#2230 - Evan Hafer

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

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Speaker 2 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 2 Come on, brother. Good to see you again.
Good to see you.

Speaker 1 So, this conversation was, well, anytime you want to come on, I'm always happy to talk to you. But this conversation was birthed out of that crazy conversation we had in Elk Hunting Camp.

Speaker 1 Which one?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, we had quite a few of them where you just

Speaker 1 You will open up my eyes to some of these things. First of all, I never understood the extent of the man fuckery in Afghanistan.
Oh.

Speaker 1 When we were talking, remember we were hanging out in front of the trucks and you were telling me about mumbles? Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a few conversations I've had with friends that for the rest of my life,

Speaker 1 now things are different. Like now I look at,

Speaker 1 that one conversation, that one hour conversation we had, like, okay, the world's different now.

Speaker 2 You know, I always assume people have heard these stories from Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 Cheers. You got to drink that.

Speaker 1 Sorry, you can't. You got cheers with alcohol.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Buffalo Trace.

Speaker 1 So, yeah.

Speaker 2 The amount of man-on-man buggery in Afghanistan is significant.

Speaker 1 Did they warn you about it before you went over there?

Speaker 2 No. No, I think there were so many different things about both Iraq and Afghanistan that the learning learning curve for all of us was so high.

Speaker 2 Culturally, you don't think about a lot of those things. You just don't.
You just, you know, you grow up in America.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 You assume everybody, every man is basically like an American male because that's at 26 or 27 years old. You know that there are cultural differences for sure.

Speaker 2 But I'm telling you, I was in Kuwait for like the first time early on, and

Speaker 2 the Kuwaitis like to hold hands. Like the dudes like to hold hands, and that's not comfortable for

Speaker 1 guys. Isn't that weird, though? Because we do shake hands.
Yeah. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 But you don't walk around holding another man's hand. It's just not comfortable in any scenario.

Speaker 1 But imagine trying to explain that to someone who didn't understand what makes it gay. Like at what point in time does like holding onto a hand, does it get, you know, like there's like a meter.

Speaker 1 Like you can kind of like hold onto a hot potato for a couple seconds and then it'll burn your hand.

Speaker 2 After a certain point,

Speaker 2 you're walking around holding another man's hand and you've never really done it probably since you were a kid, maybe holding your dad's hand when you're like three or four years old.

Speaker 2 And in special forces, they tell you, you know, you have to

Speaker 2 work with the cultural differences. And they're just talking in generals.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Like these are, they're not specific because they don't know where you're going. And you're going to have to work by, with, and through the host indigenous force.

Speaker 2 So you have to accept some of the things, the cultural differences, and just go with the flow.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So, as a new green beret, you know, as SF guys, you're just walking around holding another man's hand. You're so freaked out about it.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, man. Oh, man.

Speaker 2 What the fuck does this mean? Like, you know, you're questioning all your reality. Like, oh, my God.
You know, and then after a few years,

Speaker 2 you know, time and repetition and war or whatever, somebody goes to hold your hand. You're like, get the fuck away from me.

Speaker 2 I'm not doing that, bro. Come on, no.
No, I'm not doing that.

Speaker 1 So you gave up after a while.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, there's a lot of things you give up, right?

Speaker 2 You're taught in SF, drink the tea, eat the food, you know,

Speaker 2 do everything simply do. Yeah, just completely assimilate.

Speaker 2 And honestly, like, a lot of that is really good because it does teach you to be a lot more open as far as listening to what they're going through from their tribal plights.

Speaker 2 Like, what are they going through from a combat experience? What do they need? And you want, and you want to build rapport. That's what you want to do.
And,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 rep after rep in a war zone, you kind of get fatigued with that. And then you're like, yeah, let's just get to the dirt here, man.
Like, who do we want to kill?

Speaker 1 Like, let's, let's get to that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 got it. You don't like that tribe.
We don't like that tribe. We don't like this.
You don't like that. Cool.

Speaker 2 Okay, so I'm not going to eat with you because every time I eat with you, I can't shit for like a normal shit for like a year. So we're just going to not do any of that.

Speaker 1 And you tell me you literally didn't shit anything but diarrhea for you said more than a year.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was years, man. I was living and working with the Afghans and

Speaker 2 I went from Iraq.

Speaker 2 And I did the invasion with special forces from the south and I did multiple rotations in Iraq both with SF and then with the agency when I went over there.

Speaker 2 And then when we did the, when we shut down Iraq in 2009, I turned around and basically went to Afghanistan in 2009.

Speaker 2 So I went from Iraq to Afghanistan and then I went from Afghanistan, kind of finished up my CIA

Speaker 2 combat, I guess, experience and then went back to the States to do a training thing. But by the time I got to Afghanistan, i had lots of time in iraq i had like four years on the ground and

Speaker 2 afghanistan was way different

Speaker 2 but i was living and and working with the afghanis i was eating with them and

Speaker 2 your job is to not only train assistant advise build rapport but you're trying to figure it out so you need to be on the ground with them living, eating, breathing, sleeping, like the whole thing. And

Speaker 2 their,

Speaker 2 what we call the chow hall facilities aren't the cleanliest. You're trying, like, you're working with them.
You know, you institute different things, like soap and water is like a good thing.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it doesn't really matter. You're still going to get sick based on, you know, the water, where is it coming from? Where, what type of well source.
Like, there's lots of different variables, obviously.

Speaker 2 But, dude, I didn't have a solid shit for two years. And it was just kind of got normalized to the point where, you know, you're,

Speaker 2 it's, it's such a gross thing to think about. Man, you could not trust a fart ever.

Speaker 2 I got this great, I got this great story. So I came in off the gun trucks and

Speaker 2 I'm tired. I'm, I'm, like, went into the embassy and I had a meeting with somebody in Kabul.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I had this like titanium mug.

Speaker 2 that was like the size of a toilet bowl and I'm filling it up with coffee and I haven't slept for i don't know let's say 20 hours at the time i'm i'm dirty and i'm filling up this this uh this coffee toilet bowl basically because i'm getting ready to go into a briefing This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Speaker 2 And I let out a fart and it wasn't a fart.

Speaker 2 And the dude behind me was like,

Speaker 2 I didn't even turn around, dude. I knew there was somebody waiting for me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 I shit my pants.

Speaker 2 And I didn't even turn around. Didn't even blink an eye.
Didn't even like lift up the handle because it was just normalized.

Speaker 1 And he goes, did you shit your pants?

Speaker 2 And I was like, yeah. And I just turned around and walked off.
It was like, it was the deputy ambassador or something.

Speaker 1 It was like, it was like the ambassador, right?

Speaker 2 And I'm just like, whatever, dude. I got shit to do.
I'm out of here. Yeah.
Yeah. That's, that's to the point of which I had a permanent stain in like my combat, my, my fatigues, right?

Speaker 2 It was just so bad. But I was like, you you know what man

Speaker 2 you got shit to do like

Speaker 2 people adapt you don't you don't sweat little things like that and honestly you're just trying to like get through your

Speaker 2 you're trying to get through any and all things and it's not like we're in trench warfare or anything like that it's just like dude I had shit to do I had people to train we were going out and I couldn't let that like you can't pull over if you're you can at times but there are just times where you just you just can't so you just got to keep moving And it sucks.

Speaker 2 It's like the less glamorous side. I don't know if there's a lot of books out there telling all the cool stories about that.

Speaker 1 So when did you find out about the buggery?

Speaker 1 Was it something that you need to like? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it started in Kuwait. And

Speaker 2 I had an Arabic linguist, and he was a younger kid.

Speaker 2 You know, he was blonde hair, blue eyes. He's a Mormon kid.
And he literally joined the army at 18.

Speaker 2 You know, two years later, after going to the Defensive Language Institute in Monterey, California, you come out and you're speaking Arabic, basically. And

Speaker 2 young kid, blonde hair, blue eyes, good Mormon kid, comes out and he's with us. And the Kuwaitis kept talking about how they want to take him camping.
And we're like,

Speaker 2 why do you want to take that dude camping? Like, what's so special about that guy? You know, and you're like, after a while, you realize, like, that's not what they wanted to do, right?

Speaker 2 They were like talking about it, like, either a joking way or a serious way, but that's the first exposure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then, did it take you a while to figure that out?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, because you're so naive. Like, dude, I'm like, I'm 26 years old.
Like, I don't fucking know. I don't, I don't think this is a thing.

Speaker 2 I grew up in Idaho.

Speaker 2 Like, I know, yeah, it exists, but I'm so, you know, blithefully like moving through the world, like thinking thinking everybody's an American male right like now this is weird and then

Speaker 2 you know you go to Iraq where I went you know I went to Iraq and multiple multiple rotations over there and

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 start to

Speaker 2 assimilate with you the Iraqis you're either working with or you're training with and then it kind of starts to to to fall apart where it's like, oh, this is somewhat normal for them.

Speaker 2 Now they don't talk about it. And I'm not saying it's like everyone, by the way.
I'm saying like it's it's at least relevant enough culturally where it's somewhat normalized and not talked about.

Speaker 1 Is it similar in Kuwait as Afghanistan or do they vary? Iraq is different?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're all a little bit different.

Speaker 2 I mean the Afghanis

Speaker 2 we had to have

Speaker 2 depending on

Speaker 2 where we were were in their barracks living situation like you had to put really hard restrictions like you know no butt fucking guys for the majority of this because

Speaker 2 this is a health issue we weren't like it's not like we were we were putting bibles on their beds or something we're just saying hey this is really unhealthy you guys are going to spread a bunch of different diseases to one another and like we've got a mission to to accomplish here and every sf guy every guy that's like been afghanistan knows what man love thursday is and it's kind of a it's kind of of a thing that they do.

Speaker 1 Is it just Thursday, or is it

Speaker 1 just a thing

Speaker 1 to say? But it's just they fuck each other. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there's the kid with the blue eyes,

Speaker 1 and after a while, you're like, hey, they don't really want to camp with him. They're trying to fuck this guy.

Speaker 1 And then you start thinking, like, hey, how much of this is going on?

Speaker 2 It's exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then as you're exposed to

Speaker 2 not more of it, because you don't really see it, you hear about it. So So

Speaker 2 as you build rapport, build confidence in your friendships, and people start to talk about it. But

Speaker 2 it is fairly pervasive. And

Speaker 2 it's one of those things that

Speaker 2 you just kind of accept that that's happening from

Speaker 2 a good portion of the guys.

Speaker 2 50%, 60%?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 what we talked about, kind of rewinding,

Speaker 2 the more disturbing factor is

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 2 socially indoctrinated in the children, like the sexual exploitation of children. So it starts early and then it moves into the adulthood.
Bachabazi is a real thing, and

Speaker 2 it's dressing

Speaker 2 boys to look like girls. And they have

Speaker 2 some Afghanis, when I say some, I don't know how pervasive it is, but it's very, it's, it's a big percentage. And

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 2 adult male stuff, that's like one sub-segment of their culture, but it's the

Speaker 2 sexual exploitation of children that when you find that out, that's when things really turn for you psychologically. You're like, this, this place is really fucked.
And it's, and it's very pervasive.

Speaker 2 It's, it's very, it's, it's a, it's,

Speaker 2 you know, if you go back and you read The Kite Runner,

Speaker 2 when I read The Kite Runner when I was in Afghanistan, I realized that, you know, it's not only the story about this kid, but it's also the story of Afghanistan. It's very, very,

Speaker 2 those stories run parallel because

Speaker 2 children are

Speaker 2 sexually exploited regularly, and it's mainly the boys, from what I understand, to the point of which

Speaker 2 I was driving out on this

Speaker 1 op,

Speaker 2 I guess, from Kabul to Jalalabad. And when I first got to Afghanistan, I used to see these truck drivers, and I thought, you know, my dad was a truck driver.

Speaker 2 It's really cool these truck drivers take their sons out with them on the road. That's such a really cool cultural thing.
And my interpreter turned to me. He's like, those aren't their kids, dude.

Speaker 2 That's how fucking horrible it is.

Speaker 1 It's so horrible that they're on display. Yes.
They're on parade, Ian, you were saying. The guys would parade around their harem.

Speaker 2 Kandahar and different

Speaker 2 areas,

Speaker 2 they'll have parades, and they're on display as to this is my harem, and they're proud of it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was one of the most disturbing things that we would talk about specifically between like the departments, between Department of State, CIA, and the military.

Speaker 2 When you're out with the guys from a tactical and combat role, you see them and you interact with the way they are from a tactical level

Speaker 2 every day.

Speaker 2 And you'd bring this up to

Speaker 2 management and they would say, oh, that doesn't, what do you mean? That doesn't happen. That doesn't happen.
Or they'd pretend it doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 But if you were on the ground in Afghanistan during the times I was there, honestly, from 2001, we'll say, to the time that we pulled out, everybody

Speaker 2 uniformly would agree with what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 If you spent some time in Afghanistan, you knew that was happening. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 And Did you see these parades?

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 2 But National Geographic, I believe, did an article on it several years ago.

Speaker 1 See you in the channel. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Bachabazi.

Speaker 2 I could be getting the pronunciation a little bit off.

Speaker 2 But it turns for you

Speaker 2 emotionally and psychologically because you're like,

Speaker 2 okay.

Speaker 2 Now I've got some hate.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Makes your job a little bit easier. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Makes your job a little bit easier. Yeah.
It also makes it harder

Speaker 2 for you not to

Speaker 2 want to change the entire government system where you want to completely rewrite the entire DNA of the cultural infrastructure. Right.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 it's sad. and it's

Speaker 2 it's evil and it's all of these like really horrible things. So

Speaker 2 as much as you want to help the Afghans and their plight,

Speaker 2 yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 Inside the lives of girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, the cultural practice of bacha posh.

Speaker 2 Bacha posh, I think that's the flip, that's the reverse.

Speaker 1 Encourages parents to dress their daughters as sons for a better future, but often it only makes life harder.

Speaker 2 That's a different, so it's boys as

Speaker 2 the opposite, yeah.

Speaker 1 Girls dress as boys.

Speaker 1 So this is a different thing.

Speaker 1 Why do they do that? What's that about? Girls dressing as boys.

Speaker 2 Well, I think because,

Speaker 2 well, one, there's a very low education rate. And when I come back to

Speaker 2 the women are really seen as

Speaker 2 in Afghanistan. I'm generalizing, right? I'm taking really big swaths of the Afghan culture.
So I know this isn't every Afghan.

Speaker 2 I've got lots of different Afghan friends, and I've hired a lot of Afghans.

Speaker 1 This isn't everybody with a thumbs up. This is the dancing boys of Afghanistan.
Go back up again, show what's going on. These guys are throwing money at this dancing boy.
Back that up, Jamie?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was. I just clicked somewhere random kind of training back towards.
Oh,

Speaker 1 what the fuck, man?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Those are like little boys, and they were dancing like strippers, and these guys are throwing dollars at them. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. This is so crazy.

Speaker 2 And they're younger, so they go much younger.

Speaker 2 This is the thing that people didn't want to talk about in Afghanistan that we talked about regularly, which was these are very

Speaker 2 what we feel are distinctly

Speaker 2 wrong.

Speaker 2 These are very wrong things from

Speaker 2 American support, tactical, and strategic intervention. Like, we should not encourage this whatsoever.
And it made it very difficult at times for us to

Speaker 2 trust what the State Department or somebody else was saying. But I mean, this goes back to Iraq and honestly, trust in policymakers and the State Department and their entire

Speaker 2 position, either politically, philosophically, it's just fundamentally flawed.

Speaker 1 So when you're hearing about this, and the the one of the things about

Speaker 1 child molesting molesting

Speaker 1 is that if these kids are growing up in this culture where they're going to be an adult and they're going to do that to kids as well, which has probably happened to all these guys, right?

Speaker 1 Like, this is,

Speaker 1 you're not going to fix that with all these people alive.

Speaker 1 Like, the culture gets to a point where it's so fucked that it's like, how do you, how can you ever fix that?

Speaker 1 How many generations would it take before the scars of all those people being abused wears off and normalizes, and people can be normal again? People can be like what we would consider a Western

Speaker 1 civilization like London or

Speaker 1 New York.

Speaker 2 How?

Speaker 2 What we'd feel is the

Speaker 2 morally appropriate cultural boundaries.

Speaker 2 That's like how many generations would it take? And there's lots of different things that you can talk about because

Speaker 2 the history of Afghanistan is,

Speaker 2 we'll say, post-80s and Soviet intervention. And then, you know, with

Speaker 2 the Taliban pushback or the Mujahideen, and like, they've completely destroyed the education, the progress, and evolution of Afghanistan. I mean, they had decades of war.
Then you had

Speaker 2 basically

Speaker 2 a failed state with Taliban and extremist control. I mean, as the Taliban moved in, fundamentally, it's an evil organization.

Speaker 2 I went, there's a soccer field in Kabul where the Taliban used to stone women to death because they weren't wearing their hijab.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 the rule of a woman would be raped

Speaker 2 and she would be accused of infidelity on her husband. And they would stone her.
Or they would beat her with a stick.

Speaker 2 And they turned the soccer field into a place where they could have public displays for execution.

Speaker 2 It was completely insane.

Speaker 2 When you think about it from where we're coming from and then where we're going, and

Speaker 2 we're trying to

Speaker 2 nation build, which I have

Speaker 2 fundamental disagreement with that as well, but

Speaker 2 you eliminated the

Speaker 2 educated portion of your population, you

Speaker 2 swung to a very extremist, fear-based religion, and then it was all

Speaker 2 based on the Quran as far as their education system. So they completely separated the women away from being able to evolve.
They treated them as beasts of burden.

Speaker 2 You had to be an Islamic extremist to be acceptable. It was a completely

Speaker 2 hegemonic theorical state, or

Speaker 2 it's hegemony as far as like it's the theocracy ran everything and it was a very extremist version of Islam and

Speaker 2 as we came in

Speaker 2 and I wasn't there in 2001 I came there much later I came there in 2009 was my first real rotation there

Speaker 2 it it it had been seven years but really it it was almost like going back in time almost a thousand it felt like you're going back in time like a thousand years that's one of the things we were talking about in camp.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 when you hear about Socrates and all these ancient cultures, the Spartans, all these people that had boys. Yes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you see what's going on in Afghanistan, you realize how old a culture Afghanistan is. It's like one of the oldest civilizations in terms of the way they behave.

Speaker 1 It's almost like they never caught up with the Western world. I think it was

Speaker 1 Michael Shermer might have written a book, a paper about this.

Speaker 1 He wrote an article about how Islam's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment and that it essentially maintains the same values and

Speaker 1 the same cultural values as when it was created. So, you know, how old is Islam?

Speaker 2 1600,

Speaker 2 I think it's like 500 years past Christianity. So it's called

Speaker 1 1500 years old. 1,500 years old, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 That's how people behaved back then. That's what it is.

Speaker 1 And when you think about like Alexander the Great, Alexander the Great, who was gay, right, who conquered much of Afghanistan and giant swaths of the world,

Speaker 1 he probably like his army and his behavior and what he probably stained that area with like a type of behavior.

Speaker 2 I think you're 100% right. I think that you had

Speaker 2 portions of the world that were culturally cut off from being able to evolve at the same rate as some of the other places within the Middle East.

Speaker 2 And those tribes essentially haven't had the opportunity to evolve because they've been very isolated. I mean, you look at Afghanistan, it's an extremely isolated area of the world.
And

Speaker 2 y if you go back to the seventies, it was relatively progressive, somewhat secular. And then

Speaker 2 the Soviet intervention, the collapse, the failed state led to the rise of the Taliban because they had eviscerated

Speaker 2 all of

Speaker 2 the intellectual and the economic class. And in order to succeed or live there, you had to completely capitulate to the theocracy and the fascist state.
So you had to go back in time to live.

Speaker 2 You had to grow a beard. And when I say this, Is it everybody is 100% no? I'm saying like this is the way people live.
They lived under tyrannical rules that

Speaker 2 provided zero opportunity for, you know, if you had girls,

Speaker 2 sorry, they're beasts of burden. They treat goats and donkeys better than their girls, their children.
The homelessness of children in a war zone is so heartbreaking. Like, it is,

Speaker 2 it

Speaker 2 strips away at the goodness in your soul, watching desperation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when you see homeless children every day in these cities that are dirty, starving,

Speaker 2 and there's really not a lot you can do because

Speaker 2 you have a war to fight. And

Speaker 2 you not only think about it from the homelessness position, you think about the exploitation position.

Speaker 2 Like these kids are so fucked.

Speaker 2 They're homeless. They don't have parents because maybe their fathers were either

Speaker 2 killed in the war. Their mothers can't,

Speaker 2 they can't afford to keep them. And they continue to have more kids.
And especially if they've been raped, then there's a cycle of

Speaker 2 not only exploitation and violence, but then it's also

Speaker 2 it keeps them down economically. So you have

Speaker 2 massive amounts of children that were homeless and exploited, exploited, and they're starving. And it's,

Speaker 2 you know, you, from my perspective, when you live in that environment and

Speaker 2 you can't think about it.

Speaker 2 Like, you have to shut that stuff out. Because if you think about it, it's like opening the door of the submarine.

Speaker 2 All the water's coming in, and it's going to fucking sink you. So you have to, you have to build a,

Speaker 2 for lack of a better term, man, you have to build a callus on your soul

Speaker 2 because you can't function

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 meet and exceed your mission success criteria if you're going to, if, if, if you get steamrolled by depression on what you're seeing every day.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 Time and repetition, which is one of the big problems, I think, with the GWAC community, or at least what we've had in the last 20 years. I mean, there's lots of different compounding factors that

Speaker 2 I think contribute to the acceleration of veteran suicide, which I don't want to launch into some rant about the issues that I think we're all faced, but it's definitely something that I'm extremely passionate about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm really hoping, and we've talked about this a bunch of times in this podcast, but I'm really hoping that something's going to change with RFK and about psychedelics and veterans.

Speaker 1 I really, really am am hoping that they open their eyes to this stuff.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 I was talking to Marcus Capone, and he runs Vets, which he's the guy, his organization is the organization that takes the guys to Mexico to do Ibogaine.

Speaker 2 And Marcus is a retired SEAL. I was talking to him yesterday, actually.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we

Speaker 2 I'll go off on this, which is,

Speaker 2 you know, we as a subculture from the Global War war on terror community the veterans we're under an epidemic of suicide and depression and the va has not been a help to us like especially the war fighters like the guys that are

Speaker 2 we have rodered up time and time and time again they've gone overseas we've done the bidding for the country

Speaker 2 we've watched our friends get killed and fucking torn in half in like very ultraviolent ways We've been exposed to overpressure and chemicals and all these other things. And then we come back

Speaker 2 and within the VA system, their answer is, here's your pills, here's your retirement, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 And it's not working. You know, Marcus and I were talking about this yesterday.
He was on antidepressants for seven years.

Speaker 2 Seven years,

Speaker 2 like antidepressants, and they weren't working. And

Speaker 2 he...

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Speaker 2 Just by chance, his wife, I believe,

Speaker 2 said this might work.

Speaker 2 We need to go to Mexico and do Ibeane. This might work.

Speaker 2 So here's a guy that went, did it one time, has never been on antidepressants since.

Speaker 1 Did he have to get off them before he went there and did it?

Speaker 2 I don't know exactly what the protocol is as far as like you have to get off and then you have to get back down there. I know that most

Speaker 2 of my friend group now, they've done it and

Speaker 2 they have an extremely high success rate. You know, Vets has done a thousand

Speaker 2 former warfighters and they have an extremely high success rate where they're eliminating pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 2 So they'll go down, they'll do it one time, maybe they've done subsequent sessions, and they have this really high success rate. And this is part of the, yes, this is part of the issue is

Speaker 2 we're under an epidemic of veteran suicide, like more so than we ever have. And the worst thing about this too is it's also affecting our family and our kids.

Speaker 2 Like our kids are four times higher to commit suicide than our peer set.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's not just the GWAT veteran community. Now it's our families and our children.
You have something that has such a proven track record to help heal

Speaker 2 vets.

Speaker 2 And we can't do it without breaking the law. We have to leave the country.

Speaker 2 It's insane. So you can send me to Iraq under false pretenses, and

Speaker 2 you can have Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all these like orchestra of fucking idiots can send us all to Iraq

Speaker 2 for weapons of mass destruction. We can go fight the wars, come back.

Speaker 2 And now we have to break the law to go fix what's wrong with our heads or our you know our emotions or our not only our psychology but dude we're broken like we've been beat up and kind of shoved in a closet and then we're sedated and told to shut shut the fuck up

Speaker 2 and meanwhile you know wolfowitz and bremer and all these other guys they get to walk around and provide you know public speeches about how fucking great they are because they're you know strategically important

Speaker 2 whereas my peer set

Speaker 2 we're under an epidemic of of suicide. Our kids are committing suicide.
The VA is no help to us, and we have to go break the law.

Speaker 2 It's like you get to go flip a fucking coin and paint some paintings, and you think that everything's okay.

Speaker 1 And that one doesn't make any sense. Out of all the ones, that's one that mushrooms you can do recreationally.
No one's doing recreational Ibogaine. I've never done it before.
Have you done it?

Speaker 1 No, huh? I've never done it, but everybody that I've talked to that, they said it is one of the most like ruthlessly introspective journeys in your life. You don't, it's not fun at all.

Speaker 1 Dakota Meyer told me, he's like, I fucking hated it. I couldn't believe someone made me do it.
After it was over, I was like, what the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 1 It's not a fun time. It's not a recreational drug.
It's not a drug of addiction. It's not a drug of dying.
It's not.

Speaker 1 Let's find out what the LD50 rate is for ibogaine. It's probably bananas.
It's probably just like psilocybin. Probably can't really overdose on it.
No, I don't know. I don't know that.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Ibogaine might kill you. It sounds really crazy potent.

Speaker 2 Most of my

Speaker 2 close friends have done either ayahuasca or ibogaine, neither of which they would say is a good time, all of which have said, all of which, 100%.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they've come back and been not only fundamentally changed, but better. And these are, you know, my business partner, Jared Taylor, he's gone and done Ibogaine.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then multiple other people that probably don't want me to to talk about them on the podcast.

Speaker 2 Guys that have been on 15, 20 different pharmaceuticals can literally scrape them off their dresser into a garbage can the day they get back. Crazy.
And the fact that we aren't trying to evolve

Speaker 2 this section of the medicine, I know that Stanford did a study. I'm not exactly familiar with all the data associated with it.
But

Speaker 2 the fact that we aren't leading the charge as a country

Speaker 2 to come up with dynamic, out-of-the-box solutions for the guys that have gone overseas and you know done

Speaker 2 the the hard and courageous task for this country and then they come back and they can't get help and we're not pushing the envelope that's a crime I mean I've got lots I got lots of issues with you know Iraq at this point right I mean it's fundamentally

Speaker 2 I've told this to people, like, Iraq is with me every day, right? Afghanistan was a part of my life, but Iraq fundamentally changed me for the rest of my life. And I think about it every day.

Speaker 2 It's not going away. It'll never go away.

Speaker 1 And what about Iraq that was much different than Afghanistan that changed you?

Speaker 2 Well, it's the first war experience I had.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, for me,

Speaker 2 I was like hook line and sinker. Regime change, you know, move.

Speaker 2 We've got to find weapons of mass destruction. We've got to eliminate the threat.
We've got to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

Speaker 1 Everybody thought it was real. Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, there was nobody more motivated to go to war than

Speaker 2 me. You know,

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm sure there was, but you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 So you were in that group.

Speaker 2 You were gung-ho. Oh, 100%.

Speaker 2 It's not only, hey, we're going to go to war, we're going to do something good for America. These guys attacked the United States.

Speaker 2 We're going to eliminate the terrorist threat.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, war is such a strange and surreal circumstance because it changes you for good, it changes you for the bad. And I've looked at this a lot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I looked at like life experience like a radio wave almost like a band where you have highs, you have lows, and most people

Speaker 2 we'll call it 90 plus percent of the United States,

Speaker 2 their frequency only gets so high and only gets so low, and it basically stays within, we'll say

Speaker 2 a fairly small band within the center. Combat, what happens is you go really high and you go really low, and it forces you outside of social norms on a second-to-second basis.

Speaker 2 And then you do that over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 And so, one person might get in a car wreck in their life, and that goes really low. So, it's a really high adrenaline dump, and it goes really low because they have an injury.
That's like one thing.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 going out in a combat zone multiple night, like not only multiple nights a week, sometimes you're doing multiple targets a night.

Speaker 2 You might be getting what the rough equivalent of an adrenaline car wreck,

Speaker 2 the rough equivalent of a car wreck from an adrenaline dump and a high and a low, you might be doing that three or four times a night.

Speaker 2 And then you're doing that

Speaker 2 night after night, week after week, and it fundamentally changes you because you have to chop all of this down.

Speaker 2 Because if you get too ramped up and too chaotic, you're going to lose control and you won't be able to complete your mission criteria. If you get too low,

Speaker 2 you also won't be able to achieve your mission criteria.

Speaker 2 Your survival instincts kick down, so it chops your ability to feel all the way down to a normal person's bandwidth because it's a survival mechanism. This is just my own assessment.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 from a combat experience perspective, the first time

Speaker 2 you feel it,

Speaker 2 and I'll tell you, I mean, the first time I was

Speaker 2 in an ambush,

Speaker 2 I was losing my shit.

Speaker 2 I mean, anybody that tells you they're not fucking scared, they're either like fundamentally flawed.

Speaker 2 They're like Travis Bestrana, he doesn't have like a fear portion of his brain, or they're just lying. Like, you're scared out of your fucking mind.
Like, going north, like driving north into Iraq,

Speaker 2 you're looking into the deep, dark abyss of the unknown. And you're like, what the fuck? Am I going to be a coward? You know, am I going to live? Am I going to die?

