 1 I get to go on my first elk hunt this year.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow. Where are you going?

Speaker 1 There's a

Speaker 1 family out in Utah.

Speaker 1 They own some ranch out there. I think it's called R5 Ranch.
And they wanted to put a hunt on for a veteran.

Speaker 1 So they partnered with an outfitter called G3 Outfitters, and they bought a tag, and for some odd reason, they selected me as their veteran that they want to take out on an elk hunt.

Speaker 1 Now, I've always wanted the elk hunt, man. I've just, you know, I've just never made it happen.
There's a lot that goes into it, as you know.

Speaker 1 And so they're taking me to New Mexico.

Speaker 1 They bought some tag from a landowner, and

Speaker 1 they're going to take me out there elk hunting.

Speaker 3 That's a great spot. New Mexico's a great spot for elk.

Speaker 1 He sent me some pictures of some of these bulls. Yeah.
I said,

Speaker 1 what an animal.

Speaker 3 Yeah, New New Mexico's got some crazy genetics, too. There's

Speaker 3 there's two there's there's a guy who explained this to me, that there's really two different, besides like Tule elk and Roosevelt elk, there's Rocky Mountain elk and then there's Yellowstone elk.

Speaker 3 And the Yellowstone elk are an older breed that has larger antlers, a bigger animal. And you find a lot of those in Arizona and you find a lot of those in New Mexico.

Speaker 1 So where we're hunting at is right, it is on the border of Arizona and New Mexico.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I bet you have great genetics out there.

Speaker 1 You know what, man, I can't believe it.

Speaker 1 I can't believe this is the first, that my going to be my first elk hunt.

Speaker 3 Are you rifle or bow hunt? It's going to be rifle.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 I'm a big archery guy, too.

Speaker 1 When I hunt whitetails, when I started hunting whitetails, that was what I did was bow hunt and still bow hunt quite a bit.

Speaker 1 But this is a rifle hunt. I love bow hunting.

Speaker 3 Rifle hunting is great. It's most effective, most efficient way to hunt, but there's something about having to get inside, you know, 70, 80 yards, sneaking up, executing a perfect shot.

Speaker 1 Now you're a Hoyt guy, too, right?

Speaker 1 I have been too all my life.

Speaker 3 They make amazing bows.

Speaker 1 My wife a couple years ago bought me that RX-7

Speaker 1 with the

Speaker 1 carbon fiber riser.

Speaker 1 I always wanted a bow with a carbon riser because I remember hunting so many hunts in the southeast, whitetail hunts, walking into the stand and your hand just getting so cold. Right, right.

Speaker 1 Carrying that bow around.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's the difference. Carbon doesn't get cold like that, like aluminum does.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the main reason I wanted one, but it's been a great bow.

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Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they make them better every year, and I don't know how the fuck they do it. Every year, they just tune a little bit of this and change a little bit of that and adjust the cams.

Speaker 1 They've probably got it mapped out for the next 10 years in advance. Yes.
Oh, they do. They could go ahead and make the best one.
They just...

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, it's incremental improvements based on like how the industry is going. But we went to the Hoyt factory.

Speaker 3 I've been to the Hoyt factory a few times, but we went recently and showed the process that they make those things. It's so incredible.

Speaker 3 It's all these like super sophisticated computers and machines and CNC machines, and they're cutting the aluminum, and you know, they have like so many different steps to make sure that quality control is perfect.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 at the end, when you get it, you really appreciate it. And they're so smooth now.

Speaker 3 Like, I've been bow hunting for 12 years now, 13 years, 13 years. And just the difference in 13 years is crazy.
Like, if I go back and pick up one of my old bows, it just feels archaic. Yep.

Speaker 3 They're so smooth now. The draw cycle is so smooth, and they're so dead in the hand when you fire them.

Speaker 1 And those parallel limbs, and they're so short and compact.

Speaker 1 You know, the old bows we used to shoot back in the day, the old Viper Techs and all that from Hoyt and Matthews had the old SQ2s and Q2s, and they were just long and

Speaker 1 unwieldy in the stand.

Speaker 1 You know, you can make, like you said, 100-yard shots now with a compound bow. Back then,

Speaker 1 I mean, there wasn't nobody shooting in bows at 100 yards. No.
Because they just weren't tuned,

Speaker 1 I think, so finely as the bows that we have today. I mean, that RX-7, man, every time I shoot that bow,

Speaker 1 it amazes me at how that arrow just flies like a laser beam. Mm-hmm.
I'm like, good night, man. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a cool thing. Have you ever shot a stick bow?

Speaker 3 Yes. Okay.
I'm not good at it, though.

Speaker 3 I shot it on vacation once. I was shocked at how bad I was because I'm so good with a compound bow.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to figure out where to aim, where it goes, and do all this shit and how to let loose, right?

Speaker 3 I have a buddy who hunts exclusively. My buddy

Speaker 3 Ryan Callahan, he hunts exclusively with a homemade bow.

Speaker 3 He's got a long bow that he he made i don't know if he made this one i know he's made them before but he you know it's those real simple bows i'm like why

Speaker 3 you can't even get much energy out of that thing but it's the extra challenge you got to get real close you got to get real close and be real accurate yeah i went i took mine on a mule deer hunt up in uh the wasatch range in utah

Speaker 1 two years ago And yeah, I mean, you got to get within seven to ten yards of that animal with a long Yeah. I mean, I do.
I do, anyways.

Speaker 1 You know, Fred Bear might, he might have made a 20 or 30 yard shot, but you know,

Speaker 1 you got to get right in their laps. And we were, I was on public land, it was a wilderness area.
That's where I like to hunt. I mean, I like wilderness areas.

Speaker 1 That's the highest designation of preservation that Congress can award to a piece of land. So if you're in a wilderness area, you know, there's not going to be no horses, no mechanized tools.

Speaker 1 Nobody's going to be clearing trails with a chainsaw up there. If you ever want to go in the backcountry, find a wilderness area.
Not a national park, not a national forest. Find a wilderness area.

Speaker 1 But we were watching these mule deer, and you know, I'd watch them in the morning, they'd get up and feed. Well, then I'd wait for them to go lay down.

Speaker 1 And then you had to move on that mule deer and use the terrain, put the terrain between you and him,

Speaker 1 and they'd be bedded down and you could get with I the closest I got to one was about five yards and he was bedded down under a tree just kind of out in this big old rock I was way up in the mountains big old rocky area well I stalked all the way up there to him and I got about five yards from where I'd last seen where I saw him bed down at you know I lost sight of him when I started the stalk and

Speaker 1 I got impatient and I got there and I was laid down up against the rock and that tree was right there and I thought, you know, it it took me about an hour to stalk over here.

Speaker 1 I said, I wonder if he got up and moved.

Speaker 1 And I peeked my head up over that rock and that big son of a gun was just looking right at me. I'm talking about eye to eye, five yards.
He jumped up and tore out of there.

Speaker 1 That was the closest I got to killing one. But if I would have just laid there with that longbow and been patient and waited for him to stand up off his bed,

Speaker 1 I could have drew and shot him right there.

Speaker 3 Well, he's probably already alert. He probably heard you.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he heard me or not.

Speaker 1 I had the wind. I had the wind.

Speaker 1 I had shoes on, but you know, I'm stalking across big, big granite rock slabs and stuff, so it was pretty quiet. I mean, there was no indication when I picked my head up.

Speaker 1 He was still laying there on bed. There was no indication that he knew I was there other than when he saw me peek my head over the rock and stand up and tear out of there, you know.

Speaker 3 They're the most difficult to hunt because they're just dealing with mountain lions all day long.

Speaker 3 And they're just always like, and they'll jump the string quicker than any animal.

Speaker 3 Other than like, the craziest ones are Axis deer. Have you ever hunted Axis deer? I haven't.

Speaker 3 Axis deer evolved with tigers. So they move so fast.
I had a video of an Axis deer that I shot at at 70 plus yards

Speaker 3 with a lighted knock, and you see the arrow launch. I mean, his arrow's going 290 feet a second.
You see this arrow launching towards this deer and this deer is feeding in the field totally broadside.

Speaker 3 He hears the arrow within 10 yards, ducks down, hauls out, and he's gone by the arrow got by the time the arrow got there.

Speaker 1 He hears the arrow in flight.

Speaker 3 Exactly. He had no idea.
We were very far away. That's why I took the shot.

Speaker 3 It's one of the things with those animals, like you're sometimes better off taking a long shot than a close shot because they hear that bow go go off and they just duck and go.

Speaker 3 I mean, they're not trying to duck under your arrow. What they're trying to do is load up their weapons or load up their legs rather.
Get super low so they can launch themselves forward and get on.

Speaker 3 They're just trying to take off as quickly as possible and that means dropping down. And when they drop down, arrows go right over them.

Speaker 3 But this one was so fast within 10 yards, he was nowhere near the arrow. His ass was over here.

Speaker 3 The vitals where I aimed for was right here. He was already over there.
He was

Speaker 3 two feet away from it and he didn't start moving until that arrow was 10 yards away from it where was that at that was in hawaii hawaii okay lanai is a crazy place because lanai has no predators and it's a small island it only has 3 000 people living on it but it has 30 000 deer plus so they want you to kill they want you to kill them kill them as many as you can they have people that are snipers that go out there at night and everybody on the island eats good because it's the best meat axis deer is delicious if you've ever had it.

Speaker 3 It's right up there with elk. It's fantastic meat.
And they're just completely overpopulated, so they have to do it. So people hunt them there 365 days a year, so high pressure.

Speaker 3 So they're used to like, they're always with their head on a swivel, always looking around for a hunter.

Speaker 1 That would be a fun hunt. That would tune you up.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's great before elk season.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that would tune you up.

Speaker 3 Because you'll get, if you blow a stalk, you get another stalk in 10 seconds. Like you're on another animal and you're in these fields that that used to be where the dole plant grew pineapples.

Speaker 3 So, it's kind of a weird ground. Like, I guess the way they would farm pineapples, they would put like a layer of plastic down,

Speaker 3 and then the soil would be above the plastic. So, everywhere you go, it's weird.
You see, like, almost like a garbage bag plastic underneath the dirt, all over the place. I'll be darned.

Speaker 3 And these animals are, you'll, you'll like, you'll sit on the top of a hill and look down on a field, and you might see 600 axis deer wandering around this field. Good night.

Speaker 3 It's crazy. It's crazy.
It's so unnatural.

Speaker 1 Are they're not native?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 They were given to King Kamehameha by, I think, the king of India, whatever the ruler of India was in the 1800s.

Speaker 3 And they've had them on this island forever. And they're just completely overpopulated.

Speaker 1 They're all like all over the place.

Speaker 3 And big ones, too.

Speaker 1 It'd be a fun hunt.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's a great hunt. It's a great, if you have a rifle, it's a no-brainer.
It's like you're 100% going to get a deer.

Speaker 3 But if you've got a bow, I mean, I went out there with Cam Haynes and Remy Warren and Adam Greentry and all these just like bona fide killers who like world-class hunters.

Speaker 1 Cam's the best in the world, man.

Speaker 3 Best in the world.

Speaker 3 And John Dudley was there, too. And we went out there and we were there for like six or seven days and everyone was successful.
And then we made a podcast about it, blew up the outfitters.

Speaker 3 It's a great place to go hunt. You stay at the four seasons, incredible food, amazing

Speaker 3 amenities, beautiful, beautiful resort. And then you get to go and hunt in this incredible place.

Speaker 3 But after we left, he said they had 150 people come within that season from then until the time we went back the next year. One guy was successful with a bow.

Speaker 1 One.

Speaker 1 One. Night, man.

Speaker 3 And you get so many opportunities, but they're so fast. And if you

Speaker 3 bad odds.

Speaker 3 Here's the deal. Don't try the morning.
I've hunted in the morning and I've been successful, but it's too fucking quiet.

Speaker 3 You really want to go in the afternoon because in the afternoon you get a lot of wind. Yeah.
And, you know, you just got to pick your spots and play your stalks correctly.

Speaker 1 Have you turkey hunted?

Speaker 3 Yes. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Eastern or what was it? California.

Speaker 3 It was in California. Okay.

Speaker 1 It was

Speaker 1 Merriam's or

Speaker 3 probably. It was in

Speaker 3 the wine country up there. I went up there with Steve Ranella.
Okay. He took me to our county.
It was fun.

Speaker 1 You know, his buddy's a big squirrel hunter. Steve's buddy's a big squirrel hunter.
What's that guy named? Clay Newcombe. Yeah, he's got a bunch of feist dogs.
I think he hunts off of mules. Yes.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what we ought to do. We ought to set up a big squirrel hunt with everybody.

Speaker 1 Me and you and Clay and Cam, and we'll just... We ought to set up a big squirrel hunt once.

Speaker 3 I've had squirrel once.

Speaker 3 With Ranella, he cooked some squirrel up for us.

Speaker 1 He's It's good. Boy, if we could get him to come in and cook, too, that would be outstanding.
It would be. Because I have a hard time making this wild game taste worth a flip.
Do you?

Speaker 1 I'm just not a good cook, man.

Speaker 3 I noticed that. Well, I was going to talk to you about your steak cooking.

Speaker 1 We've got to work on that. Yeah, I'm just not much of a cook, man.

Speaker 3 I wanted to cook a steak on a Traeger, and I was like, listen, the way to cook a steak on a Traeger is you can cook a steak on a Traeger.

Speaker 3 Like, you could cook, like, if you have a roast, like, you can cook a good roast on a Traeger, but the reality is you need to be able to sear it. And so you can't really sear things on a Traeger.

Speaker 3 And I saw what you did. You try to turn the temperature up real high and then cook it at the end.
The key is get it on a frying pan. Like get it low and slow on the Traeger.

Speaker 3 I like 225 degrees with the super smoke. Get it nice and smoky.

Speaker 3 Get it up to 120 degrees and then cast iron skillet. Get that motherfucker hot.
Put some beef tallow in there and

Speaker 3 like 90 seconds on each side.

Speaker 1 Seals it up. Perfect.
Now, do you do most of your own cooking?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I do almost all my own cooking. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I cook a lot.
Does your wife cook? Yeah, she cooks too. Yeah, my wife cooks.
I'm so blessed that she cooks because I've got a long ways to go.

Speaker 1 I actually made a goal of mine I've been working on. I cook for her one night a week.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's worked out a few times, but I'm learning.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that tip on the steak, though.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the tip on the steak, it's reverse sears, what it's called. And I learned that from whiskey bent, my friend Chad, Whiskey Bent Barbecue.

Speaker 3 And he said, if you really want to cook a steak correctly, he goes, you want it to be slowly cooked and then sear the outside. A lot of people try to sear it first.
He's like, I don't agree with that.

Speaker 3 I think the way to get the juiciest steak is to slow cook it and then sear it at the end, the reverse sear method.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to try that one again.

Speaker 3 It's the move. It's the move.

Speaker 1 My cousin raises all the cows we eat. Oh, that's true.
My mama makes all the bread we eat. My wife grows all the vegetables that we eat.
I'm going to seasonally, you know what I mean, seasonally.

Speaker 1 My cousin raises all the cows. You know, we get our water right out of the ground.
I take buckets of water once a week, go collect water. Comes right out of a spring.

Speaker 1 Some old rednecks found a spring back in there and ran a PVC pipe out of it, you know, and so we just go there and collect all the water.

Speaker 3 So you're totally off the grid.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, we'll order some stuff from the grocery store, you know, just it would.

Speaker 3 But your home is totally different.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't be hard at all to ramp things up to the point that we were 100%

Speaker 1 eating what we could produce as a family unit.

Speaker 1 No one person is going to produce everything that they need for them and their family to eat.

