Transcript of #2569 - Bill Thompson New

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Some people think the stuff about the Roadster online was like, you know, it's not real.

It's 100% real. My friend was there.

No, no, I— so I'm even like Words are tough to— you have to use your words very carefully.

Well, here's the thing. Will it be available to the general public?

Right, probably not.

No! How could you use it? How could you make that legal where you have a car that can fly over other cars if there's a traffic stop?

Like, I'm trying to— I guess what some people are saying, it's like, you know, a test model car. Like, this will not— this is the version— A concept. A concept car, yeah, yeah.

Well, first of all, it probably won't be released anywhere near when they say it's gonna be released, just based on what he's done in the past. mean, the Roadster— there's a lot of people that paid $250,000 for the Roadster in 2017.

Yeah, I know a guy who did that.

Yeah, I know a guy who did that too. And like, imagine you did that back then and you were expecting that car. You got a completely different design.

Yep.

I mean, completely different looking car. Now it has the fucking Lamborghini doors.

Yeah.

And it flies. What? This guy's nuts. I would— He's so out of his mind. He's got too much money. He just does whatever the fuck he wants.

I'm not with people saying it's fake with wires and stuff. Some people said that there was wires on cranes. Yeah, I don't— I'm not buying that.

No, well, there is already a car that does that trick where it can go upside down. There's this, uh, there's this race car. Oh God, I forget the name of it, but it actually has a fan underneath the bottom of the car that acts as a suction, and this car does insane lap times because it's absolutely glued to the ground. Perfect handling. Yeah, perfect handling. handling, and it's only a one-seater car.

McMurtry Spur.

Yeah.

Um, try to find a video.

Put some headphones on. Shit, watch this thing. Put it— see if you can find— it's a, it's a hyper— yeah, see, that's it. It goes upside down. This thing is literally crazy. It, it blows away all of the lap times on every single racetrack because first of all, it's really light, really tiny, has insane power because it's all electric. And it has so much suction at the bottom that it can go upside down. So they were the first ones to at least demo this type of tech, and they did it on this car. Like, this car literally has so much suction— give me some volume so you could hear this. So this is a literal suction cup underneath the engine that's allowing this thing to hold its entire body weight, which has got to be like, I would imagine, at least close to £2,000.

Yeah, I wonder if it's one of those carbon fiber Bodies, carbon fiber.

Even if it is with the engines and the batteries. Yeah, yeah. So if it was a, a combustion engine car, maybe it could be under £2,000. Like, there's a few Porsches, like, they make some really old, like, uh, restomod Porsches from, like, the 1960s and early 1970s that can get under £2,000. They, like, there's this guy that worked for God, I think he worked for Bugatti or something like that. One of those crazy high-tech car companies. And he built a car that was completely the opposite. He built a car where he stripped everything out of it. He made like a 1969 Porsche, stripped everything out of it, made all of the panels fiberglass, and he got it to like £1,800.

Wow.

And the idea is like, that is like the most visceral driving experience, the most connected you are to a car, the lighter they are. The heavier they are, they can get really crazy with performance. My Tesla's probably like £4,000, but it's like a time machine.

Isn't the Cybertruck like 7,000 or 8,000 or something like that?

Well, that's even bigger. I have the Model S, but the Cybertruck is all cold-stamped steel. I think that's the type of steel they use, but it's incredibly heavy.

I ordered one of those and then I ended up pulling out. I kind of regret it. I don't know. I wanted one. I loved it. I just liked the idea of it. It's very seldom that I would look at a car and just smile every time I looked at a car. And every time I looked at that Cybertruck, I just smiled. So I was like, I kind of want one of those. And then I put the money down and my wife was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I want one. Like, I've always been a Ford guy, so I've got like a Ford Tremor, which I love that truck. And so I put the money down and then I started hearing like other guys got them and they're like, oh, there's some issues and bugs being worked out. So I was a coward and I pulled out. I shouldn't have done it, but I did.

Well, you can get one now.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they make them, I'm sure they make them better now. I'm sure they've figured out whatever the kinks were.

It's like any other thing. Yeah. The first generation, it's gonna have kinks that have to be worked out.

Yeah, but there's some issues where people are like pulling the panels off and some of the panels were like literally glued on, but they fixed all that stuff now. So this is the thing in the air. Honestly though, completely honestly, I like the look of the original model better.

I do too. I

think it looked cooler. The original Roadster, it looked more like a modern supercar that looks more like a Lamborghini.

Looks like a Lamborghini had a baby with a Cybertruck,

right? Yeah, and not even like a new Lamborghini, like a Lamborghini from the '90s.

Yeah,

which are cool,

like a Countach.

Yeah, yeah, it's just like, it's like, that one is sick.

That's slick.

That's— that thing's sick. That looks amazing. That's the— I mean, maybe they could redo that, I don't know.

Crazy world.

It's— these things are weird. It's weird that you can get a car that goes 0 to 60. That is gonna be real. It's gonna go 0 to 60 in under a second. That's fucking insane.

Well, at that test it was 0.8, 0.9 seconds or something like that.

Yeah, that's crazy.

That's, that's like you're gonna liquefy your insides if you go any faster.

Well, it's half the speed of sound, right? I mean, it's full top speed, rather. Its top speed is half the speed of sound. Which is just insane. I think it's like top speed is over 300 miles an hour. What is half the speed of sound? Is it like 380 or something? 360. 360? That's insane. That's fucking insane.

I mean, I like going fast, but I don't know if I want to go that fast.

I, I like, I like going fast, but what I really like is the feeling of a car. That's what— unless you're a race car driver, All the how fast you go is all horseshit. They're all fast. Every car's fast. You can get a— you want like the bargain, this is like the absolute best cool car bargain. Get a Ford Mustang GT.

My favorite car of all time, and I've been saying this for years and I've never bought one, but my sister and her husband used to race Mustangs, and he had a '71 Ford Mach 1 with the big back end. And he eventually turned it into like what they call a Super Comp Funny Car. So it became alcohol-fueled, and the only thing that was original was like the back end, but everything else got replaced over time. It was a funny car, essentially. But I've been in love with that car since I was like 8 years old. Like, I just look at that and I think to myself, that is like— that is muscle car par excellence. Like, it's the perfect—

Yeah, and those cars aren't the best to drive. No, they don't handle that good. No, but it's the feeling that you get when you're driving them. It's like you're driving a ride. Like, when my kids were little, they used to love this one ride at Disneyland. God, what is it called? It's, it's based on the movie Cars. It's like you get in a car and you're kind of steering and you're going out. It's like you're on tracks and you're going around.

Like the Lightning McQueen car type of thing?

Yeah, I forget. There's 2 car rides. There's one car ride where you're not steering, you're just in a car. It's like a roller coaster and there's a car next to you and you're supposedly racing. This one's different. This one, you, you get in these little cars, you actually do kind of steer them. Huh. And they're fun and it's not fast. It's like, but it's like loud and you feel the steering and the engine. Like, that's what I like. I like cars that engage you. Like, there's a visceral connection. There's like, there's some sort of a mechanical connection. You feel it. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, an online psychological counseling service. We all have something we regret. Maybe it's something small, like making plans with a friend you haven't seen in a long time, then having to back out at the last minute. But should you really feel guilty about that? Explore thought patterns like those and how they're affecting you with BetterHelp psychological counseling. They match you with a qualified German counselor, plus everything's completely online and flexible to what you need. Take a closer look at your own expectations and recurring thoughts.

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Yeah, I did driving courses while I was in the military. Um, we had like what you would call— I guess it was called at the time like a high-risk officer pipeline. So the— I guess like the expectation would be at some point you might be caught or captured. So there's all these different courses that they send you through. Mm-hmm. In order to, you know—

Sure.

It's like SERE school on steroids. But one of the courses was for like a week and a half, all you do is learn how to drive. Like, they have rally car instructors come and teach you how to drive and like how to do trail turns and Hmm. How to, you know, navigate course. And then you do on-road, off-road, and like they put you in all kinds of crazy scenarios. Like at one point they drive you up to a checkpoint and you've got a bag over your head and they put you at the checkpoint and they say, all right, we're gonna take this bag off. When we take the bag off of your head, react to the situation like it's an operational scenario and you can employ whatever you need to do. Like they basically just want to see how you do under pressure, but it's part of the CAR course. So you are at this checkpoint and, you know, for me it was, you know, the guards started freaking out and then they are shooting blanks and stuff and basically they just want to see, because they teach you exactly how to do it, like you plant your left foot or you— yeah, you plant your left foot, you stand up, you get behind yourself and then steering backwards and like how can you navigate a serpentine in reverse in a car while under fire and get out of a situation?

It was a lot of fun. The courses were a ton of fun and you learn like from the best drivers in the world. And, uh, like everything in life, you think you have a conception of how these things will be before you get into them. It's like golf. Like I really, I got into golf years ago because I was told I would suck at it. And because I was a rugby player at the time and it was my, you know, father-in-law said, you're not a golfer. You're, you're a large blunt instrument. Like go keep playing rugby. And so I was like, Fuck this guy. I'm gonna fucking be as good at golf as I can. So, you know, at first I was trying to lift the ball or I was trying to overcorrect and prevent a slice by really strengthening my grip. It was actually, no, you gotta hit from the inside to the out. You gotta transfer your weight here. You actually, if you want the ball to go high, you need to hit down on it. And it was the same thing with cars. If you want to drive fast, keep your tires in contact with the road as much as possible.

Use the brake to front-load the weight. 'Cause we were driving Interceptor, Impalas in the course. Mm-hmm. So it's like most of the weight's in the front, so you want to apply brakes through the corners. People think Fast and Furious is like the fastest way to drive a car. You know, I should say the public consciousness. Obviously, anyone who's ever been around a race car driver or watches race cars knows you need the wheels in contact with the road as much as possible. You, you try to draw a straight line through the course and navigate that straight line. So if you're cutting corners and stuff like that, to keep the cars as straight a line as possible, steer as little as possible. Don't oversteer like you always see in the movies. like people are oversteering like the car. And it's like, no, like the guy on the course was like, never oversteer. If you have to put one hand over the other, you're failing. Feed one hand, feed the wheel from one hand to the other and take a trail turn. And if you oversteer, you're going to lose contact with the ground and you're going to be slower.

So it was all these opposites. I guess the point is—

Opposites of perception, you mean?

Yeah. You have a perception going in that this is like a fast, Like, when I get really good at this course, I'm gonna be, you know, what do they call it, like in Fast and the Furious when they're, you know, taking a really tight corner and their back end swings out and the car is squealing? I don't remember the phrase. Sliding. Drifting. Drifting. Drifting. Like, you think, like, you know, 25, 30-year-old me at the time was like, this is what I'm gonna be doing by the end of the course. Like, no, apply the brake and take the turn. Correctly. Roll turn it correctly. Keep the wheels on the ground.

Yeah, that's the key is knowing the limitations of the car and being able to avoid doing that. Yeah, but it's been like

a— If you wanna get around quicker. It's been the case for me in life anytime I learn something at a very high level. Like even with archery, like the slower you can pull the trigger on the release, and my instinct would be like slap it. Mm-hmm. And some people slap it and do fine, but for me, it's the same with long-distance shooting. Like when I take a long-distance shooting course, pull that trigger so you almost can't even anticipate where the arrow's gonna go. where it's gonna fire, at what point it's gonna fire, like manipulate the play and pull the trigger as slow as possible, and that will be the most accurate shot you're gonna take. If the shot surprises you, 9 times out of 10, it's gonna be more accurate than a shot that you've anticipated.

Right, because you're anticipating recoil.

Yeah.

There's, there's a caveat to that. The caveat to that is there's some very high-level archers that win a lot of big tournaments that do what they call command trigger.

For sure.

And I think what's going on there is those guys learned how to shoot a surprise shot first. And those guys, almost all those guys, those target guys, they use a hinge.

Yep.

And, or at least sometimes they use a hinge. A lot of them use thumb buttons now, but, and they use a thumb button like a hinge. They just load it up with back pressure until it goes off. Yeah. In a surprise shot. But there's, there's guys like James Lutz, and there's a few of these— Kyle Douglas. Tim Gillingham. These guys win giant tournaments and they command shoot.

Yeah.

So they shoot— what they do is they put the pin over the— and they know how to stay stable.

Yeah.

And they've done it for so long and they have tremendous back pressure on the trigger or on the, the bow they're pulling. Yeah. And then they hit the trigger when they want it to go. Yeah. They can keep their shit together. And I think it's, it's a mental thing. The real problem with people and target panic is 2 things. One, If you're in a tournament, like, and you're shooting, if you're getting tired, like, those guys are shooting. If people have never seen a Vegas round, so what a Vegas round is, you have 3 targets and you're shooting at 20 meters, and you're shooting, you're trying to hit a dime at 20 meters 30 times. And so that's how you get a 300 score.

Yep.

This guy Lutz just shot 719. So he— out of 720— 720 is possible. So out of 72 arrows, this motherfucker only got a 9 once, and he's command shooting.

Yeah.

This is the thing. It's like, so it's not— it's not a steadfast rule.

Yeah.

But to overcome the pressure of that anticipation and flinching, that's when people turn to a surprise shot. I think the pressure's the problem. It's not the technique of releasing. Because if you show someone how to shoot a bow and they put the target— they put the pin over the target, they hit the trigger, for a while they're good at it, right? So what happens? What makes them not be good anymore? Well, it's clearly their mind. Yeah. It's clearly the pressure. Yeah. And so I think maybe you can be just as accurate, if not more accurate, using a command shot But you need to understand how your mind is working, and you need to understand how to mitigate pressure and, and how to stay calm. Yeah. And I think there's only a few ways to do that. There's strategies that you can use, you can learn techniques, but the reality is when a moment— a big moment hits you, you're gonna freak out. So I think the strategy might be just have a bunch of big moments. Have more big moments in your life, more instances in your life where you have to deal with pressure.

And that kind of tracks with everything else in life. The people that have dealt with pressure, that understand pressure, and, and know how to perform, they can kind of do anything. You can kind of go from that and be involved in all sorts of other things that involve pressure. But if you don't know pressure at all, and then all of a sudden there's a screaming bull elk in front of you at 40 yards, and all you've been shooting at is a target, you're gonna panic. Yes. Especially if you're not a pressure person. Yes. Now, if you are a pressure person, You're probably still gonna freak out the first couple of times, but eventually you'll figure it out.

Yeah, your road to figuring out will be a lot quicker. Yeah, if you've dealt with pressure in the past.

That's what I think.

I— on our— with Spartan Forge, we have a guy on the— on our ambassadors, I guess you'd call them. I don't like any of the terms. He's a guy that we trust to consult for us on features in the app, and then he'll talk about the app. It's— his name is Levi Morgan. Oh, he's the best. Fantastic archer. And just spending time around those guys, they definitely have a way of— because we had an archery competition a couple of years ago, everyone in the company, and he was part of it. What's funny is this— now, if we were to do this 9 times out of 10, this guy wouldn't win, but one of my engineers is this killer named Evan Fried, and he and Levi were in the final. Like, 20 guys started this archery competition. It was the 2 of them at the very end, and Evan beat him.

Oh my God.

I couldn't believe it.

Weaponized autism.

He's one of them. He's one of them. He— I mean, he absolutely was a stone-cold killer. And then we did it with these other guys at a TAC event, like a Total Archery Challenge. We went—

How much did he beat Levi Morgan by?

I mean, he won. I don't remember exactly what the delta was, but he won.

That's crazy.

And nobody could believe it. Like, everyone looked at him like John freaking Wick for the last— for the rest of the weekend. Like, who is this guy that just went and shot at the king and didn't miss? And Levi's the best in the world. And like I said, if they had done that 9 times more, Right. Right? Levi would have won the next 9. But for one moment— Maybe. For one moment, he was Prometheus.

I don't know. But see, there's that— we're going back to the mind again. If he can do it once, why can't he keep doing it?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, there you go, Evan. Maybe you should quit as an engineer for me and go and be a professional archer or something like that.

There's a lot of these rules that people have for things, and I'm like, well, who invents these rules? Other people. And a lot of times people invent rules to sort of To kind of rationalize or deal with their own struggles, right? So they invent rules of like what you can and can't do, what you can and can't get away with, what works and what doesn't work. You'd only know what works if you try it and it works.

Yeah.

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That's a heuristic, which is something I talk about all the time, is people come up with a good enough way to do something that works for them.

Yeah.

And it might not work for everyone. Well, another example of this would be Cam Haynes. He doesn't— he really slap the— whenever he

fires, he kind of pulls it slowly back, but he does— it's definitely a command shot.

Yeah.

But then again, look at First of all, his ability to deal with pressure. Yeah, right. He runs 300-mile races. He does all this crazy shit. On top of that, he's been a hunter for 30 years plus. Yeah, probably more, probably 40 now, right? So he's been hunting most of his life, and he's had so much experience pulling the trigger on animals.

Yeah, yeah. And that reps— it's all about reps.

It's all about reps with everything in life. And it's all about— it's not just reps, it's recent reps. You know, it's like having the amount of repetitions like recently to the point where it's a normal, natural part of your psychology, the way your mind works.

I'll do that with whitetail hunting, is I always make sure I try to kill 2 or 3 doe before I really start zeroing in on going for a buck. Because if a buck's the first thing I'm looking at and it's been 9 months since I've hunted, or 6 months or whatever since I've hunted, I'll still get it. I've been hunting for 25 years and I'll still freak out. Buck fever. Or get the adrenaline drop afterwards. I don't usually get the— I've never really gotten the adrenaline drop when it's happening. But as soon as that arrow is loosed, then I'm like, I'm just like freaking out. Like, I don't even know what happened.