Speaker 2 I mean, our casualty, projected casualty rates was that we were going to lose most of our ODA.

Speaker 2 So you're stepping into a situation where you're going, okay, well, I know out of this six-shooter that I'm going to play Russian roulette with, there are four bullets in this. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And you're driving north, going, okay, let's fucking do it. So you've already capitulated and given yourself up to die, which is, it's actually a very cathartic and I think personally

Speaker 2 an experience that you can evolve from. Because at that point, if you're dead,

Speaker 2 you can live

Speaker 2 uninhibited.

Speaker 2 Like everything I do from this point forward, this is gravy

Speaker 2 on the steak, man. I'm already dead.

Speaker 2 I was driving north in Iraq and I like through like the desert

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 my best friend and i are like driving north and and you have like hours to stare off into the fucking sand you know you're you're you've got night vision goggles or whatever i had a whole fictionalized funeral for myself

Speaker 2 i just fucking what else am i going to do right you're just like driving north you know and there's nothing going on so i had a whole fictionalized funeral i buried myself

Speaker 2 and so I was already dead or at least I felt like that

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 we get in her first engagement and the world starts cracking apart and your mind can't keep up to what what's actually happening you you'll hear the gunfire

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 you know I felt I felt the explosion. I looked in the rearview mirror of the Humvee, which sounds crazy.
I looked in the rearview mirror. And

Speaker 2 I saw this car-sized chunk of fire flying behind the vehicle. Like, so distinctly remember this.

Speaker 2 And I'm turning to my team leader and I'm like, we got to get the fuck out of here. You know, I'm like, losing it, right?

Speaker 1 So stupid.

Speaker 2 That's so stupid. We've got to get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 You know, like, losing it, dude.

Speaker 2 I'm just fucking losing it. And he's like, and he's cool, man.
He's like calm, cool. He's on the radio.

Speaker 2 You know, he's like, you know, vehicle one, you know, or vehicle three, this is vehicle one, vehicle three, this is vehicle one.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we're checking to see

Speaker 2 if we have comms between us and the other vehicles. And I'm fucking losing it.

Speaker 1 I'm like, why are you the fuck out of here?

Speaker 2 You know, it's like, okay.

Speaker 2 Because, I mean, you know, you're used to like watching movies or whatever, and it's the first time anything like this has ever happened.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 at this point, you know, the full insurgency hasn't kicked off that we were hunting Fettie and

Speaker 2 these guys weren't the most sophisticated cats on the planet. They weren't that good.
So,

Speaker 2 But we end up pushing through and then consolidating at the end of this.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 fundamentally, this changed my tactical experience in combat forever because my team leader, who I respect and love, he was killed two years later. He's one of my best friends, was my best friend.

Speaker 2 He turns to me and he goes, Hey, man.

Speaker 2 If you don't have a solution to the problem, just shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 That's great advice. I know.
That's great advice across the board. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was like, okay, Roger that. You know, I was like, okay, fucking Roger that, man.

Speaker 2 And then it became

Speaker 2 a practice discipline when shit's going super sideways and

Speaker 2 you know bullets

Speaker 2 when bullets are flying.

Speaker 2 I hate sounding like that. I I don't want to say I don't want to sound like that at all

Speaker 2 but that's what it is dude you you keep your shit together and then I became by the time I my my last ambush in Iraq I was in

Speaker 2 was my I saw I'll bookend this experience with ambushes

Speaker 2 yeah I was in Mosul

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I was in a little BMW trying to work my way and I was I was working as

Speaker 2 basically low like you're trying to fly under the radar you're low viz cia at this point so we're trying to blend in we got hit at a checkpoint and they light us up and so now i'm alone in a car with another guy and the the cia chief

Speaker 2 and the entire iraqi army in missoula iraq is essentially pursuing us through the from i mean missoula is the size of los angeles and i started at the north end of los angeles basically and had to work my way to the southern end of los angeles being shot at

Speaker 2 And I'm trying to sort through the problem, man. Like, I got a fucking map sheet, and

Speaker 2 you don't know. I mean, this is Mad Max in the fucking Thunderdome.
And Missoula was one of the most fucked up cities in Iraq.

Speaker 2 Like, it was, it looked like going back to Stalingrad in different sections of this place. It was a complete shit show.

Speaker 2 And I'm alone with my, you know, the guy I was with, and

Speaker 2 I'm trying to navigate through the city and help the driver. We were being pursued from literally north to south, yeah, being shot at, and we're going, okay, right, turn, right, turn, right, turn.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I have the, I have like

Speaker 2 the dragons are at the bumper.

Speaker 2 They're gonna fucking, they're gonna pull me out of this car and chop my fucking head off. Like, they're gonna turn my car into Swiss cheese.
They're gonna fucking chop my head off. I'm dead.

Speaker 2 We're dead.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I have, like, I brought up Kyle's. they were on station.
We had a really good, really good relationship with these, with these guys.

Speaker 2 And I was like, hey, you know, you, this is me. I'm in a, you know, black BMW.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I'm moving, you know,

Speaker 2 from north to south. And

Speaker 2 helicopter came back and said, oh, I know who you are. I actually fucking, you got the everybody following you.
Because we,

Speaker 2 not all checkpoints are created equal. And for whatever reason, they decided they were going to kill us that day.

Speaker 2 And I mean, you don't have time. You're not going to sit around and be like, why do you guys want to kill us?

Speaker 1 Well, we're just good guys, you know?

Speaker 2 You're just going to keep moving. I had to work my way all the way south

Speaker 2 to a bridge. And I had like one last, one last fucking Hail Mary, man.
Like,

Speaker 2 we had to get across a bridge into a place called Diamondback.

Speaker 2 And I didn't have a QRF because they couldn't pin us down a quick reaction force.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 like the Kai was like they they saved our life because they had they had the roads blocked off on the bridge and i was basically smoking in at like 100 fucking kilometers an hour and the kiwas came down and like literally dropped their fucking skids on the front of the on the on the front of the car and panned around like we're gonna kill all you fuckers wow yeah and i looked over at one of the guys i looked over and like flipped him off and it was like you dead you know, and then

Speaker 2 like, uh, like parting the C's, like Moses or whatever, they moved the fucking cars and we drove back in and that was it. So, bookending, my point of that conversation was

Speaker 2 I was losing my shit, the first one, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I came back and I was talking to the Kiowas, and they were like, bro, we didn't know how bad this was because it sounded like you were ordering a pizza.

Speaker 1 But everything,

Speaker 2 Everything in between was like

Speaker 2 rep after rep after rep after rep was like,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 calm down, keep your shit together. And one of my really close friends, this guy, Jeff Kirkham,

Speaker 2 my first team sergeant, like awesome fucking guy, like one of the most tactically relevant people in my life.

Speaker 2 He's like, psychology is more contagious than the flu.

Speaker 2 So when you start losing your shit,

Speaker 2 it infects everybody else around you.

Speaker 1 What a great quote. Yeah.
Psychology is more infectious than the flu. That is a great quote.

Speaker 2 Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 That's so real.

Speaker 2 So real.

Speaker 1 That's so real.

Speaker 1 That's so real.

Speaker 1 It was everything.

Speaker 2 Everything. Everything.
It controlled every

Speaker 2 piece. of what I would do from that point forward.
Like, lose your shit in a gunfight,

Speaker 2 and then you infect everybody else around you. Yes.
Rise to the occasion, be the calm and the chaos,

Speaker 2 become a, you know, even if you don't feel like it, even if you're, you're awaking out, man. Like

Speaker 2 internally,

Speaker 2 you can't, you can barely keep your shit together, but what you do is you're like, okay, but I gotta, I, I gotta project

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 because if I infect everybody else with my chaos I'm injecting more chaos into the equation, and we're all we're all gonna run the possibility of dying because of this, because of my actions.

Speaker 1 I think that's why people gravitate towards inspirational figures, is because they're trying to get some of that psychology. They're trying to get it worn off on them.

Speaker 1 You know, great quotes, and great feats, and fascinating people. You want to absorb some of that psychology.
That is such a great, great quote, though, because it's so true.

Speaker 1 If you're around someone that's freaking out, you're trying to keep your shit together, it's so hard to keep your shit together.

Speaker 2 You can't. But if you're around a bunch of dudes

Speaker 2 who are surgeons and stoic,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 there's no flexion, what I would say is like

Speaker 2 in the time and repetition in the community, I mean, there's a default emotion that is acceptable. It's, you know, anger.

Speaker 2 Right? So anger and when I say joy, it's like joy from gallows humor typically, right? But it's like you have to,

Speaker 2 everybody becomes a stoic.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 2 nothing can phase you. And if you are a guy that is phased,

Speaker 2 you're a liability. You're a liability.
You're going to get chopped.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're infected. Yeah.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So Iraq, so going back to what I was talking about with Iraq.

Speaker 1 I'm

Speaker 2 supercharged and

Speaker 2 my reality started to kind of crumble. Is

Speaker 2 we met up, we went up, we were on the first ODAs, and we did this joint op with the CIA to go meet this guy, McToddle Soder.

Speaker 2 This is early on, this is like March of the war. And

Speaker 2 McTaddo Soder became a prominent figure later on in the war. He was really relatively well, like not known at all in the beginning of it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was working with the CIA case officer at that point, not just me, it was like my entire team. And McToddle's like,

Speaker 2 he's a bad guy. Like, he's just a real piece of shit.
And at that point, in On Najaf, who's this town,

Speaker 2 and we went out, did a meeting with him, and we came back. And all of us on the military, paramilitary side, we're like, this guy needs to die.
Like, we need to actually go.

Speaker 2 And he has a small armed force. He's basically going to be the instrument of the Iranians.
And we're having this big debate in the team room. And everybody that carried a gun, like, we speak,

Speaker 2 we speak animal kingdom. We know when there's a threat.
Right. And then we have this case officer who's like a, you know, adjunct professor at fucking Georgetown.

Speaker 2 The guy didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. And we're like, this guy needs to die.
We need to go like get on him now.

Speaker 2 And.

Speaker 2 Case officer is like, no, he's going to work with us, you know?

Speaker 1 We're like. They wanted him to be an asset yeah

Speaker 2 we're like this guy is a fucking stupid like this guy's a he's a Shia supposedly Shia cleric you know if you know Iraq you got 60% of the country Shia it's typically gonna answer Iran you've got 15 20% is up north it's the Kurds and then you've got the rest is Sunni

Speaker 2 And we're like, this guy's not going to fucking work with us. I mean, this guy's a real piece of shit.
And he's already spinning up a militia. He's going to be a problem.
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we're like, okay, like you're the, you're the big brain on Brad. You know, you're the PhD, man.
Like, sure, you know.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we acquiesce.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 years later, I don't know how many

Speaker 2 guys died going into...

Speaker 2 going back into Najaf trying to find this fucking guy. I don't know how many.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was a whole basically surge push of probably a division to try to go find this guy, but we had the opportunity to kill him right there.

Speaker 2 Like, literally, we could have, like, he had less than 40 guys in the compound. We could have, like, gone out and got him right, like, that night.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then he became a problem. And not only did he become a problem, it was like the...

Speaker 2 The decision makers were so poor at that point early in the war.

Speaker 2 It started to really affect me in the sense of like I was still bought and sold, but I started to really think these guys might not know what the fuck they're doing when

Speaker 2 it was like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and

Speaker 2 Brennan

Speaker 2 when they debathified Iraq. So after we invaded,

Speaker 2 they did this thing called debathification, which was basically they fired the military and everybody that was involved in the bath party.

Speaker 2 And once again, we're in the team room

Speaker 2 and we're watching CNN and it's Rumsfeld talking about we're, we're, we're debathifying Iraq. We're, we're firing everybody.

Speaker 2 And I'm not exaggerating. Everybody in the, everybody in the team room was like, what the fuck? Like, you guys, like, you guys are, you guys are going to create the insurgency.

Speaker 2 Like, it was on the ground that moment, that second, like, I wanted to throw,

Speaker 2 like,

Speaker 2 I wanted to throw a fucking brick through the TV. Like, I was like, these guys are paint by numbers creating an insurgency.
They have no fucking clue what they're doing.

Speaker 2 And that was like that moment, which is fairly early,

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 I lost a lot of confidence in the decision makers.

Speaker 2 But, okay, you know, the question is: well, why'd you keep going back?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 you want to try to search for

Speaker 2 meaning and you're trying to find

Speaker 2 the actual purpose. Like, what is the purpose? Like, are there WMDs here? Like, are there, you know, like, legit

Speaker 2 direct traces back to 9-11? Are there things that we're doing that are going to directly affect and protect America?

Speaker 2 And you're kind of searching for it. And not kind of, you are.
Like, that's that's what you're doing. Or at least that's what I was doing.

Speaker 2 And by the time,

Speaker 2 by the time I left in 2009,

Speaker 2 I just figured I was going to die. Like, I was like, fuck this place.

Speaker 1 Like, fuck, like,

Speaker 2 like,

Speaker 2 I lived Iraq, right? And then I was like, well, I think

Speaker 2 time and repetition

Speaker 2 and thinking that you're dead for that long

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 searching for not only some

Speaker 2 what I would say is good in the war itself, because there is good. You have your buddies,

Speaker 2 you have the camaraderie, you have the adrenaline,

Speaker 2 but you also think you're going to fucking die every day for years on end, and that's not... Fundamentally, it turns out it's probably not good for you psychologically, I guess.

Speaker 2 And so I went to Afghanistan thinking, well,

Speaker 2 and I went to train Afghanis for

Speaker 2 a force up there. And when I went to train those guys, it was, hey, if I can train Afghanis to take on the war,

Speaker 2 maybe I can protect 18-year-old kids from getting their fucking legs blown off.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe I can protect the, you know, the 20-year-old kid from Nebraska from getting a fucking RPG stuff through their face.

Speaker 2 And I was older and I was also willing to die.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 the kids, when I say the kids, you know, 18, 20 years old, like, man, it's not,

Speaker 2 you know, it's not fun to watch those. When I say that, that's an understatement.

Speaker 2 It's so

Speaker 2 heartbreaking to watch

Speaker 2 a kid that's never been to fucking combat, like, die.

Speaker 1 It

Speaker 2 it changes everything in your life.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so you go from, you know, Iraq to Afghanistan,

Speaker 2 you know, and I'm watching all this stuff unfold. And there's like, there's, and I don't want to say it's all negative because there's, there's, you know, there were things that were very positive.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I'm so jaded by the time I get there.

Speaker 2 that I'm like, well, if I can save some Americans, I'll save some Americans. And,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 if not, at least this will be an interesting experience.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, there's a laundry list of other things that we can talk about. I don't want to get so fucking down, I guess.

Speaker 1 It seems like it's impossible not to once you're going back on it.

Speaker 1 How could you not?

Speaker 1 And the overwhelming negative experiences, the overwhelming horrific experiences.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 I think think that's where I have this massive distrust in politicians.

Speaker 2 And I think that's part of the reason.

Speaker 2 They have squandered the courage

Speaker 2 of the American servicemen in these

Speaker 2 forever

Speaker 2 wars

Speaker 2 that we've entered in under lies. So like, you know, Wolfowitz and W and Rumsfeld and

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 sorry, man, I don't, I don't have any respect for those guys. Like, I don't, not only do I not have any respect for those guys, I have a profound amount of hatred for their arrogance.

Speaker 2 Because I'm in my 20s,

Speaker 2 I'm not making excuses, but you know, there's plenty of guys like me that were

Speaker 2 not only hook lane and sinker, and I still would, I'd still sign up for this country. I think service is a remarkable

Speaker 2 courage. It's courage and service back to our community is something we have to cherish, like we do.

Speaker 2 But when you have

Speaker 2 an orchestra of idiots that are manipulating the courageous men and women of our country to go into these wars based on a neocon pipe dream,

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Speaker 2 No consequences. You know, you can pull out of Afghanistan and leave billions of dollars of equipment.
Who the fuck got fired? But if I made a mistake, if me and my buddies made a mistake, we fucking

Speaker 2 lost our lives. We'd go to jail.
Like, we lost our clearances. And I'm not trying to sound like a whiny bitch.
I'm just saying, like, no consequences for these guys. Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 they get to go paint paintings and they think it's okay.

Speaker 1 Imagine no consequences for lying about weapons of mass destruction.

Speaker 1 And has there ever been a large-scale investigation as to what led them to either believe or to push the narrative that there was weapons of mass destruction?

Speaker 2 Well, I think if you read, I mean,

Speaker 2 there's a lot, I think there's a lot of like

Speaker 2 there's a lot of books out there, obviously, and whether or not you have to kind of sort through the actual documents and figure out where these guys were at.

Speaker 2 And I've spent a little bit of my life trying to understand from their perspective. And I honestly think a big part of it is the guys who are making the decisions,

Speaker 2 their hubris, their

Speaker 2 utopian belief that they were going to be able to rebuild Iraq like Houston. You know, like, oh, it's an oil country, you know? And,

Speaker 2 you know, they really believed

Speaker 2 that if they didn't rein in this rogue nation of Iraq,

Speaker 2 that Iraq was going to eventually contribute to terrorism. And you had guys that were so consumed

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 their intelligence when it flipped to not only hubris, but they didn't have wisdom. They had intelligence.

Speaker 2 Wolfowitz is a smart guy. He's not an idiot.

Speaker 2 The problem is he's not wise. These guys weren't wise men.

Speaker 2 There's a difference between having a high IQ and having the experience and repetition, seeing death and destruction, seeing people's lives fucking torn apart, and then understanding something from reading a book or thinking about it from an economics perspective.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, I think Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney,

Speaker 2 they had this belief

Speaker 2 that they could do anything they wanted to validate this. And they did.
They had to data mine information and

Speaker 2 pull and pluck from different analysts that agreed with them. But the most of the Intel community didn't agree with them.

Speaker 2 They're like, we had defeated the Iraqi army to the point when I say defeated it.

Speaker 2 Like if we go back to the 90s, we say Desert Storm was 91.

Speaker 2 And then from that point forward, you can basically say, you know, HW to Clinton administration, Clinton administration with the economic sanctions and

Speaker 2 with the integrated bombing campaigns that they had led throughout the 90s. We had essentially stuffed that guy back into a hole where the only thing he could do was sell oil in the black market.

Speaker 2 And he had a really, he had to, he had a fascist state where he and his family had

Speaker 2 complete control out of the country, but he wasn't going to be a threat from an international terrorism perspective. That's just false.
It's not only false, but it is patently false.

Speaker 2 And they had to mine the data to validate it. They had to lie.
They had to

Speaker 2 sift through and find and pick and pull the pieces of information. And they really thought this was going to be a fucking cakewalk.
They did.

Speaker 1 Because of Desert Storm, you think?

Speaker 2 They thought because of Desert Storm and what they and they were listening to these assets like

Speaker 2 Chalabi and some of these Iraq, former Iraqi exiles, and they were listening to these guys who, by the way, were also manipulated by the Iranians and paid for by Iranian intel guys.

Speaker 2 They're Iranian assets. They're listening to these people and they were living in their own echo chambers,

Speaker 2 validating this

Speaker 2 idea that it was better for regime change, for the international, not only the international economy, but it was going to be

Speaker 2 a stable

Speaker 2 petroleum-based country where we could integrate democracy. And none of these guys were Arabists.
None of these guys actually understood. the Middle East, not one.

Speaker 2 They didn't have any combat experience. They didn't really have any any combat experience from the long-term, low-intensity conflict,

Speaker 2 guerrilla warfare perspective. They were given not only the information, but they were given

Speaker 2 most of the information they were given was saying this is going to be much more complex than you think it's going to be.

Speaker 2 And they denied

Speaker 2 not only the opinions, but the information, and they went ahead with their fucking plans anyway. Rumsfeld chopped, single-handedly dictated how many people were going to participate in the war.

Speaker 2 Like he was dictating how many divisions it was going to take and he's like, actually, I think you could do it for half that. Like he was like trying to negotiate how many guys

Speaker 2 that Tommy Franks was going to use to invade Iraq. And Tommy Franks didn't have the balls to say, actually, I need two more divisions.
So a lot of this is just like fundamentally,

Speaker 2 these are professional politicians and bureaucrats drinking their own piss.

Speaker 2 Like I was saying earlier, you know, like you can drink your own piss once or twice before your kidneys start to shut down and it'll fucking kill you, right? These guys are all sitting around

Speaker 2 in their echo chambers talking to the same types of people, defining how they were going to send servicemen and women to Iraq, and they were wrong.

Speaker 2 Not only were they wrong, but they were told otherwise by lots of different people to include, I mean,

Speaker 2 Tony Blair had a lot of different issues with this.

Speaker 2 Colin Powell essentially sold this and got the domos to fall on the entire thing because they knew that Colin Powell was so respected that if he sat in front of the UN with Tennant, who was the director of the CIA, right behind him and held up this little thing of

Speaker 2 VX or whatever it was, that they could push it across the line from the international community. I mean, these guys were crooked, man.
And not only were they crooked, they were so fundamentally wrong.

Speaker 2 And there's no consequences.

Speaker 1 Nothing.

Speaker 2 Zero consequences.

Speaker 1 They put Martha Stewart in jail.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. They go after Trump for fucking two years on, you know, Russia collusion.
It's like, you spent $7 trillion

Speaker 2 in thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Speaker 2 And you're saying you're going to put this guy through the ringer for two years because there might be some dossier that was paid for by the Clintons? Like, who's the criminal?

Speaker 2 And so for me, I get all wound up when it comes to this because rep after rep, year after year,

Speaker 2 my two closest friends in the world were literally

Speaker 2 one torn in half by a EFP, which was a direct,

Speaker 2 Iranian-manufactured shape charge.

Speaker 2 My other friend was turned into fucking moondust. And I mean, these are my two closest friends in the world.
Guys I grew up with

Speaker 2 in the army that I spent every fucking day with.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 since then, I've had obviously more friends, but I mean, those are the two closest friends in the earliest part of the war. So I'm so directly affected by this because

Speaker 2 it fundamentally changed who I was forever.

Speaker 2 It gave me a profound amount amount of mistrust in my government, you know, in the decision makers. I don't believe, I actually don't believe what they're telling me anymore.

Speaker 2 I have a lot of skepticism when it comes to

Speaker 2 the people that are pulling

Speaker 2 the handles in government. And I have to go to my peer set.
And what I told people is, man,

Speaker 2 my currency is courage, right? It's like, that's what I broker in.

Speaker 2 So my friends that have gone through the GWAT, which I'm extremely happy for all these GWAT guys that are getting appointed to these positions, you know, you've got Pete, you've got Tulsi,

Speaker 2 JD,

Speaker 2 like they fundamentally know that what war is.

Speaker 2 And when you have decision makers that have never been to war and their kids will never go to war,

Speaker 2 and Cheney's kids never went to war,

Speaker 2 W's kids never went to war.

Speaker 2 And none of these guys, by the way, they're all Vietnam-era guys. None of them went to fucking Vietnam.

Speaker 1 So it's not a good idea. Nor did Trump.
Trump didn't either, right? You got a bunch of deferments.

Speaker 2 But I think the difference is, is that when somebody is saying, stop the endless wars,

Speaker 2 I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative than I am to go, oh, we need to invest and put more time, money, energy into creating more chaos and destruction in the American service members' lives or the lives of other people.

Speaker 1 Did you ever see that

Speaker 1 speech with Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson?

Speaker 1 No. Tucker Carlson essentially ended Mike Pence's political career.
Really? In one speech. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 this was when Pence was running for president. And Tucker was sitting there with him and Pence was talking about getting helicopters and tanks and weapons to

Speaker 1 to Ukraine. And he was explaining how they were being incompetent because they weren't providing them with what they needed.
And Tucker went on this rant. See if you can find it.

Speaker 1 I bet you could find it under that. Here it is.
Listen to this.

Speaker 1 This is the whole thing. You should show the Tucker part because it's

Speaker 1 four minutes a little. Let me hear what he says.

Speaker 1 Just start right where your cursor is. Click where your cursor is.

Speaker 3 January, we'll let somebody transfer some jets.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, Mr. Vice President.

Speaker 2 I know you're running for president.

Speaker 2 You are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years.
Drive around.

Speaker 2 There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States. And it's visible.
Our economy has degraded. The suicide rate has jumped.

Speaker 2 Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased.

Speaker 2 And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.

Speaker 2 I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that?

Speaker 3 Well, it's not my concern.

Speaker 3 Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern. I'm running for President of the United States because I think this country is in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 3 I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.

Speaker 3 And as President of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities. We're going to secure our border.
We're going to get this economy moving again.

Speaker 3 And we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.

Speaker 3 Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth. We can do both.

Speaker 3 And as President of the United States, we will secure our border, we will support our military, we will revive our economy and stand by our values.

Speaker 3 And we will also lead the world for freedom under my administration. I promise you.

Speaker 2 Amen. Vice President Mike Pence, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 Just that. That's not my concern.
That's not my concern. What the fuck are you talking about? How would you ever answer anything that way? That is not my concern.
That's not your concern.

Speaker 1 You don't think you just made a really good point that we're really confused as to, first of all, aren't we like a trillion dollars in debt how do we have

Speaker 1 35 and a half trillion dollars in debt like it's crazy it's crazy how do we have the money how do we have the money to send to iraq and we don't have the money to fix our cities how do how and how can you say that's not my concern that what that is is the opposite of what trump is that is nonsense talk i mean not that he doesn't have nonsense talk but that is not a real a person's real feelings that is just political speech that's just, we're going to clean up our country, we're going to preserve the right.

Speaker 2 It's memorizing soundbites.

Speaker 1 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2 And that's the entire problem with Washington right there. Yeah, exactly.
They memorize soundbites. They say one thing, they do the other thing.

Speaker 1 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2 Completely,

Speaker 2 they've lost the trust of their constituents. They've lost the trust of the American public.
And by the way, it's administration after administration. It's politician after politician.

Speaker 2 It shouldn't shouldn't be a surprise that people don't like politicians. I mean, look at that guy.
He's a fucking robot. He's weird.
He's a weird dude.

Speaker 1 He's weird. You know, they kept trying to say JD's weird.
JD's not weird at all. I met that guy.
He's fucking cool. He's normal.
Smart as shit.

Speaker 1 I could hang with that guy. He could be my friend.
Yeah. He's not even a little weird.

Speaker 2 No, that guy's weird.

Speaker 1 I mean, I guess anybody who's that smart is weird. You know, people that go to Yale, people that like, he's weird in that way.
Like, that's an odd dude. You don't see a lot of those.

Speaker 2 But normal.

Speaker 1 That guy's bizarre. Like his face doesn't move.
Did you get Botox at 80? Like, what the fuck is going on? Like, you're weird.

Speaker 2 I think they have low IQs and they're pushing that thing to the red. That's why they're actually so afraid to do anything because they're like, I have, they're like, I'm really pushing this thing.

Speaker 2 I've got like a hundy, like a 105, but my parents were rich. So I went to Yale.
And if I break outside of my box, actually people are going to know that I'm a fucking retard.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Well, I also think that if you're that ambition,

Speaker 1 you have ambition at that level and you're so driven to become the alpha that you want to be the president, the amount of work that's involved in that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for reading.

Speaker 1 It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for watching documentaries and having important in-depth conversations with people and expanding your understanding of the world. It's very narrow.

Speaker 1 They're basically actors.

Speaker 1 Most of these people exhibit a lot of the traits that I see in actors.

Speaker 1 This desire to morph oneself to please the people around you, the saying the things that you think people want to hear because you want to get ahead. It's all very similar.
They're actors.

Speaker 1 And the fact that these actors can rise to a position where they can actually dictate what these military veterans do and don't do when they have no knowledge or experience in this.

Speaker 1 The fact that that's a real thing is fucking crazy. It's really crazy.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that's by the time I left, I was so jaded

Speaker 2 and the motivating factor was

Speaker 2 I was like, no man will ever have control over my destiny again.

Speaker 2 Like I won't, I will not,

Speaker 2 I will not put a bit in my mouth. Yeah.
For another

Speaker 2 man in the government, they will not be making decisions for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think we can recall a time in our history where we did trust the government.

Speaker 1 Which is such a weird thing to say. You know, I used to think it was the Obama administration, but boy, Obama during this Kamala Harris administration, it changed my opinion of that guy.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 Did you have a high opinion of him?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did, just as an intelligent person, a statesman.
I felt like he's probably like caught up in the system. It's very difficult to make real meaningful change.

Speaker 1 You know, you think you're going to do something and then you get into office and you're like, oh, God, what a fucking quagmire this place is.

Speaker 1 But watching him just straight up lie about Trump, the thing that got me was that very fine people thing, the white supremacist thing.

Speaker 1 They just kept trying to say that he was a racist, which is this thing that I think worked in like 2017.

Speaker 1 You know, I think it worked back then. I don't think it works anymore.
I don't think people believe it anymore. I think that we've gotten numb to all this stuff.

Speaker 2 It's a sky is falling thing, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like cry wolf or whatever.

Speaker 2 It's like you guys can only call

Speaker 2 you only call me a fascist so many times. I mean, like the New York Times wrote that article a couple years ago, right?

Speaker 2 Where I'm like, it was the front of the coffee cup where it's like, do you want Trump 2024? Do you want low taxes? Do you want this?

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I want all that. Sounds good.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you can only call me a fascist, racist, asshole. I mean, to be fair, like,

Speaker 2 I can float into the asshole category relatively relatively easy, but

Speaker 1 only when prompted. Yeah.
Only when prompted. Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 you know one of my fucking favorite things of this whole election cycle has been

Speaker 1 yesterday

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 Biden and Trump sat down in the White House. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I guarantee it. I fucking guarantee it.
I never saw that dude so happy in his fucking life. He lost.
His party lost.