Speaker 1 It's my cousin, he raises cows, you know, so we know where they're coming from. We know how they're living.
We know what they're being fed. Like I said, my mama makes bread.
My wife can grow anything.

Speaker 1 It's an effort. You know, I hunt.
I can bring in wild game meat at any time.

Speaker 1 Everybody thinks about when the apocalypse comes, you know, you think you're going to be eating all these deer and elk and stuff. You're going to be eating squirrel, buddy.

Speaker 1 Squirrel and birds, maybe opossum every now and then. Them deer is going to be gone quick.
Probably. You know, small game,

Speaker 1 if you want to really subsistence,

Speaker 1 you know, get your meat from the wild, you've got to be able to hunt small game. Squirrels, rabbits, coon, possum, you've got to be able to hunt them.

Speaker 1 You know, you go out and try to hunt a coon without a dog.

Speaker 1 You ain't going to kill no coon. Right.
You know, I can take a good dog out and kill 10 coons in an hour if I'm in a huge.

Speaker 3 What does raccoon taste like?

Speaker 1 Raccoon is pretty greasy. You got to, again, you got to cook it right.
You know, so much wild game, other than elk, I found elk seems to be really, really good, even if you're not a skilled cook.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, to me, anyways, it's the best wild game meat I've ever ate.

Speaker 1 But like these squirrels, coons,

Speaker 1 things like small game, even rabbit, they can get real tough.

Speaker 1 You know, that you can.

Speaker 3 Is that raccoon, James?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's coon right there. You cook it in a crock pot.
A lot of these small game, you slow cook it, you know, and that kind of helps keep it moist and break break it down.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But anyways, man, I'm all over the darn place.

Speaker 3 And you probably have to cook it to a high temperature, too. Raccoons probably get trichinosis, right?

Speaker 1 I don't know if a coon does or not. I've killed a bunch of bears, and I know they do.

Speaker 3 They do.

Speaker 1 That's the one thing I didn't like about bear.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 it makes me uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 I've killed two black bears, both of them with my bow.

Speaker 1 Both of them about 500 pounds. Wow.

Speaker 1 Those are big black bears. Those are big, big, big black bears.

Speaker 3 Are these Georgia black bears?

Speaker 1 No, these are Virginia. There's a place in Virginia called the Great Dismal Swamp.
It's about 110,000 acre continuous block of land. That's what's left of it.
It's eat up with bears.

Speaker 1 I mean, I would take my condog down

Speaker 1 the swamp bottom. We called it the run.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 during springtime, when them bears were out with cubs, I couldn't even hardly run my condog up and down through there. There were so many bears in there.

Speaker 1 And them sows would get, they would get, you know, mad at us for being in there and start popping their teeth and making racket.

Speaker 1 I took a young man with me down in there one time, first time he ever been coon hunting. I was hunting a dog called a leopard cur.

Speaker 1 And I cut that dog loose in there and he went down in there, oh, boom, slam, treed. I thought, all right, this is good, because coon hunting can be rough.
We walked down in there and I had

Speaker 1 this young guy with me. He had the rifle.
We got up to the tree and I walk up to that dog and leash it up. And I'm fooling with the dog, getting it leashed back on the tree there.

Speaker 1 And he said, What is that?

Speaker 1 I said, What are you talking about? He said, Stop and listen. And I stopped, and that dog quit barking for a second.
And all of a sudden, I could hear bark raining down on the leaves.

Speaker 1 above my head because it was summertime. About that time, about a 300-pound black bear comes sliding down out of that tree like it was on a fireman's pole.

Speaker 1 Landed, I'm talking about that junker landed right in the midst of me, him, and the dog.

Speaker 1 And he's standing there. He's just frozen because he's never been coon hunting before.
He's got the gun. He's just frozen.

Speaker 1 And about the time that bear hit the ground, I snapped the leash off of that dog because the dog was my only chance to run this bear out of our vicinity. And those, these cur dogs are real gritty.

Speaker 1 They won't back up.

Speaker 1 I mean, they won't back up from nothing. They're like

Speaker 1 a game cock, man.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that dog tore out after that bear, ran him out. I looked over at that boy.
I said,

Speaker 1 were you just going to, you've got the gun. You just stood there and didn't.
He said, well, I thought that happens all the time.

Speaker 1 But that's how many bears was in this area, man. So I'd be out there whitetail hunting, you know, and a big old 500-pound boar bear would come up.

Speaker 1 You know, I've had them climb the tree that I was sitting in, the tree stand. But, you know, if a big one came by,

Speaker 1 it's hard not to shoot a big trophy bear, especially with a bow.

Speaker 1 So I've killed two, but when we killed them bear,

Speaker 1 I would just, there was a lot of poor, real poor people that lived around in there.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 there was one man named Zachariah. He was about a 90-year-old black man.
He had one eye. He hunted year-round because he had to hunt to eat.

Speaker 1 We'd see him out in the field deer hunting in the middle of the summertime, wouldn't nobody say nothing to him because they knew he had to to eat. But I'd call Zachariah when I'd killed that bear.

Speaker 1 Well, then he would call all of his people in the community, and we'd take that bear down to the skinning shed, and within 10 minutes, we'd have 50 people lined up at the skinning shed with grocery bags.

Speaker 1 And so we would cut this bear up and process this bear, and these, you know, poor people, they'd come down there and get them a big piece of meat.

Speaker 1 Well, by the time everybody was done, there wasn't maybe but one piece of meat left, you know what I mean? Because I don't like bear, but I sure do like killing them.

Speaker 3 Have you ever had it cooked well?

Speaker 1 Done well?

Speaker 1 We've cooked some at the house, but I haven't. I mean, I haven't, that's what I'm saying.
I'm not a good cook.

Speaker 3 You just have to learn how to do it. My friends John and Jen, they run an outfitter in their outfitters in Alberta, and they're bear hunters.

Speaker 3 And I've been bear hunting with them, and they take like a roast and they'll cook it on a Traeger, they brine it, they put it in, like they marinate it, and it's fantastic.

Speaker 3 It's like some of like better than the best roast beef you've ever had.

Speaker 1 Oh, I know there's a way, there's a way to make it taste good.

Speaker 3 It's all it's also in what they eat.

Speaker 3 You know, if you get them and they've been eating like a dead moose, and you know, they've been feasting on that for a couple weeks, and then it's rotten, and they just stink, and it's not good.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, they want to get acorn bears.

Speaker 1 These bears, we were killing what they would, the reason they were so big, they were eating corn and soybeans.

Speaker 3 Yeah, perfect.

Speaker 1 You know, they now they'd eat a pile of of deer guts too. I mean, they eat everything.

Speaker 1 I would gut a deer out there. You know, if I killed a deer, I gut it in the woods.
I don't gut them back at the house. I just gut them in the woods and you come back an hour later and they wouldn't be

Speaker 1 not a speck of them guts left. Crazy.
I mean, they would eat the fire out of them.

Speaker 3 Do you know that the early pioneers preferred bear meat and they used deer just for skins?

Speaker 1 No, I did not know that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like Daniel Boone and all those fellas, those guys, they were bear hunters.

Speaker 1 They wanted the fat.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they wanted the fat and they ate bear meat because they thought it was closer to beef.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, it is closer to beef, I would say, than deer.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would say so. Especially if it's cooked well, it's delicious.
It's just you got to get a bear that's not eating rotten meat and not eating fish and cook it right.

Speaker 3 But if you cook it right, it's fantastic. It's really good.
Bear sausage is fantastic. It's all just in how you get it prepared.
Yeah. How you do it.
Rinnell is really good at it.

Speaker 1 Well, see, I got to start running in the right circles with people that can cook. Yeah.
That's my problem.

Speaker 3 My friend Jesse, who owns this restaurant out here called Dai Douay.

Speaker 3 What is Jesse? He's that

Speaker 3 he's he runs a school that teaches people how to shoot hogs,

Speaker 3 how to butcher them, how to cook them. And, you know, he he likes old, ruddy, old hogs, and he really knows how to do it correctly.
So this is it.

Speaker 3 This is a new school of traditional cookery. So, Jesse will take people and he'll take them out there, teach them how to hunt, teach them everything about it,

Speaker 3 how to stalk an animal, how to dress the game, how to cook it and prepare it, and what the cuts you're looking for. And he teaches classes on this.

Speaker 1 How cool is that?

Speaker 3 It's amazing. I mean, it's a small class because he wants to do it correctly, but he's incredible.
And that restaurant, if you ever get a chance to go to a Dai Douay in town, it's amazing.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go ahead and tell you: if you can make an old boar hog taste good,

Speaker 1 you have gotten to be a master.

Speaker 3 He's a master. He also cooked diver ducks for us, which everybody says are disgusting.

Speaker 3 And they were fantastic. And he's like, it's all just in the preparation.
He marinated them, he slow-cooked them on a smoker. They were fantastic.

Speaker 1 All that stuff just takes time, you know? Yeah, it just takes time. It's so much easier just to cook a ribeye.
oh yeah you know what I mean that's the easiest the easiest is yeah it's just

Speaker 3 there's something about wild game to me that's it's a different kind of food it's yeah it's it feels different when you eat it there's more energy to it yeah it's like it's just so nutrient dense you eat it your whole body just goes whoo

Speaker 3 you feel it you know like you cook an elk steak and you eat that medium rare and you're just biting into it and it's juicy and

Speaker 3 i can't wait man oh yeah i hope i get one i think i got a good chance of getting one these boys are serious yeah so well with a rifle your chances are a lot higher and i know you're a real good shot so you probably and it a guy like you also could shoot accurately at a distance which is huge yeah no idea you're there you know you can i'm sure you can make a 500 yard shot easy and if your rifle's tuned correctly for something like that it's like you got a pretty good shot

Speaker 1 Have you been up to the Yukon territory at all?

Speaker 3 No, no, I haven't. I just got back.
What are you doing up there?

Speaker 1 It's been, you know, it's been quite the journey,

Speaker 1 both on the on the macro and the micro level to wind up here at this table with you. I

Speaker 1 spent the last, about the last month sitting with a good friend of mine, one of my biggest mentors in my life. I said I'd sit with him for hours on end while he was dying.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 then I had to leave him and I went out to the Yukon.

Speaker 1 Sorry, man.

Speaker 1 We need to talk more about that, by the way.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I got a teammate that I went through SEAL training and all with. He was paralyzed 14 years ago.

Speaker 1 He wanted to go on

Speaker 1 an adventure. And I said, well, there's a race out there.
It's a thousand-mile kayaking race. It's the longest kayaking race in the world on the Yukon River.
Totally unsupported.

Speaker 3 He said, all right.

Speaker 1 Well, he prepared for about two years.

Speaker 1 And we went out there and did that on the Yukon River.

Speaker 1 And then I came home and my buddy died the day I got home.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 it's been a man, it's been a wild last month or so.

Speaker 1 Have you ever got to sit with anybody? While they're dying.

Speaker 3 Important to you? Not while they're dying.

Speaker 1 I highly recommend it. It will teach you

Speaker 1 so much, man.

Speaker 3 About what's going on.

Speaker 1 It has made me grow.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know, man. It just gives me the daggone chills thinking about it.
And

Speaker 1 the crazy thing is, is the type of person I used to be, I would have thought.

Speaker 1 You know, going and sitting with someone who's dying is a waste of time.

Speaker 1 Like, I got other things to do, right? You do too. We got busy lives.

Speaker 1 Well this man, he mentored me

Speaker 1 hunting and everything, working, all that. His name was Don Tidwell from the time I was about 13 to the time I left to go become a Navy SEAL.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I did my whole Navy thing. I got out.
I reconnected with Don for a while, but then I started this company now that we have 3 of 7 project. Got busy.
I have a curse from my military service.

Speaker 1 I have this unique ability to be able to forget you ever existed.

Speaker 1 When I get on some sort of mission and you're not part of that anymore, I can forget you ever existed. And so I lost touch with him because of my own selfishness

Speaker 1 and been doing this thing for the last four or five years. Well, his wife called me and said, look,

Speaker 1 he just wants to see you one more time.

Speaker 1 He's got pancreatic cancer. He's got maybe two weeks left.
He just wants to see you one more time.

Speaker 1 Good night, man.

Speaker 1 Took a lot of courage for me to go show up in front of him and sit down with him and say, Mr. Don,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry I haven't been the friend to you that you deserve. Will you forgive me? He's laying there dying.
He looks back at me and says,

Speaker 1 son, there's nothing to forgive.

Speaker 1 I mean, just like.

Speaker 1 And then from that point, I'd go sit with him twice a week for eight or nine or ten hours, just sit right there by his bed. I'd read the scriptures to him.
He only had a third grade education.

Speaker 1 We read about the gospel and we read about the resurrection and we read about creation. And,

Speaker 1 you know, we don't, the first thing that you learn, I think, when you sit with somebody that's dying is that death is the great foe

Speaker 1 that sits above mankind and scoffs. at our wisdom.
You get what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 He said that death is this great foe. It is the enemy that sits above us and mocks

Speaker 1 the wisdom of man.

Speaker 1 Mr. Don had built

Speaker 1 basically an empire

Speaker 1 within the community he lived in. He had made millions and millions of dollars as an entrepreneur.
Couldn't read or write.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 He still

Speaker 1 had to succumb to this process that's coming for all of us. Like,

Speaker 1 I don't know, man. That was like, that just hit me.
Like,

Speaker 1 we think, we want to look up at the sky and we want to explain how the cosmos began and we can't even solve our own biggest problem.

Speaker 1 We can't solve our own biggest problem,

Speaker 1 which is death, right?

Speaker 1 It's the biggest problem for all of us. Yeah.
We can't figure out how to solve it, how to overcome it. Like,

Speaker 1 we don't think about this enough. Like,

Speaker 1 have you ever thought,

Speaker 1 why

Speaker 1 are you dying?

Speaker 1 Have you ever thought about that?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 1 Like, like, not, like, I get it. Like, all of us, we understand death as, you know, we go along through this life, but and then something happens.

Speaker 1 We get hit by a car, one of our organs fail, cancer happens, whatever, and we say, that killed us, right? And that thing did kill kill us but your entire life is leading you to that point like why

Speaker 1 do you have to die like it's it's by necessity

Speaker 1 you must die

Speaker 1 why

Speaker 1 what's killing you

Speaker 1 what what do you what's killing you

Speaker 3 well age Your body stops reproducing correctly. Your cells don't reproduce correctly.

Speaker 1 So why does that happen?

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Speaker 3 Learn more now at dodge.com based on the latest competitive information available IHS standard full-size CUV segment and horsepower and that's causing that every animal almost every animal on this planet has a timeline that it exists in it's probably

Speaker 3 it's probably uh a natural function of keeping a balance like all of nature has a balance and i mean can imagine if mosquitoes lived a thousand years what a fucking pain in the ass that would be no they get a couple, but you know, how long does a mosquito live?

Speaker 3 A week? How long does a fly live? A week?

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 3 Because otherwise we'd be fucked. You know, a deer, a good deer, a good deer that's like the best days of its life.
It's like 13 years, it's done. It's over.

Speaker 3 It's limping. It's going to get torn apart by coyotes.
Whatever gets it. Everything has a time.
Because if it didn't, then there'd be too many people.

Speaker 1 There'd be too many balance.

Speaker 3 The balance would be all fucked up.

Speaker 1 That's a great answer, man.

Speaker 3 The thing is, there's a lot of scientists that are working on that. A lot of scientists that I've talked to that are treating aging

Speaker 3 like a disease. So instead of just accepting the fact, like, oh, you're 50 now, things are slowing down, like, well, why are they slowing down? And what can we do to reverse that?

Speaker 1 I love thinking along those lines, man. Like, yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3 At the very least, what it does is improves your performance radically as an older person, improves your physical performance.

Speaker 3 What people would be capable of naturally with no supplements 20, 30 30 years ago. It's a very different world today.
Very, very, very different.

