Transcript of #2482 - Andy Stumpf New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Being a pacifist is the way. Avoid violence at all costs. You know what I mean, Joe?

Look at you, dog. You're a fucking author.

Let's take it easy. I'm not an author until tomorrow, technically.

No, you're an author once it's written. I can read it, which makes you an author. I have a book in my hand. Makes you an author.

I tell you what, man, you had more of a— you had more of a hand in that book than you would think. Really? Every— you know, before we started, I had you sign one of the copies because I'm gonna keep it for myself. And the people's names who associated themselves with that, who took a chance on me and supporting me, they have just as much hands as the monkey who may or may not have been sitting in front of the computer writing out the words very slowly.

Isn't that the case with everything in life though? I mean, it's, it's really who you know and like the people that you associate associate with and what you learn from them and their examples with everything. Then there's no individuals that are responsible entirely for their own life.

There are individuals though that would tell you that they are.

Those are the people that I don't hang out with.

Yeah, I can't, I can't suffer being in the presence of somebody who thinks that they had every idea and every right decision was theirs. Because I look at my own life, one, I can't compete with that because my life is defined by its mistakes and idiotic things I've done. But two, I just, I don't I'm a product of the people who I was raised by, the people I was around, the people still in my life. I mean—

100%. We all are. If you don't think that, you're delusional. You cannot have an exceptional person that's surrounded by dipshits. They just won't— eventually they'll give in to dipshittery. It's contagious. Negative people—

You really got me thinking, though, if that is possible. I'm trying to think of an example.

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have said it's impossible. It could be possible, but it's very highly unlikely, and also So they didn't achieve their full potential if that's the case. They would have been even better if they had been surrounded by exceptional people.

Improbable at best.

Yeah, at best. Yeah, I, I've never seen an example of it. May— again, maybe one exists that I don't know about, but as far as all the exceptional people that I know, they all associate with other exceptional people.

You know quite a few exceptional people. You have an interesting job that has a Venn diagram that is incredibly unique in the people you've been able to sit down with.

It's pretty fucking weird.

Did you ever think?

No.

First off, by the way, I try to point as many people as possible to JRE #1 because I think it's a masterpiece.

It's a good thing to see. Oh my God. Because it's terrible.

I'm like, wait for the snowflakes.

And they go, what the fuck are you talking about? They're like, what?

I'm like, just wait. It's amazing. I mean, could you have ever thought though at JRE #1 where I feel like that was you on a laptop video? Yeah, it was.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

—to where you are now, where you were like sitting down and talking to some of the most influential people on the face of planet Earth? No.

I mean, I think if I planned it out like that, it would have never worked, you know?

You would have tried too hard, maybe?

I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I probably would have been more careful, which would have made it less fun, which would have made it less attractive. You know, I think the two things that I've done that are really important is not pay attention to much online talk about me and just follow my interests and my instincts. Like, I book the whole thing entirely on instinct. I look at all the different suggestions that come in and all the different requests to be on the show, and I go, "No, maybe, huh, where's that, huh?" Purely on self-interest?

100%. I think that's the way. What do you get per day? Ballpark people trying to get on your show?

I don't even know because I have a really good guy that filters out a lot of them.

I bet it's got to be in the hundreds.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, but he filters out a lot of them and it gets down to, you know, like what I— he knows me really well and so he, you know, sends me like some physicist is working on some new things, some quantum thing, this, that, the other thing. Like there's a new person that's doing this and there's new research on that and then there's, you know, that kind of shit.

Yeah, I think I think the difference between you and me is I appreciate the fact you can hold a conversation with those people. I would be sitting there listening to them with like the scroll wheel on attack. Do you have words that are smaller that could explain that?

Well, some of them I have to really prepare for. Like, you know, if I have like a Bryan Cox on or something like that, I'll really prepare, you know, or, you know, there's been a few people over time where I knew they were coming on like 3 months out. So I've read a couple of their books. I watched a few of their lectures. You know. Yeah. But then there's other ones like I could just hang out, hang out with them. And like Evan, Evan Haver comes on, we just shoot the shit.

Angry small French painter, fucking Green Berets.

He's the best.

I love— I was with him at the Montana grand opening, Montana Knife Company grand opening of their new HQ. We've been on the road a bit. I think like 2 days ago. He's one of my favorite people. Absolutely. He's so wee, but he's one of my favorite people.

He's an awesome human. Yeah. A very unusual human being. And, you know, he's one of the ones It's suffering from that stupid fucking alpha-gal bite. He's got that tick. He got bit by that tick that makes you allergic to red meat.

Is it all red meat or processed red meat?

It's animal meat. It's mammal meat. That's the thing. You could eat some fish. Some people can eat fish. Some people can eat chicken. He's broken it down to only eating eggs right now. That's how bad it is. He's getting all of his protein from eggs, which is a great source of protein, no doubt, but—

That's exhaustingly boring though.

Just go to dinner with him. It's crazy. The guy has to eat vegetables and eggs.

That's all he can eat. I would just mock him incessantly to his face. I know you would. I do. You guys have a larger salad? Yeah, I mean, I would mock him that way because I care for him so deeply. He is truly like one of my closest friends. He is. He's an awesome dude.

Yeah, and so he's been battling this for a couple years now. So he got clear of it and and he was eating meat again and he was fine and he thought it was over and then it came back. It came back with a vengeance and it's a weird fucking disease because I've— let's find out, put this into perplexity. What is the most— what is as far as like the documented cases of this alpha-gal syndrome? When did it first start occurring in the United States? 'Cause I had never even heard about it until Evan. When he told me about it, I was like, "What? You got allergic to red meat?" And how can a tick bite cause that?

I mean, Lyme disease is another one. Like, how does it do that? A bite from a tick just jacks up the human body?

Well, apparently Lyme disease has existed. There's been forms of Lyme disease throughout history. But there's real solid evidence that Lyme disease, which is named Lyme disease because of Lyme, Connecticut, is related to Plum Island, where they were doing bioweapons weapons research on ticks. It's historically good idea, and it's right there. It's like literally right there. And then the prevalence of Lyme disease on the East Coast is fucking outrageous. It's outrageous how many ticks carry this fucking thing.

I know so many people that have Lyme disease, and that's a lifelong one too, right? Like, you're not getting off that train.

If you can manage this, you can cure it. You can cure it. People have cured it, and they've particularly cured it if they get on antibiotics very quickly. One of the weird things about Lyme disease is the bite has a little target around it. It's weird. It almost looks like a bullseye because the infection, as it grows, there's a red circle around the bite, but that goes away within a few days. But if that's recognized, you bring it to a doctor, they get you on antibiotics, you can actually get off of it, depending on the severity of your case, obviously. So here it is. Alpha-gal syndrome appeared to have first emerged in the US in the late 1980s, but was not recognized as a distinct tick-related meat allergy until the early 2000s. So in '89, clinicians in Georgia collected about 10 cases of delayed allergic reactions to mammalian meat— mammalian, mammalian, mammalian meat— and linked them to prior tick bites. These observations were not widely recognized at the time. Allergy was first formally identified as originating from tick bites in the US by Thomas Platts-Mills in the early 2000s. Reports note this discovery process beginning around 2002 and becoming clear by 2007.

Huh. So the— in the medical literature, it's first described in 2009 when published work documented patients with delayed reactions to red meat and linked them to IgE against alpha-gal. Interesting. So it seems like it's in the '80s but really started being recognized in the 2000s.

Explain. I mean, he has definitely— he's slendered down.

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I'm pretty sure he was wearing his wife's pants at the MKC event. They were very tight, very tight, unacceptably tight. But that could be a benefit if you're the same size as your wife and you have just one wardrobe. I'm here for it.

That's nice. Yeah, yeah, it's efficiency. Some of their shoes though are really hard to walk around in. I mean, you got to commit. Yeah, I would imagine.

I mean, if—

yeah, when I go places with my wife and I'm like, what are you doing? You can't walk. This is a crazy thing you're doing. It's not for walking fashion.

It's for what my daughter would call the steez, which I think means style.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know. I'm actually not sure that I'm using it correctly. She just teaches me words and I throw them out at random times.

But I learned a lot.

Steez means style, I think. Yeah, steez.

Okay. Did you know about that one, Jamie? The steez? I've probably heard it, I don't know. I have never heard it until this moment.

There you go.

At least I don't believe so. The steez.

Feel free to use it however you want to.

Yeah, chicks wear stuff that they're so vulnerable in. You can only take steps that are less than 24 inches wide because you've got a dress that's like clinging to your knees, which is very odd. Like, it's like tight all around here, so you've got these like short steps, and then the bottoms of your shoes are slippery, and then your heels are elevated, and then the heel has a point to it. Yeah. Get stuck in the grass, just waiting to snap at the most inopportune moment. It's the dumbest shit of all time, and they're fucking crazy expensive. The whole thing makes no sense. Like, what are they doing?

They're trying to look good for us, Joe.

But they look good already. That's what they don't understand. I think they're looking good for themselves. I think they look good without that shit. I would agree. Yeah, a hot chick in flip-flops, no one's going, God, I wish she was wearing some shoes that you couldn't walk around in.

She might even be more approachable if she wasn't in flip-flops, because you'd be like, hey, She's like maybe more down-to-earth.

Maybe that's what they're going for. They're going for not approachable, trying to keep the fucking— doesn't that defeat the overall end, like, long end-around purpose? No, you're trying to get dudes that are, you know, willing to take a chance, you know, on what? On a gal that's unapproachable. Like, you have enough confidence in yourself that you'll step up to an unapproachable gal. Nope, not me.

Hard pass. Hard pass. I'm willing to do some things that people think are odd, but yeah, I'm hard—

that's a hard pass. Yeah, I know, but it's also— it's like you're not— you're in line. There's a lot of other dudes approaching that too, probably. So now then it's like you're in an audition process. Fuck all of that.

Life is way too short for all that.

It's great for people who don't have anything else to do. If that's all you want to do.

Nope.

Yeah, I'm not interested in that either.

Same. There's way too much other exciting shit out there.

But yeah, if you and your wife wore all the same clothes, that would be an issue.

A good issue or bad? I mean, if you're limited on time, we're gonna— we're gonna go on a trip, let's just bring a pair of pants, we'll switch.

I wonder what people did in the caveman days.

I don't think they were wearing much, right?

But you're wearing like some kind of animal skins. It's basically a one-size-fits-all Yeah, tarp, loincloth, throw over yourself. Yeah, loincloth to keep your dick from getting caught in thorns, and then a tarp.

Yeah, yeah, cutting edge at the time.

I was reading this story about these guys that were exceptional marathon runners in Africa, and one of the things that they did is this insane fucking rites of passage where they would circumcise them with this I don't remember the process, but it was a particularly brutal process. They sliced the tip of their dick off, and then they would make them literally crawl through thorns. Yeah, the whole idea is just like make you as hard as humanly possible. And these guys, they were pointing to this one tribe as developing exceptional marathon runners because these guys had such high pain tolerance and such like willingness to go through horrific Ordeals. What is it? Here it is. Initiation. Okay, so he says he had to crawl mostly naked through a tunnel of African stinging nettles. Then he was beaten on the bony parts of his ankle. Then his knuckles were squeezed together, and then the formic acid from the stinging nettle was wiped onto his genitals. But that was all just a warm-up. Early one morning, he was circumcised with a sharp stick. That's what it is. A stick. Stick. During this whole process, the crawling, the beatings, and the cuttings— try to say that guy's name.

No. Kip Go—

Kip Go Guy?

Kip Gogi?

Kip Go Guy? Kip Gogi? Was obliged— sounds like a Korean dish— was obliged to be absolutely stoical, unflinching. He could not make a sound. Indeed, in some of the versions of the ceremony, mud is caked on the face and then mud is allowed to dry. If a crack appears in the mud, your cheek may twitch, your forehead may crimple. Crinkle, you get labeled a kebetet, a coward. You get labeled a coward if your cheek crinkles and stigmatized by the whole community. Manners say that this is enormous social pressure placed on your ability to endure pain and is actually great training for a sport like running, where pushing through pain is so fundamental to success. Circumcision, he says, teaches kids to withstand pressure and tolerate pain. Manner says he thinks this distinct advantage conferred on athletic kids grew up in a pain-embracing society as opposed to Western pain-avoiding one. Interesting. Yeah, what is this? Where is this at? In Kenya? It's a Kenyan tribe.

Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you, Joe, if that's what they did to your people, I would run pretty goddamn fast too because I would want to get the hell out of there.

Yeah, I think it's that, but I just think, you know, you're joking, obviously, but imagine if that's the norm, if that's your baseline, you're like accustomed to that. That's the worst thing that you go through and you have to do it completely stoic. At a young age. At a young age. You would develop some insane tolerance to discomfort, which—

I don't know if one time is enough though. I mean, like what they're describing is horrendous, but true tolerance and resilience and ability to work through that stuff, I don't think it's a singular event. Right. Not that marathon running is an easy endeavor by any stretch, so they're continuing to do that. I mean, I get what they're doing, that rite of passage, but holy hell, I mean, mm-hmm, that's pretty gnarly.

That's a thing that you, you will see from ex-fighters and even ex-military guys. Like, what they endured when they were young was so brutal that as they get older, they avoid any discomfort at all. They get fat and they just want to drink and be lazy. And you're like, how did you go from being that beast to this slob. And you know, they still, in their mind, they're still a beast, you know, because I did this and I was a world champion and like, big fucking belly.

Yeah, they can't see their dick when they're naked anymore. Weird. It's— I don't have any stats on how, but it's because they stopped doing it, correct? Right. I mean, laziness affects everybody, right? Everybody thinks that you come from the special operations world and you're defined by discipline for the rest of your life. Now you're still a human being at the end of the day, behind the curtain. And, you know, gravity wants to keep guys like that on the couch just as much as everybody else. Yeah. But I think you realize the utility of not allowing that to happen. Some people do. Some people do. I mean, that's true of every occupation in life. Sure. You know, yep, yep. Maybe it's a little bit more uncommon for people to see those that came from that, one of those occupations. But yeah, they're out there.

Yeah, I think that's probably in everything. In the medical world, I'm sure there's guys that like really paid attention in college and then they're kind of half-assing it. As doctors. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's like the difficulty of the grind. Sometimes you get through it and then you just go, I don't want to ever fucking do that again. Like, I know guys who are former Navy SEALs will not get in a fucking ice bath. Yeah, I'm one of those.

Hi, nice to meet you. Why would I consensually do that? No, no. And I also wish that they could make a sauna that was just room temperature but had all the health benefits.

See, sauna doesn't bother me at all.

I can tolerate that one way more than exceptionally cold water, which I understand the health benefit. I'm willing to pass on that particular health benefit. It's emotional for me. I just don't want to do that anymore.

I get it. Yeah, I get it. But when I get to the cold plunge, there's a— the bitch in me is so loud. But when I get to the sauna, there's no bitch. It's like, just get in. It's like, I know it's gonna suck about 20 minutes in, it'll suck for the last 5 minutes, it's really gonna suck, but the first 10 is easy.

I just high-five my inner bitch at the cold plunge and turn around. Like, why don't you take a lap in that thing? I'm done with it.

I almost don't do it every day. Every day, almost don't do it.

Yeah, it's harder emotionally than it is physically.

And it's weird because after a minute it's not that bad. After 1 minute, it's like you just kind of, you develop like sort of a relaxation, and you're cool. Yeah, it's fine, especially if you do it a lot. But the first 10-15 seconds are just like, what am I doing? You just want to get out. You just want to quit. Like, get me the fuck out of this 34-degree water with ice up to my neck. Fuck this. This is so stupid. I don't have to do that. Yeah, you feel like you're having a heart attack, but then you just chill, and then when you get out, you're like, oh, You feel so good. It's so worth it. Or don't do it.

Just leave it empty. Use it to store tennis balls or something other than ice cold water.