Speaker 1 he was happy when when obama had to shake hands with trump and do the whole transition thing obama looked like jesus christ look at

Speaker 1 look at his fucking smile dude trump's like uh whatever look at his fucking smile man

Speaker 1 that's like when your kid gets married that that dude looks like a hairless cat look at it's crazy first of all what have they done to him what have they done to his face go back to that other picture because it was more high res

Speaker 1 look at his mug man first of all for sure he's got something going on with his forehead they botox the shit out of his forehead they gave him a facelift for sure There was a bunch of different things they did, which very ill-advised, by the way, folks.

Speaker 1 Look at Trump. He looks like shit.
No one cares. Everyone loves him.

Speaker 1 You don't look better if you get your face pulled back like a lizard. You just look more like a lizard.
Everybody thinks you're a lizard already. But look at that smile.

Speaker 1 That motherfucker's never been happier in his life. In his life.
He's like, that bitch.

Speaker 1 She went down. You can't tell me he wasn't happy.
Like, when he put that MAGA hat on, you ever see that? Oh, yeah, yeah. He put the MAGA hat on.
He took it with him on the plane.

Speaker 1 I guarantee you. I guarantee you, that motherfucker was happy.
He had a giant smile on his face. He said, welcome back to him.
I thought it was Hitler.

Speaker 1 I thought he was dangerous.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's what they all said, right? It's like, hey,

Speaker 2 he's a threat to democracy.

Speaker 1 and then all of a sudden it's like ah hey we're gonna have a smooth transition here this was the guy that you said was sharp as attack he was gonna up until four months ago four months ago that guy was gonna be running again and now here he is smiling like a cheshire cat

Speaker 1 how big was this that's a crazy smile man he looks

Speaker 2 He looks like he's wearing a mask.

Speaker 1 He might be.

Speaker 1 There was that one fake Biden. Did you ever see the fake Biden? Yeah, yeah.
The tall guy. That guy was so much taller.
That guy was like 6'4. He was a giant Biden.

Speaker 1 It made no sense.

Speaker 2 They're gonna smoke that one by us. Like, it's like, dude, this guy's like, you know, 6'7, could be playing in the NBA.

Speaker 1 He was so much taller. They showed Jill and him together.
Jill's like, what happened? That's a different human being. Totally.
It's so nuts, man. It's so nuts.

Speaker 1 All the different things that happened during this election are wilder than anything you've ever seen in a fucking movie.

Speaker 2 I think it brought so many more people into politics, too. And people, the more people pay attention to what's going on with politicians, with the country, I don't think that's a bad thing.
Because

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 bureaucrats and politicians alike, they directly benefit from people not paying attention.

Speaker 2 And so they only want you to pay attention once a year when they're going to try to get everybody galvanized around a couple little stupid things and then get them out to the voting booth, but not too many.

Speaker 2 We don't want a lot of complex thought out of the voters, we don't really want them to think about too much

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 we still got a national deficit that we got to increase. And I got to

Speaker 2 line the pockets of all my buddies,

Speaker 2 Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. We don't want them to get in too far.

Speaker 2 Don't start talking about the reserve or don't start talking about any of that other stuff.

Speaker 2 I think that's what it is.

Speaker 1 Well, I think that's also why politicians, or some of them at least, are terrified of podcasts. Yeah.

Speaker 1 because you do have to talk about them but that's what makes guys like JD and guys like Trump unique in that they will just sit and talk with anybody I mean he sat with Theo Vaughn Theo talked to him about doing Coke.

Speaker 1 It's awesome. It was so funny.
Theo's amazing. It was amazing.
Theo's an ability to be himself no matter who he's talking to. And him talking to Trump about how he used to love to do Coke.

Speaker 1 It was like...

Speaker 2 And Trump just sitting there, which was super funny, by the way.

Speaker 1 He's sitting there like this poor guy. Like, you see Theo falling apart in front of you, like, Jesus Christ, I thought I was running for president here.
I think I might have to help this young fellow.

Speaker 2 Who do I need to talk to about this?

Speaker 1 But, like, you know, Kamala didn't have the ability to do that. Or if she did, nobody brought it out of her.
I was hoping I could. I really was.
I was hoping I could have a conversation with her.

Speaker 1 There's all this talk now that the reason why she didn't do it is because of progressive people in her party, the pushback,

Speaker 1 which might have some truth to it, but for the record, they offered me two very specific days

Speaker 1 in different places in the country to travel and then go do it and do it for an hour. I said, I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 1 And especially after Trump had done it here in three hours, I'm like, this is the only way to do it. And Elon said it best.
He said, he goes, you can kind of bullshit someone for an hour.

Speaker 1 But he goes, hour two and hour three. Like, that's when the real you comes out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're going to get. It's the real you.

Speaker 2 You're going to tear the layers off the onion, right?

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 2 It might make you cry. Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 the more you peel it, the more you might be like, oh, this person's fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 How much are you bullshitting the world, right? And

Speaker 1 the quote about Trump or the narrative about Trump has always been that he's bullshitting everybody, that he's a con man.

Speaker 1 He's definitely very persuasive. Scott Adams has wrote about this pretty much in depth about how well Trump...
practices the art of persuasion. You know, the art of the deal.

Speaker 1 He's great at making people his friend and making relationships.

Speaker 1 And if you're his enemy fuck you scorched earth You know, it's like this and there's fear of that You don't want to get on his bad side.

Speaker 1 There's all this like there's this art of like how he negotiates and he's gone through this years and years and years of business, but but that's him That's the guy's right there.

Speaker 1 You could talk to him about everything and anything. He's right there.
He's not protecting any of his ideas. He called a girl he's allegedly slept with horse face when he was the president on Twitter.

Speaker 2 It's so funny.

Speaker 1 It's the wildest shit. So you're getting what you get.
That's who the guy is. And you love him.
I like him.

Speaker 1 I've grown to like him. I had a much more negative opinion of him back in the day because it was

Speaker 1 there's only so much you can pay attention to and do deep dives on before you lose your fucking mind. And with him, I was always like, oh, that guy, they grabbed him by the pussy guy.

Speaker 1 It's probably not good for the country. That seems crazy.

Speaker 1 But as time went on, I was like, oh, you need a guy that is completely crazy to expose how corrupt the whole system is and how they all collude together and how they all they all say the same.

Speaker 1 There's all these montages of clips of news organizations saying the same narrative outright over and over verbatim word by word. They're getting fed this by someone, some entity,

Speaker 1 somehow or another, they're collaborating and they're all choosing this very specific narrative and they're running with it and they're trying to destroy people with it. And I saw them do it with me.

Speaker 1 I saw them do it with me during the COVID thing. And it was all motivated by the pharmaceutical drug companies and the prophets.

Speaker 1 And they were terrified that someone's going to come along and somehow or another put a notch in this little thing that they've created, which is a devious little thing that they've done, where they eliminated all sorts of other remedies.

Speaker 1 They cut out all these generic drugs that possibly could have been used to help people. They denied people the use of monocolinal antibodies.

Speaker 1 They pushed the fucking shit out of this one thing so they could make money off of it. And they did it in collusion with the media.
No one acted like a journalist. No one looked at the excess deaths.

Speaker 1 No one looked at the instances of myocarditis in young people. No one looked at any of that.
There was no journalism. It just showed everyone that the whole system is bought and paid for.

Speaker 1 It's all corrupt. And the only way you could find out who a person really is is to listen to them talk for long periods of time.
It's the only thing, it's the only truth serum we have left.

Speaker 1 And even that's not 100% effective, but it's pretty good. It's pretty fun.
Your brain knows bullshit.

Speaker 1 You know, you ever like met some guy and like he's dating this girl that you know, and there's just something about the guy. It's like, what he's shaking my hand.
He's being nice to me.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I don't trust this motherfucker. Like, something's gross about this guy.
And then you find out he's a piece of shit. But it's always this thing.
Like, you feel something.

Speaker 1 If you talk to someone long enough, there's patterns in the way they talk, the way they think, the way they consider things, whether or not they can admit that they're wrong, or whether or not they can tell you why they changed their mind.

Speaker 1 How did they form their narratives? Like, what bad paths were they on, and what personal correction did they make, and how long did it take before you got to a better place?

Speaker 1 You learn about people when you hear them talk for long periods of time. You can't fake personal growth.
You can't fake like stuff you've learned.

Speaker 1 You can't fake flaws that you're willing to expose to people so that they could perhaps see them in themselves. You can't fake that.

Speaker 1 And all those people like Mike Pence, he's got zero of that. You can't sit

Speaker 1 that guy down and have a conversation, a real conversation with him.

Speaker 2 He's so afraid of...

Speaker 2 Honestly, I don't think he even knows who he is.

Speaker 2 Guys like that don't even know who he is.

Speaker 1 Like an actor. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 They're like actors. Like my buddy Dave,

Speaker 2 we were talking yesterday. You met him the other night.

Speaker 2 I've known him for 20 years.

Speaker 1 He was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 Dude, you know, we met in Kabul back in the day.

Speaker 2 Dave and I, like, we go way back.

Speaker 1 He's good friends with Bruce and with my friends. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Crazy. Like, because he was a team guy, right? So he's like former CL CIA guy.
And Dave and Van were talking about this.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when you can just be authentically engaged with people

Speaker 2 where you can just be yourself.

Speaker 2 And that's part of the issue with, I think, a lot of vets and

Speaker 2 why they connect really well with vets is because you can just authentically engage with people and say I this person knows I'm a little bit broken this person knows that I've probably done shit that I'm not super proud of and they know that I've got a dark sense of humor but I can like just kind of open I can open my heart and just have a real conversation with somebody and that's the shit you chase yeah where You can just be yourself and you can talk about stuff and you can like try to evolve the way you're thinking and feeling.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And these artificial bullshit conversations that we have throughout our day with people we don't give a shit about are these like, you know, inauthentic, unreal,

Speaker 2 you know, veneer people. It's like, I have no interest in having a conversation with a fake person.
That is stupid.

Speaker 1 The best thing that I took out of moving to Texas from moving to LA, I have way less of those conversations. I have almost none of them here.
Well, my conversations here are with normal people.

Speaker 1 They're normal. So many people are infected by the rhythm of Hollywood, which is just about people trying to become successful.

Speaker 1 And the way you become successful in Hollywood is you get chosen because you have to go on auditions.

Speaker 1 That's the primary, right? The number one top of the food chain. Well, I guess rock star, rock star, and movie star are number one and number two.
Maybe interchangeable. Maybe they're the same.

Speaker 1 Same, if it's a 10, like biggest stars in the world, it's 10. Movie stars and rock stars.
And movie stars,

Speaker 1 everything you do is about your relationships with people and whether or not people think you align with them politically and whether or not you support the right causes.

Speaker 1 You wear the bow tie at the Oscars. You act proper.
You do all the things that you're supposed to do. And if you do all the things you're supposed to do, then you get into the club.

Speaker 1 You know, and if you don't do all the things you're going to do, then they're not going to use you. They're going to use Daniel Craig.
They're going to use this guy. They're going to use that guy.

Speaker 1 They're going to use Dave Bautista. They're going to use The Rock.
They're going to use, there's so many guys that want these roles. And there's only so many good roles.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Especially if you're going to be a male movie star, you know?

Speaker 1 So no one can color outside the lines. And Dennis Quaid is like one of the rare few male movie stars who just fucking completely gave up.
He's like, I support Trump. I support,

Speaker 1 I'm a Christian. You know, I sing gospel music.
Like, fuck you. I quit.
And he did this Reagan movie. It was a Reagan movie.
Okay.

Speaker 1 It's about a 1980s president. They wouldn't let him advertise on certain social media networks because they said it was during the time of the election and it could affect the election.

Speaker 1 What was it? Was it Facebook? Like, what's kept him from, was it YouTube or Facebook?

Speaker 1 Some one of the social media outlets kept him from advertising this movie, which is a great movie about Reagan, where he plays Reagan. He does a fucking amazing job.
It has nothing to do with today.

Speaker 1 It's about a guy who's dead.

Speaker 1 He's not dead.

Speaker 2 He's dead. He's been dead forever.

Speaker 1 He was dead his last year in office. He was fucking up full-on Alzheimer's.

Speaker 2 That's the thing with this whole

Speaker 2 social media, you know, censorship, demonetization, like the way that they've

Speaker 2 honestly, and how I say they.

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Rated M for mature.

Speaker 2 There's a big group and

Speaker 2 you were talking about it the other night. Even with your show, with the Trump show.

Speaker 2 And then it's not trending. You can't even find it.
The firearms community on YouTube deals with this all the time.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, all the time.

Speaker 2 You know, the guys that have the huge YouTube channels from a firearms perspective,

Speaker 2 they're demonetized. They have to upload multiple times.
They're in like a company.

Speaker 1 My good friend Collins, Colleen Noir. Yeah.
His fucking show, he can't get it to grow. He can't get his Instagram to grow.
He's like completely stifled.

Speaker 2 And they're keeping the lid on this. I mean, like Brandon Herrera

Speaker 1 after he was on the podcast, Facebook acknowledged his mistake and lifted the restrictions. Aha, yeah, you acknowledged it.

Speaker 1 Look at this. He expressed a belief that Facebook labeled the content as an attempt to sway an election.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like the entire.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Facebook. They said

Speaker 1 that they were in their defense, but that's what they said. It was just a mistake, Jamie.
I'm just, that's what they said. Jamie, it's just a mistake.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 The entire firearms community, and it's weird because we,

Speaker 2 when I say we, we talk about it all the time. Like, whether it's the biggest YouTube channels

Speaker 2 for the firearms space, they're constantly battling, trying to keep their channels up. This is a constitutionally protected right.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And because

Speaker 2 there's a difference in political opinion,

Speaker 2 they can tip the scale,

Speaker 2 which is completely insane to me.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of traffic. I mean, you think about some of these really big channels that are out there.
These guys drive millions and millions of views.

Speaker 2 People obviously want to watch, and they can't increase their reach, or they get demonetized, and they're constantly screwed with over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 And that's the way that we've, I think a lot of us have felt we've been living under the thumb of, you know, our

Speaker 2 social media oligarchs that are deciding whether or not our information is agreeable to their political opinion.

Speaker 1 Did I ever tell you the time that I was having a conversation with a Facebook YouTube executive and my wife had to grab my leg under the table and stop me? Seriously? In Hawaii, okay?

Speaker 1 So I'm with a friend, and my friend was an executive at Google, a very nice person, great, no problems with them. We're all having a good time.
We're sitting down drinking and talking.

Speaker 1 And I got a couple in me. And

Speaker 1 this lady who's a big wig at YouTube sits down across from me and we start talking. And I said, when it comes, so we get into this conversation.

Speaker 1 It's a very friendly conversation nothing problematic at all I don't think she knows you know even knows who I am and this is a long time ago so this is like

Speaker 1 2015 14 so my podcast is not that big right it's not that big at all let's face I could tell you exactly when it was when did Sam Harris and Douglas Murray have a conversation when did uh the strange death of europe come out tell me about that uh that's uh douglas murray's amazing book that has been proved now to be absolutely accurate in his assessment of what was going to happen to Europe with Muslim integration.

Speaker 1 Essentially, the guy nailed it. And

Speaker 1 him and Sam Harris. Okay, so you have two public intellectuals who are having a conversation about cultures and about

Speaker 1 what is different about these Islamic cultures and their desire to impose Sharia law, like at least in certain areas. So they're having this conversation.
And it gets labeled

Speaker 1 as it gets flagged off this guy's account.

Speaker 1 So I find out about this video because this guy has an account and he I don't remember where he posted it, maybe Twitter, but he said, I got flagged on YouTube for having this in my playlist as something that I watch, like not even something he hosts on his channel.

Speaker 1 So I asked the lady, I said, why would someone get flagged for a conversation? She was it was hate speech. Just like that.
Just like that. It was hate speech.
I go, do you remember the conversation?

Speaker 1 Because I watched the conversation. I don't think it was hate speech at all.
She was definitely, it was heavily hate speech.

Speaker 1 I go, but it's between two public, and then my wife just clamps on right now because she sees the fucking thing. I'm rabbit.

Speaker 1 Now, like, it's two public intellectuals having a conversation about a real thing that's happening in the world. And there's no hate speech in that.
There's no slurs.

Speaker 1 There's no degrading of people, a generalization of people. There's no racism.

Speaker 1 They're talking about real cultural differences and how they're going to affect Europe.

Speaker 1 And this fucking lady just, it's hate speech. The arrogance of the way she said it to me, and she was a big executive.
And I was like, oh boy. I was just boiling.
I was boiling.

Speaker 1 And thank God my wife grabbed my leg. She fucked her.

Speaker 1 She grabbed the shit out of my leg because I was ready to go. Because the lady was going to engage with me.

Speaker 1 And I was like, okay, this is a podcast. No, you're fucked.
You're fucked. You're fucked.
You're fucked. You're just lucky there's no cameras here.
What you're saying is absolutely crazy.

Speaker 1 Like, who are you to make that distinction? And do you have any idea how that affects us culturally? When a person like yourself, who lives in this fucking

Speaker 1 San Francisco,

Speaker 1 this whole bizarre tech cult bubble, that's what you live in.

Speaker 1 And you want to impose this crazy leftist perspective on everyone in the world to the point where you're not even allowing two world-renowned public intellectuals have a public discussion about this in front of an audience.

Speaker 2 Dude, I would deal with that all the time where people, I would talk about the Middle East. I spent most of my adult life in the Middle East.
I was in Iraq. I was in Jerusalem.

Speaker 2 I was all around the Middle East and Africa. And I would just say, I just don't agree with

Speaker 2 the way that Saudi Arabia runs, right? I don't agree with the monarchy. I don't agree with

Speaker 2 Islamic Sharia law. I don't agree with, oh, you're a fucking racist.
And you're like, what? No, man. I just don't think that it's the best way to go about it, right?

Speaker 1 Like, there's a bunch of different ways to live.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, I'm not a racist. I've lived there.
I've been there. I've spent a ton of time there.
I think this is better.

Speaker 2 And these are the reasons why. And people didn't even want to have a conversation with it.
Oh, you're a racist.

Speaker 1 Well, this is what's crazy. You have to be able to have those conversations, even if that person's wrong.

Speaker 1 Like, if someone wants to get on YouTube and tell the world why Sharia law is better, I think they should be able to do that.

Speaker 1 Let them do it and let someone counter it and let them have debates. And Sam Harris has had a bunch of debates like that.

Speaker 1 You can watch them online. They're amazing.
Let people figure out who they agree with.

Speaker 1 And if you just shut down discourse and say that it's hate speech, and you're defining hate speech as no slurs, there's no like, we got to kill all these people. There's none of that.

Speaker 1 There's no hate in this conversation. You're saying hate speech is disagreeing with a narrative that all leftists must ascribe to, regardless of any objective assessment of the facts.

Speaker 1 Any just sitting down and looking at it and go, you know, I don't think I agree with this aspect of it. Like, I think that, like, telling women that they have to wear a hijab everywhere,

Speaker 1 you're not giving them the choice.

Speaker 1 Not giving someone choice is just fundamentally bad for the race, for humans. It's oppression.

Speaker 2 Anything outside of a meritocracy in the context of being able to evolve a conversation based on the best idea wins.

Speaker 2 And when you're chopping out 50% of your population and saying they're beasts of burden and where they belong is just essentially

Speaker 1 deplorable.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is the problem that I have with this.

Speaker 2 And anytime that I've had this conversation around the Middle East where like these are the things I don't like about it. And I mean there's lots of different things.
It could be the, you know, the

Speaker 2 Arab men will typically wear this very long,

Speaker 2 open-bottom garb, right? It's, it's typically referred to as a man dress. I'm like, God, I hate that thing.
This thing's stupid. Like, I've had to wear it, you know, and I.

Speaker 1 Did you wear underwear? Did you wear underwear anyway?

Speaker 2 Sometimes.

Speaker 1 I've won a hijab. Like, we were talking about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, I had like a... tiny little like belt-fed machine gun that I'd have to wear because I'm a small guy, right? I'm 160 pounds.
And so I would often be the woman because I could,

Speaker 2 I could be the fucking, I've got a feminine frame, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've got, you know, birthing hips, of course, but,

Speaker 2 you know, I could get a little saw with,

Speaker 2 which is a squat automatic weapon, a little belt-fed machine gun, a couple frags underneath a hijab, and I could sit in the back seat. Oh, wow.
It's like, surprise, bitch, I'm not a woman.

Speaker 1 Picturing you with a hijab and a belt-fed machine gun under your dress is fucking hilarious.

Speaker 1 It's so much fun, man.

Speaker 1 Did you have a thing where you could pop it up? Like a Loki jacket?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'd Velcro.
So we had a whole department in the agency where

Speaker 2 they would like design costumes and shit for you. So you could, I had like, I had this fake mustache.
I got a picture of it. I'll fucking send it to you.

Speaker 2 But I had this fake mustache and like they would put tanner and fake mustache and like sunglasses.

Speaker 1 I'd like drive around around looking like saddam half the time like like that fucking america world police movie oh yeah

Speaker 2 full on and and it's so funny because like you'd have like

Speaker 2 a no shit a person putting makeup on you before you like go out to do something you got a fake mustache and you know or for me i'm like just give me a hijab i already know what i'm doing give me the fucking put me in the lady thing

Speaker 1 are we allowed to wear makeup at all Are the Islamic women allowed to wear makeup under their hijab or not?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, they can, depending on

Speaker 2 where they are.

Speaker 1 Some parts they don't let them do it.

Speaker 2 Some parts, yeah, depending on

Speaker 2 how extreme they are. But if you went to Kuwait or something like that, they would flash it.
You know, it's like a signify, it'd signify that they're like racy, you know?

Speaker 2 Sassy.

Speaker 1 Little

Speaker 1 hussy. Look at these eyelashes.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I saw our nostrils.

Speaker 2 I saw our ankles. This bitch is

Speaker 1 Isn't it wild though that that religion, the absolute most suppressed religion, suppressive religion when it comes to women and gays, are the ones that the progressives are so vehemently defending?

Speaker 1 Like that's the one they defend over all religions. You can be Islam like a leftist will

Speaker 1 accuse you readily and quickly of being Islamophobic. It's a great thing.
You can shut you down.

Speaker 1 It's a great pejorative. But no one ever accuses you of being being an anti-Christian.
No one. It never comes up.
No one, no one, there's not even a word, right? You can have Islamophobic.

Speaker 1 Is there a Christianophobic? I've never heard it.

Speaker 1 What is a word, like a disparaging word for someone who is

Speaker 1 prejudiced against Christians? Does it exist? I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, it probably doesn't even exist.

Speaker 1 It's like honky.

Speaker 1 It's like a racist term for white people. Cracker.
It doesn't work.

Speaker 2 It's like Caucasian cis male. I don't even know what that means.

Speaker 1 If that's Christianophobia or whatever.

Speaker 2 whatever. Christianophobia.
See, that's.

Speaker 1 I've never heard anyone utter that.

Speaker 2 That's too much garbly gook.

Speaker 1 You can't say it fast. No, no.

Speaker 2 Islamophobia is kind of fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Islamophobia flows. It sounds like you're intellectual.

Speaker 1 Well, this podcast is filled with Islamophobia, first of all. Let's just discuss this.

Speaker 2 This is really important.

Speaker 1 We need to direct them to feminism.

Speaker 2 But I think that's so funny because

Speaker 2 when I listen to

Speaker 2 academics,

Speaker 2 you know, I'll pull up a YouTube and I'll go down a rabbit hole on a certain thing and I'll listen to an academic. And then half of them,

Speaker 2 I shouldn't say half of them, like a good portion of them, they're talking about things they've never actually experienced.

Speaker 2 So for me,

Speaker 2 I've lived in the Middle East. Like I've lived in Jerusalem.

Speaker 2 I've lived and interacted and been in these cultures

Speaker 2 and seen them in a very vivid way.

Speaker 2 And when I say this,

Speaker 2 tactical and combat experience, specifically in these countries,

Speaker 2 it's very vivid.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 part of the problem with

Speaker 2 this differentiation, let's go back to it, but this differentiation between the decision makers and the people actually implementing the

Speaker 2 tactical execution on the ground is that there's a huge disconnect from the reality. They don't have the wisdom to understand what it is.

Speaker 2 And what I used to tell people is like, I was almost like a zookeeper

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 I would usher, depending on the person, I would usher them through the fucking zoo so they could see what's going on, but they would see it from afar. And I kept the lions from eating them.
Right.

Speaker 2 And there's this very clear differentiation between the people in charge. And most of them shouldn't have been in a combat zone, specifically in the agency.
They should not have been in a combat zone.

Speaker 2 And when you unpack the agency and you look at,

Speaker 2 you have paramilitary guys, and they're more than qualified to be there.

Speaker 2 And then you have like the cocktail circuit guys and they're just trying to get their combat tour so they can get promoted to another fucking spot. But they actually have no business being there.

Speaker 2 Meaning they need guys like me to keep them alive.

Speaker 1 Oh, so they're just like getting in days for

Speaker 1 the ledger.

Speaker 2 There's a very famous,

Speaker 2 infamous.

Speaker 2 case officer from Coast back in the day, and I was on the ground there, not in Coast, in Kabul at the time.

Speaker 2 And she was being groomed to be the assistant director.

Speaker 2 There's a great book on it called Double Agent, but I was on the ground when it happened.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she had this

Speaker 2 asset that she was trying to get in, which is an agency asset that she was trying to get into a base in Coast.

Speaker 2 Once again, this person has no,

Speaker 2 they should not be here.

Speaker 2 They should be in Germany going to a cocktail party, like pretending like they're really cool because they have high intellect, but they have no context to going down to the basis of reality.

Speaker 2 And these are like rules of the jungle. Like this, like this power is the only language they speak.
Like you can't intellect your way out of this thing. Like a fucking bullet is a bullet.

Speaker 2 A bat is a bat. Like it will win over your articulation every time.

Speaker 2 If you want to win a debate and you just put an axe handle through somebody's fucking head That's how you win right that like it doesn't matter

Speaker 2 It doesn't matter. So

Speaker 2 like they bring in this asset and she's like oh, you know this asset is the guy He's gonna give us the the coordinates to bin Laden. We've been working with him for a long time.
He's an amazing guy.

Speaker 2 It's his birthday. He wants us to bring him a cake

Speaker 2 So she bypasses all the security systems bringing in a guy from Pakistan

Speaker 2 So she gets him because he's like, I don't want to go through any security. I'm your trusted guy.
I don't want to go through first. I don't want to go through any security.

Speaker 2 So she tells security, stand down. She doesn't tell anybody about it.
She brings this guy in through the gate, like blows him through.

Speaker 2 Now, the security guys, mind you, are like, what the fuck did you just do? They're running down to this situation to try to get ahead of it.

Speaker 2 He steps out and he looks like the Michelin Tiger Man and fucking clacks off.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 2 And three of my friends were killed in that suicide bomb. She was killed, ultimately.

Speaker 2 But that's a perfect example. And there's like multiple different examples of

Speaker 2 there's a different cadence mindset and capability associated with what I would say is the paramilitary guys versus the case officers, the spies. There's just totally different guys.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they tried to intermingle

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 of capabilities and, more importantly, promotions to try to get people

Speaker 2 promoted, which is another reason why

Speaker 2 some significant things have to change over there.

Speaker 2 And they got the guys.

Speaker 1 They could send people to you just to, you were supposed to protect these people.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so they could be collection officers on the ground.
I mean, like,

Speaker 2 time after time, example after example, I had this guy in this town called Lashkagar, out of the middle of fucking nowhere.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 before we go there, so let's rewind to Iraq.

Speaker 2 I had a spy that we were working with, and they're called case officers in the agency. And

Speaker 2 we go out to pick her up from the airfield, and we're like bringing her to where she needs to go. And

Speaker 2 we pick her up, and she gets in the car behind, she gets in the car behind me. And

Speaker 2 she takes out her pistol. She points it.
And I'm in the passenger seat. She's right behind me.
She takes out her clock.

Speaker 2 She puts a magazine in it, racks the slide right behind my head, like directly into the back of my head.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. And I turn around

Speaker 2 and I'll tell you exactly what I said. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 2 I turn around. I'm like, give me that thing.
Like, and I called her,

Speaker 2 I called her some like

Speaker 2 very rude,

Speaker 2 very rude things, right? So I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? Don't take your pistol out. I go, if both of us are dead, then think about it.

Speaker 2 But I'm going to keep this.

Speaker 2 You just don't have it anymore. And so I gave her back.
I actually gave her back the empty pistol. I was like, listen, if both of us are dead, feel free.

Speaker 2 Take one of our guns, take both of our guns. I don't give a shit because I'm dead.
But I get back in and the chief of base at the time pulls me in. He's a fucking super good dude.
And he

Speaker 2 calls me. He's like, hey, man,

Speaker 2 I heard you had quite an exchange with somebody. And, you know,

Speaker 2 we don't really appreciate this. And, you know,

Speaker 2 I might have to send you home. And I was like, did she tell you what she did? He was like, no, I just thought she got in the car.
And you told her, like,

Speaker 2 you know, you fucking dumb, whatever. And give me your gun.
I was like, no, she racked her slide into the back of my head.

Speaker 1 And he's like, oh, God, get out of here. I'll talk to her.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, God, get out of here.

Speaker 2 I'll talk to her.

Speaker 1 Oh, Jesus. She forgets.

Speaker 2 But it's like.

Speaker 1 Do they even have to show competency in weapons use?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's.

Speaker 1 Do they go through the same sort of program?