Speaker 3 And with all the different modalities, all the different things you could do, like hyperbaric treatments, NMN, supplementation, red light therapy, cold plunge, sauna, all these different things radically change the composition of your body and your overall metabolic health.

Speaker 3 Radically changes it.

Speaker 3 And then with hormone therapy and all the other different things that you can do, I mean, it's just a, just because of science and because of people figuring these things out, it's a radically different world than it was in the past.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 is there a solution? Like, is there a fix

Speaker 1 for death? Like, is anyone searching or even contemplating that?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. David Sinclair is all over that.
He's a guy from Harvard that we've had on the podcast a few times.

Speaker 3 That's his primary study.

Speaker 3 They're treating aging as a disease and trying to figure out what different types of medication, what different types of therapies, what's the root cause of the cells aging and not reproducing correctly.

Speaker 1 It's an ugly thing, man. Oh, it gets rough.

Speaker 3 Especially if you don't take care of yourself.

Speaker 3 You know, that's the rough one. When you see people that have been drinking their whole life and then they quit at 75 and you're like,

Speaker 1 it's a little late.

Speaker 3 You know, you've been torturing your body, forcing your body to process poison for decades. Yeah.
You know, and

Speaker 3 also just living in cities alone. You were talking about that smell,

Speaker 3 that weird smell that you get in cities. That's fucking brake dust and tires and exhaust fumes.

Speaker 1 And doo-doo.

Speaker 3 And doo doo. It's a little bit of doo-doo.
Not bad here. Go to San Francisco.

Speaker 1 I found a turd on the side of the trail today, a human turd. It was a terrible log, too, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah. My wife went back and took a video of it.

Speaker 1 You might see it on YouTube in the next couple of days. Okay.

Speaker 1 Your visit to Austin.

Speaker 1 But yeah, man, just sitting with him makes me contemplate these things.

Speaker 1 And for me,

Speaker 1 obviously, because of my worldview being shaped by Scripture, it makes me go to Scripture and bounce these questions off of the Scriptures, you know.

Speaker 1 And even

Speaker 1 it.

Speaker 1 I think it was powerful too because, you know, I'm sitting with a man who's important to me, who is bearing this burden of death. And by the way, he bore it well.

Speaker 1 It was amazing to me that I could go and sit with him and he would talk to me and take time to spend with me even in the midst of this terrible

Speaker 1 process that he was going through. I told him, I said, you could have just laid there on this bed and not said a word to anybody and nobody would have blamed you.
You know, it's scary.

Speaker 1 He couldn't sit still, you know,

Speaker 1 because he was in so much pain. Daggone, cancer is rough, man.
Pancreatic is about. Yeah, it's rough.

Speaker 1 But then, you know, he had these same questions that I'm thinking, like, why does this have to happen?

Speaker 1 You know, and then

Speaker 1 for me then to have to go and search the scriptures and then come to him with the scriptures and share the scriptures with him

Speaker 1 to,

Speaker 1 you know, give him some of the answers that he had. You know, it's like I would read a scripture to him and he would say, because again, Mr.
Don had

Speaker 1 a

Speaker 1 strong faith in the message of what we call the gospel,

Speaker 1 but he didn't know all the other stuff

Speaker 1 because he couldn't read.

Speaker 1 So I would read a scripture to him and

Speaker 1 then he would say, read another one.

Speaker 1 Read another one. And I was see, it was the, it was the wildest thing, dude.
I've never seen it. I've never seen anything like it before.

Speaker 1 I've been following the Lord Jesus for

Speaker 1 13 years now. I was reading these words off of the page, not even explaining them to him.
I was just reading him these scriptures. And they were manifesting

Speaker 1 power in him.

Speaker 1 Like you could see,

Speaker 1 you witnessed a change in his expression

Speaker 1 and his attitude. It was like these words I'm reading are manifesting power and hope

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 like literal energy. Like, I would come over and read the scriptures to him, and he would have been in bed for the last four days, wouldn't get up for anybody.

Speaker 1 I'd read the scriptures to him, and then next thing you know, we'd be out on the porch.

Speaker 1 Like, he'd get out of bed, and we'd go walk out on the porch. I'd have to help him walk, right? And his wife kept saying, you're the best thing for him right now.
I'm like, no, you don't understand.

Speaker 1 It's not my presence. For somehow, I'm reading him from these scriptures.
And it's like manifesting some sort of power and hope in him. And it like would give him energy in some way.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I can't explain. I've never seen it happen like I've never witnessed that before, you know?

Speaker 3 Well, it's probably even more profound because he can't read, so you're reading it to him.

Speaker 1 Dude. Right?

Speaker 1 Dude, it was wild, man.

Speaker 1 And I would read these scriptures to him, Joe, and

Speaker 1 he would say, yeah,

Speaker 1 I understand that now. And like, we're reading complex things.
Like, we're reading about the resurrection, like the bodily resurrection of all the saints

Speaker 1 at the second coming of Christ. And, you know, he asked me one of the questions he asked me,

Speaker 1 has anybody ever really explained to you what happens when we leave here? You know, because he's wondering these things. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm about to depart this tent, buddy.

Speaker 1 What's about to happen? And I'm like, well, the only answer I can give you, Mr. Dawn, has got to come from these scriptures.

Speaker 1 And so, and I would read these complex scriptures to him, 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and 2 Corinthians chapter 5. And

Speaker 1 he would under, like, it would make sense to him in his mind more than my mind could comprehend the truth. truth of what I was reading.

Speaker 1 Like, that was what was wild. It was like

Speaker 1 This veil.

Speaker 1 This veil between

Speaker 1 this realm and the next realm was getting thin.

Speaker 1 And he was taking in the truth of this word and processing it logically at a level that I can't process it because this veil for us is still so thin unless you hit that DMT, right?

Speaker 1 We talk about that later.

Speaker 1 But, right? And so I'm witnessing, it was wild, dude. And two, like crazy things happened.
Like

Speaker 1 when I'd sit with him, like every

Speaker 1 couple hours, I'd get up and go check in with his wife or something. And we had a camera in the room with him.
And we could watch what he was doing.

Speaker 1 And when I would walk out of the room, you give it a few minutes and you would see him start to look above him. And

Speaker 1 he would be reaching

Speaker 1 like this

Speaker 1 for stuff above him. And like we didn't know what he was doing.

Speaker 1 We never even asked him. I wish I would have asked him like, Mr.
Don, what are you seeing? Like what are you reaching for?

Speaker 1 Well then back when I would come back in the room with him he would stop doing it.

Speaker 1 And then toward the end there, he had a stroke. He was paralyzed.
One his whole left side of his body was paralyzed. And so he was just, you know, he couldn't sit up or do anything.

Speaker 1 And then finally,

Speaker 1 at the very end, when he passed away,

Speaker 1 he literally sits up out of, he sits up erect in his, out of his hospital bed, reaches both of his hands straight up like this,

Speaker 1 and then lays back down and

Speaker 1 departs the tent. Whoa.

Speaker 1 So I started researching this.

Speaker 1 What the crap is going on?

Speaker 3 I wish you asked him what he was reaching for.

Speaker 1 You watch, there are,

Speaker 1 I found this hospice nurse on Instagram. I don't remember her name.
But

Speaker 1 she's like posting all these videos of people doing this exact thing.

Speaker 1 And they're reaching for stuff, and she's a hospice nurse.

Speaker 3 Did you save it? Do you have it on your phone?

Speaker 1 I don't have it. I don't remember.

Speaker 1 She's got a lot of following. She's got a big following.
Just look up. Jamie will probably find it.
Hospice nurse on Instagram or whatever. But she posts all these videos of these people.
Is this her?

Speaker 1 Oh, they're reaching. They're like calling out.
I don't know if that's not her, but this is another one. That's not the one I watch.

Speaker 1 Call it a death reach. It's a very common thing.
And they're calling out a lot of times the names of loved ones that have passed before them.

Speaker 1 They're seeing something. Like

Speaker 1 they're seeing into the other realm. Oh, it's that lady on the far right over there.
That's the one I watch. She's a little crazy, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you.

Speaker 1 She puts out some wild stuff, man.

Speaker 1 This is common stuff, man. What's her name?

Speaker 3 What's her name, Jamie?

Speaker 3 It says below. Hospice Nurse Penny.

Speaker 5 Weeks before their death, when they're able to tell us what they're seeing. When they're able to tell us about these visions, they're almost always above them or up in the corner of the room.

Speaker 5 But sometimes as they get closer to the end of life and they're no longer able to communicate, we start seeing them reach into the air.

Speaker 5 So I'm convinced that when they are reaching into the air, they are reaching towards those people who they love, who have died before them.

Speaker 1 This woman's not a believer,

Speaker 1 as far as I know.

Speaker 1 I don't think, I don't know what her, you know,

Speaker 1 how her worldview is in terms of what happens after this, but she's just sitting here showing you, saying, Hey, this happens.

Speaker 1 We can't figure out why.

Speaker 1 We can't figure out what's going on. Obviously, for me, when I see that happening, when Mr.
Don sits up in the bed, even though he's literally paralyzed by a stroke,

Speaker 1 he sits, and it's an impossibility. He sits up in his bed and reaches both hands in the air and then lays down and departs the tent.

Speaker 1 What do I, I, I have to believe that like

Speaker 1 his transportation had arrived.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? And to witness that, how does that not like strengthen

Speaker 1 your,

Speaker 1 you're witnessing something that's tangible.

Speaker 1 It's like, how does that not strengthen at least your

Speaker 1 faith? that there is something

Speaker 1 coming after this. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 There's so many stories and the thing is people have this arrogant assumption and this is a lot of based on academics and science and this on this belief that we have all the answers to to reality when we don't even really understand consciousness we don't consciousness is a massive mystery

Speaker 3 so the this idea that we've got it solved and when I when I hear people say, when you die, that's it. It's over.
Like, how do you know? You're just saying this. You're just saying this.

Speaker 3 That is as much of a belief system as any religion.

Speaker 3 This belief in something that you have no evidence of whatsoever. But there's so many anecdotal stories of people with near-death experiences, including Sebastian Younger.
Do you know who he is?

Speaker 1 I've heard the name.

Speaker 3 Brilliant journalist. He's a great author.
He's written some incredible books.

Speaker 3 He did Ristrepo, right?

Speaker 3 A documentary about the war. And just an amazing, interesting, very, very intelligent guy.

Speaker 3 And the last time he was on the podcast, he was telling us a story about he had a medical emergency, some sort of,

Speaker 3 it was like an artery burst, right, Jamie?

Speaker 3 Something inside of his abdomen, and he was bleeding out on the inside, and he was dying. And he got to the hospital and had this near-death experience that...

Speaker 3 like very, very vivid experience interacting with his father, like like

Speaker 3 just beyond anything that he would have ever comprehended, and came back with a completely different perspective on life and death and like what this is, and where that there is something else.

Speaker 3 There's something out there.

Speaker 3 And people that have had near-death experiences or died and been resuscitated, they come back with the same fucking story over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Speaker 3 There's not a lot of variation. There's different interpretations of what they're seeing, but it all fits within the same framework.

Speaker 3 It all fits within a framework that this is, there's something there. Did you see the video of this kid

Speaker 3 a couple weeks ago? No. He's having a wild experience where he sees Jesus, he sees his dead father,

Speaker 1 says it's beautiful.

Speaker 3 Why is this kid?

Speaker 1 I miss my

Speaker 1 hair case.

Speaker 3 I think he was sick and he's coming out of surgery. I don't know the exact story on what was happening to him.

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 3 This video goes on long. It's a 10-minute video, but.

Speaker 1 whoa.

Speaker 1 He's in a dream. He's dreaming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's dreaming all right. He's seeing into a different, he's seeing into the next realm.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, this hard shake is.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's crazy.

Speaker 3 You could dismiss that. You could dismiss that if you wanted to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can, man. But look, man.

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Speaker 1 And I don't even need all these signs and wonders. Like, I don't even need all that, man.
I mean, it's great when you get the opportunity to witness things like I got to witness with my friend, Mr.

Speaker 1 Dawn, and just see his faith and see that the word manifest power in him. Like,

Speaker 1 it's great when you get to see it, but you can get too carried away with all that stuff, too. You know what I mean? It's like,

Speaker 1 I don't know, man. You know, I'm wondering, Joe, if the Almighty ain't calling you.

Speaker 3 Calling me how? On the phone?

Speaker 1 Calling you, man?

Speaker 3 What do you mean? In what way?

Speaker 1 I'm just wondering.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people are wondering what the Almighty is doing,

Speaker 1 what he's working

Speaker 1 in you.

Speaker 1 See,

Speaker 1 Scripture is dripping with

Speaker 1 something that's called election.

Speaker 1 A lot of people get mad about me talking about this, but

Speaker 1 this truth that

Speaker 1 we

Speaker 1 will

Speaker 1 never

Speaker 1 choose God, the Almighty. We will never choose to believe.

Speaker 1 As a matter of fact, scripture actually says over and over again, the whole message of the cross is foolishness.

Speaker 1 It's foolishness. I mean, seriously?

Speaker 1 Some dude died on a cross. What What does that represent to man? That represents weakness.
That represents defeat.

Speaker 1 That represents death. You're gone.

Speaker 1 The message of the cross is foolishness to man.

Speaker 1 We will never choose

Speaker 1 to believe in the message of what we call the gospel. That is that Jesus Christ died on the cross according to the scriptures.

Speaker 1 He was buried and that he rose again by his own power according to the scriptures. That's foolishness.

Speaker 1 And the only way that we can or will ever believe that, like truly place our faith in that and everything that's contained in that statement right there, because there's a lot there, you could literally spend the rest of your life meditating on that right there, the gospel, the what was done on the cross and by way of the resurrection of Christ.

Speaker 1 You would never get to the end of it. You would never comprehend everything.
You would never search it to its bottom.

Speaker 1 You will never believe that. And the only way that you can believe that

Speaker 1 is if the Almighty, in His grace,

Speaker 1 basically makes you alive. spiritually.

Speaker 1 Because these things are spiritually discerned. They're not logically discerned.
They're foolishness to man. These things must be spiritually appraised.

Speaker 1 And so the Almighty, by his grace,

Speaker 1 makes you alive, literally spiritually alive, so that then you can discern the truth of not only the gospel, but everything, the totality of what is contained in Scripture.

Speaker 1 It's called the doctrine of election.

Speaker 1 And so when I say, I wonder if the Almighty's calling you, what I mean is I wonder if you are one of the Almighty's elect. Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 That's a lot.

Speaker 1 And if you are, you better hold on to your britches, son.

Speaker 3 I oftentimes wonder what's going on and why me.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You must, man.

Speaker 3 You must. It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 You must. And I hate, you know, that's a personal thing, man.
And

Speaker 1 I hope you don't take that as any disrespect.

Speaker 3 No, I don't. It's just

Speaker 1 for me

Speaker 1 seeing

Speaker 1 it's odd how much we have in common,

Speaker 1 seeing what a

Speaker 1 special human being you are.

Speaker 1 Like, it's exciting for me.

Speaker 1 To be able to hope that the Almighty is indeed

Speaker 1 calling you. Like, that's exciting, dude.
Like,

Speaker 1 literally, I prayed for you last night.

Speaker 1 Like, I literally,

Speaker 1 on your behalf, I begged the Almighty

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 basically make you alive spiritually so that you could have discernment and be able to appraise these things that are in Scripture that have seemed like foolishness for so long to you. You know what?

Speaker 1 They seem like foolishness to me for a long, long time, dude.

Speaker 3 What changed?

Speaker 1 We're talking about a bunch of wild stuff, man.

Speaker 3 Can I take you back while we're in the middle of this? I'd like to take you back to like how you got on this journey of being a podcaster and then to that.