Well, at least you can keep it together before the arrow's loosed, because that's where most people fall apart. I mean, I've seen professional— you know, I don't want to call them professional hunters, but people that make their living as hunting influencers, and they have these videos and you can watch them on YouTube, and they're shaking like a leaf when they're drawing back their bow. And they're like, wow, this guy's been hunting for 40 years. Yeah. And he still gets jazzed up.

Yeah, there's something about that. I think it's why we all want to keep hunting, right? Because it's probably wired— It's hard to do. Well, it's hard to do for sure, but it's wired into our, you know, whatever, however we evolved, however we established over time, one thing is true is that we were able to stick around and have success because we had these groups of hunters that would go out and hunt for the tribe. So there's wiring in us—

100%.

That hunting might be the only way Or one of the few ways to tap into that in a way that your body immediately understands.

Fishing is too. Yeah, fishing is true. I always bring— well, I have these comparisons that I do. It's one of the reasons why I say I never go to protests, because protests are like fishing. This is why. Like, fishing is a part of your DNA. Like, you get a little kid— when my daughter was 5, it was like the first time I took her fishing. When she caught a fish, she was like so excited, like, oh, oh, oh! It's in you. It's in you. You know that catching this thing means your, your body's rewarding you with all these good feelings and good endorphins because now you're gonna eat. Yeah, you're gonna be able to feed your family. You're gonna be able to survive. When you're protesting and everyone's walking down the street chanting and cheering, that's too much like war.

Yeah.

That excites the part of the brain that thinks we're supposed to smash Starbucks to crush the patriarchy. Yeah, or whatever the fuck you want to do, light things on fire. When you see people behaving with, you know, air quotes, mob mentality, what is that? I'll tell you what that is. That's war. That's your body's ability to recognize that it's you with a bunch of other people that are supposedly on your side, you're in a life-or-death situation, and you're against another team. And you're marching and chanting and screaming, and everybody's hyped up, and next thing you know, violence breaks off and everybody gives in to that feeling. Giving in to the kind of behavior that would be almost impossible to imagine if you were by yourself. Yeah. Smashing someone's car window while you're by yourself, walking up to Starbucks with a fucking traffic cone and breaking the window and diving in and throwing things off the shelves. You would never do that while you're by yourself. Why are you doing it with this giant group of people? Yeah. It's, it's the war thing. It's just like the fishing thing. Yeah. You know, like, it's in you.

It's that circuitry. Let's go! You start Black Lives Matter, whatever it is, whatever it is, you know, no kings, whatever it is. Yeah, you start marching down the street, free Palestine. You know, these fucking buildings are keeping us from freeing Palestine. You want to light them on fire. And that's what people do. It's, it's a normal part of us that allowed us to survive to 2026 with tribal warfare.

Yep, that we needed that circuitry.

And that feeling that you get from catching a fish Multiply that times 1,000 for archery elk hunting. Yeah, it's, it's off the charts, the highs and the lows.

There was a deer I was chasing. I'm more of a whitetail hunter. I've only been elk hunting twice. I want to do it more. I just haven't had the time, and I lived on the Eastern Seaboard most of my career. I was in the military, so the option of going west and elk hunting wasn't in the cards for me. So mostly whitetail hunted. But a couple of years ago, I was hunting a public land buck in the Allegheny that was 12 years old.

Where's the Allegheny?

Well, it was actually— wasn't actually the Allegheny, was east of there, but it's north— north-central Pennsylvania would have been the better way to say it. But I just say Allegheny because that's near there. It's farther— it's farther east of there. It's actually a couple hours east of there. But anyway, I was hunting up there and there's a buck everyone had known about, and he was old and huge, and at one point he was like 170 inches. And that's pretty big for a public land whitetail buck.

It's huge.

And everyone knew about it. And I was going up into this area to hunt where there he had been historically during the rut. Thermals were wrong in the area. Thermal draw was pulling and— or it was rising still and it should have been pulling at this point. So I was like, this is a bad spot. Like, where, where he's at, he's gonna smell me coming in. So I'm just gonna walk to a different part. So I walked to the front of the mountain and just went up there where I knew the thermals would be better. he was on a doe, and I was still on the ground. I hadn't even climbed a tree yet. I was on the ground, and he was pushing a doe into like a ditch, and then he popped out. And when I saw him, I was like, holy crap, that's him. Like, that's the Monarch. Everyone called him the Monarch. And I was like, uh, like, I'm still like freaking out. Anyway, I pulled back and put it right in, like double lunged him at like 35 yards. And I had like an adrenaline drop for like 25 minutes afterwards.

I couldn't even call. I my buddy to come and help me drag him because I was so— I was freaking out so bad. And, uh, it was, it was a consequence of like 3 years of knowing this buck existed or that he was in the area. Mm-hmm. And then you put all this time in, like way more time than you should, to chase this animal, and you, you have this goal, and then all of a sudden it's in front of you and you're like, I can't believe this is happening, this is happening. And then I always say the same thing I used to say in the military when I was shooting, which was to kind of get into my zoning-out mode, I had this acronym I learned in the military, which was STAB: steady position, trigger squeeze, aiming, and breathing. So every time I'm at full draw, I say to myself very silently, I'm just in steady position, slow trigger squeeze, aim, breathe. And then I always breathe at the perigee of my breath. So I'll take a big breath in, I'll breathe all the way out so there's no air in my body, and then slow pull.

And when I say that, when I remember to say that to myself, then it's kind of like any panic or anything kind of falls away, and I'm just focused on the task of steady position, trigger squeeze, aiming, breathing. But it happened for like 25 minutes afterwards.

Have you studied any of Joel Turner stuff?

Huh-uh. I know who he is. We've talked on Instagram a couple of times. I mean, I've watched some videos, but to say I've studied him or I know the whole story, I would— that'd be inaccurate.

Well, his strategy is essentially what you just outlined, just with different words, but the same, same thing. He he says you should talk to yourself through the entire shot so that you make this a closed-loop thing.

Yeah.

Instead of an open-loop thing. And so what that means is an open-loop thing is like swinging a baseball bat. Once you start to swing it, you're swinging it. Yeah. Right? It's going. Yeah. And a closed-loop thing is something you could stop at any moment, like writing. When you're writing something down, you could just stop that pen at any moment. It's not like it gets away from you. Right. So the thing about an archery shot is it can kind of get away from you, and that's when you flinch, and that's when you're 6 inches off the mark.

Yeah.

At 20 yards, and you don't understand what happened. And it's— that's what he teaches people to avoid. And he was a SWAT team member, and he would teach people proper techniques in order to— I mean, he learned psychology, and he learned like what's going on in the mind in order to be able to execute in those situations that are extremely high-stress hostage situations. Like, you had to shoot somebody that was holding someone hostage.

Right.

He's been in those things, and he realizes that that's a life-or-death situation that can be mitigated by a certain amount of understanding of what's happening in the mind and what causes open-loop or closed-loop thinking. And so what you're doing is instigating closed-loop thinking by talking to yourself the entire time. Yeah. So by having every moment controlled and every moment calm, and you have a system, and you're actually saying that system through your head, That's what keeps you in the present, in the moment, instead of just panicking like a lot of people do. We've all seen it. People just freak out.

Yes.

And some people don't understand what is happening in their mind, so they just repeat these things over and over again. And they have good days and bad days, and they don't understand where the bad days are coming from. And what is it? Well, what it is is your mind got away from you. And sometimes the mind can just run amok.

Yeah.

It can just take it— let— that's why people have anxiety attacks. I mean, yeah, maybe some of the reasons why people people. I don't want to say, but I don't know why people have anxiety attacks. But some people have anxiety attacks because they start thinking about something and dreading it, and then it builds up in their mind, and then all of a sudden it's just a runaway train inside their brain. And they haven't developed personal methods for stopping that and mitigating that kind of stress and, and recognizing what's happening while it's happening, and then talking yourself down off the ledge and just Peace of mind, getting, getting yourself to a peaceful place. Some people don't have those strategies, so the moment something goes sideways, especially if they're not used to pressure, the moment something goes sideways, it just runs away from them.

Yeah. So lots of people say lots of things about me. I remember Andy on here talking smack about me being Captain America of autism. That's the first thing that comes to mind. Andy's the best. He's— I mean, I talked to Andy almost every day. He's become one of my closest like, I shouldn't say closest friends. I should say someone I regularly talk to, and he's good for me because he's kind of the opposite of me in ways. Like, he— like, like my wife and I are good for each other in the way that she worries about everything. She's worried right now. She's sitting outside worried out of her mind right now about something, probably something she hasn't even talked to me about. I almost worry about nothing until it becomes something that's important to me. Like if someone asks me to do some work or something that's particularly important, then I care about like, okay, this work will represent me. I got to do it as diligently as I can. My representation reflects on my family. So then things— I start caring about things. But if I do have a superpower, I would say it was imposed on me in a weird way by my mother.

My mother was an alcoholic and would go to AA meetings and drag me along. like when I was really young, and they would say the Serenity Prayer at the beginning of every Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, which was, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. So I would be standing here and watching these people tell these insane stories like, I went on a 7-day bender, I am from Missouri, I woke up in Las Vegas, and I would just be like, what am I doing here? I am like 9 years old, like what is happening? But that did stick with me. And I would say that is one of my superpowers is if I can't affect something, I don't worry about it. Like if there is nothing I can do about it, like I just had a conversation with my daughter about this last night who is worried about teenager things. I was like, look, you know, I have told you the Serenity Prayer, your Amma, my mother, used to tell me, like try to just live by that. And that kind of goes to the things we are talking about with shooting is let's just focus on the things we control.

Mm-hmm. And let's develop a heuristic or a way to get through this closed-loop system that you're talking about. And for me, it was a heuristic because it was just something the military taught me that worked particularly well. I didn't know all of the psychology or stuff that you were talking about there. But I would say if I had one superpower, it's my ability to just not care when I can't affect the outcome.

That's very wise.

I wouldn't say— yeah, and I wouldn't say it's my wisdom. It's something I adopted from someone else, but it served me particularly well in life because whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Philippines or Africa or anywhere else I was in like a shady situation is like, okay, this is going horribly. What can I focus on? I can get on the radio. I can do this. I can do that. Like, let's do those things and let's get out of here. And so it's, it's served me really well. So—

Well, I think that's the proper strategy for navigating life correctly. I think the opposite, like just freaking out about everything every time it happens, that just doesn't It doesn't serve you. I think what we were talking about earlier is an issue too. Like, think about all the things you just said, all the different places you were where things went sideways. Like, most people don't have those experiences, and that's one of the reasons why most people are not resilient. And I think you need a certain amount of very high-pressure situations in your life in order to kind of galvanize your character.

Yeah, you know, find out who you are when the chips are down.

You don't know who you are. Like, we've all seen these guys that get in fistfights online, and these videos online, and they don't know how to fight, and yet they talk themselves into this fight. They— it's almost like they want to believe, and they want to convince this other person they know how to fight, and then they think they're gonna be able to do it, and everyone's watching. I'm just gonna hit this guy, and it doesn't work out. No. And they wind up a highlight reel. And everyone makes fun of them, and then their life is literally ruined now. When I was a kid, if you got your ass kicked, no one knew but you and the guys who kicked your ass.

Yeah, and it happened all the time for me. It was like every 2 or 3 weeks somebody would get in a fight.

Yeah.

Fighting was so common for me growing up in like in a farm town in the middle of North Dakota. Oh, I'm sure. It was the highlight of our month. Nothing else to do. If the school bully and someone else threw down or whatever and that guy won, or like— Right. It was just like, this is awesome.

But everybody got over it after a while. And you forgot about the fight because there'd been 10 other fights since then and life moved on. Yeah. Now if you get your ass fucked up in a— if you go to talk some shit to some dude in a convenience store in front of his girlfriend, he KOs you

with a can

of something. Like, someone's got the thing in your face like, oh shit.

Yeah, you got knocked the fuck out. The internet remembers.

They remember forever. And all your friends remember, all the people that hate you remember.

You become a meme.

Yeah. It's a way more difficult time to fuck up than ever in the past.

But it's one of those things too where I said this while I just did Andy's podcast like 3 weeks ago, but it's like essentially we can choose. If you don't force— you said, talked about resilience, but if you don't force the harshness of nature upon you, like if you don't adopt it and try to put yourself in situations where things will get hard so you can find out who you are, and you can do this in a multitude of ways, right? You can do it with jiu-jitsu. You can go to a jiu-jitsu gym and get your ass handed to you time after time and just understand like, okay, I'm not the badass I thought I was, and there's a whole wealth of things that I can learn for the next 50 years. And so you're adopting something. Or like hunting— my friends that I do, we do fasted hunts together. We were gonna do this one this year, but Spartan Forge kept me from— Fasted? Fasted. So what we do is we take a cooler, we pack it with drinks and food and accouterments like salads and stuff like that, and then we get a Yeti and we lock it.

And then one of the wives has has the code for the Yeti. And she doesn't give us the code for the Yeti until we kill something. So we have to send her a picture of a doe or send a picture of a buck or something like that. And so we'll just have salt water and we'll fast for 2 or 3 days. And then, you know, somebody kills a doe finally. Like, there's— in the past when we do it, there'd be 5 or 6 of us. So someone's gonna kill in the first few couple of days. The shortest time was ever like 36 hours. The longest time, I think we went 4 days. And you're just hunting fasted. And it's the best feeling in the world when someone texts and says like, doe down. It's like when you're 3 days into like— and I'm a heavy guy, so I can go a long time without food. Like, I usually do a quarterly fast where I'll go— the shortest is usually 2 or 3 days, and the longest I'll do is 7 days.

But isn't that different when you're out hunting? Like, you're burning off a lot of calories.

It wears you down a lot quicker. Yeah. Yeah. So like, by day 3, you're hurting. And so, we have always killed within— except for one time, we've always killed within 3 days. But the sense of community, and we talked about the wiring that it taps into, like when you're sitting around a fire with like 5, 6 people and nobody's eaten and now you're texting the photo and you're opening the cooler and like— Yeah. You want to cry almost. You're like, oh man, you're the best. I can't believe you did this. This is the best day ever. Oh my God, like you're just— you're feeling like you're on top of the world and it's— you just killed a doe.

I know, but that's what we're wired for and we're missing that. I mean, this is one of the reasons why people are so attracted to like these videos of people who survive or videos of subsistence cultures. Yeah, in the Naked and Afraid. Yeah, all that stuff. There's a reason why we're attached to those things. I think it's because that those human reward systems are the strongest purveyors of happiness that we have currently available to us.

Yeah, because we're not really wired to get happy from an Instagram video. It happens, like we get happy scrolling.

It can last a little, but it's different. It's not the same happiness. It's a very temporary— it's not a body happiness. Like you shoot an elk at 60 yards and double lung it and watch it tip over, that kind of happiness is— there's nothing like that. Yeah, there's nothing like that. That's a different thing. That's a survival thing. It's built into your DNA.

But the point I was making was if you don't choose something, like choose to eat well, choose to train, choose to hunt, or choose to do jiu-jitsu, or choose just to get a degree in something really difficult, if you don't adopt those things, then like nature, reality will judge you and you're gonna get fat and old or have no meaning.

You're also gonna get anxiety over almost anything. Yeah, almost anything and everything. The people that I know that freak out the most about things don't do anything difficult.

Right.

And they're the ones that are freaked out all the time about things that I'm like, just walk it off. You're gonna be fine.

One of the things that works really well for my wife is I'll tell her to do something creative when she's feeling anxiety. She'll like paint or draw or build something or do something. And that seems to be a good way to get like the creative juices flowing and just like complete something. Because I think one of the other problems is that we work— both of us work in the tech industry, and the job's never done. Like, when you're building software, you're building things, like, it almost never gets finished. Right. It's always like, we're done with this thing, it's on to the next thing. So you don't get that sense of like, you know, North— I would go back to North Dakota every year and just farm and drive beet trucks for like 2 weeks. I'd take vacation to go and farm and drive beet trucks, like do harvest. Because I just liked it being done. And most times I donated the money to my church. So I just go home and drive trucks for 2 days, 12 hours a day, beet trucks where I'm following a loader, putting beets into the back of the truck and driving it there just because I was like, I did 3 fields this week.

I feel awesome. Yeah, you worked. Yeah, I worked and I did physical labor and it's finished. That's the best part about it is the work's done.

Well, there's something about that stuff that's very appealing to people. That's why Yellowstone's appealing. Right? These people, they, they have to run these cows or they're gonna not survive. I mean, that's why we like, you know, these people that live as trappers and they live in the fucking Siberian mountains.

Yeah.

There's something about that stuff that's just built into us.

I think we're probably more evolved for that than we are for what is going on today. So it's, it's satisfying the same circuitry we talked about before.

Yeah.

Which is really what we're made for.

Which is interesting because like you recognize this, yet you're in tech and you have an awesome application for phones.

Yes, but the goal of it is to get people out. I always— that's true.

Every time your tech is actually, yeah, very good for people that are outside. Yeah, actually helps you.

And because people have less time, they can scout at home, or like when they really want to get out into the woods, or that, you know, September 13th and they fly in 2 days, it's like, all right, I can go scout this mountain. digitally, find out places I want to go and look at, and then mark them, and then get on the app. But I always tell people when we're developing the app too, like, there's a bandwidth between the brain, the thumbs, and a phone. And the amount of— I'm always trying to maximize that bandwidth. So the less time that I have to interact with an app in order to get more information, I've increased bandwidth.

Right.