Speaker 2 Everybody thinks there's like this Jason Bourne type person,

Speaker 2 you know, like spies are Jason Bourne or something like that. It's like, it's just not fundamentally correct.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 2 any soft guy,

Speaker 2 any soft guy is so more, much more proficient at firearms. I taught a selection and vetting course for former soft guys that wanted to come into the agency.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I taught it for a couple years. And I was one of the main architects behind the selection criteria.

Speaker 2 And we would have to go out and train spies. And I would shoot their qualification with my left hand, like on two hours of sleep, still half in the fucking bag.
Like, it's just so, like, ridiculously

Speaker 1 ingrained.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and more importantly, it's that's not their job, right?

Speaker 2 They're collection people, and I'm defending them to a certain degree because they're very high IQ. Their selection criteria in their courses is.

Speaker 1 They're still prepared for that.

Speaker 2 No, they don't belong in those places. Like, when you go into

Speaker 2 the when you go into a combat zone and when it's a very

Speaker 2 complex because there's different different areas in combat zones and some of them are more dangerous than others,

Speaker 2 you can't have some of those people there. It's too dangerous, man.
You've got to have collection people that are on the military side that can handle themselves unilaterally.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you can't have like your regular

Speaker 2 humdrum spy. This isn't Jason Bourne.

Speaker 2 They're not competent. And more importantly, that's not their thing.
It's the thing of proficient artisans in combat collection and the art of war.

Speaker 2 And that is a very subset niche profession of guys that are extremely competent and very dangerous.

Speaker 1 Why do we want to believe in a Jason Bourne?

Speaker 1 I think it's all...

Speaker 1 Love that. They love it.
They love that narrative. Some super spy, 007 dude that can fuck everybody up.

Speaker 2 It's fun, right?

Speaker 2 Oh, we noticed

Speaker 2 you're a really good boxer in your local gym and you went to Yale. We're going to recruit you.
Like, get the fuck out of here. Let's go stupid.

Speaker 1 He's a judo champion.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's a judo champion. They'd always start

Speaker 1 the same way.

Speaker 2 Oh, man, we noticed you're hitting the bags and you're a

Speaker 2 political science major in Yale.

Speaker 1 There's a guy with glasses and a hat on watching you run around the track.

Speaker 1 I think we found our man.

Speaker 2 If they only knew the the bureaucratic steps that it took to get into it, where it's just

Speaker 2 so much paperwork and interviews, and

Speaker 2 it's like, who is this guy? What has he done?

Speaker 1 Well, what's wild to me is the spies that infiltrate terrorist organizations.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 there's people that are in the IDF that have infiltrated Hamas. They live with them.
They're in

Speaker 1 there. They're in there.
Lots. Isn't that crazy? Yes.
Can you imagine?

Speaker 1 That life?

Speaker 1 That life is nuts, man. Worried you're going to be found out.
And these guys knowing, Hamas knowing that a certain percentage of these people have to be Israelis?

Speaker 1 Well, that is so crazy that they do that.

Speaker 2 When you have those guys, and we need those guys. Like, I'm not.
Oh, yeah. Like, we need those guys.

Speaker 1 Must be so exciting.

Speaker 2 The non-official cover of the Knox. Yeah.
Like, that's that.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's so much respect.

Speaker 1 Well, you were explaining that one guy that's a professor. Yeah.
Well, yeah.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 I mean, out of all the guys, like, I had such a unique ride in history in times, right?

Speaker 2 Where, you know, looking out the window, kind of just being a passenger in history and then being able to talk to some of these guys.

Speaker 2 And I would sit down and I would always find like the older guy that's in the, you know, we have like dining halls where the agency has their own separate dining halls and bars and shit like that.

Speaker 2 And I sat down with a guy one day, and I was just like, hey, man, what's your story? You know? And

Speaker 2 he was telling me

Speaker 2 he was an anthropology professor at the University of Washington. And

Speaker 2 he was finishing his PhD and he was crossing the Mackenzie Traverse in Canada. And he did it in era-appropriate clothing and a canoe and the whole fucking thing.
Right? It's just completely insane.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 It's like so insane.

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh, how'd you get in?

Speaker 2 So he's making his way across. He gets to a cabin.
He's starving. He's going to die.

Speaker 2 He's explaining this to me.

Speaker 2 He's like, I'm going to die. I break into this trapper cabin.
I find a bunch of old, like, old canned food. I gorge, I just like engorge myself.

Speaker 2 And now I have the screaming shits.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm like wiping my ass with this National Geographic.

Speaker 2 And I pull out this ad. And the agency used to have ads in National Geographic.
And

Speaker 2 he thought to himself, wow, that's really interesting. I should apply.

Speaker 1 So he applied when he got back. Imagine the scenario.
You're fucking starving. Then you're eating botulism-filled cans of beans with pork and shit.
Wiping your ass with a National Geographic.

Speaker 1 You see an ad. I mean, it's a fucking scene in a movie.

Speaker 2 It's insane.

Speaker 1 That's a scene in a movie. So right?

Speaker 2 He goes back to University of Washington, becomes a professor. The agency, he goes through the entire process.
The agency recruits him.

Speaker 2 He goes through training, but still he has to keep his double life going.

Speaker 1 So he starts a life as a double life, in fact.

Speaker 1 Becomes a professor while he's in the agency. Correct.
Wow. So from the jump, he's got a double life.

Speaker 1 It's not like he gets recruited, he's some Nobel Prize winner, and they say, we need you to be for America. Yeah.
Wow.

Speaker 2 And his first job, I'll never forget him describing this to me because

Speaker 2 I didn't know. I didn't know any of this.

Speaker 2 So it's part history, part just agency history. And

Speaker 2 he goes, my first job was I flew to Angola.

Speaker 2 And I just had a suitcase full of money. And they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere.
And they're like, go kill Cubans.

Speaker 2 That was his job.

Speaker 1 jesus christ just a bag of money and one straight directive okay and so in defense here that's cool as

Speaker 1 like wild

Speaker 2 trust that hey here's a bag of money yeah go kill some cubans because you had

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 you know it's it's a proxy war right between uh south africa and um the it was the soviets and the cuban by proxy They were both supporting each other.

Speaker 2 They were both supporting the communist revolution in Angola. So we were pushing back, from the state's perspective, we were pushing back against the

Speaker 2 Soviet intervention, which was driven from the Cubans. So he had a huge,

Speaker 2 huge Cuban intervention, which is something most people don't realize. And I just thought it was fascinating because it was the first time I...
heard about it.

Speaker 2 And here's this guy that his job was, here's a bag of money. Go kill Cubans.
That's your job.

Speaker 1 Wow, he's a professor. Pretty cool.

Speaker 2 Wally's a professor. So he'd be like, going, so he would go back to, you know, whatever university and go, okay, kids.

Speaker 2 I know I've been out on a dig, you know, and

Speaker 2 I've been building, you know, at-lattles in Australia trying to do this. But really, we was in Angola hunting Cubans.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 2 That's pretty badass. That's way better than Indiana Jones, as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 1 No, it's pretty cool. Right now, chalkboard chalkboard and shit, thinking about gunning dudes down.

Speaker 1 Okay, and then plus the five. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Who here can answer this?

Speaker 2 Nobody, nobody, nobody can know. That's so he never tells anybody.

Speaker 1 Anybody.

Speaker 2 No, and he's still, I mean.

Speaker 1 So I guess with a guy like that, if you can find a guy who's willing to wear

Speaker 1 era equivalent clothing, would you say an error correct

Speaker 1 clothing and make his way through a trek that was most likely going to kill people in the 1800s?

Speaker 1 You know who did something like that? He didn't do the whole thing, but Ranella, the way I met him was

Speaker 1 he had a show before Meteor. It was called The Wild Within, and I got really addicted to it.
Seriously? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I used to love, way before I ever went hunting, I used to love watching hunting shows.

Speaker 1 I used to watch like Ted Nugett's Spirit of the Wild. My wife was always like, what the fuck are you watching?

Speaker 1 But I was always obsessed with hunting shows and wilderness shows people in the wilderness because every time I'm in the woods, I feel like it's a vitamin. I'm like, oh, I'm getting this vitamin.

Speaker 1 So I was like, I wanted to like experience more of that in my life. So I was watching it on TV.
So there was a show called The Wild Within.

Speaker 1 And what Ranella did was he, like, I think he used like... Error correct weapons too.

Speaker 1 I think he used like a musket and he shot a bison and he turned the bison into like, I think it was a bison, whatever the animal was. He turned it into a boat.

Speaker 1 He made a boat out of it and drifted down this river. He did like all these things that these pioneers did back in the day when they were making their way across the country.
That sounds awesome.

Speaker 1 It was pretty dope. That's how I got to meet him.
That's how I got him on my podcast. Before Meat Eater was ever a show.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
He was super dismissive of a podcast. Now he's got one.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's a lot of people. He's like, what am I doing here? I'm in this comedy club with this fucking dude who's smoking weed.
Like, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 I feel like there's a lot of people that probably dismissed it. They're like, oh, what the fuck is Joe doing?

Speaker 1 But now he's got a great podcast of his own. I love that guy to death.
Oh, he's awesome. He's such a smart dude, too.
He knows so many things.

Speaker 1 He's a fascinating guy to talk to because he's super well-read. And he can talk to you about all kinds of shit that you would not expect from a guy who's a professional hunter.
No.

Speaker 1 You know, he talks like a PhD. It's very, but also like a hunter.
Very unusual dude. And like one of the very best guys to explain hunting.

Speaker 1 Like, I saw a debate that he had, it was like a, I think it was a book that he had released, and he was doing one of those talks they do at bookstores, and this guy was a vegan, and the guy in the audience was a vegan, and the guy got upset with him.

Speaker 1 And Renella handled it so perfectly. Just the way he communicated with the guy and explaining his perspective, and you have a different perspective, and I'd love to have a conversation with you.

Speaker 1 He didn't do it with any bullshit. Ted Nugent's like, ah, you pussy, growing out the vagina.

Speaker 1 But Renella is like the perfect answer to people that objectively they look at it, they go, wait a minute, I do eat meat. Like, I am a hypocrite.
I am hiring a supermarket hitman.

Speaker 1 Like, why am I upset at this man who not only hunts his meat, but cooks it and writes cookbooks and cooks it on television? Yeah. And like, this is the same thing.
Like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 1 This is so stupid.

Speaker 1 And then you've got the people that really believe that you shouldn't eat anything but plants. And my problem with that is I think plants are smart.
I think they just move real slow.

Speaker 1 and I think they have a way of interacting that is noticeable and measurable. I think there's probably a consciousness to plants.

Speaker 1 I think life eats life and I think that's the only way it survives and I think that's just the way it goes. That is just the way it goes.

Speaker 1 And you can choose to just eat plants but I don't think you're going to be as healthy. I just I think it's too hard.
I think people can kind of survive on vegan diets and do well on vegan diets.

Speaker 1 There's athletes that are on vegan diets. I don't think they hit peak performance and thrive.
I think that's all people who are consuming nutrient-dense meats. Meats and fish and eggs.

Speaker 1 Those are the people that, when you look at athletes, the predominant, the best athletes in every sport are all consuming protein. They're all consuming animal protein.

Speaker 1 There's so few that are vegans that hit elite status and maintain. A lot of them get injured when they switch to vegan, too.
There's just so much in there.

Speaker 1 It's collagen and B12 and fucking, there's so many different aspects to different amino acids.

Speaker 1 You can have this ethical thing in your head, and I get that ethical thing. Like, I don't want to see a thing suffer.
I think plants suffer, you just don't feel it. Right.
I really do.

Speaker 1 I think there's a communication with them that's probably similar but different to the way we feel about animals getting killed by other animals. I think it's just a part of this whole process.

Speaker 1 I mean, they've shown that you can take the recordings of beetles eating leaves and play recordings of beetles eating leaves near a tree, and the tree will experience distress

Speaker 1 to the point where it changes the profile, the flavor profile of the leaves. It releases chemicals, these phytochemicals into the leaves that makes it disgusting for the bugs.

Speaker 1 And they do it with giraffes, like when giraffes eat, I think it's acacia trees, when giraffes eat acacia trees, the trees downwind all become disgusting to the point where the giraffes will starve because they won't eat it.

Speaker 1 They change their flavor profile to protect themselves. They release some sort of chemical.
It makes them inedible.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 Because you can see it with

Speaker 2 who's a Paul Stamitz has

Speaker 2 when the fungi is talking and communicating

Speaker 2 and the health benefits to fungi and different plants.

Speaker 2 I think anytime you have this edict where no meat, no plants, no,

Speaker 2 I think that's just another version of religious extremism. Where if you were just to say, what makes sense,

Speaker 2 morally, what am I going to have to coalesce? And from me,

Speaker 2 I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I hunt.
Like, that's the way it is. And we eat a ton of wild meat.
I'm not a hypocrite. We eat meat.
I love fish.

Speaker 2 I love fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 I think if you're making this determination where there's no meat, this is the only thing I'm going to eat.

Speaker 2 Well, one, man, that's a lot of time, effort, and energy that you're spending specifically on your diet constraints that could be allocated to

Speaker 2 being a better dad.

Speaker 1 Or maybe they could do all those things too. Maybe.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think their philosophical point is a good one. I think their ethics, the morals,

Speaker 1 their perspective is that I want to live a life with the least suffering possible. I think that's noble.
I really do.

Speaker 1 I think the problem is life eats life. And I think that's the real problem.

Speaker 1 And I think the problem is if you're buying just vegetables in the store, boy, you need to take a good look at monocrop agriculture because it's fucking bananas.

Speaker 1 You know, there was

Speaker 1 Taylor Sheridan in Yellowstone. There was a scene where Kevin Coster was talking to the hippie lady who's trying to shut down ranches and shit.
I forget what her thing was.

Speaker 1 But he was explaining how if you're on a vegan diet, you want to kill the most things, become a vegan. Become a vegan.
Because you don't understand. If one life is one life, okay?

Speaker 1 If the life of a gopher and the life of an elk are the same thing, and why wouldn't they be?

Speaker 1 You have no idea how many things have to fucking die to make monocrop agriculture.

Speaker 1 It's a bloodbath.

Speaker 1 They kill everything. They kill groundhogs, ground squirrels, you fucking name it.
Ground nesting birds, fawns. Everything gets gobbled up by combines.
It's an enormous industrial operation.

Speaker 1 It's not natural. So now you're limited to organic plants, okay?

Speaker 1 So if you're growing all of your own food and you know, you're growing a lot of soybeans, a lot of different things, like if you go hemp, if you're in a place where you can grow it legally, hemp is actually a really good source of protein.

Speaker 1 It's actually got a really complete amino acid profile. You can, you know, you could survive.
You could do it that way.

Speaker 1 But if you're a regular vegan, if you're just a person like, I get vegan pizza at the supermarket, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 You're contributing to this mass slaughter of small animals. You're just not aware of it.

Speaker 2 Have you watched that Netflix docuseries on it's basically vegan propaganda? I forget what its name is.

Speaker 1 Is it the Game Changers? That's probably

Speaker 2 fascinating, like from a wide variety of reasons, but more importantly, so I went and got some vegan cheese.

Speaker 1 Didn't like, tried it.

Speaker 2 I was like, okay, it's not bad, but I mean, dude, it's a laundry list of ingredients associated with making this, which seems pretty insane to me, versus what's the ingredient on a good cheese?

Speaker 1 Milk.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 This thing's like a dissertation of ingredients. And it's so processed.
That is literally what it is. If you want to be, I said that a million times.
You want to be a vegetarian? Eat Indian food.

Speaker 1 They make delicious, delicious vegetarian food.

Speaker 1 You don't have to eat fucking vegan cheese. Stop pretending.
Stop lying. Stop eating tofuti or whatever the fuck that shit is.
Get out of here. Get out of it.
Get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 That's nonsense. What are you eating?

Speaker 1 And also, eat mollusks. People should look into that.
Those things are so primitive. They're way more primitive than plants.
We just have a problem with them moving. That's all it is.

Speaker 1 If people, like, they don't even have nerves. They don't feel pain.
They're fucking the simplest of organisms. Yet their...
Protein is like animal protein. It's really good for you.

Speaker 2 Do you eat oysters?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Eat the fuck out of oysters.
And every now and then I hear about some dude dying. Yeah, I eat Escargo.

Speaker 1 But every now and then I hear about a dude dying from oysters.

Speaker 2 So we are in Normandy.

Speaker 2 This is super funny. Funny story.
So I went out to the 80th anniversary for the Normandy invasion, took a bunch of dudes out there. And my kids and I are out on this beach.

Speaker 2 And I'm taking my pocket knife out and I'm just chopping the oysters off the rocks and eating. oysters straight out of the ocean.
Oh, wow. And my girls are running away from me.

Speaker 2 They're like, this is the grossest shit I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 And then pretty soon they got into it. So then they're trying to find me the oysters to bring them back and show me where they are.
My wife was like,

Speaker 2 you're going to fucking die. Like, you're going to, you're going to poison yourself.
You're eating these like right out of Normandy. Like that, the, it's one of the beaches out there.

Speaker 1 All the munitions are in the water. Yeah, my

Speaker 1 shit.

Speaker 2 And then I had to, I'm eating them. And then I quickly searched: hey, are there

Speaker 1 any toxins?

Speaker 2 After I've eaten like three,

Speaker 2 are there any toxins in the oysters in Normandy? Thank God it was like, you know, 99.9%.

Speaker 2 I'll live on the edge here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when I lived in San Francisco, you could collect mussels. There was like mussels that were on the rocks.

Speaker 1 But then I think I brought them home once, but then I found out that there's like a couple months out of the year that they're poison. You get like red tide, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I was like, I dodged the bullet, but I was like, what's that bullet? Because you could just go find muscles and pluck them off of things.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you this.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 if you were to move back to California, okay,

Speaker 2 but to take Texas politics with you.

Speaker 1 That's not really possible.

Speaker 2 But if it were,

Speaker 2 I'm taking you on an imaginary journey.

Speaker 1 Did you move? Yeah, yeah. No.
No. I like it here.

Speaker 2 You like the weather?

Speaker 1 I like everything. I like the size of it.
I like the way people behave. People are super friendly.
I like the scene here. The restaurant scene's amazing.
The comedy scene's amazing. Live music.

Speaker 1 A bunch of cool people now. Like, so many of my friends moved here.
I love it here. I just love the vibe.
I love that it's,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 I love that we're not connected to the Hollywood machine. There's like a pull of deals and shows and things that you get roped into doing because you think about the money they'll pay you.
Right.

Speaker 1 And then you wind up like becoming one of those people. Like you have to say what they say.
You have to be, if you're not politically aligned with them, you're going to lose gigs.

Speaker 1 You change your behavior. I see it with so many comics.

Speaker 1 They're really good comics coming up. They're like, wow, this guy's going to be good.
He's really good. He's getting better all the time.
And then they get a fucking show.

Speaker 1 They get a show and then they tone everything down and everything gets softer and everything, you know, you start seeing some like bullshit jokes in there like, oh, you decided to cover this joke, cover this subject just for like, just for like street cred, progressive street cred.

Speaker 1 Like you see it happen. You're like, ah, you got called into the rocks.
The sirens, they call you into the rocks. That's what it is, man.
They call you into the rocks.

Speaker 1 You stop being you.

Speaker 1 You stop being you because they dangle that carrot in front of your face. And there's no carrot out here.
The carrot is just podcasts and other comics. So that's way better.
There's no control.

Speaker 1 There's no manipulation. There's no someone's dangling this over you.
You have to agree with what I agree with.

Speaker 1 No one cares at all about any of that stuff here.

Speaker 2 It's freedom. And

Speaker 2 we were talking about it the other, I think it was today, right? Where it was like, you know, another comic was like, oh, can you believe they're a Democrat? And I'm like, no, it's weird.

Speaker 2 Like, or whatever, right? You know, know,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 2 it's fine in the context of, I think,

Speaker 2 being a conservative, because I don't necessarily say like, oh, I'm a Republican. I'm like, I just believe in less government.
Like, I don't like bureaucrats at all.

Speaker 2 I have a high degree of skepticism on anything that they say. And I typically will question anything an elected official will say.
So, but for me, I'm like,

Speaker 2 I don't care if the guy next to me is going to vote for, you know, whatever

Speaker 2 alternate politician. I care about, like, what are their ideas? Why do they think a certain way? What are they doing? What kind of a human are they?

Speaker 2 And what is the character of the individual?

Speaker 2 Am I going to disagree with him? Yeah, but who the fuck cares? It's kind of fun.

Speaker 2 Like, it's kind of fun to disagree with people and debate them and have a different opinion versus being in an echo chamber where people all agree and they're all kind of lockstep in their belief system.

Speaker 2 It's kind of fun to have some wingnut talking about socialism half the time.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, what the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 2 You believe in that? It's like some Orwellian nightmare, man.

Speaker 1 And if you could have a conversation with someone where you're friendly with each other and completely disagree, it's a beautiful dance.

Speaker 1 It's a fun dance to talk to people that have just completely different perspectives, but you're not rude to them.

Speaker 1 You just ask them, well, why do you think that? Well, did you ever consider this? And you have conversations like two normal people just having a conversation. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 1 So that's what you think. Huh? What was your childhood like?

Speaker 1 Just get into shit. Like, what are we dealing with here? Like, why do you have this perspective? You know, and

Speaker 1 you have to be able to talk to each other. And there's a bunch of people that we hang out with that have totally different opinions on all kinds of things.

Speaker 1 Like my friend Josh, who was here the other day, loved him to death. He told me he voted for Jill Stein.
Said he voted for Jill Stein just like a protest vote. Wow.

Speaker 1 I think the two-party system is stupid. I'm like, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, I get it.
Look,

Speaker 1 I voted

Speaker 1 for two Libertarian candidates in a row. So I voted for Gary Johnson, and then I voted for Joe Jorgensen.
Why? Because I was like, this whole thing's gross. But that's like California.

Speaker 1 I knew it was going to be blue anyway. California is always blue.

Speaker 1 It was like a legitimate protest vote. And I guess he was in Florida, so that's a legitimate protest vote if you want to pull that to me.

Speaker 1 It's going to go red anyway, whether you like it or not.

Speaker 2 It's going to go red.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Florida goes red hard.

Speaker 1 When they saw Miami go red, they were like, oh, boy.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy. And one of the things that they were saying, like, the whole

Speaker 1 like what goes red and what goes

Speaker 1 like if you look at the country, like California is way more red now than it's ever been in the life of the last four years.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a big difference. If you look at there's a map of California, how it voted from 2020 to 2024, it's a giant swing.
It's like it's the red's going like this.

Speaker 1 See if you can find it, Jamie. It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 And that's not because people have been radicalized.

Speaker 1 That's because the left has gone fucking cuckoo. You guys have gone crazy, and you're authoritarians.
You want everybody to behave and believe and think and talk the way you do, or else.

Speaker 1 Look at that. Look at the difference.

Speaker 2 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Holy shit, dude. That is wild.
Yeah, it's most of California by land mass. By far.

Speaker 1 It's probably 70% by land mass or 70%.

Speaker 2 What's that blue up there on the east side? Like, what is that close to?

Speaker 1 Is that like that's probably where they grow the weed, son? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 2 Where are you guys at? You guys got to be like Tahoe.

Speaker 1 What is that one?

Speaker 2 Like, that's got to be like Truckee or something.

Speaker 1 You got to shut off a blocker.

Speaker 2 These fuckers.

Speaker 1 Here it goes. Oh, these fuckers.

Speaker 1 Oh, you have to get a signal. Yeah.
Go to the other, just the image. Just the image, real quick.

Speaker 2 See, I've thought about this because I always tell people California is my favorite climate in the nation.

Speaker 1 It's the best.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's it. So what's the one in the upper...
Well, it's not. I can't click on it.
The one that's blue.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's counting on it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guarantee you that's where they grow the weed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They want to keep everything nice and quiet up there. Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 Everybody, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 Hey, man, we don't want these guys to criminalize weed again. That's where they're fucking growing.

Speaker 1 Where's Humboldt, Jamie? Where's Humboldt? Humble Norris up here somewhere. Up there.
That's where they grow all the best weed. That's where they have problems with the cartel, too.

Speaker 1 Cartel grows weed up there, too.

Speaker 2 The cartel grows weed in California?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's what I was going to. That's what I wanted to ask you was about the cartel.
Do you think that they're really going to...

Speaker 1 That one was Humboldt, the one you guys were asked. It was Humboldt.
Oh, shit. Okay.
There we go. You're right.
Yeah, they grow all the weed, son.

Speaker 2 There you go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a dude named John Norris who's been on the podcast. He wrote a book called Hidden Wars, and he was a game warden.

Speaker 1 So he's just thinking he's going to go around checking fishing licenses and shit like that. And then one day they find a creek that's been diverted.

Speaker 1 So they have to follow the creek that thought maybe a farmer had like dammed the creek somewhere and done something to get water illegally.

Speaker 1 He goes up there and he finds these PVC pipes and it reads this giant grow-op, and it's all cartel guys.

Speaker 1 And so this guy's job changes from being a game warden, let me check your fishing line, to running a fucking tactical unit.

Speaker 1 They had attack dogs, they had attack dogs, they had fucking shootouts with the cartel in the woods over weed.

Speaker 1 Because here's what happened: California made weed legal in the state, but made growing it a misdemeanor if you grow it illegally.

Speaker 1 Okay, so if you are a person who's doing it legally, you can grow it and you can sell it if you have a license. You can open up a shop and you can sell it.
They tax the shit out of it.

Speaker 1 It's great for everybody. But the problem is you made growing it illegally a misdemeanor.

Speaker 1 So then the cartel just starts growing it everywhere in the national forests because even if the guys get arrested, nothing happens. It's a misdemeanor.
So it's nothing.

Speaker 1 So they're using these crazy toxic poison pesticides, all this shit that's totally illegal to use on regular crops in America.

Speaker 1 And 90% of the illegal weed that's being bought around the country is coming from them.

Speaker 2 Holy shit, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 And they're doing it all in national forests, and they're doing most of it in California.

Speaker 1 Dude, they find these growout. My friend found one.
You know him, Cody. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He found a fucking grow-out on Tojone Ranch. Really? Yes.

Speaker 2 Oh, my gosh, that's right.

Speaker 1 Yes, he found a cartel grow-out

Speaker 1 on Tojon Ranch. Where they had, this guy carried in pipes on his shoulder.

Speaker 1 Deep into the woods, diverted a stream,

Speaker 1 and then there was this whole field of weed that these guys had planted out there. They were camping out there.

Speaker 1 They had little religious symbols and shit they kept by their bed to protect them, like the Virgin Mary and shit.

Speaker 2 What do you think? I've heard this. This is what I wanted to talk to you about because it pertains to the cartel.

Speaker 2 It's like, what do you think about releasing SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force on the cartels? What do you think that looks like?

Speaker 1 Well, I think you've solved one problem.

Speaker 1 You've solved the problem.

Speaker 1 You no longer have distribution, but you still have a demand.

Speaker 2 You still have a demand.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The real problem is there's always going to be a demand.
The real problem, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea, by the way. Okay.
I like that idea. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the problem with that idea is you're always going to have a demand. And if you're going to have a demand, someone's going to fulfill that demand.
And who the fuck is that going to be?

Speaker 1 How are they going to get the Coke in? You're not going to just not have Coke. So here's the question.

Speaker 1 By having prohibition of alcohol in the United States, it's

Speaker 1 widely agreed that that led to the rise of the mafia. Right.

Speaker 1 Bootleggers, the mafia, criminal organizations that were organized crime, that went on to do a bunch of other horrible things inside our country, and they were built up with money because alcohol was illegal.

Speaker 1 The moment alcohol stopped being illegal, you still have these people with all this money now. You fucked up.
Now they're organized gangsters.

Speaker 1 And now, you know, okay, alcohol is legal now, so they're just going to sell it legally. Right.
And they have millions and millions of dollars from a life of crime.

Speaker 1 You've already done that with the cardell. You got to do, just got to, you got to do something.
You got to do something. And you probably also should legalize drugs.

Speaker 1 I don't think you should take drugs. I think Coke is probably terrible for almost everybody.
I think meth is probably terrible. Do people do cocaine?

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Really? Like it's really a thing.

Speaker 1 The growing Chinese investment in illegal American weed. Of course.
Why would they get in on it? Check out this number that it says here.

Speaker 1 Of the 2,000, or sorry, of the 800 farms that OBN is in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has shut down. In the last two years, 75% were linked to China.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 China's growing weed here.

Speaker 1 They're growing weed here.

Speaker 1 Oh my god.

Speaker 2 I was thinking about this from the thought exercise where I'm like, because I, you know, I know these units. I'm intimately familiar with them.

Speaker 1 Bro.

Speaker 2 If we declare war on the cartel, like these, these dudes are not going to understand what the fuck is going on. No, of course not.

Speaker 2 They are going to be

Speaker 2 because,

Speaker 1 God, you'll stop the distribution.

Speaker 2 that's gonna be yeah they they are in for a world of like ultraviolence they've never actually felt before because they you know obviously this is a very capable ultraviolent organization they have fucking no clue if we organize these tier one units against them

Speaker 2 this is gonna be

Speaker 2 what i would be doing if i was down there i'd be like i know all those shoeboxes in my fucking you know my walls that i'm gonna have to collect up i'd be getting ready to retire right now that's what i would be doing because if delta force is is hunting me, bro, I would be so terrified.

Speaker 1 Is that a real thing that they've proposed doing? Yes.

Speaker 2 That is a real thing.

Speaker 1 Who proposed that?

Speaker 2 I'm almost positive either JD or Trump had said something with the new guy from ICE, like we're going to mobilize tier one units against the cartel.

Speaker 2 The only thing I thought was like

Speaker 2 retire.