Speaker 3 Because I want to know like what is the transition from the seals

Speaker 3 to becoming this guy is very outspoken on YouTube and starts putting these videos out and things get interesting. And then you very

Speaker 3 very religious and spreading that in your YouTube as well. Like how did this whole journey get started for you?

Speaker 1 Well I had

Speaker 1 I decided I wanted to become a SEAL because I wasn't really good at anything else in life and I

Speaker 1 didn't want to go back to school and all that stuff. That's a whole long story but I decided I wanted to do that.

Speaker 1 I finally, I went to join the Navy.

Speaker 1 They disqualified me, sent me back home after boot camp, wouldn't let me go to Buds, told me I never would be able to become a SEAL because I had a pericardial cyst on my heart, seven centimeter cyst on my heart.

Speaker 1 You can look it up. Research Navy SEAL Pericardial Cyst.
You can read the whole medical journal. I'm the only one.

Speaker 1 Came back home, paid for my own heart surgery as a civilian, showed back up in the Navy less than a year later. Made it all the way through SEAL training unscathed.

Speaker 3 So what they have to do, they have to remove the cyst?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they had to cut my chest open and take a big old cyst off.

Speaker 3 How big is the they have to open your ribs the whole deal? Right from here to here. Oh, so they go through?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they peeled my pec up, peeled it up, cut me open right there, went in there and took that cyst off.

Speaker 3 How long did it take to recover from that?

Speaker 1 Took me about a year. I was back in the Navy about a year after that surgery.

Speaker 1 You know, but

Speaker 1 if it wouldn't have been for that, I wouldn't have made it through SEAL training. Man, I didn't even know how to swim, dude.

Speaker 1 I didn't even know how to swim. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 I was the most unlikely person to ever make it through SEAL training. Okay.

Speaker 3 Hands down. Did you have any background in physical fitness?

Speaker 1 No. Nothing? Lord, no, I didn't.

Speaker 1 It took me two or three months to pass a mile and a half run. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Made it through SEAL training, all this and that good stuff. I had a very colorful career.

Speaker 1 Started off real good. Got real bad.
I mean, I've been through it all. I've been in SEAL training at the end of our bud's prep phase, you You know, I was awarded the Hard Charger Award.

Speaker 1 You know, everybody selected me. The instructor Cadre said, you're the one that's going to make it.
I was actually the only one to ever receive that award to make it through that training pipeline.

Speaker 1 Everyone else they had selected up until that point all quit.

Speaker 1 But they selected me not based on my physical abilities, but based on the fact that I had had a dang heart surgery just to have a chance to toe the line to try something that everybody quits anyways.

Speaker 3 So, did you train for the SEAL training? Did you give yourself enough time to get physically fit?

Speaker 1 After that heart surgery, when I went in the first time, I could barely pass the physical standards test that I needed to pass to get the SEAL contract.

Speaker 1 If I would have gone straight through and wouldn't have had that heart surgery, there's no way I would have made it.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't have been able to meet the physical standards once I actually got to Buds. There's no way.
But when I had that heart surgery

Speaker 1 and then I finally got to where I could, you know, okay, man, I want at that point,

Speaker 1 I wanted it so bad because I had to go through all that. You see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 I didn't want it that bad until I had to go through all that pain and fear and have my chest cut open and all this crap.

Speaker 1 But man, when I came out the other end of that, like I said, man, I was like a game rooster, man. It was like you look into the eye of a game rooster and he's got one burning hot desire.

Speaker 1 It's to fight.

Speaker 1 I mean, you a man appreciates combat sports. You ought to go watch a cock fight one day.

Speaker 1 I mean, just that's what I had. I just had this burning hot desire

Speaker 1 for this thing.

Speaker 1 Nothing was going to stop me. Made it all the way through.

Speaker 1 Man, I had a lot of ups and downs in my time in the teams.

Speaker 1 That's a whole that's that's a three-hour long story, but basically,

Speaker 1 man,

Speaker 1 I got to my SEAL team and they had slaughtered our entire team to

Speaker 1 cover down on Africa and a couple other European countries.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I got so pissed

Speaker 1 because I'm like, there's a war happening. Like, that's the reason I joined.
Like,

Speaker 1 everybody that joined wants to go and fight in this war. And here, now I'm wind up at this place that's, you know, not going to go where everybody wants to go.
I got so hateful.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 through the course of a couple of years, I just got involved in all manner of what I would call sin.

Speaker 1 All manner. Drunkenness,

Speaker 1 sleeping around with women, hurting people on purpose.

Speaker 1 Hateful, terrible person. I didn't love anybody.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the whole down,

Speaker 1 the downfall of it

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 I was overseas.

Speaker 1 I was on a, and we had a range day. The night before, I had went out and just burned it down, son.

Speaker 1 I had no business going to the range that day. I'm going to go ahead and tell you.
But what do you do? You get up and go to the range, right?

Speaker 1 I'm sitting over here on the range, messing with my gun, pretty out of it.

Speaker 1 And I have a negligent discharge. And the guy that's standing beside me is my gunner's mate.
And it barely skims him in the side of his leg.

Speaker 1 It was pointed down, thank God. Pointed down.

Speaker 1 That happened.

Speaker 1 And that was the thing that like

Speaker 1 stopped me in my tracks. Like, holy crap, Chad, if you keep going the way that you're going, you're going to kill somebody.
You know what I mean? I mean, I was involved in all manner of sin, buddy.

Speaker 1 Stop me right there. I had to go through a Trident review board, a disciplinary review board, a captain's mask, the whole nine yards.

Speaker 1 Luckily, I had a good enough reputation up to that point that I had guys

Speaker 1 that vouched for me. Specifically my sea daddy, Jake Hubman.

Speaker 1 He wrote a whole long thing.

Speaker 1 Chad's done well.

Speaker 1 This and that. And they presented that.
And the Navy let me stay in, keep my trident.

Speaker 1 Well, went back home, moved in with some lesbians. Still continuing on this path or this just trajectory of just ugliness, just hatefulness, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 But I had kind of started hiding it a little more, you know, while I was at work. I was like, okay, if I'm going to go to work, I'm going to have to square myself away a little bit.

Speaker 1 You know, tell you how hateful I was, this man, Jake Hubman, my sea daddy,

Speaker 1 he started struggling with alcoholism shortly after I had that big mistake.

Speaker 1 Well, I got back in the platoon, and they told us, they said, well, you know, Jake's struggling with alcoholism. We're sending him off to this rehab program.
They said,

Speaker 1 just leave him alone.

Speaker 1 Well, remember I told you I can forget people exist. I just forgot he existed.
A couple months later, he killed himself.

Speaker 1 That's what kind of friend I was. That's what kind of person I was.

Speaker 1 Here's this guy who, that's the kind of person that I still am sometimes today.

Speaker 1 There's literally nothing good in me. I'm convinced of that.
Here's this man who had poured so much into me, literally trained me up, taught me the ways of war.

Speaker 1 It's on account of his mentorship, probably, that I was able to stay alive throughout the course of my career. And I just turned my back on him when he was going through the hardest time of his life.

Speaker 1 He kills himself.

Speaker 1 I don't ever get to make that up. I just ignored him.

Speaker 1 That's the kind of, does this describe to you the type of person that I was? Yeah, that's pretty bad, ain't it, brother? I mean, that's pretty bad.

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Speaker 1 So I get back in a platoon, get ready, deploy again.

Speaker 1 I'm keeping my wickedness under control,

Speaker 1 you know, outwardly, but it's still still all there, man.

Speaker 1 Well, we go up to Tunisia, North Africa, and Arabs attacked the embassy up there when all that Benghazi and that stuff went down. It happened all over North Africa.

Speaker 1 So we went up there, re-secured the embassy. We came back,

Speaker 1 we left there and came back to Germany

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 re-jock our equipment because that mission was over in Tunisia. Came back to Germany to rejock, and then we were going out to Nigeria.

Speaker 1 And while we were in Germany,

Speaker 1 the only way for me to tell you this in just simple terms is we were staying in a barracks that was inhabited by some sort of demon.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that was the genesis of my conversion.

Speaker 1 of me being made aware that

Speaker 1 okay so when you say it's inhabited by a demon like in what way so i was in there with a couple other guys i wish i would have wrote all this down uh

Speaker 1 i was laying in bed one night in this place

Speaker 1 we had we we this there was nobody else in this building it was just me and a couple there were me and a guy in one room and two other guys in the room across the hall there okay

Speaker 1 Well, I'm laying in bed and I and all of a sudden I'm jolted awake by something that hits my door.

Speaker 1 And I lay in bed for maybe 30 seconds, and while I'm laying there listening, I can hear some strange voices echoing up and down the hall of this building that we're in.

Speaker 1 And so immediately I get up, open the door, walk out. Nobody's out there, walk around, nobody's in the building.
Go in my buddy's room beside me, they're both passed out. But it scared me, dude.

Speaker 1 I was like, what on earth is this?

Speaker 1 It scared me.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 these things, these

Speaker 1 things would, like the oven would be turned on, like

Speaker 1 these bumps and noises.

Speaker 1 But more than all of that, there became this

Speaker 1 oppressive feeling of like

Speaker 1 evil in this place.

Speaker 1 And the guys that I were with, that I was with in there, they started getting freaked out about it too.

Speaker 1 We called our senior chief, who had been staying there before us. It was just like an old empty place that guys would come and stay in for a few nights before they left out.

Speaker 1 We called our senior chief. We're like, hey man, did you have any strange experiences in this place? He was like, oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 there's something in there.

Speaker 1 And so, but like, I remember walking into this place, and I would, there was a stairwell.

Speaker 1 I would walk up the first flight of stairs, and then there would be a second flight that cut back, and there was, like, a landing up there, because we were staying on the second deck.

Speaker 1 And, uh, like, I would,

Speaker 1 you know, as a hunter, like,

Speaker 1 how you have that sense when something is, like, staring at you.

Speaker 1 Like, you would, I would feel this thing staring at me up there on that landing, and I would fully expect to turn around and see some sort of something up there. And I never saw it in physical form.

Speaker 1 We started doing this research online about, you know, looking at these forms and stuff about this place that we were, you know, in and finding all kinds of other stuff about it.

Speaker 1 I'm like, well, whatever is going on here,

Speaker 1 I can't sleep at night. Like, I don't want to be in that place because it's literally scaring me that bad.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the sanity check was the dudes I was with were getting freaked out too.

Speaker 1 And like I wish I would have talked to them and written down the things that they were specifically experiencing. Do you remember any of them? So that I would, it's been so long ago, man.

Speaker 1 Like the experience that I had was so powerful. Like that just is the one thing that sticks in my mind.
But I remember the two guys across the hallway, one of them had to leave.

Speaker 1 They were going out to a different site. And that dude, the other dude, was left in that room by himself.
He moved across the hallway to stay in the room that me and my guy were with

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 he didn't want to stay in that room by himself. Jesus.
And so

Speaker 1 I was literally at my wit's end with this. Like, I was so, like, I couldn't sleep at night.

Speaker 3 How long did you stay there for?

Speaker 1 This would have probably went on for about a week. Yeah, this probably would have went on for about a week.
We were there for maybe two weeks.

Speaker 1 And so I called my little brother at my wit's end

Speaker 1 because, again, I just told you the type of person that I was. I had no,

Speaker 1 you know, interest in spiritual matters. I didn't believe in demons or spiritual warfare or God or any of that, right?

Speaker 1 But I'm like, here and now I have encountered something that seems very real to me. And

Speaker 1 it's not in this realm.

Speaker 1 here's some sort of entity that I don't know how to combat I called my little brother because I knew my little brother was a Christian and I said well here's one of these Christians they'll have a little bit of maybe a little bit of insight on this spiritual stuff that might be going on here he said well man I said I ain't never ran into nothing like that he said I'm gonna put you in touch with my my pastor of my local church here.

Speaker 1 They were real close.

Speaker 1 His name's James Cordell.

Speaker 1 James called me the next day and I told him all was going on. Well, he acted like it wasn't no big deal.
I said, no, buddy. I said, you don't understand.
I said, there's something in here.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is. He said, ain't no big deal.
He said, put me on speakerphone. He said, I'm going to walk around.
He said, walk around this building.

Speaker 1 up and down the hallways. And he said, I'm going to pray.

Speaker 1 And I put him on speakerphone. I'm walking around this building, up and down the hallways in my room.
He's praying against this thing in the name of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 He says, all right, now, we had a little kitchenette there. He said, you have some olive oil in there.
I said, yeah, we got a bottle.

Speaker 1 He said, take just a little dab of that olive oil and just dab it on the top of your door frame there. So I did it.
Joe, I'm thinking the whole time, this is so stupid.

Speaker 1 But what else do I do in this situation? Let's try this, right? Let's just give this a shot, right? And I dab that little olive oil up there, and

Speaker 1 we get off the phone.

Speaker 1 I leave, go to work, we come back that evening, wind down.

Speaker 1 Total peace had returned to this place. Like, I didn't no longer heard, or felt, or was experiencing any sort of fear or

Speaker 1 anything like it all was gone like I all the sudden it was just like oh

Speaker 1 okay now I'm just in another little barracks room here like did the other guys feel the same way so this is what's funny we I didn't tell the other guys that I did that

Speaker 1 and because they were all gone when I walked around with this crazy man on speakerphone

Speaker 1 embarrassing it's embarrassing i mean in a certain sense it's still embarrassing to tell that story today. Again, this is foolishness, man.
Like, you're asking me to tell this story on this platform?

Speaker 1 Like, this, it's hard, you know what I mean? Because who's going to believe this? Like,

Speaker 1 but I don't care. I'm just telling you, like, what I remember that experience as, and it impacted me so much that it changed the trajectory of my entire life.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the next morning we woke up, and my buddy woke up in the room. He said, what's all over the door?

Speaker 1 And I looked up and that little dab of olive oil had somehow

Speaker 1 like dripped down and covered the entire door

Speaker 1 of the room that we were staying in. And you could see it toward the bottom of the door, like the drips, like the whole door was like shiny.

Speaker 1 And he said, what's all over the door?

Speaker 1 And I said, don't worry about it, man. I don't know what the crap that is.

Speaker 1 I was so embarrassed to tell him that I had done that.

Speaker 3 But it was just a dab of all of it.

Speaker 1 It was just literally a dab of all of it.

Speaker 1 I don't even know where that fits into the whole experience.

Speaker 1 I don't even know where or how that fits in. I don't even know what this thing was

Speaker 1 or why this thing

Speaker 1 would have been attached to a place.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't understand that, man. I don't, and I'm, again, I'm not like big on this whole spiritual warfare thing.

Speaker 1 But after that happened,

Speaker 1 all that happened,

Speaker 1 no more, nothing in this place, I said, I have got to get my hands on

Speaker 1 scripture and figure out more about

Speaker 1 this figure, Jesus, who I heard this man praying in the name of, right? Because there's obviously there was some power power like being wielded there by the name of Jesus in prayer.

Speaker 1 And so I did. I got my hands on a Bible.
I started reading in the book of Matthew. I began my, again,

Speaker 1 through this this, this was obviously the experience that the Almighty had chosen to call me out of darkness into the marvelous light of his truth.

Speaker 1 Open the Bible. I had seen the Bible before.
I had, you know, heard it read. I had even read it before

Speaker 1 in the past, but it was never anything that meant anything. I couldn't understand it.
You know what I mean? Like, what the crap is this trying to say to me here?

Speaker 1 I began to read in the book of Matthew, and I began to,

Speaker 1 well, for the first time in my life, I realized how all of that applied to me

Speaker 1 as the hopeless, wicked, wicked, ugly, depraved human being that I

Speaker 1 like my mind was awakened to my own state.