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Yeah, that's why that would be—

I don't know, something about their physiology that it might actually be detrimental to do 34 degrees. That— see if you can find any data on that. You know who's a great— what's her name? Suzanne Soberg. She's the one who created the Soberg Principle. She's one Huberman cites all the time. But I think there's something to do— maybe it's less muscle mass. Your body has a more difficult time heating itself up and creating a thermal barrier.

I don't know. Huberman is an example of a guy that I deeply respect but struggle to understand what he's saying.

Here it is. Is this Suzanne's? Did you put this in Perplexity? Our wonderful AI sponsor, Perplexity. Specific considerations for women. Women tend to vasoconstrict faster and have larger drops in core temperature. Aha, especially those in, I don't know what that is, luteal phase? Yeah, their cycle. The cycle, oh. When progesterone is higher, so extreme cold could be more stressful. Very cold plunges near ice, 35 to 45 degrees, can cause big sympathetic and cortisol spikes that may disrupt menstrual regularity and thyroid function if overused. Oh, interesting. Animal and limited human data suggests cold can influence reproductive hormones and cycles. Women with heavy cramps, endometriosis, fibroids, and/or on HRT contraception should be cautious and talk with a clinician first. Good luck finding a fucking clinician that understands cold plunges though.

And there's a picture of me in the lower right. It's probably what I look like when I get my toe in. I just don't like it, man. Don't do it. You don't— hydrophobic, I think, is the correct term.

You suffer enough. You suffer enough. So this book, the title is Drown Proof. Yeah, you were saying before we got started how many Navy SEALs wind up drowning. Yeah, and that it's actually kind of shocking.

It would be for a community that is supposed to have their roots in a maritime environment. I mean, the SEAL community draws its origins from the UDTs and the Scouts and Raiders, and honestly, up until 9/11, it was one foot in the water and one foot on land. Like, every operation would start in the water, and then you could go onto the land, but you'd probably go back into the water. And almost all the training we did 9/11 was based around water. And I think— let's see, Jamie, you could look this up— two SEALs recently drowned on a shipboarding, real-world shipboarding. One guy, it seems like, in the climb peeled off the ladder and went into the water, and somebody saw him and went in with him. Because of the concept of being a swim buddy, never to be seen again. Oh yeah.

And they know what, what happened to them? Like, how?

I mean, it's, yeah, 2024 in the Arabian Sea.

Oh, so he fell off a ship?

Yeah. So they were approaching a vessel. I mean, there's a couple ways that you can get on a boat. You can come from a boat and you can climb up, or you can go to from a helicopter and fast rope down where they could land depending on how big the boat is. So they were coming up alongside. It's called an underway or a VBSS, visit, board, search, and seizure is the technical military term for it. And on the climb up the ladder, the guy peeled off, fell off the ladder, and another one went in with him as his swim buddy. If they immediately— and there was, and maybe still is, an ongoing investigation. From my understanding, they saw their head maybe one time up, and then they were gone. Their bodies were never recovered. So that would seem to be that they were wearing negatively buoyant equipment, so they were dragged down and they probably were not able to activate their life jackets in time, which is super unfortunate. But the water doesn't give a shit who you are and how much of a badass you are. I think it's one of the most gnarly environments on earth.

It really is. Every time I go in the ocean and I swim in the ocean, there's this feeling like, I think I can make it to shore, but I might not be able to. Like, if you jump off of a boat and you've got like a couple hundred yards to shore. As you start swimming, you start swimming like, I'm fine, I'm fine. Oh boy, my heart is going pretty fast here. I'm breathing pretty heavy. That's a long way. I'm moving very slowly. Like, what if I can't do this? These are real positive thoughts to have mid-swim here, Joe. Yeah, not good. Not good. Yeah. It's only happened to me a few times, but my friend Greg actually had to save a woman. He was on vacation. He saw a woman getting caught in the tide. And she's getting pulled out. Oh, like a riptide?

Uh-huh. They never— those things will pull people out, never to be seen again. Yeah, people don't— so I live up in northwestern Montana, and a lot of the Flathead Lake, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, is right where I live. And Glacier National Park, tons of snowfall, and so it's glacially fed rivers that feed into Flathead National Forest— or not in Flathead National Forest, the Flathead Lake. And boating is a huge summertime activity, and people travel from all over the world to come to Montana to see GNP, Glacier National Park. And every year people are drowning in these rivers. And I don't know, it's dangerous, but it can be avoided. But it seems as if they just do not have respect for even medium-moving water. They have no exposure to it. They're not used to being in that water, and they don't look at it and realize, like, that'll kill me. We're so incredibly fast, and every year people are going into that thing and dying. Every year.

Well, it makes sense also that it's so fucking cold. That water's— you got glacier streams. Yeah, it's like Remy rescued a lady from that. You know Remy Moore? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Remy actually saw a boat that had capsized and saw like gear floating by and saw a woman that was struggling, and I believe her partner died. No, I'm sure a partner died, and he jumped in freezing cold river and rescued her. And he was like, there's a bunch of moments during there was like, I am not going to make it, I'm gonna die trying to save this lady.

Which happens when people get close to that point. You either going to, in your best attempt to save them, they will try to use you as a life raft and climb all over you. The next thing you know, two people are gone instead of one, right? Yeah, the water, the water will eat your lunch, man. It's, it's wild. But you think we spend so much time training in the water that it wouldn't happen. There's— I mean, there's diving accidents. There is— there are deaths in training.

How often does that occur, deaths in training?

Oh, probably about every 5 years. And it sucks. And what I'm about to say, people won't understand, but I also think it's essential.

I don't want it to happen, but I think it It probably is essential that it does every once in a while because the training has to be so difficult that you get to the brink.

You have to train people for the job that they're going to be asked to do, and the training standards need to be a directly downstream reflection of what the career is going to be. And I don't have the vocabulary to describe how bad I feel for the families, and I'm not trying to minimize anybody's death. But you will lose more people in the real-world execution of the job if you don't make training that difficult than you will by making it that dangerous, knowing that it's gonna be that dangerous and that people will die. That will have a positive impact on people surviving the actual job itself.

That completely makes sense. It's just the realities of life.

Yeah, some jobs are very unique and some jobs have very unique requirements and you have to train for that. Or it's gonna either come for you on the front end of that or the tail end of that. That's the balance of which one of those you're gonna focus on.

Which is why the lowering of standards is so fucking dangerous. And when it's talked about like the lowering of standards to make it fair for some applicants, like there's no fair in that job.

I've never seen a bullet change trajectory because it noticed what you had between your legs and wanted to go be more fair and equitable to somebody else. You know, it's— it doesn't matter in those moments.

Nor does the ocean give a fuck. No, period.

No, I don't believe it does.

But it's so weird when we try to apply these workplace equity considerations to something that's— is like, literally, I can't think of a job that requires more of you than war. Like, there is— there's— this is literally life or death and taking life. There's no, there's no job that requires more of you. And so you would just automatically assume the standards, especially for special operations guys, have to be the most stringent possible. You have to weed out all the bitches. Like, you can't have any bitch in you at all. There's got to be none. No quit, no nothing. And that's— there's only one way to do that. It has to— you have to make a bunch of people quit.

A lot of the times the people who are bottom-lining the policy changes don't have a direct impact in the training pipeline themselves or the execution of the job or which is crazy. Yeah, I mean, the military is a bureaucratic system. Even in the special operations world, even at like the JSOC level, people would be— it never really makes the movie, the amount of paperwork that you end up doing. Like you go on a trip and you have to collect your receipts and do your travel claim and all this other BS. It's all just shit blowing up and you throw a grenade and it's a fireball the size of a 55-gallon drum of gasoline. And yeah, and then there's 2 days sitting in front of a computer typing out all of your administrative stuff because of all the bureaucratic restraints that are still involved. In all of that. It doesn't seem smart. It's just the way the military system works.

Now, is that to somehow or another mitigate potential actions that should not have been done because you have to be so documented, everything has to be so laid out?

Like, I mean, there's a lot of— even like the equipment that you wear, oftentimes— well, almost all of it is gonna be serialized. So you were issued that equipment, you're responsible for it. There's paperwork that goes for being issued that. If you lose it, which does happen, and it's not gonna be career-ending, like if If you went out for a week in a row and you're like, hey, I lost my night vision goggles again, I'm gonna need another set of those, you might have a problem. But shit happens and people lose gear. But, you know, night vision, weapons, ordnance, ammunition, like a lot of that stuff is serialized. And so it's just the bureaucratic way that even at that level, you still have to keep track of all of that stuff.

You think they should hire somebody else to do that?

They do. But oftentimes you are in small units, very isolated by yourself, and so you still have to maintain— like, even in the middle of nowhere, you still have to maintain the paperwork aspect of all the stuff that you take with you. God, that's kind of crazy.

Yeah, that seems like an unnecessary distraction to an already very insanely difficult job.

I mean, I'm not saying we do the paperwork well. I mean, come on, Joe, there's a reason why the DoD has never passed an audit. But I mean, ever.

I know, the Pentagon— like, how many years in a row has the Pentagon failed their audits?

Like 700.

It really is kind of bonkers.

I believe the Marine Corps is the only branch of the military that has ever actually done a legitimate audit and passed. Really? Those guys are tightened up, man. Those guys— God, I love Marines. They are— shout out to the Marines. They are the best, man.

Wow. They the only guys who pass the audits? That's crazy. Yeah, yeah.

The rest of us are just out there like, I think I got it with me.

But the problem with that is once you don't pass audits and there's a history of you not only not passing audits but not being punished for not passing audits, That opens up the door. No, the Pentagon has never passed, never passed a full clean department-wide financial audit of— as of the latest audits, Defense Department is the only one of 24 major federal agencies that has never passed a full financial audit. Hell yeah. So it's only been going on since 2018. So no big deal, guys. It's only 8 years.

Yeah, that's only a few trillion dollars. Whatever, whatever. It's fake money anyway.

They just make it. That's pretty crazy.

Well, the budget is interesting in the military. So they go off a fiscal year from October 1st. And— Look at this. Hold on.

Look at this statistic. Where we at? The Pentagon's own audit materials have pointed to a target of around 2028 financial year to achieve, to finally achieve a clean department-wide audit. Contingent on fixing longstanding accounting and systems problems. Imagine if the IRS calls you up and says, "Andy, you didn't pass your audit." You go, "I think I can get it in 2028." I'm on a lower trajectory towards this target you want to be at.

You want me like this? I'm like this.

I can get there in about 2 years.

Yeah, they're like, "No problem. Let's just take all your money between now and then." Oh, God, no. We don't need to do that. Let's give you a bigger budget to work with. I wonder if that answer takes into account what's going on currently in the world, because I feel like we're running through some inventory that might have to be tabulated.

Seems like there's probably a lot of ordinance that's been—

A lot of it does sit around for a while, so there is an argument to expending it. I am not in any way, shape, or form— It could go bad.

It's like tomatoes.

You got to eat them. Not exactly like tomatoes. Suppose a grenade is slightly tomato-shaped, but a JDAM looks nothing like a tomato.

What do they do? I don't know if this has ever happened— what do they do if, whether it's missiles or any weapons, have been sitting around too long and you— is there an expiration date?

There probably is, and I mean, I've been there when we have literally burned rifle ammunition, large stockpiles of rifle ammunition. Really? Yeah.

Because if it's sitting around too long, there comes the possibility that it's no longer effective.

Man, this is a while ago. I think it was more that once we got issued it, we were expected to expend it all, so we were not allowed to take it back to base with us.

So we were— Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, that's even dumber. You want some funny stories?

Talk to Evan sometime. I bet you he's had this experience. So there's a weapon called the Carl Gustaf that if you shoot too many of these things, it's in the manual, it'll start separating the lining in your lungs from your body because you're just— it is just this massive projectile. And you'll go out and do these training evolutions, and they'll say, yeah, here we are, the Carl G. Do not stand behind this bad boy when it goes off.

So how many can you shoot before it separates the linings of your lungs?

I believe the warning is somewhere around 6. Jesus Christ. Oh, Joe, you'll go out to training evolutions and there'll be 5 guys and there's a pallet of ammunition, and they'll say, you're not leaving here until all these are shot. Oh my God, and you're cracking off Carl G's until you have a nosebleed. Or you'll go out there, they have like LAW rockets, or, you know, when I first went through, it was M60 ammo. They're like, yeah, but you guys, the training's not over until you guys shoot all this. Like, yeah, but we totally did everything we're supposed to. We can't— we understand that, but just go ahead and lay down on the line and shoot these thousands of rounds of ammunition at whatever you want to because it's been issued to you, so now you need to go expend it.

Can you show me one of those things going off, Jamie? Carl G's. I want to see what, what it looks like.

I'm trying to talk my wife into naming our next dog Carl G.

I shot a.50 caliber once, and I was like, a Barrett.

Yeah, I was like, how'd that feel?

Boom! Like your whole body just goes boom.

Yeah, so this is a two-man Evolution here. Look at the size of that bad boy. Shit. Close it, lock it. He's checking the back blast. This guy's like, fuck, I'm about to lose my teeth.

Here we go. Oh, did you shoot it? Yeah, I didn't see it. It's supposed to be essentially recoilless.

It doesn't feel— why didn't they show it?

They did. Well, show it again.

It's— that's, that's the back blast right there.

Oh yeah, so he doesn't even move.

Oh, when he was pulling the trigger, that wasn't loaded. That was a fake shot of him showing how you pull the trigger.

Oh yeah, okay, let's see if there's more video. I just want a better shot of it actually going off in his arms. Let me see what it looks like. Ready for fire. Here we go. Backblast area clear. He looks fucking nervous. Yeah, look at him breathing. Firing, firing, firing. Oh my goodness. Oh yeah, airburst.

You can set these suckers— you can twist the, uh, the warhead to set a delay on the thing.

You can have it airburst, like if they're trying to play hide and seek with you on a wall See, this is the argument for those little robot dogs, because you put one on one of them little robot dogs and have that thing shoot it, and that way you don't have to lose the lining of your lungs.

I don't know if a robot dog could handle that thing. Really?

What about one of them big robot dogs?

I don't know if the answer is just make it bigger. Probably. I'm sure there's a size of robot dog that can handle that.

I mean, you would imagine.

But then you would need a friendly other robot dog to reload it for him.

Right. But that would be possible. That would totally be possible. Or the robot dog has like arms in the back. Yeah. Do it.

That was a training round. Nice little rifle barrel. Yeah, that's crazy.

That's cool. See, what a great shot. Imagine standing there taking that shot though. Fuck all that.

As a dude loading around into it.

Oh yeah, good lord.

Yeah, no, next time you're sitting down with Evan, ask him like, hey, did you ever guys at the end of training evolutions ever have extra ordnance and ammunition that you had to dispose of. That's crazy. They just make you blow it up. Yeah, his answer will be yes, and he'll just start laughing.

So if you have to do it outside of shooting, how do you do it?

You can blow stuff in place, like you can make a large pile of stuff and, you know, launch something at it.

Uh, that probably won't fire.

Mm, you can actually light ammunition on fire. It'll go off. And if outside—

what direction?

Well, outside of it being compressed in the chamber of a gun, which, you know, if you think of like an AR platform rifle, when the round is in the magazine, it gets pushed forward by the bolt, and it's being held by all sides except for down the barrel. So all of the pressure is pointed in that direction, which is what propels the bullet down the barrel. If you remove that, it kind of just explodes in place. I'm not saying it's safe to like stand around and like have a beer while you're watching, like from me to you. We would be on the other side of a berm, but it sounds like popcorn going off. And then for other stuff, you can layer explosive charges on top of it and probably get all of it to go.

—God, it seems insanely wasteful. It seems like you should be able to say, "We achieved what we needed to achieve in our training. Here is our excess ordnance that we could use in the future." [Speaker] Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you just haven't spent enough time around the military.