Speaker 1 If

Speaker 2 you guys got some money, man, I would like put that away, you know, like maybe move Jamaica.

Speaker 1 I don't know, go somewhere. Yeah, buy a restaurant.
Like, try to go legit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, go legit. Dude, if those guys are hunting you,

Speaker 2 by the way, like, you're done. You're fucking done.

Speaker 1 And it's a weird thing that that's going on right at our border. So straight.
It's a weird thing. Because it's so close to us, and it's so ultra-violent and dangerous.

Speaker 1 And it's just completely shaped the way the entire economy of the country works. You know, they have so much power and control.

Speaker 1 And it's a criminal organization that is entirely, almost entirely at least funded by us, by our desire.

Speaker 1 Trump declares war on cartels. President-elect said notorious crime syndicates and drug kingpins will never sleep soundly again once he launches his plans to tackle the issue.

Speaker 2 I thought about this for a long time where I'm like,

Speaker 2 if they turned loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years.

Speaker 2 It'd be gone. That's the quote.

Speaker 1 He wants to send troops to Mexico.

Speaker 1 He said we make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations. Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 1 Bro, it is going to get wild. It's come January 20th.
It's going to get wild, man. It is going to get wild.
Very interesting.

Speaker 1 But the thing is, like, people, inaction is action as well when it comes to this. Like, you're just, you're going to continue to prop them up.

Speaker 1 They're going to get more and more power and more and more money. And we got to figure out why everybody wants Coke.
What the fuck is it? You think it's Coke? I think that's the big one.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sure it's the big one. I'm sure a lot of it is pills.
They have fake pills. Like they sell like street pills, street, you know, different like anti-anxiety medications, MOLLI.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of stuff they sell that's also laced up with fentanyl, which is responsible for, you know, who knows how many tens of thousands of people.

Speaker 2 It's like 200,000 people is what they're what they're saying is that fentanyl is responsible for that.

Speaker 1 crazy high crazy high it's insane it's it's a horrific thing and it's gotten to the point where people are scared to try any kind of drug because they're thinking fentanyl they found fentanyl in weed you know what yes people they found fentanyl laced weed yeah

Speaker 1 people are dumb as shit man you don't think they'll try putting fentanyl in weed people are dumb as shit they'll try all kinds of things people are retarded

Speaker 1 i know people that have mixed mao inhibitors and mushrooms and acid all together like what are you doing? Are you trying to go to space? Like, what are you doing, man?

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ, you're just experimenting with your mother. What is an MAO inhibitor?

Speaker 2 What did you say?

Speaker 1 An MAO inhibitor, monoamine oxidase inhibitor. It's the ingredient in ayahuasca that makes DMT orally active.
So monoamine oxidase breaks down DMT in the gut.

Speaker 1 That's why when you eat, like, like if you eat a salad, that's why you don't trip balls. Got it.
Okay. Because otherwise, like, most plants, some crazy number of plants plants have DMT in it.

Speaker 1 So, like, how many plants have DMT in it? I think it's like a thousand or something

Speaker 1 nutty like that.

Speaker 2 When you think about the legalization of psilocybin,

Speaker 2 so Texas, and this is what I know about Texas because they're leading, I think, a lot of research specifically related to vets.

Speaker 1 Apparently, the former governor Rick Scott is really into this. Rick Perry.
Rick Perry.

Speaker 2 Rick Perry, because of his relationship with Marcus, Luttrell, and some of the other guys in the community,

Speaker 2 he has been leading the charge on this. Do you think that

Speaker 2 from psilocybin being legal in the United States, do you think it would be an issue? Do you think it would be an issue at all?

Speaker 1 I don't know because

Speaker 1 you're going to get people trying it that wouldn't try it before. You're going to get people that use it irresponsibly, just like you get people that drink irresponsibly.

Speaker 1 I think that's the situation that we find ourselves in if we're going to give people personal freedom. They're going to make bad decisions.
You know, you can buy a Corvette, right? You can go to

Speaker 1 the Chevrolet dealership, buy a Corvette right off the lot that goes zero to 60 in four seconds, and you're flying around corners.

Speaker 1 You could be a fucking maniac and kill people in a Corvette, or you could just enjoy it on the highway and be responsible and say, wow, what a great car. This thing's awesome.
I love it.

Speaker 1 And you don't cause any problems for anybody.

Speaker 1 Both things are possible. That's what's going to happen if we make drugs legal.
You're going to have people try those drugs that probably shouldn't be trying those drugs.

Speaker 1 You're going to have people get addicted to those drugs that maybe wouldn't have gotten addicted if those drugs weren't available to them, especially if they weren't legal, if you could just buy it somewhere.

Speaker 1 But if you don't rip the fucking band-aid off of this like infidelization of society and let people know that there are things out there that

Speaker 1 they're telling you you can't do. And the people who are telling you you can't do them haven't even experienced them.

Speaker 1 And when it comes to things like psilocybin and psychedelics like if you haven't experienced them you really shouldn't be talking about them you have no idea what you're talking about you just you have you can't possibly know

Speaker 1 you can't know and if you do if you have experienced them then you're probably going to agree with me you're probably going to agree that there's some like some serious benefits to it 50 yeah god i thought it was a lot more than that

Speaker 1 At least 50. I had read something that was like in the hundreds.
I can't find a solid number.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's in a lot of stuff, but so the point is, is: like, I know Phalaris grass is like really rich with DMT, and there's a, that's also the acacia tree.

Speaker 1 That's what one, when they connected, there's like a

Speaker 1 university in Jerusalem that connected this idea of Moses and the burning bush to a DMT tree.

Speaker 2 Oh, right.

Speaker 1 Because the acacia tree is like rich in DMT, and the idea of burning it, you see God, and God gives you this message and tells you what to do and what the rules of behavior are.

Speaker 1 I think anybody telling you that these things should get you locked up has clearly never experienced them. No, they never have.

Speaker 2 I spent all of my life with a top-secret security clearance, like most of my life, like from my 20s to my 40s, right?

Speaker 2 And my personal experience with them,

Speaker 2 this is before, you know, before we went public, but

Speaker 2 my personal experience with them was

Speaker 2 my, you know, my

Speaker 2 problems were rep after rep, cycle after cycle

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 combat after

Speaker 2 relatively high stress scenario after scenario after scenario. And I was having a really, really hard time

Speaker 2 trying to directly connect with love.

Speaker 2 I actually

Speaker 2 could not connect with that experience. It was really difficult.

Speaker 2 And my wife and I were going, we were going through this, this ongoing debate and dialogue with it. And she's like you need to try it and we tried it

Speaker 2 it fast forward probably 20 years

Speaker 2 of talk therapy it for me personally

Speaker 2 and it gave me this this like direct connection with this this feeling that i hadn't felt for years and this is the feeling and this is my point with with

Speaker 2 with vets and especially from the combat vets the guys that like rep after rep after rep with over pressure and explosions and a lot of violence, is that they lose context with this really important feeling that you have to have, which is you have to have direct love for your family, for your spouse, for yourself.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if you've killed that

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 all of the things that you've done, you've built a scaffolding, this artificial scaffolding on top of this. It creates a callous.

Speaker 2 And you got to be able to break through that.

Speaker 2 From a psychological perspective, an emotional perspective, it accelerates that back. And you can kind of reset.

Speaker 2 You really can.

Speaker 2 I can't imagine.

Speaker 2 I was thinking about this from my dad's like 80 years old, right? I'm like, man,

Speaker 1 if

Speaker 2 he's got, he's got lung cancer now. And I'm like, gosh, if he could

Speaker 2 coalesce

Speaker 2 around

Speaker 2 killing ego and past and try to understand himself from a different more introspective way this would take decades maybe of talk therapy or

Speaker 2 a session where you could you could really accelerate your growth as an individual I think that's what for for GWAT vets and for vets in general. I mean, I think that's what

Speaker 2 they're missing. This key component is being able to retouch with their emotional strength and be able to balance these things out where

Speaker 2 you can evolve and live your life.

Speaker 2 Do you think, you've said it before, I don't know if you said it on a show, but do you think

Speaker 2 society would benefit from it?

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people would benefit from it, but I think a lot of people wouldn't. I don't think people with real psychological disorders should be doing it.
Right.

Speaker 1 You know, I think people that are really fucked up and having a hard time with schizophrenics people you know i don't know i think it's probably dangerous for you i think it's probably a bit of a stress test for your psyche you know you hear about these stories like the guy from pink floyd that dropped acid and freaked out never came back there's those stories like we hear those stories of guys just go out there and kind of you lose them

Speaker 1 I've kind of seen it with some people. I've seen it with one kid who was just like smoking a ton of weed and just lost his mind and became schizophrenic.
And you don't know.

Speaker 1 Like, did he have a tendency towards schizophrenia already? Did he fall prey? Was it just his unique biochemistry and how he interacted with weed? Was it just inveterate wheat?

Speaker 1 I mean, he was every day. He was smoking weed constantly.
What is it? Like, what caused him to crack? You know, I don't know. I don't know.
But I don't have that problem.

Speaker 1 And I think it's very beneficial. And I don't like when people tell me that because someone has a problem with something that I shouldn't do it.
I don't agree with that.

Speaker 1 i think you should be allowed to take chances as a person i think if you want to do bmx jumps and fucking do flips on your bike you should be allowed to do it you want to do jiu-jitsu and have grown men try to kill you go ahead go do it do whatever the fuck you want to do i don't think anybody should be able to tell you what you what you can and can't do but why does that change when you talk about substances that someone puts in their body well because those people could do those and then they could commit crimes but those are already crimes Like you already go to jail for those crimes.

Speaker 1 So like if you do something violent because you're on a drug, you're going to jail because you did something violent. Like, there's a crime, you committed that crime, you go to jail.

Speaker 1 So, like, we already have laws

Speaker 1 that address all the problems. And you're assuming that more problems would occur.
We don't know that. We don't know that.

Speaker 1 We don't know that more people won't chill the fuck out and wouldn't have a dramatic decrease in violence across the country. Imagine that.

Speaker 1 Imagine you have a few people that lose their fucking mind, but you have a dramatic increase in consciousness through the entire country where people develop like a mushroom culture and people start like micro-dosing all the time and people get way more comfortable with talking to each other, way more creative, way more like community oriented and love oriented.

Speaker 1 That's not a bad thing.

Speaker 1 That's a real possibility with something that exists right now. There's a happy pill.
It's out there and it's illegal. And God made it.

Speaker 1 God made it. And it's probably the source of most religious experiences.

Speaker 1 It's probably some sort of a connection to a lot of those religious experiments, or experiences rather, and what was probably some sort of a psychedelic adventure that they went on.

Speaker 1 And who's to say that that's not even how you talk to God in the first place? We don't know because

Speaker 1 it's been held back from us. It's been kept from us like we're a bunch of babies.
It's something that human beings have used for thousands and thousands of years.

Speaker 1 The Greeks used psychedelics to start democracy.

Speaker 1 And yet here we are in the greatest democracy the world's ever known in 2024 with full access to the internet, all the data that's available, all the anecdotal stories, and it'll get you locked in a fucking cage.

Speaker 1 That's nuts.

Speaker 1 That's really crazy. It's completely insane.
That doesn't make no sense. I've tried to look at it from all different ways.

Speaker 1 I do agree with you when people say if you make cocaine legal, people are going to die. Unfortunately, I agree with you.
But if you don't make cocaine legal, people are also going to die.

Speaker 1 I don't know which one is more. And I don't know if it was just real cocaine versus cocaine mixed with a bunch of other horrible shit.
If, like, the real cocaine wouldn't kill as many people.

Speaker 1 I don't know how many people are dying just of cocaine and how many people are dying of fentanyl-laced cocaine. I bet it's way more fentanyl-laced cocaine.

Speaker 1 So, if you have just pure cocaine and the same amount of users, you're going to get way less deaths. So, that's a net positive.

Speaker 1 Then, you take taxes from that sale of that legal cocaine and you use it to sell up rehabilitation centers where you give them ibogaine. Give people the ability to break addictions.
It's possible.

Speaker 1 People do it. They go to Mexico, kick opioids.
People do it all the time. My friend Ed Clay did it.
That's how he got into it.

Speaker 1 He started his own clinic because he went down there because he had a pill problem. You get an injury.
You're doing jiu-jitsu, you're always fucking hurt.

Speaker 1 These guys get a disc problem, their arms all fucked up. They take a little pill.

Speaker 1 You feel better. But then you need three pills.
Then you need four. Now you're fucked.
And now there's nothing nothing to help you other than ibogaine. And that's illegal.
So you make that legal too.

Speaker 1 So with those two together, who knows? You might have way less deaths. And then you would have taxes that you could take from that stuff and use for all sorts of things.

Speaker 1 It would be horrible for taxes from cocaine sales to fix the schools. But what if that's what did it? What if that's what did it?

Speaker 1 And what if the exact same amount of people buying cocaine are still buying cocaine? What if that is the fix?

Speaker 1 And what if responsible use of drugs, all kinds of drugs? Sure, don't drive a car when you're coked up. Don't take heroin and fly your plane.
No, responsible use, just like responsible use of alcohol.

Speaker 1 Why is that so crazy for us? Why is that so alien? Because we've been turned into babies.

Speaker 1 We've been turned into babies where you're allowed to take pharmaceutical drugs that make you high as fuck, whether it's high as fuck on Adderall or high as fuck on opioid.

Speaker 1 That's fine, but you can't go out and get yourself some mushrooms. That's just crazy.

Speaker 1 And for these people that are the ones in charge that are making all the money from these decisions to keep up with this insanity in the internet in 2024 in this tide of change, I feel the same way about them as you feel about those poor cartel members.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 you probably should be doing something else.

Speaker 1 What is this?

Speaker 1 Weed and fentanyl? Short answer is they're false. There's no solid evidence that marijuana is being laced with fentanyl.
Here are some of the reasons why.

Speaker 1 Didn't someone get caught with it, though?

Speaker 1 At the bottom, it says that there's been a few publicly stated media stories that have said that's what the case was.

Speaker 1 We were talking about one, then they said there was weed that was laced with fentanyl that someone got arrested for.

Speaker 1 It says lab tests claims that they were errors, and then the corrections don't make the headlines. Hmm.
How do you get an error? How much fentanyl fentanyl is out there? There's an error.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was just contamination. And it wasn't the weed that had fentanyl.
Fentanyl's all over the place. It could have just been a field test.

Speaker 1 They could have just been like, does this have fentanyl on it?

Speaker 1 They rub the weed, and the weed comes back like, yep, someone touched fentanyl and they touched the weed, and now you've got fentanyl-laced weed.

Speaker 1 It could be that.

Speaker 1 That actually does make sense, right? Because if you think it's some cracked-out dude working in weed fields for the cartel, he's probably going to be doing fentanyl.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's going to be doing fentanyl.

Speaker 2 He's going to be all on everything, basically. So it's going to pop positive on everything.

Speaker 1 He's on a tent in the fucking woods with a little Virgin Mary statue. Like, for real.
I know. He's going to get candles and

Speaker 1 having shootouts with the fucking cops. It's so crazy that that's going on.
And that there's hundreds of them. And that the Chinese are running them.

Speaker 2 Like, this is the most insane part where it's like everybody knows what's going on.

Speaker 2 All these chemicals are coming from China. They're being offloaded into Mexico and South America.
They're being produced

Speaker 2 and then they're they're pushed across the border.

Speaker 1 Everybody knows. Did you ever talk to Mike Baker about any of this stuff?

Speaker 2 No, I've never actually talked to Mike Baker.

Speaker 1 Do you know him? You never met him? I've never met him. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I got to bring you two guys together.

Speaker 1 I love that dude. But one of the things that he was telling me was about the Chinese sell cell phone towers like cheaper.
Right. They're like, you just buy ours.
We're not going to listen to you.

Speaker 1 And they put them all around military bases. We promise we're not going to listen to you.

Speaker 2 Hey, guys, the Chinese said they're not going to listen to us.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's good enough enough for me. They're around this nuclear weapons facility.
Of course. They're all over the place.
And then they buy land. Like, Dr.
Phil was highlighting that.

Speaker 1 They buy land right next to military bases. Like,

Speaker 1 how fucking silly are we? This is so, we're so silly. Like, someone's moving our chess pieces around.
We're like, oh, this isn't happening. This isn't even happening.
They think like that.

Speaker 1 There's no way they'd be buying up all the weed. There's no way they'd be buying up all the farmland right next to the military.

Speaker 2 There's no way they would be exporting chemicals so they could manufacture fentanyl to come in and

Speaker 2 eviscerate 200,000 fucking people.

Speaker 1 There's no way they're

Speaker 1 no way they would do that. There's no way.
That's crazy to even think. Meanwhile, the only way you get those chemicals is from China.
The only way you can get them is from China.

Speaker 1 They send them to Mexico. They cook it up.
They send it our way.

Speaker 2 But no, there's no way the Chinese are thinking that maliciously.

Speaker 1 There's no way. There's no way.
Well, aren't they still mad at us for the opium wars?

Speaker 2 I think the Chinese are not necessarily mad at us. They're just thinking about themselves from a hundred-year vision, and they're saying, okay, where do we,

Speaker 2 where and how do we ascend to

Speaker 2 being able to take place, take America's place as the international superpower. Right.
So I don't know if they necessarily have an opinion-based axe to grind.

Speaker 2 It's more about how do we put the pieces together to take the pole position away from the the United States?

Speaker 1 I'm sure that's their primary goal. But I do remember reading something where they were talking about, was it British? Who, there was people that introduced opium to the Chinese, like on purpose.

Speaker 1 It was like a campaign. The First Opium War.
1800s. Okay.

Speaker 1 Britain, the war was triggered by China's efforts to enforce its ban on opium. The British responded by sending a naval expedition to force China to pay reparations and allow the opium trade.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the British wanted to keep that fucking dope flowing. Isn't that wild? They went to war to keep the dope flowing.

Speaker 1 This is what people have to recognize about Afghanistan, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is something that it sounds so conspiracy theory that no one even wants to touch it. But the troops had to guard the poppy fields.

Speaker 1 Afghanistan heroin went way up when

Speaker 1 it went way, way up. Their production went way up.
They were supplying at one point in time. What was the number, Jamie? What percentage?

Speaker 1 Was that what it was? 70% of the world's heroin was coming out of a place that we had occupied.

Speaker 2 Well, and the other issue is that

Speaker 2 the Taliban was using the opium essentially to fund their growth in

Speaker 2 their militia. So the DEA was out there.
So you had the DEA out in Afghanistan doing direct action ops.

Speaker 2 And you had soft guys that were going out walking through poppy fields and marijuana fields and all these other things. Then you'd pass it off to the DEA.

Speaker 1 90%.

Speaker 2 Oh, 95, yeah.

Speaker 1 In 2021, 90%. 90%.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 2 You destabilize the entire country. You deter everyone from actually

Speaker 2 focusing on the opium. You focus on terrorism and the Taliban.
And then you allow it to flourish. And

Speaker 2 the dirty secret nobody wants to talk about

Speaker 2 from that perspective is that

Speaker 2 we as a country have dealt with a lot of shady opium dealers, like drug lords that were essentially exporting opium.

Speaker 2 And if they weren't part of the Taliban and/or if they were anti-Taliban, you do business with them. It's the same story.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What's your triage of priorities? So, you know, how, hey,

Speaker 2 we need to get, you know, we need to fund our army in South America. So, hey, how do we do that?

Speaker 2 Let's import some coca.

Speaker 2 You know, let's invent a market because we got to get, you know, we got to push back against the commies in Nicaragua. It's the same story.
It's a different story. Do you know?

Speaker 1 I've had Freeway Ricky Ross on like two or three times. I had him on recently.
I had him on recently. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he was the guy. He was the guy who was making millions, millions and millions and millions dollars.
He couldn't read. He was making millions of dollars selling Coke for the fucking government.

Speaker 1 Myanmar overtakes Afghanistan and the world's top opium producer.

Speaker 1 Violent political turmoil in Myanmar in the years since 2021 coup has contributed to a production increase. Wow, so they took over.

Speaker 1 That quick.

Speaker 1 What's that?

Speaker 2 Check this out.

Speaker 1 Meth is cheaper than beer there.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of drugs going on there. Whoa, 25 cents each.

Speaker 1 That's all. Imagine for a quarter, you could do meth.

Speaker 2 The golden triangle.

Speaker 1 Imagine doing meth. Imagine doing that quarter.

Speaker 1 What kind of judgment do you have? You pop that 25-cent meth and fucking chug it down with a Budweiser. What are you doing, man? What kind of life are you living?

Speaker 1 This guy said he took 10 pills his first time. Oh, 10 pills? How did it work out? I took 10 pills and I was totally lost.
Didn't recognize my family. Whoa.
Didn't recognize my children. Son.

Speaker 1 Couldn't sleep at all. I didn't drink.
I didn't eat. I felt powerful.

Speaker 1 The last one's so perfect. I felt powerful.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look, I don't think that should be legal, but, well, here. I don't think you should do it, but I think it should be legal.
I think if it's not legal, the cartel sells it.

Speaker 1 You just have to figure out what to do with the money that you're going to make from it because that's devil money. Like, you're selling meth money.
Like, that's devil money.

Speaker 1 You're ruining people's lives. There's going to be a bunch of, like, slippery people that are kind of hanging on, but doing their best, and you're gonna meth them down the road to oblivion.

Speaker 1 That's true, that's true, that's true, but that's not gonna happen to me.

Speaker 1 I'm not gonna get methed out, I'm not gonna try it. I haven't even tried Adderall, I'm scared of it.
So, some people are gonna figure it out, just like most things in life,

Speaker 1 just like drinking, just like driving, just like doing jiu-jitsu, just like riding a BMX bike. Some people are gonna get hurt.

Speaker 1 So, we have to decide what's more valuable to you, nerfing the whole fucking world

Speaker 1 or people figuring out what's best for everybody. And the only way to do that is to give people freedom.
That's it. It's the only way that works.

Speaker 1 We figure out what works, what doesn't work by successes and failures, and we all adjust along the way. But you got to give people freedom.
Freedom and information.

Speaker 1 Those are two very important things. When you're suppressing either one of them, you can't be the good guy.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no. You're not the good bot.
You're not the good guy. Freedom has to be sacred across the board, which freedom comes with accountability, which means responsibility.

Speaker 2 And that's the problem is that when freedom,

Speaker 2 I think when you can distill it down and you can create control, then you can create profit. So power, control, and profit, those things like they directly have this confluence where

Speaker 2 people in power will obviously manipulate that and they'll restrict our freedom.

Speaker 1 Yes, especially if they can make more money.

Speaker 2 100%.

Speaker 1 Have more control, have more power.

Speaker 2 And if COVID taught us anything, it taught us that we can't forfeit freedom to low IQ, power-hungry bureaucrats that want to affect our life because they're stupid.

Speaker 2 So why would we ever give away our freedom to a bunch of stupid bureaucrats?

Speaker 2 Exactly. That to me is the fundamental difference between the entire election process.
It's like, how do I maintain or increase my individual accountability, which comes with freedom, right?

Speaker 2 And how, if we want to capitulate that, that's the other side. I think that's a referendum on freedom.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I don't want to oversimplify it, but that's kind of where I think it is. It's where it is.

Speaker 1 You're not oversimplifying it. If you don't have that, you don't have any of these things.
No. You don't have any growth.
You don't.

Speaker 1 You're going to have people that are in power that stifle discourse. They're going to stifle debate.
They're going to stifle it because they only want their side to be heard.

Speaker 1 It's that lady at the table telling me that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray was hate speech. It's those people.

Speaker 1 You're going to have those people dictating what you can and can't talk about based on their own morals. And you don't even know how they think about things.
You don't even know them.

Speaker 1 They don't do podcasts.

Speaker 1 They're not hanging out with you at the bar. You're not going to dinner with them.
You don't fucking know them. So you don't know if they're making good judgment calls.

Speaker 1 You don't know if their assessment of something is something you agree with or if it's even rational. You don't know.
You just, these weird strikes you get on your account.

Speaker 1 You get like this fear-based letter that comes to you. If you do this again, you're fucked.
You're like, oh no, now what do I do?

Speaker 1 Well, I better self-censor and go along with the machine and stop misgendering people and stop doing this and stop doing that and stop saying this.

Speaker 1 And then you're fucked. And then you're fucked.
And then you might as well be living in any other country that's controlled by a dictator. It's just a dictator by a different name.

Speaker 1 That's all it is. It's fascism, but it's not right-wing fascism.
It's left-wing fascism. It's adherence to the state.
They want you to go along with the mandate.

Speaker 1 The way they talk about things, the way you have to talk about things.

Speaker 1 And to think, if anything, this election was a giant fuck you to all that, where everybody was like, fuck, you guys are fucking crazy. We see where this is going.

Speaker 1 You're going right off a cliff and you're running. And if anything, they showed you about that,

Speaker 1 the Harris budget, which has spent a billion dollars,

Speaker 1 580 million of it or something like that was for staff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 580 million.

Speaker 1 And there's all this money that went to all these outreach groups and all these different and celebrities. And like, what the fuck is this? And then they're $20 million in debt at the end of it.

Speaker 1 And you want to manage the economy?

Speaker 1 This sounds crazy. This is, what did you do? Like, what happened here? Who went crazy with a checkbook? Yeah.
Who went

Speaker 1 hog wild? Who went hog wild?

Speaker 2 Nobody in the administration has ever been business, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, like,

Speaker 1 nobody. Find out what the numbers were to staff.
Because I want to be accurate about that, but I think I am. I think it was 580 million.
And I was watching this on Fox News, and they don't lie.

Speaker 1 No, they don't.

Speaker 2 They never lie.

Speaker 1 They had a giant lawsuit, right? The Dominion lawsuit. Yeah, that was a big one.
They got hit. I had a piss.
All right, let's take a little break here, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they said it on Fox News, Jamie, so it has to be true.

Speaker 2 It has to be true.

Speaker 1 Man, that's way better. Oh, fuck.
No, better than Fox News.

Speaker 1 Patrick Bett-David. I know, I know.
I'm telling you, I see the tweets that say that, but Fox News' website says the campaign spent $56 million on payroll and payroll taxes. So what's that other money?

Speaker 1 But wasn't there all the money that they had spent on

Speaker 1 activism? Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Didn't they count that in staff?

Speaker 1 I don't know. This all comes from like Twitter.
I don't know where well if it comes from Twitter Jamie. It's real.
I'm just telling you. Stop being a fucking party pooper.

Speaker 1 People asking for their scroll up and let me see what this says. It says

Speaker 1 but no, um s I'm sorry. I'll scroll down a little.
I just want to see what it all it says.

Speaker 1 So it says Kamala raised one point zero zero three billion. She spent one point three seven billion.
She spent five hundred and eighty two point five three million on staff.

Speaker 1 I that's that That doesn't add up because I saw she spent $680 million on ads. So those two numbers, you know, there's no money left over for everything else.
Right. So one of the two isn't correct.

Speaker 1 One of them is. How much does she spend on ads? $680 million or something.
Oh, my God. That's like the.
She has done my podcast for free.

Speaker 2 Dude, that is like

Speaker 2 the secret. It's not even a secret.

Speaker 2 When it's campaign time

Speaker 2 and you have all these ads, these ad guys that are out there, they're buying up all the ads, and it's a wash in money.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 2 hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're just pipelining campaign donations into ads.

Speaker 2 And it's like loading up their money guns and just shooting it into space.

Speaker 1 That's what they're doing.

Speaker 1 That is what it's like, right?

Speaker 1 And they've been telling people that this is effective. Yeah.
And so they have this business going.

Speaker 2 It's just complete absurdity.

Speaker 1 Don't get me wrong.

Speaker 2 I actually, politics is so fun for me because I think it's really interesting. And it's like,

Speaker 2 I can't get into football or anything else because I like the data associated with things. And if I got into football, I'd be like one of those fantasy football dorks and I can't get into it.

Speaker 2 And so politics is one of those things where I'm like, I follow it. I love it.
It's interesting.

Speaker 2 Just trying to understand the strategy behind it.

Speaker 1 I've changed my opinion of it a little bit since the election.

Speaker 1 I don't think

Speaker 1 the control, the grip of the control of the country is as strong as I thought it was.

Speaker 1 I thought this concept, so everyone has a concept of they. They don't want you to know things.
They're controlling things.

Speaker 1 I have a feeling that in times of crisis, like what we find ourselves currently in, it's like when the lights come on and roaches scatter. That's what I have a feeling.

Speaker 1 I have a feeling there's no way that they can trust each other and that they all know that a certain percentage of people are going down for corruption.

Speaker 1 There's a certain percentage of people that did some dirty shit.

Speaker 1 There's some connections with organizations and corporations and some emails. Save your emails.
It's one of the things that Rocky

Speaker 1 said, yeah.

Speaker 1 Preserve your records and pack your bags. Dude,

Speaker 1 so epic. Yeah, that's epic.
Preserve your records because we know you're all a bunch of liars. Yes.

Speaker 1 We've caught you already on emails lying about stuff. So this is, you've all perjured yourselves.
Like Fauci perjured himself. There's no if I'm so just a definition of gain of function.

Speaker 1 Like, shut the fuck up. You don't change the definition and make it ultra super nuanced so that it fits in your little excuse box of why you didn't fund gain of function research.
The fuck you didn't.

Speaker 1 That's what you did. That's what it is.
And when Rand Paul was confronting him with it, that was like one of the craziest moments. You, sir, do not know what you are talking about.

Speaker 1 It's like an evil villain. Yeah.
Yeah. An evil villain that just lied to everybody and got away with it.
And no repercussions.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I think that's like the story over and over for these guys that are in power. There's no repercussions.
Yeah. There's no accountability.