Speaker 1 Like, I didn't realize how ugly and depraved I was.

Speaker 1 Like when I let my when I passed up on my friend and he killed himself, like I didn't think nothing of that.

Speaker 1 I just had this

Speaker 1 revelation of who I was and why

Speaker 1 why I so needed

Speaker 1 something to save me from that.

Speaker 1 And when I had

Speaker 1 that revelation, literally by

Speaker 1 the grace of God opening my,

Speaker 1 making me

Speaker 1 spiritually alive, able to discern the scriptures, when I had that revelation, I read about

Speaker 1 Jesus,

Speaker 1 his life, his death, why he died according to the scriptures, his resurrection, what that means for me.

Speaker 1 It changed everything. Like, literally, I was made a new creature

Speaker 1 overnight. It's the greatest miracle that God, the Almighty, could ever work is taking somebody like me who was literally so useless,

Speaker 1 making me alive,

Speaker 1 making me a brand new creature, waking up the next day

Speaker 1 and being completely changed in how I see the world, how I see myself, how I see the words on these pages.

Speaker 1 how I see the creator of the cosmos.

Speaker 1 That's a miracle.

Speaker 1 Like nothing else that I have experienced in life produced that amount of change

Speaker 1 nearly instantaneously. And I'll never forget walking down into the little platoon hut like the next day after

Speaker 1 having this revelation of the gospel and what it means for me. and who I am.

Speaker 1 And like,

Speaker 1 dude, I didn't

Speaker 1 it's crazy man it it literally changed my desires

Speaker 1 like that that's the miracle right like how do you change your desire

Speaker 1 how do you internally change your desires

Speaker 1 like I didn't I had no appetite for pornography anymore I had no appetite for the foul language that I used like I had no appetite for gossip Like, I

Speaker 1 overnight. Literally, overnight.
Like, my literal desires were changed.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that was the,

Speaker 1 ultimately, more so, the more so than the whole thing that was going on in the barracks and the guy saying the prayer and this thing leaving.

Speaker 1 Like, that experience of being made a new creature and the realization of what on earth just just has happened to me,

Speaker 1 that was the thing

Speaker 1 and is the thing that I cling to so tightly. Like

Speaker 1 nothing else could have produced that

Speaker 1 type of change in me but the grace of God

Speaker 1 and the revelation

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 he's given me. of who I am and who he is.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 as you go,

Speaker 1 this has been from then to now

Speaker 1 just a

Speaker 1 long

Speaker 1 and arduous, sometimes, sometimes joyful, but process

Speaker 1 of sanctification, essentially.

Speaker 1 One of the things that I pray most often is for the Holy Spirit

Speaker 1 to conform

Speaker 1 me into the likeness and image of Jesus Christ at all cost.

Speaker 1 At all costs.

Speaker 1 Well, first time I prayed, Dad, that was hard to pray, man.

Speaker 1 You read about Jesus in Isaiah 53. What's it say about him? He was a man of sorrow, well acquainted with grief.

Speaker 1 Conform me into the image of Christ.

Speaker 1 And that process of sanctification is ongoing. My understanding of the scriptures is ongoing and progressive, even still to this day, and hopefully to the very day that I depart this tent.

Speaker 1 It's everything to me, man.

Speaker 1 Like, it's, it's, no, no, no, no, it's literally everything

Speaker 1 to me.

Speaker 1 Some people say, well, Chad, doesn't sometimes don't you have moments of doubt?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I'd be a liar.

Speaker 1 Think about what I believe.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, sometimes, don't you have moments of doubt? Yeah, I have moments of doubt sometimes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure, man. But what I realize is that

Speaker 1 if I could possibly depart from this faith that I have

Speaker 1 in the Almighty, if I could possibly even depart from that faith,

Speaker 1 what would I have?

Speaker 1 I would have nothing.

Speaker 1 Like, what's the

Speaker 3 what's the point? This is the fascinating aspect of this that an atheist needs to take into consideration.

Speaker 3 What you're talking about had a real result.

Speaker 3 This belief in faith has had a real transformative result on you as a human being. Now, if there was nothing to this, if this is all nonsense,

Speaker 3 and there was a method that you could use,

Speaker 3 just some sort of a way of viewing the world that would instantaneously change the way you see yourself and see everything, wouldn't that method be explored and wouldn't that be taught?

Speaker 3 If this is the thing

Speaker 3 that brought you to who you are now, that's a real thing.

Speaker 3 Regardless of whether or not anybody wants to believe in Jesus Christ or believe in the resurrection or believe in the gospels,

Speaker 1 it works.

Speaker 3 Like, that's the thing about Christians, like real Christians, and I've been very fortunate to meet a bunch of them.

Speaker 3 I had a weird journey in religion myself because I went to Catholic school when I was in first grade and it kind of ruined me.

Speaker 3 They were horrible.

Speaker 3 This nun, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember anybody from when I was six years old, but I remember that bitch. She was so fucking mean, man.

Speaker 3 And just the experience, the way they treated children, it was so fear-based. And I was like, this is not God.
God has nothing to do with this.

Speaker 1 This is people.

Speaker 3 It's man sense. This is people.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it kind of

Speaker 3 set a tone for my life, you know, where I dismissed any

Speaker 3 notions that there was some sort of truth in these religions but the more i've explored

Speaker 3 not just christianity but many different religions

Speaker 3 people are trying to document a truth and it's very hard to decipher through the tongue of man it's very hard to decide when when human beings write things down and human beings give state give statements on things you have to always take into consideration human nature human beings are not that accurate in how they depict things.

Speaker 3 And then you have the problem with translations. Truth, brother.
You have the problem with it going from ancient Hebrew to Latin and Greek and to all these different languages.

Speaker 3 And then you have the problem with spiritual narcissism.

Speaker 3 So you have the people that are the conveyors of the message who take on these powers themselves that are above normal men and control people by, you know, before Martin Luther came around and made a phonetic version of the Bible, there's very few people could read and very few people people could read Latin.

Speaker 3 They didn't know what it said. So you had to rely on the priest to tell you everything.

Speaker 3 When people started being able to translate these things into different languages, it's wonderful, but also something's probably missing. You know, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a scholar.

Speaker 3 He's the guy who wrote that book,

Speaker 3 DMT, the Spirit Molecule. He did these

Speaker 3 slow drip studies, these FDA-approved studies on DMT with people, with patients.

Speaker 1 I'm very interested in that.

Speaker 3 He's a fascinating guy. Well, he learned ancient Hebrew just so that he could read the Bible in its native tongue.

Speaker 3 And it took him 16 years to do that. I believe it.
Yeah, he's a fascinating guy.

Speaker 1 What an endeavor.

Speaker 3 Yeah, fascinating guy. I think they were trying, they were writing something down.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I learned from Wes Huff, Wesley Huff, who's a biblical scholar who's been on the podcast, he told me that the book of Isaiah, when they find it, they found a version of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls that is identical

Speaker 3 word to word for a version of it that they found a thousand years later.

Speaker 1 That's pretty miraculous, isn't it?

Speaker 3 A thousand years.

Speaker 1 And not only that,

Speaker 1 but what about the content of Isaiah?

Speaker 1 What about Isaiah 53 as it describes the suffering servant, how it literally outlines

Speaker 1 the life and death

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ, and it was written, what, 400 years

Speaker 1 before the crucifixion? Like, even the content of Isaiah, not only the accuracy of

Speaker 1 the translation and the accuracy over that span of time when you compare copies, but even the content of it. How did this prophet write this thing about this person?

Speaker 1 And it was fulfilled perfectly literally to a T

Speaker 1 by the person of Jesus Christ hundreds of years later. Oh, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 So and by the way man like I'm not telling you or anyone listening to this this what

Speaker 1 we call testimony like what what the Lord's given me experientially in life to share with other people. I'm not telling you this to convince you of anything.

Speaker 1 Like there's nothing that I can can say to convince you in the truth of the gospel. Like I truly believe that.

Speaker 1 There's no words that I can use. There's no logic that I can apply.
There's nothing that I or anyone else can say to convince you of this.

Speaker 1 And it goes back to what we started off in the conversation with of these things must be spiritually discerned. And it is by grace, God's grace,

Speaker 1 that we are made alive and able to discern the truth of these things.

Speaker 1 That's a hard thing to accept, man. Like, that man is totally depraved.
And I can't say anything to convince anyone of the truth of these scriptures.

Speaker 1 But the scriptures are dripping. literally dripping with that very fact.

Speaker 1 That's the interesting thing about the scriptures. They leave nothing for man.

Speaker 1 Like it's almost the single thing that separates what's contained in the Holy Scriptures from other religious philosophy. It literally leaves nothing for man.

Speaker 3 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 1 Meaning, there is nothing that you can do

Speaker 1 to be made righteous. in the eyes of the Creator.

Speaker 1 There is nothing that you can do to save yourself. As a matter of fact, without

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 grace and the help of the Almighty, you can't even believe the truth.

Speaker 1 You won't, you won't do it.

Speaker 1 You are spiritually dead

Speaker 1 prior to regeneration.

Speaker 1 You see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 When you're dead, if we had a dead man laying on the the floor right here

Speaker 1 and I said,

Speaker 1 dead man,

Speaker 1 hearken unto my voice. There is a hospital a mile down the road.

Speaker 1 And if you'll get up and walk to that hospital, or you'll allow me to take you to that hospital, they'll shock you and bring you back to life.

Speaker 1 Is he going to respond to that message?

Speaker 1 He's going to lay there dead, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're dead spiritually until we are made alive by the grace of the Almighty.

Speaker 1 It leaves nothing for man.

Speaker 1 Not a thread. It leaves me not a single thread that I can cling to.

Speaker 1 And then you look at the whole saga of Scripture.

Speaker 1 Well, what's this all about anyways? Let's take it all the way back to Genesis, all the way through Revelation and everything in between.

Speaker 1 The whole saga

Speaker 1 is to glorify the Son,

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ. What's the purpose in me even being saved?

Speaker 1 It's so that I can be presented

Speaker 1 to Christ as His bride.

Speaker 3 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 1 We,

Speaker 1 God's people,

Speaker 1 are the whole purpose of our existence is for us to be presented to Jesus Christ

Speaker 1 as His own people

Speaker 1 who will glorify Him for all of eternity.

Speaker 1 It's to glorify the Son,

Speaker 1 the whole saga that was determined by the sovereign and immutable will of the Father.

Speaker 1 It can be changed. The whole saga, the only purpose of it all is to

Speaker 1 present this,

Speaker 1 I can't say this word real well, peculiar.

Speaker 3 Peculiar.

Speaker 1 People

Speaker 1 to the Son

Speaker 1 as a bride, an offering, to glorify the Son for all of eternity. The whole saga is to lift up and glorify Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 It's the only purpose for me even being saved.

Speaker 3 And you're convinced of this?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 I'm not convinced of this because that's what I want to believe. Like, I'm convinced of this because I'm convinced of the truth of the Holy Scriptures.

Speaker 1 And again,

Speaker 1 the entire, when you look at the thing from a 30,000-foot view,

Speaker 1 I'm convinced of that. Because why would I want to believe that?

Speaker 1 Why would I want to, if I wrote this story, would it not give me something to cling to?

Speaker 1 If I wrote the story, would it not give me some other purpose than just being offered up as a bride to the glorification

Speaker 1 of the Son,

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ? Like,

Speaker 1 if I wrote that story, wouldn't I write it differently than that? Because I'm a man, right? I would leave myself something to cling to. Surely this salvation means something more

Speaker 1 than just that I am part of this special people now being offered up as a bride to Christ. Surely there's something that I can do in this life, a choice that I can make to believe in this.

Speaker 1 Like, surely I have the power to make that choice.

Speaker 1 But if I had the power to make the choice to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ in and of myself,

Speaker 1 then that salvation would be coming from me.

Speaker 1 You see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 When you realize you don't even have the power of choice in you, you are dead.

Speaker 1 You will not choose it. When you realize you don't even have the power of choice.

Speaker 3 So you believe it has to be that this wisdom has to enter you somehow.

Speaker 1 You are entered

Speaker 1 by what Scripture calls the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of God who comes and dwells in you.

Speaker 1 And that is the entity that makes you spiritually alive and gives you the ability to appraise the scriptures essentially spiritual things because before that it's foolishness.

Speaker 3 Have you ever

Speaker 3 paid any attention to the Shroud of Turin? Have you ever looked into it at all?

Speaker 1 I've just seen it pop up, you know, as I scroll through.

Speaker 3 Well, they used to dismiss it because they used to say they did a carbon date on it and it was only 500 years old. But they've since made some revisions to that.

Speaker 3 And there's a lot of people that believe because of the wear of the cloth, the age of the cloth, and I think they've done subsequent tests that place it around 2,000 years old, which is really fascinating.

Speaker 3 The other thing that's fascinating is they didn't even know what the image completely was until someone took photographs of it and then looked at the negatives.

Speaker 3 And in the negatives, then you get this image of Jesus. Not just Jesus, but with

Speaker 3 the scars and the markings on his back,

Speaker 3 the part of his body where he's pierced, the piercings on the wrists.

Speaker 3 And they really do believe that this thing is 2,000 years old. And the other thing that's strange is they have no explanation as to how that image was created.

Speaker 3 They think that image was created somehow from some sort of a burst of energy.

Speaker 3 It's not stained, it's not dyed, and it's not something that's easily reproduced, especially if you think about the timeline.

Speaker 3 If this is supposedly a forgery, like, how would they make an image that would only show up in a negative? And what would be the motivation to fake this in this manner?

Speaker 3 See if you can get some photos of what it looks like, Jamie.

Speaker 1 You know what I love about what you're saying, Joe?

Speaker 1 It's so amazing how the Almighty works in each of us differently.

Speaker 3 Like, look at this. This is

Speaker 3 this image. If you see the original, see, the originals to the left, like they didn't, you know, they saw that and they're like, oh, what is this?

Speaker 3 But once you look at it with the negative, show the negative again, the black and white.

Speaker 3 Once you see the negative of it, see, make that larger, then it starts getting very strange.

Speaker 3 Because you look at the piercings on the wrist, and there's these

Speaker 3 blood stains in these areas.

Speaker 3 It's very strange. Wow, man.
And it's a very large piece of cloth.

Speaker 3 I think it wrapped his entire body, and so it was like seven feet long, and then they folded it. So it's his back and his front.
So he was inside of this thing.

Speaker 3 And this is the image. I think it was debunked recently.
Was it debunked again? I think so. What did they say now?

Speaker 3 I remember seeing something about it. They found some sort of processes that have been around for a few hundred years.
that do some sort of this like negative transfer.

Speaker 3 Right, but did they know that 2,000 years ago?

Speaker 3 that's where I think the carbon dating has been readjusted to. Oh, really? What are they saying now? I mean, I typed in debunked, and I was looking through a few articles.

Speaker 3 See, there's people that believe, and there's people that don't believe, and it gets weird.

Speaker 3 It gets weird because there's a lot of people that want to debunk things. A new research shows that the carbon dating of the Shroud is fake.

Speaker 3 Findings that it was the carbon dating that was fake, not the Shroud. This is a central conclusion.
There's a few articles about it being fake, but again,

Speaker 3 I don't know if they're 100% like this is fake or if they're just haters, you know.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You know what's interesting to me about the body of Christ, the physical body, like is being transposed onto that

Speaker 1 shroud, whether it's real or not. Have you ever thought about this? If you think about going back to talking about death and why do we have to die?

Speaker 1 Why is it a necessity for all humans? Well, the scripture tells us that for human, the reason that we must die is because of sin, right?

Speaker 1 That started with the very first sin of man and woman in the very beginning, right? Because scripture tells us that man was created to exist eternally in the beginning, the human physical form.

Speaker 1 When man sinned,

Speaker 1 a lot of things happened.

