Mass Surveillance, AI & The Death Of Mainstream Media - Andy Stumpf

I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States government I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where if a government knows more about you you are actually safer as a people I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows about you probably the less secure that you are I don't have any wisdom but I certainly will tell people what I think regardless of what they may think about it and how it lands with them and if you don't like the answer don't ask me the [ __ ] question good stuff Andy stump ladies and gentlemen welcome to the show thank you for having me Prime Time ratings last night CNN 569 th000 Fox News 1.73 million okay MSNBC 1.86 million the first episode of Tucker Carlson on Twitter 82 million in 20 hours so far so basically an adx increase over what would be considered traditional mainstream media yeah of 40 30X over all three together yeah wow um where do you get your news from Mostly the internet how do you select your source and how do you bounce you know we're in an interesting time a time where I think people have more access information then in the history of humankind and it seems like every day we're through that envelope or threshold even more I have seen it in myself I've seen it in other people I'm sure you have too the pros of the internet is you can find anything you want to the cons of the internet is you can find anything that you want to if you go there pre- coocked or with some type of confirmation bias let me just tell anybody what they're going to find on the internet exactly what they're looking for and you can get lost in fake news literally like satire sites that sometimes are so ridiculously good they're hard to tell that they're satire [ __ ] to here for it um you'll come on to traditional media Outlets like you the Fox News the CNN and if and I'm sorry if this day and age of people don't realize that everybody and that message is bought and paid for I don't know how to help you because it's right there in your face you'd have to be blind to not see it and I don't have a problem with people getting news from either one of those sources let's just recognize there's a slant on it and a bias and also they're in the business of selling ads just like TV so it leads you at this place where do you get information do you go on substack do you go on to Twitter do you go on to traditional media Outlets how much do you have to bounce it against the other side to determine that the information that you're getting is actually legitimate or real did you see the debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Douglas Murray a couple of months ago no you know Malcolm and and Douglas as well and uh it was a discussion around mainstream media basically needs to it's uh not something that you should be able to trust and there was some really interesting arguments from both sides that there are are constrictions and guidelines around what you can and can't do with traditional media that are um unrestricted when it comes to the more New Media uh but that also brings with it degrees of freedom that people can take advantage of it's a really really interesting discussion and I think the sort of terminally online World sees New Media as this Bastion of free speech which gets itself closer to the truth because it's no longer encumbered by any of the rules and procedures and the bought and paid for and so on but I think think if everybody took a really close look at it the incentives are different but they're still not exactly pure free speech and Truth are not always synonymous and I think people have to be really cautious with that I don't have a great answer for myself as to where you even bounce ideas or resources especially in a world where like I've just recently started playing around with chat GPT holy [ __ ] or Image Creators holy [ __ ] and these are in the in like what will be viewed in the very near future as their infancy yeah if they're that good right now and it can really fool intelligent people I feel like Skynet is just around the quarter we are mere inches away from just getting [ __ ] by robots that's what it's going to look like dude I I have a I have a friend who sells silk pillowcases and bamboo sheets on Amazon and he has been Amazon funneling and building his business up and so on and so forth it's very effortful to do and he got chat GPT to write his sales page for him and then he used mid journey to create the photos that he needed to do for the image listing and the increase in his sales that he's had is absolutely absurd and he showed me look these are the other top five competitors for bamboo sheets and silk pillow cases in the United States and look at how much better my IM are he said well cuz I wasn't constrained by reality or physics I was able to just perfectly dial in exactly what I wanted through mid journey and I got chat GPT to write the prompts for Mid Journey yeah so you've got AI telling AI what to do so I literally the day before yesterday this is the 7th of June I think on the 5th of June I tried mid Journey For the First Time because I kept seeing articles about it and I was thinking how could I make I'm like could I improve YouTube thumbnails for the podcast messing around with this because oftentimes as I'm sure you are your staff knows like I kind of want to have a certain feel so I'll just Google image search like I'm not Google image searching [ __ ] I'm GNA create it in a day and a half and I'm going to be super upfront honest I an idiot I am not an intelligent person I can like I can Wrecking Ball my way through life in a day and a half I have already created some images that were beyond what what I was even thinking was possible and that's 1.5 days I mean with the least experienced user on the planet yeah yeah yeah it's terrifying I think your point when it comes to talking about media heterodox New Wave whatever uh is that you're going to be able to propagate a lot more news stories that are going to be automatically generated maybe this is the bulk of reporting the boring stuff that just needs to be done potentially will come from chat GPT or some other sort of automated system which has been trained on the biases that humans have so it perpetuates and propagates those existing biases so yeah man this this Tucker thing is is absolutely fascinating you know for I think uh Matt Walsh's what is a woman that the daily y released over the weekend to celebrate the start of pride month that's right they released it the Twitter allowed them to put it up correct then Elon Musk retweeted it and pinned it that is potentially the most viewed documentary in human history now because it got hundreds of million I think a 100 million plays over the weekend that's insane on Twitter the most viewed documentary in human history I think that's a metric for how much people don't have faith anymore in traditional media sources I I truly think that it is my concern is with the AI whether it's a good thing or bad thing at some point my thoughts will always shift back to weaponization and the volume of information that that AI can create and could get the snowball rolling downhill before people could actually backtrack and figure it out for most people it seems like they their deeply held beliefs are about one click deep and it's usually the first search result so if you got a volume of information heading in the wrong direction that was legitimately untrue and I think it's a very uh fair thing to say that the the Western World however you would want to Define that has you know there's an access to every belief system and there's an access to those belief systems and those belief systems are also looking at Ai and leveraging Ai and weapon weaponizing AI I don't know if we're intelligent enough as a species to survive well think about it this way right you make content on the internet as do I what you're trying to do is find a balance somewhere between exactly what you want to talk about and what your interests are and some degree of what's going to be at least partially interesting to the audience you don't want to compromise yourself so much that you get audience captured but you don't want to be so nichy and completely Sol I istic that all you do is indulge yourself over and over it's a blend between the two right there is a third participant in every conversation that is the audience member that's listening what you're trying to do is in some regard and varying degrees reverse engineer what the audience wants right that's at least you're you're conscious of what the audience wants so creators try to do that and then algorithms try to deliver content that people want to it so the Creator predicts what the algorithm needs based on what the audience wants now you can remove the Creator all together and just go algorithm direct to Consumer right because you have no restriction on how many different iterations of content and images you remember the Cambridge analytica thing right where there was um custom built memes around the exact pain point that these particular subgroups had around Hillary Clinton or whoever it was and we're going to Target them and create them and do all of the rest of them but there's still a guy somewhere sat working out what meme to make what text to use dragging the image in creating it putting it out there you could have individual me right I know Andy's profile and we will make a meme or a series of memes just for him so I think yeah but wait until the AI can replace that individual and then you have ai teaching other AI correct correct and then we have to go beg a robot for our water ration every day yeah well dude I I think it's it's terrifying yeah it is and when you think that within the space of probably 3 years it wouldn't be surprising if most of the content created on the Internet is no longer human generated if you think that the internet is aess pool at the moment at least you know the content that you're consuming was made by another person yeah in the future it very well might be the case that it's a rarity to not have an automated oh my God this is a post from a real person as opposed to an automated uh bot of some kind there's already um social media where you need to upload images of your face I think maybe even in Instagram has this for verification now uh to ensure that it's not bots so you have to put a photo of your face up and maybe a photo of your ID up and what this does is it ensures not only is it the same person but if you try and duplicate it you can't have more than one account or some other some such which is trying to restrict bot activity and that's just now I mean in one and a half days on Mid journey I feel like I could create both of those things full Universe give me a half an hour and I could create both of those things and then you have person I mean what is it what happens when it gets to the point if we're not already edging towards it already where people are questioning every piece of information that comes at them because they don't know they don't know if it's biased I think we're already there I think we're already there too but I don't know if I don't think we're trending for it to get better I'm concerned that we're trending for it to get worse and where does that land us where do people go at that point to actually get information about the world that they can trust well you you mentioned at the beginning that the issue that people have is now uh an abundance not scarcity right there's too much information not too little information and very quickly the over the last sort of 30 years the skill set that was most advantageous to a human went from someone who is able to seek out information to somebody that is able to discern information right it's now all about can you work out how legitimate this is can you do your sources or your checks uh a video from a friend of mine went hyperv viral as he was talking about um America is the third third highest country out of 193 Nations worldwide in gun crime and if you were to remove the five largest cities for gun crime from that we would move from third down to 190th or 189th or something like that took me one Google search to find out that that's not true that's not even remotely it sounds [ __ ] amazing yeah like oh [ __ ] well let's just cut these cities out of the US problem solved oh and there was like a little bit of a they're mostly blue cities and blah blah blah and don't get me wrong dude if I'd heard it and I've propagated tons and tons of stuff like that oh I heard this like little Zinger let me get it out there that sounds cool uh but yeah that's you with your human biases imagine if you had a custom purpose-built viral machine that knew exactly the way to deliver it that knew exactly what was going to trigger you but going back to the Tucker conversation right you as somebody that's been in this great nation longer than I have How likely do you think it is that more and more of the news guys I think trevan Noah recently left his show I think he was released or or maybe left uh Tu Carlson obviously released by Fox Now doing his own thing what do you think the future of these sorts of news organizations would be if people can go and make 40 times the entire Prime Time ratings by going and and yoloing it themselves with a couple of students and a nice garage setup in the house maybe we don't need mainstream meter anymore I think we're through the Looking Glass on that one I I think that Tucker and just those numbers alone speak to how much people are looking to a traditional source and the traditional models I mean I think they're mired in bureaucracy I have uh been to the fox um news Studio a few times I've done a couple of written pieces for them and a couple of uh inperson stuff and it is a large building with a massive amount of people that is constrained you know they have they do have different uh journalistic uh thresholds and barriers that they're going to need to at least be able to clear to present uh information and ideas but they're way slower and there are 100% soft and probably hard boundaries on what their hosts can say what they can do and I'm sure that the money is good I have no idea what they what they make but if somebody wants to go out and have complete flexibility and autonomy and probably actually make orders of magnitude more money by being on their own why