Speaker 2 I oftentimes think of Dick Cheney as a guy sitting back in like a high-back leather chair

Speaker 2 in a big

Speaker 2 black tile tile office that's completely shiny with a white cat on his lap, like just petting it. That's the way I think about that fucking guy.
Like fuck that guy.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 these guys,

Speaker 2 to keep flashing back to this, but it forever fucking changed me, right? Where I'm like,

Speaker 2 these guys fucked up so many people's lives.

Speaker 1 Like countless,

Speaker 2 countless lives. And the fact that they still think they have public trust with zero accountability,

Speaker 2 man.

Speaker 1 How wild was it when Dick Cheney was endorsing Obama, or excuse me, was endorsing Kamala?

Speaker 2 Of course he was.

Speaker 1 And everybody was like, yeah, look at that, right-wing people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, you might as well have painted. If you would have been a NASCAR driver, he would have had a Lockheed Martin fucking jersey on right then at that point.
Or Satan. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Satan and Lockheed Martin working to get sponsored by Satan.

Speaker 2 Patches on his uniform, like that Chappelle. Remember that fucking Chappelle skit where it's like with politicians

Speaker 2 where they're NASCAR drivers?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I already like the mash.

Speaker 1 Satan would be amazing. Or just all caps on the back, Satan.

Speaker 1 And the liberals would still find a way.

Speaker 1 It's like Satanism in the classical sense. It was just like a rejection of the norm.

Speaker 2 I mean, think about it. He's a fallen angel.
You know, I mean, think about how bad that is.

Speaker 2 We have to think about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Dick Cheney's basically a fallen angel.

Speaker 2 Have you seen those Babylon Bee skits where it's like Satan talking to the Democrats about like, dude, you guys fuck.

Speaker 2 You guys jumped a shark on this. What are you doing?

Speaker 1 It's so good. Did you see the Babylon Bees one recently where they were talking about criticizing Trump's new appointments in comparison to Biden's appointments? Have you seen it? No.

Speaker 1 It's just images.

Speaker 1 I can find it. So you can find it.
Yeah, because it's on

Speaker 2 dude.

Speaker 1 It's just the bald dude with the dress. It's the other dude who's the first female admiral.
It's the first female admiral. Imagine if you're a woman and you're trying to become an admiral.

Speaker 1 This motherfucker just jumps the line. He's like, okay, yeah, cool.

Speaker 1 Have you seen it?

Speaker 2 That whole thing with like the, it's like the Avengers United. Here it is.

Speaker 1 The Biden administration declares Trump cabinet picks unqualified.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, if you just look at that thing, and then you look at, like, and when I say things, right, it's just like you look at this thing and then you can do a direct comparison.

Speaker 1 Like, okay. You know who scares the fuck out of me? Who? The new borders are.

Speaker 2 Oh, dude, he's a bad motherfucker.

Speaker 1 He scares me.

Speaker 1 He scares me. I imagine myself with a backpack sneaking across the Rio Grande and that fucking guy's there.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, what did he say?

Speaker 2 He was like, ah.

Speaker 1 About families? Is there any way to not separate families? Yes.

Speaker 1 He deported them together. He deported them them all.

Speaker 2 You know what it reminded me of? You remember that?

Speaker 1 It's just like he said it. I was like, whoa.

Speaker 1 Well, this is getting dark.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 See, I'm like a bleeding heart. Like, I want people from another country that are poor to make their way here and make a better life.
I want that. I just wanted to be scanned.

Speaker 1 I want to know what the fuck is coming over. I want to make sure they're not cartel members.
I want to make sure they're not terrorists.

Speaker 1 But I'm all for people that want a better life because I would do it.

Speaker 1 I'd be a complete total hypocrite if I said I lived in Guatemala in some village and there's no power and I found out that I could walk to America and if I did it, it'd take three days and then I can get a job in the fields and then I make way more money and I could send money home and everybody could have clean water.

Speaker 1 I'd fucking do it. You would do it.
We'd all do it. So I get

Speaker 1 that's the part of me is like, man, I don't want to send anybody back. But the other part of me is like,

Speaker 1 what about terrorists? Like, what about checking for cartel members? What about the fentanyl that's coming through? Like, you can't have an open border.

Speaker 2 I believe in it, like, I believe in a meritocracy, right? It's like, may the best idea prevail. May the hardest workers prevail.

Speaker 2 The problem is, is when we export all of our manufacturing to China, when we have an like South American, we have a border crisis.

Speaker 2 And obviously I'm a coffee guy, so I think about coffee all the time. And I think about Nicaragua, El Salvador, like all of the South American and Central American countries that grow coffee.

Speaker 2 And I talk to the farmers and

Speaker 2 all we have to pay them is five or ten cents more a pound, depending on the coffee. And most of the time, when I'm talking about coffees, I'm like, yeah, no problem, 10 cents more.
Who cares?

Speaker 2 What that allows them to do is build schools, pay a livable wage, all the things that they need to do to be successful in Guatemala,

Speaker 2 Nicaragua, wherever they're going, wherever we're talking about. So I think about this like, okay, so we're exporting these manufacturing jobs to China.

Speaker 2 And if we're just concentrating on economic policies in this hemisphere, where

Speaker 2 from a national security perspective, if we're exporting jobs to South America, we're creating economic opportunity and mobility in South America and Central America, we're creating jobs, economic stability, generational wealth, and we're also solving one of the issues that we're having, which is a

Speaker 2 border crisis.

Speaker 2 It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me to say, hey, we want to export. And I know this started with the Nixon administration.
And, you know, you have essentially slave labor, which

Speaker 2 I'm 110% against, which I don't think in any way, shape, or form we should support economically.

Speaker 2 So if we're to export and look at this from a manufacturing and industry perspective from this hemisphere, how do we

Speaker 2 align ourselves around strategic stability? How do we protect against our border crisis? How do we still import? Because I mean, I know Americans love their cheap goods, like they love their shit.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? They still want to have this decreased labor cost.

Speaker 2 I think investing in South and Central America is just not a bad thing. If we're not going to invest in America because of the cost, then we have to invest in this hemisphere.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, it makes sense that if you want to make the world a better place and you want less people trying to sneak into our country, one of the best ways ways is to make their country better.

Speaker 1 Right. But we've got to do it ethically.
The crazy thing, and we've beaten this horse a thousand times, is that everybody has a phone and everybody's phone is made by slaves. Right.

Speaker 1 And if it's not made by slaves, the cobalt that's in it,

Speaker 1 there's a real high chance that it came from someone with a fucking stick poking it into the ground and digging it out for you. Right.
And that's everybody.

Speaker 1 We have to take a hard look at all this stuff. We should be making our phones in America.
We should be making our phones in America with American minerals.

Speaker 1 They're their source for people that get paid a fair labor rate wage. They get health benefits.
There's OSHA. People check on things.
Make sure that regulations are in place.

Speaker 1 Make sure that people get like, make sure that they're making enough money to

Speaker 1 make a living, to live, a livable wage.

Speaker 1 You have to do that in America if you want to do it legally. The only reason to do it somewhere else is so that you can do something legal because it's legal there, but it's not legal where you live.

Speaker 1 It shouldn't be legal to have people people working in another country for you for fucking 15 cents an hour. It's just, it's too crazy.

Speaker 1 It's too crazy that you just cross this dirt path and now you're allowed to be a piece of shit. Like, it seems crazy.

Speaker 1 But if you're doing it the right way and you're paying people well and you're allowing people to like thrive in a place where there was nothing before, yeah,

Speaker 1 you can give people a pathway to do a lot of different things.

Speaker 1 Economic success opens up a lot of fucking doors, especially with education, especially with safety, with schools, with better communities. People have money.
There's not so much tension.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's good. It's good to have a thriving industry.
It's good to have a thriving economy. It's good for everybody.
It's just not good for everybody, everybody.

Speaker 1 There's always going to be people that suffer in every kind of economy, in every kind of situation in the world. There's going to be people that suffer.

Speaker 1 And like we were talking about on the way here, like some of it's just luck.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of luck. There's a lot of luck.
Luck is, luck's a real thing, you know, good and bad. And it's, there's, you know,

Speaker 1 that's one of the most important things about having some success in this life, you know, is having the humility to understand that you just got lucky as fuck.

Speaker 1 You're lucky as fuck if you're alive, especially you, right? You're lucky as fuck you're alive.

Speaker 2 You know how lucky I am? It's like tenfold order. I got all my fingers and toes.

Speaker 1 It's, it's,

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 incredible. Incredible business.
Like, I think. Good friend of mine.

Speaker 2 God, man.

Speaker 2 Like, it's so incredible when you think about like the birthplace lottery of hitting the jackpot.

Speaker 1 Like, holy shit. I think in this time, too.
Yeah. I think we're so lucky in this time.
I think I'm particularly lucky because I grew up before the internet was at all. Like, how old are you? 47.

Speaker 1 So I'm 10 years older than you. So when I was

Speaker 1 like 30, no, I think I was 27 when the internet became like a normal thing to have in your house and you had a dial-up.

Speaker 1 And you turned on America, got mail, or you got mail. You've got mail on AOL.

Speaker 1 So from that point on, the fucking world changed so wildly and so quickly that we weren't even really noticing it while it was changing. And now here we are.

Speaker 1 Here we are in 2024, where it seems like the most chaotic, the most weird. Trump just won again.

Speaker 1 Somehow or another, I helped him. Like, all this is fucking crazy.
Like, this is the wildest timeline ever.

Speaker 2 This is the most, what we're talking about. This is the most optimistic

Speaker 2 I've been in in our country.

Speaker 2 This is the most optimistic I've been in my adult life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the moment that he won like that in a landslide, I was like, maybe they don't have such a grasp. And maybe this will open up the door to making things more rational and balanced.

Speaker 1 And we can stop a lot of this fucking awful corruption that's just intertwined, like the mycelium that's under the soil. Yeah.
The corruption just intertwined. And a lot of it's legal corruption.

Speaker 2 Dude, it's insane. When you think about,

Speaker 2 obviously, I'm super interested in the military-industrial complex, but when you think about, you know, we had, we'll say,

Speaker 2 50, 60

Speaker 2 military-industrial contractors at the start of

Speaker 2 9-11, and then now we're down to five. And we think of $860 billion

Speaker 2 of annual debt associated with the defense budget, which has has gone up since our height in the world on terror or the war on terror.

Speaker 2 And we have five guys or five big companies that are basically taking 50%

Speaker 2 of that 860.

Speaker 2 And then 50% of that

Speaker 2 is profit.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 how is it happening? When you think of this triangular effect between the military-industrial complex and, okay, you have the revolving door between the Pentagon.

Speaker 2 So every star that comes out of the Pentagon goes back into the military-industrial complex with X amount of years of disassociation and blah, blah, blah. It's okay.

Speaker 2 Then you go back into the military-industrial complex, so you go into like Lockheed, Raytheon, one of the top five.

Speaker 2 Then you have congressmen and senators that are making decisions specifically related to the budget and the military, the defense budget.

Speaker 2 They're lobbying to increase defense spending, but then they also have

Speaker 2 factories that are related to like the F-35 or some big military contract where they're making 40, 30, 40, 50%

Speaker 2 in profit. So they're the guys that are lobbying to increase the defense budget.
Their campaigns are being paid for by the military-industrial complex.

Speaker 2 They're directly increasing the military budget.

Speaker 2 It's a self-licking ice cream cone. It's insane.
It's completely insane. And the fact that we don't have any

Speaker 2 strict firewalls and separation from

Speaker 2 ethics and

Speaker 2 I'm not against people creating jobs in their state. That's not what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 I'm saying the fact that there are not strict firewalls between the fact that you're going to directly profit and/or your campaigns are paid for by the people that you will lobby to go in and increase the taxpayer's

Speaker 2 liability. I was thinking about this the other day.
I was like, if the taxpayer had an itemized

Speaker 2 look at where their taxes go,

Speaker 2 it just came out annually or once a month or whatever it is, and they looked at what they were paying for, I'm pretty sure they might have a more vested interest into how much they're paying, what they're paying for, and saying, you know what, maybe we shouldn't be asleep at the wheel.

Speaker 2 Maybe we should probably pay a little bit more attention to this.

Speaker 1 Isn't that amazing that you don't get an itemized list, but you're required to give an extraordinary percentage of your money to the government?

Speaker 1 Like, what is the tax bracket of someone who makes a million dollars a year? What is that? 40%.

Speaker 1 40%? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 43%, probably.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's imagine you're paying 40%

Speaker 1 in income taxes. Then, if you live in California, you pay another 14.4%, I think it is, something like that.
And then I think it's another 1% if you live in the city of Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 So now

Speaker 1 you're down to 30, what, 34%? What do you get there? Somewhere in the high 30s. So then you have sales tax on everything you buy.
You have property tax. You have insurance.

Speaker 1 You have whatever your house costs. You don't have a lot of money left over.

Speaker 1 And the government doesn't even have to tell you what they're spending it on. Like you probably get less less than they do.
If you really think about it, if they get 40%,

Speaker 1 let's just say you don't have tax shelters and all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 But if you pay 40% in income taxes, and then after all the shit, like after all, property tax and state tax and this tax and sales tax, like, what do you have? How much did you get? What did you get?

Speaker 1 How much money did you actually get? Like, I bet the government got more than you got, bitch. 70% of your time at work is working for the Fed.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is so bananas that you don't even get an itemized list of what they spend it on.

Speaker 2 I have to file my audited financials, right? I think about this all the time.

Speaker 1 I have to.

Speaker 2 It's a requirement. I have to pass them.
Right.

Speaker 2 The Pentagon

Speaker 2 hasn't passed an audit in decades. They have like 60%, we'll just say 50% of the Pentagon's expenses.
They're like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know where it went.

Speaker 2 Sorry. Shit out of looks, taxpayer.
So, how is it? It's this rules, rules for thee, not for me.

Speaker 1 Don't

Speaker 1 always miss their audits. Yes, there's how bad.
How many times do they miss their audits?

Speaker 1 Through the IRS. The

Speaker 1 Pentagon.

Speaker 1 How many times?

Speaker 1 I think it's like it's crazy numbers, too. Like, whoopsies.
Oops.

Speaker 2 I just forgot about that $300 billion.

Speaker 1 Article 1.21 says they've never passed an audit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there we go. There we go.
There we go. So it's rules.
It's rules for thee, not for me. They've never passed an audit.

Speaker 1 Never. Yeah.
Come on, never.

Speaker 1 Never.

Speaker 1 Never.

Speaker 1 The Pentagon's accounting records are so convoluted that billions of dollars cannot be accounted for. Charges a new government report.
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. That is so crazy.
Never? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you'll go to jail if you don't pay these.

Speaker 2 You'll go to jail if if you're not paying your taxes.

Speaker 2 You haven't survived an audit.

Speaker 1 It's funny. It's so funny.

Speaker 1 Despite having trillions of dollars in assets and receiving hundreds of billions in federal dollars annually, the department has never detailed its assets and liabilities in a given year.

Speaker 1 For the past three financial years, the Defense Department's audit has resulted in a disclaimer of opinion, meaning the auditor didn't get enough accounting records to form an assessment.

Speaker 1 Like, sorry, we don't have any paperwork.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Where'd the money go? I forgot. Gotta go.

Speaker 2 I'm just a military guy.

Speaker 1 We are just trying to keep America safe. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's what it is. What if all of it's going to UFOs?

Speaker 1 What if all of it's going to UFOs? What if all of it's going to some propulsion research thing that they're doing? They've got UFOs. They're just not telling us.
What are they spending it on?

Speaker 1 How much of it is getting greased into the side pockets of people?

Speaker 2 But even then, from a transparency perspective, does it not shake out for us?

Speaker 2 Because if we were saying, hey, we're going to spend, I don't know, let's just call it $100 billion on like black fund experimental technology to maintain our strategic hedge of money.

Speaker 1 I like how you wrote the Senate like that. That's super official.

Speaker 2 Do you think that we would all be like, no? I mean, it's better than not passing a fucking audit where you're like,

Speaker 1 I don't know where it goes, maybe. I'd rather you tell me that you can't tell me than tell me you don't know.

Speaker 2 Right. Tell me you can't tell me.

Speaker 1 Tell me you can't tell me despite costing more than 1.7 trillion in its estimated life cycle attempts to audit the program have run into major hurdles oh the f-35 so this is just the f-35 the f-35 had some propulsion money it could 1.7 trillion it probably

Speaker 1 i'm sure i'm sure look if area 51 exists and now we know it does for sure it was a real base they said it wasn't a base forever and then during the obama administration they had to expand the boundaries because surveillance equipment and binoculars and telescopes are getting better and more sophisticated.

Speaker 1 And they were filming things that were flying around they shouldn't have been filming. So they expanded the boundaries.
They had to say that Area 51 existed. Right, right.
So what was that?

Speaker 1 Where'd you get the money? What'd you do? What are you doing down there? Why do people say you have UFOs? What the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 1 Why do you have a base in the middle of fucking nowhere that's built into the side of a mountain? Like, why are you guys acting like this is an Avengers movie? What are you doing out here?

Speaker 2 Once again, it goes back to just transparency.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or you can't tell me because you think I'm a fucking baby.
Like, the same reason why you think I can't have mushrooms.

Speaker 2 The same reason why we can't have full disclosure of the JFK assassination, right? There's 4,000 documents.

Speaker 2 Have we talked about the JFK assassination on this?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think we have.

Speaker 2 Have we gone down the rabbit hole?

Speaker 1 Have you got to go? I went down the rabbit hole with multiple people.

Speaker 1 Have you heard my theory? No.

Speaker 1 Maybe not. I don't know.

Speaker 2 What's your theory? So, my theory is:

Speaker 2 it all goes back to the Bay of Pigs.

Speaker 1 It's all Baya Pigs.

Speaker 2 It's all Cuba. It's all Baya Pigs.

Speaker 2 And so I'm looking at it from a paramilitary CIA perspective and thinking about it from

Speaker 2 Alan Dulles, which obviously like he's in charge of the Warren Commission after Kennedy fired him. So I'm giving everybody a kind of a summary

Speaker 1 explanation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Dulles Airport, which is the Dulles Brothers, the single most two powerful fucking people in Washington, even during the Truman administration. But either way.
So

Speaker 2 what happened, I think, was was so Operation Zapata, which is also George H.W.

Speaker 2 Bush's first oil company that he supposedly left fucking Connecticut and went out after his Yale, you know, his Yale tenure after World War II.

Speaker 2 It's like, I'm going to be an oil guy and start fucking Zapata oil. Yeah, of course, right? Even though his dad's best friend was Alan Dulles, sure.
Anyway, so

Speaker 2 Operation Zapata, which

Speaker 2 it turns into the Bay of Pigs, and Kennedy gets read in on this. He says, yes, let's go.
And then when it comes down to the day, like, I mean, you've built

Speaker 2 1,400, let's say, you know, 1,200, 1,300 man force that's a CIA former Cuban

Speaker 2 exile army.

Speaker 2 You've built it, and Alan Dulles has been the main architecture. He's been the main architect behind this.
You've got all these guys. So let's even go back.
These are all OSS

Speaker 2 World War II guys that

Speaker 2 let's create a clear delineation between what they're doing and

Speaker 2 what they think the president is doing. The president's like, yeah, yeah, he's elected.
Fuck that guy. We're the agency.
Like, that's the way Alan Dulles actually ran things.

Speaker 2 He wouldn't, half the time, he wouldn't even brief the president on what he was doing.

Speaker 2 So he puts together this thing, clears it through Eisenhower. Eisenhower says, yes, let's go take those fucking, you know, Cuban commies out.

Speaker 2 They put together a 1,100-man force. They've been training on this.
They've got secret bases in Guatemala. They've got all these paramilitary CIA guys.
They're ready to take the beach.

Speaker 2 They're expecting air support because without air support, that changes the entire tactical equation. Like, if you don't have air support, there's a lot of things you just don't fucking do, period.

Speaker 2 So, the morning of, Kennedy denies air support for the Bay of Pigs. So,

Speaker 2 the morning of. So, these dudes are taking the beach.
These are hardcore,

Speaker 2 like, CIA-trained paramilitary guys, Cuban exiles, and World War II hardcore regime change combat veteran. Like, these are the hardest motherfuckers on the planet that we have.
He pulls air support.

Speaker 2 He left 1,100 guys on the beach

Speaker 2 to die, basically.

Speaker 2 These guys all get rolled up, so they lost about 60 guys. 2406 is the name of the brigade.

Speaker 2 60 guys died.

Speaker 2 A thousand plus got put in Cuban prisons.

Speaker 2 Now you got an axe grind.

Speaker 2 You just pissed off the entire CIA paramilitary organization.

Speaker 2 I don't know if I'm the president. I don't know how I don't end up with a moonroof, to be honest with you.
Like, I just pissed off the guys that are actually in charge of

Speaker 2 assassination, paramilitary, all of the dirty deeds around the planet. I fire Alan Dulles for this catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs.

Speaker 2 I've got a thousand-plus guys that are in prison in Cuba. I've got the entire former OSS, hardcore, anti-communist, anti-Castro organization of the CIA pissed off.

Speaker 2 If you don't think they're not going to tee a guy up like some pro

Speaker 2 commie Oswald guy in a, you know, in a

Speaker 2 multi-story building in Dallas, if you don't think you're going to end up with a hole in your head, you're crazy, to be honest with you. That's the way I'm looking at this.

Speaker 2 So they end up getting these guys out, but man, he pissed off a lot of super capable guy, means opportunity intent.

Speaker 2 Means opportunity intent, which is now you left me and my buddies on a beach in Cuba.

Speaker 2 Bro, you are not going to get out of here unscathed. I'm just.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's my theory.

Speaker 1 I think that, along with all the other stuff, means there was probably

Speaker 1 a bunch of people that did not want him around. Oh, yeah.
He wanted to get rid of the CIA.

Speaker 1 He had his eyes on the Federal Reserve. There was a lot of crazy talk about secret societies.
And, you know, you've seen that speech about secret societies. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he was a real threat. And as soon as you can get those killers to want him out, too, well, now you've got a problem solved.

Speaker 2 Well, you had a bunch of guys that thought he was soft on Q. He was soft on Russia.
They had a bunch of dirt on him because he was banging a bunch of chicks.

Speaker 2 All of which,

Speaker 2 okay, you know, maybe it's true, maybe it's false. I don't fucking know, but I think it's fairly validated at this point.

Speaker 1 I think it's pretty true.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you have

Speaker 2 a collection of people that are thinking this is a zero-sum game. This is a Cold War.
If you're weak on Russia and you think that the guy's going to bend his, you know, he's going to bend a knee to

Speaker 2 the bear,

Speaker 2 you've got a lot of,

Speaker 2 you've got this confluence of interests

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 it's inevitable.

Speaker 1 And he's also not universally loved. We think of him as being universally loved because he's dead.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But when he was alive, like there's a lot of people that were not fans of his in the Red States,

Speaker 1 probably particularly in Dallas, driving through Dallas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's OBJ. It's from

Speaker 1 what's amazing about it really is how sloppy the whole thing is sloppy as shit.

Speaker 1 The whole thing, from autopsy to the fucking magic bullet lane on the gurney to having to come up with the magic bullet theory because of the ricochet and the underpass.

Speaker 1 Like the whole thing is so clunky. It's like such a shitty explanation.
You couldn't kill one extra guy and say there was another guy over here. We killed him too.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You guys are, this is such a shit job you guys. You don't have one other idiot that you can get out there? One other idiot, give him a bad rifle and just fucking shoot him.

Speaker 2 But they don't have any, they don't have the context of what we have, which is social media.

Speaker 1 Right, of course.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, when did the Zapruder film...

Speaker 1 It was like 12 years later. Yeah.
And it was on the Geraldo Rivera show.

Speaker 1 And Dick Wheatley.

Speaker 1 Dick Gregory, who is a stand-up comedian, brought it on the Geraldo Rivera show. Are you serious? I don't know.
I want to know that. Dick Gregory, who is a stand-up.

Speaker 1 He was a a lot more than that, too. He's an activist,

Speaker 1 but like a real one. You know,

Speaker 1 not in any way some sort of a social value grifter, which I think a lot of people gravitate towards activism because it gives them a chance to be really shitty because they're right.

Speaker 1 He was a brilliant guy. But it was also a guy who was a truth seeker back when it was really hard to get to the truth.

Speaker 1 This guy had to acquire a copy of the Sapruto film and Time Life got a hold of it, apparently, like right after the assassination. And they just kept it.
They just kept it. They just kept it.

Speaker 1 And when you watch it, you realize why they kept it because you see his head go back into the left. And it looks like he does get shot in the neck from the front.
He holds his fucking neck like this.

Speaker 1 He doesn't hold it back with his head. No, no.
He holds his neck like this. Like, that's impact.
That's where it hit him. And then...
His fucking head goes back into the left.

Speaker 1 And we're supposed to think that this fucking guy did all this from the school depository. Maybe he did take a shot or two from the school book depository.
I don't think he was innocent.

Speaker 1 I'm not of the camp like it's a binary thing. Because either

Speaker 1 Lee Harvey Oswald was a Patsy and the CIA killed him or Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That's a stupid way to think.
I think for sure they used him. They probably gave him a rifle.

Speaker 1 He might have been in that window. He might have just been in the building.
He might have been in the area. Who knows? I think he probably did shoot that cop.

Speaker 1 Like when they were chasing after him, it seems like he did kill that cop. I think he was an asset.
But I also think there was a bunch of people shooting at the president.

Speaker 1 And if you look at that area, you've been to Dealy Play. You've been there.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It's a weird. It's a weird street to drag down, right? It feels weird.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, shit, it's a lot smaller than I thought it was.

Speaker 2 It's tiny.

Speaker 1 It's really little. Yeah.
Like, when people say he couldn't have made those shots, like, shut the fuck up. He's right there.
He's right up.

Speaker 2 Like, literally, you look up in the building's right.

Speaker 1 He had a scope. At least he had a scope.
That's what's crazy about the kid that tried to kill the president, but tried to kill Trump. He didn't even, he had iron sights.

Speaker 1 Which is insane. But it's not if you just go in center mass, but this dude's doing it for a headshot, 140 yards.
And he's probably never shot anybody before.

Speaker 1 He's a a 20-year-old kid that they just somehow or another Operation MK Ultra mind fucked him into shooting at him or he's on some crazy medication or

Speaker 1 China or who knows? Who knows what they did? It's a chip in his head. Who knows? Who knows what the fuck happened? But, you know.

Speaker 2 And then some mobster,

Speaker 2 some like happenstance mobster is so passionate about Kennedy. He's like, I'm going to kill the

Speaker 1 shoes.

Speaker 1 And people are letting him in with the pistol.

Speaker 1 Bang. It's so dumb.
Dude, it's it's then you know what happens to him, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he dies of cancer.

Speaker 1 Before that, before that, no, huh? Jolly West visits him in jail, and he goes crazy. Jolly West, who's the head of MK Ultra.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Jolly West, who's the guy who got Charles Manson the acid, allegedly, from the book Chaos. He goes into it.
Jolly West went to visit Lee Harvey Oswald, or excuse me, Jack Ruby.

Speaker 1 And Jack Ruby's on the ground underneath his bunk, crying in the fetal position that they're murdering the Jews with fire, and he's tripping balls.

Speaker 1 This guy dosed him up with acid, blew his fucking brains out, and then they probably injected him with cancer. 100%.
See you later, fuckface.

Speaker 2 I think you have

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 outside. So, if we want to go all the way back, and you want to just know my like two cents on this, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, so Dulles knows that eventually the president is going to like they're going to snuff him out, they're going to fire him.

Speaker 2 Dulles decides that he's going to have this whole separate CIA

Speaker 2 that's CIA guys, but they're all really

Speaker 2 very trusted

Speaker 2 in internal, external guys.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think those guys are essentially his guys.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they get hung out to dry in the Bay of Pigs.

Speaker 2 They're not attributable to the CIA other than loose affiliated documents.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 Dulles gets fired and they're like, okay,

Speaker 2 let's go. Let's, like, Alan Dulles didn't want to be answering to the president because he didn't answer to the people.
He was answering to a bigger call in his mind.

Speaker 2 He's answering to, this is an imminent threat. The big communist bear is going to come and eat our lunch.

Speaker 2 So he's answering to the greater good, which is a reason for, like, the backdrop of the Cold War is a a reason for a lot of this nefarious activity. Like, Angleton,

Speaker 2 like, all these directors,

Speaker 2 everybody looks at these guys as like really nefarious characters, but you have to paint everything in the backdrop of the Cold War. Like, we're doing all this stuff to save America, right?

Speaker 2 And I'm not validating them.

Speaker 1 I'm just telling them they have.

Speaker 1 We have to understand that perspective. Yes.
Because that was a big thing even when I was in high school.

Speaker 2 This is the Cold War. They're going to fucking kill us all.
They're going to nuke us. They're going to nuke us.

Speaker 2 So we will do, it's very Machiavellian. The means justify the ends.

Speaker 2 Anything and everything to save the nation at any point in time. So you have guys that are baptized in extreme patriotism, and their belief is that they are doing things for the best of the nation.

Speaker 2 And that if they have an elected official,

Speaker 2 they can't be trusted.

Speaker 2 They can't be trusted. And these are guys that are, and I went out to Omaha

Speaker 2 for the 80th.

Speaker 2 These are,

Speaker 2 it's so interesting for me to think back on this because these are guys that are World War II vets that,

Speaker 2 like,

Speaker 2 they saw everybody die. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 the Soviets lost tens of millions of guys in World War II. They were defeating

Speaker 2 fascism, which is, you know, they were defeating the Nazi Party, you know, the Japanese army, and they've seen thousands of men die. And

Speaker 2 they're serious guys. They're not

Speaker 2 lighthearted. They're not full of love.