So less buttons, less time, just Let's just get them the information they need and get them focused on the woods. Because if I had my way about it, they wouldn't pick the phone up once they're in the woods. It goes in their chest pocket or their rig or whatever, and then they're hunting. This is the apps that I'm building. Like, we're just about to implement an awesome thermals feature that we've been building for a long time, and we can now accurately map thermals. So when you're elk hunting and you see like a, you know, I'm waiting for these thermals to switch because where these elk are at— where these elk are at, the sun is hitting the side of this mountain. Thermals are rising from the bottom and the wind is coming from the top. So there's no way to get to these elk. So I need to wait for the thermal switch. So with this update, we're going to put out first on the web, you can pick a day, time of the year. You can go historical and look up historical weather. So you can say these elk were in this area. I dropped this pin.

Now I'm going to place this marker here and I want to see how the thermals are acting in the area. This is what kills most hunters, is not understanding how thermals work. Mm-hmm. Especially whitetails and elk hunters. They don't know how the thermals work, or they don't understand it, or they've never gone in the offseason.

Like, what we're talking about with people— for people that don't know what the fuck we're talking about— when the morning is happening, when it's cold and early in the morning, all the wind is going down the mountain. Yeah. When it gets hot, then all of a sudden the ground heats up, and then the wind starts going up the mountain. Yeah. So when these animals are below you as you're coming down the mountain, they're gonna smell you immediately because all the smell is coming down. So you have to approach them from the bottom. Yeah. And then when they're above you, if it starts getting hot out, you got to get above them, and you got to get above them quick or they'll blow out.

Yep.

They'll blow out of there. They'll stay, and they could smell you from forever away. I've seen animals smell me from 100 yards away. Yeah.

It's wild. I've seen, I've seen good data on studies, and a buddy of mine, he used to take— a friend of mine, he died in 2017, but he's a prolific whitetail photo— he took photos of whitetails. He had a deer pen And there was a mountain that was a 3/4 mile away from his property in New York. And when those does came into heat, all of the bucks would gather at the base of this fence to smell the wind coming off of this mountain of these does that were 3/4 mile away. So you think about that, like how well they can smell. And so yeah, we're putting this thermal feature out, but the thermal feature, the reason I bring that up is because it's designed to be used at home. So you can map the thermals for an area, you can put in the temperature, you can put in the wind speed, And this engine beautifully maps exactly how the scent is going to move around on this mountainside.

Can I ask you this? Does it vary depending on east or west slope? Because if it's east slope, the thermals will rise quicker, right?

Yes, and yes, because of the sun and the incidence of the sun. Because what we had to build into this was an extremely high-resolution topographic layer. We had to have this engine, but then we also had to put like canopy cover into this.

Oh wow.

So it modulates differently based on the type of canopy that it's in, whether it's elk on the side of a hill or it's in the open air or it's elk inside of a bunch of hemlocks— or not hemlocks, but aspens or something like that. It's gonna change how those thermals work. And I've been using it just the other day. I've got these spots with whitetail. It's a little different because the bucks know where these thermals are as bucks get older. And we'll get off the whitetail deer. I apologize, but you got me hyped up on hunting.

No, I love whitetail deer. Number one most hunted big game animal.

Yeah, no, I just mean hunting writ large. People— I doubt most people want to hear me talk about hunting.

Okay, I think people like hearing people talk about things that are very fascinating to them, and I think people that don't understand hunting, especially people that think it's easy, you really don't understand what it is. You really don't understand how complicated it is, particularly bow hunting. But even, right, I think rifle hunting's easy. Good fucking luck. Rifle hunting is not easy. It's not easy. There's so much territory. You have no idea how big the mountains are. When you get out there, it is insanely hard. Yep, it's all hard. Yeah, yeah, it's a little easier than archery in that you can be 300 yards away and accurately shoot. Okay, still not easy. Yeah, not by the— that's like saying that boxing is slightly easier than MMA. Boxing's not easy. Shut the fuck up.

It's different.

It's— they're hard things to do, and especially to do them well and to understand all these different, like When I first started hunting, when Steve Rinella took me— that's that mule deer that I got right there, 2012. That's when I first started hunting. Immediately I was like, oh my God, this is so much more difficult and there's so much more to learn than I ever understood. There's layer upon layer. It's so complex.

Especially to be good at it.

And I'm not that good at it. I mean, I'm successful at it, but it's also a lot of it because I use really good guides and people help me and I'm And I can handle pressure, so— and I'm in shape, so there's those things. But I'm learning things all the time. I'd say like if I was a hunter, if it was like a jiu-jitsu belt, I'd be like a high-level purple belt, maybe a brown belt. Yeah, but I'm not a black belt. Yeah, I know the difference. There's like when I hunt with Cam Haynes, I'm like, oh, okay.

Yeah, I don't know anything.

He's a 6th-degree black belt. He takes— he shows me things all— every time. I've known that guy for 12 fucking years, and every time we hunt together, he shows me something new. And I learned something new, some new approach, some new way to handle a situation. This is what's going on. They're gonna do this. This is why they're gonna do this. You got to know that. We got to get ahead of them.

Yep.

Like, there's things he knows that I don't know, and I— you only learn with time and with studying and when it becomes the primary focus of your life. And for me, it takes over my life around June. Around June, it just takes over my mind.

Yes.

I do other things, but I'm thinking about September.

Same thing. I was— when I was driving yesterday, I was telling my family, I'm like, I'm watching the leaves change. All I can think about is I want to be in those trees right now. Yeah. It's like, it's— there's something about— well, anyway, to finish the point on the thermals, I marked some of— using this model, I marked some of my best whitetail hunting spots in the mountains. And then I mapped the thermals and looked at the thermals, and it was— it became apparent why deer were using these routes, because an old wise whitetail buck knows he's getting thermals from like 320 degrees are funneling into this one spot based on the predominant wind for the area, all these things that the app can tell you. And it's like, oh, that's why he's always been in this spot, because he knows the whole mountain before he ever steps a foot on it. He knows, he knows if there's a hot doe on that mountain. He knows if there's hunters on that mountain. He knows if there's anything on that mountain. Yeah. He can smell it. And it really has opened my eyes. Like, I can't wait to get this feature out so people can see it.

But the goal to put put a bow on this is to get people out and experiencing it because I think it's a great mechanism for like coming of age for young kids. Like, hey, you know, you're 14 or 15 or whatever, I'm gonna treat you like a man from today. We're gonna go out and kill an animal and eat it together and get a bunch of guys together. For men, I think. It works for women as well, but I'm saying particularly for young men, we've kind of lost coming of age rites. Or we've kind of like, you know, Native American tribes you study, or Viking, or all these other— they had a time and place where it's like, now you're a man, I'm gonna treat you like a man, no more excuses. Right. And we've kind of put that off, and we kind of spoke about this last time, but it's something that I think we desperately need for young men because— and for adults even who haven't really chosen to start acting like men. And I can say I act like a child all the time, so I'm not a perfect dude, but the military was that for me.

So mine got kind of outsourced. But it's— I think it leads to a lot of problems that we have in society today, like things my grandpa used to bitch at me about when I was a kid. Like,

100%, there's a lot of people who are never truly tested, and they live their life with this just cloud of uncertainty constantly hanging over them, and this— yeah, not this lack of understanding of their capabilities and how they can expand those capabilities. Yeah. That's the thing about being tested, is that you realize like, oh, I fell short. I'm— I suck at this. This is not my thing. I got to learn how to do it. And then you learn and then you realize, oh, I can expand my potential in all things. Mm-hmm. I learned it from martial arts. That's what— that's what happened with me when I was young. I got into martial arts when I was 15, like really heavily, and then it became my whole focus and it changed my whole— the whole way I approached life. I realized like that pressure and big moments and things that are difficult are good for you. They're blessings. Yeah, and you learn about yourself from those things.

Yeah, I think I talked about this with Andy, but I think it was Plato was not only known for his great thinking but known for his excessively good wrestling ability.

Really?

Plato means broad or broad shoulders. That's what his name meant. And he said it's one of the worst things in life to go through life and not understand the full potential of the human body, like to not push yourself physically to a place where, A, you understand the actual capability of your body to make it through a situation, and then B, to understand what type of person you regress to when the chips are down, which was another thing the military gave me. It wasn't like something I had this profundity and I went out and searched for it. It's like I'm in a SERE course where I'm being pursued by operators, because there are the regular SERE courses in the military and then there are graduate-level SERE courses. And that was kind of—

What is a SERE course? How do you say

it? Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. So in the initial one, which is kind of more for pilots and aircraft crew members, they teach you how to survive in the wild, how to evade capture, like if you are being pursued, And then if you are caught, how to resist torture, enhanced interrogation methods, that type of thing, and then how to escape. So you get kind of like a watered-down version that a lot of people go to, but then this high-risk officer pipeline, or if you are in JSOC and other organizations, they put you through like a real deal Holyfield one. The one I went to was like 3 weeks and they teach you picking handcuffs, how to escape from a trunk, how to escape from a house. How to improvise, like make firearms, shotguns, how to dress a squirrel and eat it, but they put you through like a week. I think it was actually 6 weeks maybe, not 4 weeks, but you do 2 weeks of training where it's like you just sit in a place and you're picking handcuffs. You sit in a place and you're learning how to get out of a trunk. You sit in a place and you learn how to conduct polish on what you're wearing.

So if you're spotted by policemen and you need to change how you look, How do you polish yourself so you change your appearance? So if they've got an APB out for a guy in a gray shirt and black pants, how do you change that quickly? Then after they teach you all that stuff, they throw you into an operational scenario where you're just being pursued by a bunch of people who do this for a living. And, you know, my evasion was like, I think like 12 or 13 miles through the Appalachian Mountains, and you're sleeping on the ground at night. And I actually had a crazy It's the only thing that ever happened to me. So I wasn't in an invasion. People are going to make fun of me for this story, but it's fine. I was in the Appalachians and I was like on day 2 or 3 or maybe 4 or something like that, and I had eaten very little. Before I left the town that I was in to get up on the— and they teach you like how not to just walk a trail. You basically serpentine snake a trail, and so you know where the trail is, you can still orient yourself, but you are not following the trail because that is going to make you easily caught.

So you are running, and when they started the operational scenario, you are put in a trunk of a car with a painting outfit on, you are handcuffed, and you are zip-tied. So you have to first defeat all of those restraints. So you are learning— you learned how to pick the cuffs, you learned how to get out of duct tape or these other things. And then you learn how to pop the trunk from the inside whenever it's not built to be popped from the inside. Now they have all of those latches that you can pull and just jump out, but they will put you in like an older vehicle and then you have to evade. So now you are running from people who are chasing you and the local authorities know that you are part of this course and they are also, if they see you, they will also pursue you. So you quickly learn how to change what you are wearing, whether that is going to like a Walmart donation point and reaching in and grabbing clothes Or, you know, at one point in the course, I just put my whole bottom half in a mud puddle.

So my white outfit now looked like I had black jeans on in the dark. So you learn all these, like, you know, little things to do, and then you do the evasion part. Well, during, like, day 3 of the evasion part— and I still don't know if this is a dream or if this happened. I'm pretty sure it happened. I'm 80% sure it happened. But I hadn't eaten for a few days, and I thought I ran into hikers on the Appalachian Trail. So I came to an area and there were these people sitting on a log and again, I don't know if this was a dream, I don't know if this is because I hadn't eaten for days or because I was being tracked or I was under a lot of pressure, but I had like a quick conversation with them and they are like, well, we are going to go to sleep. And I was like, okay. And they had along the trail, they had these like little open-faced cabins. Right. And so I saw them go into this open-faced cabin and go to sleep. And then I started a fire and slept on the ground next to the fire.

And I just told them, oh, I am just, you know, they give you a cover so you can just tell people what your cover is while you are in there when you interact with people. And so I did all that, I started a fire, I am sleeping by this campfire. I wake up in the morning and it was a big dirt area, so I wake up in the morning and I looked over there like 3 hours later, this was like 2:00 a.m. when I got there, and it's like 5:00 or 5:30 now. And I look up and I'm like, oh, they're gone already. Well, that's weird. So like, I start the fire again, quickly warm myself up to keep evading. And then I looked at the ground, there were no footprints anywhere. So I was like, wait, did I see people here last night or not? Like, did this happen or not? And I'm like freaking out. I'm like, I'm not seeing— like, there should have been dirt. Like, I thought they were sitting on a log. There's no log here. So when I was debriefing after the course, I told the— you do a debrief with like a doctor who is monitoring everyone because at one point you are being slapped around or you are locked in these cages or you are locked in like at one point in the government detention part, I am locked in a cement block, like you are in a cement room where you can't stand up, you can't sit down, it is too thin for you to like get on the ground and they are playing this horrible freaking music at the top behind your head.

It is like violins that make no sense. And you are in there for like 8 hours, and so you really start getting like— have you ever done like a dunk tank or like a tank where it is dark?

Yeah, sensory deprivation.

Yeah, so this is what this is. It is sensory deprivation. You can't lay down, you can't stand up, you can't get comfortable because it is only like 5.5 feet tall. It is too thin for you to lay on the ground. They are playing this music in the back of your head, and this is after you have been evading, so you have been captured, so you are dehydrated, you haven't eaten. And I was like seeing worms everywhere. And I was like, I kept telling myself, you're hallucinating. Like, I was seeing like all these snakes inside of there. Like, all this awful shit is happening to you. And so I talked to the doc afterwards. He was like, oh no, I've heard this story like 15 times.

Did he hear the story of people meeting people that weren't there?

People meeting people that weren't there or having an experience or being in a place because they do have you with a GPS sensor and like a, in a fanny pack. Uh-huh. So that if you get lost or you get turned up or hit by a car or something like that, they know where you are. But they don't use that to chase you, or they are not supposed to. And so he is like, yeah, I debrief guys who thought they were in like different parts of the city or they thought they were in a different area altogether, or they get lost and turn around and they are dehydrated. So like when you are not eating for a while, you have got the stress of being chased by people who do this for a living, you haven't had any water, no reliable meals, you are stressed out and you have been running for 3 or 4 days, like your mind starts Doing things to you. So I still to this day don't know if A, that was a dream, B, I hallucinated those people, or C, they were there and just like the dirt was gone in the morning.

Guys, you know I'm into ketones and I rock with Ketone IQ, but here's something that blew my mind. Throughout history, you see all these civilizations talking about fasting and how good it can be for your body and brain. I honestly feel sharper when I do it. That's because when you fast, your body starts making its backup fuel. Ketones. They burn clean, last long, feel amazing, and they help you with focus and mental clarity. But fasting is really hard. So when I need to stay sharp, I take Ketone IQ. It delivers the same super fuel your body naturally makes when fasting right to your brain. They help me drop into laser-like focus when I want to stay locked in and think clearly. And that's the beauty of it. You get the benefits of ketones without having to fast. Finally, you can pick it up at CVS, Nationwide, and your first shot of Ketone IQ is always free. So head to your local CVS and try one for yourself, or go to ketone.com/rogan for 30% off your subscription order. But maybe they're interdimensional travelers.

Maybe they're interdimensional. It's, it's possible.

If you were an interdimensional traveler, why do you have to look like an alien, you know? Yeah, if you've got the ability to come here from another dimension, I think you probably have the ability to look like Elon Musk.

I think it's highly likely that Elon Musk is an interdimensional traveler, but—

Something along those lines.

He's something.

Yeah. There's— but that's my thought about aliens in general. Like, I think if they were amongst us, there's no way we would ever know.

If they have the technology to do the things that we think that they're doing, we are woefully inept to try to comprehend or understand what it is they're doing or who they are or what they're doing.

Right. And why wouldn't they be able to imitate us? We're simple. And there's also so many different models of us to choose from. There's so many different versions of us that you could draw from and create a compilation and, you know, make an artificial person or an image of a person or just affect someone's visual cortex to the point where they don't see you for what you really look like.

Yeah, for sure.

That seems like simple compared to traveling interdimensionally. Yeah. Or traveling interstellar.

Yeah.

If they really do have these gravity drives that can instantaneously transport you from one galaxy to another. I think they could probably pretend they're a person.

Yeah, I mean, we, we can screw with our own perception all the time, and then people explain it to you and you're like, holy crap, I didn't even realize that. Yeah, the 2 faces looking together with the vase. Oh yeah, there's a— there's one on the line where it's like, it's a block with like a black bar in the middle.

Uh-huh. Yeah, we did that the other day. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Well, I won't retell the story.

Oh, we've done it twice. It's incredible. So what is that called again? Corn sweet? Yeah, corn sweet.

Yeah, so you could— your perception can be messed with. And if you think—

That one's nuts.

Yeah, if you think you're in control of your faculties, you rest on a limbic system and a central nervous system that's been around for a long time, and it's very patterned the way that it metabolizes reality. And our ability to mess with that is—

I wonder what evolutionary advantage, if any, there is in being able to hallucinate. When you're tired.

I think there's probably something to do with— well, what— I'm not an expert on this, but I know that dreaming is particularly important when it comes to that stage of sleep cycle, is where you store memories. So one of the things that happens when you're not sleeping for a long time is your memories are one of the first things to go. Mm-hmm. Because you need those stages of sleep in order to remember things.

No, that makes sense, because when I'm sleep-deprived, my memory sucks.

Yeah. I mean, I think dreams have tremendous amount of function. I myself am a huge believer. It's probably one of the things I believe in most is dreams. And this is going to sound crazy coming from somebody who makes his living doing engineering, but I do think that the collective subconscious and the individual unconscious, we're resting on millions of years of learned lessons that we can't possibly be born with. And so they pop up out of this collective subconscious. Like you see a person, you just get the ick. You're like, I don't know what I like. This guy, I don't like this guy. Right. That lesson's probably happened to your ancestors 10 million times. And something is popping out of that substrate that you don't have full access to and is telling you that because it's a heuristic that has been adopted over a million years of evolution or 300,000 years or whatever you think humans have been around for. That story's been told a million times, and I think dreams, it doesn't make sense to me. And again, I'm not the expert on this, but it's stuff that I think about all the time.