Speaker 1 Death, that's the moment, scripturally, that's when death entered the equation. So, this sin is a big problem.
Like, that is the genesis of death

Speaker 1 entering the equation and becoming a reality for all men.

Speaker 1 I wonder a lot what happened when that sin

Speaker 1 caused death in man. It's almost like it changed

Speaker 1 man's genetic makeup. It's almost like man was created in the beginning to exist in a physical body eternally, meaning he had

Speaker 1 perfect genetics, right? He could exist, nothing decayed. He could continue on for all eternity.
He also had the ability to

Speaker 1 be in the presence of the Almighty. In some way, the human brain could interact with the Almighty.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 when sin entered the equation, it's almost like man's genetic code was marred.

Speaker 1 And death entered the equation and we began to age. And it even, when I think about it along those lines, it's totally theoretical, by the way.

Speaker 1 That's how we inherit our sinful nature is because the result of sin actually changed the genetic makeup of of man's physical body. And therefore, by necessity, he now has to die because he ages.

Speaker 1 And also we lost our ability to perceive the almighty and to actually converse with him.

Speaker 1 We lost something in our brain.

Speaker 1 That's why I wonder about that DMT stuff.

Speaker 1 We lost, like, we lost some...

Speaker 1 Something in our brain that originally allowed us to see into this other realm and converse with this almighty being, we lost the ability to do that

Speaker 1 because of sin. Which brings me to the body of Christ.
The interesting thing about the body, physical body of Jesus Christ,

Speaker 1 he was the only man, according to Scripture, who ever fulfilled the law of God completely and perfectly, which means his physical body, his literal physical body, was not affected

Speaker 1 by sin, sin, which is the thing that is causing all of us to die by necessity.

Speaker 1 And I just wonder if that physical body, if the body of Christ, if Christ would have grown to maturity, which he did, which went about when he started his ministry, was full adult maturity, I wonder if he would not have been crucified, if he could have lived in that physical body forever, if the aging process would have stopped and he would have never had to die because the effects of sin

Speaker 1 were not upon him, the curse was not upon him.

Speaker 1 And it makes me think about that body because they took his body off the cross, laid it in the tomb.

Speaker 1 When we die, our bodies begin to experi uh go through decay very quickly. You've seen that, killing animals.
You kill something within a few hours.

Speaker 1 It starts to get kind of blowed up, stiff as a board. After about a day, it stinks, all nasty.

Speaker 1 He died. They put him in that tomb.

Speaker 1 He was there for three days. That body didn't decay.

Speaker 1 The spirit then re-entered that same body.

Speaker 1 And that body, that same body, rose up

Speaker 1 and eventually ascended into heaven. He took that body with him into this other realm.

Speaker 1 It just makes me wonder like what the human body was like in the beginning when we were created perfectly with this mental ability to interact with this other realm, converse with the Almighty,

Speaker 1 the absence of sin. In other words, our genetics were perfect.
The human body was perfect. It would not die.

Speaker 3 So, this is if you're taking the Old Testament absolutely and literally.

Speaker 3 And if you do that,

Speaker 3 what do you think about evolution?

Speaker 1 That's a great, that's a great question. What do you think about

Speaker 1 evolution a little bit here lately?

Speaker 3 The various forms of humans that have been detected,

Speaker 3 including recently Denisovans. What was that one? Juliens? What's that one? They've added something.
The giant, huge-headed people. They don't even know how big they were.

Speaker 3 They think they were quite a bit larger than us. They found multiple

Speaker 3 types of humans, obviously, Neanderthals.

Speaker 1 Well, if you can't tell by now, I like to think about things.

Speaker 3 Oh, I do too.

Speaker 1 It's fun. It's fun.
You know what I mean? Like, the whole thing I just talked about was totally theoretical. Like,

Speaker 1 I can't prove any of that. But when I think about evolution,

Speaker 1 one of the first things that's striking to me is how on earth,

Speaker 1 well, first of all, consciousness is a big problem. You mentioned that earlier.

Speaker 1 But how on earth

Speaker 1 did

Speaker 1 we, as the beings that we are, or we could take any being on earth and use it as an example,

Speaker 1 how do we go through, how many millions, or do some say billions?

Speaker 3 Of life? Of years? Not evolution. Of humans, but for life, yeah.
What is life? How long ago did life first appear on Earth?

Speaker 3 I think single-celled orgasms, it's like

Speaker 3 three billion years or so.

Speaker 1 Now, what I'm about to do here is I'm about to apply some country boy logic here, Joe. Here it goes.

Speaker 3 What does it say? 3.5 billion years.

Speaker 1 3.5 billion years

Speaker 1 from life

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 what we are as beings now. Now, look, are you ready for this country boy logic? I'd love to hear it.

Speaker 1 How on earth did we go through 3.5

Speaker 1 billion years

Speaker 1 of evolution and being shaped by our environment?

Speaker 1 And here we are after 3.5 billion years

Speaker 1 and we can't stay around for more than about 75 years and everything around us can kill us. Like,

Speaker 1 if I think about, again, country boy logic here, if I think a 3.5 billion year-long process of an organism being shaped by its environment, I would like to hope it would produce something a little better

Speaker 3 than what we are today. What it's produced is pretty fucking extraordinary

Speaker 3 in comparison to all the other animals.

Speaker 1 In humans. In humans.
In humans.

Speaker 3 Nothing is even close.

Speaker 3 And then you have to think of how long humans have been around in this form, at least according to science.

Speaker 3 They believe it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 to 500,000 years based on the fossil evidence. It could go further or back, probably go further back.

Speaker 3 Eventually, they'll probably figure it's like six or seven. But there's a timeline.
There's a timeline when Homo sapiens existed and when they didn't exist before.

Speaker 3 And then there's a bunch of different forms of human. There's a bunch of different hominids, a different bunch of, there's, you know, there's Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, there's a ton of them.

Speaker 3 So, what we've been able to achieve in this very

Speaker 3 relatively speaking, when you think about 3.5 billion, which is a number that you can't really comprehend, you say it, but it's

Speaker 3 too big. It's too big to really wrap your head around.

Speaker 3 Think about the behavior characteristics that you can breed into your dogs in a short period of time.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 I heartily agree and believe in adaptation.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Heartily agree

Speaker 1 in in different forms, drastically different forms of human.

Speaker 3 Look at just dogs. Just look at dogs.
Your dog came from a wolf.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 I have two dogs. I have a golden retriever and I have a spaniel, this little puppy that we just got.
And both of them also descended from wolves. And it's ridiculous.

Speaker 3 They have zero killer instinct other than squirrels, my dog Marshall, who kills squirrels,

Speaker 3 and turtles. But he's not a wolf.

Speaker 3 He's some sort of a new thing that we've created through selection and breeding and

Speaker 3 over time. It's a totally different animal, just like we are.
We are a totally different animal than Neanderthal, a totally different animal to ancient man.

Speaker 3 We're just different. We're different in some way.

Speaker 3 And especially if you go way back to Australia Pithecine and all these different animals that these different hominids that were very primitive, much more ape-like than us, there's There's a path.

Speaker 3 You could see it. It's like, there's a lot of mysteries.
The big one is the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years. That's a crazy one.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I always wonder when you're reading, particularly the really old texts, when it gets into like the Dead Sea Scrolls, when it gets into

Speaker 3 the Old Testament and even stuff that's before that, it's like,

Speaker 3 What were they trying to remember?

Speaker 3 Because you got to remember, before this stuff was even written down, it was an oral history for about a thousand years what were they what were they what was the original story and that's where i think the truth is i think there's truth i don't think these people were making up myths and fairy tales i think that's that's a silly way to think about it i i think it's much more likely that some

Speaker 3 immense events had happened over the course of human history and these people were trying to document it with whatever limited ability to express themselves that they had at the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There's something there. It's just the problem I always have with all religions is man, the tongue of man, is human beings and our desire to

Speaker 3 we

Speaker 3 use hyperbole. We exaggerate, we change times, we change,

Speaker 3 we write things that make ourselves look better than we should. History is written by the winners.
It's very difficult to know, like, what was the genesis of it?

Speaker 3 What was the original thing that they were trying to write down? But I think there's truth in the original thing.

Speaker 1 Man, you're headed in the right direction, Joe. When you said a problem you always have is with man.
Yes. Man is indeed the problem, my friend.
Yes. You are headed down the right path, man.

Speaker 3 Well, we are the problem, but we are also seeking solutions. People like you, people like me, people that want to be better people, and there's a lot of people out there that are listening to this.

Speaker 3 People that want a better world they want a better society and they recognize that there's there's certain things that you can do both to change your life and to inspire others like that's there's a reason for those instincts they're not necessarily even self-serving there a lot of them are community serving and that's in a way self-serving because the more healthy your community is, the better you'll feel, the better your life will be.

Speaker 3 There's reward systems that are built into our tribal nature.

Speaker 3 And there's a lot of good to that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I think,

Speaker 3 like I said before, if you do follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will have a better life. If you believe it, you will, and you live by it, you will have a better life.

Speaker 3 But there's that weird jump that you have to make, right? There's the weird jump where

Speaker 3 you have to abandon this

Speaker 3 critical thinking and logical mind

Speaker 3 and accept that there's an extreme value in living this way.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it hasn't been around for all these years by accident.

Speaker 3 And I really do believe that at the origins, and I just,

Speaker 3 we all wish we could know. We could hear it.
Like, that's the frustrating thing about it. This is all really the word of God.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, come back and give us a refresher course.

Speaker 3 How about, you know, like, maybe we're not bad. We just need to know.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what, Joe, I should just let you talk the whole dang podcast, man, because you are so good

Speaker 1 at just

Speaker 1 summing stuff up and getting to the root of

Speaker 1 questions and things. And, you know, like, like, you know, you talked about that whole,

Speaker 1 that, that transition from just like living it out to have a better life to all of a sudden like placing your entire hope in this message of the gospel.

Speaker 1 Like that's that transition that I was talking about that you can't choose. You know what I mean? Like so

Speaker 1 you're summarizing all of this so well, man. And it's interesting to me too that,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 the Almighty has these plans for each of us, his sons and daughters. And

Speaker 1 He leads us each along this path

Speaker 1 to the ultimate revelation that we are searching for. But every path looks different.

Speaker 1 And it's so interesting to me to get to hear you speak this way because he led me along this path that involved this spiritual warfare. What was I? I was a warrior.
Like I understood warfare.

Speaker 1 I understood encountering an enemy. And

Speaker 1 that's the story I told you. You know, he kind of led me to this ultimate revelation and to this regeneration along the lines of that.

Speaker 1 I have to believe that and I have to hope that he is leading you along this path specifically

Speaker 1 the way you're experiencing it because that's how your mind works, man. Like you're a master.

Speaker 1 You are intelligent. You understand things.
You want things to be

Speaker 1 somewhat logical and orderly. And, you you know, like the Shroud of Turin thing, or,

Speaker 1 you know, any of these other artifacts or the Dead Sea Scrolls or something like that. Like, I can do without knowing about all that and be just fine.

Speaker 1 But according to the way the Almighty made you,

Speaker 1 maybe you can't do without all that stuff and be just fine because you're different than me. You know what I mean? Yeah.
So I want you,

Speaker 1 man, it sounds so weird because I only, we just met. But like, I want you man to be confident in the direction that you're going with the questions that you ask and the way that you search

Speaker 1 because it's beautiful man

Speaker 3 well thank you yeah um it's beautiful I'm blessed with the time I'm blessed with the time to ponder things yeah you know that is a that is a very big blessing man it is because if you're too busy and your life is too overwhelmed with obligations and and I have a a lot of them but fortunately for me a lot of my job gives me time gives me time to think yep a lot of what I do and a lot of these conversations give me time to think and and talking to different people with different perspectives different life experiences and what they're trying to figure out because we're all trying to figure out like what is the purpose of this like what am I doing here and

Speaker 3 some of the most miserable anxiety ridden people that I know have no belief system.

Speaker 3 Some of the most miserable anxiety-driven people that I know are atheists. And some of the most angry and bitter and attacking and condescending and atheists.

Speaker 1 And also Christian.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, there's a lot of Christians that way, too. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, there's a lot of Muslims that way. There's a lot of Buddhists that way.
There's a lot of people that are full of shit. And that's, you know, that's with everything.

Speaker 3 Like, with that, you can get a good plumber, you can get a terrible plumber. You know, and it's just how human beings vary considerably.

Speaker 1 There's a philosopher that Martin Luther quotes in his book, The Bondage of the Will.

Speaker 1 And this philosopher says, you can make anything out of anything. And he's talking about scripture.

Speaker 1 You can take the holy scriptures and you can make anything out of them that you want to make out of them.

Speaker 3 Right, if you want to interpret it in a completely different way.

Speaker 1 You can make anything out of anything. And that's where we have these issues.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 people love to point out the hypocrisy in the body of Christ, the visible church, Christians, people who proclaim to be Christians, the hypocrisy of Christians.

Speaker 1 And I would agree with you 100%.

Speaker 1 There is a lot of hypocrisy. And a lot of

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 the visible church does

Speaker 1 is makes what they want to make out of the scriptures in order to control people.

Speaker 1 I mean, that, that, that, that, that's like

Speaker 1 huge, man.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like, and there's also the issue of mega-pastors. Yeah.
You know, when you think about a rock star, you think about someone who's selling out an arena, right?

Speaker 3 You think about a preacher, you think about like a Joel Olstein type character, unfortunately, because they're more popular than any of the other ones. And so that becomes, that's a far,

Speaker 3 it's on the far spectrum, a fringe figure. Yeah.
You know, Rolls-Royce's, private jets, expensive suits, all of it's fucked. None of it makes any sense.
None of it seems

Speaker 3 remotely Christian, right?

Speaker 3 To amass billions of dollars in enormous plots of land and have huge houses and you're flying around in $65 million planes.

Speaker 1 Dude, you're a comedian. You got to watch this dude named Jesse Duplantis.

Speaker 3 Is he a comic?

Speaker 1 Oh, no, he's like a mega preacher, but dude, you just got to watch videos of this dude.

Speaker 1 Is he off the charts? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 You know, that's how Kinnison started.

Speaker 3 One of the greatest comedians, if not the greatest of all time, Sam Kinnison, started out as a tent preacher.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, when people like to point out the hypocrisy of Christians, like

Speaker 1 I get what you're saying, man, like, and how religion is used to control people in some ways. You can make anything out of anything.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing: here's how I would respond to you as a Christian.

Speaker 1 Yes, you are right. I am a hypocrite.

Speaker 1 I am a liar.

Speaker 1 I am a cheater.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm not really a thief per se. I don't steal.

Speaker 1 I covet people,

Speaker 1 the things that they have, the things of this world.

Speaker 1 I hate.

Speaker 1 I do all of those things.

Speaker 1 That's the point.

Speaker 1 Like in that realization of who I am,

Speaker 1 that revelation is the foundation of

Speaker 1 my clinging to

Speaker 1 Christ. Right.

Speaker 3 I see what you're saying.

Speaker 1 Clinging to, do I want to do those things? No, I don't want to do those things. But there is something in me.
There is a remnant in me

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 leads me to do things

Speaker 1 that I don't want to do. And the things that I want to do, I don't actually do.

Speaker 1 Now, not 100% of the time.

Speaker 1 Like, that's not my desire.

Speaker 1 But when I actually, when I do those things now, the difference is my response to them.

Speaker 1 So, like, I told you how wicked I used to be well you know used to be if I had an argument with my wife you know maybe I was rushing out the door and I was maybe I yelled at my wife and I went out got my truck and went to work the rest of the day I would be justifying my

Speaker 1 yelling at my wife she deserved to be yelled at right screw her man

Speaker 1 like she's in the wrong

Speaker 1 now when I do those things I yell at my wife, I walk out the door. It's the same thing that I did before,

Speaker 1 but I do it now, and I get in my car

Speaker 1 and it crushes me, dude.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I can't believe I just did the thing that I know I don't want to do, but I did it anyways. It's my response to those things.