would you mire yourself in bureaucracy when you can put together a small team and be you know the first person through the door and then reap the benefit of that are you on a network for your show uh no just the internet no but you you know what you know what I mean like an ihart radio uh no I put it up on the just the normal platform any sponsors that you do you handle yourself either through an agency that's working like as a consultant for you uh I used to go through the agency route and then just due to my relationship with evet Black Rifle I just streamlined it and was like you know what how about we just do this so my point being that even within our world the New Media thing um there are varying degrees of people being bought now if it comes to uh networks and stuff like that the people that are listening are concerned my favorite creators on iHot radio maybe they're part of a globalist conspiracy those guys they help with production they help you get guests and they sell ads right like they're not they're not really stpp increases yeah it increases your reach largely in the experience I do have with those things there are other platforms and maybe those platforms whatever they fall into whatever uh the globalist or whatever it might be that doesn't mean you as somebody who has content on that platform is a part of that correct yeah uh my point being that even within that you found it easier to streamline even what is already quite a streamlined uh way of working so for somebody like Tucker I would be really interested to know why Twitter apart from the fact that you can reach what will probably hit 100 million plays in 24 hours which there's no way even on YouTube that you could do that if you did a 100 million plays on YouTube in 24 hours You' be the number one trending video worldwide on that site Mr BEAST's Mr BEAST's squid game video did somewhere in the region of 70 million but that was a movie level production that was custom built for verality Tucker just I mean it was a well crafted monologue he was actually talking about this um Dam explosion have you seen this m so uh Tucker points to ke's uh possible role in the kovka damur uh so if it was intentional it was not a military tactic it was an act of terrorism Tucker said commenting on the incident blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine but it hurts Russia more and for precisely that reason the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it so basically he's saying maybe this is a false flaggy type thing yeah the water level below this Dam has risen by 12 M which is that's going to change some neighborhood layouts a [ __ ] city um that's what used to be a city yeah correct correct you're now your granny's now at the bottom of a lake totally um but my point being that he's able to talk about stuff that he wants without any restriction I don't know how he's monetizing and I would love to know why he chose Twitter apart from reach reach is self-evident is he being paid there's no ads as far as I can see I do play for Twitter blue which means maybe I'm ad free so perhaps there would have been pre-roll ads running before it maybe people that have watched it that don't pay for Twitter blue can tell us or whatever if they saw ads but you didn't do a this episode is brought to you by yeah anything there was no ads running partway through it could lead to that I mean I don't I don't know a whole lot about Tucker in the world that he comes from I'm going to assume he was well taken care of when he was at Fox so the move might actually be to drive awareness before the monetization can you imagine the hammer you could swing in negotiation like oh hey by the way I do about 100 billion players in 24 hours so here's my rate oh you don't like my rate next yeah dude so again for the people that don't know this world I would guess you could probably charge between a 10 and $20 CPM on that so that's per thousand plays which is a [ __ ] ungodly amount of money let's just multiply that by a number that has a lot of zeros yeah correct and I you know it doesn't matter how much tuer was being paid at Fox yeah I can guarantee it wasn't that much nobody nobody [ __ ] talks those sorts of numbers but I don't think he's in a rush to monetize no no I think his move is probably build accumulate build Foundation because then you can take it then you're the you're the captain of your own ship you have your hand on the wheel and people can get on board but you get to tell them what state room they're in as are the other way around yes and think about it this way Tom saguru that does your mom's house he pivoted from comedian comedian with podcast comedian with very well produced podcast comedian with podcast and other podcasts under it to now Network so he is vertically integrating himself further and further back up the chain smart yeah and you know I don't know who runs who directs the editorial policy at Fox News something tells me that I've never seen them on TV and I don't respect them as a Creator oh they're not a Creator I bet you it's a lawyer probably yeah but I respect Tom saguru as a Creator I know that he understands the craft so I go oh yeah that that network has legitimacy and toer Carlson will be able to lend legitimacy to other people that come below it's the same with uh Ben Shapiro and the daily Wire yeah right you know Shapiro Jeremy boring Jeremy not necessarily front-facing but you know he can he's done well-crafted adverts and I've seen him on podcasts and he can speak MH and you know in a world of uh social media where people want that behind the scenes thing they want to know Kim Kardashian's dog's name and they want to know where Z Efron goes for coffee on blah blah on his Instagram stories I think that that's I think that gives a a degree of sort of resonance yeah I'll be curious to see what he does with it I mean what I guess the better metric will be how does the second video do honestly well if the if the algorithms anything to go by that would be one other thing that I haven't heard anybody talk about one of my friends brought this up to me Elon Musk pinned the what is a woman uh documentary it's a tweet Elon musk's 20-year-old child recently went through gender transition really I did not know that yes officially I think that might be a name change or some sort of uh intervention uh no one as far as I'm aware has brought up the fact that Elon is quite sort of forthcoming and vifer about his stance on uh trans stuff especially around children I wonder how much of that is driven by a personal investment yeah odds another sort of families get ugly right people who tell me that you know they have a perfect family it's like let's go back a few Generations let's shake the branches a bit I can tell you right now mine's got some interesting branches as do they all um so who knows I mean who knows the dynamic between father and child are they close are they antagonistic I mean you've all seen both that you know the I watch that documentary I don't find it to be controversial it's it's a man asking a legitimate question looking for information valid reasonable articulable responses that can be defended bring your idea let's bring it into the light not the Shadows let's investigate it let's ask questions and see what remains um but yeah I mean that's a that's an issue that I can't in the people that I have talked to even inside of the trans community and The Limited in um interaction that I have had the answer is very widely so it you know who knows what's going on there between child and father and it's also not uncommon to have family members who have diametrically opposed beliefs which is awesome at you know Thanksgiving well I think uh political leaning is 60% heritable which means that you do have most of the family in One Direction yeah and then the outliers and another load them up with some cocktails at holiday parties and let's just work it out yeah I did Friends giving last year which was way better than Thanksgiving yeah because you actually get to choose your friends but you don't get to choose your family this is a very true statement it's a very true statement yeah families get wild I get it I don't know a single person who like again if you dig enough far enough back you're going to have issues that uh are oftentimes insurmountable according to a new survey from the American K Institute three in 10 Americans under 30 support the installation of cameras in the home to monitor wrongdoing strikingly the Figures were markedly different among the 18 to 30 cohort 3 and 10 support the installation of surveillance cameras we can probably also map this to emerging support for intrusive digital surveillance on the growing body of studies indicating that faith in and support for Democratic Norms is falling with every generation even as the same group turns against open debate and academic freedom in other words there has been a pronounced turnaway from the foundational liberal norms and towards a basine of authoritarian control and surveillance in the name of safety care and the avoidance of harm Kor report speculates that this shift is generational noting that the over 45s have a marketly different attitude to surveillance and suggesting that this is likely connected to the growing prioritization of safety if you're used to interacting on social media and you're used to unaccountable Authority and you've grown up partially online you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy for example allowing social media to track your behavior in exchange for access to the digital services that enable your virtual Social Life 3 and 10 want home surveillance inside who decides what's right and wrong who decides what's the apprpriate I I have three kids um we're just getting into birthday season my daughter just turned 15 my middle son will turn 18 next month and then my oldest son will turn 20 wildly different and it's just different between having boys and girls there's a way that and I learned this lesson the hard way you know I I can talk to my sons in a tone of voice and not that I am aiming to do so but I mean you get frustrated as a parent right there's times where you're just like you're at your wits end and I've there have been times where I've been very sharp and direct with my sons I made that mistake one time with my daugh daughter and I watched her kind of Wilt away and it was she was quite young but I learned my lesson in that moment but so for me I I kind of have a and it's a floating scale as they evolve as human beings too and they're processing but right and wrong who who decides in that surveillance is wrong doing what is wrongdoing what what's the difference between wrongdoing in difficult parenting decisions that you have to make discipline um it like and by discipline I'm not talking like Joo get up at 4:30 I'm talking like take a nap Joo you know I'm talking like discipline disciplining put your dishes away yeah again or you know hey you snuck out of the house at 13 years old and you were gone for two hours and I caught you coming back in Oh and it looks like you're shitfaced these are hard parenting things that you have to deal with the idea of surveillance I think it was a quote from Thomas Jefferson it came up on my own podcast not too long ago but it's essentially in a nutshell I'm sure you've heard it is those who are will willing to sacrifice a small amount of freedom for an increase in safety or deserving of neither or security and I it's such a slippery slope first off I don't think most people have any idea how much the government is capable of collecting on them right now um for most people if you're listening to this you need to assume that anything you do on an electronic device is at least being held somewhere I don't think we have enough people or the Computing bandwidth to look at it in real time but we absolutely do retroactively people like oh we know the government can't do that there's rules in the Constitution it's like okay listen there go onto the internet which you're probably spending most of your life on and actually you're consuming this content on it anyway and Google the Partnerships between America and our allies and what we do when we want to flirt the Constitution we have our allies look inward because they have your country might be a little bit guilty of this Chris we might have a partnership with a couple people across the ocean that have access to the same data that can look in because they don't have to worry about the constitutional rights of American citizens I would imagine that we have a reciprocal agreement with them as well there are ways around all of this stuff I have tried to teach my kids since they had access to electronic devices that anything you do on an electronic device lasts forever and you should be aware of that um and I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States government I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where if a government knows more about you you are actually safer as a people I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows about you probably the less secure that you are I mean I'm sorry if you look at what's going on in the FBI um and I just had an FBI agent who retired after 20 years on my podcast and he was talking about the shift in the higher levels of the FBI government organizations can be weaponized in directions because of what the government knows about people and their beliefs and they shouldn't know those things the pay we got an example uh the websites that you visit are you a member of the NRA are you a member of this or that organization did you visit this website um what have you posted what do you post about what type of things do you they can get a really good profile about who you are as a person and these large organizations people forget often I think that they're just a conglomerate of of individuals if you get a large amount of individuals that all think the same way pointed in One Direction the result that you're going to get from that is going to be biased and I think it people are so willing to allow the government to look into their life in my opinion the government should know almost nothing about you and I but we should know everything about the government and what they're doing and it's completely backwards right now dude it's scary it's scary stepping over here into America you guys have a much closer read even if you