Actually, I was, back in the day, I was trying to impress my now wife, and she's a mathematician, and she went to Johns Hopkins, super smart, like just outside of the normal distribution of people, especially a woman who's really into mathematics. It's just not— Normal, or it's not, you know, as common. There's far more many men— I'm gonna get shit on for this— I meet way more men mathematicians than I do with women. And I'm sorry, I don't control the fabric of reality, but it seems to be the case. I'm just observing things. I'm observing patterns. Anyway, she's a mathematician.

You covering all your bases.

Yeah. Well, dude, doing your podcast the first time, so much hate.

Yeah, you gotta stay out of the comments.

I don't know. I don't go to— I didn't read your comments. Where you getting the hate? DMs.

Oh, well, stay out of the DMs.

Yeah, well, I will from now on.

You should close those off anyway.

Yeah, but, uh, what— oh yes, so dreams. I will have a problem in my life, and so the reason I was talking about impressing my wife, she was into chaos theory and she's reading all these books on chaos theory. Mm-hmm. And so I went on YouTube to watch some videos about chaos theory. And I actually, this is an origin story for me of types, of a type. I actually saw a Jordan Peterson video, but it was not about chaos theory. It was about chaos and order. Like, it was like, you know, it was one of those, but I didn't know. So I clicked the video and this is before he blew up. This was like, you know, when he was just posting stuff on YouTube. So I watched this video and my goal of watching the video was to get into understanding chaos theory. But what I ended up doing was getting into Carl Jung. 'Cause I watched one of these first videos. So I have a very addictive personality. So I started reading every Carl Jung book I could, like everything about the collective unconscious, the Red Books, everything that he wrote, and really got into dreams.

And this might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't matter because it's particularly useful to me, but I'll have dreams where— And I used to have a psychologist that I talked to when I was in a kind of a depressive state years ago. And he was— I made sure to hire one who was a Jungian. So I would document my dreams and say, here's what I had a dream about. And it just became astonishing to me that my dreams were trying to tell me things. And from an evolutionary standpoint, it made sense to me that your body wouldn't just present you Fuzz like a TV screen, that dreams would have an evolutionary function where you're able to draw on the lessons of the past. And you could call that the collective unconscious; you could call that the Holy Spirit of God; you could call that transcendent reality. It doesn't matter. But there seems to be something to dreams. I'm convinced of it because I still document my dreams to this day. And when things are happening in my life, the dream will be telling me like here's where you're at. This is what you need to do.

And then we watch these dreams manifested in reality through a particularly good book or a particularly good movie. And it's tugging on that same string where we're watching something and people have done this better than me, but you're watching something and you're not understanding what you're watching, but you know that you love it. Mm-hmm. And you want to keep watching it. And it's because your unconscious is telling you there's a lesson here for you. And I'm going to make you keep watching this until you understand what the lesson is. And the example I always give people is, Let me tell you a story, and the story is about a guy who is innocent, but he is sentenced to death. And he had a collection of disciples that followed him around, and he taught them beautiful things about the world and the fabric of reality and gave them appreciation for life. He died and was reborn or raised from the dead, but also passed through to this world through a woman's womb. And he's a fisher of men. So, I'll tell people that story and they'll be like, what story am I telling? You know, like, well, you're telling me the story of Christ.

I was like, no, I'm telling you The Shawshank Redemption. It's the greatest movie of all time, per, you know, IMDb, per Rotten Tomatoes. It's a perfect movie. I'm not saying Stephen King wrote that book to retell the Christ story. What I'm saying is that story is a very base story, a story of the complete perfect man who's innocent of a crime, who's tried and killed for that crime, but reborn. And that's because in the collective unconscious and in our lives, we need to undergo those same things like I talked about before. You have to force nature and reality onto you and adapt to them and suffer a little death, like even an ego death. Like you had a system, the system failed, now it's time for you to recalibrate that system and then be reborn into the world. And so, I think all of those things are tightly coupled when it comes to dreams, when it comes to media that we consume, stories that hit with us and we don't understand why. And great art is art that's made and the artist doesn't even know the story that he's telling. He just has a compulsion to tell the story, and so they write it down.

And we don't know, like Stephen King is a great author. I love consuming his stuff. But he's more of a vessel to the unconscious than he is somebody who just thinks up great stories.

Well, he wrote a lot of his stuff basically unconscious. Yeah. You know, some of his great works. What do you mean by that? Well, he doesn't even remember writing Cujo.

Great movie.

Yeah, great book. I didn't read the book. The book is fantastic. I didn't read the book. He was heavily drinking and doing drugs back in those days. Yeah. And he would just get blacked out and write these books. Yeah, and I think it was Carrie too, right?

I'm not sure.

He's got a bunch of his books where, you know, some of the best ones where he was just obliterated when he wrote them.

Yeah, and that was the way into—

yeah, he's tapping into that. Get away from himself, get out of his own way and tap into that thing, because that's one of the things that creative people always talk about, is getting out of your own way.

Yeah.

And yeah, you know, finding that, that zone.

Having drunk stupor. Cocaine-induced haze.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen the movie Maximum Overdrive?

No memory of writing the book at all. Yeah, I did.

Oh, great book.

King wrote it between '81 and '85 while deeply dependent on alcohol and cocaine. One of the best books. He also wrote books like The Shining, Pet Sematary, and The Tommyknockers during that era while regularly consuming alcohol and Cocaine, Valium, Xanax, marijuana, and even mouthwash. He's openly shared in his own writing. Yeah, it's in the book. He often had to stuff cotton swabs in his nose to stop cocaine-induced nosebleeds from dripping onto his typewriter. Fuck yeah.

Jeez.

Meanwhile, some of his best stuff.

Diving into unconsciousness and then like a hero coming back with something, a story.

Have you ever heard of the hypnagogic state?

No.

Yes, I have, but I don't remember what that term is.

I have a perplexity describing Salvador Dalí's use of it because I found a few people that did it, but I was getting really into dreams too and was having some weird sleep-deprived visions, and I found that this is a thing that smart people, I guess, tapped into.

Being half awake and sleep deprived? Well, I told you about the NewsRadio writers. I've told you that before. Yeah, yeah. And so the, the writers on NewsRadio They didn't do drugs, but they would stay awake. So they'd stay awake till like 3 o'clock in the morning and then start writing the scripts.

Wow.

Yeah, and everybody was just like delirious, and they would write till like 6, 7 in the morning. We would show up to do the table read, and these guys were still awake from the night before. So they'd written the entire— hilarious shit, because they were just like— it's like they were high, but they weren't high, and they would write these ridiculous Absurd scenarios and really hilarious lines, and they were doing— they were purposely doing it under sleep deprivation to induce that state.

Yeah, and that I think is a, you know, it's gonna sound paradoxical to say it, but that's a heroic action, right? Like going into, going into the unconscious, a place where you're either depriving yourself, hurting yourself, but you're, you're, you're diving into the mud, the, the water, and Yeah. And you're pulling out something great. Like, it goes to what you said about fishing. Like Christ said, I'll make you fishers of men. And that means I'm going to dive into the water to the abyss. I'm going to pull out something of value and everyone gets to eat and be happy. And that's the hero story par excellence, is people going into unsavory conditions, making sense of an unknowable environment, recalibrating themselves and then returning. That's always the story in the book, right? The hero gets defeated in the beginning. He has to go through some type of transformational period, which often— like Star Wars, he's in the swamp, or Thor: Ragnarok, he goes to this upside-down world where he has to fight the Hulk, who's his friend, or any of these movies, they have that. And then there's the return of the king where he sets order and makes everything right.

And dreams, I just— it's one of the most valuable things to me. And one of the things that kind of sucks about it is, is And Jung talks about this, is once you start to really learn and live, like you try to become a better version of yourself, you'll actually end up dreaming less. But when you do dream, the dream will be more dense. And but the layers of the dream get more— the dream is never just to solve one problem. It's usually, it's many problems stacked on top of themselves.

So say that again. When you learn more about yourself?

When you start listening to the dreams, Okay. And you start living like—

You dream less.

Well, not necessarily. The better lesson is, if you start listening to your dreams and you start orienting yourself based on the feedback that you're getting from the collective unconscious or the Word of God or the voice of God, and you start setting your life in order and you start acting like a better person, the need for dreams is not as profound.

How does he make this determination? Is he running a study? Like, how many people is he looking at? Is he dealing with his own personal experiences?

So I read this, and I think it's called— I think this was in the Red Book, but I'm not sure. Or it might be— I can't remember which. Maybe Man and His Symbols. It doesn't matter. But what he's basically saying is, the dreams are there to provide you input and corrective measures, and to let you know the archetype that you're acting out. And then once you start setting yourself in order, a good marker is you're no longer dreaming. In other words, you're doing the right thing now, so your dreams don't have to keep giving you this feedback. Huh. Jamie can pressure test me because I might be wrong, and I don't want to say something wrong on this podcast of all.

It's also— it's like—

This statement, this is taken from something he said. It's almost like that, but it's not.

Dreams balance the conscious mind. If your waking mind is overly rigid, hyper-rational, or arrogant, the dream will supply emotional, vulnerable, or contradictory imagery to restore equilibrium. Interesting. Self-portrayal of the psyche. Jung saw that a dream was a spontaneous self-portrayal in symbolic form and of the actual situation in the unconscious. They show you where you truly stand psychologically without the ego's filters.

Yeah, dreams drive towards wholeness and self-realization. So what I got from Jung was the more you start to become more of a whole person and you engage in the self-realization, The less utility the dreams will have, and therefore you'll have less of them. So in other words, if you're doing well by yourself—

I understand this, but I don't understand how you'd be able to study this unless it's all completely anecdotal from an individual. Yeah. Because you're one person and your thought process, especially as a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, is going to be very different than most people. So to say that— it's got to be people that always dream. Like, there's people that have very vivid, lucid dreams, and they're able to cultivate those.

Yeah. And I would also say Jung falls out of the distribution of today, what most people engage in is cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, is not what Jung was doing. Like Jung was far more radical. And I wouldn't say the most peer-reviewed guy in the world. So it just, it, and it could be like anything else in life, a heuristic that doesn't necessarily the right way. And the reason I say that is because heuristic is something that's not the right way to do something, but it works for you. It's the right way to do things for you. And it just might be a useful heuristic to me, but it certainly— I can think of just, you know, a dream even I had last week where I wrote it down and went back to it the next day because I woke up at like 4:00 in the morning. I wrote it all down, woke up the next day and looked at it, and it was like smacking me in the face, like what the dream was telling me.

What was

that?

Is it personal?

I mean, I can talk at it at a high general level, but it is personal. Um, uh, uh, problems with legal, with, uh, some legal stuff. And, um, uh, you know, I'm almost through it, but, uh, it's taken a toll on me for about a couple of years. And we got some resolution that was some of what I wanted to see and some of what I didn't want to see. And that night I went to bed pretty angry. And then I had a dream where I was on a train and there were these people that were like rendezvous people. Mm-hmm. all over the train. And they were like, you know, biker-looking guys, kind of rough. And they were making fun of me or they were telling me I wasn't shit. And then some of them would challenge me to things. And then in the dream, I met a woman and I was like, hey, I really don't know what's going on in this dream. Like, or I'm not in this dream, in this place. Like, can you help me out? And she was like, well, you kind of have to learn what's going on here on your own.

Like, and so at one point, a bunch of gunshots came from the outside of the train. And I grabbed her, like, as the guns were shooting, and I put myself in between her and the gunshots where they were coming from. And then she said, when we got up and, like, the guns stopped firing, she's like, okay, I can help you out some here. And she started telling me things about this train world that I was in. And then a guy came and challenged me whose name was also Bill, but he looked like old, like an old bearded guy, like an old, like, biker beard guy. And we started fighting, and I put him in an Americana, and which, you know, anybody who knows how to fight shouldn't succumb to an Americana.

What are you talking about?

Well, I'm saying like, you know, if I'm fighting like a blue belt and I try to hit him with a, you know, a basic jiu-jitsu move, he's gonna fuck my world up.

Oh, I don't know about that.

Well, Andy would. Guys that— Gordon would, or maybe guys—

High-level black belt.

Well, I don't know. It just seems like—

People get caught in Americanas all the time. Maybe.

I don't know. than I do, but I put him in an Americana and I ended up— not that this is possible, but I ended up compound fracturing his elbow.

It happens all the time.

And he didn't quit. And the woman told me as I was fighting, she's like, not only does he have to say uncle, you have to accept that he just submitted before it's over. And so he's like, I'm not done. And I was like, oh my God. So we keep rolling and he tackles me and I get into a guard and And I, and I put him in an armbar, and I break his arm with an armbar, his other arm. And then he's like, okay, I submit. And then she's like, now tell him you accept his submission. And so I was like, I accept your submission. And then, and then later in the dream, like, I get off this train.

This is a crazy fucking dream.

Yeah, and I wrote it all down. I can show you it on my phone when we get out of here, because I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and wrote it all down. And then I got out of the dream, and I ran into my wife, and my wife said, I'm going to get on the train as well, and I feel like I need to go ahead and test myself or get into the world. And I was like, baby, don't do that. Don't get on the train. It's not a good place to be. It's horrible. Don't do it. And she's like, oh, I feel like I need to do it. And then I woke up. So the dream, like I immediately knew just from like the self-study and reading these things, the train was a framework for the legal system. In other words, there are these people that speak terms you don't understand. It's got its own direction and inertia and gravity, and you don't control where the train goes, just like you don't control where a courtroom or a judge or the justice system goes. You are subject to everything that's happening in that train, and they are going to say and do things that don't make sense to you and that you are going to need someone else.

And like it said up there, a compensatory— compensatory function for men is usually an anima character. And anima relation is, you know, I've heard you talk about this and what you're describing is anima integration, but essentially men need to first become men. And once men become men, then they can start integrating anima. And what— an easy way to say this is a grandfather or a man needs to grow up and become hard. He needs to be disagreeable. He needs to fight. He needs to learn. how to push himself and test himself and instill these masculine features into him. Once he's done that, then he can be the old grandfather that's got like a granddaughter on his lap, or he's emotional with a grandchild, or he's starting to learn really more about his wife. But he first needs to learn himself. So he has to harden his masculine— his masculine features before he integrates anima features. But anima features in movies or in books or in all of these things, it's usually a character— like if you watch the movie Wolverine, or not Wolverine, if you watch the Logan movie, he's got a young version of himself who's a woman who has no ability to speak.

So she lacks logos. She lacks an ability to express herself in the world. And as she starts to integrate and get closer to Logan, who's this masculine character, she finally adopts Logos and starts to speak towards the end of the movie and even starts speaking English. And so, and because they're the same person, she's a clone of him, Jung would say that's the anima part of Logan that he needs to integrate before he can defeat the bad guy in the end of the movie. So this anima character on this train who is, you know, a particularly good lawyer or someone who understands this world that I don't understand, and I need to Show them something, like protecting her from the gunfire, before she starts telling me about this world and how it works. In other words, I have to use that compensatory relating function in order to understand this train that I'm on that I've got really no control over, and that the stakes of this fight were far bigger than I ever thought they were, and that the person that I'm fighting, which is not the person I'm fighting in court or not the person that I'm fighting in life— was actually me, and there is a part of me that I was experiencing in that dream who is not willing to give the fight up.

He will fight until he has gotten Americana, until he has got a broken arm, until he has got an ankle lock and he can't walk anymore. My dream was warning me about taking this to the end, and if you take this to the end, it could be bad or it could be good. We don't know.

Well, it can consume your life.

It could consume me, yes, and consume millions of dollars and consume everything else. And so my dream was readying me and saying, look, you are at a threshold where you have to open yourself up to parts and really learn the justice system and really learn these things, or you are not going to be ready for the fight. And the fight is not against the other guy. The fight is actually against yourself. And so that is the nexus of the dream. The dream is not telling me about the future. It's telling me where I am at this point in time. So it's very useful to me, these things. And we see them reflected in media, like I said, in that Logan movie I talked about, he actually fights himself and that himself that he fights, the clone, have you seen the movie?

No.

He's got no logos, he can't speak. And this daughter or this clone of him has no logos and he cannot speak. And they're moving from south of the border, which is this like chaotic desert wasteland up into North Dakota actually in the movie, which is this like, Garden of Eden type of place. And it's there, it's this like buddy travel story across this place where he has to integrate these parts of himself in order to finally defeat his shadow self, which is a Jungian thing, which is this other Wolverine with no ability to speak, who's this animalistic version of himself. And only then in the end of the movie, he's, you know, it's really the story of Moses, but in the end of the movie, he's literally hung on a tree and killed by his own shadow self. And then only then can this new version of him, this anima-integrated version of him, go north into Canada and live freely. So, it's one of the highest-grossing Marvel movies of all time. I think it made over $1 billion. But it's telling a very old story, and that old story that it's telling is an ascent of a mountain like Moses to go up and get the new law.

But it's also an ascent of the mountain to— that will ultimately lead to your crucifixion, but it will save everyone else that you love. It's like the Jews in the wasteland. It's this death and rebirth story that speaks to a very deep level in people. And even as engineering-minded as I am and as scientifically minded as I am, I can't dispense with something when it's as useful as it is. There's just something there that keeps scratching at me and I can't let it go. And it's part of my addictive personality. Like I said, I've consumed so— like Erich Neumann and Carl Jung and Freud and Adler and all of these great authors who wrote about all of this, the perseverance of the human soul under extraordinary circumstances. You can't dispatch with these things because it got these people to where we are today, and there seems to be some truth there.