Speaker 1 The most, I think, accurate way or picture to describe this, remember I told you I woke up the next day and like my desires had changed? Yes.

Speaker 1 The most accurate way I've heard this described is if you had two plates of food,

Speaker 1 you know, you had a plate of the finest food and then you had a bucket of garbage.

Speaker 1 You turn a pig loose into the room.

Speaker 1 The pig is going to go and stick his head in that bucket of garbage and eat that garbage before he eats the food off of that fine

Speaker 1 plate.

Speaker 1 Because he likes the smell of garbage. He's attracted to the taste and the smell of that.

Speaker 1 We have pigs at the house. Like this is what he would do.
He would go eat the garbage before he ate the good stuff.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that pig, he's eating that garbage and there's this good stuff right here next to him. And

Speaker 1 he's not even ashamed that he's eating that garbage because he's a pig.

Speaker 1 If you you had the power to snap your fingers and to turn that pig

Speaker 1 into a man,

Speaker 1 that man would then lift his head up out of that garbage

Speaker 1 and he would look around him and he would be ashamed that he had been eating that garbage

Speaker 1 and he would depart from that garbage. and go to the finer food.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah. That's what he would do

Speaker 1 that's that's that's the transition that i tried to describe to you earlier how i was changed overnight it was like i no longer desired garbage more than i desired the fine things that the lord has offered to me my desires changed right i see what you're saying but we still go back Like that there's a remnant of that pig in us.

Speaker 1 And every now and then we want to go back and eat that garbage, but we're ashamed. We don't want anybody to see us, and we're ashamed, and it upsets our stomach,

Speaker 1 and we respond to it differently.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's kind of the change and tying this all back into: well,

Speaker 1 why aren't Christians perfect?

Speaker 1 They say

Speaker 1 they preach all this stuff.

Speaker 1 As a preacher or as a teacher,

Speaker 1 the closer you preach the true

Speaker 1 literal word of Scripture in terms of standards, the closer you get to that standard that's portrayed by Scripture,

Speaker 1 the more of a hypocrite you are going to become

Speaker 1 because you can't meet it.

Speaker 3 What you're saying, though, this is what I was getting at. What you're saying is

Speaker 3 one of the best examples of the power of being a Christian.

Speaker 3 What I'm talking about is the general perception of people on the outside that don't really maybe don't, maybe hang out mostly in secular circles. Maybe they have a bunch of friends that are atheists.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they see religion as this big scam.

Speaker 3 And because the most popular versions of religion for a long time is televised religion, you know, that's when you you think about people's exposure that aren't religious to religion, what do they, they hear about scandals, they hear about, you know, the pedophilia in the Catholic Church, they hear about

Speaker 3 money that's being inappropriately spent. And

Speaker 3 so the versions that they get are like, oh, this is just bullshit to control people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they don't hear enough about

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 genuine transformation stories and like why this is valuable and why it's also valuable to intelligent people because this has always been this

Speaker 3 is a misconception or at least a narrative that's pushed out that it's for dull-minded people it's for dull-minded people that can't make sense of the world it's too much confusion to them so they need a structure which is totally in alignment with the the the whole truth that the this cross thing is foolishness.

Speaker 1 Like, I understand that. Right.

Speaker 3 I mean, well, the fact that you do makes it much more palatable for people, too. What you were saying makes more sense to people because, like, okay, he's addressing these feelings that I have, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you read, and I think it's 1 Corinthians chapter 2,

Speaker 1 the Apostle Paul is writing, like,

Speaker 1 hey, I didn't come to you with these wise words, like,

Speaker 1 trying to convince you of anything. I simply have preached to you this gospel and notice that not many of you who are considered wise

Speaker 1 like were able to believe this because it's it's literally foolishness

Speaker 1 until you're made alive and it was it's funny it was by the Almighty's sovereign immutable will that he chose the cross

Speaker 1 as to be the story of redemption for man.

Speaker 1 It's funny that he chose the cross

Speaker 1 and he did it for his own good pleasure. He chose to destroy the wisdom of man

Speaker 1 by a message

Speaker 1 that is seemingly foolish. It's so backwards.

Speaker 1 He chose to destroy man's wisdom,

Speaker 1 our natural man's wisdom,

Speaker 1 All the great things that man

Speaker 1 has done and known and discovered, he chose to destroy all of that by this foolish message of the cross for his own good pleasure. Because man in his wisdom

Speaker 1 did not know God

Speaker 1 when he came here in the body, in the person of Jesus Christ. They actually killed him.

Speaker 1 So he said, I'm going to destroy y'all's natural wisdom with this message of foolishness.

Speaker 1 Kind of comedic.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 3 So if it really did happen, it's the most bizarre way to get a message across.

Speaker 1 It's the most bizarre way that you could ever

Speaker 1 like literally even imagine, man.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 and imagine you trying to explain to people your experiences with whatever you encountered in those barracks.

Speaker 3 And people hearing that, like, it's the problem with unique experiences that are completely outside of the norm.

Speaker 3 Well, what's more outside of the norm than the resurrection of Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ being actually the Son of God? Like, imagine trying to explain that to people.

Speaker 3 They'd be like, What are you talking about?

Speaker 3 There's this guy, his name is Jesus. Like, shut the fuck up.
Like, what are you in a multi-level marketing scheme? Like, what are you talking about, man? This guy wants money from you?

Speaker 3 Like, what is this guy? This guy fucking your wife? Like, what's going on? No, no, no, no, man. It's not like that.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, right, right.

Speaker 3 But if it really is true, you would be stuck. You'd be stuck with this story.
And you can't leave that part out. No,

Speaker 3 you're commanded to tell the entire story.

Speaker 3 So you have this conundrum. All right.
This is part that's going to sound crazy, but

Speaker 1 you summed it up well, Joe.

Speaker 3 You summed it up well, brother. The most fascinating thing of it, but I always tell people,

Speaker 3 look all that, look at it, but also know that if you live that way and if you believe that, and if you follow those teachings, you will have a better life. There's something to it.

Speaker 3 There's a reason why people have been doing it. There's a reason why true Christians are some of the nicest, most compassionate, friendliest, charitable people that you'll ever meet.

Speaker 3 There's something to it. There's something to it.

Speaker 3 There's the origin of it all.

Speaker 3 There's truth in the origin of it all. It's just trying to figure out what it means.
And then

Speaker 3 the translations, even the translations in English that you're reading, the way they communicate is so different than the way we communicate today.

Speaker 3 So, you have to realize like the evolution of human discourse over thousands of years, the way we phrase things, the way we describe things, the way we talk about things is all very different.

Speaker 3 So, you have to get scholars who understand the original way they talked about.

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Speaker 3 These things. And what, what, what did, why, why did they say a phrase this way? What is the meaning of this?

Speaker 1 Isn't it so good that we have men that have dedicated

Speaker 1 their entire lives to that?

Speaker 3 Do you follow that Wesley Huff guy?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 He's fantastic. I do, man.

Speaker 1 I'm so thankful for men like him.

Speaker 1 R.C. Spurl

Speaker 1 is one that I love to read his stuff. He's passed now.
Martin Luther, of course, is another one.

Speaker 1 But I mean, because you think about me,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 what do I spend a day reading scripture?

Speaker 1 Two hours a day, maybe? Sometimes three?

Speaker 1 Like, I'm never going to become the expert. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, you spend an hour a day or two hours a day doing anything. Yeah.
You're never going to become

Speaker 3 proficient.

Speaker 1 You'll be proficient. Yeah, you'll be able to kind of know your way around it.

Speaker 1 But the stuff that you're talking about knowing, which is stuff worth knowing, you know, that's the meat that we can consume.

Speaker 3 Also, when you're talking about the Old Testament and the New Testament, you put the two of them together, you're dealing with thousands of pages.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 thousands,

Speaker 3 thousands of pages of very confusing scripture. Where some of it you're reading, you have to read it three or four times, and you just got to go, Okay,

Speaker 3 what exactly is he trying to say here?

Speaker 1 Because you have to figure out how it fits with the rest of it, yes, because you can read it in a way and you're like, This

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 contradictory.

Speaker 1 If scripture is contradictory,

Speaker 1 it is not from God. Right.

Speaker 1 It cannot,

Speaker 1 by nature of

Speaker 1 what we know about the nature of the Almighty, what's revealed in Scripture to us just about His nature, His attributes, right?

Speaker 1 It's one of my favorite things to study: the attributes of the Almighty, which we cannot even begin to grasp the fullness of it. But some of His attributes have been revealed to us.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 if that is His Word, it cannot contradict itself

Speaker 1 Because that would go against

Speaker 1 what we know

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 who he is. You know, yet?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But yet, sometimes it does.

Speaker 1 Seemingly. Yeah.
Seemingly.

Speaker 3 And again, this is probably the interpretation of man.

Speaker 3 You know, and this is... where it gets problematic.
I mean, it is

Speaker 3 ultimately fascinating that you have something like the book of Isaiah, where they found an older version that they didn't even know existed.

Speaker 3 It turns out to be a thousand years older, and it's verbatim. Fascinating, right? It is.

Speaker 3 But before that got written down, they talked about it for a long time.

Speaker 3 A long time. And so few people could write things down and so few people could read.

Speaker 3 That's where it gets weird. But I think

Speaker 3 ultimately, behind it all, they're trying to tell a story. They're trying to tell a fantastic story.

Speaker 1 And I think ultimately, too, I think something that you could add to that, Joe, is if

Speaker 1 what I'm saying is correct in terms of what I believe about Scripture, ultimately there has also to be some divine influence over the preservation

Speaker 1 of those scriptures.

Speaker 1 It's the only way, right? It would be the only way for the scriptures in their original language to be truly the word of the Almighty to man.

Speaker 1 The complete revelation of

Speaker 1 the Almighty to man.

Speaker 1 Like, there has to be some divine influence

Speaker 1 for that to happen.

Speaker 3 Right, but then you have to take it back to the origins of it. Like, what was that? What was that divine influence? Yeah.

Speaker 3 What were the experiences?

Speaker 1 Was it a converse? Yeah, was it a con? How did it, you know, we like, we like to, uh,

Speaker 1 you like to

Speaker 1 kind of the

Speaker 1 it, and here's another thing, man. It all involves faith.
It does involve an aspect of faith.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, because we look at the letters in the New Testament who were mostly written by the Apostle Paul.

Speaker 1 And the only way that we can trust that, okay, this is the literal message from God to us, but it's coming through a man.

Speaker 1 Like, how does that happen?

Speaker 1 Well, we have to believe that, again, the Almighty is influencing man through the power of his Spirit in the man to write the things that the man wrote. You know,

Speaker 1 that's why

Speaker 1 this belief in the Holy Spirit and of the believer actually being possessed with the Spirit of God is so essential. Like, it has to be that way.
Or else, the Apostle Paul is writing his opinions.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Or he's writing based off of his experience. You know,

Speaker 1 you could take it all the way back. What did Pilate say to Jesus? What is truth?

Speaker 1 We all, you know, what is like

Speaker 1 truth.

Speaker 1 I don't even know that truth can come from man alone because everything

Speaker 1 that we

Speaker 1 have

Speaker 1 experienced is so influenced by our upbringing, by our perspective, by our memory, by

Speaker 1 so many factors. That's why I hate, dude, I hate seeing these guys, these former military guys attacking each other, man,

Speaker 1 about he did this and he did that and he didn't do this and he didn't do that. I'm like,

Speaker 1 I mean, some guys might flat out be, you know, telling a fib, you know, I get that, right? You know, that's not good.

Speaker 1 But man, so many guys, so many people are recounting experiences that they've had in their life and their service and whatever it may be.

Speaker 1 And like all of that is shaped by their unique perspective and the way that their mind works. And,

Speaker 1 you know, it's like

Speaker 1 I can't attack a dude for that. You know what I mean? So if we're saying that the Bible is truly the

Speaker 1 perfect revelation of God to man, then we have to understand that the source of that,

Speaker 1 all of that, did not come from man in some way. It was wrought by God through man,

Speaker 3 if that makes sense. It does make sense.
And that is the ultimate truth where it all started from. It's just trying to

Speaker 3 sift through

Speaker 3 the tongue of man to get to whatever that truth is.

Speaker 3 And then this thing that will ultimately, I mean, unless some some insane technology comes about, we'll never know. We'll never be able to go back in time and figure that out.

Speaker 1 That's a problem, ain't it? It's an issue. You know, I talked to my buddy about that while I was

Speaker 1 sitting there with him,

Speaker 1 you know, as he was passing away. And,

Speaker 1 you know, scripture describes

Speaker 1 when you leave your physical body here on earth,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 your spirit basically goes into the presence of the almighty immediately

Speaker 1 but in that state you're unclothed and you don't want to be unclothed

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 like i was

Speaker 1 i'm i'm having all these i lost my train of thought there on what on where we were going with that but um

Speaker 1 Yeah, man, I forgot the original question, but it was it pertained to something a conversation I had with him.

Speaker 3 Well, you you were talking with him about

Speaker 3 this sort of leap of faith that you have to make.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Okay, that's what I was talking to him about.
I was like, right now, Mr. Don,

Speaker 1 there is an element of faith in what you believe. Like,

Speaker 1 and that. That's a problem.
Like, that's, it's hard to explain that. It's hard.
That's a problem. But when you leave here, like, you're no longer going to have to live by faith.

Speaker 1 Like, once you get there, you're going to know you made it. Like, it's, it's, it's all, but it goes back to what you were saying.
Like, we'll never know. There's always going to be an element of faith

Speaker 1 in what we believe. Like, there has to be, as it pertains to things

Speaker 1 of God,

Speaker 1 there's always going to be a certain element of faith. That very faith is the gift that the Lord gives to his elect.

Speaker 1 The ability to believe.

Speaker 1 Like, that is the gift, that element of faith. That's the gift that I treasure more than anything else that I have in my life.

Speaker 1 But it's still

Speaker 1 tough. Remember I told you I have doubts sometimes? Of course.

Speaker 3 Well, that's where the skeptical person steps in and and says, Well, this is ridiculous. It's all based on you have to believe in faith because logically it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 And so, this is the problem with that is that you're making this assumption that the human mind is flawless and that it could perceive truth regardless of your learned experiences, regardless of what you know about the world.

Speaker 3 You could see truth even if it's a completely unique thing.

Speaker 3 You could know that it doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 Like, there's no way. There's no way you know.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 if it is a puzzle, what greater puzzle than you have to believe something that defies logic? Like,

Speaker 3 if you're going to demand faith of someone,

Speaker 3 you would

Speaker 3 deliver it in a way that

Speaker 3 the only way to buy into this is that you have to get past your logic. You have to abandon it.
And you have to believe something that you've been told is impossible.

Speaker 3 But my answer to that is you look like a good preacher one day, man.

Speaker 3 My answer to that is: isn't everything impossible? This is the problem with that. The problem is, Terrence McKenna once said that

Speaker 3 science only demands of you one miracle. That's the Big Bang.
If you believe in one miracle, everything else it says it can explain with materialist science.

Speaker 3 So if you the miracle of the Big Bang is way crazier to believe than the resurrection of a human being.

Speaker 3 That seems more logical.

Speaker 3 It seems more plausible. People live, people die, maybe people come back to life.

Speaker 1 I'll buy that.

Speaker 3 More than the entire universe is smaller than the head of a pin. And through no process that anybody has adequately explained, becomes everything.

Speaker 3 And maybe it's a continual process. It happens over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 Well, you like,

Speaker 1 you like to look into all this stuff. My wife sent me a YouTube video or something the other day.