Speaker 2 Like, these are guys that are baptized in ultraviolence to the point of which this is a zero-sum game, and we have everything to lose and nothing to gain by being nice.

Speaker 2 And nobody will get in our way to being able to maintain the sovereignty of the nation. Once again, I'm not justifying it.
I can just get into the mind of them because

Speaker 2 if I'm jumping into Nazi-occupied France in, you know,

Speaker 2 1940X, because a lot of the OSS teams went in there, and I'm watching my friends get fucking mowed down by Nazi machine guns, and I'm killing Nazis, and I'm moving my way to overthrow Hitler, and now I feel like Stalin is the next thing that I have to defeat, but the American public just doesn't understand.

Speaker 2 I'm like, I'm 1945, man. I have been quite literally baptized in blood, and I'm not going to let it happen.
Now, you think about a high-intellect,

Speaker 2 type A-driven, ultra-violent guy that may be

Speaker 2 semi-coherent based on their copious consumption of alcohol.

Speaker 1 Probably, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, well, old, you know,

Speaker 2 a lot of these programs start to make sense because these guys are like, they're fucking serious guys and they think that we're going to die in a nuclear holocaust.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And everything, the means justifies the ends. They're very Machlovellian.
I don't necessarily, once again, I'm not trying to say that like every evil deed is justified.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying like I've seen the beaches in Normandy.

Speaker 1 I understand greater than a lot of people what combat will and the direct psychological and emotional effects, what it will do to people and I can I can kind of see myself going like hey man if I'm a 26 year old guy that just went and fought the Nazis and I think that the the big bad bear is coming after me right man you're a pretty serious character that that feeling of the big bad bear coming after us got lifted with the fall of the Berlin Wall with the fall of the Soviet Union all that stuff went away the fear when I was a kid that fear was everywhere you know I've talked to so many people that are like my age or around my age that remember being a child and being worried about a war with nuclear bombs with Russia.

Speaker 1 It was constant. It was in the air.
When Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table and said, we will bury you,

Speaker 1 I watched that video on YouTube just like a month ago, and it's still scary. The two fucking banging his shoe.
And when he said, we will bury you. Was that a direct quote or was that propaganda?

Speaker 1 Let me, that one feels fishy. I bet that's one where it's like a little bit

Speaker 1 more slippery than we will bury you. Because, you know what I mean? Like, when you get away from the story,

Speaker 2 that was a direct response to when we agreed, we have this mutual agreement between the Soviets, and Khrushchev wasn't, like, Khrushchev wasn't actually

Speaker 2 a Stalinist. He was making very big reforms

Speaker 2 in the Soviet Union. And so he felt betrayed by the U-2 spy missions that were taking place when we,

Speaker 1 after,

Speaker 2 you know, after they shot down the U-2 spy plane in Russia.

Speaker 1 And because we lied, he was like, bang, bang, bang.

Speaker 2 And I'm fairly certain that's what that whole thing was about because I think Khrushchev was a man of honor.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 like, these fucking guys are lying to me.

Speaker 2 And, I mean, Stalin was a shitbag. Don't like, I'm, of course.

Speaker 2 But Khrushchev was like making significant reforms within the country. He was an anti-he was

Speaker 2 broadly condemned by a lot of the old

Speaker 2 Stalinists as.

Speaker 2 Here it is.

Speaker 1 I don't see him banging a shoe in the video. He's banging his fist.

Speaker 2 Oh, he's banging his fist, yeah.

Speaker 1 I thought he banged a shoe. The video says, Did he bang a shoe?

Speaker 1 That's a scary language when they're yelling it. I know.

Speaker 2 Put that under a couple pints of vodka.

Speaker 1 Someone was saying this, but it's so true. There's nothing scarier than Russian Muslims.

Speaker 1 Like the fighters.

Speaker 1 Russian Muslims are the fucking scariest fighters, dude. I think if there's like one group that I would categorize, like, what's the scariest? I might be Russian Muslims.

Speaker 1 We will bury you Threat widely attributed to Khrushchev in Western press was reported to have been made at a send-off reception to Poland's

Speaker 1 Gomuka in Moscow, November 1956. According to Time magazine, Khrushchev was overheard to say at the final reception

Speaker 1 for the Polish leader, if you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you, whether you like it or not, history is on our side, we will bury you.

Speaker 1 So he said that to Poland.

Speaker 1 But that was a, in a, wasn't that in a police song or a sting song? The Russians Love Their Children Too?

Speaker 1 Wasn't that? Scorpions? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think it was a sting song.
Really? Sting song called The Russians. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was saying, Khrushchev said, he will bury you. So they probably, it was probably some fake news, just like how they said about Trump saying that very fine people on both sides.

Speaker 2 It's always been

Speaker 2 fascinating to me because I think about the Russians and how many tens of millions of people they lost in World War II.

Speaker 2 And I think about

Speaker 2 very empathetically

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 they got fucked. They really did.

Speaker 2 I think, and I'm not saying

Speaker 2 we did anything bad.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying like what we did was we delayed the invasion of Normandy and we felt like a lot of people think this was that we were trying to soften up the Soviet Union because we felt that they were a follow-on threat in World War II.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 we delayed the invasion intentionally, essentially, to let

Speaker 2 a lot of Russians, millions of Russians, essentially die on the Eastern Front.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when you really think about it,

Speaker 2 from

Speaker 2 those men, from my context in combat, from

Speaker 2 how I think think about combat, how I think about death.

Speaker 2 Those guys had a significant axagrind because they're like, we need fucking help. We need you to open up the Western Front.

Speaker 2 I'm not validating Stalin because, once again, I think he's a complete piece of shit.

Speaker 1 I know what you're saying. But

Speaker 2 yeah, as a Russian

Speaker 2 population, knowing that we delayed the

Speaker 2 opening up the Western Front to

Speaker 1 go

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 take over essentially, you know, Hitler,

Speaker 2 Nazi Europe, because at that point, obviously, it wasn't just one person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have a significant amount of mistrust with you guys because we lost, you know, 20 million people plus the civilian population. I mean, some estimates of 30 million fucking people.

Speaker 2 And you guys opened up Normandy, came through, and then you're telling everybody that you won,

Speaker 2 you're the reason you won World War II, and you're not even giving us any validated credit.

Speaker 2 They had invaded Japan before we

Speaker 2 dropped the bomb,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 the Japanese were just as terrified of the Russians as they were the Americans.

Speaker 2 However, I can see from the Russian perspective going, man, we sacrificed millions of people to defeat the Nazis.

Speaker 2 And you guys are basically giving us no credit. So

Speaker 2 I think back, and I'm like, man, 1945, like where these guys are at, because they're all about my same age. We went to combat roughly the same

Speaker 2 age.

Speaker 2 And there were a lot of people that were debating all of these issues back then, 1945, 1946. They were talking about

Speaker 2 not only Stalin, but Patton was talking about like, we need to just keep going, right? Patton was talking about going, we need to keep going. We need to defeat Soviet Russia.

Speaker 2 And Eisenhower was like, actually, no, you're crazy.

Speaker 2 Fuck, dude.

Speaker 2 I think that's what he said. You know, I think that's what he's like, hey, fuck, dude.
Like, what are you talking about, Patton?

Speaker 1 That's what he said when he addressed the nation. Yeah.
Right?

Speaker 1 And that was right after that.

Speaker 2 So I keep thinking about myself and

Speaker 2 those guys.

Speaker 2 I think about myself a lot of times too, or, you know, 20 plus years after the fact, like this is 1968.

Speaker 2 This is 1968, man, from our war.

Speaker 2 So from 1945 to 1968, give or take, you think about all these GWAC guys that are being appointed,

Speaker 1 it's kind of a cool

Speaker 2 revolution, but 68 was a very important year in American history. I think 24 was a really important year in American history.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 24 is a big one.

Speaker 1 The one we're in right now is a big one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think when people look back at history with these great moments of change, I mean, think about how, you know, people look back at the Reagan administration, like when Reagan got elected, what a landslide.

Speaker 1 Like they look back at those days. Like we look back at like these historical moments, but I think this one is crazier than any of them.
This guy gets kicked out.

Speaker 1 They try to put him in jail multiple times. He gets shot at.
He says, fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 1 And then he wins. And he wins in a landslide when they were all saying that it was a close race.
And the whole thing is just wild to watch. It's like, this is nuts.
Like, this show is nuts.

Speaker 1 If you're watching this show on TV, like, these writers are fucking amazing. Whatever they're doing, like, keep doing this.
This show's crazy. This twists and turns.

Speaker 1 You got your crazy billionaire character who doesn't even seem real. Doesn't even seem real.
This guy's making rocks and fucking electric cars.

Speaker 1 There's no way. He buys Twitter because he wants to save free speech.
What?

Speaker 1 Insane. And the people that used to love him now hate him.
The people that are driving their Teslas around, like, god damn it. They're angry, but you still have a lease.
You know,

Speaker 1 you still have your Tesla. You hate Elon.
You hate X. And Don Lemon said, I'm leaving X.

Speaker 1 There's no good discussions to be had here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's fucking boohoo.

Speaker 1 So you don't like criticism. You don't like criticism.
If you want to get into this game, okay, you want to get into the online game, the online game's different.

Speaker 1 And in the online game, you get judged by who you fucking actually are, dude. It's not about your producers and your teleprompter.

Speaker 1 Shut up.

Speaker 1 You're on your own.

Speaker 1 If people think you're stupid, you're going to hear it. And it might be because you're stupid.
It might be. Look, people say a lot of people are stupid that are not stupid.

Speaker 1 I've seen people say brilliant people. I've seen people say Elon Musk is stupid.
I have seen that. Yeah, I've seen that.
I've seen, there's, you're going to get it.

Speaker 1 No matter what, you're going to get it. Everyone's going to get it.
But if everybody's saying you're stupid.

Speaker 1 Maybe. You might be stupid.
You might be stupid. You might have been protected from that stupid by these network shows.

Speaker 1 If you want to exist online and you don't like criticism on Twitter or you think there's disinformation on Twitter, community notes on Twitter is the greatest fucking thing that's ever been created.

Speaker 1 Because people get to look through the community notes and find out, oh, that is bullshit. And here's why it's bullshit.
Or, oh, that actually is true.

Speaker 1 Even though it sounds crazy and people are protesting, it's actually true. That's fun.
That's good.

Speaker 1 We learned something. If you can't handle that, well, you can go wherever.
Where do you go now? Where do you go? Where do you go? Threads?

Speaker 1 What? People go to threads.

Speaker 1 But they wear for a while. It's crazy.
But they wear it for a while. Yeah.
It's not going to work, I don't think. No.

Speaker 2 Have you ever had, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard of Zuckerberg on this? Yeah, I like Zuckerberg a lot. Yeah.
Yeah, I like him a lot.

Speaker 1 I think he's a weird guy, but you have to be a weird guy if you're a super genius 100 billionaire who's into jiu-jitsu. He's a weird guy, but he's cool.
I like him. I've had fun with him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we played a fencing game together with virtual goggles. It was fun.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We both put on

Speaker 1 virtual goggles.

Speaker 2 He got him on mine when he was like in in Hawaii or San Francisco.

Speaker 1 No, we did it in the same room.

Speaker 1 It was fun. Yeah, yeah.
The new Oculus is fucking cool. And you've got to wonder where that's going to be.

Speaker 1 Because when I first tried the very first Oculus, it was kind of cool, but kind of crude in a way. And with each new version of it, you get like, it's much smaller now.

Speaker 1 It used to be, we had a cable, and the cable was attached to the ceiling on a wire so that you can move back and forth through this, all these wires connected to you when you have the oculus.

Speaker 1 So you had to be plugged into the computer, actually. But now you're not.
Now it's just on your head. And now it's fucking resolution.
It's pretty goddamn good. It's and it's weird.

Speaker 1 Like you do things like you can go to a comedy club and you sit in the audience and there's all these other people in there. There's a comedian on stage.
It's fucking strange.

Speaker 1 There's all these little online games you can play with other people, 3D shooters and shit, and you've got goggles on, you feel like you're in the game. It's real weird.

Speaker 1 And most people are kind of freaked out by it. So I don't think it's like they went with that whole meta thing.
They thought everybody was going to dive into the metaverse.

Speaker 1 metaverse, but I think there's this uncanny valley between like you put the goggles on and you're in the world and you kind of feel it, you feel uneasy. Like, this is weird.
This feels weird.

Speaker 1 VR feels strange. Like, a lot of people makes them dizzy.
They want to take it off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, my wife is like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, mine is too. But I think they're going to get to a point where it's not going to feel weird.

Speaker 1 Like, there's some commercial applications, like, there's a company called Sandbox, and they have this fucking amazing game called Deadwood Mansion.

Speaker 1 And in Deadwood Mansion, you go into like this warehouse base. They have one in Austin.
They have one in Woodland Hills where we used to go. It was right down the street from the studio.

Speaker 1 You put goggles on and all of a sudden you're in a mansion. You got a shotgun and zombies are running at you from everywhere and you're boom, you're blowing their heads.
Seriously? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's fucking amazing. Dude, no one in my family wants to play it anymore.

Speaker 2 Why is it too intense?

Speaker 1 I get very intense.

Speaker 1 Very intense when I'm killing zombies. They don't like it.
It's gross.

Speaker 1 I'm like, come on, let's kill zombies. Like for Father's Day, I made them come kill zombies with me.

Speaker 2 I fucking love it. That was your Father's Day present.

Speaker 2 You told your parents. Yeah,

Speaker 1 daddy wants to kill zombies with everybody.

Speaker 1 It's fun. You got a shotgun and they're running at you.
You're blasting their heads off and you get attacked from behind. It's fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 You have a haptic feedback vest and you see red when they're attacking you. You see splatters of red in front of your face and they're attacking you and you're shooting them in the face.

Speaker 2 Everybody wants to do that, dude.

Speaker 1 Everybody wants the debt.

Speaker 2 I mean, if we were like, oh, we're in a zombie apocalypse, how many dudes do you know? They're like,

Speaker 1 oh, my God, awesome. Awesome.
This is going to be funny. They're so slow.
They're so slow. But these ones are pretty fast.
The ones in this, some of them run at you. They run at you.
Wow.

Speaker 1 It makes it more fun. Remember that movie 28 Days Later where the zombies were running? Yeah.
That's the scary zombie movie. Yeah.
Running zombies are, that's the real zombie.

Speaker 1 The walking dead zombies, get the fuck out of here, bitch. You ain't getting me.

Speaker 2 So disappointing. Like, the first five seasons were great.

Speaker 1 How are they not all dead?

Speaker 1 How are not all the zombies dead? They all just get half a mile.

Speaker 2 More and more zombies.

Speaker 1 How's that possible to kill them all? It's so easy to kill them.

Speaker 2 I can't get enough zombie movies.

Speaker 1 I love them. I love them.
I love the post-apocalyptics movie. You know what I don't like? Daryl using field tips.

Speaker 2 So stupid.

Speaker 1 Why is he using field tips on his crossbow?

Speaker 1 That drives me crazy. That drives me crazy.

Speaker 2 And he's like pulling them out, loading them back up. And you're like, dude, come on, man.
You're

Speaker 1 making me angry. You don't lose any fletchings? You don't get any pass-throughs?

Speaker 2 No pass-throughs. It's all just like sticking in their heads.

Speaker 1 Like, what the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? This is the dumbest weapon ever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Daryl.

Speaker 1 That fucking field tip's got to go, son. You don't have any broadheads?

Speaker 2 You got to put like

Speaker 2 a solid tri-blade or something on there. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Get some good, like, get a real fuzzy trocar. Yeah.
That's what you want. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, like a Montech, one of those Montec carbon steels. Yeah.
Send it.

Speaker 2 What was that one?

Speaker 2 The hide? What was that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Hyde.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. That did a lot of damage.
I'm very impressed with that one. Because that one, I got the 125-grain one, which has the steel ferrule.

Speaker 1 And it's got a two-inch cut with the mechanical blade and a three-quarter-inch cut with the fixed.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't make a big hole opening going in. See, two technical talk, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, two and three-quarters. It's a broadhead for archery.

Speaker 1 When it goes in, that's when the blades open. So the rage, which I used to use for the T2 now, the Dudley version, that opens up on the way in.
So it leaves a big hole all the way in.

Speaker 1 But this one opens up inside. So really, you're penetrating with the fixed head, and then once you're passing in, the pressure is what makes those other two blades go.

Speaker 1 So they really make a pretty small entry hole. But the exit hole is a crime scene.
The exit hole was a crime scene because you're going out with two and three-quarter inches. It's just

Speaker 1 instant death for the animal. It's like super ethical.
I think

Speaker 1 when it comes to like the amount of damage they can do, those mechanical, they put animals down so quick.

Speaker 1 So quick. Yeah.
There's something to be said for that giant cut that they make inside. It's just so different.

Speaker 1 Like Cam's, Cam's, he's using a catapult. It's basically a catapult.
Yes. That four-blade carnifour thing.

Speaker 2 That's insane.

Speaker 2 But Cam changed my life.

Speaker 2 Like he really did. He was like, create a really big hole.
Yeah. I don't care what you do.
Just create a giant hole. And that's because you're going to put the arrow in the right spot.

Speaker 2 If you create a giant hole, then you're going to have a great blood trail and you're going to find your animal. He rewrote my entire hunt sequence this year.

Speaker 1 Because you were, before that, you were penetration. Yeah.
Right. Which is another way of looking at it, right?

Speaker 1 If you're thinking about a cut, a cut that goes through the entire body is a very long cut and is always lethal if you get them in the vitals yep but you don't get a blood trail and it does they don't die as quick no the the dying is quick thing is the one in uh tojon last year that bull died in like less than ten seconds and how many seconds was it seven if that maybe five ran up to the top of the hill and just fell down i've never i've never seen anything die i've never seen anything die that fast and that's those big mechanicals like and i'm not saying that because yeah it's you know you're joe like you're just the dude on the side of the mountain that was shooting the alk that I was watching.

Speaker 2 Like, it fucking died faster than anything I've seen even shot with a rifle in the chest cavity, right? Right. So, clearly differentiating between like

Speaker 2 a headshot and a chest cavity. I've never seen anything die that fast from an animal.
It was dead.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think there's something to be said for those giant holes because it's just if you, especially if you have a strong bow, so if you have a bow that has a lot of kinetic energy and a lot of speed and you're shooting a heavy arrow and it's hitting that rib cage, like there's something for that big cut.

Speaker 1 It just stops them.

Speaker 2 Because are you at 80?

Speaker 1 84? 80 or 84? 84? Yeah. The new bow is 84.
Oh, the new Hoyt is so smooth.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's so smooth.

Speaker 2 So they just came out yesterday. Yeah.
I got to go.

Speaker 2 I got to go find the new one.

Speaker 1 I felt so special. I had one for a couple months and I had to blur it out.
I took pictures.

Speaker 2 I felt like such a chump.

Speaker 1 I was out there tay on.

Speaker 2 It's like, I just got the old one. It's not a big deal, man.

Speaker 1 Well, I used to think that when I saw Cam shoot his, I'm like, how could it be better? These are so good. How could it be better? And then you shoot the new one, you're like, god damn it, it's better.

Speaker 1 It's super accurate, like so dead in the hand. Like the way the shot breaks, it's just like they keep making it smoother, smoother draw cycle.
It's faster.

Speaker 2 So you're doing 84.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What are you garmin?

Speaker 2 What's your feet per second on it?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's 293 or 294.

Speaker 2 So what are you shooting, 450?

Speaker 1 475.

Speaker 2 475?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I bumped it up because I went to those 125 grain hats, but my bow went from 80 pounds to 84 with the new one, and then it kind of made up the difference.

Speaker 1 So the 25 grains, and it was basically the same kind of speed as with the last one, which I had a 450-grain arrow. So this is like, I think there's probably like a number you shouldn't go below.

Speaker 1 I don't know what that number is. You know, like grains.
Like some people, they'll hunt elk with like a 300-grain arrow, and a lot of people are like, don't do that. Don't do that.

Speaker 1 You can get away with it. it because they're like, well, my daughter shot an elk and it was a pass-through and she's got a 50-pound bow.
Okay, she got lucky. She got lucky.

Speaker 1 You need some force to get in there.

Speaker 2 Like if you're shooting 500 on an 84, on a on an 84 pound, 85 pound bow, so let's say you're doing, even if you're doing 270,

Speaker 2 that's still

Speaker 2 massive penetration.

Speaker 1 Massive kinetic energy. Especially if you have carbon arrows.
Yeah. I love those carbon arrows with the victories with the slick outside because you pull them out of target so much easier.

Speaker 2 Who's making those?

Speaker 1 The VAPs.

Speaker 1 What are they called? The TKOs? Yeah, I love those. Ripped TKOs.

Speaker 2 That's it. The ripped TKOs.

Speaker 1 Those are great. Their coating that they have on it is like...

Speaker 1 It's so easy to pull out.

Speaker 2 They got like a Teflon or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you got to think that aids in penetration, too. It has to, right? I mean, isn't that why guys like the thin diameter? Like, Cam shoots those.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he's doing it now, but he was for a long time. He was shooting those four millimeter arrows.
Right. Those real skinny ones.

Speaker 2 The four mil.

Speaker 1 I like lighted knocks, and the four millimeter with the lighted knocks make me nervous.

Speaker 1 Because knocks break sometimes. And they're more vulnerable because they've got that little light inside of them instead of being a big solid piece of plastic.
Right. You know?

Speaker 1 Like, I always change them before hunts. I always put fresh ones on.
I never trust ones that have been sitting around. Never trust ones that I've shot already.

Speaker 1 I'll shoot them a bunch of times, like for practice, but they break sometimes.

Speaker 2 And especially I'm not paying attention, so I might might be accidentally touching arrows i do the same thing like i have fresh arrows for hunting yeah but they're the exact same setup for practice so that's why i like like the sever or something like that because the severs

Speaker 2 you can pin them and then i can just shoot the shit out of those and then let just not not use the pin yeah no that's huge That's why I like them because I can shoot the same exact weight and dimensions and I know the flight characteristics are going to be the exact same versus sometimes when you get those

Speaker 2 practice heads yeah they're different they actually have different

Speaker 2 flight characteristics because the way that they're put together is not exactly the same and I believe in the fact that it's like hey man if you got a a slight fin on the front and it's a different fin on the back even though it's only an inch you still have to be 100% consistent to maintain the same flight characteristics.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why when guides get real nerdy about like what helix, like what kind of helical you have on the veins and like what kind of twist you put in your veins and you have to have the you know a single bevel blade that twists for the broadhead in the exact same direction you'll get a right twist with left veins then you'll get all fucked up but their idea is that you're trying to get it the broadhead to spin through the animal that's the whole idea behind the single bevel those is that do you think that's true though there's something to it yeah there's something to single bevels because of the cut the way the edge is cut so for people listening single bevel means the edge angles in on one side.

Speaker 1 Double bevel means it comes together as a point, right? So think of a blade, but a blade with only one side that you can, you know, you see like where the steel is

Speaker 1 is ground down to the edge. The other side doesn't have that.

Speaker 1 So the idea is that that creates this angle and that when you're spinning, your arrow is spinning because the helicals of your vein, it goes into the animal's body cavity and the bevel in the broadhead accentuates that spin and it continues that spin through the body causing like a whirlwind of trauma inside the animal and that it you know it almost effect acts as multiple blades because it's kind of spinning around it's not just cutting a straight line it's twisting but the question is like how much twist and is it more effective to have like a four blade thing like a four like a tooth of the arrow like one that you could you know those i don't think it's true You don't think it'll spin the bevel spin?

Speaker 1 No, I don't think it does.

Speaker 1 I think it does a little because there's a a guy named lusk archery and he um does these tests on these things and he actually shoots them into ballistic gel and you can see them spin so some of them do spin but the

Speaker 2 i think it's too complex though once you because

Speaker 2 once you have a rib cage right and let's just say you go through the rib cage even the consistency of the rib cage so we'll just say a perpendicular shop in the rib and the perpendicular shop from the rib cage right at 40 yards so we'll just keep all the variables basically the same

Speaker 2 even then,

Speaker 2 there's no nicking of the rib. There's no variation of the actual animal skin.
There's no

Speaker 2 slight quartering away, start quirting towards. There's no...

Speaker 2 So ballistic jail, I think there leaves a lot of questions for me.

Speaker 2 So even though it's twisting in the ballistic jail, because it's consistent, you're shooting it directly perpendicular into a very consistent

Speaker 2 format,

Speaker 2 and you're getting a consistent result. You're not going to get a consistent result.
I just don't believe you're going to get a consistent result through a rib cage.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the reason why a lot of people like mechanicals.

Speaker 1 It's one of the things that they say is that the cut is so large when you get into the body cavity that you take out all the other variables, it's going to do so much more trauma than something that's just a slit blade.

Speaker 1 That let's say you do hit that rib cage and it does slice and only hit one lung because it deflected off of it and it doesn't spin at all. And now you lost the animal.

Speaker 1 Whereas you get a mechanical, it goes in there, it creates this massive fucking hole. It does all this trauma going through two and three-quarter inches of trauma going through the animal.

Speaker 1 The odds of that animal surviving are gone. If you get him in the body cavity, they're gone.

Speaker 1 And I've seen people hit people with really good shots with small broadheads and not do much damage to the point where the animal runs off, they have a hard time blood trailing it.

Speaker 1 Even if the animal dies 30 minutes, 60 minutes later, you might have a hard time finding it, especially if you bumped it.

Speaker 2 100%. I've had that exact experience like multiple times with those little broadheads.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It

Speaker 2 Cam, like I said, he changed the entire

Speaker 1 way. He thought about it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because he's like, create a big hole.

Speaker 1 Well, he changed his thought about it too. He was always a fixed-blade guy.
Always.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 who told him to do that? Oh, Wayne did from the Bowen. Really? Yeah, Wayne said, you got to try these carnivores.
So just trust me, just try them. It's like, these things are crazy.

Speaker 1 It opens up these four-blade blade catapults it looks like it looks like one of those uh turkey broadheads you know what i mean

Speaker 1 it's crazy and because of the design it's just like the hides it opens up from the front yeah so once it's inside then it's doing all its damage so you don't have to worry about it getting destroyed going in through rib cages and stuff as much as you do with other things because it's really just going to get a little hole going in and then once it's in then it's opening It's kind of a perfect idea.

Speaker 1 The only thing

Speaker 1 that people don't like, like Dudley doesn't like, it doesn't leave a big hole in the outside. Like, I talked to Dudley about it.
He's like, I want extreme trauma. I just want extreme.

Speaker 1 I want one big giant cut with all that energy just going through the, like,

Speaker 1 think of it like sticking a samurai sword

Speaker 1 through the animal's body.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, obviously he's one of the best bow hunters on earth, too. So, like, there's a bunch of different philosophies on it, but I think the idea of the mechanical blade is legit.

Speaker 1 And I like the hybrid idea the best because then you always have a fixed blade no matter what.

Speaker 2 I like the hybrid. Obviously, this year was great because I like the hybrid a lot more than

Speaker 2 going either pure mechanical or pure fixed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you feel like you got a little insurance policy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like the best of both worlds. You're like, okay, cool.

Speaker 2 Let's keep consistent with this. And

Speaker 2 everybody I talk to, you know, they have.

Speaker 2 Well, throughout

Speaker 2 the past year, several years, they have all different opinions, which is broadheads are like, you know, assholes. Everybody has a fucking different opinion.
Sure.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, John has his opinion. Cam has his opinion.
Everybody has their opinion. Like, my buddy Dan,

Speaker 2 Elk Shape, do you ever watch that? Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's got his opinions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's got his opinion. All these guys have opinions.
So I'm just trying to like. And they're all successful, too.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's the crazy thing.
It's like you're trying to sort it out. Like, who's right?

Speaker 2 And so I'm just trying to create the data and put it down into

Speaker 2 what works for me.

Speaker 2 And I don't have any sponsorships, so I'm just

Speaker 2 which allows me to be fairly empirical in the way that I'm actually selecting the criteria. But I also don't have the reps these guys do either.
So you have to kind of rely on

Speaker 2 their data and then collect all of it and then kind of put it in

Speaker 2 one case.

Speaker 1 If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
I'm always fucking around with things. That's one of the cool things about archery is all the tinkering.

Speaker 1 You know, there's like so many different things you could try. Like this year is the first time I tried a 15-inch front bar.

Speaker 1 You you know i went to a 15 inch front bar with a 12 inch back bar oh i like it so much better really because yeah because i was using that quivalizer and the problem is with wind it's a sail that sail just pushes your pin around too much but i love that guy though oh yeah i love it it's a great look the equivalizer i used it for years it's a great invention but i find that with wind in particular i know on a long the the balance that i would get from that quivalizer i can get from that i'm using a cutter stabilizer with a 15 inch front bar and a 12 inch back bar right And it's perfect.

Speaker 1 It holds so good. It holds so nice.

Speaker 1 It feels so dead on. And this year I went with a 10-degree downward angle of the front bar.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

Speaker 2 Why did you go with it down versus what matters whether or not it's

Speaker 1 perpendicular? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.
But I was talking to these archers who do it, and Levi Morgan does it. His goes at a downward angle, too.

Speaker 1 And I was talking to this archer, and he said it actually, for some reason, it helps you hold better. Like you feel it, it locks in better.
Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the slight downward thing with when you're pulling back, there's something about the slight downward angle of it that it lets you hold better with the same amount of weight. Right.

Speaker 1 Because it's going in a different direction than just straightforward. It doesn't totally make sense, but I really believe in it.

Speaker 1 Like when I started doing it, I was like, ooh, there's a little different feel to this.