think that most Americans aren't sufficiently concerned about what the government knows about them and aren't sufficiently aware it's a conversation that is much more surface level and much more front and center uh in the UK it's just it's not a a real discussion we don't have we don't uphold the virtues of of freedom from tyranny and all the rest of it in the same way that you guys do um now I have no idea about whether our government is or is not surveilling us as I can answer that for you yes 100% 100% well there we are [ __ ] we should we need to have a conversation Britain we need to have a conversation about freedom but I mean the the especially the thing about looking at your surveillance inside the house and you make a really great point that who determines what is or is not acceptable behavior you know we've said for quite a while when it comes to having conversations on the internet are there topics that should be Beyond The Pale that you're not allowed to talk about and even if there are topics that you can talk about de facto you can't talk about them because of the sort of response if you start bringing up race and IQ that's not going to be allowed if you start bringing up stuff to do with anti-Semitism or conspiracy theories to do with certain ethnic groups that's also not going to be particularly well-liked and you know maybe very good very good reasons that it's hard to work out who is a good actor that's genuinely having a good faith interested conversation to try and find out truth and who is a bad actor that's trying to be the front end of the funnel toward a a KKK March right it's difficult to to pass apart those two I think the better question is would you rather have conversations that may not be agreeable to people happening in public or have those same conversations that are still going to happen occurring in private I think as a society we are better off having them occur in public my theory is pull things into the light if you push things into the Shadows you can't really see what's going on in there and I think it creates an environment and room for things to turn quite sour correct well the the problem with censorship and the reason that it doesn't work is that it doesn't stop people thinking things it just means that they no no longer are truthful about the things that they think they pick and choose where they tell the truth correct as I mean as we all do but on on issues like that it's yeah I I would rather know the racist that lives next door to me than be surprised by it years down the road yep so well you know there is still even for the best meaning amongst us uh a degree of push back a potential risk of cancellation retribution in one regard or another when you talk about these things in public or online or whatever but in the safety of your own home when you're talking about this you have a a wife that is interesting and philosophically you can have really difficult discussions about cool things we had a chat uh around a pool a couple of weeks ago about the dis genic effect of abortion so the fact that uh abortion is more easily accessed by people who are richer people who are richer are better able to do Family Planning which actually means that restricting access to abortion encourages more workingclass and underclass children to accidentally be born off the back of this which actually means that you are propagating more poverty uh then you are propagating more rich people and there was maybe a conspiracy that restricting this could be done from top down to ensure that we have enough workers to continue to do the jobs that are laborious that the Bourgeois don't necessarily want to do great word Bourgeois yeah I love it [ __ ] yeah uh but you go okay that that's like talking about dis genic that's the literally the opposite of eugenic that's pretty sort of trigger word then you're talking about some stuff to do with group conspiracy you're talking about you know differences and all of the rest of it fascinating comments some super super smart people sat around like three World Poker Stars and a bunch of other people and I was like [ __ ] this is awesome really really engaged in this conversation listening to these people explain a topic that I didn't really understand but if that was part of this new home at home installation surveillance thing and the child or the young daughter who doesn't like the idea that Mom and Dad have got the friends around talking about this with poker players they press the button that oh they say I want to report the For Thought crime or whatever Tom Cruz comes in and you're [ __ ] he puts a Halo on you yes yes correct oh that's what was that not premonition what the [ __ ] was it oh majority report yes yes it is [ __ ] yeah also let's say we allow let's go down this pipeline yes let's say we tell the government for whatever reason we lose our goddamn minds and we say you know what US Government we're going to let you put cameras in our homes my [ __ ] is wide open please enter do you seriously I am a gape do you what a word one on the board for Bourgeois one on the word for gape referring to yourself as a gape is like oh my [ __ ] god that's all I got for today people I'm out of here good um what do you think the odds are of them ever saying you know what we should take these back out you know what this is enough we have cameras you know but these are these are 1080p we need to up grade this with some 8K and honestly you know we were only kind of getting some camera views how about the bedroom we need a bedroom and we're going to need the audio too because you know what if people are using non-verbal what if it's non-verbal abuse of things that are incorrect I don't know of a history of of in US of giving the government an incredible amount of power which in my opinion observation cameras in in the homes of citizens is one insane but an incredible amount of power I don't have an example of willingly giving it back correct that is a razor blade that every step that you take you are going to cut yourself even a ret right it clicks down and it's like okay it can only go One Direction and it's not a good direction yeah that's a tourni kit that you're putting on and putting on and putting on and putting on and the next thing you know your limb is getting saw off in under the guise of safety so I think the interesting uh part there was if you're used to interacting on social media you're used to unaccountable Authority and if you've grown up online you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy in exchange for Digital Services that enable your social life it definitely seems to me that this sort of generalized risk aversion uh this optimization for convenience Comfort um uh safety over Freedom SL genuine privacy well they grew they don't know a world without it correct you know my all three of my kids again they they didn't grow up my daughter probably the most um digitally native digitally native my Sons not not 100% but not as much as my daughter they don't really know or understand a world without that device and what that device can create for them it's hilarious when I explained them going to the library and looking for books about you know the career I wanted to go into when I was younger they're like why would you why would you do that or ringing a friend to tell them where you'll meet them because once you're out of the house you have no other way of getting in contact with them one of the most hilarious conversations with my middle son I was explaining to him a pager he goes That's the dumbest [ __ ] I've ever heard my life oh wait a minute a number that I have to call that goes to a device that beeps you and you'll call me on another device why would you just combine those to I'm like yeah well the Apes were still figuring it out took a while yeah Steve Jobs wasn't born yet yeah no he truly thought that I was from the dumbest species in the history of man when I was explaining a pager to him yeah yeah man and you know if you've spent all of this time with at your fingertips the most controlled I could I choose what I get exposed to anything that I am exposed to which is remotely objectionable I can report so why can't I report things in the real world if most of my social experiences occur online most of the interactions most of the stuff that I consume happens on the internet on average Americans spend 3 hours and 43 minutes per day on their phones for genz it's going to be way way way higher than that that's spread across the entire nation 20 years ago that time didn't exist so where's it come from squeezed out of real life experiences right so if you spend most of your time consuming things on the internet and there's a report button or a block button or a mute button when you're walking through the real world and you get exposed to things that you're not happy with well I can't where's the yeah [ __ ] I I also think you steal your ability to develop resilience through the hardship that you have to experience growing up I mean grown up is not an easy thing um and I don't think it should be easy how old are you 35 okay I'm so I got 10 years on you I'm the person that I am today because of the experiences that I went through my parents went through absolutely no effort to try to uh make my life devoid of things that were challenging if actually it if I look back on it as a parent myself now I'm like holy [ __ ] they actually for one I thought I was Jason Bourne growing up I'm like I was I was the Jason Bourne but I failed the chromosome test so I was a little bit short on my you know spy ability I got away with nothing but they let me get away with a lot because they had some boundaries that they were letting me operate inside of because they knew I had to fail and they knew I had to suffer the consequences of that failure they knew that not every social interaction was going to be great they knew I was going to have conflicts and therefore have to develop conflict resolution skills as I was growing up I tripped I fell I scuffed myself up and I learned from those things and I think if you rob people of those opportunities you are developing the softest generation of human beings possible and that's not that's not what I want for anybody it's not what I want for this nation for Any Nation or the world in general yeah I saw I quoted this in my newsletter this week about the stats of how few Americans can join 76 of% of American adults aged 17 to 24 either too obese to qualify or have other medical issues or criminal histories that would make them ineligible to serve in the US Armed Forces without a waiver I wish that number was higher I'm being dead serious I hear people I'm all about inclusivity like I don't have a problem with inclusivity it bothers me when it's inclusivity for inclusivity purpose and just for just so we can say we're inclusive I think that the military should be very exclusive I think it should be extremely difficult to be able to join and proceed down a pipeline that you want to go down because at the end of the day you I look at what is it that you want to do and what are the standards for that job what are they based off of and and I can only speak through the lens of my own previous military experience the standards that our that our job was based on and that we were held to came from a battlefield and I don't give a [ __ ] about your woke ideology because none of that matters when you're covered with your friends brains not a single stretch of that [ __ ] matters whatsoever all of those ideologies and all of these platforms and and ideas that people want to put onto the military just so they can say that they did I think that they should be removed I think it should be super hard to get into the military we should exclude most people from it because they don't meet the physical standard the uh whatever standards are listed with the uh intelligence standard the educational standards all of those things that's a good thing um I think we are headed down the wrong path when we just start opening the doors up and letting all of those people in because that is not a military that is based to operate in the environment that the standards are based upon I had a conversation with Heather MacDonald who has written a book called when race Trump's Merit and she's talking about how affirmative action for different ethnic groups is CA causing meritocracy to kind of be thrown out of the window and it's it kind of it's really uncomfortable actually to to kind of go through because there's a lot of pretty sort of harsh and and disquieting stats that you start to learn but the main thing that I realized was most people most sane people wouldn't have a problem with the military having an incredibly rigorous standard for entry because they understand that if you get this wrong mortal danger is on the other side of it right if you have somebody that is unable to keep up with the rest of their platoon because of their physical fitness or because they've got diabetes or because they've got a gluten intolerance or whatever that person puts themselves and everybody else at risk but really almost all Industries are just a difference of degree not a difference of kind away from that so she used this example of uh underrepresentation uh within Alzheimer research or Parkinson's research but the problem that you have if you start to do uh an excessive amount of affirmative action in that uh especially if you completely disregard or mostly disregard meritocracy is that you slow down Parkinson's and Alzheimer's research which is directly impacting people's quality of life yeah so okay it's not mortal danger but it's like Health span and lifespan it's mortal danger for some precisely so you go okay and then so where at at which point all the way down to the checkout operator you know like at what point do we say that this doesn't have a operating based on Merit doesn't have a place to be within this system it's really hard to find a line at which you go yeah it's it's about there it's about the person that professionally does cro crochet or [ __ ] bakes cakes or something like that you know I mean I I think that the the conversation should be had and it's probably going to be a shifting scale depending on what you're talking about um you know should it be as difficult to join the military as it is to work at a Dunkin Donuts no right like we need to be able to have a a sliding skill