Well, it's undefinable, and it's very strange. Whatever the dream state is, there's something going on there that's It's very odd. Very, very odd. And I don't dismiss it. I don't understand it. I don't dismiss it. But I'm very wary of people who are clearly defining it, like mapping the territory.

Yeah.

I don't know if you have the ability to do that. And I don't— I think people want to define things that are undefinable because it gives them comfort.

For sure.

That there's a structure to things that You know, they can, they can say, oh, I get it now. I don't know if you're ever gonna get it.

I think it's the same thing that you get when you hear from people— when I was 16 is the only time I've ever done drugs in my whole entire life, and I can now say this that I'm out of the military.

That's outrageous.

I've never done anything, but when I was a child,

um— Meanwhile, you're doing drugs right now.

Right, nicotine. When I was a child, some friends, some friends gave me mushrooms when I was like 16. And it was a crazy experience. And it also— I won't tell the story because we've already done this once, but it also led me to an updating of my system and an understanding of who I am.

How come you never did it again?

I was in the military. How come you don't do it now? Security clearance. I don't know. I just— I'm not saying I wouldn't. All I'm saying is I'm so hyper-focused on what I'm doing now that I don't, I don't There'll be a time and a utility for it. There'll be a time and place for it. And I do think— I've talked to lots of veterans, other guys who have done like the— what, they go to South America and they do ibogaine? Ibogaine. Yeah. And, you know, I talked to one guy who said, you know, he had a ton of antidepressants and medication and stuff, and he went down there and did that. When he got back, he threw it all away and he was better afterwards. So there's definitely value there, but again, that's that pattern of diving into unconsciousness and diving into this world that will judge you. And some people come back better, some people come back broken, some people overcook the goose. I'm not sure. I think I would probably do it one day. I'm just so busy building. I would worry I also worry about my mind. Like, I also know I would never do like cocaine, or I would never do like some of these other drugs because I'm really already highly strung.

I'm really hyper-focused on things.

Yeah, that's why I've avoided Adderall, even though it's very interesting to me.

I would never be able to get near— I mean, I do nicotine.

I might want to try it once.

I do nicotine because it helps me think. It's the only thing that can make me focus. Like, when I— I don't do too many a day, but when I do them, it's usually when I'm trying to think about a problem or like zero in on something. Mm-hmm. Whereas other people, it like makes them feel like giddy or high or whatever. I get no feeling from this other than like it just—

Yeah, it's a definite nootropic.

Makes the world focus in. And I had it, you know, when I was in Iraq on my second tour to Iraq. I started doing like mint skull because we'd convoy like a long ways and there wasn't anything to do. It's not like we had a TurtleBox or a Bluetooth speaker in the Humvee. You just had 6 hours of driving in front of you, so I'm gonna throw a Skoal in, just like dip mint Skoal. And but then I started brushing my gums away, so I quit. And then when this stuff came out, I was like, oh, I get to get the nicotine without the— without brushing my gums away? Sign me up.

Right. Yeah, it's very addictive to people. It's interesting. It's, uh, it's this stuff. These pouches have come out of nowhere.

I get off of them every once in a while. Like, I'll switch to— there's this one that I use that's got no nicotine in it.

Ultros?

Ultros. Yeah, so I'll just do like that for like 2 or 3 weeks.

Yeah, those are great.

And then

that's just nootropics.

Yeah, and so I'm not, you know, wired up. Like, the first day is always like, this kind of sucks. Like, I want one. I don't have like the comedown that most people have where I'm like, I'm gonna kill someone if I don't need one right now.

Yeah, it's interesting.

You get I do get disagreeable.

I don't. I think it's biological, man. I can just stop taking them. I took them like when I was on vacation. I took off 10 days and no problem at all. And I do that all the time. I take 3, 4 days off. Doesn't irritate me. But I think that's biological. I think some people have that weird thing and some people don't. And some people, they— it gets in their system to the point where they need it all the time. And some people don't. I've heard horror stories of people. I've also heard horror stories of people with other stuff that I find really troubling, like kratom. Kratom is a big one. What is that? I'm sorry. That's that weird fucking— it's kind of an opiate, and it's everywhere. It's in those Live Free drinks, and those— there's a lot of different— like, they banned the synthetic version of it from gas stations now. people are buying this stuff in convenience stores and weird sketchy stores. And it's

an

opiate? Yeah, man. That you could buy in a grocery store or a convenience store? You can get it from a leaf, right? It's from a plant called the kratom. Kratom leaf. I don't know what the plant is, but this stuff has become very popular, and I've heard horror stories of people going to like, you know, a quote-unquote health food store, like a juice shop, and And they have these little Live Free drinks, and they go, oh, this must be healthy, it's in this place. And you drink it and you're fucking vomiting, and it's like you feel like you're on opiates.

Wow, I've not even ever heard of this.

Yeah, it's interesting because there was a guy that, uh, he had some real problems with opiates, and then he started telling me that he got off opiates, got clean, and then he was telling me about kratom. That he takes kratom. And I say, what is this stuff? And he said, well, at low doses it acts almost like a stimulant, like caffeine, and then at higher doses it's— it more relaxes you. I'm like, okay, like, well, how much do you take? So he told me, well, you know, if you want to take a couple of them, like before a podcast or something, try it. And I did. I was like, hmm, this is kind of interesting. Took a couple pills. I was like, it is. It's kind of like a little stimulant. No big deal. And then I said, how much do you take? And he said, well, before I wake out— work out, I take 10. So I said, what? I go, you take 10? I go, what does that feel like? He goes, I don't have a problem with it at all. So I took 10, and I called him up and I said, hey man, I go, you're high.

I go, you're getting high. This is— you're not sober. Like, this is not a sober thing. You're— this— I'm high as fuck right now. It was a weird high because it was a high that didn't seem to affect my motor skills. So it was at the studio I did it, so I worked out, have no problem working out. It didn't affect my cardio, it didn't affect my ability to lift weights, it didn't affect anything. And then I was playing pool, it didn't affect my ability to play pool either. It didn't like fuck with my motor skills like alcohol will.

What do you feel like when you're on it? Like, what are you feeling?

Oh, so it's weird. It's a weird high, but whatever it is, it's a high. I was like, dude, you're high as fuck if you're taking 10 of these. Like, you're not sober. And, you know, I think there's a bunch of people that have had problems with opiates that don't recognize that this takes them down that same road. And then I know a lot of people that are heavily addicted to kratom and can't get off of it.

Wow.

Like friends. I have one good friend who takes it every day. He's taken He drinks bottles of these things. He's drinking like 6 a day. I was like, fuck, dude, that's crazy.

I'm so afraid of drugs just because I come from a family of— not to smite my own, I love my family— but just drug addicts and alcoholics.

Many people do. I mean, it's, it's not nothing to be ashamed of. It's normal.

I think I'm the only one who's not been to jail or rehab.

That's crazy.

And then, you know, I've got 2 sisters that died from overdoses and a brother that killed himself.

Oh my God.

Fuck. Yeah, 2 years ago or 3 years ago, my sister Jenny died. Maybe even longer, 4 years ago. And then my sister Heather, who was most like me in the family— in other words, like, we both wanted to get out of North Dakota— and she married into a great family, like one of the best families I've ever seen, and then got on antidepressants. And then I believe when she got off the antidepressants, it was really rough. like a really rough time for her, and she got addicted to methamphetamines. Oh. And then ended up leaving her family and going up to like Fort McMurray, Alberta. And she was up there for like 7 years and wouldn't talk to any of us. And her and I were very close growing up. We were the most alike in that we just wanted to leave North Dakota and see the world and do things. And, and so while she was up there, she was at like a rehab facility And in this wacky fucking Canadian America's Top Hat place, they would give them meth once a week.

What?

At the facility. Yeah. And so she either stored up her meth, like didn't do it one week and kept it and faked it, or got some from someone else but did like a critical amount of meth and killed herself at the facility. And, and

they would give you meth?

They were giving it.

I mean, why were they giving it?

Jamie, you can look this up, but there's a term for it, and I don't remember what it was because I asked the same question. Because her brother, or my brother, ex-brother-in-law, her husband Rick told me, and I was like, why are they giving it to people? And he's like, well, they wanted them doing it like in a clean, safe environment instead of like out on the streets. And I'm like, how about we just get them off of that shit? Like, can we all agree that's bad?

Yeah, what a strange strategy. This is the strategy that they employ in a lot of these cities, right, where they give people access to drugs that are safe and they also give them clean needles and crack pipes. This is something that you see particularly on the West Coast. It's a very common thing in the Pacific Northwest. There's a bunch of these places that will give people— they give them money, they'll give you drugs, and they'll give you needles. And the idea is that you're providing them with safe access.

Well, it killed my sister. Well, she killed herself, but I'm saying, you know, my family is just the story— not the story of it. There's good people in my family, very good people that I love very much. So I'm not trying to smite my own, but we have a problem with addiction.

Dude, a lot of people have a problem with addiction, whether they believe it or not. You know, I think addiction is a normal part of human behavior. And I think there's probably an evolutionary aspect to that. I think addiction is what allows people to get very focused on certain things. Like, to become a good hunter, what do you have to do? Well, you have to be very addicted to the idea of hunting. Yeah. You know? And I think that same sort of pathway can be very destructive. And it can be very destructive, like you can get addicted to gambling, which I've seen a lot of people get addicted to. to gambling, or you can get addicted to drugs and alcohol. You know, there's this guy that I knew that was a world-class pool player, like one of the best in the world, and he hurt his back in a car accident and then become addicted to pills. And my friend Tommy said this best. He said the same thing that made him great at pool made him addicted to those fucking pills. Like, he couldn't put them down. He, he was just invested in those pills.

He wanted to take them all the time, and he died of a drug overdose. Young. And this was a guy that never drank, never smoked, was clean, sober, and which is his number one focus, which is being the best pool player in the world. And I think that thing that we all have, especially some people have in spades— I have it— is I become very addicted to things.

Yeah, me too.

It's very focused on things where it consumes me.

Golf did that to me. I don't golf anymore, but I got to where I was like a 6 handicap, which is a fairly good golfer.

What are you, Jimmy? That's better than me.

About a 14, 15.

So I just shot a— I played for the first time in a few months the other day and just shot like 12 over, which is like a good golfer. But there was a point when I lived in Hawaii that I was like, you know, I shot a couple of par rounds, like 1 or 2 over. And I did this solely because somebody told me I was too much of a fucking gorilla and I'd never be good at it. That was the sole reason. Every time I was practicing, I'm like, yeah, you're probably wrong. I'm gonna show them. I'm gonna show them. That's so ridiculous. I'm gonna beat it. And I like devoted my whole life to it. And then when I got really good and I was better than most people I ran into, I lost all interest. I hardly ever do it now. Really? Hardly ever do it. It's— how am I— it's— that's— it's really weird. It's happened to me a couple of times in life. Where I would go down a road of addiction. It just— fortunately, the addictions were in like positive kind of, you know, positive control loops where I would get into something hard, and then once I felt like I had a certain level of mastery, I'd move on to something else.

Well, that's probably the part of you that wants to learn something from scratch again, to go through that same process.

Yeah.

Which is That's the most important part, I think. The most difficult part is the beginning. Becoming a beginner at things, I think, is very beneficial.

The white belt.

Yeah, it's very beneficial to you to learn that there's something that, oh my God, I know nothing about this. I'm terrible at this. I have so much room to grow.

Yeah.

Whereas something that you've been doing for a long, long time, it, you know, it becomes more of like fine-tuning.

Yeah.

And these slow incremental improvements rather than understanding there's this like enormous sea of information that you're not— you don't have access to yet.

Yeah, with golf it was like, I'm hitting the ball straight, moving on.

That's nuts.

Like, next thing. Bow hunting is though something I haven't exhausted, and obviously technology is something I haven't exhausted.

Well, I think bow hunting is so variable too. There's so many different things. If every shot was 20 yards and every animal stood still, it would be boring. You'd get bored of it. Well, yeah, I don't think you'd get bored of it, but it wouldn't have the same appeal that it has where it's completely chaotic. One of you doesn't even know the game you're playing. That's the animal, you know. It's, it's playing a different game. Its game is survival. It's looking for predators, and you are a predator, but it doesn't understand how you're doing it. And your, your, your thing is like to get to a position where you can execute. execute a shot and do it right. And then the amount of time that you have to put into it, I think, is the real thing for me. It's like the understanding that— look, if I take a few days off of archery and I go and shoot, my first few shots are a little shaky. Yeah. A lot of times I'll still, you know, hit the 10-ring at 60 yards with, you know, a few days off, but it feels a little odd.

It feels— it doesn't feel 100% locked in. And then I have to do it again till I'm locked in. And if I had to shoot an animal like that, like if I had to shoot— if I had a very difficult shot on an elk at like 70 yards and I hadn't shot a bow in 2 months, I would not take it. I wouldn't be able to. Right. Which is nuts.

Right.

I've shot thousands of arrows at 70 yards effectively in a lethal zone. Yeah. And yet I wouldn't be confident that I could do it, where there's a lot of other things that I would be very confident that I could do. if I hadn't done in months, right? It's weird. It is weird. And I think because of that, because it's such an engrossing and involving process, the process of archery in particular, and then bow hunting at the extreme level of it— I think there's 2 different extreme levels of archery. There's target archery, which I think is extreme mentally, but it's still a stable static shot, a static target, versus bow hunting, which is non-static, moving, enormous animals. and all their senses and all the different things that are involved— wind, all the factors, elevation changes. There's a lot of stuff going on. They're moving. There's a lot of things happening that you never can master it. There's no mastery. You can get more effective than you used to be.

And there's different ways to do it. Mm-hmm. Like, I've got— like, I'm a very analytically minded bowhunter. I like breaking everything down, understanding the thermals, Rise and fall of the sun, first light, last light. What are these thermals gonna do on this hill? Where's this buck coming from? Where's the doe bedding? Where are the scrapes outside of that doe bedding? How do I get downwind of them? How do I avoid the parking lots? How do I do all of these things? I've got this other buddy, his name is Johnny Stewart, who is just a deer. Like, I'll go scouting with him. This guy kills 2 or 3 big bucks every year, and you would think this guy must have like a system, and he's just like— I this feels like a place where there are deer. I'm like, well, John, what are you talking about right now? He's like, I don't know, Bill, but like, just the way this place looks to me— Well, it's pattern recognition. Yeah, yeah, but he's pulling it from a place where he, he can't cite to you what's going on, right? Whereas when I walk into a spot, I'm like, well, I've got 3 intersecting trails that come here, there's, you know, doe bedding over here, I've got 2 scrapes here, the thermals come up at 8:30, so I want to be— I want to wait for the thermal switch before I get into my stand, otherwise my Scent is gonna paint this side of the mountain, and he's just like, this looks good.

It's interesting that there's, there's people that are system-oriented, and then there's other people that are instinctive. Yeah, that, that's a big factor in striking. So in striking, one of the things that I find interesting is some people who are great strikers— and by strikers, I'm talking about martial arts— yeah, some people have a system and they're really good at like showing their system and teaching their system, and other people can't quite tell you what they're doing.

Right.

They just know how to do it. They know how to— they know how to like do something at varying speeds in order to fuck with someone's perceptions, their timing and reads.

Yeah.

And they just do it instinctively, and it's just they've done it— they've done it so many times. They just know what they're doing, but they can't teach it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's so strange, especially when you talk to people who are at that very high level. Like, I think you know, but I've become pretty good friends with Georges St-Pierre. Mm-hmm. And when you— him and I bear hunted last year together, and I spent basically a week with him. And I didn't do jiu-jitsu. I did mixed martial arts in the military. I did combatives, we called it in the military, for like 7, 8 years. So it was a little different. Like, you would learn the basics, but then it would get into All right, now that you've got him in this position, you can stab him. Or now that you're in this position, you can break contact. Or like— so there was a combat nexus to it. Right. That wasn't strictly jiu-jitsu. There was more to it. And, um, but like talking to him and then just like messing around or seeing like how he applies pressure or what he's doing or how he's a great wrestler and how he integrates these other things, it's just— when you deal with these people, or like with Gordon, It's like you're at a level that's just— I couldn't ever get there even if I hoped to.

And even if you could explain to me what's— like, in other words, Gordon could pin me in a position and say, here's what you got to do. I still can't do it. You know what I'm saying? Right.

To him.

To him. And so they're just at such a level that even if they are able to articulate it to you, you're still not getting there because you don't have everything that it takes to bridge the gap from here to there.

Well, Gordon's very— systematic, you know, and it comes from his teaching under Donahue. Like, Donahue— John Donahue was, I think, the great mastermind of jiu-jitsu. He has very specific systems and he breaks things down like they're very technique-oriented. And then there's, there's things that you just learn from over the course of training. There's the flow of it all. Yeah. That you learn from it. But Gordon is like a great example of someone who's an amazing teacher and As well as an amazing jiu-jitsu competitor, because like his— a big part of his income comes from his instructionals, selling instructionals. Yeah, because they're so good.

Yeah, he— I mean, the thing that's interesting to me about Donahue is like he's almost like a first principles jiu-jitsu guy. Like when you hear him talk, like he breaks things down to like very elemental levels where it's like, what is the point of jiu-jitsu? What are you doing with jiu-jitsu? Like, what are you trying to establish? And it's like, right, I'm not even thinking about these things. But he's like— because I think his background's in philosophy, right? Or something like that.