00:39:34

Uh, well, that's been explained to me about budgets, that if you do not meet your budget, you get in trouble because then they can't ask for the same amount of money next year.

00:39:45

So I heard that every year that— when I was in. And September was a fantastic month to be in the military because that's when they— because the budget Budget year is October 1st to October 1st. So September, the bean counters really start taking a look at what they have left. And they'd say— I was a supply rep for a short period of time, meaning I was, I was a little cog in the wheel of supplying stuff to the guys. They're like, you need to spend $100,000 in the next 3 hours on shoes. Which, let me tell you, REI is happy to take your money. REI.com will run that card And you always would hear this, if we don't spend it, we're gonna lose it. But I never actually saw that tested. I don't know if you actually would get in trouble. They just always assumed that you would, so you ran that sucker down to bankrupt, and then October 1st, you're good to go.

Wow. So here's a good question in terms of like shoes. When your missions involve a bunch of different types of terrain, a bunch of different, like, is it, do they favor a lighter weight shoe that's more of an all-purpose shoe, Because like, I couldn't imagine you would be wearing like, like a crispy mountain boot with like high leather. Yeah, well, so it depends.

Very— you gotta have a wardrobe, Joe, right? Being good at your job is second only to looking good while doing your job. So we— trust me, I've sent people back to hell. I'm like, your top and bottom aren't matching, we're not doing this, go change. Really? Yeah, you have to look the part. It's equal to your professionalism and tactical ability. Interesting. Yeah, maybe perhaps I was a little bit picky on that, but I don't— I don't want to clash on the battlefield. You need to look good. It sounds like you can't have everybody looking awesome and then one like, you look like shit, go change your outfit out.

Yeah, you have orange boots on, dude, what are you doing?

Yeah, the boots, you could— I mean, you take a Pelican case or a box, you have a tool for every job. So if you're gonna go up in the mountains, if you're gonna go like northeastern Afghanistan, you're gonna wear a different type of issue for sure. If you're in Iraq in an urban environment, you're gonna wear probably the lightest weight, like the— I forget who makes them, but like the Speedcross shoes. And those things are— I mean, that you might get 2 months out of those, so you'd bring a couple pair. You're gonna bring some footwear that if you needed to go into the water, like not swim around in the water but pass through water, or those like Salomons. Yeah, Salomon Speedcross. Oh yeah, and the soles on those things, they don't last very long But again, when you get $100 grand to buy shoes for 3 hours, you can buy, you know, extras for people. So you kind of have a— it's just like all the rest of the gear. You have cold weather gear, you have desert gear. And the coldest I've ever been is actually in the desert because of the super high, high, and then the super— that swing, right, was way colder than like in mountainous terrain.

The moon. Yeah. But I mean, so you— when you lay out your stuff, like before every deployment you get ready to go on, you're laying your stuff out. You probably have 2 tables like this this with all like desert, woodland, cold weather layering system, shoes, different load-bearing equipment, different back. And then you just lay it all out, put it into a bag, and then you're doing the best you can. Then you're kind of just packing, you know, for what comes up in front of you.

And you're just ordering stuff from REI for real?

Sometimes, yeah. Wow. So not everybody— not everywhere. The conventional teams are very limited in their ability to do that. At a JSOC level, you have a little bit more room and flexibility to source from outside vendors.

So you would go for the best possible tool for the job 100% of the time? Yeah. Yep. Instead of just get military issue? Correct. Yeah. I got the dumbest question for you about— tell me more. This is the dumbest question. Have you heard of the story of the Kandahar Giant?

Are we talking about an actual giant? Uh-huh. No. How did you hear the story about a Kandahar giant?

There's a crazy thing called the internet.

I may spend less time on the internet than you guys.

And if you have a good algorithm, and by good I mean retarded, you get— Oh my. This is a visual representation, obviously not an actual picture. So there was a story that— what is the guy's name that was on Jesse Michaels' podcast recently? I don't remember. I'll check. So supposedly there was a giant that engaged US troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and in a very remote area. And this guy was shot and killed and medevaced out of there, or, you know, helicoptered out of there. And that 12-foot giant, Tim Alberino. And he was—

was he telling this story as if he was there or he heard this?

This. There's never a guy who was there. Damn it. There's apparently one guy who has his face covered up in one of these videos that I watched. It's like one of the blurry, like, you know, like a witness to a mob scene.

Yep. And so that's how you know they're legit. 100%. Thank you.

I think the same way. That's why I sent it to all my friends. But he was telling the story from people that he talked to that were there.

See, and here's the thing. I want stories like that to be true too. I still am just waiting. Same thing with aliens. God, I so deeply want it to be true. I just need somebody to hold up an actual piece of evidence and say, this is what I'm talking about, instead of I saw, I know somebody who was read into, I had a buddy who got engaged by a giant, or they like, okay, where is it? Right. And until then, I got a real hard time believing that. Oh, I'm with you.

But I also want to believe, which I know clouds my vision.

I just think it makes you hopeful.

It gets me to a certain point, and then the point— like, there's a point where my logic kicks in and I'm not willing to go any further, and that's Bigfoot. Yeah, with Bigfoot, I'm like, I know too many guys that are in the woods all the time.

And let's not forget the game cameras they often leave behind. That's right, like millions of game cameras.

That's right. Come on, at this point Like, I could have bought it in the 1960s, like, maybe, who knows, before drones, before satellites, before this, before that. And, you know, there's good arguments that you wouldn't find the body because, like, you and I have hunted in the mountains many, many times. I've never seen a mountain lion skeleton. Have you? No, no, no. I don't know anybody who has. I've seen mountain lions. I've never seen a mountain lion skeleton. I've never seen a bear skeleton. I'm sure people have found them. Yeah, but I haven't. And we know there's a shit ton of mountain lions and a shit ton of bears. So there was a very small population of primates. It's not inconceivable that you wouldn't find their body, especially if they were in some way advanced to the point where they were burying their dead, which is, you know, it's not outside the realm of possibility if they have a language of like— who knows what these things are. But no, I just, that doesn't, I think it used to be real. And I think there's real evidence of that.

I want it to be.

No, there's real evidence. There's a thing called Gigantopithecus. It was an 8-foot-plus tall bipedal hominid that existed in Asia. And it's in the orangutan family. And there's like recreations of what it looks like standing next to a human. It's huge. But that just makes sense. I mean, there used to be giant wooly mammoths. There used to be giant sloths. The idea of a giant primate is not inconceivable. It's like size is all relative anyway. Our idea of what's big compared to a fucking giraffe or this, it's all— it doesn't— you know, if you have enough resources and there's enough food for these things, they live in a lush tropical environment or a lush wilderness environment, it's not impossible to think that something would get way bigger than a gorilla. But for that thing to exist today— Oh, God. Yeah, that's what it used to look like. Like. So I think that is probably what all these ancient myths are based on. That's probably what used to exist. So it was bipedal, which is also interesting, and that's based on its jaw structure.

Here's a question for you that you, uh, the species burying themselves— these are intrusive thoughts that I have and can't get out of my head— why don't we bury people vertically to save space? That's a good question. Wouldn't you get more square footage? A lot more.

Yeah. Be harder to make a 6-foot-tall hole, or, you know, for the tall person.

I feel like they make oil drills that could— I mean, I'm not saying that they do now.

Yeah, but back in the day, it'd be easy to— someone's laid down, just roll them over into the hole. I mean, but because a 6-foot-deep hole that's like 6 feet long—

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying in today's world, yeah, I think we can evolve.

Well, here's even weirder. You know, you have to embalm people before you cremate them.

But why exactly?

My friend Joey Diaz says it's a racket because he knew a guy who ran a funeral home. The big embalming market?

Well, it's all a racket.

The whole funeral home thing's a racket. They know, like, your family member dies, you have to bury your family member, you're in grief, and then they try to sell you on some fucking fancy coffin. They sell you on this and sell you on that. But the embalming is— it's mandatory. I did not— at least for some places, because I know that some people are trying to do what they call natural burials. I don't know what the regulations are on— like, let's find that out. I'm already— there are upright— they called upright burials. Oh, it is a thing. They do exist in the U.S., though, or is this some like Nordic country? There's a cemetery that does it already. I was trying to look up more information on it. Probably a bunch of cheapies.

One thing already that I can give— I'm just thinking about like, most of them have fences, so like maximum square footage utilization.

Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Gravity's an issue a little bit. Keeping it in the— I don't know. There's just stuff. Gravity's an issue.

Gravity's not going to be an issue. First off, once you're in that coffin, nothing good's happening. Right. Vertically or horizontal.

That doesn't make sense. What kind of gravity is it? Just drop them in the hole.

I think the family— It'd be like this.

Like slide it down in that hole.

I think they're saying the family doesn't like the idea that they're going to be compressed into a small amount in the bottom of the coffin. Like a science issue, I think.

Well, they're fucking dead, you know. You know the most gnarly way they bury people, or the most gnarly funeral? Well, they're still alive. No, well, they're dead.

Well, I'm saying that would be the most gnarly, right?

The most gnarly post-mortem is the Tibetan sky funeral. Do you know how they do that? No. Vultures. They literally break the body up, chop it up into chunks, and the vultures know it, and so they prepare. So the vultures are all hanging around waiting. Well, it is a tradition in Tibet set with at least certain people to get rid of their bodies that way. And the idea is that, look, the person's dead. This is a more natural way, you know, and they'll cycle back into the ecosystem the way it's supposed to be with all animals. We're the only animal that opts out of like rejoining with all biological life because it's supposed to be a biological body deteriorates underground, that feeds the soil, that feeds, you know, whatever animals feast on its bones, and then it becomes all part of this big beautiful cycle. We're like, yeah, we've got some chemicals laying around we'd like to fill the veins up with to make them completely poison so that they never deteriorate, or they just slowly turn into gelatinous sludge. By state, looks like. Okay, so it says burial, burial, burial burial— why is that word weird to me right now?

Burial is regulated by state-by-state city-county zoning. There's no federal rule that specifies body position, horizontal versus vertical. What are the laws in terms of embalming? Green or natural burial, simple shroud, no vault, minimal disturbance, is legal in all 50 states, but only in locations that comply with state and local rules. Green or natural burial from water sources would be a big reason for that. Oh, interesting. So you don't want people to rot.

But what about cows?

Cows can rot, you know, like a dead coyote just rots. We don't want to eat people. Yeah, but it's not— drink them either, I guess. Well, it didn't— no, I was watching this documentary about this family where the kid, his dad was a serial killer, and the dad would throw people in a well. Well, and he had to help him when he was young. His dad would kill people and then throw them down the well. First time he did it, he said, I think it was a young boy when his dad first took him to get rid of a body and throw it down a well.

Not all bonding experiences are created equal.

How many people have died drinking well water that was polluted by a dead body?

Hopefully not that many.

What'd you find, Jamie? That's disgusting.

Have you thought through your end of life? Do you have— have you told people?

I would like to not be embalmed. I would like to just be buried in the ground and be absorbed naturally like everything else.

Do you have that written down anywhere though? No.

I don't care. Once I'm gone, figure it out. I don't give a fuck.

Well, there's an argument to help figuring it out for those left behind so it makes it easier.

I don't want to make things easier when I'm gone. I want it to be complicated as fuck. I want them to be arguing over my will.

Well, I only asked because we had to think through this stuff because you do like a review of your will every time. Yeah. And, you know, final requests, I guess it would be. So you had to think through that.

Jamie, stop scrolling. So for direct cremation, no public viewing, cremation within a few days, body kept refrigerated, embalming is generally unnecessary and not legally required in most states. But the thing is, it's, it's most of the time it's done. According to my friend Joey, whose friend— at least it was in the past— his friend ran a funeral home. The guy was telling him what a fucking scam it all is. It's just, you're just charging people for all this stuff.

It probably— it's just like anything else.

Here it is: many funeral homes require embalming for presentation and public health reasons if you want a public viewing or an open casket before cremation. Oh, who does that? Some jurisdictions or airlines may require embalming for long-distance or international transport, or if there's a long delay before commission. Well, that makes sense, because if you don't embalm it, you're gonna stink up the whole fucking plane. US law— jet— I mean, I'm sure you've smelled dead bodies before, but the first time I ever smelled a dead body, I was a little kid and someone died in our apartment building. It was crazy. You'd walk down the hallway and the fucking smell— that was me and my cousins and my sister. We were walking down the hall. We were like, what is that? We're probably like 6. It was this insane smell. And it turned out this lady was just living by herself, died. And so she was just rotting in this apartment building.

You think you still recognize it to this day?

It's very unique. Is it? Humans are very unique smell as opposed to regular animal?

Well, the mechanism of death can change, I guess, a little bit. Sure. But in general, yeah, a couple days later, like, they all kind of smell the same.

I've heard— yeah, I've heard humans are uniquely gross in the way we smell. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not awesome. Yeah. Not awesome to be around it.

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Like, is it where funeral homes request embalming before they cremate you? Also, here's another scam according to my friend. When you think you get your family member ashes, you get a bunch of shit. You get a bunch of ashes. You get ashes from some fucking, fucking guy you don't even know. They don't care. They just shove a bunch of ashes into an urn. You're like, it's Grandma. She's here with us forever. But it's not really. It's like—

I hope that one's not true. That's gnarly. Yeah, it's true. It's like the epitome of laziness.

I'm pretty sure it's true. Though, if the requirement was coming from funeral homes instead of law. And of course, most of the time, yes, the requirement to embalm before viewing or before cremation is coming from funeral homes or cemetery policy, right? So they're trying to make more money. So this is what Joey was telling me about. Yeah, so it's not a federal requirement. FTC says embalming may be necessary if you choose certain arrangements like a public viewing, but the necessity is based on the funeral home standards, not a blanket legal mandate. So the most people probably don't know that. So the funeral home will tell you, oh, we have to embalm them first.

And you're in a pretty susceptible and malleable mind space. Exactly. Time.

Yeah, they're just really used to it. They're really used to it. They must get— they must get so accustomed to just— they don't give a fuck. There's bodies there every day. People are always dying. It just— it's an opportunity to make more money, which is rough.

Yeah, you would like to think that humanity wouldn't be like that, but yet here we are.

Yeah, find out if— well, the other thing is like, you remember that Sam Kinison bit? I don't know if you ever saw it.

I know who Sam Kinison is. I'm not very familiar with his bits. One of the greatest of all time.

But he had this bit about homosexual necrophiliacs who were caught spending— paying a bunch of money to be alone with the freshest male corpse. And it was just— it was an actual true story that he read in the news news, but his whole thing was like, imagine you're on the slab, you're like, well, I'm dead now, I'm gonna be with Jesus, and hey, hey, what? And he would be like rocking back and forth on his stomach. What is this? It feels like some guy's got his dick in my ass.

You mean life keeps fucking you in the ass even after you're dead? It never ends. It never ends. Ow, ow. You comedians are a unique bunch. Let's, you know, I'm glad there's somebody out there who can weave a story like that together and have a meaningful message at the end of it.

But there are— there have been cases of people getting like hot girls that are freshly dead and fucking them, getting caught.

Yeah, because humans are horrible. The vast— I try to tell myself that the vast majority of humans are trying to do the best that they can, but I never forget that there are people out there who are like that.

Sure. Yeah, there's people out there that are gross. They're just evil. I was reading about this guy who is an oncologist who got arrested because he was giving people chemotherapy that didn't really have cancer. Cancer because chemotherapy is uniquely profitable for doctors. Yeah, it's very profitable. So he was telling people that they had cancer and they did not, and he was giving them chemotherapy, which— I have a friend who died recently, and, uh, he went through the first round of chemotherapy, went into remission, and, uh, the chemotherapy was so bad that when the cancer came back, he decided to just die.