we're an advanced species we have the ability to think let's use that skill a little bit more did you see that um criticism around Navy SEAL selection being too harsh uh as seals was sprayed with te gas and forced to sing Happy Birthday yeah you see this video [ __ ] awesome what's your thoughts on that um I mean I I say that a little bit tongue and cheek first off anybody who's been through that pipeline has experienced that and there's a few ways that you can look at it uh from my understanding what I will say is this from my understanding from what I have heard from other instructors that were there those particular instructors instructors were a little bit off the reservation and this can happen because instructors again you wear this blue and gold t-shirt and your hat and your shorts and you roll your socks this super dumb way and it's just people they might all look the same to the outside perspective but just because you're an instructor or even a seal doesn't mean that you're a good person by any stretch you get the wrong person in the wrong role bad [ __ ] is going to happen so the amount of Cs gas that they were exposed to from my understanding exceeded what the um what do they call it it's a god of course I can't remember right now it's every EV it's a Evolution sheet so everything that happens in Seal training that the room for imagination is almost non-existent it's basically like pull the three- ring binder here is what we are trying to accomplish it like you know the mission statement here's what we're trying to accomplish here's our boundaries this is the evolution this is what it is this is how long we're going to do it for the students don't know this so as a student it's very chaotic I didn't know this until I went back as an instruct I'm like holy [ __ ] like basically every day limits to this the limits are unbelievable and the safety net should be incredibly robust but also invisible to the students there's a portion of that train I'm like yeah you maybe you should feel like you're going to die you're not going to die we're not going to we're going to do our absolute utmost to prevent you from dying even though it does happen um but there's a psychological test there as well it's a physical and mental Crucible so I have no issue with people being exposed to CS gas because I was exposed to CS gas uh the third phase of training occurs out on San CL Island which is where that video came from the problem I have with it is the training and those Evolution sheets and again those standards you can draw a very precise breadcrumb trail to the why why do we expose people to CS gas and training well because one it's very common and the first time that you're exposed to it probably shouldn't be for real so what do we need to do we should expose it to people in a training environment where we can have a robust medical staff problem is from my understanding they involved people people in that that actually weren't necessarily directly involved in the training pipeline they exposed them to far too much gas and one of the biggest issues I have with it is that there was some [ __ ] idiot there filming it with a cell phone do your job because I tell you right now filming it for your Instagram page is not your job and I don't know what you think is going to come from that and the reason they make you sing happy birthday is that requires you inhale and exhale it's the same they they do that it's is that what you did uh we didn't they didn't have a sing Happy Birthday they like there's all these like frog Man songs that you sing when you're in training and they'll just have you do something that increases your respiration because there's some people out there that can hold their breath a really long time now that holding your breath in an environment like it's still it's on your clothes it's it sucks what's it like what's it what's it burns um have you ever uh well I was my sister one time had like a little mace spray thing and I had I don't know why I had it in my pocket and I sprayed on myself and then wiped my eyes I was say have you ever done that but most people haven't cuz they're not idiots no so it would be it's uh it burns you it it really burns your eyes water an unbelievable amount um within a few seconds you'll be questioning how it's possible that your body creates as much mucus as coming out of your body um you cough it can make seem like people it's hard to breathe for some people they describe it as as they're inhaling like Flames from this like very hot is it is it going to kill you unless you have an underlying medical condition I think it's so highly unlikely does it feel like it's going to kill you probably to some people and that's the point we have to expose students to those things that they may be exposed to overseas I would rather have a student have that experience and know the cognitive decline the physical decline the emotional Decline and the impact that it's going to have on their ability to do their job in training before it happens in real life now if the instructor staff went 1% beyond what is on that Evolution sheet then they are wrong for doing that because that evolution is based on that real world requirement they used 5x the gas or 10x the gas then they should be punished for that particular activity but the the evolution and of itself is essential now somebody looking at that on Instagram could be like oh well that looks like torches like you don't know anything about this job you're I'm not saying your opinion isn't valid I'm just not going to pay any attention to it because you don't know what you're talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena are we talking about aliens yeah [ __ ] yeah God I hope they're real yeah why are people scared of aliens I would have one on the podcast yeah I don't know what the [ __ ] we'd talk about but I mean if there's aliens out there which I think there are mathematically I think it's improbable that we are alone out here it's uh our ability as a species to think that we are so incredibly unique shocks me sometimes if they're here visiting I have to believe that they are more advanced than we are I would assume and obviously technologically because they're covering a distance that we are not capable of covering um it seems like they are able to evade detection to a degree and I would honestly guess that if we are seeing them it's because they would want us to see them but both of those things combined lead me to believe like if they wanted to [ __ ] us up they probably already could have and would have so I don't know I think maybe like where the comedy planet to them like you win a prize on some other planet they're like dude you just won the best prize ever we're going to send you to this other planet and you're not going to believe the [ __ ] that you're going to see and so they come and they watch and they laugh and they go back and they tell Tales of how dumb we are but it doesn't worry like like let's get on like this is awesome sit down and like have a chat with me or like Bluetooth to my mind or however that works I'm not interested in the probing part you know but like and I don't know why that was such a narrative early on yeah I kind of like a thing that wasn't it I got taken up into the sky they levitated me up and the first thing that they did always right up the ass yeah it's like they were they were forced to be a gape a gape that's it I love the fact it's like it's using a verb as a noun you have so few times in life to use that word that I think you should seize as much as possible let's get it in a few more times before we finish up so David grush this guy that's the dude yep I've watched a good bit of stuff on him and his story in your professional opinion yep how reliable do you think that this particular person's story security access clearance all the rest of it is so I have very limited knowledge of him I actually was exposed to his videos for the first time yesterday um in a very in a very brief article um so he was in the Air Force I think he was an intelligence officer he held a TSS c clearance um and apparently he worked for a program that was peripheral or directly involved in identifying uaps is what I think they call call it aliens you know military officer cool intelligence officer great tssci clearance what's up it's top secret special compartmentalized information and it sounds like a big deal but honestly it's not I mean if you look at the U not too long ago there was a national Guardsman the the intelligence leak he was uh he had a tssci clearance and access to these databases because often times you know to hold certain jobs you have to have certain clearances it's the same clearance that I had when I was uh at the seal uh Seal Team on the east coast and it takes about two years to actually get the clearance so often times you'll get the job and they'll just give you an interim clearance meaning you have the clearance and access to the stuff as if you it had the background investigation had been complete but then it takes like 2 years to catch up to it it's not an uncommon clearance it's cool to say and write out like oh top tssci clearance he must know everything I was read into with that clearance in the course of 17 years I was read into a few programs that offline I can give you a few Google search words and you would literally be able to find the information on the internet people's thoughts that Jason Bourne is like out there maybe there is in my experience that's not the case it's a com combination and like this Vice of like 60 people's career jammed into one unique little coin and that's just not the way that it works so I don't doubt that he might have worked on a program that was basically around um identifying unidentified [ __ ] in the air like that's probably a good idea like Hey we're kind of seeing these things that we don't know what they are let's put together some people to do that from my understanding that was nested inside of the Air Force what he was referencing in the video and what he seems to be referencing when he kind of made like the the tour of uh the media tour is well there's this other program and it's their job to actually collect things and what I'm hearing is from these people these senior officers they are telling me about things that they saw and for me personally now we're talking like second and third hand information it's like listen he's like oh we weren't read into this program and we weren't we weren't allowed access to that one and that's totally common compart the C yeah the compartmentalization is totally common the CA and his status yeah I was not read into programs that other people the commands that I was read into because there's two things you have to have you have to have the appropriate security Clarance but then also the need to know just because you have a tssci doesn't mean you're like walking into a skiff which is like a room about this size where they keep all this dumb secret [ __ ] or access to programs you don't just get to go like oh hey uh yeah I'll be in the ski for the next three hours and you're just thumbing through stuff that's yeah it's not the way that it works so if this guy's job which I don't doubt that he held that job and I don't even necessarily doubt that other people would be coming up to him and saying to him hey this is what I saw and and this is what I did but it's not uncommon that they are going to separate programs that might have something to do with each other but the best way to keep a secret is to keep it compartmentalized and separate like I'm sure that even when it went back to uh you know creating the first the Manhattan Project I bet you there were people who were working on that project that years later were like oh [ __ ] I actually designed well I designed that was my housing designed that wire they had no idea why because it was compartmentalized why because we were trying to keep it a secret so I personally don't think that we're alone I hope that we're not alone like I would legitimately like what's up dude let's go have a beer alien do you drink beer like what's going on here I don't think there's as much to be scared of as people may think but these people coming forward like I have all this secret information and then I'm not going to actually give you a shred of it to me puts their legitimacy in question anybody that doesn't have firsthand knowledge of something but there's some other interesting stuff that in order to be able to communicate this information he had to get I think it's Department of Defense or Security Homeland Security clearance to be able to say these things and he was allowed that's not much of a whistleblower then no so he was allowed to say these things they said so they have determined that what he was going to say is not classified information yeah because he had to get the clearance in order to be able to get this out at least this is what was reported on Fox News so then what the hell is actually going on Joe's theory is that they're trying to steal more money from us who the government they're trying to distract us with the aliens while they pass some other [ __ ] that uh takes more money from us oh okay he thinks it's a false look over there the aliens are over there the Deb ceiling nobody needs to see this he is he he's Landing more on I think this is actually an intelligence operation trying to point our uh attention false flag actual another Direction but a psychological false flag yeah well here's the thing what who was that um that president that said uh if only we were attacked by an alien force we would how quickly would Humanity's differences be forgotten so it was maybe Reagan or somebody like that anyway uh the point being that at the moment because largely life is very comfortable and there is no existential threat apart from the ones that people make up and population collapse uh apart from the ones that people are concerned about that are in the news the only enemies that people have are the the ones inside right the ones internal to their Nation I actually think that if you were to say there is a an alien civilization that's out there we're not sure if it's hostile or if it's uh benign you would actually end up with quite a bit of cohesion because For the First Time Ever humans tribal biases are able to be deployed against something other than humans well it's a threat for the entire population