Speaker 1 I love that. I love all the tinkering.

Speaker 1 I love the tinkering. That's so much fun.

Speaker 1 It's so much fun because it's like

Speaker 1 there's all these different ways to do it. You know, there's all these different releases, there's all these different styles of releases.
There's so many different things you could fuck with.

Speaker 1 You could just go down a rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

Speaker 2 You know, that's what I did.

Speaker 2 You and I,

Speaker 2 I would say like 90% of their techs are around

Speaker 1 what release were you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like what release am I doing?

Speaker 2 And I went, I think I bought 20 releases this year. Like over the course of 23, 24, after

Speaker 2 the hunting season.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's fun. It's just pure fun.
Because, okay, dude, I know I got it. It's like 250 bucks.
Sure, you buy a release, and I fuck with it for a couple of weeks. I get the pros and cons about it.

Speaker 2 And then I pass it over to

Speaker 2 the guy that runs my little bow shop there at Black Rifle, Isaac. I pass it off to him, like, sell it on eBay.
I don't give a fuck about those things.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I got a box of them. Yeah, I get it.
I got a box of different releases. I've tried everything from four-finger releases to two-finger releases.

Speaker 1 What I really like is that one with the clicker, that onyx with the clicker. It's got this little click and then

Speaker 1 I feel like I can shoot that as good as I can shoot a hinge. So you get the best of both worlds.
You get like the ability to make it go off if you have to.

Speaker 1 You know, if there's some weird situation where, you know, there's, you have like literal split second to make a very close shot. You can get away with that.

Speaker 1 Or you could shoot at at a long-distance target and feel just as comfortable as you do with a hinge. You know, because there's something about having that little click and that onyx clicker.

Speaker 1 Like once you feel that little click, you know it's about to go off. You just pull through it.

Speaker 2 It's so funny. I'm the exact opposite.
I hate that fucking click.

Speaker 1 Like when I'm on the click, I'm like, click.

Speaker 1 I just want it to go off.

Speaker 2 I just want it to go off.

Speaker 1 It does fuck with your head. But one thing it does is it puts all your concentration in the shot process instead of like hammering the trigger.
Right, right.

Speaker 1 You hear that click, you know, it's right there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you just pull through it.
And it's so, it's such a delicate little click that once you get it in your head and you shoot with it a bunch of times, you like welcome it. Like, there we are.

Speaker 1 Click. Come out.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So you're, you're like, come out. Looking forward to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then the click is like, settle in. We're right there.
Blah. It's like that one extra step that gives you this one extra little piece of concentration.

Speaker 1 Joel Turner talks about it in that whole shot IQ process, and he developed it. He developed it on XClicker.

Speaker 1 Oh, he developed it. He developed it.
Oh, shit.

Speaker 2 Okay, cool.

Speaker 1 So that one little thing, that one little click is what separates it from a regular trigger. And then blah, blah.

Speaker 1 And then you get all your thought process into the shot process and just making sure you do a good shot. Huh.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right. I've used it.

Speaker 1 It's a thing you got to get used to, like everything else. But then you talk to Cam Haynes.
He just fucking hammers that trigger. Oh, I know.
He shoots everything.

Speaker 1 So it's like, some people people can't do it that way it's it's weird everybody's got a different way they like to do it it pisses me off so bad because I see like some of my buddies

Speaker 2 like um

Speaker 2 do you know who Chris Jensen is the country music singer have you ever like uh

Speaker 2 he and I have hunted together a few times in Colorado he just hammers the trigger it's the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life he's just like pow like

Speaker 1 that's kind of how cam does it and I look at him

Speaker 1 touches off the trigger I look at him every time I'm like,

Speaker 2 oh my God, man, how are you like hitting the target?

Speaker 1 And he's like just center mass just over and over again.

Speaker 1 I think it's a mind fuck that a lot of people put their head into that you're going to get target panic and that you can't control your emotions during a shot process to the point where you could command trigger.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't make any sense to me. No.
It doesn't make any sense from like, I can understand the psychological aspect of target panic, but I have a feeling that it comes from two different things.

Speaker 1 It comes from buck fever, which is like you're freaking out. You never shot a buck this big before.
Oh my god, he's right there. And you're like, ah, and you freak out.
That's normal.

Speaker 1 But that's an experience thing. And you have to learn what that is.
And if you do it a bunch of times, then you get to the point where, like, oh, I know how to control myself. I know what this is.

Speaker 1 And the more often you do it, like, if you can go on a couple of pig hunts and then go on an elk hunt, you're way more in the groove.

Speaker 1 You're like right there. You know what to do.
You know how to do it. And you could touch the trigger off 100%.
Cam does it every goddamn time.

Speaker 1 I think it comes from the target archery community because I think those guys are staring at these fucking little tiny X's from 20 yards and they got to shoot 30 of them in a row. Right.

Speaker 1 And I think you get mind fucked.

Speaker 1 And that's why those guys have hinges and all these crazy and 40-inch fucking stabilizers and Vs that come out the back. And it's all about not moving.
Plop. But that's not bow hunting.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about this: that I think the difference between bow hunting and target archery is like the difference between doing free throws and playing basketball. Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Free throws, nobody's fucking with you. You're on the line.
You can measure it. You can sit there and you can throw it.

Speaker 1 Different sports. Basketball, you're running around.
You got to people. Different sports.

Speaker 2 Same sub-skill set. Right.

Speaker 1 That's hunting.

Speaker 1 Hunting is basketball. Target archery is free throws.
That's what I think. Yeah.
That's what I think. And I think you can't tell a guy like Cam Haynes is doing it the wrong way.

Speaker 1 If the best guy does it that way, you have to go, okay, why do we think you can't do it that way? Well, it's psychological. It's all psychological.
It's all panic.

Speaker 1 It's all not being able to control your nerves. If you can shoot perfectly that way at a target, you should be able to shoot perfectly at an animal.
You should be able to.

Speaker 1 It's not, the animal isn't like some fucking invulnerable thing that you have to do it a certain way or the frequency is not correct. No, it's an animal.
It's like just like a target.

Speaker 2 The Army marksmanship team is not Delta Force. That's the current.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 2 Very different. Very good shooters.
Army marksmanship team, probably extremely proficient shooters, maybe even better so than Delta.

Speaker 2 However, it's a different scenario-based activity, completely different.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just because you shoot accurate at a stationary target doesn't mean you understand how to the freaking.

Speaker 2 When you have a

Speaker 2 horse coming in with swords on its head,

Speaker 2 the freaking. It's a fucking different thing, man.

Speaker 1 It's screaming.

Speaker 2 It's like, ah, I'm super horny. I'm going to fuck you.
I'm going to kill you. I don't know.
And you're like, oh.

Speaker 1 Could you imagine if you came over from Europe and there was no elk over there and you were camping in the woods? You were one of those first guys, your stupid fucking burlap tent, and you hear,

Speaker 1 you'd be like, demons.

Speaker 2 This fucking, you don't know. You're like, is this thing going to...

Speaker 2 Is it going to run me through?

Speaker 1 And so I'm going to die? 100% going to kill you.

Speaker 2 I would be more scared of that than a bear. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This has giant swords on its Well, if it runs straight at you and just impales you.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't come in this way.

Speaker 1 I'd be more scared of a bear, though. I feel like I'd grab an antler.

Speaker 2 If I hadn't seen any one of these before and something comes in and it's got giant pointy things on its head, and I'm like trying to be completely blank slate, and I've got this other fuzzy thing that I can't really see.

Speaker 2 It's like claws and teeth. I'm like, my God, I'm way more afraid of this thing with swords on its head.

Speaker 1 Depends on the size of the bear. Depends on what kind of bear we're talking about.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like if it's a little black bear, I don't give a shit.

Speaker 1 Black bears are white. I don't care.

Speaker 2 I don't care about those things at all. Like it's, it's so, they're, they're kind of obnoxious.

Speaker 1 Did you see that one that got shot in New Jersey that's 880 pounds? 770 pounds dressed? It's fucking crazy. In New Jersey.
Dude. In New Jersey.
In the East Coast.

Speaker 2 How is that possible?

Speaker 1 They have the most.

Speaker 1 They have the most black bears per capita in the whole country. We've played a hundred times the video of the bears wrestling in the middle of a neighborhood and far rock away.

Speaker 1 Big fucking black bears just going to war in the middle of the street.

Speaker 2 I had, I grew up in this middle of the like logging community out in the middle of nowhere. And there was this dude that used to keep

Speaker 2 Wei Fido. It's out in the middle of nowhere, dude.
It's like so hilljack, but it's awesome.

Speaker 2 And my grandfather, everybody, they're all hardcore loggers. But I'm not exaggerating.
We had a guy just outside of town that a pet bear, a pet black bear.

Speaker 1 How old was it? I mean, it was a full-grown fucking black bear, dude. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And he would just,

Speaker 2 this is the sad part. Like, he had defanged it because it would slobber on people.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And, but,

Speaker 2 he had a full-on black bear that

Speaker 2 would suck on his arm, basically.

Speaker 2 Oh, jeez.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, he fanged a couple people accidentally.

Speaker 2 He what?

Speaker 1 He fanged a couple of people accidentally playing with them.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. So he made them gummy.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Gummy. What did he feed it? Who the fuck knows, man?

Speaker 2 Donuts.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 2 when I say this,

Speaker 1 these are

Speaker 2 laggers.

Speaker 2 You know, these are, these are.

Speaker 1 How long did he have this bear?

Speaker 2 Probably 10 years, I would imagine, man.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 2 I tend to

Speaker 2 turn down the volume on my redneck upbringing.

Speaker 1 Hold on. How did he

Speaker 1 keep this thing in his yard? Or did it just run?

Speaker 2 No, we would drive by it on our way to another town, and he had a fucking bear in his front yard in a cage.

Speaker 1 It was insane, dude.

Speaker 1 Cage? Oh, no. I thought it was just running around.
No, no. He kept it in a cage.
Big cage.

Speaker 2 Just imagine.

Speaker 1 He never let it out?

Speaker 2 No, he'd let it out all the time. He'd like fucking walking around.
The guy was a complete insane person.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And my uncle,

Speaker 2 my great uncle, he's like 80 years old.

Speaker 2 Complete crazy person too. Taught himself how to fly back in the day.
He came back from World War II. He was on

Speaker 2 Navy. He's a Navy ship guy.
Taught himself how to fly.

Speaker 2 He would fly around this Piper Super Cub. And back in the day, you get a bounty for cougar tails.
So he had a walker hound, and he would put him in the front seat of his Piper Super Cub.

Speaker 2 He would fly around looking for tracks, land his plane in the middle of fucking nowhere, kick his dog out. So he'd tell me these stories and I mean I hunted with this guy forever.

Speaker 1 And the dog would find the bear. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He'd punch him out on the bear or the cougar or whatever it was. Tree it.

Speaker 2 Tree it, shoot it with a 22 hornet because his whole thing was you let them bleed out in their lungs and then they'll fall out of the tree.

Speaker 2 You don't want to shoot them with too big of a caliber because it knocks them out of the tree and they run around.

Speaker 2 If you shoot them with small caliber and it penetrates both lungs, their lungs fill up. Oh, they drown and they fall out.
Jesus Christ. This is what, like, my Cecil Ball was my uncle back in the...

Speaker 1 Did he have a backup gun?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. This guy was completely insane.

Speaker 1 He had like, when I was hunting, he was comfortable with a cougar and a 22.

Speaker 2 Dude,

Speaker 2 this guy was 80 years old when I was hunting cougars with him back in like the panhandle of Idaho.

Speaker 2 And he would tell me stories and I would only go hunting with him to listen to the stories because they were the best fucking stories on the planet he crashed his plane he got fired from the sawmill he was buzzing the tower buzz in the tower crashed his fucking plane into his boss's office and was like fuck you I'm out of here

Speaker 2 dude he was a complete insane person and He was telling me this other story, and these are like the summarized version,

Speaker 2 the cliff notes of it. But, dude, he would bay cougars in the middle of the mountains by himself.

Speaker 2 He's fly his plane, land it in the middle of the snow, find a spot for him, bay cougars, and he had this cougar up in this log jam above a creek. And he was telling me this

Speaker 2 cougar had tucked himself underneath the logs above the creek, and there was snow on top of the logs, there was logs, and then he was like crawling in underneath in the middle of the mountains with like a 357 snub nose.

Speaker 2 he climbed into the cougar den because he's like these this cougar is eating my dogs and he's like reaching around my uncle who'd had like three strokes by the time that I was talking to him

Speaker 2 he's like and he'd stutter a little bit

Speaker 2 he's driving like 80 miles an hour around like like crazy logging roads in the middle of nowhere I'm white knuckling

Speaker 2 his Toyota Tacoma with with cougar hounds in the back of the Toyota going oh my god I'm gonna fucking die any moment. And he's like,

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I got my,

Speaker 2 you know, he's like,

Speaker 2 he had a slight stutter, and pull out his snub-nose 357 like a gangster and reach underneath the logs and start pulling the trigger once he found the right fur between the cougar and his dogs.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. This dude was completely

Speaker 2 insane when it came to doing things.

Speaker 2 This is my uncle. This is like the guy that I'm like hanging out with.

Speaker 1 He reached into the logs and felt his way to the cat.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 With a snub nose,

Speaker 2 whatever, you know, 350

Speaker 2 to kill the cougar because he was pulling up his dogs and eating his dogs.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 2 Like, when you talk about where I grew up and like the guys I grew up with, because I, you know,

Speaker 2 I'm a green beret, you know?

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, you fucking pussy.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're not like walking around in the woods with a saw on your back, you know? And I'm like, yeah, just jumping on planes, I guess.

Speaker 1 You know, that's hilarious. They look down on it like that's an easy job.

Speaker 1 You're not a fucking lumberjack. You're not a fucking lumberjack.
You're kind of a pussy. That's so crazy.

Speaker 2 I'd go home. My dad would make fun of me.

Speaker 1 Isn't it interesting that there's like

Speaker 1 levels of

Speaker 1 discipline and hard work in the world? Like there's there's like if you want to be a logger, there's no easy logger job. They don't exist.
That is a hard fucking job. Those are hard men.
Yes.

Speaker 1 You know, you want to be a logger and you're going to do it for 30 years? You're going to chop and carry trees for 30 fucking years.

Speaker 1 You're going to be living in the woods, chopping and carrying trees for 30 fucking years.

Speaker 2 And like falling trees, wrapping

Speaker 2 big cables around them. And they'd be like, oh, you carried a backpack through the woods.
And that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 I mean, you think about the different groups of people that live these extreme lives. And how many people are at the coffee shop with blue hair that are totally oblivious?

Speaker 1 And they think hard work is like, you know, I'm dealing with my trauma and

Speaker 1 I'm going to Starbucks today to protest.

Speaker 1 It is a guy with a log on his back, and he's 75 years old. And he can't wait to get off work so he can kill cougars with a pistol.

Speaker 2 With a fucking 357.

Speaker 1 And we all exist on the same landmass. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Some dude that looks like he's like building bikes in the 1800s with the fucking curly comb mustache. It's like waxed up.
And you've got another guy

Speaker 2 that's like 80 years old. It's had three strokes.
It's driving around in the mountains. It's running up a mountain at a six-minute mile, chasing his dogs to go kill a cougar.

Speaker 2 Nah, not the same person. Not the same order of priorities.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Well, there's probably a lot of those guys back in the day. Yeah.
I bet that was a common type of human in like 1820. Yeah.
But you ran it all. That was like how you had to stay alive.

Speaker 1 You know, you lived to be about 40, then you had a stroke.

Speaker 1 Everybody died. Nobody got any vitamins.
You were You're eating fucking cornmeal and gruel and trying to eat squirrels.

Speaker 1 You're barely getting by.

Speaker 1 Like you're eating.

Speaker 2 You're eating a bear. That's how fucking nasty.

Speaker 1 They preferred bears. Yeah.
That's what's crazy. Apparently, they thought it tasted like beef.
They cooked a lot of bears. God.

Speaker 1 It's fucking gross. Some of them are gross.
The grizzlies apparently are super gross.

Speaker 1 I asked, Cam just released a new video, redemption a grizzly bear hunt yeah yeah i saw it and uh it's good great video but uh he ate the bear i was like how did it taste like it was okay and then i talked to james he's like it was fucking horrible it's horrible it tastes disgusting but black bear didn't taste that bad if you get it from a good spot apparently like ranlla says the the blueberries

Speaker 1 bears that have been eating blueberries are the best tasting meat ever but that i think that's also relative to bear meat so they're saying no he says it's like a great tasting meat period i don't believe him.

Speaker 1 You don't think it was like flavored with like all they ate was blueberries? I think the problem is they eat so much rotten shit. Yeah.
And that affects the way they taste.

Speaker 1 But I think if they're eating only blueberries, like, did you ever see his video? With the blueberry fat? Yeah. It's like purple fat.
It's crazy. He said that's delicious.
He said it's so delicious.

Speaker 1 I believe him.

Speaker 1 I love it. You think he's a fucking liar.
I lead him last year. He's awesome.

Speaker 2 He's so much fun to hunt with. And he's so...
But I just firmly disagree with him on this. Where I'm like, bro, like, no.

Speaker 1 What is the best-tasting game animal for you?

Speaker 1 Moose. Moose.
Moose. Interesting.

Speaker 2 100%. That's a good one.
And for me or for my kids,

Speaker 2 moose is the only game animal. My kids are like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 They are 100% chips in. They look forward to it.
Not only do they look forward to it, they request it. It's the only game meat.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. That's very interesting.

Speaker 2 Like, I can eat elk,

Speaker 2 but I'm I'm the only one at the table eating elk.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I only shot one moose ever, and I ate it, and I remember it was good, but that was with Ben O'Brien, like, 10 years ago. But I

Speaker 1 haven't had a lot of experience with it. For me, it's Axis deer, and elk are the two best ones.
Elk first, Axis deer second. Yeah.
Do you like Axis? I love Axis. It's crazy what it tastes like, right?

Speaker 2 It doesn't taste like a deer. No, it's like this is a totally different kind of animal.

Speaker 2 It's not even beef. It's like a clean.

Speaker 1 It's almost sweet.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's a clean beef.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's an interesting flavor.

Speaker 1 And the fact that, you know, they have so many of them in Hawaii, like that Maui Nui Venison Company, if people want to buy wild game, you can get actual wild game from Maui Nui Venison.

Speaker 1 They'll ship you access deer, frozen. They have meat sticks.
It's fucking great. I'm not affiliated with them.
I know the owners, but I don't have anything to do with them. But it's a great company.

Speaker 1 And they're doing something that you actually have to do. There's no natural predators on Maui.
So they have to shoot these axis deer. They're fucking everywhere.

Speaker 2 They're like

Speaker 2 rodents, basically.

Speaker 1 And they're a delicious rodent. It's a crazy animal to hunt, too, because they grew up with tigers.
So they evolve with tigers. So they move so fucking fast.

Speaker 1 They're the fastest animal I've ever hunted.

Speaker 2 I shot a doe at 30 yards bedded, and she dodged the arrow.

Speaker 2 It doesn't even make sense.

Speaker 1 They move so fast.

Speaker 2 It doesn't even make sense. So I started shooting them longer distance away because

Speaker 2 the arrow is quiet and they can't hear the string slap.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So they can't hear the bow. So I started just shooting them a little bit further away.

Speaker 1 They still hear the only way.

Speaker 1 We stopped hunting them in the day because in the morning there's no wind. We started hunting them only in the afternoon because there's more wind and the wind at least covers a little bit of it.

Speaker 1 But Dudley got video of me shooting this Saxis deer at 80 yards and it's a perfect shot. Perfect.
It's going right to the vitals at 80 yards. Perfect break.

Speaker 1 And then 10 yards with the arrows 10 yards from him. He goes

Speaker 1 and he's gone. Within 10 yards, he was gone.
He was nowhere near where the arrow is. What? He moved.

Speaker 1 He heard the arrow coming and he moved out of the way. 10 yards from him.
There's a video of it, slow-mo video.

Speaker 1 Because it's a lighted knock. You see a perfect line headed straight for his vitals.
And then,

Speaker 1 gone.

Speaker 2 Gone. Not even

Speaker 2 close.

Speaker 1 Not even close. Like a bullet.
I missed him by like a whole quarter.

Speaker 1 He was gone. He just ran away.

Speaker 1 They hear things. They think a tiger's coming.
They just go. They just go.
It just makes you feel so slow when you watch how they move.

Speaker 1 People suck. We're so fucking clumsy and soft, and we're so vulnerable.
My back hurts. Ow.

Speaker 2 My arrow that's moving at 300 feet per second.

Speaker 1 It has no chance.

Speaker 2 No chance. No chance.

Speaker 1 No chance. Especially if they see the bow go off or they hear the bow go off.

Speaker 1 They're gone. And they're delicious.
And they're everywhere in Texas, too. That's the wild thing about Texas.
You could just bring whatever you want in.

Speaker 1 You want zebras? You can bring zebras. You had zebras.

Speaker 2 I know I did.

Speaker 1 You can have fucking zebras. My wife saw a zebra one day when she was driving the kids to school.

Speaker 2 I know. We have.
Dude, I saw a zebra.

Speaker 1 I think I saw a zebra. I said, you probably did.
Some asshole probably has a zebra. The zebra got out.

Speaker 2 My kids would be like driving around and like, let's go look at the zebras.

Speaker 2 Okay, let's go look at the zebras.

Speaker 1 You could have zebras in Texas. but I love it.

Speaker 1 I love it that you can go to like when we went to that place down in South Texas, that ranch that my friend owns, when we went down there, like there's African animals here.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Even these crazy black bucks and all these different animals are not from anywhere near here. And there's thousands of them.
Like this is nuts.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you shot that

Speaker 1 Neil guy. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but everybody says that's like the best meat ever.

Speaker 2 So put it on the scale associated with everything else.

Speaker 1 It's really good. It's all really good.
All wild game from a healthy animal is delicious. I find, at least undulates.
They're all delicious. I've never found one that I didn't like.

Speaker 1 But I still think elk is the best. That's just my, I like the flavor.

Speaker 1 Also, I like elk hunting so much. It means more to me when I'm eating a piece of elk.
I think I'm just biased. I think if there's anything, I just like eating them.
I like eating them.

Speaker 1 And I also think it's going to sound crazy, but I think you get their spirit. I think there's something about these super potent wild animals that you kill with an arrow and then you're eating it.

Speaker 1 Like you get the spirit of that experience, the spirit of that animal. I think it empowers you in some very strange physiological way.
I really do. I think they're so vitamin rich.

Speaker 1 Like they're such athletes. The way they run up a mountain, like you're getting these nutrients from that animal that I don't think is any like any other animal.

Speaker 1 Because they're so much stronger than all those other animals. They just run.
They have 900 pounds. They run right up the top of a mountainside like it's nothing.
You're like, this is crazy.

Speaker 1 You watch them when they get winded and they fucking run over the top of a hill that takes you 40 minutes to crawl up. They just run up it.
When you eat that thing, you're like,

Speaker 1 you just feel it. You know, you feel it and your body feels it.
You get like a little boost.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's electric.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I feel the same way.

Speaker 1 I've given it to people that don't even hunt. Yeah.
And they go, dude, I feel so good after I ate this. I go, yeah there's something to that

Speaker 2 it's superfood it is a superfood my neighbors when i gave them you know elk or whatever it is they're like dude this is amazing yeah like yeah this is what it feels like to be a hunter this is what it feels like to go out kill something process it, put in a package, and it's special.

Speaker 2 It's meaningful. It's the whole celebration.
And I hate to say it like that, but it is. It's like, this is,

Speaker 2 you said it earlier. And actually, I wanted to.

Speaker 2 What do you call it? Like an assassin for your food or something?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. A supermarket assassin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, supermarket assassin.

Speaker 2 This is the difference is over here. You think this is, one, it tastes different.
Two, there's... a definitive meaning you're associating with it.

Speaker 2 So there's no way that you can tell me that there's not a psychological and nutrient connection between those two where it makes something more meaningful and beneficial specifically for you.

Speaker 2 There's just no way you can tell me that's not better.

Speaker 1 Right, like a good meal with people you love, I feel like almost gives you extra nutrients. Almost like there's an extra good feeling about it.
That's why people like eating together.

Speaker 1 You know, eating good food with people you care about, having fun. The whole experience is better for your overall being.

Speaker 2 It's the difference between like jacking off in a port-a-potty and eating a meal with your fucking family, right? It's like

Speaker 2 there's like a huge difference.

Speaker 1 Like one is like gross and a little bit shameful and disgusting. And just like one's a jack-of-the-box cheeseburger.
This is an elk that you cooked on your own grill. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a big difference, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, I'm glad I found it. I'll tell you that.

Speaker 1 It's also, it's so hard to do. You know, we've both had our trials and tribulations, elk bow hunting, and it's just, it's so difficult to do that the people that do it well,

Speaker 1 the people that are successful, you know how hard it is to do. You're like, God damn, you pulled it off.
Like, that's a hunting elk with a bow in the wild is a real thing.

Speaker 1 Even in the places we go are better because they have more elk and stuff. It's always hard, folks.
It's hard. It's always.
The problem with the public land thing is the public.

Speaker 1 I have so many friends that have terrible stories about guys winding elk on purpose, blowing elk out.

Speaker 1 They're all competing against the same packs of elk or the same groups of hunters are competing against the same elk groups. It's crazy.
It's like

Speaker 1 these herds of animals are getting like winded on two and three sides because people are like moving in trying to get them.

Speaker 1 You know, it's just

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 ideal situation would be that

Speaker 1 I think the ideal situation

Speaker 1 would be like, you know, they're trying to do that

Speaker 1 that American, what is it called? The American Serengeti Project. They're trying to like rewild a whole section of the country.

Speaker 1 They're buying up land and they want to like bring back buffalo and bring back all these animals. If everybody, like at one time in their life, could have like some sort of a hunt where

Speaker 1 someone shows them how to do it, someone takes them out, they get an animal, and they cook and eat that animal. If you're a meat eater, I think at one time in your life, you should try to do that.

Speaker 1 I think that may be the solution for people to understand what it's all about. Just one time in your life, or even go with someone when they're doing it.
One time, just know what that's like, because

Speaker 1 it ignites a little part of your DNA that you didn't even know was in there. There's like a little part of us that for tens of thousands of years, the only way we survived is hunting.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thousands and thousands and thousands of years, just baked into our DNA.

Speaker 1 And when you're in there and you're in those woods, and you got that rangefinder, and that elk is 52 yards away, and you see him walking through the bushes, and you know you got a window and it's like a part of your DNA that just goes, yeah, this is what we're doing.

Speaker 1 This is what we're doing now. Lock in, lock in, get the animal, bring it back.
There's like some crazy, like ancient primal code. And I tell people it's the same thing when you catch a fish.

Speaker 1 When you catch a fish, it's like, oh, oh, oh, this excitement that you catch a fish. That's built into your code because now you're going to live.
You're going to live. You got food for your family.

Speaker 1 It's in there, a human reward system. And that's how we're supposed to get food.
We're supposed to appreciate the food because it's hard to get. That's what it's supposed to be.

Speaker 1 It's not supposed to be going to the supermarket and look at the ground beef is $5 a pound and fucking

Speaker 1 you never chase anything. You never go kill anything.
You're just sitting there eating your fucking bowl of pasta, watching TV. It's easy.

Speaker 2 It's so easy, right? It's just, it's not supposed to be that easy.

Speaker 1 It's not supposed to be that easy to live.

Speaker 1 If it is, you're going to get anxiety. You're not designed for that.
You're designed for like trauma and testing. You're designed for struggle.
You're designed to overcome things.

Speaker 1 And if you're not ever overcoming anything, you're filled with anxiety. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't deserve this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How do I deserve this majestic fucking animal that I just consumed? I didn't earn it. No.

Speaker 1 I just paid for it. Which is weird.

Speaker 1 Doing some weird job and then you got these hitmen out there whacking cows.

Speaker 2 Supermarket hitmen. That's like the best.
That is one of the best quotes I've got.

Speaker 1 It is awesome. I mean, if there's anything that's, there's nothing grosser in this country than factory farming.
It's the grossest thing ever.

Speaker 1 They have laws where you're not even allowed to film it because it's so gross. Oh, it's disgusting.
It's like gag laws. Where you go to jail if you filmed horrific acts.

Speaker 2 Which is completely insane when you think about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 When you think about how easy it is to go get your food and people knew,

Speaker 2 especially meat eaters, I've never quite understood meat eaters that are anti-hunting. That makes no sense to me, by the way.

Speaker 1 That makes no sense.

Speaker 2 Like zero sense.

Speaker 2 How can you think that this is a better way where you're caging an animal, filling it full of like hormones and supplemental nutrition and corn and all these things, and then you're putting a bolt through its head?

Speaker 1 But I'm not there. And then I'm at Starbucks protesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm not there. It's like, but you don't know how this McGriddle got in my hand, but now I'm putting it in my mouth.

Speaker 2 Just because I want to actually feel the significance of this event in the context of like, I don't have any bloodlust. I just don't want to be a hypocrite.
Right.

Speaker 1 It's also one of those things that, like, if you haven't experienced it, you really don't understand it.

Speaker 1 And when you're trying to explain it to people, they're looking at it from like the cartoon Disney version of Hunters and movie version of Hunters where they're all cocksuckers.

Speaker 1 Dude, we should wrap this up because we got to go meet camp for dinner. It's almost six o'clock.
We've done like

Speaker 1 how many hours do we do?

Speaker 1 Almost five. Oh, bro.
It's almost five hours. Holy shit.
Like that. All right.
All right. Thanks, bro.
Appreciate you, brother. See you, bro.
All right. Bye.

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