That's how mom dead. She had survived cervical cancer. It metastasized into her lungs 10 years later. Got on the chemo, which I don't know what is in that stuff, but they, you know, the platinum treatment, whatever it may be, and had the realization that she was either going to die from cancer or she was going to die from the chemotherapy. And she chose hospice just because the ride on the chemotherapy was so horrible that she couldn't take it anymore.

My friend said the pain of brushing his teeth was so intense, like the sores in his mouth from the chemo. And then once cancer went into remission and then it came back— and by the way, this cancer came very quickly after vaccination. It was one of those where, you know, you can get into that all day long if you want to really get into a deep conspiracy theory that's got some real facts to it. But there's something called SV40 40, and they found SV40 in some of the mRNA vaccines. SV40 is simian virus 40, and it's a virus that was contracted— that people got because they used kidney cells from monkeys in order to cultivate these vaccines. This is like known about for a long time, and in certain batches they've tested positive for SV40. 40, which is like some just legacy material that they have that they make vaccines out of. And he was one of the lucky ones.

Sucks, man.

There's a young dude, you know, he's in his 40s, early 40s, fit young guy. Cancer came on like a fucking tidal wave, just a freight train mowed him down.

How much time did he have between diagnosis?

Well, I got him connected with Gary Breckman and Gary Brecka helped him quite a bit, and that's how he originally got through it and got over it. He was okay again and, you know, went into remission. He said he's feeling pretty good. And then, man, wasn't more than a year and a half, 2 years later, it came back with a vengeance, and he was dead just 6, 6 months later.

Later. Does it change how you view life, your own life, when that happens close to you?

It's just shocking that healthy, fit people get something like that. And it happens so quickly. You know, this is, you know, like I said, my suspicions is it's connected to the vaccine. And I don't think that everybody who got that mRNA vaccine is going to die of cancer. I think it's contamination issue that some of the batches had it and some of the batches didn't. But, and then some people react very differently to whatever, whatever's in it. But with him, man, it got him. And it's not uncommon. There's, there's a shitload of ignored cases of what they're calling turbo cancer that people have gotten after the mRNA vaccine. Like, it's, it's barely a conspiracy theory. It's more likely an ignored inconvenient fact that these pharmaceutical drug companies are trying to ignore.

Do you think they were trying— going upstream from that, the pharmaceutical companies or people that were pushing to try to find what perhaps they thought would be the fix to the solution, do you think that they were doing the best that they could and just their enthusiasm outstripped their capabilities or they pushed stuff a little bit too early? Was it as deep of a conspiracy that people think, and that behind the scenes they're trying to reduce overall global population?

I don't go that way. I don't go to the reduce overall global population, but I do understand why people would think that, because there have been a bunch of people that are supposedly philanthropists, Bill Gates, that have talked about reducing overall population being a goal, and that goal could be— like, Bill Gates was actually quoted saying that that goal could be achieved through vaccines. Vaccines. Like, what the fuck does that mean? Reducing global population through vaccines? How? Well, one way is the— what is it? DDP or DTP vaccine? Diphtheria something and pertussis. So they were caught in Africa. One of the vaccines that they were using on women in Africa Africa turned out it's tetanus, right? Diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis had HCG in it, which is an endocrine disruptor. I don't know what's the exact specific description of it, but what it was essentially doing was rendering these women infertile. And so they were supposedly vaccinating them for tetanus these other diseases, but really what it was doing was they were making these women infertile and they were experimenting on them and they were doing this in Africa. You know, they, they like to experiment in places where not a lot of people are watching and there's not a lot of infrastructure and not a lot of internet connection and they can, you know, get away with trying stuff on people.

So this, this concept of reducing population through vaccination. There's some real-world examples of people doing that. But, you know, why? I don't know. I don't think that— I think if you find out about how much money was generated during the vaccine pandemic, during the COVID pandemic, that is the most likely scenario. They were just trying to make an enormous amount of money.

Do you remember that you and I did the first podcast after the lockdown in LA? Yeah. And then I drove with my wife down to San Diego, and I don't think she had been, because we got to San Diego in about 17 minutes.

There's no one on the road.

And I remember saying to her, if we come back, which we will, don't expect this. It was like a ghost town. But we were in LA the day that it locked down. I remember texting you like, um, are we good? You're like, yeah, YouTube says we're essential. Let's roll. We're essential.

That was what was crazy. There was essential businesses businesses that were allowed to stay open. Restaurants weren't one of them, fucking insanely enough, but fast food places were. So there was certain places that were essential, and media was essential, so we were allowed to. Although we did get ratted out. The health department came to our LA studio, and they made us put a bag of masks on the wall when you go in, and also a note that shows all the precautions that you have to take place, like stand 6 feet apart. And then people were also complaining that this table's not 6 feet wide, wide, and so we weren't observing the proper social distancing. So I said, okay, well, why don't we just do this and you do that and we'll do a podcast? Oh yeah, we're 6 feet right now. We're 6 feet now. We're good here. It's like— it's— and then it turns out that that was all made up. It was all horseshit. You know, it's the Who song, We Won't Get Fooled Again.

You know, I want to believe that they were trying to do the best. I don't believe that. I said I want to believe.

Yeah, I know. I don't even want to believe that.

But then what do we do about it?

We never listen again. What if they're right the next time?

I don't think they will be.

I don't think they're ever right with that kind of stuff, especially something that's not killing everybody as they said it was. They were just gaslighting us all over television that people were dropping like flies. And especially egregiously disgusting is gaslighting us about children dying from it. Yeah. You know, and there's a lot of really fucking shitty human beings that were posting about this on Twitter. And I don't know if they were being paid to do it or if they're just ideologically captured, but there was a lot of people on Twitter talking about children dying from COVID It's a fucking dirty lie. There was a very small amount of kids that died during the pandemic, and those kids, all of them, had something wrong with them already. All of them had comorbidities, which is like also a giant percentage of all the people that died, period. It's like, what is the number? It's like 75% of them, something like that, had 4+ comorbidities. 4 comorbidities is crazy. Yeah, it's like you're already fucked. That means 4 things that are already killing you, you know? Yeah.

Do you think we learned anything during that time period?

Yeah, I think we learned that the pharmaceutical drug pharmaceutical drug company has a lock on the media that is very disturbing. Like, the media did not report at all vaccine injuries. They didn't report on it at all. It was never discussed. People were dropping dead. They were ignoring it and gaslighting. And then we also found out the amount of money that these pharmaceutical drug companies pay to these corporations, whether it's Fox or NBC or CBS or whoever it is. Is, in advertising. It's a huge part of their budget is advertising money. And the way Cali Means explained it to me, he goes, it's not so that people find out about the drugs. It's so that these news stations don't criticize the pharmaceutical drug companies.

Well, if they control the ad inventory and then the checkbook behind that. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Do you ever do pharmaceutical type reads for your show?

No, no, I say no to them.

I only say yes to dick pills.

Dick pills I'll say yes to. Like, listen, get hard, stay hard. Yeah, yeah, I'm down with that. Well, see, I'm not anti-pharmaceutical drug company, but I am— and the problem with corporations is they have an obligation to their shareholders to make the most amount of money possible. And it's not the people that are making these things, that the people that are making them, these doctors and engineers and scientists scientists, all these wizards that are coming up with all these life-saving medications. Then you get the money people, and the money people are the ones that fuck everything up, because the money people say, you know what, we could charge $1,000 a pill for this stuff. You know, there's certain medications that literally cost $1,000 a pill, you know, and they just try to make the most amount of money possible and prescribe it to the most amount of people possible. And then you get monsters like this cancer doctor that I was telling you it was giving chemotherapy to people that don't fucking have cancer.

So how do we break that system though?

Hammers. Take that guy in a room, take that guy in a room, just keep him alive, slowly break him down with a hammer. Start with his toes, but I feel like work your way up to his hips.

I feel like it's so deeply entrenched in our political system as part of it as well too, that the money transfer— how do you break that? It's hard and detach watch that.

AI God. AI God has to come alive and take over the system.

Now we're really getting into terrain I don't understand. I know what the word AI means.

I don't know. AI God, the one that created that Jesus meme that Trump just posted, that's AI God.

Joe, I told you he explained it. He was a doctor. That's what they call them.

That's what AI God calls Jesus.

Jesus is a doctor. The mental gymnastics involved involved in some of these people who are so ideologically captured. Yeah, is shocking to me. It's weird.

It's weird because there's no way there should be this kind of money in politics. There's no way it'd be good for anybody if the people with all the money are controlling most of the things that happen. It doesn't make any sense because they're just— they're all sick anyway. They just want more. If you're worth $200 billion and you're still trying to make more money, that's what you're trying to do with your time. Well, you're sick. There's something wrong with you. There's like, what are you doing with that money? How is it possible that you could spend all that money?

Isn't the answer for some people, or the dollar figure that they're shooting for, just more though?

Always. My friend— well, you know Brian Callen. Brian Callen has a friend who's worth $3 billion and he feels poor because his friend is worth $80 billion. Imagine that. Imagine feeling insecure.

You have $3,000 million and you feel insecure. You feel poor. Yeah. Yeah, because he's eating ramen at night. Let me just tell you, bothersome. Yeah, mac and cheese and ramen out of the microwave.

I feel poor when I'm around Elon. Yeah, but jokingly.

But also everybody on earth probably, right?

But it's jokingly feel poor. Like, I don't really feel bad for myself or insecure about the fact that he's got it. What does he got?

He's getting close to a trillion.

He's like worth $800 billion on paper. Paper. Yeah, until California taxes get a hold of them. They'd like to suck all that dry and give it to the homeless people. Well, they're doing good.

Their program would work if we gave them a little bit more money. That's all they need. They just need that wealth tax.

If they could just siphon off some money from the billionaires. That's the real problem, is they don't have enough money.

Are you glad you left?

Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. You've been here, what, 6 years?

6 years? Yeah, been almost 6 years. Been in Montana from 9. Nice. I can't think of a reason that I'm going to leave. Yeah, really can't. It is amazing. Well, Montana's got so much going on for it.

First of all, there's less people, which is relaxing.

You feel better. 1.1 million people in the state. That's all of Austin. That's probably a subdivision in Austin.

Well, it's Austin is a million and then the surrounding area is another million.

We just had a net decrease in population in Montana last year.

Yeah, because all those fucking people that came over because of Yellowstone, they went through a couple of winters and COVID.

They're like, yeah, this sucks, we're out. Or that remote work Work job was like, hey, time to come back to the old office.

Also, you try driving an electric car when it's fucking 30 below zero outside. That bitch is— oh, it says you got 200 miles? Guess what? You got 30.

There is one Cybertruck where I live. It's not mine. I bet it's a rich guy. He owns a Thai food restaurant. There you go. Which, I mean, I don't know what level of wealth is associated with that.

Probably got some money.

Yeah, honestly, it might be money laundering is what he specializes in. It's hard to say. Might have a nail salon or two under his umbrella. They're great when it's warm out.

Yeah, but they— the battery life significantly— do you remember? I think it was Chicago or Detroit. There was a few years back, there was a giant blizzard that hit, and people with electric cars, their cars died on the highway, and they were really fucked. Yeah, really fucked. Because look, if you have full tank of gas and you're idling, just idling on the highway way, that's a pretty long time, especially if it's diesel.

Geez, you'll get 24 hours out of it.

100%. Yeah, so you'll survive. If you have a fucking electric car and you get stuck on the highway and it's just bumper to bumper forever and that thing is the only thing keeping you warm, you better pray that someone lets you in their car. Yeah, because you're gonna die out there.

You'll freeze to death in your own fucking car. I like the concept of them, you know.

I drove one today. There, it's a time machine. I have a Tesla Model S, the highly—

don't you have like a highly modified one? Those— oh yeah, I was gonna say, it might say Model S on the outside.

Yeah, well, the speed is the same as the standard one. The speed is exactly the same because they don't do anything to the engine because it already has 1,100 horsepower. Do they like widen yours? Yes, it's— the track is widened, it's got a much more robust suspension setup, it's got carbon fiber fenders. There's a company called Unplugged Performance performance, and they take it and they just— it just handles phenomenally, and the brakes are way better. So it does that. But the thing about it is the speed. That's just insane. Like, when you merge onto a highway, it's a time machine. You just hit the gas like— and it's no sound, so it's— and all of a sudden you're going 90 miles an hour like, like that. It's nuts.

We're into different things, Joe. I'm gonna stick with my F-150. I like those too.

I have one of those. I have Raptor. I have a Hennessey Raptor.

I don't have that model.

Yeah, so I like a Raptor, but I like one with 1,000 horsepower. First off, who doesn't?

I just don't like the price tag associated with the 1,000 horsepower one.

It's a little pricey. Yeah, but I was on the phone the other day because, you know, it's got the speakerphone thing. So I'm on the phone with my friend Tommy and I'm driving. He goes, yo, what the fuck are you driving?

A dinosaur?

You could hear the And the supercharger whine, it's awesome. But I get it, it's not for everybody. But if you drive one, just the ability of those things, just the insane capability, the ability to go 0 to 60 in under 2 seconds is just nuts. Yeah, for a 4-door sedan. You know how to drive though.

Yeah, some people probably are better off not getting into a car that can do do that.

Well, that's what's weird, right? So like, if you want— like, say if you want to get a concealed carry license, you have to go to a range and you have to demonstrate that you know how to use a gun correctly.

Are you talking about here in Texas? Yeah, because Montana is a constitutional carry state.

Well, it's constitutional carry here as well, but still concealed carry, you get reciprocity. So if you have concealed carry, you get reciprocity in Florida, Nevada. So if you get a concealed carry license in Texas. You can go to places where, you know, they're only— maybe they don't even have concealed, they don't have constitutional carry, but they recognize Texas concealed carry because of the additional training.

Yeah, exactly.

But the point is, like, you have to show that you know how to use it. You can go buy a Corvette and you don't have to show anything, which is crazy.

Well, you have to show a likelihood that you're able to pay for it.

That's it. That's it. Yeah. So you can get like a Corvette ZR1, which is also 1,100 horsepower, power and fucking bonkers, a bonkers fast, insanely engineered car, you don't have to show that you know how to drive at all. Yeah, you just have a driver's license, so you could ride into the nearest telephone pole sideways. I mean, there's plenty of, plenty of videos of that. Yeah, a friend, my friend Whitney, sent me a video of a street takeover in Los Angeles this Saturday night where they took over some street and gunshots and people just, they stop— they cut off the entire street so no one can go anywhere. People surround these cars, and the cars drive around in circles. Yeah. And then someone started shooting at people. Awesome. What a classic pairing. Yeah, good times. It's good to have rules. Yeah.

Yeah, they're not doing that in Montana. Exactly, exactly.

You have to have an enormous amount of people in order for things to get that chaotic with a very small percentage of humans.

Were there cops there for that, or they just didn't want to get the mix.

They didn't show up until after, you know, the cops showed up when, you know, people start shooting.

Yeah, that's generally when they're gonna respond.

They're getting security cameras. But the thing is, in Los Angeles, they don't fucking put you in jail for anything. They let you right out. There's no cash bail. They're letting people out for all kinds of crimes. Yeah, I was listening to a podcast where a guy was a former gang member, and he was saying he's leaving Los Angeles because they're letting 70,000 people out of prison prison. It's like, it's gonna get too dangerous.

So it was too dangerous for the gang member. There's the answers to some tests right there. Maybe pay attention. Yeah, you would—

you gotta wonder, like, what are they trying to do with California where everything seems to go in the wrong direction? Like, if you, if you look at the vaccine thing, like, do you think they're really trying to lower population? Is that what they're trying to do, like kill off a percent? What are they trying to do with California? Are they really trying to destroy this 'Cause if I was trying to destroy a state, that's how I would do it. I'd let everybody out of jail. I'd regulate the fuck out of everything so nothing can get done. You know, you can't buy these in California. Why? These are Alps. Yeah, because they're flavored. This is wintergreen. Shout out to Tucker Carlson. This is his brand. I like these. These are very delicious. Oh, by the way, I showed these to Daniel Cormier. He goes, where'd you get those? And I go, in Texas you could buy them. He goes, you know you can't buy them in California? And he goes, "I get 'em and I bring 'em around all these dads." They're like, "I'm a dealer." They're like, "Where'd you get that?" 'Cause they won't let you have flavored nicotine pouches.