just not one segment of the population correct people are brought together much more over shared hatreds than shared loves at the moment there is more hatred than there is love but if the hatred could be directed at something in the sky or somebody out there you could white pill this and say oh you know there's actually a potential good that comes out of this but yeah I I don't know man it's there's a lot of different people that are part of this story like this lady that's involved that was helped to feed David this information is this lady that's been a part of sort of a UFO truther conspiracy the for many years well let's so let's say that let's play this out as if everything he's saying is true so he was not part of the program specifically but he's hearing that there is a program that exists somewhere nested inside of the dod that they go out and they retrieve all of these things for one that would be an enormous operation where first off you'd have to staff it and man it so we're talking you'd have to have aircraft specifically dedicated for that so you'd have people up front flying the aircraft you'd have people in the back of the aircraft and the people in the back of the aircraft are going to be probably Junior personnel and my point in all this is like the more people that see this the more people that like try to keep a secret among five people and then add a zero to that and then add a zero to that H how is this the factor of leakage that's what I'm saying like you're trying to tell me that somewhere there it's nested inside of the dod and they have a dedicated Wing that's doing this and they're flying all over the place and nobody can give me one concrete shred of evidence well that's uh you you said earlier on about people need to be able to sort of hold two thoughts in their mind at once this is a relatively difficult one for some people some of the time to do which is the government and the New World Order is unbelievably sophisticated and able to coordinate itself so that Global Health passports and microchips in our vaccines and aliens are able to be kept from us and also the government is so useless that I wouldn't trust them with anything and they are completely incompetent and all of rest it's like Yo which one is it yeah which one is it is it that they're able to coordinate a half thousand person operation to be able to go and retrieve the most valuable artifact of non-human origin ever discovered even including meteors in in plain sight and we haven't figured it out yet and not a single not a single verifiable leak yeah or is it that they're completely useless and nobody should ever be trusted and the government needs to get the [ __ ] out of my life I'm totally fine with both of those things being true that they can be portions of it that do both in my opinion what is it hanin's Razer did not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity it's like do not attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by people that just really really really are good at lying agreed and you know there could be a third option somewhere in between those two where you kind of said it there's a small because the government and these organizations are just people would it be possible to find people that are super capable and competent and operate well inside of an incompetent government yes well that's the C again right that's what I'm saying yes you could but man I my personal [ __ ] meter goes off pretty pretty rapidly and also and I don't know why there was something about the way that the individual was talking about it that just was like the good instincts yeah it's like I don't know man maybe he's telling the maybe he's talking about things he truly believes uh but there was there was something about it that rung off to me that's always something that I find interesting you know when there's a a a missing child and the parents go out and they do the Press tour there was this a girl called meline mccan in the UK very famous child that went missing I think in Turkey in sort of the mid90s and the number of conspiracies about her parents that they'd kidnapped her or they'd sold her into slavery or they'd been negligent to her or some other [ __ ] uh which very well may be true um and people were analyzing how they' done their press conferences and one of the interesting things I reflected on there is they were saying these people are unreliable actors look at nobody nobody would act this way when giving a press conference about their lost daughter I'm like oh sorry hang on where's the [ __ ] Handbook of examples of how people are supposed to normally behave when their child [ __ ] missing like cuz there's two they've either killed her chopped her up and and spread her in the sea or she's been stolen right like I can give you way more options than that let's be creative how are you you're the guy you're the guy that would dispose in the body so but my point being like how how are you supposed to behave like how do you behave and the same thing goes for this guy so you know in terms of some degrees of freedom let's say that you do have these you know again do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity or perhaps um incompetence yeah or culpability or or believability from this guy you know he he could be telling the truth so you've been given this information by these people that have said that this is true they seem reput able to you perhaps they also believe that it is reputable perhaps it's second or third hand from them you don't know where it goes what's the playbook for how you're typically supposed to be able to give an interview to the Press claiming that this is potentially the first alien craft but the other thing what was it he said he said something about there's been a nonhuman you know he he almost read it like a novel it was like there's been uh would be a pilot exactly and uh you know that's the same in this one I'm like is this a [ __ ] Thriller novel or something well also don't forget you know both you and I I'm used to being around cameras like they don't bother me anymore I could only imagine let's say let's again go down the thought process of he everything he has is the truth and he is actually trying to be a whistleblower and this is the first time he's ever had a camera in front of his face you're going to ask a little you're going to act a little awkward you yep yep yep yep yeah NASA's got this panel for uaps apparently and they are encouraging commercial pilots to come forward do you talk about this do you hear about this so this is pretty interesting so NASA's got this panel right there's these uaps that are happening again this may be a part of the conspiracy to the false flag thing but what they're doing is it seems like commercial pilots because they spend way more time in the skies than all militaries combined by a [ __ ] huge margin they uh observe a variety of strange aerial phenomena but there is a stigma in the commercial Aviation Community around Pilots submitting this yeah because they're going to think you're crazy in February alone the FAA had 68 reports from commercial pilots so this is NASA trying to encourage a cultural shift amongst commercial pilots for them to come forward so that they're going to be less reluctant to report it because again you're going to be shunned and maybe mocked as a crazy person uh and yeah in February alone the FAA had 68 reports supports of uh uaps by commercial pilots I think we should embrace it I I mean if we're not alone and they want to come here I don't think we're going to stop them so let's embrace the fact that it's possible and you know the commercial pilots yeah I think for years the stigma has been oh you believe in aliens tractor beam huh probe yeah I get it tape yeah totally so I think I actually think it's a really good thing um I actually have quite a bit of flying experience and sometimes you see weird [ __ ] up there reported and what you're going to get is probably the vast majority of those things are things that were reported that can be explained but you might get a small uh minority of them where you can look into it and we can develop a better understanding of whether or not we are alone or not just just tell the goddamn truth if you see something you don't understand that's unrecognizable make a report on it and yeah I I I just I'd rather lean into it make some popcorn invite them down like why not yeah man it's interesting the it's everything seems to be picking up speed whether it be conversations about Ai and recursive self-improvement whether it's nanotechnology or bioweapons or natural pandemics or engineered pandemics or aliens or whatever um I think the next 5 to 10 years is going to be a real fever pitch for stuff because if it keeps increasing if it keeps I mean aren't we at vertical yeah pretty pretty it's the inflection is feeling pretty like the hockey stick is very hockey sticky at the moment yeah I don't know how much more vertical that we can get yeah it's going to I would describe it as wild it's going to be a wild time I'm glad that I live in a remote section of Montana maybe give me a little bit of buffer is that you are yeah [ __ ] yeah yeah up in the Northwestern section it's I need you know just a little physical buffer not saying it's they can come visit me there too I actually prefer that they did Welcome arms come on in but it's going to be a little bit you're going to be later in the day yeah it'll buy me a little time geographically topographically to buy me a little bit of time what is your opinion on this sort of I'm seeing this more and more especially since I've moved to America this sort of very a it's not quite being a prepper but it's kind of being prepared no it's like military Ling it's like people people that like to wear sort of tactical wear as casual where uh people who are maybe non-military but could be relatively wealthy but spend a good bit of time sort of surrounding themselves with military or or or with firearms and doing lots of tactical training and stuff like that it's a it's a tenuous balance because it can absolutely be taken too far I mean the things that get reported are like individual buries a school bus and makes it into a bunker and lives out of that and is putting camel paint on every day and waiting in the bushes for an unseen government entity that's probably never going to come cuz they know you're crazy and you're isolated it's like oh the guy's in this trench again Japanese uh guy the Vietnamese Soldier or whatever that wouldn't yeah there's one in Guam too I think he finally came out of the cave like 20 years later yeah so that would be I think like the pejorative of prepper because it it definitely I think it does have a a pejorative slant to it but I also think that people should take a very holistic view of how much they rely on other people to be able to do their day-to-day and and if people do that it's kind of shocking I mean water power food housing Transportation information all of these things and I'm not saying that everybody needs to have a diesel generator in their apartment and an HF radio set and 60 days worth of food and somehow you're siphoning like gutter water into your house into 55 gallon drums there's a balance in between the like so there's a and b right there's there's a balance in between I think and it kind of goes back to resilient resiliency if there was a catastrophe and actually I was uh I was down here a couple years ago when Texas got the they had like an inch of ice on the ground and it was Armageddon snow you know it almost ground people did these people are [ __ ] with cold weather well but not I mean there's there's there's that aspect of it let's remember who said that it wasn't me but but they also like the infrastructure like when the power went out for 4 days people are losing their [ __ ] minds it's you can actually prepare yourself even just through knowledge on how to navigate something like that you don't have to have all of those things I think you should have I mean so where I live for an example is slightly different um there are places in Montana that can get a little Western physically and metaphorically and response time from First Responders is going to be 45 minutes to an hour depending on where you're at you need to in certain times a year have the ability to handle your own [ __ ] until a higher level of care comes and that might be a couple of days so I think in that environment you need to at the very least think in those considerations but it I just I I I hate people who just willingly Outsource everything that they need for their life to somebody else and they don't take any ownership of it and then there's the other forign like you're talking about the people who want to wear you know military flare and regalia and they want to talk about a civil war while they're posting pictures of them themselves on the [ __ ] internet with their Optics on their rifles on backwards it's like I'll send you plenty of them it's it's a hobby of mine to look at that you know it's I hate people who call who are calling for Civil War people have no idea what it is that they are asking for they have no idea what that that would actually look like and for some reason they seem to think that it would save the country as opposed to just destroy the country yeah um I I had a conversation with a friend who spends a lot of time shooting and is very responsible and he sort of talked to me through his progression that he had of becoming a gun owner and then becoming sort of competent and then proficient and then kind of where he's at now uh and he was saying that he's fluxed in his um desire for an incident to occur an awful lot and it's kind of given him emotional and existential Whiplash uh because of what's happened and I mentioned to him and I'm sure that you'll be familiar with this as well that there are some people who spend a good bit of time around firearms and when I'm around them I get a sense of hunger they want something to happen for something to kick off because they've done all of this training and they've spent all of this time thinking about the bad guy and you you roll BJJ you want to compete right you you do boxing you want to get into the ring you don't just hit the pads all the time you want to actually and I mentioned it to him and he said uh I've actually become as I've got super out into expert level I've become