Speaker 1 Apparently they saw something with one of these telescopes or something that they look into the cosmos with that has completely like destroyed all their evidence of

Speaker 3 their the theology behind the big bang yes james webb telescope yeah they're they're finding

Speaker 3 they think that some of what they were interpreting as the initial signals of the big bang are not that that this that not only that but the origin the birth of the universe is far older than they they think it was because they're finding galaxies that are far too large and formed, that are so far away that they would have had to form far quicker than they thought was possible from the moment of the Big Bang to that.

Speaker 3 So this has extended, in some people's eyes, the birth of the universe to 22 plus billion years old instead of 13.7 or whatever it is. So they think it's possibly even older.

Speaker 3 But then there's also questions like the Big Bang itself might not be correct.

Speaker 3 You might be just interpreting the signals of this part of the space, part of the universe, that we just can't see yet because we don't have the ability to see further than what the James Webb Telescope can do.

Speaker 3 So as we develop better and better tools, with each iteration, you're going to have a much deeper understanding of the vastness of the universe itself, which may ultimately be infinite.

Speaker 3 And Roger Penrose thinks that not only was there not just a Big Bang, that there's a continual cycle of these things that happen for eternity, that there's never been a beginning.

Speaker 1 Go ahead and wrap your mind around that. Wrap your mind around that.

Speaker 3 Because we always want to think in terms of our own personal biological limitations. We have a birth and we have a death.
Well, what was the birth of the universe?

Speaker 1 Well, why?

Speaker 3 Why assume that? Why? Because we have this tiny little lifespan of 100 years.

Speaker 1 Even when we try to interpret hard things about scripture or we think about

Speaker 1 the Lord,

Speaker 1 almost always we put time constraints on him. Like, how do you think

Speaker 1 without the constraints

Speaker 1 of time

Speaker 1 in your mind? You know what I mean? It's freaking wild, man.

Speaker 3 Well, then time gets real weird when you get into the Old Testament. Like, how old was Noah? What?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, what is that? They lived a long time. You know,

Speaker 1 that kind of goes along with my theory of

Speaker 1 at the fall fall of man, literally marring man's genetic code and how that has just kind of progressively gotten worse over time.

Speaker 3 It's possible, but it's also possible that their interpretation of time is different because they didn't understand calendars.

Speaker 3 You know, that they, what they considered a year was not what we were talking about. We're talking about a completely different thing.

Speaker 3 We have such a limited understanding just of human civilization. I mean,

Speaker 3 there's new findings

Speaker 3 constantly that are completely throwing a monkey monkey wrench into the timeline of human history.

Speaker 3 And you know, some of the biggest ones are happening in Egypt right now, where they're finding structures under through tomography, through these uh the use of satellites.

Speaker 3 They're finding these structures underneath the pyramids that go down two kilometers deep. Very controversial stuff, but they've repeated it over and over again.

Speaker 3 There's these these cylinders and there's coils that seem to be wrapped around these cylinders. They're hundreds of meters deep and then there's more structures underneath there.

Speaker 3 they're like well what is this like who made this like the explaining the pyramids themselves is impossible they try they pretend people are just smarter than you think okay maybe

Speaker 3 but also crazy that you've got this fucking thing that's what 17 acres in its footprint 2 million 300 000 stones some of them cut from a quarry 500 miles away placed hundreds of feet in the ceiling some of them are 50 plus tons that they've moved into these positions, cut perfectly.

Speaker 3 You can't have even a razor blade in between of them, set to perfect north, south, east, and west. And now you find out there's structures underneath them that might go down two kilometers.

Speaker 3 We might have a completely fucked up understanding of human history. And it's very likely we do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's,

Speaker 1 you know, there's a lot of speculation around. I'm sure you have had somebody on to talk about this

Speaker 1 period of human history in scripture where it talks about

Speaker 1 essentially these these angelic beings

Speaker 1 basically pro-creating with women, human women,

Speaker 1 and creating some sort of hybrid race, men of renown with special knowledge. And

Speaker 1 it would seem that something like that, when you look at the example and all of the stuff you just talked about with the pyramids,

Speaker 1 they were getting special knowledge

Speaker 1 from

Speaker 1 some source. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Like you said, we can't understand it, man.

Speaker 3 Well, we don't. Unfortunately, because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we have a limited understanding of what was going on.

Speaker 3 But what they did accomplish that's still there today baffles, just baffles the greatest human minds. They're like,

Speaker 1 What I love about you is you're not afraid to ask these questions, man.

Speaker 1 And what you're doing here on the show, it's like you're not afraid to dig into anything.

Speaker 3 Well, I don't think you should be afraid of questions, and no one should be.

Speaker 1 But a lot of people's pride,

Speaker 1 you know, like

Speaker 1 keep them from

Speaker 1 kind of asking those questions.

Speaker 3 I mean, well, people take themselves seriously. You know, I don't really take myself very seriously, luckily.
And also, I'm not married to my ideas. My ideas are just ideas, and they're not mine.

Speaker 3 They're just ideas, and I'll entertain those ideas. But if they're wrong, I'll say, uh-oh, that's wrong.
I thought this. This is why I thought that.
This is what it turns out really is.

Speaker 3 And I think if you can do that, you'll have a healthier perspective. Just ask questions.
Don't be afraid to sound foolish because there's probably a reason why you want to ask that question.

Speaker 3 And maybe there's a logical answer that'll make you seem foolish for asking the question. You're like, oh, okay, now I get it.
But maybe not. And there's a lot of assumptions that people cling to.

Speaker 3 And boy, we found out a lot about that during COVID. There's a lot of shit that people just believe wholeheartedly that's 100% not true.

Speaker 3 And you'll yell at people about it and you'll fucking change people's lives and you'll treat people like plague rats and it's 100% you're 100% incorrect.

Speaker 3 And you've based your entire identity on this information that's 100% incorrect. And then years later, you're still justifying it because your ego won't allow you to admit that you were incorrect.

Speaker 3 You had made false assumptions. You had gone down the wrong way of thinking.
And here you are stuck with this undeniable truth that's right in front of your face. You were fucking wrong.

Speaker 3 You were wrong. You got played.
You can't trust the government. You can't trust the pharmaceutical drug companies.
You can't trust anybody that's making a profit off of you.

Speaker 3 There it is right in front of your face. And

Speaker 3 that's the problem with

Speaker 3 taking yourself too seriously. That's the problem with being married to your ideas.
That's a problem with always wanting to be right and always wanting to sound intelligent.

Speaker 1 That's so good. Joe, that's so impactful for me to hear you say that because I have to share this with you, of course.

Speaker 1 I've told a few of my close buddies and friends that I was coming on the show today to have a conversation with you.

Speaker 1 And it's amazing people's response when you tell them that you're going to come and sit down to the mighty Joe Rogan. the most powerful man on the internet.
I've heard you called that.

Speaker 1 Dude,

Speaker 1 don't be offended by any of of that.

Speaker 1 This is what people say. And, you know,

Speaker 1 I had so many people tell me, now, Chad, when you go sit down with Joe, you better just stick to what you know.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm sitting here like,

Speaker 1 buddy, I don't know a whole lot. Like, when you really get down, like what you said, man, like, you're not, you're, you're not

Speaker 1 attached to your ideas and they're not, a lot of times they're not even your ideas. They're just,

Speaker 1 you just think about things deeply and you ask these questions and and when you live that way you you do you you do come to the realization that

Speaker 1 man there's very little that I actually know when we define the word or the idea of knowing something.

Speaker 1 And even scripture tells us any man that thinks he knows anything hasn't known as he ought to know. In other words, as soon as you think you have the answers to most things, you are totally backwards.

Speaker 1 You haven't known. The ultimate form, I think one of the ultimate forms of knowledge or knowing is realizing that you really don't know much.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 But it's just funny that you talked about that, and that was some of the advice I received.

Speaker 1 But if you only talk about the things you know. Tell me what you know.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but the problem with that is like you're never going to get anywhere. You got to be able to.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, man, it's

Speaker 1 people's perspective of what you've built here and

Speaker 1 what you do and what you've accomplished. I think it's just

Speaker 1 so skewed,

Speaker 1 just based off of some of the conversations I had. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Well, it's always going to get weird when anything gets large. You know, people have their own opinions and their own perceptions of things that are successful.

Speaker 1 Why do you keep going at this point?

Speaker 3 It's fun.

Speaker 1 You enjoy it? I like it. Yeah.
That's good. Yeah, I like it.

Speaker 3 I enjoy it. It's enriching.
I like talking to people. I like learning new things.
I like having interesting conversations, fun conversations.

Speaker 1 What was your first kind of big break?

Speaker 3 As a podcaster?

Speaker 1 As a pod? I mean, just in general, as

Speaker 1 someone who's public.

Speaker 3 I guess the big one was Fear Factor.

Speaker 3 you know that was the one that kind of made me famous but what led you there i was on a tv show before that called news radio it was a sitcom okay i was on that and before that i was a stand-up comic

Speaker 3 and uh you know my trajectory's been very slow which is good it's healthier for you you can you get it better like you can deal with it because the worst thing that ever happens is like a 20 year old kid becomes super famous you're just fucked you're fucked you you just you're not gonna be able to handle that you're gonna going to be off the rails.

Speaker 3 It's just too weird. The world is a totally different place.
Everybody knows who you are everywhere you go. Everyone around you needs you.

Speaker 3 So you have all these talking heads around you that are kissing your ass. Your perception of the world is completely distorted.
You never had to truly develop your character.

Speaker 3 You know, you've got untold wealth in your teens. Like, you can't handle that.

Speaker 1 Nobody can handle that.

Speaker 3 No child stars ever make it out and seem normal. They're all fucked.
It's like cement where you you mix it wrong.

Speaker 3 There's not enough waters, not enough sand, whatever it is. The formulation's wrong.
You're never going to fix it. You're never going to fix it after the fact.
It's already formed. And it's a tragedy.

Speaker 3 But to get fame slowly.

Speaker 3 As long as you're always working on your character. And one of the things that will keep you sane when you're going through fame in particular is voluntary adversity.
Like, particularly working out.

Speaker 1 Man, that's good, brother. I can relate to that, man.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. I know you're big into ultra running and that kind of voluntary advertisement.
I saw you took up jiu-jitsu recently, too, right?

Speaker 3 That looks fun. It's fucking tiring, huh? For a guy with the kind of endurance that you have.
Isn't it amazing how tired he is?

Speaker 1 It was rough, dude.

Speaker 1 Bad rough.

Speaker 3 Yeah, jiu-jitsu is humiliating. It's humbling.

Speaker 3 But there's a lot of power in that humbling.

Speaker 3 It makes the rest of your life so much easier. It really does.

Speaker 3 Jiu-Jitsu was a huge factor in my sanity and my ability to stay sane through everything.

Speaker 3 I'm getting humbled all the time.

Speaker 3 I'm exhausted all the time. Dudes are strangling me all the time.

Speaker 3 So that kind of conflict was so overwhelming, but yet also positive and

Speaker 3 helped me so much with character development, my understanding of myself, and what I was able to accomplish if I worked hard enough. It allows you to navigate the weird waters of fame so much easier.

Speaker 1 That's really impactful to hear you say that, Joe, because I think that is

Speaker 1 and has been my exact same experience, you know. And

Speaker 1 we've been doing, we've been, I've been kind of public for the last five years now, and it's, it's been kind of slow, but, but again, it kind of went big there for like within two years.

Speaker 1 Like the YouTube and stuff blew up to the point that I'm nowhere, obviously, on the level that you experience in your life, but you know, you can't go out in public without somebody's going to stop you.

Speaker 1 Well, you're at the level where I know who you are. In all these comments and all this stuff, you know what I mean? But like, but like continuously choosing to do these

Speaker 1 challenges that like I don't even know if I'm going to be able to do it. Like, the Yukon race, the Yukon 1000, we didn't finish that.

Speaker 1 We went 435 miles, and David started having circulation issues in his lower body because he's paralyzed. Blood doesn't flow very well.

Speaker 1 And, like, his leg is usually the size just of his femur, you know, or his bones. And by the third day, his legs were the same size as my legs.

Speaker 1 And he started to develop these pressure sores on his butt, which is very, very dangerous for people who are paralyzed just from sitting in that kayak for 18 hours a day.

Speaker 1 But like,

Speaker 1 we didn't complete that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 we were out there,

Speaker 1 like truly in the, in truly in wilderness, like struggling against not only the miles, but just the environment. Like, I love to hear all these hippie people talk about Mother Earth.

Speaker 1 It's like, Mother Earth will freaking kill you, son.

Speaker 1 You talk about Mother Earth around me. That tells me one thing: you ain't spent much time in nature.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But man, we're out there just like struggling through this. And it became something that for my teammate,

Speaker 1 he physically wasn't in a place that he could safely continue. But like,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 so refreshed me, dude. Yeah.
Being out there, the experience,

Speaker 1 the struggle, it's brutal, man. Like, 120, 130 mile days, 18-hour days in this kayaks, you're getting three hours of sleep,

Speaker 1 having to cook all your food. It's all self-contained.
But, like, I come out the other end of that, man, and I'm just like so

Speaker 1 dialed in, dude. Yeah.
Without those experiences,

Speaker 1 I agree with you 100%, man.

Speaker 3 I think all men need voluntary adversity.

Speaker 3 I think you need it.

Speaker 3 I think that's one of the reasons why people are so filled with anxiety and depression. And I think you need to challenge yourself all the time.
And I think it needs to be physical.

Speaker 3 I think it's not just a mental thing. I think people need physical challenge.
I think it's a very important part for maintaining sanity.

Speaker 1 It is for me, for sure. I have to have something, you know, on the micro level daily, on the macro level, I have to have maybe

Speaker 1 two things, big things a year that

Speaker 1 I look at and I'm like,

Speaker 1 I don't know if I can actually finish that or not.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? And then it forces me to

Speaker 1 train, to learn, to prepare, to plan.

Speaker 1 That's when you get, if we want to move toward mental toughness and how this kind of preps you and keeps you going through life, Like, that's where all the mental toughness is really built: through the training process.

Speaker 1 Like, on race day,

Speaker 1 you shouldn't be getting any more mentally tough on race day. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you waited too long. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Your brain is just a muscle like any other muscle

Speaker 1 in my experience. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you stop exercising it, and people want to act like there are

Speaker 1 people out there, maybe like me or like David Goggins or these people that have become so mentally tough that like we're just good.

Speaker 1 Like we should be able to show up anywhere, anytime and perform and just crush everyone.

Speaker 1 That's not how it works. Like every one of us, we have to prepare and train.
and train day in and day out and go through the process in order to perform.

Speaker 1 That's a never-ending thing. But people want to believe that you can just become mentally tough and then possess that and perform for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 They want to believe that because they don't want to do the work that's required to actually perform at a high, high level.

Speaker 1 You know, it's almost like an out

Speaker 1 that people want to take or believe in.

Speaker 3 Well, listen, man, I'm glad you're out there. I appreciate you very much.
I appreciate you coming in and doing the show. And 3 of 7 projects on YouTube.
Are you on anything else?

Speaker 1 Just threeof7project.com. If you want to come train with us, that's what, I mean, that's my passion in life is not only my faith, but teaching.
And everything that we do is

Speaker 1 we have training exercises, you know, once a month or something. And I'm out there with you, suffering with you.

Speaker 3 Beautiful.

Speaker 1 And go check it out if you want to. Come hang out.
And Joe, man, I can't thank you enough for your generosity.

Speaker 1 There's many times during that conversation that you could have made me look like a fool, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 No, no, no.

Speaker 3 You had a lot of grace for me, brother. I enjoyed it very much.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 All right. Bye, everybody.