It's illegal in California. It's for your safety. They're trying to turn you into just a little baby that needs everything from the government. Everything. Everything. We were at that launch party.

Somehow I got an invitation to be there. So we go to Tennessee. Tucker stands on a chair and talks about Alp, you know how— Stood on a chair. Chair? Yeah, because it was just like it was in Dave Ramsey's barn. And again, like, I'm so far not in the social circle of this. And so we listen.

I think he should have sat on someone's shoulders. That would be even better. He's pretty big.

So you needed somebody who like has squatted once or twice in their life. So we listened to him talk and they had a little like on the other room is a huge fireplace was just this like a charcuterie table about this size. So I'm getting some cheese and then I turn around I'm like, hello, Mel Gibson, and I just fucking went and sat in the corner.

I was so uncomfortable in that environment. 'Cause Mel was there?

Mel, there was a lot of people there. I just, you know, you've sat down and talked with him. You exist in a different orbit than I do. I exist in an orbit of 1.1 million total people that I don't see every day.

In the state. In the state.

So, like, I interact with the people I want to. I was not prepared to have a cheese stick and turn around and see the dude from Lethal Weapon standing there. Hi, I gotta get out of here.

By the way, if you talk to him, he's— he is one of the most normal, easy-to-talk-to movie stars you will ever meet. Yeah, he has no airs about him. He's very easy to talk to.

I just don't do good in social situations like that where like everybody was relatively recognizable. I just got to sit in the corner and I hang out with my wife and we eat charcuterie.

I get it, I get it. I don't like those things either, believe it or not.

It's— well, I I have been— do you remember the event you did at Performance Archery in San Diego? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize— I watched you trying to make your way to the bathroom, and it took you about 30 minutes to go 20 feet. And I don't know how you deal with that. I don't— that's— I mean, one, I know you well enough outside of that. Like, you're a genuinely nice person. You will give people the time like, because you're appreciative, right, of the fact that they want to meet you. Like, I totally get that. But also, sometimes you have to piss. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how any of those people— or maybe you don't— operate in, like, in a sense, in air quotes, of normalcy.

It's not normal, but the way I think of it is like, they just like me. It's way better than if they hated me. Way better than if you go into the bathroom and everybody wants to kick your ass. Ass. Like, they're— I'm going to the bathroom, they just want to say hi. And for them, it's a very unique moment. So I try to reset every time I see a new person, and I try to treat them as if it's like this is a complete— for them, it's a unique experience. They get to meet— and, and never believe that it— I am unique, you know. Don't believe the hype and don't think you are special, but always appreciate the fact that someone else does. And so take the time to say high. And I can't— the UFCs are hard because I can't— like, sometimes I'm going through the crowd and I have to— like, sometimes I leave my commentary seat and then I have to take a piss, and then I have to run back. Yeah. And then everybody's trying to get a picture while you're— you know, like, you're literally going through a crowd of people in between bouts.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I got— I high-five people, but they're like, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't stop because if I stop, then they'll all swarm. And I guess I can't do that. I have to keep moving. So that bothers me that I have to say I can't stop. Even when I'm leaving the venue, like, I can't, I can't, I have to keep moving. I'm sorry, I appreciate you, but I can't stop because if I stop, I'll never get out of here.

I've been to one of those, and we were at UFC 300.

That was a good one. It was—

your seat was good. You had a good seat. I watched the fight from the back of a projection onto one of the things up in one —Well, you didn't get tickets for me. I'm never gonna ask you for tickets, by the way.

—Well, just fucking let me know when you want to go.

—Well, no, actually, I don't want to go because I missed listening to you guys talk. I didn't realize— so we were sitting there, and it like— I heard Gaethje get flatlined before we saw it, and I'm like, holy cow. You want to talk about not the punch, but the reaction to that? Oh my God. Same. But there was so many people, and we were there with like Jocko and Origin, and, and there had some people that were down there low. But we ended up— Lee and I ended up watching from like the back. So we got to see it, but we both said the same thing: it's way better on the couch, or I want a pair of headsets like this so I can listen. Because now, like, let me be honest, before I started training jiu-jitsu, I was like, you fucking stand them up right now!

Those guys are just— well, now as a jiu-jitsu 'You're a black belt.

Aren't you embarrassed about yourself?' No, you don't let that guy earn that position. You don't ever get them off the cage and you never get them off the ground. I'm with you.

I've been preaching that from the beginning of the fucking sport.

I would have been the dude with like the redneck guzzler Coors Light half covered in it like, 'If I can stand him up!' 'Cause it's like— and now I'm like, 'No, no, no.' Never. Especially when they're sweaty. Oh my God. Like if that guy's dominating him, you stay right there. Exactly.

It's so hard to get someone to the ground, and it's so hard to hold them down if they're good.

The experience though, from— not good. I am gonna say this. Yeah, I would rather pay for the Paramount than listen— or for the pay-per-view than the current Paramount experience. Sorry, Dana, but the commercials suck.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of commercials. That's why I like YouTube Premium. I don't want commercials. Yeah, I'll pay for the pay-per-view. They should offer Paramount Premium, like, where you get no commercials. Commercials. Like, you should get a different experience.

There's been some streaming issues as well too, and I think— and I know— yeah, it's— there's—

well, it could also be Montana internet.

Listen, we have electricity, we have running water. We— I've actually seen solar panels up in Montana. They don't work great for 9 months out of the year, but you get the Starlink.

Yeah, that's the shit.

I was actually one of the first people to get it in Montana, and it works fantastic.

I have the little one that's like a Yeah, it's amazing. It's fucking great. You just take it. We— I took it to Utah. We were streaming like stuff while we're in the cabins. It was awesome.

It's kind of life-changing. Oh, it's great. Sometimes I FaceTime with people, but then other times like, I'm gonna leave that in the truck because otherwise maybe I'm just gonna enjoy. That's true.

But you know, the thing about elk hunting is you're so tired by the end of the day that you're not gonna sit there looking at your phone anyway. But it's nice to be able to FaceTime home and say hi to people. And for sure. But I do like the fact that when you're out there in the woods, it doesn't work at all.

Yeah, yeah, that is— God, I hate hunting sometimes. Like last year, do you strike out last year? Oh no, even worse, wounded an elk. Oh no. I think I'd actually—

oh yeah, it's with a rifle.

Yeah, well, I tell people that I am the Navy SEAL sniper with the most confirmed misses because I can just smash that trigger back, close your eyes, hold your breath, let it gray out a little bit, and then really just jerk it.

That's the worst feeling when you know you could have done it so much better if you just had taken a little bit more time.

It would have been hard for me to do it worse, Joe, if I'm being honest. How could you possibly miss? Because I'm an idiot sometimes, and I'm just— God, as I was pulling on the trigger, I was watching it just drift back towards the beginning of the guts, and instead of just stopping, just gave a little bit more and then never saw the thing. Looked for it for 2 and a half days. Is there a worst feeling in the world than wounding an animal.

No, there's not. And it's also like a miss like that, you have to wait a year to get another chance. You have a whole nother year to sit about and think about that miss before you get back to hunting again.

This year I think I might be able to go back to archery, because although they call jiu-jitsu the gentle art, I get banged up sometimes. Oh bro, I was, I was rifle hunting that year. I was training with with a 15-year-old young man at the end of a day of training with some savage black belts, totally. And you know how when you say when you first start, like, hey, you need to relax? Well, I also found that you can relax too much. I was laying on my side, let him work on an armbar, got a hold of my arm. I was gonna work on an escape, and as my arm was coming up over my head, I heard my shoulder cavitate. It was like— and of course, on my drawing arm for my bow, and we were a couple months away from hunting season. Felt it go, partial tear of the pec, completely black and blue. It was the gentle art.

There's nothing gentle about jiu-jitsu. Yeah, it's ridiculous to call it that. I don't know who— what psychopath called it the gentle art. I was— I've been hurt more times. Everybody I know that's done jiu-jitsu as long as I have has like either artificial disks in their back and neck or has had multiple knee surgeries that That's me. I've had 3. Or has had torn shoulders where they had to get reconstructed, or blown-out elbows. Yeah. You still train? No, I haven't in a while. I want to though. Yeah, I did a little bit of training about a year ago with Gabe Tuttle, and I was getting back into it, but I'd still struggle with this one knee. I have one knee that keeps fucking up on me, man.

For you, it would be very hard to find the appropriate training partner. Yes. Like, you're never going to a group class again and getting in there at open mat, people would come for your head because they're assholes.

Yeah, but I always did. That's what I always did. I never— I always trained. I didn't just like only train with like one guy that like stuck with all the time. I always went to classes. Yeah, cuz I think that's the only way to really be good. I don't think there's a real way to train with one person that's like taking it easy on you and really achieve a high level. Level, I think you have to go in there with people that are gonna tap you, and you have to go in there with people that are trying to tap you, you know. And you know, if you're good and if you're strong, you can avoid a lot of shit. But you know, you get in there with some fucking 25-year-old wrestler who weighs 210 pounds and built like a superhero, it moves at a speed that your joints and ligaments can't move at. Yeah, I can't keep up with your own my back. I can't keep up with this. This is— and if I do keep up, I'm gonna blow something out.

Since I found it at 41, I don't think we should teach it to anybody under 30 because it deeply offends me when children come out of the children's class and they've been training like 6 times longer than I am. Like, what? Like, their movement patterns were developed on the mat. I'm like, I know we're using the same alphabet, we are not putting together the same words.

Well, I knew that I knew that from striking because I knew that from kicking. I was like, I started martial arts before my body had matured, and my body matured becoming very flexible and very fast. And so as I got thicker, I maintained that speed and everything. But I was like, I don't know if you could ever get as good as I got if you didn't start when I started. I don't know if it's possible. And I didn't start jiu-jitsu till I was 30. And when I started doing jiu-jitsu, I remember thinking, God, I wish I did this when I was a kid. Yep. Because I see some kids where their fucking scrambles and their transitions, like, built into their neurons, where they're just like, everything is so fast and so kinetic and they're just moving and flowing.

Like, fuck, I could have started in like '97, but the few people who were doing it were so enthusiastic, it just nauseated me.

Like, it's like veganism. Yeah, like they turn you— make you want to eat meat.

Come roll with us. I'm like, I don't know what you guys are doing. It's very questionably gay at best from the outside. I don't like how much you like it. Because you like it that much, I'm out. And then I look back, I'm like, oh, I started in '96.

Yeah, not me. I guess I took— yeah, it was '95 or '96. It was right after UFC 2 came out on video. So UFC 2 was— '93 was the UFC. I found out about UFC in in like— I didn't find out about it in '93. I found out about a year later, and it wasn't available. Not UFC 1 was not available on VHS. I had to get UFC 2, and I found out about it from somebody at the kickboxing gym that I was going to. He was like, you got to see this. And I was like, what is this? I was like, oh my god, they did it. Because there was always this thing when I was a martial artist when I was young, like, what's better, judo, karate? And no one knew. And then there was like the Jean-Claude Van Van Damme, Kumite movies where you'll— you meet and all the styles come together and you find out what's best. But when I first saw UFC 2, I was like, oh my god, they did it. And then I was like, oh my god, I don't know that. This one guy's killing everybody.

A lot of people that were saying that in those single-digit ones. Oh my god. So then what number UFC did you first commentate at? UFC 12. Damn, dude, that's a pretty quick— well, they probably were doing less frequently as well, but that's a pretty quick flash to bang. Yeah, we've seen it on a VHS. That was '97.

So by '97, I guess I was 30. Yeah, I guess I was 30, somewhere around there. So that was the first UFC that I was already training at that time. I was training at Carlson Gracie's with Vitor Belfort. There was— Vitor Belfort was there, Murilo Bustamante was there. Like, oh, like, it was amazing. Just stumbled upon that place. I actually went to Hickson's first. But I was so ignorant, I thought Carlson Gracie, Rickson Gracie, I thought it was the same. And Rickson was further away, and Carlson's was closer. I was like, "Oh, I found a closer Gracie jiu-jitsu. I'll go here." And then it was also at the time where Extreme Fighting was out, which was John Peretti, who was one of the commentators for the early UFC, was now doing this. And it was really good. Like, Mario Sperry was fighting, Igor Zinova was fighting. Vive. And these guys, a lot of these guys were from Carlson Gracie's, so I saw the Carlson Gracie, the two bulldog logos, which is fucking dope. And then I found out that it was on Hawthorne Street in LA, which is like really close to the Comedy Store.

I was like, oh, this is perfect, because I was living in North Hollywood. I'll just drive there.

It was much efficiency.

Yeah, it was much closer. But I just, I got there at literally the perfect time because it was right before Vitor was making his UFC debut. Debut, which was UFC 12, which I commentated at. So I was literally training at the same school as Vitor, so I knew what to expect. I'm like, these guys don't know what the fuck this guy's doing. Like, this is— this— because everybody thought he was just a jiu-jitsu guy. Yeah. And meanwhile, he had lightning hands. And, you know, it was a slimmer Vitor. He was only like 200 pounds back then, just moved like a fucking panther. And I got to see this sport just sort of emerging merging, where really it was becoming something completely different. Like, at first it was just a bunch of people that didn't know anything, and, you know, there was— or they didn't know anything about mixed martial arts. They either know judo or they know karate. And then there was Royce, and Royce is just tapping everybody, and everybody's like, oh my God, jiu-jitsu is the way. And then when I went to Carlson's, I was like, jiu-jitsu's kind of the way, but look at this guy.

Like, you got to take that guy to the ground, and that guy's hands are like a fucking professional boxer's.

This Yeah, jiu-jitsu is awesome. It's not complete. No, you can have a nice black belt and end up in an ambulance if you can't get through a striking range.

Well, not only that, there's a lot of guys that were really reliant upon the gi back then, unfortunately, because this is all— you got to realize this is all before Abu Dhabi, right? So this is before Abu Dhabi Combat Club came out, which was an amazing organization that paid real money to grapplers to compete but made them compete without a gi, which was like, for a lot of guys, they didn't know what to do. They're so used to grabbing sleeves and grabbing collars and grabbing pants. And the one guy who had figured it out was my eventual instructor, Jean-Jacques Machado, because Jean-Jacques was born with essentially one hand. His left hand is just a thumb. He just has a thumb. He had a birth defect. And because of that, his game was all overhooks and underhooks hooks and gable grips, which was— he wasn't relying on collars and all this other stuff. So his game was very different. He just dominated in Abu Dhabi, and that opened up the door to Eddie Bravo. So Eddie Bravo, he learned a lot of his techniques from Jean-Jacques as well, and a lot of his style was based around Jean-Jacques' principles, which is don't rely on the gi because you don't always have the gi.

It's a good tool to use if you have it. If you're fighting a guy who's got a winter coat on, it's It's awesome. Like, the last thing you want to do is fight a judo guy if you're wearing a winter coat.

So not optimal for how your head's gonna feel when it hits the concrete.

Yeah, and you ain't gonna be able to do shit to stop that.

I mean, I asked you early on, I think we had linked up when I was— actually, it was right at the beginning of COVID I was a white belt, and I asked you how you train and manage grip stuff, and you gave me a piece of advice that I still have, I still utilize. And you said whether you have a gi on or don't have a on, just focus on taking no-gi grips. Yes, son of a bitch.

Yeah, that's what I always did. Yeah, the only technique that I really love is the clock choke. You know, when you get a deep grip on the collar and you funnel that left arm underneath and spin. Oh my god, that's instant death. That clock is so nasty. The cross collar, that's great too.

Available for more areas. Oh, for sure. Just pop that head right off. Just cross collars nasty.

There's a lot of great, great gi techniques that are super effective if someone's wearing clothes. I mean, you'd be amazed at how, how durable t-shirts are, you know. You could really choke the fuck out of someone with a t-shirt.

So Henner has a video where he'll get the first hand in, he's got him in closed guard, he reaches over and he grabs the bottom of the shirt, pulls it all the way up, and then wraps that around. Oh yeah. It's got to feel like a garrote.

Yeah, just horrible. Yeah, horrible. And especially if they're wearing like a strong shirt, like a flannel shirt or something like that, something you really grab. Yeah, yeah. But, but that was John Jock's style. His style was use no-gi grips even with the gi. So for me, it made me concentrate more on defense because you couldn't pull out of things as easily. Yeah, but I never felt lost going into Nogi, so I would go back and forth all the time. So, you know, I got my black belt from Eddie first, but I got my black belt from Jean-Jacques right after that because I was training at both places. That was also a beautiful thing about Eddie being Jean-Jacques' student and them having a very close relationship. It never felt like you were a traitor, that you left schools, because I never really left schools. I trained at both places. I always trained at Jean-Jacques, and I always trained at Eddie's. You weren't a crayon. Yeah. Is that what they call it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So it was, it was, that was very nice that they had that amazing relationship where there was no static at all.

It was like I would go to see Jean-Jacques, I'd go train there a couple of days a week. I trained at Eddie's a couple of days a week. It was awesome. Yeah.

If I had a time machine and if my younger self would listen to me, which I don't think I would, I would say two things. One, buy Bitcoin, obviously. And two, maybe get into jiu-jitsu a little bit earlier.

Yeah. But I think you— what you did was pretty impressive because you, you got through it very quickly. Like, I remember you first started training and, you know, you got a black belt in like, what, 4 years, 5 years? 5 and a half. That's amazing. That's quick.

Well, I think it depends on how you view the time. So I think the standard 10-year window is usually somebody trains about an hour a day or 2 hours a day twice a week. Mm-hmm. I had the ability where I was living, I could train 10 times a week for as long as I want to, right? So the math's still math at the end of the day, right?

But that's still very hard on the body at 40 years old. It's very hard on the body.

Vitamin I, also known as ibuprofen, comes into the training model. That shit's terrible for you. Yeah, but it makes you feel better.

So bad for you though. Also bad for your gut.

I will say this, one thing about my previous job is it teaches you how to learn. It rewards— it rewards your ability to be coachable. Be coachable. And people ask me, you know, how do you— how are you— how can you be a good student? They're just in general. I'm like, listen, how about this? Do what your instructor says and nothing more, right? If they say put your hand here and you ask them, do you mean always put it there? And they say yes, just put your hand there. Yeah, if you want to. And you know, people— there's the internet, it's an amazing thing, right? And there's a bunch of ability to go out and look for techniques and stuff, but I can't think of anything more disrespectful disrespectful to a coach to be told something, and then you are offering them something that you saw on Instagram while they're trying to teach you. Like, that's how that relationship is going to end up breaking. If you really want to accelerate your learning, focus and honor your coach. Actually focus on what they are trying to tell you to do. Do only that and no more until you have that mastered, and then you can move on top of that.

Absolutely.

That's great advice. Yeah, you have to just listen. You have to listen and never question. And then And if you— unless you have a bad coach, then just get a good coach. That's the solution to that.

Which in this era, you have choices. The era that you were starting in, there weren't as many choices.

Right. Yeah. Well, I realized that when I went to John Jacques' place, that there's levels in teaching. And, you know, obviously Hickson's school was very high level, and Carlson's was too, but Carlson's went under pretty quickly. They weren't around that long. But then when I went to John Jacques, I was like, Okay, this is a completely different level. Like, Jean-Jacques is so detail-oriented. I was also very lucky that I started doing taekwondo when I was a child, so that I always listened. Yeah, you know, and the, the traditional martial arts environment, there's no room for questioning. They don't allow any question. And I was also very lucky that the school that I started at was one of the best schools in the world. I just got lucky. I found this, this J-Hun Taekwondo— J-Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute in Boston just happened to have multiple national champions, like really elite competitors. And so I never questioned. I always did, and I never did anything half-assed. I always did it exactly— that's how you develop the right technique. Yeah, you have to.

Just how you accelerate learning too. I mean, because again, people ask me about my old job, like, well, how do you— how do you guys do all this stuff that you do? Well, you learn it a piece at a time. And honestly, it's the mastery of fundamentals. Even at that, it— I think what I determined the most when my coach gave me my black belt was that I don't know a goddamn thing about jiu-jitsu, and I can't keep up with all the flashy sporty stuff. But the better fundamentals get, the better you can tolerate a lot of that stuff. It's just the mastery of the fundamentals is just so essential.

Well, some of the elite guys of all time never did any of flashy stuff, like Hickson. Hickson was just the fundamentals honed to a razor-sharp edge. Yeah, you don't see Hickson doing some stuff you're like, oh, I've never seen that before. It's all triangles, arm bars, rear naked choke, and just done to perfection. Yeah, done in a way that black belts can't stop it.

No, I've heard stories of him lining black belts up, telling them what he is going to catch them with. Yep. And then having like 10 of them watch him catch everybody before them with the same thing and them having absolutely no ability to stop it. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, well, that's Gordon Ryan too.

Gordon Ryan, one of the things that Gordon did, I was there when he did it one of the times he did it, he did it multiple times, he would write down on a piece of paper how he was gonna submit his opponent and seal it in an envelope. And before the match started, he would walk over to the commentators and say, open this when it's over. And then, you know, you would see him catch somebody in a triangle, and then he would open up the envelope and it showed a triangle. And he had multiple opportunities to catch someone in different things. He's like, no, no, no.

See, I could do that too, but it would be what I'm gonna get caught with. Here's the most likely thing that I'm gonna mess up.

Well, that's the thing about starting when you're 40 versus starting when you're 12 or whatever it is. It's like like you're only going to be able to get to a certain height, you know?

Well, also, I recognize that I'm an aggressive hobbyist. I have competed twice only because my wife was coaching at tournaments. I was like, well, I'll go spend time with you. So here we are. I think once when I was a white belt and once when I was a purple belt. Like, that's it. I don't care about the competition. Shockingly enough, I'm not looking to have a violent confrontation with anyone ever. Right. I probably totally have filled my cup up with that one. Probably has spilled over a little bit from time to time. Like, I just do it because I really like the community. I like the fact you can't master it, so you can keep your brain young with your body young, or young as young as possible. And yeah, it's just fun. It's really fun.

It's so addictive, which is— to me was the problem with injuries was that I would always find— I'd go, I'll work around it, and I'd just go in with injuries injuries, and then they get aggravated to the point where, you know, I remember one time my fingers were getting numb because my neck was so fucked up that my fingers were numb. And then I'm like, okay, I gotta do something.

Was this from you head and arm choking people? Was a lot of that. Yep. I remember you telling me your affinities.

You're like, you've really got to just drive your head, use your neck. And also not tapping, not tapping to certain neck cranks and different things that fuck your neck up.

Neck cranks are very real.

Yeah, I also didn't work my neck enough back then. I didn't have an iron neck at that machine. Do you still use that? Oh yeah, I fucking love that.

Is it forward and back and turn or all this?

Yeah, so it's a Halo. You sit on your chest, you pump it up like the Reebok pump, and then the chin strap, you tighten that bitch down and you can adjust the tension that's required to spin it. And it has this giant bungee cord on it, and so the bungee cord is like 50 pounds of resistance. So you back up with the bungee cord until it's like fully taut, and then you go like this. I swear by that thing. All right, it keeps your neck strong as fuck, and I don't have any neck problems anymore, and I had a lot of fucking neck problems. So the thing that saved me though was Regenekine, which is like this PRP, platelet-rich plasma to the next level, that this, this treatment that a lot of guys were having to go to Germany to get in the, in the early days. They would go— like, I remember Kobe Bryant went to Germany. I think Peyton Manning went. A bunch of guys had to go to Germany to get this treatment. And it's like, they take your blood, and through some process— I forget exactly how they do it— it makes this fluid that is like this radically inflammation-fighting fluid.

And they injected it into my neck, and it cured my bulging disks, and all my numbness went away, and I got to start training again once I got back. But again, I didn't have a fucking Iron Neck back then. If I had that machine back then, I think I could have avoided a lot of the problems. Yeah, like a lot of the problems that people have with lower backs, I firmly believe it's a lack of building tissue and strength and mobility around your lower back. And I do a lot of lower back exercises too. I do a lot of rotation exercises and a lot of like reverse hypers, like that machine. That machine's awesome. Oh, that's— I did that today. That fucking keeps your back so strong and healthy, and it decompresses at the same time that it strengthens. And you know, so many guys just go into the class, they just— that's their workout. Their only workout is training, and those guys are always hurt. They're always getting hurt. I think strength training and mobility training is essential if you want to have longevity in jiu-jitsu. I really think that. I would agree. Yeah, yeah.

For the first couple years, it was a workout in and of itself, and I finally have started— I think I'm done with barbells just because I've never seen a linear object equally loaded in real life outside of a gym.

So there's some things with barbells though, like Olympic-style stuff like cleans. I get very beneficial too. You can— zurchers though, zurchers are only available with a barbell. Yeah, I think zurchers are very, very important. I think that's a big one.

I'm willing to— Jefferson squats.

There's a, there's a bunch of different things, but zurchers in particular are really good for grappling. Yeah, you know, because you've got that barbell that you're holding inside the crook of your elbow.

Couldn't you use a sandbag? You could.

Yeah, you definitely could. Yeah, there's a lot. I love goblet squats. Goblet squats. Yeah, goblet squats are phenomenal. Yeah, they'll tear you up, especially on a slant board. You know, when you're holding like a 90-pound kettlebell and you're doing those deep squats where it's knees over toes on a slant board, and your whole core is just so activated. I think that's phenomenal for just strength and stability. But I agree, I think kettlebells are the best. I think it's the best also because you there's so many different things you can do with them in terms of— there's rotational exercises I do where I like pick it down on this side and I swing and clean it and I press it on that side, let it swing down. And I do those things where you lie on your back with your, you know, on your— with your butt, with your legs up in the air, and you do those twists where you take the kettlebell and bring it each side.

You can absolutely demolish yourself with a single kettlebell. Yeah, yeah, which is kind of awesome, especially like where I live too, traveling with the truck. Like, okay, yep, put one of these bad boys in there.

100%. All the excuses are gone. I had a bowling bag that I would carry a 50-pound kettlebell with me on the road. I just put in a bowling bag because it fits in a bowling ball bag.

All right, people are gonna look at you a little awkwardly, but I'm here for it.

But if you have a 50-pound weight limit, if you check in luggage, like, there you go, whatever works for you.

I appreciate the enthusiasm for working out on the road.

Well, back then the thing was you'd never find them in a gym, and now they're in most gyms.

It's tough not to find them down at gym. Yeah, hotel gyms is like, why do you have a 1.5 kilo kettlebell? Like, is this— this is for children? Like, what the fuck? The little micro ones? Like, some people like to pretend they're working out. Sometimes that's me, just go through the motions.

Yeah, yeah, they're good for Wrist to wrist curls, you know, you take a kettlebell and you like reverse it, or you have it this way and you do these, like put your forearms on a bench. Oh yeah. And you hold the handle in your hands and you just let your wrist curls, like, because it puts you in this like weird angle. It really strengthens your forearms and your wrists. There's so many things you could do with those things, that things that aren't sexy, like Turkish get-ups, phenomenal for you, so good for stability and core, just overall body control.

Yeah, I need it now. Crouching towards 50, still enjoying jiu-jitsu. Yeah, yeah, you need a little bit.

Do you definitely need something? You need some— are you taking any peptides or any of that stuff?

I played around with peptides. Finally, 2 years ago, I got my endocrine system checked, my hormones checked. Whoo, man, that was a nice little— it was like a little gage that had red zone, yellow yellow, green. Upon first looking at this chart, I assumed that my life was gonna end in about 36 hours. What was your number? Oh, fuck, 2-something. Oh Jesus. I had never had it checked. That's crazy. I didn't feel awesome, and it— but I also— there are people who played around with an immense amount of performance-enhancing materials in my previous job, which— live your life however you want to, just understand maybe the long long-term tail on the consequences of the choice you want to make, right? I wanted to avoid that for as long as possible because, as you know, once you kind of go on that train, it's a lifelong journey. Yeah. But once I finally saw that, that piece of paper, I'm like, oh boy.

I'd say that you could attribute that to the volume of your training. That's also part of the problem, is if you're training 10 times a week, you're probably in a constant state of overtraining. Oh, For sure.

Yeah, probably for the vast majority of my life, that's been the state that I operated in. If I'm being honest, I mean, the answer was always just more. Like, if you want to get better, do more. You want to be stronger, go harder. Go harder and do more. I'm like, okay. It took me about, so I started taking TRT about 2 years ago. I am just now finally slowly dialing it in to where I feel a difference, recovery is better, but also, I mean, I try to set realistic expectations. Expectations for who I am and what I'm trying to do. Like, I'm just— I want to have the healthiest lifespan that I can. Yes. I'd rather live to 80 and be doing awesome stuff to 80 than live to 90 and spend the last 10 years eating Jell-O in a nursing home. Right. So that's what I'm going for.

You could do— as long as you're smart with your training and you don't get like catastrophic injuries, you could be very physically fit deep, deep into your 60s and 70s.

That's the And that's— I mean, I don't know, nobody knows how much time we have, you know, and how much— how long your lap is gonna be. My goal is just to fill it up with awesome experiences between here and whenever that is.

Here, here. Just stay out of that fucking flying squirrel suit, will ya?

You know, Cam just said the same thing to me, and if enough people keep saying that, I'll put that fucking thing back on just to piss you guys off.

It's kind of amazing that you're still here.

That's—

here's the thing— you've done that so many times. I mean, you broke the world record at at one point in time.

I did, yes. My ex— that was—

how many miles was that that you flew?

It's like 18.2, something like that, with a flying squirrel suit. To me, it was very reasonable. You know, the things that I do that I think are reasonable, oftentimes in my life people will pull me aside and be like, hey man, what the fuck?

Yeah, that doesn't seem at all reasonable. Well, you're only seeing that one video.

I had been skydiving for like 16 years at that point, you know. And you know, something like when I would go I remember I'd go over to Switzerland and I would do a flight in the wingsuit and get, you know, you're like you're playing tag with your shadow on a steep cliff and I would send it to you and one day you were like, I just had to throw my phone across the room watching this because it was giving you anxiety. So then I'm like, clearly I'm sending you more of these videos for sure, right? 'Cause now I got the hooky.

I threw my phone into a couch. I was like, fuck this.

What are you doing, Andy? But that was like one of many jumps and this like the months of training leading up to that. I'm not gonna sit here and say it's safe. I do think you can do it as safely as possible, and I don't have a higher risk threshold than other people do. I, I spend an immense amount of time at everything that I do looking at the risk and trying to manage it, analyze it, mitigate it as much as possible. And then you look at what's left. To me, that activity provided me enough enrichment in my life that it was worth it. I haven't put the suit on in 5 or 6 years, but I swear to God, if I get one more person telling me not to do it, I'm going to back and just start sending you videos again.

All right, well, I promise I won't be that guy that tells you that.

No, but honestly, at this point, again, talking about risk, it's not worth it. I don't live in a place where I can stay, because your currency in that suit comes from the skydiving world where you can jump it multiple times a day. In the BASE jumping world, there's no altimeter. You're just camera 1, camera 2, at about a buck 20, face first. So yeah, if you missed judge a tree or a cliff.

Fun as fuck though while it's happening.

I don't know how to describe what it feels like doing 120 miles an hour face first a few feet off the ground. Probably like that— this— what is it in the Olympics?

Skeleton? How close do you get off the ground? What's the closest?

Probably not intentionally. The closest was probably somewhere right around the 3-foot range. 120 miles an hour.

Mm-hmm. So 3-foot is like 1, 2, like that. Yeah. Jesus, dude. Yeah, that's insane.

You don't do that for very long. And then there are— and if you do, like, some of those jumps in Switzerland, like, you would hike for hours. And there's this one jump, it's actually one of the ones I sent you from. You just— it's insane. You're just looking out into like this picture storybook of like where the Kabul Giant or whatever he was would live, right? Like, you just— Kandahar. Kandahar Giant, which I think I hope it is real. I deeply— it's such a deep part of me hopes that it's real. But you're looking out at that as you're zipping up your ridiculous nylon suit and checking to make sure everything is there. And then you just rock forward. And at some point you rock to a place where you can't go back the other direction and you send it in the first few seconds because you have no airspeed. The suit doesn't fly, so you're just falling. And then it takes off and it's just these right-hand turns and right-hand turns. And then and there are small sections where the angle is correct and you can kind of connect with the train and then get away from it and connect.

The people who are able to survive it are not the ones that are flying 3 feet off the ground all the time. It's very, very short periods of time on jumps that they have practiced many, many times and they slowly incrementally work their way down there. Because again, a mistake in that environment is you're going to impact an object headfirst at 120.

I remember the video that scared me the most was a bridge. Where the guy was trying to fly through. You know the video? Yeah, I do.

Oh yeah, there you go.

Is this Andy? Oh yeah. Look at this.

Oh, I love this little grass field over here. I think my head turns to the right because there was two dudes up here. I was looking at them.

God, that is beautiful. Oh, I'm telling you, it's insane.

This is the field of joy. Wow. That's the shadow in the lower right, but that's probably—

I don't know, that's probably 10 feet off. God, that is fucking pretty. Yeah. That has got to be nuts. I mean, there's not a ride at Disneyland that can fuck with this. Oh, absolutely not. Wow. Have you ever done one of those ones where you strap a jetpack?

No, but I like where your head's at. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Remember there was a guy that was like getting in trouble because they kept finding this guy flying a wingsuit? He was flying a jetpack wingsuit. Suit and they were trying to like locate the guy who was doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was getting like— they were looking for him because he was— they kept spotting him. Where was that, Jamie? Do you remember? We talked about it on the show once.

I feel like this is like a combination of stories.

No, no, no. Secret jetpack man. Yeah, some guy had a jetpack and he was flying around where he wouldn't— wasn't supposed to be.

Yeah, so these guys are in Dubai, unfortunately.

Uh, wow, that's nuts. —but that one's nuts.

So that's an actual wingsuit, like that's an actual wing, and they got to the place where they could take this off from standing on the ground, Joe. Unfortunately, one of the innovators in that ended up dying. There's a— there is an altitude and airspeed where if you have an issue, you're not gonna be able to deploy your parachute to save you, and he had an issue at that altitude.

But yeah, who would have ever— guys up there with a plane? Show me that again. Yeah, that is insane. Would you ever do that? I don't say would I. I mean, there's a time and a place where I would do a lot of things because I would 100% would do that. I bet you would. Now, is that— does that guy have an engine on that thing?

Yeah, there's little microjet engines. You can see them. That's how much fuel?

That's a good question.

Like I said, they had gotten to a place where they could stand, so that wing is— it kind of conforms around their skydiving parachute. Parachute with— I think there's 4 little jet engines. They got to a place where they were standing, cracking those things off and going vertical, and then transitioned into flight. Yes. And then I think landing them too.

Yeah, landing them with the engine somehow. I mean, did they rotate?

I mean, they are wearing a parachute. You know what, maybe I might be misspeaking on that, but I know that they were taking off from a no airspeed, standing there and just That's nuts. Well, that's also like I said how one of the innovators died. It was in that phase, like a low altitude, low airspeed phase where nothing's really gonna—

I remember I did morning— what is it? Oh yeah, these are the jetpack racers. Oh yeah, that's crazy. I've seen that too. This is real, by the way, right?

Yeah, because it kind of looks fake, but no, those are real for sure. They actually have— there's a league, Jamie, of guys who race these things. How do we get them? That's a good question. Yeah, add to cart on Amazon for sure. How fast do you think these guys are going?

I don't these things. Whoa, and they could just land? Oh, that's wild. Just fly to work, bro. You have to have some fucking shoulder strength to do that.

I mean, I love how they're trying to show like this has, oh, like incredible military application. Like, let's take it easy, okay? It's got to be quiet, right?

Just super quiet. Is there some support for your shoulders in there? It's not like you're doing a constant dip. I don't—

well, I think that the jetpack the— so the— on his backpack, I believe that's putting some thrust out too. The hands are as well. So it's the combination of the three.

Because like, how long can you hold a dip position? I don't know.

Yeah, so here's the league. Look at these crazy— yeah, the backpack itself. Oh, getting fancy. Oh, that's crazy.

But the ground's pushing back up on you on that situation, you know. Bummer. I'm doing a dip. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, it was true.

I feel like the backpack is doing the majority of it, like the Iron Man little hand things. I feel like that's just the stabilization.

Heavy. Oh, so the backpack is doing the most of it and the other things are just steering you a little.

I have exactly 0 seconds in one of these things, so this is me talking out of my ass.

If there was enough lives, if you had multiple lives, I would do a lot of different things. That looks so fun.

It does. Jamie, what? You can't—

you— look at this guy. Where's the parachute?

You can't— oh no, there is no parachute.

Oh, so there's no parachute. That's why you want to stay 5 feet off the ground.

Look at this.

Yeah, this dude's just flying to the top of this fucking cliff with that thing. Oh, that's bonkers. For sure this is like to save people or something. No, it's for fun.

I agree with Joe more on that one.

What do you think, like, the— how much time do you get in one of those to run out of fuel? I don't know.

Time enough to fill a motivational video like this. To me, I'd be like— Gravity Industries is the company. I would be reverse engineering, like, where is this in my Amazon cart? How do I possibly make enough money to have these sent to my house immediately? What do you think one of those costs? My guess would be six figures.

So professional shop entertainment shop. Oh, click on that bitch. Let's go. Suit up. Suit me up, motherfucker.

Hold on, let me get my credit card.

Let's, let's guess, let's guess. Ah, God, 50 grand? Hmm, 100 grand?

I'm gonna say 6 figures. Oh, so far they fooled us, you sons of bitches.

Oh, clothes? You can only buy clothes? You can't buy the thing on the web. Why can't you buy the fucking thing? Let's see. Well, how much does the thing cost? Somebody must be able to buy it.

2,400 pounds for an experience, half a day. So that's just to fly it. 1,000 horsepower 10-50 horsepower gravity jet suit.

Whoa, so it's the same horsepower as a ZR1 Corvette and it's on your back.

Look at this. Yeah, first off, take that safety line off. Let's let people live.

That guy needs a safety line. Look at his neck. Let me— like, yeah, let's just— let's search the price. So you think 6 figures? I would probably say that's probably accurate, especially when I saw it has 1,000 horsepower.

Here's the better better question: are you willing to spend 6 figures to acquire one of those? I'm gonna go in the hard yes category for myself. I'm not saying I got 6 figures laying around. I'm saying I will start a new career in the— oh no, that's not a good face, Jamie.

It's not, uh, it's— it is in the 6 figures. It's not the low. It's not the edge of 600. Yeah, roughly. That'd get one.

$600,000. That's 40. Whoa, is that in US dollars?

It's like, uh, yeah, yes, depending on configuration and stuff too. Okay, what if you get it like maxed? Well, it's not giving me options. I just kind of searched around.

I think we're just gonna get closer to the 7-figure number if we do that.

They probably don't advertise how much it costs. Does it say how long you can stay in the air in that thing? Let's guess. I want to say 30 minutes. I was gonna guess under 10. Whoa. Well, I remember when I saw— I went on a radio station once and they had a guy who— what is it, 1 minute? 1 to 4 minutes. 1 to 4, that's it? So what are they doing when they're flying up to that mountain? 5 to 10 if you are doing it carefully. Well, how the fuck do they get all the way to the mountain? How do they get down? We only saw 5 seconds. Is there a gallon of gas up there at the top of that fucking mountain?

I'm way less enthusiastic about about this purchase now. Yeah, that sucks.

Yeah, $450 grand for a minute.

But what makes me enthusiastic is that they're going to innovate and evolve this, and then one day it'll be nuclear powered. Let's not get crazy.

It'll be— yeah, it'll be cold fusion. It'll be an Iron Man machine.

I mean, I feel like we could do better things with that technology before the jet suit, but I'm totally in on the jet suit.

Get an Iron Man suit. Like, that's Iron Man, right? Is the hands That's how you'd fly.

I mean, that's kind of what they look like.

Yeah, yeah, like it would come out of his feet and it would come out of his hands. I did a radio station once in Denver and they had a guy who did a jetpack thing in a parking lot. It was like a morning radio back in the day. And this guy, I think it could only last for 30 seconds, and this guy, he had 2 knee braces on because he had blown out both of his ACLs just landing and destroying his knees. But it was crazy to watch. It was crazy to watch. This guy took off and he flew around, but it was only for a few seconds. I think like it's like a 30-second deal. After 30 seconds it runs out of juice.

I'm glad there are people like that out there. I appreciate their enthusiasm.

There's always going to be, right? Yeah, there's always going to be someone. Brief description of what it has in there. Mm, a lot of jazz.

It honestly, it is like what you were talking about. So the hands like the Iron Man position, so the back has a majority of the thrust, right?

Yeah, but it heats your ass up something fierce.

Yeah, up to 56 miles per hour. Interesting. 95 jet fuel.

I wonder how much faster you go with jet fuel. Well, what does it normally use?

Diesel or jet fuel? Jet fuel.

Diesel or jet fuel? That's weird. They're not that far off. Or kerosene. But isn't that weird that one engine can burn those different types of fuel? That seems unusual. Probably the configuration part where— oh, I see, right, right, right. Like if you want a top-line one, you get jet fuel. Yeah, all right, let's try it. Yeah, but is there legitimate military applications for something like that? I can't really think of one. That's because it showed guys in fatigues that are landed on an aircraft carrier.

I could show you videos of guys in fatigues that end up banging each other, so it doesn't necessarily mean that, right?

So let's Is there a military application for that?

Let's just say, that would be far fringe. I'm just saying the fatigues isn't necessarily the qualifier of it being good utilization for the military.

So we only briefly touched on this Kandahar giant story, but were you ever in Kandahar?

Yeah, I was down in the south of Afghanistan.

How remote is it?

I mean, there's a large city there. There— town, city, I don't know the difference between the two— it's relatively built up as far as southern Afghanistan. It's going to be, you know, you have Kabul up north, Kandahar is a little bit down south. Kabul in the north, you're going to start looking at the exterior range of the Hindu Kush. Kandahar still has some topography, but you're looking at more of like a high desert terrain.

And so there's caves and things along those lines. This is the idea that this thing lived in a cave.

Yeah, I mean, so yeah, Yeah, it's— it's— there is topography that is there for sure. It, uh, possible, I don't know.

Well, the reason why, uh, people entertain this idea of giants at all is all— a lot of it's biblical. It's like stories from the Bible, and then also stories from ancient civilizations that talked about red-haired giants, which is the weird thing about this thing, had red hair. Like, the Native Americans had tales of red-haired giants that they fought off. Like, there's a lot of people that believe that all these stories from antiquity about giants are all referring to an actual different race of humans. You know, like, we are one race of humans, that's the Homo sapiens survived, but then there's also races of humans that didn't survive, like the Hobbit people from the island of Flores that they found out there was a branch of the human species that was like 3 feet tall, covered in hair, hair, real tiny heads, weird, but had tools and had weapons.

And I think some of that stuff's real. I think sometimes though, the stories, they're— they're intentionally nesting a greater message through the vehicle of that story. So whether it's like accurate or not, it's more about the story that they are telling. And I'm not saying like the Kandahar Giant has some story associated with it, but some of the old like the symbolizations and the stories that they tell. I think it's just a vehicle that they can nest something in there to create deeper thought, if that makes sense. It's what I see you guys doing as comedians. I've talked about this recently. It is interesting to me, and I never paid attention to it, but I know he's a good friend of yours, Dave Chappelle. I watched his last special. The ability for comedians to nest inside of your set pretty impactful and powerful societal conversations and ideas and get people to laugh about it. But even when they're done laughing about it, they're going to be thinking about it when they're driving home. It's just the vehicle to get people thinking about stuff.

Well, in terms of comedy, I agree, and Dave is one of the best of all time, if not the best at doing that. But what kind of a nesting would you—

you're talking about John It depends on the morals and ethos of that society. If they want to be a warrior society, you have to have something that you're constantly fighting or protecting yourself against. Whether that's real or you are nesting the morality of your society in that story, both could achieve the same end state.

If there really was a giant and they really did kill this thing and then brought it back secretly, like, what would be the purpose of that? Why wouldn't they— that's where I go, like, what would be the purpose of hiding the the fact that this thing existed. I don't see why the government would hide the discovery of a giant. Like, what military reason, what national security reason would you have for hiding this thing, that this thing existed?

At some level of objective skepticism and criticism or looking into these stories, you get to that point of like, who's benefiting from this and why. Yeah, why would anybody actually go out of their way to put this much effort into obscure something like that?

Yeah, that's how I feel about giants. But when it comes to UFOs, it makes more sense to me because then you have something that's insanely advanced, much more advanced than us. And so I had this guy, Hal Puthoff, on my show. He's a physicist, very brilliant guy, and he's been around forever. and during, um, it was George W. or Herbert Walker, one of the Bushes. Um, they brought him and, uh, a team of specialists in, and they said, we are contemplating disclosure and that we have not just required, not just acquired, uh, crashed vehicles that are of non-human origin, but also we have biological remains of these creatures. We want you to write down pros and cons of the impact of these things and put a numerical value. Put a numerical value in terms of impact on government, impact on religion, impact on all these different things. And, um, universally all of them came out with more cons than pros. The numbers didn't line up and they made a decision to not close. This is according to this Hal Puthoff guy.

I could see that being the case.

I could see that being the case too, if it was true. The UFO thing, there's just too many stories for me to openly dismiss all of them, even though I have had no experiences. It's— there's too many stories, there's too many— there's too much weirdness to it.

How about it, just given the size of the known universe and the fact it keeps expanding, what is the mathematical odds that we are completely the only thing out there?

Exactly. So this is like sort of the same argument that people used to use for Bigfoot. Like, the wilderness is so vast, the Pacific Northwest is so dense, there could be something out there that we haven't documented. Well, the problem is now we kind of have, and now we kind of know that with all these camera traps and all these different things, it's very, very, very, very unlikely that any of these stories are true. But when you get to the universe It's like, come on, it's way more likely that we're not alone than we are alone. If we are alone, that's kind of insane. I mean, it's kind of incredible if this is the only place where intelligent life has formed. I think if that's the case, we're missing something. We're missing something about the nature of consciousness. We're missing something about what consciousness actually is. Like, what is our actual role in the universe? It might be more complex than we initially believe?

I think disclosure that we aren't alone would have a net benefit to society globally. We spent a lot of time pecking back and forth at each other and fighting each other. Mm-hmm. If you got sat down and be like, listen, we have a global issue now that everybody is impacted by. This is biggest— as much of the biggest swinging dick you think you are on this planet, guess what? You're nothing in comparison to this. I think it would have a net calming effect. Maybe not instantaneously, but overall I think that that would be the net effect of it.

Perhaps. The real problem is, like all things, someone's gonna take advantage of it. But I think that if so—

let's just say it is real— I think that's already happening. Like, the US, if that's real, the US is not the the only country that has agreed not to disclose because it is to their benefit not to do so. Like these things, Russia has a crash program. I'm sure China does as well too. And I'm sure that everybody to include the US is trying to reverse engineer these things for our benefit as fast as humanly possible. Yeah.

So I think if that, if it is true, that is the case. And that's the Bob Lazar story. There's a great documentary that's out now called S4. That's about Bob Lazar. I had him on again for the second time. I don't want to believe him. I want to think he's a bullshit artist, but I believe him. There's, there's something about one guy who's a clearly brilliant guy who's been telling the same story since 1988.

Yeah, you know, and like you said, a volume of other stories. Some of them I think you can completely write off, but other ones, pretty tough, from pretty credible people who aren't making claims like, hey, I sat down and had a beer here with this thing. But like, right, I was in an aircraft that has a certain performance envelope, and we understand the performance envelope of what humans are able to fly at this point. And yeah, this thing did things that I don't understand. Sometimes the videos get— I mean, I was talking with, you know, Bill Thompson. You just had him. Sure. Love that dude. He is like— he's one of my favorite people. You got to be cautious how deep of a question you ask him. Because he has national defense level autism at times. DEFCON 5. You're like, "Bill, what's your favorite color?" He's like, "Oh, what is color?" Like, fuck, no, that's not what I meant. But we were having this conversation and his background is fascinating. What's even more fascinating is what he's done with his background and what he built with Spartan Forge with that.

And his ethics. Correct.

But he was talking about some of the videos. He understands technological things, and he can look at stuff and be like, that's the parallax of two moving objects and how a lens works. Not many people understand those things, to include myself many times when I'm talking with Mr. Bill. But I mean, he— God, he's a national treasure.

He really is. He is. He— that was one of the ones where I dipped into the comments on YouTube because I just wanted to know how people were gonna react to him. Yeah, whether They say loved him, loved him. As universal praise for how brilliant he is. And I'm like, there's only one way they're gonna respond. I'm like, if you don't like this guy, yeah, like, you're listening to the wrong show.

Have you seen what he's done with the app he created, Spartan 4? It's incredible.

It's an amazing app.

It's 20-plus years of targeting and intelligence gathering packaged into something that's consumer-facing, that if you're into hunting— holy shit. I know.

And what kind of a super genius is gonna get involved in a hunting app?

Like that? Captain America of autism. I love you, Bill, but let's be honest, he's—

he mean, he's brilliant on another level. I remember the first conversation I had with him. I was like, oh, okay. There's people that you talk to, like, whenever someone says, oh Joe, you're so smart, I'm like, settle down. No, no, no, I'm smart compared to you. I'm smart compared to some people. You know, but I know real smart people.

Yeah, there is a stark difference, a giant leap, a chasm.

Yeah, a fucking— an ocean to cross before you reach like levels like Bill and/or Elon or some of these people. That's just like the amount of processing power they have. Yeah, you know, I have a Honda Civic, but brain, and these motherfuckers have a Corvette ZR1.

I usually go with I have an IQ that you can find on a thermostat. I mean, I'm not saying it's like the winter, but maybe it's a little bit close to a hot summer day. Now, what he— what he is— I wish I had the ability to build stuff like that. Like, I use that app to hunt, but most the time I use it when I'm flying my helicopter around because it is like the terrain analysis, the ability to look at stuff, the LiDAR, the way that you can look through foliage. Again, Again, I'm deeply appreciative that people like that exist.

And again, with the ethics that he has, he will not sell your fucking email. He's been offered a lot of money to sell all the, you know, that's the thing that companies do. You sign up for something, you use your email, your email goes on a list. I'm sure if you ever opened up one of your email accounts and looked through the filters, like all the spam and promotional shit, it's like years and years of garbage.

In addition to the email stuff, I know Bill has become a very good friend. He's been offered money to do a lot of things, and his morality has stayed true throughout. Which, and again, like, those things are his to talk about if he ever wants to, but as somebody who knows him and appreciates that, I wish there were more people like that.

Yes, it's just very difficult to become a guy like that. It's a long road to be that guy. Yeah. I think because of what's going on in Iran, it'd be good to talk to you about that. This because you're a guy who kind of understands things in terms of like geopolitics more than the average person.

Listen, I can find Iran on a map, okay?

That doesn't mean I understand geopolitics. I know, I know, you're very— you're humble.

But well, my operational experience was at a low tact— like, meaning on like, there's— so there's strategic war, right? Operational war. But those are— that's air I never was in the room for. I didn't breathe that air. I'm not having— I wasn't invited, rightfully so, to planning meetings where they were talking about the defense policy of the United States, right? Or going into a country. I was down like, hey, we found this dude, we know where he's at, we can't figure out how to go get him, why don't you guys go give it a little look-see? That was the level that I operated at.

Yeah, well, one of the things that was discussed was sending a bunch of operators in to go retrieve depleted uranium. Yeah. Do you think they tried that? —Oh, as a part of the rescue? —Yeah. There seems to be a lot of ships, a lot of crafts.

—Well, okay, so yes, but okay, so we can unpack this one a little bit. So this is back to the F-15 weapons systems officer that ejected. That was a CSAR, or Combat Search and Rescue Operation, where they surged forward a lot of stuff. And then Operation— or the Ghost Murmur Stop it right now.

You stop it right now. You don't know what that is.

I know, I know. You believe in that, Joe? I want it to be true, right? Me too. I want them to be able to identify somebody from a heartbeat from 40 miles away. From 40 miles away. If that technology existed and we're not using that on to help our own populace find people that are lost in the woods, we're a bunch of fucking assholes, right? So like, let's not maybe tell people what we're doing, but you could have a specialist in a search and rescue helicopter that maybe use that and be like, 'Oh, we saw them in a field,' when you didn't actually see, right? So because that doesn't happen, I think the— it's plausible. I don't— it's possible. I don't know if it's plausible. That's how we felt. Me and Jamie were both going, 'Oh.' So, but then you can go old school, which is sending in monkeys with machine guns, like what I used to do with a PJ or multiple PJs, pararescue jumpers, because those are the guys— this is the way I describe PJs: if you want to put a hole in something, JSOC guys are great at it. If you want to plug a hole, PJs are the guys that you want on top of you just stopping hydraulic fluid.

They're medical, just absolute badasses. Nothing but immense respect for them. So the two cargo aircraft came in, they pulled the Little Birds out. I believe that there was four that you could only fit, probably, man, even if they were super light on fuel, probably 3 guys on each pod. So 6 guys per helicopter, 24 guys. Some of those are gonna have to be PJs. I don't know if that's enough to go into a hardened facility in the daytime also, which is not when you would do that for retrieving depleted uranium. Because by the way, to do that, you're going to be in full protective equipment, very likely, which you're going to be moving incredibly slow. I just, I know it was, I know that geographically it was proximal to one of the locations that they thought that that was what was going on. I think more, I think it probably was a rescue of the weapon systems officer, is my guess. And then, you know, they're like, well, we can't get the aircraft because they got stuck in the sand. Like, okay, the Little Birds don't have the fuel storage and ability to get across where they needed to go.

So they had to bring in other aircraft and you don't want to leave that stuff.

So, right. So you got to detonate it.

Yeah, they BIP it or blow it in place.

How many aircraft did they lose?

So what has been, I think, disclosed was the 4 MH-6s, which are the Little Birds that The people, the two aircraft that brought those in, I think there was some version of a C-130. And I think that was it as far as that operation. There might have been a Predator or a Reaper drone that was shot down. I think some A-10s were damaged. And then, of course, the F-15 that was ejected from. Wow. It's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff. But the military asks people to do exceptional things. And it helps you if you know that they are going to to send everything that they have to come and get you if something goes wrong. It has to mean something to be issued a flag on your chest, in my opinion, at least. And as far as those operations go, there's basically two where you are going to absorb as the people responding an immense amount of risk. One of them is going to be a hostage rescue, which I was a part of. We talked about that on a previous episode, the Jessica Lynch rescue. The number of people we thought we might encounter was a way bigger number than the number of people that we could get there in the helicopters, but you go anyway because of the chance of rescuing somebody.

Combat search and rescue, kind of the same thing. Maybe they're not— it's not a hostage situation, but it could be building towards that. I mean, maybe you don't have time to go at night, which is when you have all the tactical and technological advantage, right? The night vision goggles, right? It's like, hey, we got to go now in the daytime. We're going to level the technological playing field, and you guys are going to go full back dive and get— like, that's very high risk. Those are about the two times that you were going to accept that level of risk, and you go when you go.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. So the official story seems to track.

It is more plausible to me than any of the other stories that I have heard. I would like to think that the ghost murmur, whatever it is, but then it's like, okay, I mean, walking the dog on that one. Did this guy have to sit down and, you know, get an EKG and have his heart wave, you know, HRV on file somewhere? Because how would you not pick up somebody else's heart rate, right? How would you not pick up, you know, other animals or mammals that have— like, you know what I mean? So I want to believe— I think we'll probably get there. I don't think we're there yet.

Was that an official story? No, that's a Twitter story.

Are you sure? Well, I first saw it on Twitter, so—

I did too, but I— well, someone said it to me. I didn't actually actively seek it out. Somebody said it to me and I was like, wait, what? And then me and Jamie threw it around for a while.

The internet is the best worst thing ever.

It was getting spread around by New York Post and then the same article was getting repeated everywhere. So interesting. New York Post. Have it on the screen.

Interesting. Ghost Murmur. I mean, I would imagine, I bet you Lockheed Martin does have a program called Ghost Murmur.

Long-range quantum magnetometer. Geometry. But I'm looking at articles, so diamond-based sensors. I think Iran was saying that we tried to do the, uh, snatching of the, um, uranium. Yeah, because of the little bit foiled us. So it's like, oh, who knows what side of the story to believe, right? That is part of the problem. And you know, you got your Fox News narrative and your MSNBC narrative, and who fucking knows.

Yeah, separating the bullshit in the modern era is more like an art form than a science.

Yeah, it's very confusing and it's very disconcerting to just have no— and then also they can't tell you certain things. Like, why would the general public know about things that could affect negatively national security? Why would they tell you? They can't tell you, which is also part of the problem with— they're allowed to lie. They're allowed to use propaganda and misinformation on the American people in the interest of national security. So that's like—

it would just be better. I would appreciate it more. They're like, listen, this is what we can tell you, and then this beyond this is a matter of national security. So as much as you want to know, we can't tell you, right? I'd prefer that over a BS story that gets— it's like a really sticky idea that then gets totally out of control. Control, and then people have a 3-piece tinfoil tuxedo on walking down Main Street.

But it's just super weird that there might be something like Ghost Murmur. There might be something called quantum magnetometry with diamond sensors.

I bet that's real. I bet it works out. I mean, they're probably testing it on mice. I'm sure that the concept is valid. Well, you got to judge it.

President Trump told the Post the CIA secret new GhostBomber tool was very important to rescuing a downed airman inside Iran, as leading physicists and engineers debate how the futuristic technology said to detect heartbeats at great distance might work. So I guess the Post didn't make it up. Wow.

I don't know if everything he says is accurate, just to throw that out there.

So who knows?

Gets a little loose and fast sometimes with the details in reality.

It's just crazy that that kind of technology is even being contemplated, that there might be a future where that exists. Oh, that makes total sense to me. They could find you based on your heart rate. Well, they now know that they can use Wi-Fi in order to see 3D objects in motion in a house.

Yeah, they can map based Yeah, I mean, it's— well, I mean, again, I think Evan and I had an argument one time about radar and sonar. We were both calling each other idiots and we both found out that we were wrong once we looked it up on the internet. So we'll say it's some version of that. God, we were both 100% committed that we were correct and we were both wrong, which is classic. But yeah, like in this room, the things that are emanating, there's an ability for them to map that and determine who, you know, maybe not who you are, but I bet you it gets to that point and where you are. And you want to talk about a tactical beneficial piece of information for somebody like my old job, thank you very much. Right. Yeah, I'll take that all day.

As long as it stays out of the hands of the enemy.

Yeah, but then they'll eventually get it, and then you'll evolve and your tactics will change. And that's, that's the game, man.

It's just, it gets to a point with technology where it's like, what is not possible 100 years from now? That's what's weird. Like, we are in one of the strangest times ever in human history. History in terms of these quantum computers that can solve mathematical— like, Marc Andreessen explained it to me, and I'm going to paraphrase it, I'll probably fuck it up, but he said that a quantum computer can solve an equation in a matter of minutes, that if you converted the entire universe, every atom in the universe, into a supercomputer, the universe would die of heat death before it could solve this problem, and a quantum computer on Earth can solve it in a matter of minutes.

I don't even understand. I mean, honestly, like, I understand every word that you just used, right? But I don't understand what that means and what it is capable of, right?

Well, they think that it might be evidence of somehow or another evidence of multiple dimensions, of a multiverse, and that not only is this quantum computer operating in this universe, but in an infinite number of other universes simultaneously.

I like the Doctor Strange movies. I'm in all the multiverse. That's— I mean, to me, that's—

well, I think they started it with Spider-Man.

That might as well be a scientific documentary because that's my reference for the multiverse, right?

It's like, I guess we shouldn't even talk about it because we don't know what we're saying. Never stopped me before. But it's one of those things where it's like quantum computers are real. That's a— it's an actual real thing now. Google, specifically Hartmut Neven, who leads Google Quantum AI, recently used language that strongly suggests their new quantum chip speed could be understood as borrowing computational power from other universes. But this is an interpretive, speculative way of talking about quantum mechanics, not an experimentally established fact or a standard claim. The claim comes from December 2024 blog post about Google's Willow quantum chip. Nevin wrote that the chip solved a task in minutes that would take a classical supercomputer about 10^25 years, far longer than the age of the universe.

Again, I understand every word you just used, but I don't understand—

stop scrolling, scroll back up. He then said this lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes. And that this aligns with the idea that we live in a multiverse, explicitly referencing David Deutsch's many-worlds argument for quantum computing. Yeah, right. We're too dumb to have this conversation. That's where we need to get Bill on speakerphone. Bill? Bill, explain this. Problem is he'd be like, yeah, and then, and then the show would be 5 hours long.

Well, and then I would also understand the words that he was using, but not in the combination and sequence that he would use them. Exactly, exactly. I'm just appreciative that he exists.

Yeah, I'm appreciative that there's people like that out there. Your book, Drown Proof, I assume this is in normal language that a normal person like you and I could read?

Well, considering that I wrote it, we did not use a lot of multi-syllable words. A lot of ands and thus are in there. Well, I'm sure it's awesome.

Look, you got Jocko, Jack Carr, and me giving blurbs on the COVID so it's got to be good.

So at some point, it doesn't have to be now, but I essentially wrote in the inscription, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, my life would not look the way it does had you and I not randomly met through Tate Fletcher. Like, my post-military life would look completely different, and I have no ability to like pay you back for how gracious you've been with like your time and your platform.

So, oh, it's a two-way street because your, your presence on my show has enriched my show. It's made the show better for sure.

Well, my promise is that I will do the best I can to be a positive impact on the world around me. I think that's the best way that I can try to pay you back. And honestly, it's the reason why I wrote that in the first place. So, well, that's all I can do.

It's my pleasure. And I try to do the exact same thing. And shout out to my boy Tate Fletcher. I haven't seen that guy in forever. He's the best. I love him. All right, I love you too. Thank you very much, and thanks for being here. And Drown Proof, did you read the audiobook? I did. Yes, I love it.

After that experience, let me tell you, voice actors— I struggle with it enough as the person who wrote the words. I can't even fathom what it would be like going in there blind and like, well, let's just figure this out as we go.

Yeah, it's a tough gig. Yeah, yeah, there's a reason why they—

yeah, Jocko, uh, uh, wrote and read the foreword. Nice. That was amazing. Beautiful.

All right, that's it. Go get it, folks. It's out now. All right, bye everybody.