more and more reticent around using my firearm because I know that that's the last time I'm probably ever going to pull a trigger yeah if I shoot a person even if it's in the most unequivocal self-defense ever I'm probably not going to be able to shoot another firearm again in my entire life and you still may lose in Civil Court yep I have uh I have been around more weapons-based violence than almost almost every human being on the face of the planet and I say that because almost nobody is actually exposed to it but in the job that I came from that was literally if at the end of the day if you refine everything down and what is it that what was our job it was to find fix and finish individuals in locations where they thought that they were the most secure to find somebody locate them in space and time go to their front front door and depending on how they behave once we cross that front door either take them into custody or [ __ ] kill them and if you do that for long enough the last thing that you ever want to do is be around gun violence again I don't want to and Montana is a constitutional carry state I carry um but I don't ever want to have to pull my gun out on a human being ever again it is not and I I do agree with you there are people who have this idealistic like they're going to be like like doing a gun shoot at the okay Coral like oh dude and uh a good friend of mine uh Mike Glover who is actually the owner of Craft Survival this weekend we are doing some scenario Based training where I live up in Kalispel and we did one a few weeks ago and before that I had helped him out at another one and it's it's the morning starts with an introduction to pistols and then my wife teaches an introduction to Jiu-Jitsu and then they do scenario Based training with somebody in a red suit that may have a gun they may not have a gun these people have a gun on them with some munition rounds the wax bullets that sting like a [ __ ] Varsity move is to put them in the freezer the night before that's an aside that's a tip for anybody out there who still trains with Sim Browns put them in the freezer you'll drop him like a sniper shot to the chest the number of people who that was their first time ever actually making a decision should I pull this gun out and should I use it and the number of people that would have spent their remaining days in prison for murder is startling what's a typical scenario uh I don't want to give too much of it away but I'll give you a broad one you are in uh parking lot um and usually he'll pair this up with a male and a female the female will have a bag in her hand and somebody starts approaching you pretty aggressively asking for money hey and the is's like usually coming out of a grocery store and you have uh vehicles on each side so a little bit of a confined environment somebody is coming directly at you and go the person's loud they're coming at you aggressively and the beauty of the last uh the last time we ran this is that the role player was actually a sheriff a local sheriff so he could really speak to here's what's going to happen when law enforcement shows up uh go ahead and uh show me your hands turn around so he could give that and so the person approaches I've seen it go down now three times every one of those times the person gets shot they do not have a weapon now and there are plenty of times where that is completely and utterly justifiable and I would also say in that situation it depends on if you're a man and a woman um for women absent an incredible amount of training and even then there is a size strength and weight difference that cannot be overcome the only thing that you really can do to increase survivability is to introduce a tool into that environment that levels that playing field y so if it was just a woman um and in some of the other scenarios that was the case and the result it was interesting they they shoot early and sometimes they need to to survive but in this situation it was interesting to see people go from 0 to 100 I mean to me like the oldfashioned Spartan Kick in that particular situation would have been amazing because the role player was briefed if they do anything that is Hands-On go to the ground and the threat is over and never got to that point I got shot every time wow it's a tough one and you got to think about this from the perspective of most security cam footage is not going to have audio so you have to think about this from 12 people looking at this no audio not hearing this personing anding in your face and saying give me your [ __ ] money and I'm going to kill you and I'm a blah blah they don't hear any of that do you want to roll the dice and gamble with your life with that most people will go and they purchase a gun and another thing I think that should be required is actually a safe to put the gun in it's just those two to me have those in the UK yeah it should be it's it's it's a tool that's designed to take life and that's okay let's just treat it with the appropriate amount of respect but you know there's it's people will buy a gun they'll train with it a little bit if at all and they think that it's for lack of a better term a Harry Potter want they can pull it out and just boom and it's going to solve all these problems I think the vast majority of time if you were to pull it out it's going to introduce problems into your life that you're going to spend years trying to navigate your way out of if you're even successful it's not a magic tool it is a tool but it's not magic and there's a lot of pros and cons to it and the people that I know who are the most versed in violence whether it's with their hands or with tools they actually want nothing to do with it yeah I remember Jocko video where he's talking about um what to do if somebody gets aggressive in public yeah run away every single piece of advice involved just leaving he's a dangerous man he does not it's like you know we I I I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu now for almost five years and I go and I where are these like cool little pajamas with my buddies and it's like let's not roll outside let's go get on this padding and also like we're going to play by the same rules right like you're not going to punch me in the face and I'm not biting no head butting yeah totally I'm not going to grab your dick and twist it off it's like okay we're like we're friends we're trying to get better I don't want to go roll around in a parking lot that [ __ ] hurts even if I know how to handle myself I don't actually want to touch somebody who appears to be crazy because I don't know if they just bathed in their own [ __ ] you know I don't want any part of that like people who know the most about violence understand how how catastrophically bad it can go and you can also win a physical fight and a gunfight and lose in the grander scheme of things better to avoid at all costs Mike sent me uh did he get the bag did he get the pack of his new bck how [ __ ] cool is that thing that little what would you be call like bag yeah it has a little visor panels yeah so [ __ ] cool and so again where I live I need to have because of the distance of you know to First Response I need to have the ability to at least maintain care or provide a level of care until a higher level shows up so I have that stuff all over my vehicles and I hope that I never use it I don't ever want to use that stuff and I'm not hoping that um like driving around every corner like ah damn it there's no T-Bone wreck here there's no motorcyclist with his leg sticking well that's an interesting point the fact if if all that you wanted was to be able to be righteous why are people not as excited for the potential to step in and tourniquet someone as they are for the potential to step in and shoot someone the number of people I will ask well the number of people they also have an unrealistic understand like I'm not a fan statistics because they can be highly skewed and weaponized as well but if you look at something that you are going to carry on yourself every single day I would recommend Band-Aids and TNI kits to people a lot more than I would guns and I'm not saying that one is more valuable than the other but if I personally have come upon multiple wrecks in the US where I have rendered Aid to people and zero gunfights that's the stats that most people are going to live in however if you get into a gunfight I hope you have a [ __ ] gun cuz if not it's not going to go your way but you're so much more likely to be able to render Aid to somebody and help their life than be in a situation where somebody's life needs to be taken well that's another point that I I never really realized until I came to America which is the externality of road rage and of getting pissed at somebody on the road you tell me there's no road rage oh no there's Road there's tons of Road R in Britain but but people are like it never escalates right like no one's no one's [ __ ] swerving over in front of your car and telling you to get out of the [ __ ] car [ __ ] well but when you're here I regularly see uh I never forget it man it was the first week I arrived in Texas and we're pulled up at at a junction and up next to us pulls up this massive Mexican guy no helmet on on a trike one of those trikes LED lights on it music's bluring I was like this guy's pretty [ __ ] cool he's had that big [ __ ] tattoo all over his arms like this and he had a [ __ ] handgun just open carry on his hip and I thought he gets to go wherever he wants like if he wants to go in front of us he gets to go in front of us if he wants to stop for a while and have a cigarette he also gets to do that too yeah that there is an undertone of mortal danger in America that I didn't notice in the U in the UK and now this may be because it's simply an alien place place to me it's new I haven't climatized or the whatever but the homeless population is more forthcoming and more dangerous by an absolute country mile they more shuffly they're more skitzy they're more like come up to you and [ __ ] try and do stuff to you they'll get right up in your face it happened literally happened to my wife and I last night you go on Sixth Street uh yeah actually we were close to Sixth Street good guess telling you man it's the epicenter of the crazy here in Austin but here's the thing like my wife is [ __ ] on it a woman came by she was kind of getting aggressive to people sitting next to the woman came up and asked us for money I took a tone of voice with that individual that indicated you're going to get one answer from me and one answer and that's it she continued on and like it started building like you know what let's get the [ __ ] out of here yeah almost all violent confrontations can be avoided yeah situational aess situational awareness and just you know don't put yourself in a if like you think something's going south go north you know get out of there do you have a cross paths with dead Castro in the Sals yeah yeah we were uh I was a buds instructor and he was an sqt instructor so same two uh two wheels of the same training vehicle okay what was that like what was working with him never worked with him directly so I taught basic the basic training basic underwater demolition seal which is the six-month pipeline he taught sqt which was seal qualification training so think of it as initial Crucible very very little knowledge about the actual job sqt was I'm not not going to say a finishing school because you leave there you have a lot of knowledge but no experience it's like an associates degree it's not a masters it's not a PhD like it's the most dangerous point in your career actually as I'm sure it is in law or in medicine where you have a lot of book knowledge and Zero Street smarts you're just super dangerous to be given some tools that are yeah like a machine gun you know you're the most dangerous time in my career was when I knew everything I would have told you that but had done nothing and they're like here's a gun I'm like this is [ __ ] everything I thought it was going to be it's everything I thought it could be [ __ ] yeah well you were very heavily involved in CrossFit for a very for a long time I don't know if they would describe it like that I worked for the organization for about eight years I started off for about four years of that teaching the conceptual Foundation at the seminars so giving the lectures and the weekend seminars and then I trans IED after a deployment in 2010 to more of uh business like sponsorships um I manag the charitable initiatives for a little bit so much less consumer facing if the consumer facing is the deliverables on the weekends I'm much more to the business and then uh was the pilot for Greg for two and a half maybe three years along those lines flying MH oh wow really yeah he um so CrossFit was founded actually super small world like about eight blocks from the last house that I lived in before I joined the Navy so I am from Santa Cruz a super small Beach town on the coast and that's where CrossFit was started but uh Greg had a residence in uh Santa Cruz he had a residence in Arizona and a residence in San Diego and he's just on this just Diamond of death in the car and I had got when I left the East Coast command and come to the West Coast to be a buds instructor they were flirting with getting rid of actually winter hell week they were trying to increase the throughput of the program so they did one cycle where they didn't have a winter hell week and I checked in they're like we don't actually have anything for you to do so see you in a couple months and I like oh [ __ ] it I saw an airplane coming in to land on my way home and I literally drove off the took the exit and found where they land I was like this looks like fun I guess I'll get my pilot's license didn't do anything with it Greg calls me one day he's like hey I I remember you saying you had your pilot's license this drive is just murderous it's like eight hours each each leg of that triangle um go get all your ratings get current again and uh I'm going to get an airplane and and so that's what I ended up doing was actually was kind of that triangle but a lot a lot of the times just in the air instead but directly for Greg and directly for and I flew Dave I don't I don't know countless times what was the Glory Days of CrossFit like from the inside there were times uh I mean I guess my metric for that would be how many seminars