Yeah, Columbia. Yeah, he was, he was a professor.

That's so— it's crazy, that transition.

Or at least— was he a professor? Was he— it was definitely— was a PhD, I believe. And then started doing jiu-jitsu because he was a bouncer and wanted to learn how to fight. So like, I probably should learn how to fight, because he was a powerlifter at one point in time and a rugby player also. Yeah, and then became obsessed and, you know, became the greatest coach of all time. And he's like a character from a film. Yeah, really doesn't— he doesn't exist in real life because he's a guy who wears a rash guard everywhere he goes.

I saw pictures of him at a wedding. You just took the words out of my

mouth. I mean, but he's a real eccentric. It's not like he's trying to be eccentric.

It's like he's either this or he's a bad guy in a Bond movie.

Okay, so 6th-degree black belt, arrived in the United States in '91 to study at Columbia University's philosophy PhD program. After arriving in New York, Donahue was introduced to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, continued training at the academy, became teaching classes as well while Gracie— Renzo Gracie was traveling for competition. So did he finish his education and did he start teaching?

PhD.

Yeah, master's degree in philosophy and was pursuing a PhD.

Okay, and so that's when he became obsessed. And so while he was attending the university He worked as a bouncer in various Manhattan nightclubs, so I've elevated his education, but a little bit. That's insane. I thought he was teaching, but he, when he started teaching jiu-jitsu, he was like sleeping on the mats. Like, he's— he was there all day long every day.

Another addictive personality.

Not just that, but a man who is obsessed with— do you know the Japanese term kaizen?

I've heard you talk about it.

Yeah, kaizen is you continue to improve on one thing. constantly, where it's this never-ending cycle of improvement. And this is his philosophy that he applies to jiu-jitsu. This is this continual cycle of improvement. You know, there's, there's certain applications that people have seen, like the, the application of Kaizen in engineering, for example. Like, a good example is like they take a specific platform and continue to work on— like, a good example is the Nissan GT-R. Are you aware of the Nissan GT-R?

Yes.

Okay. So Nissan GT-R is one of the best examples of that, where it is essentially the same car for 20-plus years. Yeah, and they, they don't change the body shape, they don't change the geometry, they don't change the way it's an all-wheel drive sports car. But what they do is continue to refine it to the point where it was just fucking dialed in. Tweaking it. Just constantly improving it and just dialing it in, dialing it in further, further, further, further. And if you get like a 2025— I think it was 2025 or 2026 was the last year they made the GT-R— and you compare it to like one that was released in the 19— God, when was the first GT-R? Was it 2000s? Was it—

I think it was late '90s, I thought, but maybe early 2000s.

It might be early 2000s. I think it's in the 2000s, but it almost looks the same, but they're so much better. And that's, that's the same with everything. I mean, Kaizen as applied to mixed martial arts as a whole, like if you looked at mixed martial arts as a whole, all these individuals that are competing in it and all these individuals that are pursuing it and teaching it and studying it, they're essentially doing that. They're taking this thing that used to be this chaotic thing where, you know, there was certain strategies that people had and You know, one guy was a brawler, the other guy was a grappler, get you down on the ground, punch you in the face a bunch of times. And then they're expanding the possibilities to this, like, insane level where you're seeing people now that are, like, on the Dana White Contender Series that would be absolute world champions in 1994.

Right.

And these guys haven't even entered the UFC yet.

Right. You

know, because the level of the game— So far. Through this constant pursuit of excellence. And then this competition, this boiling pot of competition where you have— I mean, how many MMA athletes are there worldwide now? Oh my God. Who knows? It's got to be in the hundreds of thousands of elite MMA athletes. When I say elite, I mean like guys who could fight professionally. I would say there's probably— I mean, they might not all be fighting professionally yet, but they're at that level. When you introduce amateurs and you think about how many thousands and thousands and thousands of gyms there are, and out of those gyms, how many people have like people that are at a very high level? Fuck, it's crazy. So this is a new thing. Like, I say this all the time, but it really is accurate. Martial arts have evolved more in the last 33 years than they have in the last 33,000 years. And that is true. Yeah. Because from the time the UFC came about in 1993, I mean, the Brazilians were way ahead. The Brazilians were way— the Gracie family in particular were way ahead of the curve.

They were pursuing this and looking into this in the 1940s and '50s. Like, Helio Gracie was having mixed martial arts competitions in the 1940s. You know, they were having what they called Vale Tudo. Yeah. It was anything goes. And they were having fights in the ring in front of large groups of people long before the UFC was ever around. You know, Rickson Gracie famously had them when he was 18 years old, when he became the champion of the family. I mean, he was, he was defeating much larger people when he was 18.

Yeah, I remember watching that back in the day too, like peak UFC. Not peak, but it's pretty big now. I still go to it now, but watching like GSP in his heyday back in the day and stuff like that, it's just— We get—

well, that was peak emergence.

Peak emergence.

Yeah, peak emergence was like 2005 on. So 2005 was The Ultimate Fighter, and it's very rare when one moment really sort of defines the growth of a sport, but you can find that in MMA. And in that one moment was the Stephan Bonnar-Forest Griffin fight in the finals of The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV. It got millions and millions of people watching it, like more than anything anybody had ever watched on Spike TV before. Yeah. And it was just because it was so good. It was so crazy. And you see the rise of people watching it. They could, they could track the ratings in real time. So people were calling their friends going, dude, you gotta fucking watch this. Turn on Spike TV. This is crazy. And they were watching it and it changed the entire course of martial arts forever. That one fight.

Yeah, I mean, for me, the one, my watershed moment was like GSP-Bisping, like watching When GSP went up a weight class. And what year was that? 2017 or somewhere

around there. Yeah, went up to middleweight.

Yeah, but for me it was just like, okay, now I'm obsessed because this guy's just done so— like, I thought— I love GSP, I know him, but I didn't think at that— I didn't know him at the time. I just thought, I don't know, this is gonna be tough. And just to watch somebody go up another weight class and go and win in this like I just— it was amazing.

By the way, GSP is not even a big welterweight. You know, GSP, when you look at welterweights today, GSP is the size of a large middleweight— or excuse me, a large lightweight today, a large 155-pounder today.

I think he walks around like 160 right now or something.

Well, that's light. I think he's heavier than that. I think he's in the 180s. Is he? Maybe in the— maybe even in the 190s. Well, depending on how much he's weightlifting and what he's doing.

I thought he was less, but

he's definitely heavier than that. But in his prime, he would Hover around the high 190s and then cut down to 170.

Yeah, but he was a beast in that fight too.

There's guys now, like, do you, do you follow closely, like, top contenders?

Not closely, not like I should. No, not as closely as I should. I mean, I'll watch the big events or like, you know.

There's this cat, Michael Morales. He's one of the scariest guys in the 170-pound division. He's a fucking monster, like a really, really dangerous guy, and he's enormous. He gets well over 220, well over 220, and gets down to 170.

And just cuts at the last minute?

No, he cuts it slowly over time, but then he rehydrates and reinflates. And when you see him inside the octagon, you're like, how the fuck? And I don't know how many times he can do that. So that is essentially—

That's tough on the body.

Very brutal on the kidneys. It is essentially a death's door event. You're getting to death's door. You're getting to death's door 24 hours before you have to fight in a cage, and then you're rehydrating yourself and replenishing yourself. Not to 100%, by the way.

No, no, you can't.

You're not. Yeah, there's no way. So this is how big Morales is. He's fucking enormous, dude, and he's so powerful. He's absolutely huge for the weight class. When you see him, he looks like a light heavyweight. He really does, because he is. I mean, he's basically like £220 now. He looks like a big middleweight when he's in there, but yet Somehow or another, he makes it to 170, and he's undefeated. And not just undefeated in the UFC, he's starching people. And he's a wrestler who very rarely wrestles, and he has a judo background, very rarely uses that.

It's kind of like Gaethje, right?

Justin Gaethje. Yeah, he does it in a way, but this guy is much bigger and just a real seek-and-destroy welterweight and one of the absolute top contenders. Terrifying human.

Yeah, I just meant that Gaethje was a really good wrestler, and you hardly ever see him wrestling.

Right, right. Well, it takes a lot of energy to wrestle people. That's part of the problem. In order to grapple and constantly shoot and taking people down, it's one of the most energy-intensive aspects of MMA. Like, shooting on someone, you're exploding.

A lot of energy.

And then you're wrestling with them, so you're grappling with all their strength, using technique and leverage, and then you have to hoist their body up in the air. And slam them to the ground.

Get that takedown.

And you can only do that so many times, which is one of the reasons why Merab is so fucking extraordinary, is the fact that that guy can do that full blast for 5 rounds. It's insane. His, his cardio should be studied in a fucking laboratory because he's a real freak. Yeah. He's a real freak. Yeah, I bet. But very few people have that ability. He breaks world-class fighters. Like, you know, Umar Nurmagomedov, like when he fought him, like, he's like, he almost like couldn't believe this guy was still doing this like deep into the 5th round. Like, it was just so crazy, his, his, his work output. And most people don't have that. So most people, when they're really good grapplers, they develop a style that's like a mix of grappling and striking because there's time. Even Khabib, like one of the rounds with Conor McGregor, he never shot for a takedown.

Yeah.

It's the round that Conor won, and it's because he just chose to stand because he had to like realize like, okay, I burned so much energy in the first couple rounds going after this guy, taking him down, smashing him. Like, I can't keep this up. I have to take a round where I don't burn off as much energy and let my body recover a bit.

Yeah, that— the White House fight, I watched that from my cabin out in North Dakota. The event at the White House. I was alone. I've shown you pictures. Cabin out in the middle of nowhere. It was my father's cabin that I bought back in the family like 4 years ago, rebuilt it from the ground up, and I was like, I'm in the perfect place to watch this fight. I was so hyped up, like, watching the whole thing. Like, my son was coming downstairs, I was like, not now, I'm watching the fight. Like, leave me alone, I'm watching the fight. I was cheering, it was crazy. I just remember watching Ilia talk. I think he was on your podcast, wasn't he? Saying he was just gonna decimate Gaethje.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was—

he thought it was gonna be easy, and I said, man, I don't know how you could think it. And a lot of people were saying to me, like, when I was saying Justin has a huge chance, and they would go, oh, you're hyping this fight up, I know what you do. Like, Ari Shaffir accused me of that. He's like, oh, I know what you're doing, the guy who's gonna lose, you're saying he has a chance. I go, no, he has a real fucking chance. He's insanely durable, he's extremely experienced in very high-level competition against world-class fighters, and He's been in the deep trenches where you're in hell. Like, if you're in a war, like the wars that he had, like with Dustin Poirier, he had a war, he had that war with Max Holloway. He's been in those trench wars where it's 4 and 5 rounds, you've been beaten up for fucking 3 rounds, your body is broken, and you're exhausted, and yet you have to persevere and press on.

He's a freak of nature.

He's amazing.

So Tyler, from archery country. He's a good friend of mine. We were in Vegas for the Paddy fight with Gaethje. Mm-hmm. That you were gracious enough to invite me to. And we— I don't gamble, but we were leaving a casino. We were there for some reason, and I think I had like $100 in my pocket. So Tyler and I were like, we're gonna go back, or go— we're gonna go to the fight, I think. Actually, we were going to the fight. So I sat down at like a 3-card poker table, and I was like, it's an easy game, let's just play. Like, I got $100, let's just do this. So I ended up getting up to like $1,000 at this 3-card poker table with Tyler. So I was like, dude, like, let's just leave. Like, we've got the money, like, let's just get out of here. So we're walking out of the casino, and he says, hey, why don't we put money on the, um, Gaethje fight tonight against Pimblett? And I was like, okay. So I had to like download an app, and we went to the thing, and like place the bet at the place, and we both were like, we gotta bet on Justin.

Like, it's gotta go this way. It's like, you know, because— and he was the underdog.

He was?

Yeah, he was the underdog for sure, because I got paid— I put down $500 or something like that.

Wow, that's crazy.

Can you certify that? But I'm 99% sure because I got a big payday on it. I made like— I think I got $2,000, or maybe $1,500 or something like that.

I do not know why he'd be the underdog.

Yeah, there it is.

Paddy Pimblett is the favorite and Justin Gaethje is the underdog. Wow.

Yeah, so we put—

-238. That's crazy.

So we, we put that $500 apiece that we won playing 3-card— that I won playing 3-card poker on Justin.

Wow.

And then we got paid and it was in like my DraftKings account or whatever, whatever, wherever the money got deposited. I didn't even know how to get to the money. I just had $1,500 there. So at the, at the Whitehouse fight I called Tyler that night, that day of, and I said, dude, I'm just gonna put all of this money back on Justin again. And he's like, I already took my money out. I should have done that. And I was like, I mean, it was $100 and now it's $1,500. So I put it all on the— and he was the underdog again for the Ilia fight.

Yeah.

So it ended up being like $6K.

Wow.

I turned from $100 into like $6K, and then I took it out and used it to rebuild my house. So Justin, I owe Justin my upstairs. I paid for all the flooring upstairs from Justin's fists.

That's a good way to gamble. Yeah, that's good. That's good, healthy gambling.

Never do it again, but it was awesome. I mean, I had one run.

Yeah, I'm very conflicted about gambling because I've met a lot of gambling addicts. I know a lot of gamblers because I come from the pool world, you know, and the pool world was filled with gambling addicts. That was my first real exposure to people that are addicted. They would go to off-track betting before they ever got to the pool hall, and then they'd show up at the pool hall during the day. They'd have stories. The fucking horse, I bet on this horse, he didn't come in. They were all addicts, and then they would all be looking for action. Oh my God. They'd either— they played gin. There was guys that would play gin, or they'd play poker. There was like a whole like elevated level where it's like seating and stuff where it was like above the pool tables where guys would hang out and have card games. and then they would gamble on pool games. And everybody was just in action. It was in— everyone was in action. And part of me is like, oh, you know, gambling can be destructive, right? But it wasn't for me. So why is that? So isn't it like— isn't it a personal control thing?

Like, isn't it like recognizing what's detrimental to you and what's positive? Isn't that a bunch of aspects of life? Like, I'm pro-alcohol too. But I recognize that people could become alcoholics, right? But isn't that also like a personal control thing?

Yeah.

Like, should you— shouldn't you know what you, you can do and what you can't do? And isn't the real thing learning how to control yourself? I mean, so I don't have any problem with gambling at all, and I know way too many people who enjoy it to ever like come out against gambling. But yet I have friends that are staunchly anti-gambling, and they think that these gambling apps are terrible and and think these casinos are terrible and that we should outlaw all of it. And I'm like, man,

you just shove it underground.

Yeah, that's also— people have enjoyed that since the beginning of time. And then also coming from the world that I come from, coming from the pool world, gambling is a huge part of how you get good at pool. One of the things about pool is stakes. Like, you know the term pool? It comes from pooling money together to gamble.

No, I did not know that.

Yeah, it's not called pool, it's called pocket billiards. So the original billiards game— Right. Well, there's a game that is also still played in a lot of Latin American countries, South Korea, they're really big on it, and it's called 3-cushion billiards. And 3-cushion billiards is a game that you play on a table that doesn't have any pockets. And what it is, is you have 3 balls, and the key is understanding geometry and force and spin and how it affects the rails. So the rails are all these rubber rails, and in 3-cushion billiards, you contact one ball, and then you have to go 3 cushions, contact the second ball, and then the original ball. So you're contacting these 3 balls, but also hitting 3 cushions.

Huh.

Yeah, or 2 balls, but also hitting 3 cushions. So you can't just hit one ball into another ball. There's a— there's a— there is an old billiard game where they did that, but it's a very boring game. But this 3-cushion game is a much more dynamic form of it. So that's billiards. And then there's pocket billiards. So pocket billiards is what people think of as pool, is where you're shooting a ball into a hole. There's 6 holes on the table. So pool comes from the term of pooling money together to gamble on pocket billiards. Yeah. So when you go to a pool hall, That's a gambling hall. That's what they were. And so, in New York City, at the turn of the century, the turn of the 20th century, I think there was some insane number of pool halls just in New York City. I think it was over 1,000.

Wow.

Yep. And it was a lot of these guys, especially in the 1940s, and guys coming home from the war. They didn't have families, and it was a bachelor culture. And these guys, they didn't want to be a part of society anymore. They just wanted to, you know, unplug and be a part of this world of men where men got together and they gambled and they smoked and they talked shit and they— Sounds fun. Engaged in a lot of vice, you know. There's— and that was also when I was exposed to drugs, like a lot of drugs.

How old were you at this time?

23. Yeah, about 23, maybe 24 when I really started playing a lot. And a lot of these guys— that was the first time I ever saw anybody do heroin. Yeah, it was a guy who was a world-class pool player. He had 2 nicknames. One of them was Buffalo Bill and the other one was Water Dog. And this guy, he was a world-class pool player who was also a heroin addict. And what he would do is he would go into the bathroom, and everybody knew what was going on. He would go into the bathroom, lock the door, shoot up, And then he'd come out and he would sit on one of those billiard chairs. So he'd sit on like— it's like a big barstool with like arms on it. He'd sit there like this

and just pass out.

No, just, just zone out for like 20 minutes, just high as fuck on heroin, and then come back. And then when he's back, he was ready to play. And his eyes, his fucking pupils were huge. That's what I remember. It was like he had gerbil eyes, like shark eyes, and he couldn't miss. I mean, it was insane watching him play. He were playing— there's this table in Executive Billiards in White Plains, New York, where I used to play. Table 1 had these tiny little pockets because it was the gambling table. So the table— the pockets were just— Hard. Just shy of 4 inches. So you couldn't fit 2 balls in them, and they were very gaffy, meaning like the way the angles were cut, like it was like the way it was made was kind of haphazard, the way they wedged these things in there to make the pockets tighter. It wasn't perfect. Like, if you would hit the point a little bit, it would bobble out. Yeah, it wasn't— it was very difficult to be accurate on this table. And this fucking guy couldn't miss. He was playing for $10,000. Holy shit. And I was watching this guy play.

That stresses me out.

I was watching this guy play for $10,000, and he— the other guy, the guy he was playing, this guy George the Greek, who was a famous gambler, and George would be yelling at him, this motherfucker, he can't play without his shit. He's got to take that fucking shit. So he's trying to distract him while he's playing, and this guy just— he just couldn't miss, just moving around the table, seeing all the angles. It's like to him the game was simple, and it was just when he was on heroin, and he had to do heroin. And I ran into him years later. So I knew him in New York, and then I moved to California, and this was like '95, '96. I was playing in this tournament in Bellflower, California, and There's this legendary pool hall that used to exist there. There's still one in Sacramento, but there's one in Bellflower that was called Hard Times. And Hard Times was the mecca when I was playing pool in New York. Everybody was talking about Hard Times. Hard Times is where all the gambling was, and all the great players, the Filipino players, would go there. And they had this big Sunday tournament.

And so I would go and play in the Sunday tournament because anybody could play. I just get killed every week. But I'd go anyway just to be able to play like world-class players and to watch and just have fun. And Waterdog was there, and I go, hey man, what are you doing out here? And he's like, yeah, I took a trip. I took a trip to California, you know, just try to get, get in some action. He goes, I want to get in the tournament, but I don't have any money. I go, I'll put you in. So it was only like, I don't remember, it was $20, $25 to get in the tournament.

Oh no.

And so I said, I'll put you in. He goes, oh, but I gotta go get my shit. And I was like, what? I go, well, go get your shit. He goes, I need a ride. I go, I'm not driving you. And he goes, come on. He goes, you got to give me a ride. It's fine. Don't worry. And but I had a nice car at the time, my first nice car, and a Toyota Supra Turbo.

Nice.

I loved it. Yeah, I was like, I can't drive. They'll confiscate my car. Thought you were gonna say Highline. You can get in real trouble. And he wouldn't, he wouldn't play, like, or he wouldn't accept that I wouldn't take him there. So I put him in anyway. He played sober. He played terrible. He, like, he was angry, like Wasn't playing good, like rotten. Like, you could tell it was a mess. And he just— guy could have won the tournament. He was that good.

I grew up in Canada for a few years, like 3 years, and I remember reading— and I don't know who this is, and I hope Jamie can look it up for me, Jamie, if you don't mind— but there was a story of a goaltender that would play on drugs. And I want to say it was something crazy. Maybe it was something simple like cocaine, but he would take the drugs before a hockey match because it made the world look slower. Oh. And it made him a better goaltender. Mm. And he said it was like the ball— the puck became like catching a beach ball or something like that. Grant Fuhr. That's him.

Edmonton Oilers and Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender. So he publicly admitted to abusing cocaine for about 7 years, or using it correctly. Why is he abusing? Yeah. He used it correctly. Rumors and reports circulated about cocaine use involving several members of the powerhouse Edmonton Oilers dynasty. including a well-known 1986 Sports Illustrated report, though Fuhr was the most high-profile player to face official league discipline regarding— well, probably because he admitted it.

Right. I mean, I remember hearing him say like—

Yeah, 1990, he admitted it publicly.

Yeah, and I was a child then, so I'd have been 8 at that time. But I was living in Canada where everything was hockey. Mm-hmm. Like, you were not— it was hockey night in Canada. It was Molson Labatt Blue. And the whole— like, when I moved there, I was in 2nd grade, and I only knew football. And the coach was like, yeah, we only play hockey here. And I was like, I've never played hockey. He's like, well, you do now. And I was like, well, we're— my mom, we're poor, we don't have any money. This is like an—

Spoilers on Cocaine, look at that.

Look at the

hockey news. Wow.

Oh shit. But all I did was watch hockey. They made you. And I told them, I was like, we can't afford hockey gear. all of the kids on the team donated a hockey bag full of gear. The coach brought it to my house. This was like in a little town called Plum Coulee, Manitoba, like east of Winkler. Small town, 300 people. And they're like, you play hockey now. And I started learning to skate and did that for like 3 years. And it was just, everything was hockey. There was no choice in it. It was crazy.

It's religion up there.

It was total religion. Yeah. And it was, I remember hearing that story about that guy and it made me think of that when you were saying that. And that's strange. That's so strange. that people get better when they're in these altered states?

Well, Ariel Helwani posted something on Twitter today that someone sent me because it was pretty interesting, and it was about this guy who's a goalie. See if you can find it. He's talking about how interesting and introspective this guy is and a fascinating thinker. And this guy's very intelligent. I don't know his name. I don't follow hockey, unfortunately. But he was talking about how he has to be in an unconscious state to play goalie. And that as a— when he's in his conscious state, like when he's joking around and talking to people and laughing and having fun with his teammates, then he's conscious and he's thinking. He's thinking too much. So he has to achieve this unconscious state in order to just react as to be a better goalie. But it was— see if you can find it.

Like a flow state almost.

Yeah, and the way he described it was really interesting because I was like, I get that. I understand what he's saying. Because you get that with everything. Like, I cannot talk and play pool. If I talk and play pool, I'll play like shit. Like, I'm talking to my buddies and having fun, I get frustrated. I'm like, I got to stop talking because if I'm talking, I can't— like, listen. Yeah, this is the guy. Listen to this.

About 34 saves in your night, just how you felt and what you saw as you looked out from your crease. Yes, I felt nothing. The The problem with me is that I have a lot of fun playing, but when I start having too much fun, it makes me into— from an unconscious goalie to a conscious goalie. And my conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie. So I have to like let my unconscious brain do the work because it reacts a lot quicker. When I'm having too much fun and I'm smiling and I'm talking to everybody and I'm hanging out, what happens is that shifts me into more conscious brain goalie. And then I can't react in time. And then I'm just slow, I'm behind the play, and then I give up 7 goals, you know. But today it was just unconscious, like don't think about anything, you know. If you ask me how I made a save, I'd be like, I have no idea. Just my unconscious brain does it, and, uh, that's what you work and practice for, you know.

Well, you felt nothing during the game, but I wonder what you felt like after when you're doing the 3 stars and you hear the crowd.

And, uh, when the buzzer went, that's when I was like, okay, now you can let it all go. So you get a huge rush of like dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline and just like goosebumps. It's the best feeling in the world. It's like the biggest reason why I love to play. And yeah, then you can just let it all out. Now I can smile and enjoy myself. But yeah, like TV timeouts in between periods, I'm like, don't smile. Don't talk to anyone. Just focus on your game. Let your unconscious brain do it. And it was great. It worked.

What is this guy's name, Jamie? Did it say in Ariel's— okay.

I don't follow hockey anymore.

But it's the same as you were talking about with archery when you're shooting a deer, right? Yeah, like you're going through this process. You're thinking, you're going through it, but it's like you're just trying to stay focused. Then after it's over, you're like, oh yeah, now you can be conscious and aware of this moment. Like, wow, this is insane.

Yeah, it's a flow state.

Devin Cooley.

Devin Cooley, amazing.

The only other place that I ever experienced that was in the military. Like, we would plan for 6 months for an operation and do all this intelligence gathering going into an operation. where blood and treasure is on the line. One of the operations—

Blood and treasure, I like how you put that.

Well, that's always the stake when I was collecting intelligence. Those were always the stakes that I kept foremost in my mind, is that collect this like blood and treasure is on the line, like our country's money and the taxpayer that has to labor every day to pay these fucking taxes, and the blood of the people, your brothers that you love, are the ones that are going into this, because I was, like I said before, I am not the long tabber, I am not the cool guy. I was the nerd for the cool guys, so I treated it like it was, like the outcome of the entire operation depended on me is always what went through my brain. That was the only way that I went into this, and if I wasn't totally locked in, but when I would be on a hill or in a helicopter or in a Humvee watching an operation go down based off of my intelligence work, I would get into that same flow state I get with bow hunting. Bow hunting, when I was retiring from the military, I was so stressed out because I had no idea what I was going to do that was going to replicate this experience.

I was like, where am I going to get this flow state from? And it dawned on me while I was in the military that helping hunters in the same way solve targeting problems as helping JSOC guys or Rangers or Green Army guys that sense of completion that I would get at the end, like when bad guys were dead or arrested or a terrorist operation was sunk based off of all that work was just like the most addictive feeling in the world. It is a very addictive feeling, and that flow state that I would get into when I was doing work that was particularly meaningful is such a hard thing to replicate. It is like a place you have to find yourself in. It is not a place you can put yourself in. Hmm. You have to get there, like start doing the work, start putting things together, start thinking,

Here it is. What do we got here, Jamie?

A friend of mine taught me this a long time ago. I don't— I think you probably learned it in college somewhere, but—

Oh, I've seen this. Yes.

4 stages of competence.

Yes. Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, unconscious competence, and conscious completion— competence.

Unconscious competence is the last one.

The last one.

Okay.

So the idea is that you start from ignorance, and we're all aware of a lack of knowledge of skill exists. And then you go into conscious incompetence. We're aware that a lack of knowledge and a skill exists. We're unaware initially. And then you go to, we are able to use the new skill with effort. So that's conscious competence. And then mastery, we're able to use the skill easily without effort.

Yeah, it gets integrated into—

And then it starts all over again when you learn something new. Yeah, and that's why people are addicted to learning things new.

Yeah.

From the beginning. Beginner stage is very important, very good for the mind. And becoming a beginner at new things, I think, is one of the best things a person can do, especially a new difficult thing like bow hunting or like jiu-jitsu or like golf or like anything, or yoga, anything that's hard to do. Like learning it in the beginning, it's very exciting and very good for the mind. And I think one of the things that happens to people is they stop doing that, and then their brain is Atrophies. Yep, their brain atrophies the same way your muscles atrophy when you no longer use it. Yep, and that skill of— or the experience rather of learning a new skill, learning a new world, a new universe that you are now engrossed in— very, very beneficial.

So good for your ego too. Yeah, just— I don't think— as I get better at anything, whether it's building apps, military operations, My limited time in doing things like jiu-jitsu— like, I just rejoined, or was trying, attempting to rejoin a gym, but I'm gonna find a different one. Just knowing there's a thing in life, like, when I— when you get really good at something, you actually start to learn how much you don't know,

right?

It's like you've just uncovered a new world of like, holy shit, I really don't know anything. I thought I was getting towards the top, and this was a false mountain. And now the big— like, I looked at a mountain, I started to climb, I got to the top, and I'm like, oh shit, this isn't even the mountain I was I was looking at. That's over there.

Dennis McKenna had a great expression about this. He said— and I'm gonna fuck this up, but it's essentially— I'm paraphrasing it— that as you expand the bonfire of knowledge, it highlights the surface area of ignorance.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, and that the more you learn and the more it expands this this understanding that you have of the world you live in, the more it highlights how much you don't know. And that's why people that pretend they know it all are so fucking dangerous. Okay. As the bonfire of knowledge grows brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes. That's Terence. I think his brother was the original. I think that someone's paraphrasing that. I think they're attributing that to Terence when it's Dennis. I think, 'cause I'm pretty— I might be wrong. But I'm pretty sure that Terence is quoting Dennis. Either way, both brilliant guys.

Yeah, it's like the— it's like the yin-yang thing. Like, have one foot in the competence of what you've learned and then another foot in the unconscious incompetence of what you don't know, or what you know you don't know. And it's like one of those things too, is like, as you begin to learn these things, you realize— I almost become ashamed when I see how great I can be in certain Like how good— one of the things my grandmother taught me, all of these pearls of wisdom that I come back to now because there's a significant amount of time where I was being raised by my grandparents. My grandmother used to say, be good for goodness sakes. Hmm. And as a kid, I was always like, whatever, Grandma.

Isn't that like Santa Claus? I don't know. Be good.

I think it's from that song. I think that's right. I think that's right. But she would always say, like, when I was fucking up, she'd be like, be good for goodness sakes. Like, just be good. Right. And I threw that away. but she like put a seed. I think Andy said, I put that can of food in the pantry of my mind to come back to it later. Mm-hmm. Because now in my adulthood, it's like I am always trying to, you know, be good, but also for no reward in itself. Like one of the things, a funny story I always tell is when my wife and kids, when I go to poison my children at McDonald's every once in a while, I always pay for the vehicle behind me. So we will go through and we have this thing and my kids are always like looking at the vehicle behind because I always tell the person at McDonald's like I am paying for the person behind me. I do this in other places in my life much more meaningfully, but this is a good example. And this one time the lady is like, are you sure you want to pay for the people behind you?

And like my wife looks at me and she is like, you know, what is the problem? And she is like, it is going to be like $170 or something. And I was like, well, it is not a principle if I don't do it right now, so I am going to pay for them. And then as we are pulling away, there is like a big group of like, you know, a bunch of kids just going nuts that their food was paid for. But I would often engage in those types of things because it made me feel good, and that is probably the wrong reason to be gracious. And as I have gotten older—

Why is it bad to feel good, though? You are doing a good thing and you feel good doing a good thing.

There is something self-centric about it. A little bit.

I say that all the time, that there is something selfish about being generous.

Yeah, and so now I try to do it with no expectation that the person will ever know who did it. And my hope is that they will walk around saying there are angels in the world or good people in the world that do— like I will never know who this person is. So now I try to do big meaningful things in that way, but that was the pearl that my grandmother dropped me was be good for goodness' sakes. Like I am just being good for goodness' sakes. I am not doing it because it is going to inflate my ego. I am not doing it because I am going to go tell people what I have done. Like I will never tell people these things. I only use the McDonald's analogy because it is an easy one that is not like I am not this benevolent guy. But trying to do it in that way, it's just, you know, these old ways of doing things and these old sayings that people have start to come full circle. Then you realize there's a ton of freaking profundity in these things that we can leverage and try to make ourselves better people by doing it.

Yeah,

it's interesting, that idea that there's knowledge that's in us that we don't know and that we've been given whether— I guess it's through genetics, or for lack of a better term, or through whatever, soul transmission. But, you know, if you're aware that there's a young Chinese kid who did an experiment with moths, and he ran this experiment with moths in the caterpillar stage, and he found out that through the trans— formation from a moth to a caterpillar, you know, they essentially become like mush and then reemerge as a caterpillar once they go into the cocoon. Like, this is like very intense metabolic transformation— Yeah. —where their body's like broken down to this mush and then becomes a butterfly that— or a moth— that this knowledge is transmitted through that process. And not just that, but it's also transmitted to their offspring. Somehow or another. Yeah, he's proven this.

Epigenetics, I think it's called. Yeah,

but this kid proved this like physically with these animals, with these insects. See if you can find that.

I've only found a video saying it, and they don't have a link on that.

It has something to do with lavender. They used a scent, and the scent, when they encounter the scent, they, they develop this like, they, they Had something where there was like a vibration, and when they encountered the scent, there was an uncomfortable vibration they experienced, so they avoided that scent. And he could prove that the moths had gone from the caterpillar stage and the moths still retained that memory, and then also it had been transmitted to their offspring.

I believe B.F. Skinner also did this with rats.

Right, with mazes, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And with the smell of cats.

Right.

Something along those lines. Well,

the rat thing is really interesting too, because this puts it— right, it's Skinner, right? This also puts it into the principle of morphic resonance. You know, like the idea is that you're— so this is one of the things they've shown is that if you teach rats on the East Coast how to navigate a maze, rats on the West Coast can navigate that maze quicker.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is Rupert Sheldrake's work.

Yeah, strange.

Very weird stuff because I think we're very— we have this narrow-minded perception of what knowledge is and what information is and where it is and where it's coming from. It's like that thing that you said when you see someone, you get the ick.

Yep.

Like, well, I don't know what you're getting. Like, maybe you're getting— there's— maybe it's pattern recognition, maybe it's not. Maybe there's like a— there's a sense that we have That's undefined. Yeah. That you can't put a ruler to, or you can't put on a scale, but there's something there that we're not totally aware of that allows us to stay safe and has been inside of us forever.

I think it's like a framing problem because, like, the Greeks would say the spirit of war, and I don't think they meant like a flying demon or something, or like, you know, they didn't mean that there's this god of war and he's a physical entity. I think they mean This is a persistent thing across all classes of humans that no matter who they are, this is inside of them. And so it's like a god to us. It's a god because it rules us. We don't— it doesn't have— we don't have it, it has us.

Well, it's that spirit that comes out when I was talking about with protests.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, and so there's the mob mentality thing. Yes. It's this thing that happens to us.

Yeah, and so that's why I say I don't make a lot of distinction between God, the collective unconscious, or transcendent reality. It's this abyss of unknowing that we are fortunate to tap into every once in a while. Right. And pull something out of it. And like, it was interesting, I watched your interview with J.D. Vance, and you guys were talking about the difference between like what he conceptualizes as a demon and what you conceptualize as an alien. And I just think that was a mismatch impedance. I think you guys could be talking about the same thing, but you're using a regionally accepted formal lexicon to describe it. But you could be saying the same thing. So— Perhaps.

But I had a purpose to why I was questioning him on that.

Yeah.

My purpose is that my perception was that he was signaling to a certain group of very religious voters.

Yes. I know.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. No, I, and I know that's why I was so— I don't know if I messaged you about this or not. I believe I did, but it blew my mind that people were talking shit that you had him on. It's like, why wouldn't you want the vice president on? Like, there are a bunch of comments like, oh, so-and-so's here, big freaking deal, blah blah blah. I was like, look, we're in a hot war and there's a lot of shit going on in the world. And even if Joe's been told he can't ask about certain things like you talked about with Kamala, I still want the guy talking for 3 hours.

I didn't get any requests from him about not talking for 3 hours.

I'm just saying, even if that happened, I still want those people talking for 3 hours, because you can't sit for 3 hours and talk and not reveal yourself. Right. Like, methinks doth protest too much. Like, you will talk about the things that are going on, even if you don't want to. Just get the person talking. And that's what I think is the beauty of this podcast, for a myriad reasons. One of them is everyone can come on here and just talk, and people will reveal themselves in those 3 hours. You'll get to the nexus of who someone is over that 3 hours, and that's why I want Bernie on here, or I want JD on here, or I want Trump on here, Kamala. And when someone won't come on to the biggest podcast in the world who's running for high office, then we should dispatch with that person. And it wouldn't matter if it was this podcast or another one. The biggest— sit there and talk about your principles and your organizing criteria of how you— the way you metabolize the world and why you think you're the one who's fit to change it, if you can't talk extemporaneously about that, I don't want you in high office, because you're not revealing yourself.

Right. You're not revealing yourself. You're probably a construct.

Yes.

You're probably— you probably have this thing that you're promoting, this image that you're pursuing. And that you're trying to get the general public to accept that's not totally real.

Yeah, this isn't Fox News for 15 minutes where you get to read the talking points.

Right, that's, that's the issue with those things. This is just not enough of an understanding of who that person is. And in a long-form podcast, you do get that understanding. I get why people have that sense you shouldn't platform people. I think that instinct is incorrect.

If I didn't like someone, I want them platformed.

Not— well, not only that, that you already know them. Like, they're already out there. You're not gonna make them more popular. They are who they are.

Right.

But like, there's certain times, like the Trump interview was a good one, where you never got a chance to see that guy talk that way in, in really a non-combative situation, because almost all media that he did is either kissing his ass, like on Fox News, or trying to take everything he said out of context.

It was binary.

Yeah, and so, you know, and you get a chance to see someone communicate for a long period of time.

I got so much shit about Trump after the podcast with you when I gave him like a C+ or something. Mm-hmm. That was a majority of my messages. Were they mad? Yeah, you don't understand Trump and what he's doing. There's 4D chess here and you're not getting it.

Oh, it was like 4D chess one is great.

And I was like, okay, please elucidate me on what's going on right now because I'm not getting it. But because I was for him in the beginning, and then when everything started going tipsy-topsy-turvy and I wasn't able to, you know, rationally predict what the next step was gonna be, now I'm the bad guy? It's like, look, I just wanted like these 5 things and I'm not getting them. I'm getting one of them.

Yeah.

Can we have a discussion about the other 4? And so I just— it's like you said, people aren't gonna get changed. There's no one who's gonna listen to your podcast with Kamala and say, you know what, I was a right-wing guy before this podcast, but now I think I might vote for Kamala.

But the thing is, there are a bunch of people that she could have reached that are in the middle.

For sure. Yes, absolutely.

And that's where I think there was a missed opportunity, and I think a lot of people agree to that.

Or who want to know more about her. One thing I'll say about— I'll say a good thing about Trump. I've met him a few times. I was on stage with him in North Carolina. He's really good at summing one up. Summing someone up quickly. Like, when I first met him, I like shook his hand. He's like, so you're like the AI guy? You're the AI guy? You do AI? And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, I was a soldier in the military. I kind of learned it while I was there. And he's like, soldier, I could see you being central casting. AI, I don't think so. And that was our conversation. And I was like, this guy's like, he just summed me up in like a second. Like, because I, you know, I'm more soldier than I am that. And he said some other things, but that was about it. And I just stood behind him on stage for a couple of hours. But, you know, it's— he's got an ability. He's got this comedic timing, which I think is like unheard of, pretty good. But there's other things I just disagree with. And that's a free world.

I get to disagree.

It's very clear that You don't have ultimate power as a president. No, you can't just do things.

And thank God for it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that's what the whole process is supposed to be about. That's, that's the reason why we have Congress and the Senate. It's the reason why all that stuff exists.

What do you think? What do you think? We're looking at Gavin Newsom? No, and I don't think so. Or someone like that?

I don't— I think he's too much of a liability. I don't think they're gonna— there's just too much going on. with them. Just, I mean, unless they were severely desperate. I think it's probably going to be someone who's not tainted in the public eye. Someone, you know, because we buy narratives so quickly. We hated— or I don't say we. A lot of people hated Kamala Harris as a vice president, and then all of a sudden she was our savior.

Yeah.

And they did that quickly.

Yeah.

You know, there's a way that they can promote things, especially now through bots and social media. Oh yeah. And social media is infested with nonsense.

Yeah.

It's infested with bots. It's infested with completely fake stories. There's so many stories that I read, like national news stories that are absolutely fake on X and that people just put up there. And I think they're trying to discourage that somehow. I think, you know, like you, you don't get as much money from doing— because there's things like you get money from posting on X. I don't, but some people do. Like, you sign up and it's people that make their living.

I knew they had that on Facebook.

Oh yeah, they have it on X. Yeah. Okay. People make their living with engagement.

But the bots are a real thing. I can speak personally to that. Like, I've pulled the string on the bot stuff, looking at how they get funded, where they're ran out of, the people that are behind them, why they do them, how they do them. And it's such a real thing to a degree that people just don't understand how they're being manipulated by these things.

It's enormous.

It's an enormous market, billions, and it's funded in ways that I think would surprise people, and thank God for things like data leaks and things like it where we can get to this information, or just the fact that there's campaign finance laws and that money has to be routed and accounted for and these types of things so that people can pull the string on it and understand how things are being manipulated in the public eye.

It should be illegal. It really should be. I am all for people being able to express their opinions, but it should be an individual's opinions or the opinions of an individual that represents an organization. If you're a spokesperson for an organization, you want to tweet something, okay, no problem with that. But I think that organized campaigns where, you know, let's say in particular like there's some sort of big social issue, some, some, some, something that's going on in the world or some thing that involves our civilization, our culture, and then you have either a foreign country, or you have an intelligence agency, or you have a corporation that's funding this propaganda narrative, this fake viewpoint, and making it look like people are in lockstep with this. Yeah. And then you've got a lot of people that if that, whatever that narrative is, is attached to the ideology they identify with, whether it's left-wing or right-wing, then those people will start parroting those points. And you'll see it. You see this like sheep-like behavior with people. And it has a tremendous effect on how we view things as a culture. And I think it should be illegal.

I think you should have to be a person, post for yourself.

Yeah, even if you post, even if you're not named, you should have to authenticate some way if you're going to enter the zeitgeist of public, any of these types of things. Because, I mean, the other thing about Facebook and social media and these other things that people don't realize is they can feed you the narrative and put it on the vector that helps you metabolize it in the best way. In other words, if a public person is running for office and you might only agree with 10% of what this public person thinks, there are ways to manipulate the algorithm so you're only fed that 10%. Right. So you only understand this, you're only getting what you agree with with this particular politician, and there might be 10 other things you don't agree with that you're not going to see unless you pull the thread yourself. And unfortunately, just a lot of people don't pull the thread themselves because they're busy, they have to make money, they have families. And so they're only getting one side of the story, and then it's being monetized, which is also really gross. It's just super dangerous. It's super dangerous.

It's so super dangerous and super easy to manipulate us. It's like there's never been a better time to use propaganda on a society than today.

Yeah, and I watch the ways I've been in the past, how it's happened to me. So it's like, I'm not immune to this, even though I understand a lot of it and how it's happening.

None of us are. And you're certainly not immune to your algorithm. Your algorithm and the echo chamber that you exist in, they just constantly bombard you with one-sided opinions.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a weird time in terms of truth. And, you know, and everyone has to figure out what What's the best way for them to engage with that? And my— the way that I do it, I only look at things that people send me. Someone has to send me something interesting. I'm not seeking anything out anymore. It's just too much. It's too negative.

Yeah, and you'll drown in it.

You'll drown in it, and it also takes away from your time. It's such a time suck and such an attention suck, and it will waste it. It's wasted energy. And I always try to explain it to people in terms of I try to look at my attention and my energy of the day as units.

Yes.

I have 100 units, and if I spend 30 of those units concentrating on nonsense and horseshit, I've wasted 30 units, very precious units. It's only a certain amount of days in a year and a certain amount of years in your life.

I was gonna say that about gambling. The reason I don't like gambling is because if I throw down $100, that's an hour of my time, and it makes me worried. Like, I only have so much time. I'm like, I'm throwing an hour away. Yeah, I just threw an hour to this casino.

I think I would gamble on fights if I wasn't involved in the UFC. I think I would do that because I think I'm pretty good at it.

It gets you into the fight.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. If you got money on Gaethje and he starts to knock down Ilia Topuria, you're like, oh shit,

I was doing cartwheels in my living room. Yeah, but, um, it— I just think about things as time. And so when I had that 3 grand, I'm like, well, this is what would take me I think of my personal time, I bill it about $100 an hour is about how I look at my personal time. So that's the— that's time I can't get back, or I've just gained a bunch of time by getting that $3,000. So I get nervous when I think about getting rid of it. Like, I don't like to spend like that. I want to be able to pull the thread. And you said it is units. I would say money, units, it doesn't matter because time ultimately in the final analysis is the only thing we can't make more of.

Right. At least I think to live a better life, Use your time wisely, and that is an old age-old expression.

Another one of those pearls of wisdom.

Yeah, use your time wisely.

Only so much of it.

Yeah, it's so finite. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny when I, I have days where I do nothing on purpose, where I just, I'm burnt out, I've done too much, and I just like to vegetate. I just like to hang out in front of the TV and watch cool shit. I just want to be entertained. Yeah, but I'm amazed at how much time flies by. It was like sometimes I'll be watching just YouTube documentaries and it's 5 hours later. I'm like, fuck.

Yeah, COVID feels like yesterday.

Right. It does.

It does.

It does. It does. It really does. It's, it's nuts. It's nuts. We live in a very unique moment in history and I think about to become even more unique.

And in which ways?

With AI. Yeah, I think the way AI is gonna transform society is going to be Unlike anything that's ever happened before.

How do you think it's gonna transform society?

Well, I think jobs are gonna be eliminated. That's a big one.

Eliminated?

Eliminated. I think there's gonna be no use for people for a lot of things that people do right now.

What timescale are we talking?

10 years maximum.

Maximum?

Yeah, maximum. In 10 years, the world's gonna be unrecognizable. That's what I think.

So how do you feel? You think this will happen? You think we're on that course already?

Yes.

And that it— that all jobs will be subsumed?

No, not all jobs. I think creative endeavors are always gonna exist. There's always gonna be— human beings are always gonna have the need for human connection. We're always gonna want to see live sports. We're always gonna see— want to see live music. Live comedy is always gonna exist. I think going to the movies is a great Like sort of a community experience. I used to love going to comedy movies. Comedy movies when they used to make them. Oh yeah, fucking garbage. Woke killed comedy movies. Yeah. We used to be able to go and you're laughing really hard with a whole group of people that you don't know. Just like going to a comedy club. It's very similar in a lot of ways.

I was telling my wife about your comedy club and I said it's the closest thing to 1996 that I can get to. And she's like, well, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, you lock your phone away and You go in there, there's no worry about someone recording something. People get to go on stage and talk shit, and you're just— you just feel like you're back in a place. Like, no one's sitting there scrolling. I hate watching, like, people at dinner and both of them are scrolling their phones. I know. And you don't see any of that, and it's just shit-talking and fun, and you're with your buddies and you're laughing, and it's just a great experience. And so I have a theory about AI. with when it comes to what you just talked about. So I think we're in agreement in at least one thing. And I think what's gonna— I think what's gonna happen is if you look at like the number one movie in 2020 or 2019 was like Avengers: Endgame or Avengers: Infinity War, those 2 movies. Highly digitized, tons of CGI, everything's getting done in front of a green screen.

And it made, you know, $2 billion or over a billion. I don't remember exactly what the number was. And then you look at this last year and the biggest movie per dollar spent was Obsession, which was made by a YouTube creator who was doing stuff out of his basement a few years earlier. So I think to your point about people wanting genuine human interaction, my theory as it pertains to AI is AI will become ubiquitous in certain ways. It will eventually, fortunately or unfortunately, run Massive parts of the economy. It will run a lot of things. But what will happen with— people will get sick. And in a few years, your daughters are going to be able to send you an Avengers movie where it's you, Ari, Shane.

Right now, they can do that.

Well, I'm saying like with a prompt, they'll make a 2-hour movie and it'll just be the Avengers movie and it will look indistinguishable from another movie. And you'll get sick of that quick. And then people, I think things like regional theater houses, my wife and I's favorite thing to do is go to The Nutcracker at Christmas time in D.C. at the National Theater. Those things will start springing up and they'll be easier to spring up because to start a business, to start an LLC, if you have a novel idea, you're looking at $30,000 to $100,000 of negotiating red tape and government in order to start a business. Yeah. AI is going to make that super easy. And I think in a few years, we're going to see theaters. I think we're going to see— I agree with Elon in that prices are going to get way cheaper to make something production-scale-wise. Amazon's going to be— you'll be able to buy a coffee table for $1 or $2, $3. I think there will be a large deflationary effect where products are going to get cheaper and the quality of life will go up because more people will be able to buy cheaper things.

And if you're living for— on $10,000 a year, you're going to be able to live really well in the coming years because of AI. But because people will be able to set up businesses easier, like craft tables, handmade things, people setting up businesses, it will allow a rejuvenation of creative endeavors. And people with money or people who are making money in the middle income and above, middle class income and above, will yearn for handmade things. and because it's so easy to start these businesses, we're gonna— it's the same thing with people who have money now. All my friends who have money now have classic cars. A lot of them have lots of classic cars. They have handmade things, handmade furniture, all of these things. I think the market is gonna get flooded because people are gonna be so sick of highly stylized AI making everything look awesome. I think it's much more likely that in 10 years, if you and your wife and myself and my wife are gonna go out, we're gonna go to a regional theater house, and watch Hamlet or some play or something like that. Yes, that will start with people with more money.

But as more theater houses pop up and more creative endeavors, I think people are going to be able to get creatively back into things. And AI, in my estimation, will exist as like a utility in your house. They're trying to not do that in ways that we've talked about. But a good output for AI is it becomes a water heater in your house. You have your own personal GPU that you do your own training or your own things on, or it does your bills for you. It takes care of a the doldrums of life, and it can do all of these things for you. It's run locally. It's not something that you go to OpenAI for, or you go to a large company, name your large AI company. A good output from AI would be we have these open-weighted systems that are available to everyone. You buy your GPUs, it goes in your basement, your data never leaves your home. You're not out training some other company's AI. It all gets done regionally and it handles your bills for you. It does your bank account. It does all of these things.

That's a very rose-colored glasses view.

It is. It is.

But I see where they're— the human thing, like human-created stuff is going to be more valuable. That's the best possible best-case scenario.

And people will be able to afford things. If you're not making a lot of money and you don't have a lot of economic output, you're going to be able to live very well, I think.

Well, we'll see if we don't get killed by the robots.

If we don't get killed by the robots. I mean, I just, I don't see a path to sentience with AI in its current form today, I guess, is my big—

That's another conversation that we're going to have to have when we have more time. Okay. That's a long one.

I didn't think there'd be a second time. So now I believe you when you say that there's a third time.

Oh, come on, man. We'll do it again. 100%. Let's definitely do it again.

I really appreciate you having me.

My pleasure, brother. It's always great to talk to you. You're a fascinating guy.

If I can do the obligatory— so Spartan Forge, my company, We've released 2 Hunt+ updates, tons of UI updates, UX, tons of features. We're about to release that thermal thing that I just talked about before. We've got CarPlay. We've done a lot of things. We've grown a ton. And, uh, there's so too many features for me to go into there. But there's— we just produced a film on YouTube about an engineer in our company who's also a gunsmith called Old Soul. We're doing a third one about my cabin. Oh, cool. that I purchased back and having my family out there. And we're gonna have some veterans out there and raise some money.

Spartan Forge YouTube channel?

Yeah, on the Spartan Forge YouTube channel. And so we're gonna do one about my dad's cabin coming up here, and we've got some great companies. Hoyt is sponsoring it, VPA Archery, which— have you shot VPAs before? Sure. If you haven't— oh, you have? Yeah, yeah. Best broadhead. I love those broadheads.

That's the archery— they make the Archery Country broadheads.

Yes. Oh my god, I've been aiming for shoulder blades with those things on does, right, and bucks, because you can just double shoulder blade an animal and drop it. It's a great broadhead. It's a great broadhead. So VPA, um, uh, Azeo Camo is another one, and my buddy Joe, um, runs Azeo Camo. These companies are sponsoring us, um, to produce these films, and we're gonna do a coffee table book with it. But we're trying to get into reminding people why we hunt and why we're out here doing these crazy things. And it's not about bloodlust or killing, it's, it's about the joy of having a backstrap with your kids at the table. Like, you know, up until we run out of deer meat, most of my kids' diet is deer meat. And it's about that coming of age and getting back to our roots and engaging that circuitry that we talked about before. And as paradoxical as it sounds, I'm hoping to help people do that through an application. But, um, yeah, we're producing a lot of stuff. And, uh, it's also just reminding hunters why we hunt. It's not just about the big racks and the bloodlust.

Um, it's about food and tribe and beautiful shared heritage. So thank you again.

Beautiful. My pleasure, brother. Thank you. Good to see you. Bye, everybody.