they would sell and the velocity with which they would sell once they went online I think the peak I ever saw is is they were doing five different seminars across the world at probably 50 people at the seminar at a th000 bucks ahead when I was working for them and it would they could you could put it online and if you had a phone like a Shopify alert or whatever it would just be like like the Vel it was unbelievable it's just he could take a [ __ ] and hundreds would come out that's what I it was it was the demand so outstripped the possible Supply it just was everywhere you know then the CrossFit Games came about um so like National TV I I still don't know whether not that was a good thing or a bad thing for CrossFit because it the what they are doing at the games is actually a really poor representation of what the actual CrossFit programming is and it's people don't they're not even interested in having that conversation they're just like that [ __ ] looks crazy I don't want to do that it's like that's CrossFit type exercises but that's not really the programming y but it was pretty wild I mean I was sitting there at the table uh with three other people when they negotiated the first rebok deal the 10year deal was worth about 150 million and I ended up managing that with uh a good friend of mine who was a like uh he was the lawyer not a lawyer but he was the lawyer um as like a legal back stop but it was it was crazy man I get to see fully behind the curtain which good and also bad many Lessons Learned yeah yeah man it's uh which actually is how you and I ended up laking up in the first place correct yeah we have a a mutual friend who managed to get himself into some sort of quasi ious territory uh for reporting what was pretty I think well circulated uh information about a bunch of the guys behind CrossFit yeah uh and within not long of of of talking about this stuff had been hit with a number of different uh threats for litigation I actually wonder if they would have followed through you know threatening litigation is one thing following through on it is another you know liable all of the things you can be threatened with they're predicated on you saying something that's not true it's also if everything is caveated with allegedly yeah or a story suggests a source close to yeah you know you can create a lot of degrees of freedom I don't blame him for the decision that he made in my experience um there are they it's hard to say they because it's tough at many levels to separate CrossFit Inc at least during the time period that I was working for them obviously now he has moved on it's under new ownership and I think they just brought in a new CEO not too long ago it's hard for me to say where the separation was between CrossFit and Greg during the time that I was working for them but the legal aspect the threat of uh legal involvement was 100% there yeah I I know mind it's it's strange that there are an awful lot of stories I it gives me the impression that a lot of the guys that ran that were a part of CrossFit from back back in the day because it's a business that remained mostly the same from a time when the world relationships within the office between men and women um sort of accepted tone uh of how people in positions of power related to the people that weren't in a variety of regards changed so so much yeah you know from 2004 to 2018 it is Worlds Apart right you have complete Reckoning around me too you have massive changes in terms of what people expect uh as as workers as employees in terms of their rights uh social movements the Advent of social media and the expectation of of what is and is not sort of allowable behavior and um based on what I know based on My Bro Science understanding it seems like there should be a lot of people that ran CrossFit from back in the day wiping sweat off their brow for how close the sord of damle came to [ __ ] beheading them ndas are a special thing some of us chose not to sign them when we left so was there an offer of yes cash yep and I told them in no uncertain terms to go [ __ ] themselves can you say how much the cash offer was it wasn't that much I you know in not not it was it was like probably like eight or 10 grand now get [ __ ] well you know my relationship with money as everybody's relationship with bunny has changed over time you know the the best days in the US military the 1 and the 15th it's like I got paid [ __ ] then you get out of the military like oh [ __ ] this is a different this is a different Beast for me very fortunately I had been double dipping and working on the weekends teaching the seminars and I was able to transition from my military career to working for CrossFit but he was paying me more working for CrossFit than I was making in the military you just you don't go you can make good money in the military but to you'll be solidly middle class right and the amount of money that he was paying me when I got out of the military was more than I had ever made in my life and it was I'm glad that the experiences that I had occurred because it was one of the biggest lessons for me when it came to money and what it's actually worth and I got to the point where I just resigned and went from I was making $150,000 a year that's what he was paying me to zero overnight and totally fine I'm so glad that I did that it it forced me to be more creative it forced me to find my own path it forced me to this place where now I'll never work for somebody else again I'm going to work for myself and I have figured that out and you know to bring it back to the the CrossFit world when he offered me eight grand or he of course it wasn't through him it was through the general counsel it's like go [ __ ] yourself like if I'm going to go from 150 to zero right now there's no amount of money in the world that you can ever pay me that's going to prevent me from telling the truth if I want to and I was honest and and he I did an episode dedicated to my thoughts around it and I was very Broad and my thoughts still are the same it's not actually my story to tell because people have said to me well why didn't you go more into specifics and the reason I can't go more into specifics or I'm unwilling to I should say is that it bumps up against other people and I don't want to speak for other people if they want to speak for themselves or they want to be heard they are going to have to do that and I can talk about the things that I saw I can talk about the mistakes that I made I can talk about the things that I wish I had changed or had done in the moment and I can try to shed some light on what had happened in the hopes that other people can talk and uh they did a good job with ndas it seems that way man it seems that way you know an awful lot of Stories on the internet about just what the culture was like and I don't know there was a I I I got into CrossFit in 2016 2017 uh started dating a CrossFit chick and and was sold from that and then yeah I kind of got to see I think the sanitization of the anti-marketing anti- fitness industry movement to something that some people may call selling out to Mainstream other people may say required sanitization uh that was needed to kind of to kind of clean it up um but certainly you know from what I can see now it's lost it way I think I don't think that CrossFit has the cultural hold that it used to the pr prevalence of things like H rocks like H Rock should have never got off the ground yeah should have never ever ever got a foothold and the problem is as you identified earlier that I can see with CrossFit CrossFit tried to be three things it tried to be a business model with Affiliates tried to be a methodology for training and it tried to be a sport at the highest level and you are always going to end up bouncing up against the priorities for each of those and you saw this when Greg stepped in and started having 60-year-old people doing bent over rose with jugs of milk partway through um covid which I don't disagree it's not a bad thing like it's supposed to be Fitness for everybody etc etc um but that wasn't what people wanted to see and then the sport of CrossFit came up against that and that's also not necessary that these 60y old people aren't going to go into your local CrossFit box and go and do the thing there so what is it and I think it's very difficult to try and Wrangle a beast like that and then there's talk of a ESPN deal and then the buty Bros maen and and and HEBs they get like go and the entire media team gets let go and then there's like all of this stuff happens it's a weird move he comes in one day and fires his entire media team and it was a it was you know one of the tranches that they had in the organization it's a oh [ __ ] there were some there were some offices in that building that were barely big enough for the people in them and not nearly big enough for their egos there was like there was in it I'm sure that's true of every organization but a lot of the decisions if you look at it from an outside perspective like [ __ ] that's probably purely a punitive decision that we're making not a great business decision and you know when CrossFit first caught on I found it in 2005 it was in comparison to what the rest of the strength and conditioning world was doing it was it was revelatory not that they created any new movement I can't think of a single movement that is actually proprietary to CrossFit but it's how it was put together um the programming there certainly was an essence of the marketing I think he you know there was a reason that he used especially 2005 where it's like what are police doing what are military doing fire like great marketing uh and those and those communities did benefit from it as well so I think that it was mutually beneficial but if you don't evolve I don't you know eventually you're going to die and I remember in 2005 like you could not find a bumper plate in any 24 Fitness or an Olympic lifting platform you know any of those things go into any gym anywhere now and try to find one that doesn't have a kettle bell that doesn't have some type of uh object that you can lift that's something other than a barbell or an Olympic lifting station so it it did revolutionize and change I think a lot of the landscape of strength and conditioning but then the company itself kind of stayed the same and I I would I would agree with you struggle to figure out I think what the mess messaging of the company was going to be there's uh a number of phases that you go through like says the guy that's never built a multi-million dollar business but I've got lots of friends that have and it seems like the not to 1 million the one to 10 the 10 to 50 the 50 to 100 the 100 to sort of 200 the 200 to half a bill the bill the half Bill to one bill so on and so forth and at each stage you need to be allow prepared to let go of the things that came along previously and the problem is that those things gave you success in the past so you if you're sufficiently neurotic or overbearing or a Taskmaster or a tyrant you're not going to be prepared to let go of them and I have a number of friends that have got billion dollar businesses and what they've done is been very very good at just getting out the [ __ ] way and allowing people that are way more experienced than them to come in and go look let me dissolve everything that you understand about this and then let me work out how we turn that into the next iteration of it but if you're not prepared to let go of it if you're not prepared to let go of what it was it can never become what it's going to be and if you start making decisions on the whim of whether or not someone wakes up hung over a grumpy one day and decides to come in and you know G get rid of people or make comments or tweet things at in opportune times you are going to be at the mercy of and this is kind of the same I learned about how the nuclear football Works have you do you know the way that it's like distributed between all of the different silos no so this is [ __ ] fascinating so I wanted to find out from a CIA guy who worked in nuclear the like nuclear deterrent and nuclear um Armament division for a while what was inside of the nuclear football inside of it you crack this uh sort of wax thing open and inside that is the piece of paper the piece of paper's got the codes on and the president puts the codes in and I thought um what happens if there is a I think it's called a moral objector something like that in each different Silo and there's maybe 50 them around the us maybe more and in each of them there's two people and these two people are the most Junior people in the CIA right they are so Junior it's like and they work eight hour shifts so 888 that's it that's your day sorted in pairs right like in The Silo correct oh yep and get this get this right so every single hour is it varies but every single hour an alarm goes off codes come through they have to type the codes in both of them both of them turn the keys both of them press the button every single hour are you sure this story is true come from a guy that's part of the CIA Andrew Bustamante people a lot of people have got a problem with him but I don't know who that is this story seems wild though so his argument was that um you can have these moral obur the story about uh Russia from back in whenever it was that dude decided I don't think I think I don't think that they have sent all of these uh rocket it's over and then they don't and he avoids you know disc close like a insect's dick away from uh nuclear war um the reason that this is stopped is because it's distributed so uh this comes in every hour you don't know where you're firing you don't know if it's a drill or if it's real which means that everybody is just in the rhythm of doing it they're conditioned to press it and here's the other thing because all of them are on a network and all of them are distributed if any one Silo puts in the codes it can fire from any of the other silos so if you've got just one pair out of let's say it's 50 or 100 that say yes that do put it in it's go it's gone and you don't know where it's going and you don't know if it's real and you don't know if it's your silo or if you're pressing a button that goes to another Silo and you don't know what city it's aimed at and that just happens pretty much like within a bit of a play on the hour every hour and you've got to do that I feel like we could get a better system going you should go and redesign it that'd be great I feel like you and me over one cocktail on a cocktail napkin could improve this plan I'd be I'm completely D if the ministry of defense or whatever the equivalent is over here the nuclear people I think it's said doe in the US depart I knew that uh once I learned the name of the people that make make the decisions they can come to me and I'll help them make the decisions I'm here for it [ __ ] yeah I'm in I've heard you say that you don't consider yourself to be extraordinary consider yourself to be extremely ordinary think I actually heard you say yeah how is it then that you've managed to achieve some extraordinary things uh you know I think probably the most exceptional thing that I've ever done in my life was graduating SEAL training it's the odds are not in your favor um and at the same and in the same breath that I will say that I think it's an exceptional thing it's not that big of a deal which is obviously a statement that is opposed to the one that I previously made the seal Community is a community of extremely Ordinary People they are the most ordinary run-of-the-mill could find them at any Street Corner in any City in any state in the country they are asked to do occasionally very exceptional things um seal the stats on SEAL training you know about 75% of people who attempt it don't make it through um so I would say that that's probably something that would be considered exceptional but the only thing that I did to graduate that was to just keep showing up I mean there's physical standards don't get me wrong like you have to physically be able to do running swimming pull-ups push-ups all of the requirements um and you to take some tests and training like there's a diving test a dive physics test um explosive calculations tests all those things that would be associated with that the barrier to entry is not high you actually have to try to trip and fall um but I kept showing up I literally I just kept showing up um and everything else that I've done in my life has been to a degree if you look at it what I'm doing right now I what I what I'm very passionate about and I enjoy doing especially because my the fact my wife participates in it is Jiu-Jitsu how do you get a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu I don't have a [ __ ] clue but I'm pretty sure if you just keep showing up and you pay attention and you do what the people are teaching you if yout late that out over enough period of time you're going to eventually one day have a black belt tied around your waist and people are going to say that's exceptional and I think that it is but you didn't just arrive at that um I enjoy skydiving not hard you can make some really visually appealing videos and images and you can make things appear to be more difficult than they can be but it's just gravity if you get out of an airplane I'm here to tell you after 8,500 jumps gravity is going to work 8500 jumps that's not that many trust me people who work in the sport who've been jumping for as long as I have had have been would have 25,000 30,000 35,000 like true professionals who work in the sport I mean I've been Scot for 24 years at this point but it's like if you don't pull parachute you're going to die if you play a parachute you're probably going to get the chance to do it again flying an airplane um kind of the same thing like when you first go and you learn you have to like there's a knowledge based required and a practical skill and you incrementally continue to go and learn more and it's just it's not there is there is nothing exceptional about me I graduated high school with about a 1.8 GPA I played Sports in high school at what I would call and I think everybody else would call a mediocre level I was on the team wasn't really making the highlight real fiercely mild Fierce just competitively average just [ __ ] just deeply competitively average I'm not going to win any aptitude test I'm certainly not going to win any physical test I think the only skill that I probably refined over time was just I'm not it's hard to get me to quit I just keep showing up unless I realize what I'm doing is utterly meaningless and then I'll [ __ ] can that thing immediately uh but that's I mean that's really it it's I'm not acceptional anything that I have done is achievable for people whether or not they want to apply themsel in the same way that's the variable that's it yeah there's a a quote from James Clea where he says uh consistent won't guarantee success but if you're not consistent I guarantee that you won't be successful I mean for the 75% of people who don't make it through buds they chose not to show up one day they made a choice that terminated that and the people that graduated they showed up the next day and it was really hard it's a hard training program and you learn how to deal with that and then you show up the next day and the next day and the next day I watched a documentary about the backyard Ultra race have you seen this Ultra I have watched is that the one the crazy ass like long 24-hour one yes okay well it goes the one that I watched finished after it was approaching 36 hours I think we're talking about the same 4 something miles every hour on the hour yes correct yeah the guy that created I think it's the Barkley Marathon um that's the one I'm familiar with is same same so it's same dude same crazy guy uh and he didn't like the fact that people won the marathon he wanted to create a marathon where the marathon always won yeah and so he created this thing and there's a great documentary it's a tiny YouTube channel um but if you just search uh backyard Ultra I think it's in New Zealand or Australia it's about three weeks old really really great breakdown of what's going on uh and this dude who it's his first ever won he's not a pro or anything he takes this guy to the absolute limit and both of them are going in they're stepping up to the line at the start and they're fist bumping but the guy this [ __ ] awesome little section with the dude that runs it and he's sat on this like [ __ ] camping chair this crazy Sant of a a a race programmer and he says most people don't quit during the race most people quit on the chair H most people don't quit yeah they don't want to get back off the show precisely correct yeah yep they don't quit while they're while they're running that's the thing they quit because they sit down the I would say the number one time at Buds where people quit is first thing in the morning they just they quit at the beginning of the day before the day even starts it's uncommon except during hell week for people to quit mid Evolution and they just they get to the point where like you know what I don't even want to start I'm not even going to try and that sucks it uh I've been around a lot of when I went back as an instructor I spent a lot of time with the students who had given up on what they would Express as their life goals and it's you're talking with people who are in probably their lowest emotional state that they may ever get to in their life and uh even in that moment shortly after you know there's the you ring a bell three times and you do have to fill out some paperwork but regret regret is the single most expressed emotion from those people even in just the moments right after I spoke to uh Goggins um a little while ago about this and he was talking about the difference between the person who rings the bell on the person that doesn't and he was saying that there are people that he knows who rang out of buds and decades later it's still something that plagues on their mind I've run into them defining moment of their life this run into them I've run into students who I was putting through training and as an instructor you see hundreds of students so the you there's no way you're going to remember the people that uh so I have not remembered a single one of the students that has come up to me but I have run into them and just the I've s [ __ ] in airports hey instructor stump I'm like hey just so you know you can you can actually call me Andy at this point because I've been out of the military for 10 years and they will say like I wish I had this happen to me at the Denver Airport guy pulled me a I was literally head down walking I you know airpods in just cruising around guy tapped me on the shoulder stopped it's like you're not going to remember me you were working on the hell week shift the shift that I quit and I think about that every single day since that happened I'm like what year was that he like 2006 this was last year I have a friend Alex and he posted something a couple of days ago that said the heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold but unmade decisions and I think that the weight that people deal with when it comes to regret and rumination and what could have been but when you you know we were talking earlier on about differences in degree not differences of kind and what you realize is that all of the things that you choose to do in life I like that you know whether you choose to hit the snooze button in the morning or not whether you choose to eat the cookie even though you promised yourself that you weren't going to eat the cookie so largely those scenarios are just a value judgment about the story you tell yourself about what it meant to you there is no objective reason about why that particular thing is any different to hitting snooze in the morning now it may have caused you to go down a different sort of Life Path it may have been a particular um uh inflection point that could have moved your life in a different direction but all of us are failing forward on a minute by- minute basis the name of the person that you forgot the lack of sleep that you could have done the fact that you picked your phone up before you saw sunlight even though you know that you shouldn't and you know yeah [ __ ] hubman shut up stop talking negatively about the things that I enjoy yeah this is this is my life and you know all of these different things the different opportunities that we have to fail or to succeed are largely a value judgment but it does make you realize like if you want to make the most of life you need to have a degree of resilience and you need to have a degree of consistency because without that you're just going to continue to regress back to the mean you're going to regress back to the path of least resistance which is you know ringing the proverbial Bell each different challenge that you come up against I mean it very common saying how you do anything is how you do everything it there's obviously such a huge difference between hitting the snooze button and you know ringing the bell in buds but I I agree with you and I think you know resilience is something that can be built over time and for the people who are successful who go through Seal training and make it out the other end of it and again it's not like most difficult thing that you can do in your life there are other like [ __ ] go climb Everest right like you it could be your thing whatever your thing is the first thing you have to do is decide what is important to you and what is not if you can put for me when I was a very young man like this is what I want to do and I started making decisions and some of them were about I would get up before going to high school and go run on a treadmill literally at 24-Hour Fitness because the information I could get at the time on buds cuz the [ __ ] internet wasn't around was that you run a lot I'm like okay here I go I'm G to go run on a treadmill but those decisions you build momentum when you start making those decisions and they become easier and for me it was a very magnetizing pull I and and I don't it's atypical for people to know what they want to do as young as I did however that bit me in the ass when I got out of the military CU I realized I had really thought much past about cultivated anything else oh wow I've focused on my energ on something that I no longer do anymore so but again that was a different challenge But the lens of my life even in high school was viewed through is this going to help or hurt me on what it is that I actually want to do um people if they can in my opinion at least if they can find something that they have a goal of that nature whatever it is it really actually does if you can even Define a goal like that to pick something that you care about enough that it's going to modify your Behavior it makes not hitting the snooze button that much easier but it starts with what the [ __ ] do you want to do Define scare the living [ __ ] out of yourself and pick a goal that you think you're going to fail at if you can tell me because I'll ask people like they'll say well you know how do I find motivation like I don't know what are you motivated to do oh I don't really know like how can I possibly help you find motivation if you can't even Define for me the end state where somebody will I want to lose 10 PBS like come on like clearly you're 200 overweight like 10 20 lbs like no how about you tell yourself you want to lose 200 and you scare the absolute [ __ ] out of yourself because you think you're going to fail now you've arrived at a goal that we can talk about and view your lens or view the world through that lens of is what I'm doing helping or hurting that and that's a tough one because the snooze button's awesome I like to hit it sometimes I sleep my ass off but I didn't when I was younger because all I wanted to do was be a seal and you and you have to realize at some point in time that it's not the world that's going to make those choices for you and it's not the world that's going to decide whether or not you're successful or not it's your own actions and how you talk to yourself and how you frame your goals and the actions you take upon that that are going to make the difference and it it's not easy but it's not exceptional either Andy stump ladies and gentlemen where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing find out all of your content I wouldn't follow me if I were you guys uh I don't know I'm into some weird [ __ ] um uh you can find me on social media channels it's just my name Andy stump 212 and then my podcast is called cleared hot and you can find that on all the platforms [ __ ] yeah Andy I appreciate you thank you yep thank you what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace