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And I haven't got to the best part yet. All form is offering 20 percent off all orders for our listeners at all. Form Dotcom Shūgo. That's a R.M. all form dotcom Joe. All right, friends, my guest today. Well, my guests today are the owners of my favorite all time coffee company, Black Reifel Coffee, probably see me wear their t shirts and do their ads before, but they're more than that. It's even Hafer and Matt best.

And these guys are veterans. They're really into veteran supported causes and they give a lot of coffee and a lot of charity to first responders, law enforcement, military causes. They're just great human beings. And this was a deep conversation. I mean, we talked about all kinds of cool stuff like diet and just military life, but and coffee, of course. But then we got into some some heavy shit about the military industrial complex. And it was a very intense podcast, but I really enjoyed it.

And I really love these guys and I love what they stand for and I love their company. So please give it up for Evan Hafer and Matt.

Best of Black Reifel Coffee Government podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, trained by Joe Rogan podcast by night all day.

Hello, gentlemen. We're rolling. We're rolling.

No evidence that I've known you guys for a long time and I've enjoyed your coffee for a long time. So I hope you guys could come on here and talk some shit. Man, I love it.

I love being on shows with Matt, especially with you.

This is fucking incredible to your ridiculous setup that you put in the kitchen with all the coffee and the espresso, videotaped it so people could see. But the measuring of the weight of the grams, the way I know you got into it before you were into coffee, before you were in the military, right? Yeah. And then you started bringing coffee and a roaster and a whole set up with you overseas.

But like, were you this like measuring it and the exact temperature of the water and all that jazz?

Oh yeah. I, I think like way back in the late 90s I guess is probably where it all began. And I always say this where you know, every good story starts with a, with a with a good check basically. And I met this barista back in the late 90s and she turned me on to espresso. So I started really going down the rabbit hole and coffee.

So she was just like really into espresso. She wasn't she was just she was hot and she was she was a barista.

So but that was the gateway to this entire thing. And then as I continue to kind of evolve my my coffee nerd, you know, sense of me, I, I kind of was like, well, you know what? This Green Beret thing sounds pretty cool. I would love to be able to do that, jump out of planes, maybe overthrow some countries.

That's that sounds pretty rad, but it never left. And so I was still way into coffee, is roasting coffee and fires and on my stove and getting a different weird espresso machines. And the funny thing is, back in when I was an SF guy, people would make fun of me all the time like you, hipster douche bag. What do you do?

We work together to make fun of you. Oh yeah. I like sweet. Thirty minutes to make a cup of coffee you can do. Are you doing well.

That's why it's a funny contrast between this badass special forces guy and someone is like really meticulous with their coffee.

No cream. Don't you dare me Jack.

Ha kind of makes fun of it in his books where he talks about like putting honey in his black reifel coffee and half of it is just to kind of mock the fact that people who really love coffee will put anything in it.

It's a travesty. They won't. And Jack is one of my friends. So when he when he came out to the house, he was doing research for his book. I was making him a cup of coffee. And he was like, dude, this is fucking insane.

Like, how long is this going to take? I was like, man, it takes as long as it takes.

So that entire setup that we just put in your studio, I had that in my coffee lab, in my house, that entire thing. Wow. And I'm out here and I was roasting coffee on my stove and going going way down the rabbit hole with with Jack. And he's taking notes, you know, for his book. And and he's a former SEAL, you know, so we're talking shit. And he's like, you must have just been picked on in the teams right now.

It's like, yeah, maybe.

Yeah, I guess that's how I you know, I was like, if you just have to run fast because if you're going to do something weird like this, you got to be able to run really fast, do a lot of fucking pull ups and push ups and shoot really well. I think that was one of the things where I was like, man, I got to be really good at all these things because it's got to offset all my D Bagheri over here.

With respect to you, even though you said balls deep in the coffee, it's an interesting story when we both had similar professions post military as contractors and I was in this FOB and I'm sitting there, I'm like, why the fuck is there this like? Thousand dollar espresso machine for a very small base in the middle of nowhere, we'll come to find three out. Three years later, I'm chatting with them and I'm like, Yeah, do I know the agency bought some stupid ass expresses?

Like, Yep, that that was me I put to convince the supplier. And so whoever was there to buy this super intricate frickin espresso machine in the middle of nowhere, I'm like, of course it was you. Of course it was you, guy.

So that's the. Exactly. So the entire story. So I'm working at the agency then. So fast forward a few years later and the logistics person came to me and he or she was like, hey, what kind of espresso machine or coffee machine should be is like, oh don't worry, I'll send you the links to it. And it was like thirty thousand dollar espresso machine. I imported it from Italy and had it flown in through some other logistics situation.

And she's like, so this is it. I'm like, yeah, but we still need a grinder to write. And that was something that kind of lived in not only like infamy, that I had gotten the entire logistics system to buy me this espresso machine.

For me, there was no oversight. Like no one was like looking at the accounts and going, what the fuck is contrary to popular belief?

You know, congressional oversight and budgets at times is a little bit hazy when you're in war. They just kind of say, here's Lump-sum. You know, here you go. Here's 23 million dollars. As long as you can justify it, maybe will be OK.

Well, you know, the government works, too, at the end of a fiscal year. They're like, we got some money to spend or we don't get this budget next year.

And honestly, in Iraq, early on, it it was like a dumpster fire with cash, just the tax dollars that were just burnt in that place and just dumb shit you couldn't even imagine. When I look back on it now, as a guy that's very vested in what's happening with my tax dollars and like, what the fuck were these idiots doing?

Like, this is so dumb. It's so dumb.

Like what was besides espresso machines? What was the other ridiculous shit that the money was being spent on?

Oh, well, here's a great example.

So and I've got a myriad of them, but we had a field of up armored vehicles that were really fucking expensive, like five hundred thousand dollars a pop, give or take.

We couldn't take him anywhere because they were so obvious that it was a up armored vehicle that you just drive around and people would want to take pot shots at you for the fun of it.

So you have these beautiful half a million to a million dollar cars that you can't use. So you got to go. When we're working in the Lovas capacity means you're just trying to blend in, just not get shot, man. Like, don't pick a fight.

Like, let's just blend in, do our job, get the fuck out of here. But if you have a really expensive looking like G5 or something, that's just really a G5 in the middle of fucking Baghdad in a war zone, people are going to want to put some pressure washed. Washington, all that Mercedes, that big G wagon.

Yeah, I see wagons like a bulletproof G wagon. Yeah. Really?

Yeah, I did. So all of this stuff is up armored. So when you look at this like any vehicle you want, you can get a level of armor to it.

But if you buy the most ridiculous and expensive vehicle in the middle of a fucking war torn country X, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. And the whole intent of the mission is to blend in.

So to my point, you'll have fields of shit that you can't use because some dumb ass is pulling the trigger on your government tax dollars going, this looks good to me, Mars. We'll just see how that looks.

Yeah.

Why don't they take like an old Chevy Blazer and then retrofit it? Well, there's that too. You can do that. Do they do that? Oh yeah, you can.

When you look go down there, go down the rabbit hole in armored vehicles and obviously you probably wouldn't. But if if you wanted an armored vehicle at any kind, you can get it.

Now, there are there are different armored vehicles from different companies. So, for instance, Mercedes builds their armored vehicles from ground up. It's it's one of the the best, if not the best armored vehicle in the world. It's built from ground up. Jamie has it idea. Yeah.

Yeah. The glass originally was military vehicle. Yeah. That's why it's so durable.

Like my wife has one of those.

It's like the war is like fuck tank. It's not like any other car.

It's so thick, like the gauge steel. We don't they don't make cars like it.

No. And not that it's so boxy and it's got such good angles to it that you think that it really fits. Well, there is.

They look fuckin incredible. Do you remember the weight on like a level seven, like how those things are? Yeah.

I mean, it offset the gravity of the earth. It was just fucking heavy. Like, those things are so heavy and so top heavy. That was the other issue, too.

You're not going anywhere fast in those things. So if you need to give it's armored up.

Right. So you must have like steel plates at the bottom of it. It's all built from ground up, so it's not as if you have a steel plate that you can remove or something or that's been retro. Right. And it's built on the factory line for it to be an armored vehicle.

So the military guys are do they make them feel like a dictator? No, they make them for for forever. Really rich pricks or dictator acts or military or whoever it is, it doesn't want to get blown up.

Yeah.

And you can take I think it's something like three rounds of AK 47, so 762 by 39 and a three inch square and that's through the entire vehicle.

So when you're getting when you're getting lit up in one of those, it's it's at one. It's a it's an interesting experience that you're never going to forget. And then two, you're feeling pretty good, especially if they're shooting at you with AK or just like whatever.

I'm going to have a snack. You guys keep going.

You've been inside one while it's under attack. Oh, gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is what is it like?

Just ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah. Some tanks.

And obviously, you know, your job is not to stick around and kind of absorb the rounds, but that the a level seven is what it's called.

And so when you're in a level seven armored vehicle that's getting shot at by either 760, by 39 or, you know, increase the the caliber of rifle or belt, that it will absorb a certain amount of rounds.

Sometimes it will be loud and sometimes it'll be really muted and quiet, depending on just where it strikes. Yeah. Where it strikes, how it strikes.

So if it's striking an angle, if it's perpendicular to the ground, where is it hitting?

You know, so how close are you to the shooter, how perpendicular you are to the round, how big is the round?

So it'll kind of it'll sound different depending on where you're at and you can kind of gauge like where's that coming from?

How much weight does it add to the overall truck? Oh, gosh.

It you know, if you were to put your finger in one of those level seven doors by hand, you're getting trimmed off, you'll get it trimmed off.

And that's a really weird factoid about level seven is you never want to roll down the windows and you really can't on a lot of them. So when your teammates farts, it's the worst because you can't open the door, roll down the window. You're like, really, dude? Yeah.

You can't go through Chick fil A, drive through in one of those things. You can you could get I think you put the window down about this far, give or take, but it'll also take it. It'll also take a finger off.

If you want to roll up the window, the window is going to be three and a half to four inches thick.

That's how big it is. And it's not glass. It's it's a it's a plastic essentially, or some type of plastic.

But you can see through and you can see through, it looks somewhat like glass if you get close to an armored vehicle.

How many dickheads Wilson is right now going, I need that in my life. Oh, man, I need one of those. There's really a lot of companies that do that. They take like Tacoma's or Tundras. They outfitted with level Sevan's. I mean, I think that's just kind of badass one day.

Doesn't that a Dev Rolo company do that? Do you know the company? Derulo Oh yeah. That's just talking about.

Yeah, they do the that plastic coating on the outside ship called the hard plastic coating on the outside. Yeah. The synthetic Kevlar. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like this hard plastic, it's like forget what it's called.

There's a usually they use it for undercoating some cars but these a lot of cars, they do it on the outside as well and then they'll do a whole bulletproof treatment of them and then they will they say those things are like five hundred thousand dollars to the pretty expensive expensive what Jamie go to Devro Low.

It's they'll do a 700 horsepower engine option. Yeah.

And all kinds of crazy shit like when you look at the will call it the Mercedes. There it is. You'll have sometimes you'll have a V12 twin turbo V12 in a Mercedes.

That's got to be six, seven hundred.

We that's going to go to their just their model range where the model ranges. Yeah.

And then go to the Predator limousine. Look at that thing. Yeah.

They make a limo but the Predator I think is they're top of the line. Oh that's, that's, that's their F 150 to do an F 150 and they also do a tundra. But there's that line, that shit on the outside line ex.

Is that what it's called. Yeah. Yeah. That's Linux. Yeah. Yeah.

So it is really durable plastic that you can't scratch or dead.

So now that you're in Texas, is that going to be your Texas truck. I think I might have to deve x. Oh they call it so. It's like a version of Linux I'm sure. Right. I think it used to be called Linux. Yeah. Things are mean. Looking like it. Yeah.

That's dope also. OK, so it does do it for jeeps too. They're. All they do with every go, yeah, it's Linux because they've been a Mercedes issue. What do you do as disgusting?

Unscratched, but it looks like shit look OK? Yes. It's kind of like a matte looking, but the texture. Yeah, I've seen people do that with jeeps and shit. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I think Dudly did it to one of his getting. Yeah. I think his jeep was just at the office. I think he's got some kind of an axe or something.

I don't know, I just saw it, I just saw it in Utah and maybe it was that I'm just a man. I might, I might not be paying attention now. We were looking at so many different things when we were up there.

Yeah, but that so this company does that. But it's like I think that was like there's a lot a lot of rich Russian guys drive around those things.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of a rich Russian thing to do.

Like no one believes that car and USA. Yeah.

If you're a rich Russian, chances are someone wants to kill you.

I would say that's a really high possibility. That is a high possibility.

So.

So when you got out of the military, how long was it before you started black rifle?

It was started basically at the same time. Coffee in this area. Yeah. Yeah, we're still coffee in there. What is this? What kind of coffee is that?

Is that Cinnabon that I roasted special for this for this place that the shit that Costa Ricans.

Yeah. Would you think that Ethiopian bomb diggity.

Really. I love it. I was turned on Ethiopian coffee. I had this guy, Peter Giuliano. He's a coffee expert back in the day. I had him on the podcast like a few years back.

I was just interested. I was like, what? Like, what is it like these people that are really into coffee?

I started reading about people who are really in the coffee, like, I want to know what the fuck is going on, like what is happening, like these real heavy coffee nerds, because I would just get coffee and pour cream in it. And then, yeah, I was into like Mukti oil, grass fed butter and coffee for a while.

But the problem with that is people in the podcast got so annoyed with me going and every thirty seconds because you've got all this grass fed butter and oil in your throat.

Right. Just like coach, you know. So I got this guy, Peter Giuliano, come on.

And he just explained to me the whole thing, how all coffee came from Ethiopia.

And then and then the difference between what processing and dry processing and coffee rust and all these different things like where we went down the rabbit hole for like three hours.

This analogy I have for coffee, it's so similar to wine, right? You have the wine connoisseurs that can taste all the tasting notes and all that. Then you have the average consumer that goes and buys bottle boxes to get drunk or just for the caffeine.

It's very similar where if you go down the rabbit hole like Evan, specifically with everything, cigars, with everything, that's just dorks that take it to the next level.

Well, and I think that for every one of those, whether it's wine or cigars or coffee or whatever it is. Right. And which is a total sidebar story about as well, which is as I went and had dinner with Crowder one night, we went to the cigar bar and he's he's a hard core cigar aficionado.

Like he's a really. Yeah. And so he was taking me down, you know, Cigar Street with whatever he's doing. And I was taking him down Coffee Street.

And so that geekiest conversation in in America was taking place between Steven and me as we're trying to eat steak in this bar in Dallas, not too far from his office.

But I think for every one of those that you actually find a niche subculture of people that are also share, you know, your your same passion for just obscure details and things. So when you're talking about wine or coffee, you do have some type of common kinship, I guess, because I, I get it. I totally get why people are into this one little thing and they want to go as deep and as interesting as they can. I totally get it because I'm like, that was coffee.

I never get bored of it if I go to Panama or Guatemala. Costa Rica coffee is so fascinating from every aspect, whether we're looking at it from a historical, international, historical consequences of this entire commodity, whether it's commodities trading, whether it's growing and processing the future of coffee, where is it headed? How are we, you know, optimizing the growing process so we don't run out of it? Whether you're looking at it from a roasting or a drinking, all of that, you can go as deep and as detailed as you want and it doesn't get fucking boring.

I could spend the rest of my life. Ever thought about farming in the money? Is it possible to do in America? Can you do it in Texas? No, the climate's just not correct.

No, it's be out of Hawaii. Right. Which is fucking fantastic. I love Kona coffee. Yeah. It's some really amazing flavors that come out of the Big Island for whatever reason. Right.

This oil is what it is.

Yeah, it's a soil. So when you have the high lava or but let's be honest, that's not America.

Now, why is not America. It's crazy. I mean, I love I love Hawaii, don't get me wrong, but they should be they should allow to be allowed to be their own fucking country. They're an island in the middle of the ocean. It's five hours by plane from America. How the fuck is that? America? I think they should be protected by America. Don't get me wrong. But the idea that that's regular America. But come on, Hawaii, you there's a specific look.

Hawaiians have that dude looks Hawaiian. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

What does a guy from Iowa. Well, that guy looks Iowan.

No, no, it's not the way that it way. It's fucking crazy. That's America.

Yeah. Plus you kind of don't want America to fuck it up so. Right. I keep it out there.

So like none of the American politicians can fuck that thing to the point where we can't go out there and at least enjoy it in a peaceful and in a way that's beneficial for everyone.

I mean, we've done they've done an amazing job of not fucking it up. Yeah. Thinking about how many people come there, you know, like every year people are constantly going to Hawaii. They've somehow or another managed to keep it together.

Well, I think it's pretty much America's like vacation spot where we're like, we'll take that island. So, you know, we have bachelorette parties. We can just roll out there and sit on Kauai for a couple of days and drink, you know, margaritas.

The thing that I was thinking about when I was flying out there, which is really kind of a morbid thought in some ways where I was thinking about all the fat that is flown across the ocean so they can go eat more fat on the island of Hawaii in the sense of like just people and the obesity of just generally flying seven hours, landing on an island and then essentially sitting and eating in a buffet and then flying back.

And I was thinking about the fuel that's being utilized to cart just general fat back and forth.

And that's what I was thinking about when I was flying to Hawaii in January. And fat and booze.

Yeah, fat and booze. How much booze kids consume there. So much with me too.

When I go there, I just immediately start drinking. I don't drink during the day here like very rarely.

But when I go to Hawaii, like the moment I land. Fuck yeah.

About the island vibe that you're like it's 11:00 a.m.. Exactly. Something with an umbrella.

Yeah. Something on a pineapple slice in it. I know.

Let's party. Yeah. I fucking love it there. And it's my favorite hunting destination. Oh mine too.

Because it's a great place to go to get tuned up for like elk hunting because he has so many opportunities when you go to Lanai and access. Right. Yeah. And like ethically like they have to kill those things.

Yeah. Like there's no ifs, ands or buts about it. They bring in snipers on a weekly basis.

They have thirty, thirty thousand deer plus or minus, you know, they don't really know they're doing overhead surveys and shit on an island with three thousand people and it's time.

Have you been. No I haven't bro. It's bonkers. But you're there at nighttime and you hit the flashlight, hit the headlights and you just see thousands of eyes.

Yeah, yeah. You're like, whoa, this is crazy.

Well, access breed like hogs is, you know, and I think a lot of you don't know in like Texas with the exotics here what happened over the last, you know, whatever one hundred years is the rains and storms wash out the high fences and then you get the access that escape. And now they're like rapid where I live in Hill Country just an hour away. I mean, they're they're fucking everywhere. There's almost more than that. Like Wild Whitetail.

My wife saw an accident near our house.

You're driving right next to my house. On the way here. We saw about a thirty four inch axis and about, I don't know, thirty females out there in the field on the way now.

And the crazy thing with Texas is they're considered exotics. So as long as you have a hunting license, there's not the regulations like there are in the season with white tails you can they're walking groceries, which is awesome because they're like they're so delicious.

Delicious. They're so delicious.

They consider elk exotics here. Yeah. Yeah. Which is so weird because Elk used to be native. They used to be native here, but they they were, you know, extirpated. And then now that they're back again, they're because they're not standard for Texas. They're now considered exotics. So there's no like hunting season for elk out here.

Have you immersed herself in all the Texas hunting culture? I've only been here for a month.

OK, it's wild, man, because you haven't even said y'all yet. Y'all. You haven't. I've tried it.

It's a it's an ill fitting shoe for me in my vocabulary. I can't use it. I'm like a cultural, but I'm like, what's up bro? From Soko y'all.

And this guy, he's trying to shred the NA in the y'all shed scenario.

But the hunting out here is crazy because like some of the higher fence ranches and we're talking tens of thousands of acres and you know, if you ask him like can you shoot a drafter like everything's got a price tag. Oh boy. And I mean anything goes but I'm not shooting a giraffe.

No, no, I know.

But apparently there I have a friend who shot a giraffe and he says they're fucking delicious. Really? Yeah. They had to shoot one giraffe. Right.

So here's the thing about giraffes. They are like every other animal they want. Control breeding rights, so every other male, large male wants to control breeding. And when you have a large male giraffe that fucks up all the other male giraffes, like, OK, we've got a real problem with this guy. Right. And so they had to take out this giraffe. So he was in Africa at the time and they shot this giraffe and they ate it.

And he said it was unbelievably delicious.

Do they reference what it tasted like? I would imagine giraffe. I would imagine it's like it's got to be in the deer family, right? Like something like it.

Dinosaur I what family? What family is giraffe. And I have here's my thing on it, though. I'm not eating anything that is so friendly. When you go to the zoo, a baby can feed it. Right. Like my daughter.

I have video of my daughter. When she was two I was holding her and the giraffe comes with his crazy tongue and takes the lettuce from her hands and she's laughing. I mean, they're just to chill, man. And they're the only animal that I have no problem with the desu to. I just have a bit about it, because every other animal, the zoo you like, let him go. What the fuck is this? The giraffes have no problem with that.

Sounds like another day with no lions. They just stroll on over to where the lettuces feel like. That's how they talk very proper.

Yeah, that's how I think.

Oh yeah. I got a couple of those which just hang. And do you have a okapi.

No, I'm sure do have a donkey or at a ranch. What a pretty animal though. The okapi. Wow. That's beautiful.

Have you have you seen the Zyvox here. Is it a zebra donkey. They cross pollinate and it's got zebra legs and then a donkey body.

It's super weird looking. Oh, Jamie. Yeah.

Because a lot of those animals, if they get out like a zoo, don't cross over, then you have like, you know, red stag and elk can actually mate together and make a hybrid cross. Seriously.

Yeah. Yeah. Well we keep on the same little kid. That's cool, huh.

But that's a infertile animal, right? Yeah. I believe most hybrids like that come in as a pet. Wow. What a beautiful thing. What does that fucking thing with a giant. Yeah. Do that cocksucker. That's good. That's. Oh have you seen the size of those. I think that's a Watsu. I think you can Google that Waukesha's.

How what the fuck kind of neck does it have to carry that around. Look at that headgear.

Florida, Florida airboats. That's just a Florida that's a Florida airboat. That's a lot that's a lot to do. It's like very similar to a Texas Longhorn. But they got these really thick horns on them.

But actually, that's like a sprinter sanctifies right there, right? Wow. It's a Y in there. It's like a white TSG or something. Hmm.

I don't ask me wild ass looking animal.

Well, Texas has I did a bit about Texas Tigers. There's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world. Right.

One state, more tigers than all of the planet. And they're all in dudes yards.

Riddle me this. Do you think often exotic, the increase of Texas? Oh, yeah, motherfucker.

Holy shit. Look at the stats. If you showed me, that'd be like, oh, that's Avatar. That's right.

That's in a movie. That's real. Wow. One of that with that thing. Taste like it tastes just like cow.

I've had it. I like how that's your food. Oh look, I like that one. What the fuck man.

It tastes like I like you. That's Joe's first question, huh. I wonder what that tastes like. Lee Daniels like cruising through. Well, everything doesn't taste the same. That's true.

I've had people that have never had elk before and I serve it to them. They're like, holy shit. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the real thing. You feel different when you eat it.

You're like, oh, you like you feel pumped up because it's so filled with nutrients and vitamins and everything, you know, feels like alpha brain for your body.

Yeah. There's something to it. There's definitely something to it. There's a reason why they're running away from mountain lions all the time.

That's I don't know if you ever try to, but I've been taken like beef, like grass fed organic beef, like liver pills and stuff. Yeah, I do that. Do it. Yeah. Yeah. I had a company hooked me up and man I take that in about 30 minutes after I eat. I'm like super charged if I just like a B twelve shots. The weirdest thing and I think you had to like work your way up and dosage.

Yeah. That guy Paul Saladino Carnivore MDA. Yeah. Yeah he's cell. I think it's heart and soil supplements. Yeah. He sells grass fed beef liver beef, heart trachea, collagen. I take all that shit.

Yeah. Trevor does all that. The Trevor Thompson eat. Yeah. All that shit. Right. Yeah. Trevor super health conscious. Yeah. I believe in that 100 percent. I mean human beings are supposed to be in organs when wolves kill. The first thing the alpha does is eat the liver. The other will stand by and wait in. The alpha eats the liver. It's the most nutrient dense part of the body.

Do you keep it? Do you keep your liver when you. I love liver.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's by liver at the store too. I buy calves liver like when I run an elk liver or I love heart to hearts. Delicious. Your heart is my favorite.

My brother. Delicious. Smells like it in oil like almost fried a little bit.

It's delicious. And an elk liver is like it's as big as this fucking table. It's so big. It's enormous, enormous organ.

Yeah. And I've always looked at the last couple of years. It's interesting because people will go, why are you keeping that. It's funny because, um, you know, pulling my knife out, going through, you know, as I'm field dressing it and I'm like, oh, we need to keep the heart and liver.

And it's funny because people some people don't like some people. What the fuck are you doing? I'm like, man, it's really good.

I want to one day shoot a bison and then cut the liver out and squirt bile on it and eat it raw because that's what the Native Americans did.

Apparently it was like their favorite thing to do. Really. Yeah. They would cut the liver out and cut slices the liver and squirt bile on on the liver and eat it raw. I want to I want to taste that. I want to know what that is.

I'll do y just it's like salty I guess, huh.

Yeah. I mean they had all sorts of, you know, ways to get nutrition that was sort of not just natural but like instinctive, you know, like the liver, like today we don't necessarily eat liver like most, if you like, gave a survey of how many people eat liver on a daily basis.

It's like probably not even one tenth of one percent. Right.

But back then, it was like really important for nutrients because, you know, especially if you're living on the plains in the winter and there's there's no vegetables, you're not getting any vegetables. You know, you're like the Comanche basically lived off bison.

Right. And when they would shoot a bison, one of the first things they would do is cut the liver up and eat it raw with bile on it. Hmm.

I don't know what it tastes like, but that's my favorite part about living in Texas, is I live much next to hillbillies and I mean that in a complimentary sense. But like my neighbor, I don't know, two months ago I was like, hey, man, I just killed a bison on this ranch. I got like extra meat. He gave me, like, a hundred and fifty pounds. Oh, that's nice. Organic Bison's. I mean, I love it because everybody killing shit around here and.

Yeah. So good.

Well, at my studio in L.A., I had three commercial freezers, so when dudes would come over I'd give everybody meat. Yeah. I gave meat to people that you would, you know, never think would be out there eating elk.

Just never put your freezer on a GFI switch. I learned the hard way in my in my garage GFI switch went off and I didn't check my freezer for like four days ruined three axis and one that Whitesell I would think to three days it would still be frozen, not in the Texas summer in the garage.

But if is it a good seal, like a really high end freezer. Probably not. I think about of people in that first time when my my neighborhood caught fire a couple of years back and I had a freezer, commercial freezer in my garage, we had evacuated. But my friend Bud stayed by. And when the firefighters were in the area, I said, hey, man, I go go into the freezer, I go, that meat is still good and pull it out and serve it to the firefighters.

So they felt they fed like fucking 100 firefighter kidney.

Yeah, it was awesome. That's hundreds of pounds of meat. Right. And it was. But it was still frozen.

Yeah, it was still good. That's crazy. Yeah.

Good seal for like a yeti cooler. Right. Those fucking yeti coolers man. Yeah they are the shit. Yeah. You can take one of those coolers, fill it with ice, leave it in one hundred degrees sun for five days. You open that bitch up. There's ice in there.

That's crazy. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense but it's just shocking.

When we were, when we were I would row down this, the middle fork, the salmon in in Idaho. So we do like five, six day trips.

And I would pack shitty coolers with dry ice and ice and they would last five days. So even with a yeti cooler, a little bit of shade you can stretch that out for, I don't know, and you could get a week at least out of that stuff.

But the funny thing is, with just meat in general, as far as like one of the questions that I was I was trying to ask you earlier was when you're in that Carnivore diet and you were eating nothing but meat, were you eating wild meat or were you also eating some, you know, beef and some other things? I was eating bowls.

I was eating the way I was eating like a lot of elk, which I always do. But elk is very lean. There's no fat in that. So I would also I would cook it in tallow. OK, first of all, so I had a lot of body fat. I would take scoops of tallow and eat. It would eat scoops of beef tallow, grass fed, beef tallow. And then I would also cook it bacon and bacon, like I'd have like four or five pieces of bacon.

You have to get fat, otherwise you'll get that rabbit starvation going on, you know, like. So I was just trying different ways to get fat in my diet.

And you did that for a month. Yeah, a whole month and lost twelve pounds. And I got real aggressive.

Seriously. Yes. Yes. It gets you aggressive like I don't know. Yeah I think so for sure.

But also I think it's just there's something about your body thinking all it does is eat meat. Right. I mean I think like one of the things that my friends have said that have turned vegan is like that makes it more peaceful and calm and it makes sense. You're grazing your head and you're you're a herbivore now. Right. Like you're just out there eating grass and rice all day. Like, of course, like it seems like your body would be calm.

But on the other side of it, if you're eating meat all the time, your body's like, we got to kill. Yeah. Like, it's it's I think there's something to that. I really do because I wasn't trying to be aggressive. Right. But I was I would find myself like saying things. Was it a little too aggressive or like it was weird? I think the world's worst fucking excuse, you're like, God, you're kind of an asshole today, Joe.

I've just been eating meat, man.

I wasn't being a dick, but I was, like, a little quick to judge things like I can be a little too much.

And then it just there was something I think there's something to that. And I had a lot of energy.

Man, that was the other thing that was seriously. Oh, yeah. All day long. That was what was weird. So there was no crash. There was no crashing during the day. It was like I had extra energy. It was crazy. It felt weird.

You know, it's like there was no I was eating no sugar.

What about eggs? Yeah. Fish, eggs, fish, all the anything that's an animal got. I wasn't anything that's an animal. The only thing that kept me from eating that way was I got bored. So I love pasta.

I love food. I love going to a restaurant. And they make you nice crab cake or something.

I love like when I love what chefs create things like I don't want to say, hey, I eat meat. Like, look, it's just I like sushi, I like it with the rice and I like it. It tastes good. It's one of the things that I enjoy. So for that is like I could do it longer if I want, I could keep doing I could eat like that forever.

You know, I enjoy food too much I think. Right.

But the only reason I'm motivated in life to be pretty good at business is so I can buy pretty good whiskey and be a fat fuck any time I could buy the lobster roll.

That's thirty seven dollars. No, it's cool man.

Yeah, there's, there's some logic to that. Not worrying about what food costs and just, it just, there's something about I feel like when you go to a restaurant you're going to like an art gallery. So it's like this guy's an artist or this woman's an artist. She creates these dishes and then you experience their art.

You know, I don't want to just eat meat all the time. So when I go to restaurants, I eat whatever the fuck I want.

But I think eighty percent of my diet's meat. Yeah, probably around 80 percent.

I've been trying like I went strictly essentially vegetables and meat for probably the last six months just to see kind of what's going on.

And honestly, I felt really good. And then I shifted just to meet five or six days ago. So I'm I'm running just meat now. Yeah. So I'm interested in what you did. And I guess, you know, I should probably do a little bit more research, but I do it for that.

It will mean grass fed a lot of grass fed butter. I kept all the bones sonis and all the bone marrow and things like that out of my body.

And for for the most part, you know, the elk that I shot a couple of weeks ago, that thing was really fat. It had a really healthy layer of fat on it, which is more it's a lot more fat than I thought that we would get from those, especially in the rut.

I know. Yeah, I was pretty fat, too. It was pretty impressive.

But I'm trying, you know what I mean? Where it's you know, I've talked to Trevor a lot over the last several months on how are you feeling or you crashing at this time?

How he stops it. Right.

He did it for a while, but then he got off of it. He said his hormones kind of plateaued.

Well, he was doing something crazy, too. He was doing Carnivore and he was only eating for like thirty seconds during the day or something where he would gorge himself.

But he was crazy. Really. Yeah, he was. He was he was fasting till like four o'clock in the afternoon. And then so he's doing intermittent fasting. He's doing it every day till 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, maybe give himself a feed window of two hours or something like that. And he's he was prepping for his he's doing a couple of races, plus he's doing some guiding up in Alaska. So he's doing all of these kind of mental exercises, plus the fact that he's optimizing his diet, doing exercise, physical exercise.

He's got this really interesting way of kind of looking at life, but he's only giving himself maybe an hour of a feeding window a day for a while, like you call it, a feeding window, you call it.

That's like, yeah, yeah. It's weird.

That intermittent fasting thing is a weird sort of torture cult, like torturing themselves and just like there's benefits to it for sure, there's real benefits to not eating all the time because you give your body a break and you let your body digest food and and there's benefits to going into ketosis and your body goes into ketosis when it doesn't have glycogen anymore and starts eating fat, burning off the fat. There's a lot there's a host of benefits. Right. I'm not the guy to tell you about them, but there's also a thing where guys do where they want to see how long they can go.

Yeah. You know, like marathon runners, there's just something to it, like they want to see how far they can push it. And so this is the thing where you're hungry, but you're like, nope, not until six.

Till six. Yeah. That's a super aggressive Internet minute. Fast things weird to me when they eat for like two hours a day. I get it. If it's like twelve thirty. Yeah. But like 18, 20 hours, that's, that's, that's too much for me.

We would be up in the mountains. Cruising around, we are going chad hunting and it's, you know, four thirty five o'clock and it's like I can't eat yet like Giovannino Day, we just went a little something.

Now I'm not eat until Thursday.

I don't fuck around with that shit in the mountains. If I'm hunting, I eat all the time. I constantly I'm not doing any intermittent fasting when I'm walking ten miles a day in the mountains.

That's crazy when you have to. And I never know when the real work is going to begin. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to be in that position. And I found myself in that position the last couple of years where it's time to turn it on and shit.

Man, I was on a stock a few weeks ago and it took me over an hour to move 30 yards, just trying to move on this big bull as slow as I could. There were cows everywhere, so I had eyes everywhere looking for me.

It's amazing. If you don't move fast and you have the right camo, what you can get away with, you can get away.

And I didn't know what I could get away with or I couldn't get away with. And I feel like I'm doing tai chi or something, you know, moving as slow as you can. And then you never know when how long is that stock going to be and then how long is the post work? If I if I shoot this animal, how long am I going to have to track it. Where is all the work in this going to start and end.

So I'm the same way I have to eat throughout the day. I have to keep putting fuel on my body because I'm always expecting shit's going to get real like ten minutes from now. Yeah.

Those hunting situations, like you just don't know you don't know if you're going to have to pack out in an hour, like you should be fueled up, because if you get really tired and you just feel weak and woozy, you could push through it in a regular day. Sure. But if you're out there in the mountains near the 8000 feet and then you have 100 pounds elk on your back and you have to walk over, this ridge is going to take you two miles to get to the truck.

Good fucking luck.

Yeah. Yeah. You should be prepared to be gassed a bit more.

Yeah, I eat man. You got to eat. But I think there's real benefits to, you know, occasionally fasting and then that intermittent fasting. I think human beings probably eat too much. Oh generally if you look at Americans in particular were fat as fuck.

Yeah. Well, the wrong stuff too. I mean, I've always made that joke when people are like having a donut and they're just like, I have no energy and they're chugging coffee. I'm like, eat some fucking carbs and some meat and you're going to feel great. It's just, yeah, the diet in America is very interesting to me, especially when we travel and we're with some of the other guys who don't have the same dietary habits as us.

And I'm like, that's you ate gas station. Burrito's in a hot dog.

And that's that's what you had to avail. And I don't I I'm not, like, discrediting it. It's your life. Do what you want, but it's it's weird. And then they feel like shit all day and you're like, well no wonder you had.

Yeah. It's just too available.

Yeah. It's too, there's too much all the time. And I think that's where the intermittent fasting at least you know, for a lot of guys it, it can really help because it's ultimately saying I'm not going to take part in just the ease of all the food that's available all the time. And I'm going to take part in it, you know, two or three hours a day or. Yeah, just give yourself some discipline. Yeah, give yourself some discipline.

Now, when you're you're eating this all meat diet, how much of what you're eating is is the elk and wild game and what are you what are you using?

I'm using right now I'm only using wild fish. So salmon for the most part in elk. So I'm. That's it. That's it.

So I brought what about other fat sauces? Well, I mean, outside of that little little nugget, the protein bars.

Yeah, I know. Those are so fucking addictive. So good.

So good. But I think for MKT I use a lot of MKT and I'm not saying it's good whatsoever. I just want to see what the fuck happens to my body when I do nothing but good. When I say when I say non processed fats, wild meat all the way through and then stick to it for two, three, four weeks and see how I'm feeling, just make sure you get enough fat.

Yeah, that's the real problem with people when they get really tired because your body is most certainly going to go into ketosis at certain points in time. But there's also something that happens when you eat so much protein. Your body converts that protein into glucose. Right? It's I think it's called glucose genesis or something like that. Right. And you'll experience that, too. But you're going to need fat. If you don't, you're going to get fatigued.

It's good.

It'll start fucking with you. And that's one of the reasons why I got really into Talo and really started eating a lot of bacon and things like why do you think there's such like a national misconception that fats bad for your body?

Because I hear that from a lot of people, like I don't want to eat it. It's fat.

Well, they were told that for the longest time they were. Well, first of all, there's real evidence that sugar and these companies that made sugar are paid scientists to fuck with data, to put heart disease and all these problems that people have. With clogged arteries to push that off on saturated fat, right, and to take that away from from sugar, right.

And sugar, sugar is terrible for you. Sugar in that form is so unnatural. Right. Fat in the form of meat is very natural. It's what human beings have been eating since the beginning of time.

Yeah. Monounsaturated polyunsaturated saturated fats. All pretty good for you. Just like stay away from trans fats.

Well, unsaturated fats that come from vegetable oils like I think it's called linoleic acid is fucking terrible for you.

Not only is it terrible for you, there's real evidence that it makes you hungry that like you're eating it and there's no nutrients and it's your body gets hungrier. Look, throughout human history, there's never been a time until recently where people got oils directly from plants in large quantities like, you know, you got oil from plants.

It was like oil from avocados, like natural or you got your oil from, you know, beef fat or chicken fat or things. That's natural for human beings. Right. These saturated fats that are natural, your body knows what to do with them. You know what the fuck to do with canola oil?

What is it your body's like?

What the fuck is your body gets a hold of like some raw honey. Your body knows exactly what to do with it, but your body gets a hold of like fucking corn syrup and that kind of shit, like, what is this?

It just doesn't make sense to your body. And I think we've gotten into this processed food thing and processed food is almost entirely like if you if you it's first of all, it's a human it's a new human creation.

Yeah. And it's it's it should never be your first choice. Your first choice should be natural foods.

You know, your first choice should be shaped like apple steak. All that's normal. You can eat that. That's easy. Your body knows the fuck to do with that.

But, you know, you get into like seed oils and it's like really heavily processed seed oils. Like there's real evidence that that is a giant part of what's wrong with the health of Americans today is these ultra processed vegetable oils. They're fucking terrible for you.

But it doesn't seem to me like that's a stretch in logic. Right. So for just the American diet in general, for us to look at the traditional food pyramid and say, well, that's bullshit. Ultimately, you know, if greens and in processed foods that are the cornerstone of your entire diet, you're going to have some issues you can kind of look around.

You don't even have to be a rocket surgeon to figure that out, right. It's like, holy shit, obesity is an epidemic in the United States.

Yeah, we're eating a ton of processed food. And all the guys that I know that are healthy are eating Whole Foods for the most part. And it's not because you have more discipline or because you have more access or wealth. I know a ton of guys that are not very wealthy to eat Whole Foods and they're feeding in certain windows and they're still in the military, still doing fucking incredibly difficult missions and they're really healthy.

So when I look around, I say, well, OK, if you stick to Whole Foods and you limit your amount of caloric intake, we're not dealing in a high, you know, high intellect, thought process here should be pretty easy. But I think what people want is they want their easy button, like hungry.

You see Jack in the box, you pull in, you get a burger, you're like, oh, now I feel better. But meanwhile, you just forced some shit into your system and your system's got to burn off all this bullshit you poured in there.

But there's even foods that people think are healthy that are not really good for you. Like, for instance, white rice is better than brown rice.

Yes.

Like people think white rice, like I'll have brown rice and being healthy brown rice.

It's got to be one of the biggest misconceptions out there. That fucking stuff. There's arsenic in there, but it's brown. Yeah, it's not. It's brown grains. But this shit is terrible for you.

Like, there's a reason why Asian cultures for a long time have been getting rid of that outside that husk. The Japanese got it right with food.

I'm telling you, this issue of white rice, seaweed just. Yeah, all day.

And yeah, there's a lot of countries that figured it out. We're just not one of them.

We're like election process, seed oils, sugar, corn syrup. Yeah.

Preservatives, fucking gallons of preservatives, glyphosate on all our plants.

Yeah.

There's also evidence that like animals and I've been getting into this, the animals that eat these ultra processed foods, then you eat them like animals that eat like ultra processed corn, and then you eat that animal like you're getting some of the bullshit from the corn and some of the bullshit from that. All these seed oil acids. You're getting these things in your body, too.

But that makes sense to me. It makes complete sense to me when we look at what they're eating and then you're eating them for sure. There's really not a direct or you're not stretching and connecting a lot of complex thought there in the sense of when people are trying to sell me on the idea like, no, it's great, don't worry about it. It's like no man like those chickens are eating arsenic and they're packed in, you know, right on top of each other, shitting on each other everywhere.

Like I'd rather have a free, free range egg. You rather have that? I'd rather have free range chicken. It's no offense to however you want to eat, but it's just a preference of eating. It's pretty easy. I think that the the argument comes from maybe corporate impact in marketing where they'll just Americans will consume it without thinking and go, well, it's good because Jack in the Box told me that it's organic.

Well, I think there's any one thing in this country where there is a massive. Lack of understanding in terms of the way people perceive what's good and what's bad, it's nutrition because there's so few doctors that really know what the fuck they're talking about.

There's doctors out there that will tell you you don't need supplements, you don't need supplements, you need a healthy, balanced diet.

Then you look at them, they got a gut, they look bloated, they're dying like fuck is going on.

Look, I just typed in brown rice, first white rice just to see what would pop up. And like the all five or six articles that come up say the opposite. What you guys just said, that's good for you. That brown rice has a better advantage over white rice vintage.

What's it that says that there's nutrients and antioxidants and white rice is empty calories?

Yeah, wife, you listen, articles about rice is basically just carbohydrates. It is just carb is just calories. But the the shell of the brown rice is not good for you.

Google what do Google this brown rice. The negative consequences of brown rice.

Yeah, I think it's not necessarily nutritional thing. There's something you get a lot of vegan propaganda and these articles that are written by these people like, well, the one I went Google, a company I've I get food from sometimes not like I'm paid by them. But do do me a favor.

Google, Google the negative. Well, that's what I say. The negative impact of brown rice, negative health consequences of brown rice.

But that's going to be across the board with food.

I was actually just listening to a doctor discuss this brown rice. Brown Rice is the brand and German tag, both of which are responsible for giving the high fiber, the brown germ also irritated digestive tract digestive problems, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, leaky gut syndrome.

I would skip that source usually in times of India is bad. Right. But it's worse over there.

I get all my facts from Wikipedia. Really not the best source that we would start with.

I would say, well, that's the problem. Like, where do you get. That's why I was trying to say so.

I just typed WebMD is usually pretty good. I just typed in brown problem with brown rice. Go that Invictus Fitness. What is a. Here we go. The problem with Brown Rice, who often says people should eat brown rice, the majority of your protein to Brown Rice has been reported high levels of inorganic arsenic, which is what I said, which is a toxin known to potentially cause liver, lung, kidney and bladder cancer.

Some arsenic is just naturally occurring mineral, but the inorganic carbon comes from chemicals and pesticides. A researcher named Alan Aragón helped run, too. He's a very highly respected fellow. Redish on line run to different research projects, comparing the effects of white rice and brown rice on the body. See the findings below. White Rice actually has an equal or better nutritional yield and also has a better nitrogen retentive effect than brown rice. This is also because fiber and fight.

What's that word? Fight to fight fiber and fight content to brown rice act as an anti nutrient reducing the bioavailability of the micronutrients it contains. Since no one is reading the fucking link, I'll just lay things out here for you, see.

Yeah. So the problem with things that are posted online is that there's a lot of people that want to get you to eat a certain way, right. And they'd like you to eat Whole Foods. They'd like you to eat plant based foods. They'd like you to eat Carnivore. They'd like you to Iquito. And they'll try to spell things out with user bias or with, you know, confirmation bias to try to like only like if you've talked to people that are carnivore based people, they'll just tell you, like, this is the only way you should eat.

And this is why you talk to people who are vegans. This is the only way you should eat. And this is why. And more now than ever before. People think that plant based is the way to go.

So oftentimes when you Google like brown rice or white rice or vegetables or whatever, you'll only find the positive consequences. Like, it's very rare to find the negative consequences of eating leafy green vegetables, but they they exist.

The negative, first of all, oscillates like what Miley Cyrus's old boyfriend or ex-husband. He had to get fucking surgery because he was getting these kidney stones because he was eating so much leafy green vegetable.

Are you kidding me? You get oxalate. Yeah. Yeah. Can just another reason why I shouldn't eat greens, but then there's other people that can tell you the Greens are super healthy for you and there's all these benefits to eating greens and that a certain level of I think a certain amount of eating greens, there's like and there's there's a dramatic effect.

Or your body is like like certain plants have chemicals that they release to try to discourage predation. Right.

So they'll release these chemicals and these chemicals that will they'll discourage animals from from eating them.

In fact, when it goes back to giraffe's, there's certain giraffe's that have actually starved because and this is really crazy, when the giraffe's up upwind, we're eating certain plants that the leaves downwind caught the fact that they were being prêt.

They're being right. And and they change their taste profile. So they release a certain chemical that makes the giraffe's discouraged from eating them as these giraffe's hated eating this shit.

It's really crazy. Like you're crazy. Yeah. Chemicals that plants release, they don't plants don't want to be fucking eaten. Right.

You know, like and they have to figure out how to survive. So nature has all these strategies for survival. And one of the strategies that plants have is they release these chemicals in order to make themselves taste like shit or even be poisonous.

What I've been hearing more and more of this, and it's interesting because when I look at what's going on with your gut, right. And I was just having this conversation earlier with with a retired Special Forces guy, good friend of mine.

And we were talking about their are life in the military and what's happening in our gut biome. Right. What's happening with the balance of your ecosystem down here? And we were we've we've lived this life of going overseas and in overseas repetitively on on a on a on a yearly, sometimes more annual cycle in these developing world countries in combat zones. We're nuking our gut every time we go over there and antimalarials anti inflammatories, all of the different things.

We're just just dropping bombs in our gut and then we're eating high preservative foods. So meals ready to eat. And you're eating Emrys. You're not sleeping.

You're nuking your gut with antibiotics, fires and burn pits.

And so now how much is happening down here? And when we're talking about plant based or carnivore paleo or any of these other things, how much is it really dependent on the individual and whether or not they were breast as kids? How many anti inflammatories have they taken and what type of lifestyle do they where your ancestors come from? Yeah, where your ancestors come from, I think.

Any time we try to template a system or some type of system and you say, well, that's going to work for everybody, right? It's fucking might not work for any.

That's what super complicated about diet. There are some people that their day to vegan diet and it's perfect for them. Right. They have no problem with it. And there's other people that get really sick and there's other people that eat a carnivore diet and they feel like dog shit, they feel terrible, they feel lethargic and all. They're doing it right or wrong. But there's some people that eat it and they feel great. You got to find what works for you.

Right. But the thing is, people are so dogmatic about about diet and it becomes an ideology. It becomes like a religion. Yeah. And especially like vegans and carnivores, the vegan people in the carnivore, people are like there are like the right and the left wing of America. They're like the Antifa and the proud boys.

They're like, yeah, really are they are they fuckin believe 100 percent in their way of life.

This is the only way. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and they'll tell you based on their own anecdotal evidence.

The thing you need to know though about vegans is there's a no I think it's more there's a giant number of them that eat meat when they're drunk. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a huge percentage, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to call those guys out. But it was interesting. My wife posted holding up like six days. It's like a year or so ago. And man, a vegan, she got posted on some vegan page and they just went after her like, I hope you Fandi this, you that.

And I was like, damn, she's just having a filet man.

But I think anything on the diet side and fitness, it's super individualized for success because not everything that works for you would work for me. And I think to a lot of people are too lazy to figure out and do the actual effort to see what it's for. Their work routine, work hard, work easier just to say I'll be lazy today.

It's hard to figure out what works for you. You've got to be real honest about it. And you know, so many people they like.

Here's the argument for like if you get drunk and you want to be eating meat, you also get drunk.

You eat donuts. Right. You also get drunk. Like they were talking about this on Meat Eater. There's a podcast out right now with that Paul Saladino guy that I was just talking about. Yeah. Who they got into this.

And it's human beings like things that taste good but are bad for you. All right.

So if you're going to analyze your diet and you're going to really do it right, you got to be disciplined. So if you're going to do it, you should really do blood work. You should really exercise and write down your routines and then write down how you feel after you exercise and then try to figure out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. And that's one of the reasons why people like the Carnivore diet, because it's one of the best elimination diets, basically taking everything out except meat.

And then you kind of find out, hey, you know, my body doesn't react well to this or, you know, my body has a real problem with that. Or some people it's caffeine and some people it's just fucking whatever it is, it's like you have to find out what what's fucking with you. And most people don't.

Most people just you know, they go to a doctor, the doctor prescribes medication, they keep eating the same old shit. But now they have chemicals in the air that are supposed to offset whatever negative stuff that they have in their diet.

What's an interesting Segway on that, too? Because it's like in part, some of the non-profit stuff I do on the side is is solely based on that the individualized treatment for veterans, specifically in law enforcement, because you see a lot with the military, DOD, the VA, it's like you're saying you show up, don't feel good. It's a blanket treatment. Right. Here's some antidepressants. Here's all that. But it's you know, it's a Band-Aid for a bullet hole.

And if you're not actually figuring out what the cause is and you're treating symptoms, then the third and fourth order effects of those treatments are going to make that individual worse. You know, some of the issues they have, like I think I have PTSD, that that's a guy, Senator PTS, they go through and they find out they have TBI and 40 percent memory function, short term memory function. And so now you go to cognitive therapy and you get like guys or gals working through it that way.

But the only way to figure that out is through brain scans and blood work and actually focusing on the individual rather than being lazy and say, hey, here's some antidepressants when the whole time the issue is something completely different and then you have budget problems.

Right. So the veterans hospitals don't have enough money to send you through all these different scans and all these different doctors and specialists and try to fine tune. What's wrong with you?

Well, I think that that's, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is the, ah, our politicians will say our leadership, they they love to go to war.

They love it like, you know, hey, how many times can we send more guys to war? How many countries? You know? And I'm a participant in that endeavor, by the way. Right. Invaded Iraq. I've spent a lot of my adult life in in war, specifically in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But the thing that I've noticed in my adult life is that politicians love it. They love to send, you know, eighteen to twenty six year old men and women.

They love to send them to war. What they hate is paying the fucking bill. That's what they hate. They hate paying for the after effects. They hate standing by their word in the sense of, hey, we're going to take care of you, your all your health problems, your education, we're going to start. Really fixing the VA system, so there's long term care, what most veterans that I know, what they have to do is they have to continue to lobby the government over and over and over for them to prove that what's happened to their body is connected to their service.

But the issue that I continue to see is that this is a lack of of one, it's a lack of experience for our politicians. They don't quite understand what war is and the long term effects on individual soldiers after decades of service. And I think, you know, hundreds of my friends, every one of every one of us has some type of long term effect from their service. Every one of us in the sense of do you have sleep issues?

You have, you know, got issues, you have inflammatory, you know, inflammation or you missing a limb.

And really, it's it's disgusting the amount of emphasis there is on going and then the lack of emphasis on care. It really it saddens me as a society when we have to rely on non-profits to pay for the care of veterans because that the military or the DOD and the tax the taxpayer essentially. And I think if they understood this, if they knew they weren't paying for the long term care of our service members to the degree that they needed, they would absolutely have no issues stepping up and saying, hey, we have to do something about this.

And it's it's really when we look at the entire system and how it's it's put together, there's no way that a person this is a good story for my friend Clint. He's missing both his legs recently from last year during covid.

What was happening is that his leg was changing as far as the shape of it, because he was growing an additional additional layer of bone where his leg was blown off and he needed a new leg, but he couldn't get in to get a new leg. So he was confined to his wheelchair for almost six months during this process and he couldn't get an appointment. There's no reason why that should happen.

And there's literally zero reason we can't have the largest transfer of wealth from a tax taxpayer into the military industrial complex in modern history without zero ethical argument as far as our entire political system and then not continue to care for our veterans. There's just no way that we can do that as a society, because I think ultimately that defines us and who we are collectively. And it's not a good grade.

Well, there's a long history of the United States doing that. Remember when people were coming back from the first Gulf War and they were having all these issues with radiation because they used that was depleted uranium rounds and they kind of denied, first of all, that they use them.

They deny that this effect was related to that and birth defects and all sorts of like weird radiation sickness issues that people were having. They were calling a Gulf War syndrome, but they did their very best to not take care of these people.

When you look from Agent Orange in Vietnam, the long term effects of that and all the studies and research that's coming out right now with the burn pits. Yes. And the carcinogens and how much cancer. But then they're like, you can't really draw the conclusion that it came from burning shit for six months. You know, and to Evan's point as well, it's it's it's tragic, to be honest, that there's tens of thousands of nonprofits that are having to do the legwork without government grants or funding.

The money is coming from people that are being, you know, participating in philanthropy, saying, I want to do something good for these guys and gals that have real issues, like to Clint, he's missing his legs and you're going to make him be in a wheelchair for months because of it. For me, that's just absolutely unacceptable. And there has to be change.

Well, with the part of the story you were telling right before the show, Mary, about your friend who lost her arms spine, that one of her good friends, Mary, she's a EOD tech, had both of her arms blown off when she tried to catch some ordnance that they were going to dispose of. And essentially, she has a full time caregiver and she went to go see her family for I believe it was a month. And during that time, she didn't have the caregiver because she's with her husband and family and they're taking care of her.

Well, the VA determined after that stint that she doesn't need a full time caregiver because she obviously was fine that month. She was away. And this is a young lady who amazing person, like just nubs. There's, you know, she calls herself wondering, bless her heart, she's hilarious.

But she she can't do things that come so easily to us, like grab things, use the toilet, like. And she has a really funny Twitter about, you know, wiping her ass, I believe she said. But the fact that that's happening and someone in the VA wasn't like, oh, that's fucking stupid. Here you go. Full time caregiver like that.

I mean, they're just trying to find a way to cut money left and right. And it's just numbers on a piece of paper. Yeah, it's numbers on a piece of paper. And it's I don't. I think people want to be reminded, right one, it's these are bad decisions as as we look back in history, when we look at Iraq in particular, and we look at, you know, the the tens of thousands of service members who served in Iraq to include myself, I don't know if they want to be reminded of that, that section of our history on a regular basis either.

So when we have amputees and we have health issues with the burn pits, that really I think is is our cause of that that we need to talk about is our Agent Orange is you know, I think John Stewart just recently brought it up and we're active in the Hunter Seven Foundation, which does a lot of research in this.

But there's zero reason why the government is not funding to the tune of millions of dollars of research to figure out what's happening to the service members with they're directly related, you know, lung and health issues from burn pits. There's zero reason because the only reason is because if they acknowledge that it's a problem, they're going to have to pay for the explained burn pits of people.

Yeah, it's a it was essentially a big pit where you would put all of your garbage, everything, everything. So that's batteries. That's all the plastics.

It's anything and everything that is required.

Yeah, it's fecal matter, it's tires. It's anything that is directly associated with. Your living condition in a war that you need to get rid of and you would shove it all into a pit and then it would burn 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Whoa. And yes, there you go. And how close is this to where you guys were living?

In every one of the fire bases I was at four and a half years is how much time I have in the ground in Iraq. And every one of my fire bases, there was a burn pit. And not only that, you're going to have young privates out there with stress rolling it over with probably some, you know, knitted fake mask that they're wearing that they got. And they're the ones in there actually rotating the trash to burn it through completely.

So they're completely subjected to that environment from a very long time. Whose fucking idea was that really smart, really, really smart, you know, officers and contractors, the same guys that decided that, you know, the invasion was going to be a really good idea of Iraq.

They're the same people making those types of decisions in the way that, you know, obviously when we look at this now and we look back on it, we go, that's dumb as fuck. There was somebody in a series of people at that point in time in 2003 to 2009 in Iraq that were saying this is a good idea. And that type of mentality, I think, is the same type of mentality today that says this is a good idea for not for us not to fund the research, to figure out what the fuck is going on so we can do something about it.

And when we talk about it. Right are our voices are only so big.

But I think if people knew what was happening with our generation of veterans because, you know, I'm 43, you're 33, 34, 34, you got all these guys that are coming up with strange cancers like weird.

One of the Giacomo's friends and our friends who just died of cancer is a Medal of Honor recipient, had a strange, hard working cancer or some kind of cancer in his back. And he died six months down the road in what's happening. And when we talk about the other foundations and people that are diving into some of this research, it's incredibly underfunded. They're starting to have this direct connection between the burn pits themselves and the chemicals that ultimately we're exposed to or were exposed to in a lot of the cancers that guys are coming.

When I say that they're developing, I guess obviously.

Yeah, I mean, has there's no fucking way that's good for you. There's no fucking way.

And that's in the same camp. Yeah. Yeah.

Right there in the fall where you would have to put I would I would take a towel and I would wet it and then I would put it down underneath my my my my door going into this little container shipping container and I'd put another one on the top just so I could just so I could sleep the rest of the evening because the smoke was so bad from the burn pits as it would move in.

You couldn't sleep because you couldn't sleep without coughing and it was going that was every day, depending on your on your fire base. That was every day. So it wasn't the fact that, hey, man, I got all my fingers and toes right now.

I survived seven years and I feel like a counterargument to that would be like, well, whatever idiots, you signed up for it.

But if that's not an argument, I know someone say that. But I think that if you find those people. Yeah, exactly.

If you're willing to spend one hundred thousand to a million dollars on a guy or a gal to train them up to do a specific job, because you look at how much it costs to put into training in school, after school, after school, and then they get out and we're just like, have fun, especially guys and gals like we're talking tier one units. I have friends that have done sixteen, seventeen, eighteen deployments. And it's an injustice because they're willing to sacrifice their life, limb and body and eyesight for, you know, I guess the politicians assume the war, but then it's a moral obligation as our society that we have to look out for them when they come back.

That not happening.

It's insane that this is prevalent. They have these burn pits at every base. That's fucking insane.

And for the most part, most people don't watch this, Jamie.

And Afghanistan, at its peak, more than 400 tons of waste was disposed using burn pits daily.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah. And then the question is like, what else do you do? Like San Francisco fog, one soldier described the smoke as thick as San Francisco fog every day, all that like pollen, dust, the color of smoke could be blue and black or yellow and orange. However, as mostly black, everyone inhaled and ingested it.

It was absorbed by the skin fog, which is which is interesting because, you know, I think a lot of people that have deployed if you said, hey, we got to get this trash burnt, you know, we got to do it like we signed up for it. We got it. But then you got to give them the research and the medical clinicians that understand this going forward and after the fact, actually hopefully not die like this. No, no, no, no, no, no.

You got to not do that. No, I agree. But I'm saying this, but there's no way you would say, hey, let's let these guys breathe in this shit and then take care of them. No, you should not burn that shit. They've got to figure out another way to get rid of it. I agree.

I mean, but even landfills are fucking terrible. One of the things they're finding out in these when they're doing these satellite overviews is that methane like it's like they're trying to find the like the largest sources of methane and what's contributing to greenhouse gases.

It's fucking landfills, right. Landfills where you take all your food they poured into the ground. They just cover it up with dirt. It's just leaking methane into the atmosphere. It's fucking terrible. Like, I don't know what the solution is, but the solution is definitely not burn it right where the soldiers are sleeping.

No, and I think that. Now, as we continue to evolve, hopefully as a society and we look at the way that we deploy service members overseas, we've at least identified this is a problem.

But the big thing that I see is we have to continue to to look at the problem, fund the research and look at the direct connection between these types of activities, meaning burn pits. We're looking at burn pit and I'm saying that's burn pit. But it's also you know, I know Tim, obviously, he's been on the podcast, S.F. Guy, A.F. Guy. But when we look at the long term effects of we'll call it the special operations community, because I'm I'm obviously from that subculture.

But sleep deprivation, anti inflammatories, antimalarials burn pits, multiple rotations, PTS. This is a holistic health issue for the most of these guys returning. If they don't have direct or visible combat wounds, they have some type of residual. They've been affected by the war in a long term residual way. And I think what happens is as the VA continues to evolve at least past these wars, we have to look to look at it as a collective and say, how do we make turn everybody's attention within the VA system to directly take care of these guys in a very positive and impactful way.

So we don't have people like Mary Dagg that get denied a full time service giver caregiver.

How does that stand now? Is it still the way it is right now? That was like five days ago. I haven't talked to her since. I'm actually in California. But yeah, at least give the resources and the funding necessary, because I'm sure VA as an organization wants to do good and do great things. I think that when people just say the VA sucks, it's the wrong way to look at us. It's the way it's how do we critically think and solve the problem, then put in process and a plan to go, here's the resources you need so we can fix the issues that are right in front of her face.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine being a VA bean counter or being someone who works for VA Bean Counter who gets the call that you have to like cut the budget by X amount.

So figure out where are you going to slash these benefits like.

And then you have to look at these people that you're talking to, either on the phone or through email. You can't even look at them as a human. You've got to look at them as a number on a ledger. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy.

And then you have, you know, incredible giving nation that backfills that need through, you know, non-profit organizations. Yeah. I guess my only intent in that conversation is I think the government needs to do a much better job of leading the conversation than being towed around by the entire conversation. They need to get out in front of it. They have to take responsibility for it.

And I think that's the big one, which is taking responsibility for, you know, war just in general and then taking responsibility for the after effects of the individual soldiers, sailors, Marines post war. That just seems to me the thing to do. And I think most people, if they realize these things were happening, I think the last time I tried to schedule a VA appointment, it was going to take me 200 plus days to get in to see a physician, you know, about a shoulder injury.

Really? Yeah.

So it's 200 days to get on the list and I'm going to be special. I'm not I'm not, you know, missing anything. Right. But there are a lot of people that have been directly affected by this that need care. And now we have the ability, I think, and based on the current administration, to go see a primary care provider outside of the VA, which I think was a huge step. But there's still a lot to do.

Right. And there's, you know, for us having this company and what we're doing with it, you know, it's a big it's a big part of the mission of how we run the company, what we're doing with the company. It is a huge part of our mission. Just in general. It's something we do every day and it's awesome.

And I think that's one of the reasons why people love you guys so much. I mean, that's the amount of support that you guys have out there in the public. I think that I sent you that picture when I was in Italy and that guy was. Yeah, I mean, line guy in front of me in line with a black reifel coffee t shirt. I'm like, all right, man, it's it's there's something to what you guys are doing that resonates with people, that it's not just a coffee brand, but it's a coffee brand that supports first responders, military veterans.

And it means a lot to people. I think because of that.

I think something I'm really proud of with the company, too, is giving a more like visceral understanding and perspective of the veteran experience, because before the company and the commercials and stuff we did, I think there was a very singular perspective what a veteran was. It was kind of the chest beating, you know, chiseled Navy seal and tattooed bearded. Yeah. And well, not exists. I think that it's good to shed light on your tattoo. I didn't go full Navy SEAL in all my hair today.

Sorry, but like. Bringing light to the community that there are so many creative people and veterans or humans, we're just we're just Americans and a lot of a lot of these guys and gals have other professions and they're talented. They're artists. They're and I think humanizing that a little bit allows people not to look at veterans like the two ways that I've seen a lot throughout the years, or you're there, Captain America, or you're a pill popping, depressed veteran that, you know, goes to bed every night beating your wife.

And you're like 90 percent of us are in the middle of just people that want to do hopefully normal people trying to do some extraordinary things in the name of a free society.

I think there's just a cool thing that people like supporting companies like yours that do have a great message and they do do good things. It's a it's a nice aspect that you guys can put that message out there and people understand what you're about. And and that this is a company that was really started by two guys who are veterans.

I mean, it's a big company now, but really just came down to you guys and your love of coffee and just deciding to do this and then start doing good with the money. And people love that man. They'd really do. It resonates with people a lot, you know, I mean, I've had black rifle t shirts on before and and people talk to me about it means a lot to them.

I mean, we're thankful that it means a lot to him because we wouldn't be in the position we are to kind of focus on the things that we think or matter and support the organizations that we do. And I mean I mean, I think that the both of us and user and user experience is exactly what we want to have a great quality product and something that motivates people to wake up in the morning and kick ass. And if they didn't purchase it, we wouldn't be here doing what we're trying to do.

This also think about with you. That's like with you, Evan. You're so it's so obviously authentic. Like there's a video of you roasting coffee with a frying pan over a fire. Like you're such a dork with this.

It's so obvious that it's real. I mean, I love people that geek out on shit. I just fucking love it, even if it's something that I love coffee. But even if it's something that I don't even love, I just love when people are really into shit. It's very contagious.

What it's super fun, as I was talking to earlier. Right. It's I'm I'm really fortunate just as a, you know, an adult in America right now. So many different ways.

But I get to I get to do this coffee and I say I'm in coffee every day and I get to I get to explore any piece of the entire aspect of coffee anytime I want and get as detailed into it as much as I want. But the thing that I've found. That is just as interesting, if not more interesting than coffee is as the company gets bigger, you know, developing our ecosystem as a company, we have 400 employees now, right.

It's it's a it's a bigger company, 50 plus percent of them are veterans. And as I look at our ecosystem and how we support different non-profits and what we're doing on the company, it's it's an incredible hike.

It sounds like commercial, but I love seeing this incredible high quality product because I love going to these countries and Central and South America, working directly with the farmers and then pulling it back through and then uniting the customer. And the company is one in this really fucking cool ecosystem. And it wasn't something that I started out necessarily thinking about where, you know, I wanted to be in charge of a company of 400 people. That's not what I started out to do.

I literally was roasting coffee in my garage because I was trying to find something else to do. And the CIA told me that I couldn't work for him anymore. Right.

Like, fuck. Like why you couldn't work for him anymore. Man, you know, a wide variety of reasons. You know, I worked there for nine years. I deployed probably seven out of those nine years. I was angry, you know, and I'm and I don't want to say that, you know, is directly my fault, but the organization that I started with in Iraq and kind of went from Iraq to Afghanistan and left later, I was I was tired and burnt out and I was fucking angry.

And honestly, they had probably every right to tell me to hit the road. And I'm glad that they did at the end of the day, it was a wake up call, a wide variety of reasons, I was callous. I was emotionally unavailable. There was a fucking laundry list of things that were broken.

And how did you get past all that, you know? I met my wife in Denver and we got pregnant, and I hate when guys say that we we yeah, she got pregnant.

No, I fucked my wife and she got pregnant. Yeah, we were talking. Yeah.

And I really thought about it. And it was it was hard for me to think about it, but I was most fearful of not being able to love my daughter because I didn't have the emotional capacity to do that. And it was eye opening. It was actually very scary because that's not the kind of person that I wanted to be.

And we've all seen examples of people who are that and then realize that later in life, it's the saddest thing in the world is when you see a parent and then they have a grown kid that they fucked up. Yeah. You know, because they weren't because they did have all these other problems they never dealt with. And then it's too late. And then you have this angry child who you were never there for and then you're like, fuck exactly.

I looked at it and I knew in order to be a loving father, a good husband and a good man, I had to change a lot of shit. Like I really had to have a very. Difficult series of conversations with myself and give myself a lot of fucking tough love and starting a business was one of the things that I needed to do because it gave me I couldn't work for anyone else after that.

I was kind of done with working for other people. I was not necessarily searching for purpose, but I knew that I really wanted to do something with coffee and, you know, a wide variety of reasons that I love coffee. Black rifle was an image to my service rifle, and I found myself wanting to teach myself a new skill. And then what I wrote was a mission statement in my mission statement, which was just a mission statement for my life in general, which was to transition out of government service and live a happy and fulfilling life, had nothing to do with money, you know, running a company or hiring people.

I just wanted to find how to be happy and fulfill myself outside of being a commando or CIA guy, whatever that that definition for myself was. But more importantly, as I continued to develop myself and I'm not saying I'm even close to being a template for anyone, it's a constant it's a constant state of evolution to be a better man. And I also knew that all the lies that I told myself up to that point of, you know, I'm a Green Beret, so, you know, I'm I'm less than a one percentile and I'm a fucking badass.

And I'm this and I'm not all of that would have been a lie. If I would have been a bad father, all of that would have been meaningless, would have been garbage, just propaganda. Every one of my combat rotations, every one of my friends that is has been killed or maimed in this war, it would have been a complete unjustifiable lie to myself to say if I don't be the best man that I possibly can be. And work on it now, then all of that is for not it's all shit.

So. I literally, after my first year in business, was sitting in my garage. And I sold everything that I don't, you know, and I was chips in on this entire thing. And I didn't have anything left to sell, I didn't have I was living this shitty rental, my wife was, you know, packing boxes and roasting coffee, and I was getting kind of down on myself and I was crying on this pelican case in my garage.

And I it was a distinct turning point in my life where I said. Get up. Stop making excuses. Stop being a fucking pussy. And do something about your life, and when I say that, like that's the conversation, that's the exact conversation I had with my myself. And I've had that conversation almost every day in the last several years about just how can I continue to develop this ecosystem that meets my mission statement for my company that quite literally has nothing to do with money.

But how do I continue to be positive impact in my environment versus negative taking away or, you know, contributing to toxicity, which is, man, I don't want to have anything to do with that life anymore.

There's a lot of people that have they have a problem with the way they are.

And they they make a decision to change, but they fall back into their old patterns because it's comfortable, because they're used to that. So how did you avoid doing that?

Like, how did you how did you make real change? Um.

Well, one, it's recognizing it, right, it's kind of recognizing that you have an addiction when you have an addiction, you know, when you have emotional or anger issues and you're you know, you're you're just angry or whatever it is for for for no real reason. I think, one, you have to recognize you have a problem. And I think, you know, I've continued to recognize that I have a problem.

And it it's it's like quitting a habit or anything that you're doing, whether it's quitting smoking or, you know, working through a very disciplined diet. It it it's every minute you have the ability, sometimes every second you have the ability to make a decision and have a conscious effort to focus on improvement. And when I feel myself, because there are times when I feel myself sliding backwards a little bit into more of a negative event, and we do it all the time.

And this is one thing I will say about the guys that we have together is it's not just myself. It's, you know, my friends in the military, they're called it sounds so ridiculous, but it says it's like we have our battle buddies for a lack of a better term. But Matt and Jared, our other partner, we formed a team and the other people within our company that formed a team. We can talk to each other in a way that's very candid, we can emotionally expose, and the other thing is, is Matt and I will do it all the time.

If we're talking and we're talking about negative and we're grinding ourselves into a negative hole, like, stop, stop right now.

We got better shit to talk about. Pull ourselves out, dust ourselves off and.

You can't if you're by yourself, it's much more difficult, I think, when you have really good friends and for for us, we're business partners. I can be that guy for him and he can be that guy for me and Gerard can be the guy for all of us. And we have really good friends. We have good business partners. We have good people in the company that. They hope they really do, and leaving one culture, one subculture of, you know, really tight knit special operations group of guys starting a business by yourself is difficult enough, right?

It's very I would imagine it's a it's an extremely difficult endeavor doing it without your friends and people you can trust and people you can rely on. I can't even imagine because the things that we've had to go through in the last several years and the reminders like Matt won't let me be a shit bag. It's just not possible.

He won't if I start being lazy for like a week.

And I was like, you get a hundred fucking words, but it's true.

He won't he won't let me be a schipperke and I won't let him be a shit bag either in the sense of if I see him dragging, if there's something going on, what I call him, like, what's going on? How are you doing? What what can I talk to you about? So I think. One, it's focusing on your self, identifying you have a problem, looking at every minute and every second at times, depending on where it is on how to be better, and then building and building a supportive team around you that understands what's going on and how they can continue to get you up.

And we've had to do this for a lot. We've had to cut a lot of toxic people out of out of our lives, like we've had to cut some toxic people out of our lives because they're just negative weight.

They'll hold you back. That's probably been the most challenging thing for for me over the years, has been there's always going to be extraneous influences that impact you. But I've had to change environments about five different times and find the right team for me and that, you know, my core competencies work with theirs. But because a lot of people have asked us over the years, how did you get the team? Like we went through seven different teams, you know, toxic relationships or ones that just didn't mesh well together.

And the hardest part of that is just taking that leap of faith and saying, well, this is going to be really weird, but I'm packing my rucksack. It's what I did. I had a good life. I was making a lot of money in my business at the time. And, you know, I didn't like the direction things were going. And Evan called me and was like, do you want to do you want to jump into Utah and let's go?

And I packed up, moved out of my house, broke up my girlfriend at the time, drove to Utah on my tundra and one bag and said, well, time to start over at twenty six, seven years old. And I completely start over. I live in an Airbnb for six months and I think at face value that was terrifying. But the second I landed in Utah and gotten that Airbnb and I was like, fuck, all I got to worry about is the one bag of clothes I have and going to work tomorrow, something that I'm passionate about that I love.

And the rent's paid, so we're good. And from there on, like, I've just chased that feeling and then all the toxicity that kind of has impacted my life with relationships. Just get out.

It's also going to help that you're doing a business with friends as opposed to doing a business with a bunch of corporate dorks. Yeah, you know, I see people that are involved in business and I see the conversations they have. And it's almost like they're speaking some strange language, some fake language.

They all get together and talk, corporate talk, and then they get out of there and they take these big oh, they take this big deep breath and they have a drink or they drive home because they're living bullshit. They're living a lie all day long. They're pretending to be someone they're not.

I call it the ivory tower syndrome. You know, it's they just blow hot air and don't do anything. And then they don't believe in their mission. And I think that's been the most impactful thing for us is we believe in it. And it's easy to be authentic and our communication style between the team and and again, the hardest part is probably maintaining that cultural ecosystem in the company, especially as you scale it, because you want people to be open, candid, radical transparency.

Obviously, we're not saying, you know, making fun of people, but we want to be able to say, fuck, let's get this done instead of well.

And and that's why I think we've done so well so far, is because we just stick to the mission and grind it out. I mean, we're all kind of bunch of knuckle draggers that are dumb. We just outworker intelligence. Intelligence. Yeah.

And I think to your point, you know, maintaining mission focus, you know, all of these things that we learned in the military. Right. Missions. Right. Your mission statements maintain your mission focus, radical transparency. You know, I'm a zealot. At the end of the day, I love coffee. I love the company or love the ecosystem. And it's easy for me. I can go in and high five everybody and we can joke around in the company.

We have incredible atmosphere as far as the ecosystem of the company. I love going to work there.

I would hate to go to work in a really in a corporate environment. I actually hate the word corporate. Yeah.

Because it's it to me it just says this is stodgy, spreadsheet driven bullshit where you've got a bunch of people that pontificate about things that they have no idea what they're talking about.

And what they want to do is they want to run a company only for the profit versus the pursuit of authenticity under a real mission. There's a huge difference.

I stepped into corporate environments a lot, and especially finance guys are some of the worst fucking people ever in the sense of, you know, they're not funny. They have no sense of humor. I've told bankers to get the fuck out of my office and I'm like fifteen minutes late just to get some, like, payback and how many times that they've screwed good people over.

So the company itself, in the sense of any company and how you kind of create that environment, I don't like the standard corporate templated system that people work through.

It's it's really it's confusing to me as well, because, you know, when people are fake, you know, when you're having a conversation with some executive and he's like, oh, yeah, Suzy, you're. You're an incredible asset to the company. It's like you don't know who that person is. It's inauthentic. It's fake. And I would hate to go to work in a place like that every day.

And most people do. Yeah, yeah. That's that's a giant problem with human beings today, is that most people don't have a purpose. They don't feel good about what they're doing. You know, that's the Thoreau quote. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. And that is real. Man, that that's really what a lot of people are going through every day, just not having any real, real connection to what they're doing, whether they feel good about it.

They feel like they have a purpose.

They feel like it makes like they matter, like they really do matter, you know. And then what a lot of these people and they wind up getting fired by their company, you know, after 30 years of working there and they realize that they didn't they were nothing. They didn't mean anything. It wasn't important. It's devastating.

I think a lot of people like to come to like that social construct and like this is what you have to do, the nine to five kind of thing. But not to be a fatalist, but something like my positive mindset, like we're all born terminal.

The second we come out the womb, we're going to fucking die. And I've always wanted to be super proud because, you know, I think there's certain aspects of the former jobs I had. You have to kind of agree and be comfortable with the fact that there's a high probability of dying and or life changing events. And I think once you realize that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when whether that's when I'm 60 and have a heart attack or I live to be 90 or I die tomorrow, and that drives me every single day because I look back and go, I don't want to miss out in this fucking crazy thing called life.

You know, if you have one chance to, like, live this cool fucking experience, whether or not you believe in an afterlife or not, but we're all going to die. And it's very bizarre for me that people don't take leaps of faith because I get so trepidations in everything that they do and think, oh, well, what if and they hate that uncomfortable feeling these fucking punch it in the face and hit it.

But the problem is route's, you know, people, they grow roots before they know what they actually want to do. And what I mean by that is, look, you go to college, right? And then you have student debt. So these are rules right now. You you have to pay off that student debt. So you have these obligations. Then you get a job and maybe you lease a car, maybe you get an apartment. Now you have roots, you have you have bills.

You have to pay. You have obligations that you can't shirk. So you might maybe you try to save so you save a little maybe save 10 percent of your income every week. So you putting it away, you put it away and you realize how quickly that goes away. You have taxes in the end. Then you find yourself five, six, seven years in you. I want to make a change, but you have all this shit that you're paying for and then you reward yourself for this terrible job that you hate by getting a new car.

Or maybe you you buy a fucking boat or when you know that's what people do and then you're thirty eight and you're like, God damn it, I fucking hate my life. But now maybe you have a child, maybe you're married, maybe your wife doesn't work anymore because you know she's pregnant and you like fuck like what am I going to do with my life. Now you find yourself stuck and you take pills, you take antidepressants, you do something.

And this is this is the story of the American life that is untold. And this is a lot of people's existence. They find themselves in this meaningless path and then they hear about guys like you and they get excited, like maybe I can figure this out. And some of them do. And some of them start a business in the garage and some of them get together with their friends and say, let's let's partner up, let's do something and let's take a chance, like, let's plan.

And two years from now, we'll we'll make the leap. Let's start it online. Let's do something. And that's the that's the real American dream is finding independence, being your own boss, finding something that you really love instead of just doing a job, finding a job that actually means something to you.

Yeah, it's like finding the excuse to do it. And I think there's two avenues there. You can always find an excuse not to do something right. If you look for the excuse of why you should, your output is going to be so much better. And I've had that conversation with people where they say I just don't have the time. You can always find time to work out like you want to be your fitness goals. Find a fucking retention band and a kettlebell will fuck you up.

Trust me, give me thirty minutes. And I think that's applicable to anything in everything. If you wanted to get into music, you can find twenty minutes in the day or get twenty minutes less asleep to practice your guitar or learn graphic design. I mean the opportunity is out there, especially especially with the technological area, like everything's free right now. You can go on YouTube and become a master in any any technical skill. For the most part, you might not have the accreditation of a degree, but it's there.

The information's there. The only inhibitor is you.

This I don't have the time. People don't know what the fuck they're talking about. I hate that I can find you. Some folks I can find support like my friend campaigns. Yeah, that motherfucker works a full time job eight hours a day and often runs a marathon a day. Right. And then he goes at home and then he shoots his bow for hours and then he lifts weights.

So shut the fuck up.

Well, there's people that find time that's like over and over and over. Or, you know, it's Cam, like I love following Cam because guess what, it's nothing but positivity comes out of his mouth. He's frickin a rock star when it comes to all of the things that you just mentioned. Guys like that exist. You don't have to be, you know, a Goggins or a Heyns or a Dudly or any of these guys. It's a matter of, hey, man, you want to make some changes, you're going to have to also risk a little bit, too.

And that's one thing we're going to have to experience discomfort.

You're going you're going to have to suck it up. Yeah, it's going to hurt a little bit. Yeah. You know, if if you want to have stronger legs, you know, squats aren't the best fucking thing in the world to do. You know, twice a week or once a week I don't feel good is they don't feel good.

That's the way your legs get stronger. That's where you get stronger. Don't grow from being comfortable. It doesn't work that way. You got to experience that awful feeling. And that's why most people don't grow and grow, because they gravitate towards comfort.

And that's one thing I will say about this is, you know, combat to me taught me so many different things about myself. But the one thing that it taught me was that life is finite.

And in order to live, in order to live, you got a risk. You got to risk it and you got to suck a little bit, you know, for the payoff at the end. You know, that last minute of light that you have in this and this world, you don't want to be sitting there doing an audit of all the things you should have done. That would be the fucking worst.

That's I really the only thing I truly, truly fear in life is to be on a death bed and go, I should have done this. I mean, I'm sure they'll be small things, but that that that's the driving force. And everything of my life is I don't want the regrets. Yeah.

Not even a letter like I you know, those are the things where it's like I want to jump out of planes. I want to, you know, experience a foreign language. I want to I want to go to war. When you look at those things, a younger when I looked at them as as a younger man and I look at them now, I'm not going to be, you know, whatever age it is, thinking back, going, oh, man, I really wish I would have tried to be a commando.

Like, I've already got that. Now I can focus, I think, a lot more my energy on how do we, you know, become a better father, how to become a better business owner, a better friend.

But I didn't leave anything on the table in the previous twenty years.

I didn't leave any of that shit on the table going, man, I really wish I would have done that.

No, man, like I, I pushed it as hard as I could with it, with whatever was given to me, like I did the best that I could with what I got in.

And honestly, I'm probably about it. I'm operating, I think, at about 150 percent right now.

I'm overextending what capacity I have up here to try and put it all together like it's honest, like I'm just trying to fucking run it as hard as I can because the machine that I was given is like I'm very fortunate. I understand that. But I got to run this thing way past its capability to get the most out of it. Now, there's some guys that, you know, maybe they're phenoms and they're much more intelligent than I am. That would be, you know, one of the things I joke around I say is like, man, I'd love to be an astrophysicist.

Unfortunately, I'm just not that bright. So I don't have to settle for what the fuck I'm doing.

But would you. Yeah, the theoretical physicist would be fucking awesome.

I'd love to do that. I don't know. No, no. I think you found the right spot. That's I think people find the right spot. If you if you put enough attention into what you're doing and you gravitate towards what you love, you find the right spot. Yeah, you do. You do.

I used to think that I was a giant loser because I couldn't work a job because I was like, I'm just too lazy. I'm just too undisciplined. I really think that. And then I realized, like, oh, no, I'm not lazy. I just hate things that suck.

Right. You're probably a creative. Yeah, pretty much same as me.

But once I figured out, like, things that I loved, I'm like, oh, look, also I'm not lazy anymore. Now I'm obsessed. And I used to think, wow, I used to think that was a weakness, that like, oh, I'm not disciplined, I'm just obsessed. I'm just a crazy person. Right. So if I find something that I like, I can get really good at it because I'm crazy.

Right.

And then I realized, like, oh, well, all that shit that they tell you about, like ADHD and being hyperactive, not being a paying attention, that's actually you have energy, right.

You don't want to sit in a fucking chair when you're ten years old. Why some person who doesn't give a fuck about you or what they're teaching is just rambling on in front of you and you're just going crazy.

You can't wait to get out of there. And, you know, in the doctor's, like, this man needs to be on some medication that his young man has problems paying attention. Well, he should.

Yeah, you should. Well, he's got a goddamn chance because he can maybe he can fucking rock it out of this system. Maybe he's got enough energy to get away from the gravity of this bullshit that you're teaching them every day. So instead of saying like, oh, this this girl needs to be on medication, maybe that girl has a God damned chance of escaping the hell that you live in.

Right. I couldn't I can't agree more in that I think all of us have this, like, ball of fucking energy and it zaps everything around us. And if you try to point it in a direction where it doesn't work, like I could never be a finance guy, could never be a numbers guy, not on any of that. I am too fucking. But what that allows me to do is think in the clouds and be super creative and write and build content and music and all these things, and we had a really cool exercise in the business.

We did kind of like, remember when the creative problem. Yeah, creative problem solving. And we all had to take this like, pretty intricate task. And it was the best one I've ever done. But it pretty much kind of tells you where you live as far as if you're like an idiot or a developer and all these characteristics of your brain. And that's kind of how you build a team because everyone's like an implementer. He's like, get this fucking shit done.

And I'm more of like an idiot or where I come up and develop ideas, but that I don't have the the follow through, at least on the business side. And so learning about yourself just because you live in the clouds doesn't mean that, you know, you have ADHD and you need to take a.. Frickin whatever you.

It is a terrible idea of how to how to develop human beings. There's not a kid in the world that wants to set a desk eight hours a day. There's not a kid in the world. No, it's not normal.

But those they do great. There's a big system for you.

But even them, I don't know, maybe them they probably like like it doesn't mean that you can't be an accountant or an astrophysicist, but you need activity. Yeah. And children are deprived of activity most of the day.

I and I should have been out like partying boats on like really nasty, you know, in in British Columbia somewhere by some asshole dude that was, you know, here's ten minutes worth of work. Now you're just going to work you into the ground to it.

When I say that, it's that's that that's the level of, I guess, patience that I had for any of it in the sense of you can't sit a kid at a desk or at least kids like me for six or eight hours a day. Anybody in this? Nobody.

My my daughters are my daughter, six years old. Now, we were just having this conversation about school. Is VTC because of, you know, covid. Mm.

And she's six years old and you want her to sit in front of a laptop for six hours a day.

You should watch those classes I sat in while my ten year old was at school and I watched how the teachers talk and I watch like what was going on, like, holy shit.

And she looked at me. She goes so poor. Yeah.

She just looked up. It's so are they just talking monotone? Well, in Texas, they let him go to school. Right. She's in school here. She goes to actual school, you know, and my 12 year old goes to school next week. She was doing video for the first couple of weeks and they're easing them back in the school. Look, this is this is a travesty. These kids are they're getting a specially kids and public school systems, especially kids that have working parents.

This is fucking devastating, devastating, devastating.

And it's going to fuck up their development for years to come because like, if you if you like, if you took six months and didn't learn anything for six months, that foxo your development.

Well, guess what? That's what happened. Yeah, that's what happened. A lot of these kids are not learning shit and they're sitting in front of the laptop. They're barely paying attention. Yeah.

You can't expect kids to sit in front of a laptop. Like what's terrible. It's a terrible idea and it's a terrible way to experiment on kids, which is you're you're pulling this out of your you know, you're pulling this out of your ass. Yes. I think this is going to work. Let's put them in front of a laptop and we're going to sit in there for six or eight hours a day or whatever it is. We're going to give them a lunch break.

It's having this conversation with my wife. This is a horrible idea that they're experimenting with kids. Just ultimately, you have to give them some type of pre-existing assignments, but you can't sit them in front of a laptop. The other thing is, I don't want to teach my kids how to sit in front of a laptop for six hours a day to give them the discipline.

To do that, they would tell my daughter she had to eat lunch. And this laptop was the same thing. Yes. Lunch in front of the laptop. Yes.

They have to see you eat lunch. I go, no, you don't. Let me talk to teachers. Get the fuck out of here. You don't have to eat lunch from the laptop. Come, come sit at the kitchen table. Let's talk.

What's the desired outcome in that form of education? They're assholes.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. This is all making it up on the go. Yeah.

If they could justify in some way that a kid should eat lunch in front of a laptop instead of eat lunch at their kitchen table, like, why why would we do them so you could see them eat lunch the fuck out of here.

And why why would you ever think that that's acceptable to do this? And also, the teachers don't have any oversight either.

And some of these teachers are so bored, they're so bored and boring and and I've watched them talk rude to the kids. Like, this is gross.

This is it's so bad for them when and at least now the one shining star I will say to this is that hopefully we come out of this with the ability of some type of home schooling system that actually works, because the one thing about home schooling for the nation is, you know, what's the one stereotype of home schooled kids that we've all kind of religious psychos?

Yeah, weirdos. Right. Weird like. No, but now we're we're at least living in a time where. Yeah, hopefully this catches up and we can. Educate children from our home and maybe a balance between the home and the school that gives them some form of adjustment that works for them. That's the one thing I will say about this.

Oh, my God, this has been a good thing for from from a perspective of in my life, which is I don't travel as much. I chopped a bunch of travel out of my schedule. My wife stays home with the kids.

I've been home with the kids way more than I have in the last five years in it's it's it's forced us to look inside the family a lot more than, you know, on the go, constantly driving outside of the family, doing things outside of the family. It's really forced us to be a I think, a much tighter family unit with the with the four of us. And I'm always trying to find the positive in it regardless, like I'm not.

And there's plenty of negative out there. We've all talked about it and hear it on the fucking news every day. I will say the forcing function and all of this has made my family, I think, tighter, much tighter.

And I hope it has for a lot of other people. But I know it's been very detrimental to a lot of family units, too, because they have a lot of financial they have a lot of financial issues. They have, you know, domestic violence issues.

But for my family, it it's really forced us to look inside and really work on us. And so I can say we're going to try to come out of this much better family.

Well, it's like all struggles, right? Some struggles make a better person, some struggles. Australia. Yeah. And it really it depends on what the struggle is and where you're at when you come into it. And I think for a lot of people, this is a real eye opener about your health. I mean, and that's what I'm hoping, that more people pay attention to your your body. There's a direct correlation between your health and your ability to overcome diseases.

And I really, really hope that that message gets out there and that more people understand that if you are obese, if you are obese, if you you do have a bad diet, these are things that you can handle. You can do something about this. And this is the wake up call, please.

But fucking take care of yourself, because it may be the difference between catching this shit and living through it and maybe in some cases breezing right through it. Like I have a bunch of friends that caught it and I got a call for a day, what the fuck is going on. Quite a few friends that had a cough for a day. Yeah. And felt like shit for two or three days afterwards. And then we're done with it and we're working out five days later.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's all my healthy friends on the way to their athletic through coughed a little bit.

I kind of felt sick one day and the next day I was fined Paul Rodriguez, OK, who's a friend of mine, who's a comedian. He's I mean, Paul's got to be in his 60s, right? He was famous in the fucking 70s, Paul.

I tested everybody and we did this comedy star documentary and I tested Paul. He was the only one who tested positive for the antibodies. And I go, when do you think he got it?

He goes, I don't know. Because he goes, I think I had a cold in February.

He's like, he had a cold for a couple of days. And he was he just, you know, he fucking parties and it's you know, he's not out there eating wheat grass and fucking doing squats.

He's he's he's having fun.

He's he's a comic, you know, he's a real old school comic getting down, partying fine, walked it off, you know, I mean, what the fuck is going on?

But for people that are unhealthy, I just really hope that this is this is the wake up call.

Take care of your goddamn body. Take care of your health. Take some vitamin D and zinc and C and just make that a priority. Make it a priority. Whereas if you got sick, you're not worried.

It's interesting, too, because a lot of the things that people rely on as far as substances will absolutely go away. If you follow a healthy diet and exercise routine, I mean, the euphoria and like how I feel post workout is one of the most amazing feelings I've ever had. So it's not only like a bodily function, it's more it's a cognitive one as well. Just all the endorphins you get, you're like, I'm ready for the day and then you feel accomplished.

I mean, it's like incremental success makes great success and those little wins throughout the day. And I think working out is one of them.

More people need that feeling of fuck, I feel good. Yeah. Food is probably the most overused tool to deal with anxiety and exercise is the most underused tool to deal with depression. And those two things like food will fuck you up if you just eat to to cool, calm yourself. Yeah.

And exercise will help you in a gigantic way if you use it to to deal with depression and anxiety and everything.

So let me let me ask the question, though, because I've heard you talk about it on the show, which why is it that we can't have that national conversation?

Why what do you think? Ah, I mean, we just had the presidential debates last night, but why is it not debates?

That was fucking I put on my Instagram.

I'm like, we don't need me. You need Big John McCarthy. John McCarthy. Yeah. Get. But he's he's like the most authoritative UFC referee because he was a cop, right? He's the one of those stand over there, over there, like he fucking controls the situation.

You know, he would have controlled that man. Yeah. Why can't we have the conversation? Because you can't be mean.

Can't say, hey, stop shoving sugar and fucking saturated bullshit and fucking oils and vegetable grease and all the crap and fucking all the nonsense that people stuff in their face.

Stop. Stop doing that. You're fat. It's fucking you up.

Yeah. There's a fucking picture man from like the nineteen early nineteen hundreds of a guy at a carnival and he's the fat guy at a sideshow.

Right. And he's a normal fat guy for today. Right.

If you looked at this picture and like, you know, he was like this lady, he was an exhibit, he was shot.

So he was so fat that people like holy fuck, look at this guy.

You can see when Disneyland was open, you could see 100 of those guys rolling around on scooters. He's a normal person today, like a normal overweight person because people didn't have the access to bullshit back then. Like to get that fat was hard, right?

When you don't have that kind of sugar in your diet, you know that the amount of gluten and grains and fucking nonsense that people eat today, it's so easy to get that fat. But back then, it was really hard. See if you could find that picture, Jamie.

I'd typed it in and I found a lot of giant fat guys back then. Yeah, but see, you find the one there was a the guy was it was in a sideshow. So I typed in I don't know how to find that particular herald.

Huge alive. Seven hundred and twelve pounds.

Well go to the one on the upper left hand corner. Look at that guy. That guy you could find anywhere today. Yeah. Yeah you can you can cruise down. Yeah. That was a side show guy.

That's a side show guy back then. Harold Huge.

But that's a drawing unfortunately. How you look at that guy up there, go to that guy back above that. Go to that guy right there.

That guy's fucking right down the street. Go to the barbecue store. Yeah, grocery store. Restaurant. That guy's waiting in line for more bread. Texas.

Yeah. How do you change that? Right. Where if you say something like that, you'll have people that are heavier and say you're fat shaming. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm doing.

But yeah, that's how you feel bad. You feel bad if someone fat shamed you and then you make decisions that you can't fat comfort.

That's the thing that does nothing for fat men at the circus.

Jesus Christ like this. You're right there.

The subculture that we grew up in in our 20s, when we are eighteen to twenty thirty, whatever it was like, man, we'd have we would have guys slapping food out of your hands and going fatty because in the middle it back in the back in the day.

In a scene. Back in the day. Right. I guess that's so it makes me sound old but know enough to say that yeah.

We're washed up enough dude you could fat shame the shit out of people and that's just the way it worked, which was hey fatty.

And if you were meeting a task or, you know, task condition standard, you would have guys in inclose non-commissioned officers in your chow line selecting your food for you, going, dude, you're going to eat this, you're not going to eat this. And then people would go to eat something and then literally slap it out of your face and go, you're you're you're not eating that.

Now there's these open discussions and in you you read it and all of a sudden we're bad people because we want people to be healthier. If we if we say, hey, that person's obese or that's fat and that's unhealthy.

How did it how did this turn to people?

People are trying to be nice because to people that's all it is, is they think it's good to be nice and it is good to be nice. But the reality is, when you're mean to someone about certain things that you actually can change like this, one thing is like you say to someone, you got a stupid fucking nose man, like, well, that can't do anything about your nose.

But if you say to someone like you, bro, you're fat as fuck. And then they have to feel that like, oh my God, I hate being fat, make a choice, make a choice, do something. Well, is it better to be nice to someone about that? Yes, most certainly.

Is it better if you have a friend and I've had friends that I pulled aside said, listen, man, you got to lose weight, you got to do something, lose weight.

You know how many of them have done that? Zero. Yeah, they don't listen.

Like, the only time it ever works is when the person decides that they want to make a change. And oftentimes that comes from pain and oftentimes that comes from being mocked. And yeah, it's not nice.

It's not nice to fat, but, you know, shame some not nice is dying a diet. Yeah. Especially if it's coming from an empathetic, empathetic position. You're like I'm saying this because I want you to live, which means I like you.

But the thing is, people are lazy. And when you tell them that they're fat, all people like to consider is like you are shaming a person because of their body shape. And that's terrible. And that's awful. That's true. But if you also say to that person a. Hey, I love you, I care about you, but I'm going to be honest with you, you're fat as fuck and you need to lose weight. That's also fat shaming.

Well, but this is there's very few ways to get through to someone.

If someone's drunk, if they're a fucking alcoholic and they get drunk every night and you pull him aside and go, hey, man, you are a fucking drunk and you need to stop. You need to get your shit together. And they they feel bad because they love you.

Like Evan says, I'm a drunk. I respect Evan. Fuck. What am I doing? God damn. I'm going to get my life together somehow know that's OK. But telling someone that they're a fat fuck is not OK because you're fat shaming. Well, because you're making them feel bad because of their addiction to food versus their addiction to alcohol. If you see someone smoking every day, go, hey man, those fucking things are going to kill you.

Are you cigarette shaming? Like, what are we doing here?

It's true. Evan told me I have was drink a little too much whiskey. At one point I said, you're offending me. It's you're being you're shaming alcohol shaming me. Yeah.

He actually told me that he identified with as somebody that doesn't drink at all. Yeah. Like I identify as a non-drinker.

So I find this, this whiskey identifies as water. So your argument is invalid.

Evan, do you know that they're using gender neutral language in the SEALs? Not. Yeah. See that. I got it.

Made it all the way to the SEALs I sent to JoCo and I sentence it to Gorgons and I like, what the fuck is this shit? I was the same.

I was I was texting. They're talking to JoCo this morning because they did you did you read it where they gender neutral. You can't identify as him or her. It's there. They've changed this entire I think it's a how does that get in there.

How'd that get all the way to the SEALs. How did someone not say, hey, fuck you?

I think that it's the same way that most of these policies kind of they bypass logic. They go through some type of bureaucratic mechanism where somebody thinks it's a good idea. And typically this is going to be an officer that's looking to be promoted off of some merit. Where they're going to go, I'm going to change this. This is going to be a good thing for my career because this is where I'm going to hang my hat on this. I'm going to look I'm going to look progressive.

I'm going to look really good for the rest of the this is going to resonate with the rest of the culture that we're living in right now. People are going to go, oh, even the SEALs are being progressive, Checkley.

And that. And I think that's how it happens when you gun down the bad guys.

Were you were they were you of thought the ridiculousness of it. I mean, these are like trained war fighters doing difficult jobs on the planet. And we're going to bring, you know, bureaucratic like weird fucking bullshit into it. It's like, no, we are training them to do the world's worst act, which is kill another human being in hopefulness, that it's saving more human lives. I mean, this is not a PC job, right? You're getting trained with hand grenades, rocket launchers, guns to put night vision on and sneak into houses and shoot motherfuckers in the face.

And the danger is correct.

If you do make it politically correct, you're going to cost U.S. service members like that's the problem.

And then if you bring all this bullshit into it, then you're decreasing the survivability and the training that these guys and gals need to succeed and be a high functioning unit to live. You know, this is not a game of, like sensitivity. This is a game of life and death.

And people say, oh, you're exaggerating. It's not going to cause people lives to be polite and used non gendered language.

Now, this is one step on a fucking greased uphill. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this is what happens if you let that shit get in there. It's going to be like people used to say, like, why does anyone care about what goes on in college campuses? This is not happening in the real world. Stop worrying about, like leftist ideology that's permeating in school. Well, look at what happened in Seattle. Look what's going on in Portland.

That shit bleeds out into real life. And if that shit bleeds out into the seals, you got real problems.

Well, I think that's a really good point from the entire warfighter. When we look at the entire warfighter across America, we have a very small subsection of of guys that carry the lion's share of the war fighting and, you know, the special operations community, the infantry in the combat arms. So when we look at that, that's a really small number of guys. And to match point, it's the most politically incorrect profession. In the United States, quite possibly in the world, because what you're doing is you're taking human life, you can't have these two things, you can't be politically correct and shoot people in the face.

You can't have both. I'm sorry, America. You can't have the two.

You have to have your war fighters that are out there, especially when you're America. You have to have the guys that are trained to go out at night and do this every fucking night and take it to every terrorist, every bad guy internationally to protect you and your sleeping bags. You have to do that. You can't have a politically correct warfighter. Knock, knock. I'm sorry. You identify as a as a as a, you know, politically correct, nonviolent terrorist.

I guess we'll move on to the next house. That doesn't work. It's completely illogical. You can't fight wars with a politically correct attorney.

And guess what?

They're not politically correct. The people that you're opposing, these these fucking dictators and these all these different terrorist organizations, they're not playing by those rules. If you play by those rules, you're handicapping yourself. It is. And it's just it's just nonsense. It's nonsense.

And those types of people have no regard for human life, you know, and I've seen it personally. When politics get involved in wars, it kills people. I mean, I have a few instances where there were, you know, you can't drop ordnance on guys you just got ambushed by because the local village said you can't use, you know, bombs from planes. And you're like, we one of our guys just got shot. You know, we killed the three that ran out the front door, but the six that ran out the back door.

I'm just supposed to let them go live. From an ethical perspective. They're going to go do this again. And I hope they don't go plant bombs and blow up a whole, you know, engineer vehicle and kill six Americans. Like, where's the efficacy in that? Because you didn't want to offend somebody. Politics don't work in war. Obviously, you need rules and regulations and Roee and things that you know, but that's where the training comes in.

You're acting on an ethical basis on the ground. But again, I don't think anybody understands, if you haven't been there, how dynamic and complex some of these situations when it's completely dark, you're under night vision in a laser and you're having to make moments, seconds, milliseconds to make a decision whether you survive or you don't. It it's there's no black and white with that. It's very complicated. And that goes back the whole thing. We got to look out for veterans and post service because they're putting some very, very, very difficult situations.

Yeah.

When you're yelling at someone and giving out orders, you can't ask them what pronouns they use or and they're going to lie and deceive.

I mean, you know, I might my team live in squalor. Both got killed because of that. We did a callout and they said no one was in the building. They swore to a law and all this stuff. And we went in there and we got hemmed up really, really bad. So, you know, there is no there's no moral, like decision making on their side as far as well. Better tell the Americans where we are pointed in this building with AK 47 and suicide vest.

No, they're going to lie their balls off because they're trying to fuck and kill us when I think that when the expectation for the the overall, you know, the warrior class, really what it is for them to kind of adapt to this politically correct culture.

It's it's we've seen it, I think, and I've seen it, especially when we look at some of the other countries that we actually have fought with, some of these guys have to come to the United States, for instance, to get really good weapons training because weapons are illegal in places like the U.K. So you'll have British soldiers that'll come over here, especially their special forces. They'll come over and train with us because they have restrictions on how often they can use firearms in the U.K. So a great that's a great plan.

Let's make all firearms illegal. And then, oh, by the way, our special operations have a hard time training with them. And there's a very distinct and huge difference between the proficiency and the way that they're utilizing their weapons and the way that we do it because of our culture.

So our warrior class as a society, we really have to look at it and say, how do we protect them, you know, and if we're going to continue to maintain, you know, our sovereignty and say security of the nation, we really have to create a place where these guys are not affected by the bullshit that goes on in the United States. As far as, you know, cancer culture bullshit. We've got to protect them from this.

And we've also got to just decide that these guys are trained at a high proficiency level to do something exceedingly difficult. And we want to keep them. We want to keep them over there like there are break glass in case of war and now wars of just perpetual, essentially. So keep them separate from the rest of this, because we really want those guys to be proficient so we can go to bed every night and kind of rest easy. You know what I mean?

One of the things you talked about, about where this probably came from, it's a recurrent theme in Jack Carr's books as well, is that there's these officers that are career politicians really that are also in the military and they're really just trying to advance their career.

And it's it's one of those archetypes that resonates like you go, oh, I bet that guy is real. Like, it makes sense.

It makes sense as like sort of an evil sort of a bullshit artist that happens to be an officer and claims responsibility for all the good things and doesn't take responsibility for the bad things, winds up getting people killed or ones of being corrupt. How often is that really the case?

It's it's often and oh, we run into it. And I've described it a lot as you have a group of and it can be non-commissioned officers or officers and you have lots of guys, non-commissioned officers or guys that have enlisted in the military. And they they either went to college or didn't go to college, but they've enlisted and they've worked their way up through the ranks. Officers have gone to college. They've gone either ROTC or the academy. And there's very two distinctly different rank ranking systems.

So enlisted, I just go down, raise your hand, join the military, work your way up.

The officers are typically in charge of the NCO. That's most of the time. There are some special operations unit where units where that's a little bit more fluid.

But in any government bureaucracy, specifically in the military and I think even in the intelligence community, you have you have personality types just like you do in any organisation. You have the mission first. Guys, people, they're like, I'm ready to fucking do whatever it is I need to do in order to accomplish the mission. They're the they're the bread and butter of what's happening overseas. And there's a ton of those guys. And then you have a minority of mes and the mes are the guys that are I'm here to elevate and rank.

I'm here to shirk responsibility and make sure that I take responsibility for others, for other people's actions. And I'm here to be a careerist essentially, and I'll do anything to get promoted to include what they call throwing our guys under the bus. So. And he stands a good example. He was an officer, but he he you would never know that, right? He said he would never throw his guys under the bus. Jack was a great example.

He never throws guys under the bus. You know, good leaders eat last. They're not careerists. They're not trying to do anything or say anything in order to get promoted. Their mission first very capable and driven people that ultimately don't care if they get credit for what happens in most of the time, those guys sacrifice their career and their promotions because they're going to always default to what's right. The ME's are always going to default to what's best for me.

And then what happens is those me start to get a they move up much faster and more effectively then the mission guys and the subsequent effect of that, what you see is you had the army guys that are moving up in ranks and then it is a massive, you know, downside to the guys that are mission first because they want to focus on their team and getting what they need to get done, done. And then they pretty much get out of the military because they're like, I don't like this political crap.

I hear that all the time from guys.

Yeah, it's a big the retention on a lot of the really great guys and gals that serve, I think is directly correlated to to the MI people because they're essentially all about professional progression rather than how do we do the best mission and then give the team everything is a team effort in life. You can't accomplish shit in your own, really. Just like a podcast. You need the producer, you need the book like it's a team effort. And sure, you have the leader, but when you have the officer types and even at some CEOs that are I did it, you know, and they put a lot of the guys at risk where they'll do dumb shit on target or it happened to me, whereas like we did like a land, sea and air movement for the sake of doing it.

And I was the roots. And so I'm like, hey, why aren't we landed on the X or the Y? Like, we're good to go. Like one sixth you said we're in like, shut up best. This is what we're doing. And it was essentially because an officer wanted to use his rangers by land, sea or air for whatever. No write up that he might get a Bronze Star for when the only thing that happened was risking the lives of Americans and special operation guys because you just made them move X amount of clicks farther on that movement target, which, you know, IED missions, their checks and balances to eliminate those guys or to make sure that those guys get exposed.

Because I would imagine that for the enlisted men and for the NCO and for all the people that have the right thoughts in mind and the right intentions in mind, they would not want that to be there.

And I would imagine that that's the majority of the people.

Yes and no. I think that that's why the special operations community has such a high rate of volunteer, because they're escaping the conventional military where there's more careerism and the conventional military. And when you go to the special operations world, there's less of that. You're more of it's more of a peer system. It's driven on the individual capabilities in the sense of this is my team. Everything that I do is going to be evaluated by my team. And ultimately, if I'm an officer, that's that's messed up.

I can be fired. Right. My team can fire me. There's less of that. And then conventional military system because there's a hierarchy of tradition.

Now, I think the conventional military can definitely take a page out of the Special Operations Community book and ultimately make really good decisions on how they select officers and leaders just in general, because leadership is one. It's a it's a dying art in in I think it's a dying art in general because of what's happening.

Well, yeah, the military has an incredible institution of knowledge on how to really curate good leaders.

They do in this special operations community. Of course, I'm biased, but they create incredible leaders. They they know how to really curate people's talent and put the right people in the right positions and then develop leaders.

Well, that's what JoCo does so well, bringing that knowledge to to business and doing all these speeches or he's so well sought after because they want to hear a real leader.

They do in with the highest stakes in the world combat and talking about what leadership entails.

Absolutely. And for my example that I made earlier, that was a one off. I mean, the leadership that came out of Ranger Battalion, I mean, that I couldn't have been more thankful to be a part of that unit. And you see a lot of those those guys that worked their way up through the ranks, rate of time, move on to tier one units and do have extraordinary heroic careers. And it is you can definitely tell the cultural differences from a special operations leadership to the conventional army.

And that's not a knock on the conventional, because I think if you raise your right hand, your epic. But I think there's some some knots to be untied with some of the leadership and the career career officers, because there's a certain point, probably when you pin a star, you're no longer an officer. You're you're you're a politician and you're appointed by politicians. So once you move up past a certain rank, you're essentially appointed by politicians. And which now every 48 years, obviously, there's a rotation in how you're selected, who is selected for what.

So you'll start to see different aspects of the officer corps shift based on administration, because it's it's it's led by the administration. And then it takes a few years and ultimately it goes back and forth and back and forth.

But, you know, to go back to your original question is how do you continue to develop that? I think the checks and balances are it's a it's a very traditionally based organization. Right. The military is incredible and a lot of different things in. One thing that there has to be is there has to be somewhat of a firewall from what's happening in the newest trend. And, you know, the newest trend in social science and how it affects our military, I think there really has to be a big wall as far as what's affecting it and what isn't.

And I think that is as far as how we get the right people in the right places in the military. Boy, that's a that's probably a three hour podcast in itself as far as, you know, unpacking that there's some incredible and not to take away from anything that's happening, but that there are some incredible people that continue to serve in the most honorable capacity in the United States military day in and day out.

Their mission first, people that we never hear about that go through 20, you know, 30 years of a career. They retire and they move in next door. And you'd never know what they did. Yeah, and. Those are the guys that, you know, when we when we look at the community, when we look at what we're doing, just in general, those are those are the guys that I really respect in the sense of, you know, we have our subculture and our friends.

But, you know, the people are trying to earn our respect for the guys that we know have always served in silence that are the silent professionals that continue to do the work day in and day out.

And if we have their respect and we can continue to promote in different aspects of what they're doing in their mission, we do that all the time. Then when we do that, what I mean by that is. You know, we whether it's donating money or time or all the things that we try to do, we've we've shipped hundreds of thousands of bags of coffee overseas to guys that are serving the country, to our friends that are in command driven units that are doing really difficult work.

And our little our little sacrifice that we make and really not sacrifice our little commitment to them is just ship them coffee. How do we dedicate more time and money and encourage the good people, serve the country day in and day out that are really they're the heroes. Right. When when we look at this, when I when I look at the SEAL team memo, for instance, and I say there's a guy up there that made some change because he wants to, you know, get it, get a promotion.

But that's not really going to change the teams. You know, the teams are going to stay the same. Those guys are going to go to work every day just like they have. They're going to be solid professionals, doing very difficult work day in and day out. Doesn't matter if you identify them as lampa, their dams or who's or whatever it is, they're going to still do the mission. Think thank goodness they're doing that mission. So, you know, how do we just keep promoting it?

Well, that's the fear that I have of people that don't have an understanding of this, that are involved in policy. You know, when you talk about people defunding the military and when I talk to Tim Kennedy and he talk to me about the stark difference between the previous administration and when Trump took over and one thing say good things are bad things about Trump all day long. But one good thing you can say is he gave the military the money that they needed and he let them off the leash.

He he didn't politicize it. He just gave them the money that they needed. And they stopped ISIS in a year. Yeah. And he talked about it in great detail. He's like the difference was so stark between the previous administration and when Trump took over and having the resources to do what they needed to do and get the green light. And he's like, we stopped ISIS in a year.

There was no one ISIS camps that they wouldn't airstrike because of politics. And then when they transitioned over to kind of the ground force command level and said, what do we got to do to wipe ISIS? They go, here's the plan, go dead, Don. That's the way it needs to be. And this needs to be if you want to stay safe.

Yeah, yeah. And not just us, but other parts of the world. When you have radical fundamentalists like that that are doing wild shit, man, and you could watch the videos that do get leaked.

I mean, it's fucking horrific. And the idea that that somehow or another this these policies are dictated by people who don't understand what's happening there and not by military people, not by people that are on the ground.

That's crazy.

Well, I don't know exactly what the answer is to that, which is when you have professional politicians and especially career politicians that really they're fundamentally corrupted by ultimately that the military lobbying aspects of of our country, they're going to be driven left or right and any one of these countries. And when I say that, you know, Afghanistan is a really good example, how many days did it take us to overthrow Afghanistan or the Taliban in Afghanistan? What, 150 days?

That was back in 2000, September, October, November of 2001. Right. So roughly 90 days after the towers went down, we invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. It took us less than six months to essentially go from north to south in that country with a small contingent of special operations and CIA guys roughly give or take. And then you have a long term war of occupation, which has lasted almost 20 years now. And we have these special operations units that essentially invaded, overthrew the Taliban.

And then we have a long term war of occupation. And we have several different administrations that have continued to increase troop size. To what reason? Why? And then Trump, like him or not, is saying let's let's downsize our troop involvement in Central Asia or Afghanistan.

I think the only bipartisan agreement that they've had in the Senate and the Congress in the last six months was to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan.

For what reason? Right, exactly. Why? And when Trump talks about it, this is where it gets creepy.

He says there is a military industrial complex that wants to go to war. They want to keep war going.

They want that money, endless war and a lot of money. No one even brings it up. He says it and it doesn't become a big issue. He brought it up in an interview on Fox News. And that was it. That was it.

And no one will ever know it wasn't a giant deal.

Like, wait a minute, you're saying we have a large contingent of soldiers over there just for money? Is that what you're saying? Like, what are you saying?

I think you know, I think. Personally, yes, I think large scale wars of occupation are about the transference of wealth from the taxpayer to the military industrial complex, because I've seen it a small scale special operations contingent as far as we'll use Afghanistan as the template.

You can do a lot with a force multiplier, and it's by, with and through your local national your local nationals, and I think it's typically a more mature soldier that's already has a mature and developed brain, too. By the way, you know, past the age of 24, typically special operations guys are a little bit older and then you have a force multiplier effect. And ultimately you don't have a large, large scale war of occupation, which now you have 18 year old kids that are driving around in tanks that are flying around and, you know, big, robust, you know, C5, you know, logistics.

But it's less it's more cost effective to do that.

And it's also not as I think it's also not as politically advantageous for politicians. So people love to support and celebrate the previous administration for all the great things that Obama did.

OK, but he increased. Troop levels in both Afghanistan and they say, well, he withdrew from Iraq, but no, we had another surge in Iraq after that and we surge in Afghanistan after that. Well. There's really not a a coherent and logical argument that I can hear or that I've heard in the last 10 years that that I've either been in Afghanistan or Iraq for a large scale military occupational force in either one of those countries. So when you have a president that's saying, I think we should downsize our footprint.

And you don't have and you don't have the left or the right supporting that, it seems fucking crazy to me, it seems. One, it seems crazy in two, where where are media outlets and where are the other people saying maybe we should break this down and look like and look at it from the second and third order effects of a of a troop downsize, can we still maintain the sovereignty and the security of the United States at more cost effective rate, meaning less blood, less treasure?

Can we do that? My answer to that is absolutely. We should be able to do that. Absolutely.

But you know why we can't. Because it's more cost effective. For us to have a special operations, smaller contingent in it's it's less it's more costly to move big logistics, you know, tanks and airplanes and fuel and everything else, that's where taxpayers you you're you as a taxpayer are essentially paying to fund all of that.

And that's that's my that's my two cents on it.

At least it's crazy. It's crazy that that's both Democrats and Republicans and that there's no one step stepping up and saying, this is nonsense. We need to stop doing this.

And I don't understand. I don't exactly understand why either. I really don't, because I keep waiting, I keep waiting for the congressmen and the senators and a few of these other people to step up and say, wait a minute. Can we? Can we decrease our footprint in these countries and still maintain security and and ultimately protect the sovereignty of the United States? I think we can, but nobody is stepping in to the shoot after Trump and essentially backing him and saying, yes, I think this is a good idea, whereas the left should be all over this.

Yeah, they should be. Hey, less war, right? I mean, this is the hippie movement. Like, less war is good. No, you had the left fighting him over his his Syrian troop withdrawal, which is insane to me that you had media outlets that were defending the increase of troop levels in Syria.

So what I don't understand, like, why is it just the sheer amount of money? So are they influencing the politicians and the politicians all uniformly agree to go along with this, let's say probably a large part of government contracts, right.

Bullets, oil, you know, it all costs money, missiles. And a lot of those are government contracts ran by private entities and the cash flow that goes to the government, they have to subsidize and go to other companies to get what they need. And there's a lot I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, trillions, trillions. This is trillions of dollars on overall scope.

Senate rejects Paul proposal on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Wow, that's today.

No July. I'm sorry. Yeah. And what was the vote on that I forget, I know. Yeah, so where they agree. So, you know, we can where they agree is we need to maintain or increase or maintain troop levels in Afghanistan. That's where we can get everybody to agree that that sounds that's completely rational.

And what is their argument for it? What is there? I mean, I don't know what like especially coming from the left.

I have heard the argument and it's to maintain stability because they don't want the state to ultimately collapse and cause a failed state, which then puts us back into the previous circumstance where it where the Taliban can continue to increase and increase their power, ultimately developing a new terrorist organization or harboring terrorist organizations.

And my answer to that is you don't need tanks on the ground to do that. You need a bunch of commandos and and a few CIA guys. There's 23 provinces in that country. It's really not that big.

You have Pakistan, obviously a few of these bordering countries, but you don't need a large scale occupational force to do what you're talking about.

So what's what what does the large scale occupational force serve?

From my perspective, it serves it serves the transference of taxpayer dollars from the taxpayer into the military industrial complex. That's what it serves.

Now, the argument is, is that they need all of this in order to maintain stability within Afghanistan. That's the argument. They need all of it. That's not a good argument.

I don't think so, because I think that they've proven that they can. They can if the mission or the end state.

And that's the other issue. What's your success criteria, so lay out the success criteria for Afghanistan. Have you ever heard the the United States government success criteria for for Afghanistan? No. Right. And that's because there really isn't one in which is a fuckin problem.

When our leaders go to war without success criteria, it's really easy to maintain a military footprint for an endless amount of time because you're always chasing a new definition for what it means to succeed. There's no definition of when, there's no end to it. So why is there not minimum success criteria, something that you need to have on anything? What do I need in order for this organization to deem itself a success? The expectation for our or our politicians and our leaders is they have to publish minimum success criteria for any war they ever go into and then once we meet that.

There needs to be a post effect plan as to how the hell do we get out. So do you think essentially what happens is the military industrial complex or the lobbyists or the special interest groups?

They do. They make agreements with politicians. Do they communicate with politicians and tell them what their goals are? And here's where we're going to help you. This is what we want you to do. Like how do they get them all to agree on this?

I think that they have a very complex way of organizing and funding think tanks, the way that people think about war, the way they think about stability. I think that they have access. Right. So when you have access and most of these companies, if you go to D.C., you know, drive around, look at what companies are inside the Beltway, look at what companies are are publicly traded, publicly traded large companies within this this type of industry.

And they have access and their entire monetization strategy and how they make money is requires war.

So how they continue to grow their company and profit. Directly is related to how much war is being conducted. So if they have close relationships with all of the politicians within D.C. and their entire monetization strategy is built on an increased war, do you think they're working for the taxpayer to kind of withdrawal troops?

When I say that, it's like it's it's it's directly contradictory to what I think the majority of the public would like to see. I think the majority of the public would like to see a decreased footprint, decreased war, especially large scale occupational wars. And they don't financially benefit from that. They it contradictory.

Wouldn't you like to hear Trump talk about this? Oh, my gosh.

I would love for any politician to keep talking about this, but it seems like he's at least the only president in our recent lifetime. He has actually brought up the fact the military industrial complex is actually influencing these decisions.

I would love to have any politician, especially Trump or the president, talk about the military industrial complex and how how affected DC politics is and how effective we we are in the DOD as as a nation in funding overseas wars and say what you want. And when I say that as far as the pro Trump, anti Trump, but, you know, a lot of the left, they continued to kind of parade around about what all the great things that Obama did.

He increased our war capacity overseas. He didn't decrease it, did he shut down Gitmo? Did he do any of these things that he said that he was going to do for a group of people that claim that they're so anti-war? The one thing they should be saying, gosh, this guy might have a point. We might want to decrease our footprint overseas. They don't.

But to contradict what we were saying earlier, the benefit of Trump was that he added funding to the military. Right. It gave him the green light to let them off their leash. Like, where do you draw the line?

I think it's a more cost effective way to do so. If you if you have minimum success criteria. For instance, in the case of ISIS in Iraq, you have success criteria there that are clearly laid out, which is defeat and destroy ISIS and eliminate any stronghold, essentially any any occupied land that they have.

You go to work and you take it all away from them and then you're done. You leave, that's what you do, and that's what they did, essentially, and now granted, we still have force forces in Iraq, but not to the degree that we did when we were increasing to push ISIS out.

So with success criteria and ultimately clearly defined goals and objectives directly associated to any war, that is a absolute expectation that we should have for any politician voting yes. And we should hold our politicians accountable for strict adherence to the success criteria of any war. The problem is, is they keep changing every two to four years. They keep changing the success criteria. Well, that's endless war. And he's right about that. These guys want endless war and both sides.

So both sides want it, Democrats and Republicans. Why why do we want endless war in these places? That doesn't make sense to me. It really doesn't. And the only thing that makes sense to me in this in this capacity is that these guys all have a direct benefit where they're all being persuaded by the same organizations. To keep the troops and keep the transference of wealth from the taxpayer into the military industrial complex, that's fucking terrifying.

Absolutely it is. It is absolutely terrifying and we as a nation should be we should be having that conversation, that's the conversation that I want us to have as a nation versus the conversation that we're having about, you know, what crazy shit, like crazy, unimportant shit.

That's really it's honestly boring. And I think it's I think it's a distraction and a sideshow to what's really happening. But it's just crazy that you're not hearing this conversation anywhere like this conversations happening on this podcast and it's reaching millions of people, but why is this unique? That's that's what's nuts. What's nuts is that this isn't on CBS or NBC or Vice or any of these places. This is not in this long form. You're not getting this conversation.

You're not getting it spelled out the way you just spelled it out. No, and I think that there's a maybe vice maybe I had some pieces that I missed. I'm sure they have. And I'm sure there are a lot of people that would love to debate me over what's actually happening. You'd be hard pressed to find people that with two guys sitting across the table that have more experience specifically in these countries working in these countries. I have seven and a half years in Iraq and Afghanistan in my life, seven and a half years in both military and as an agency contractor.

And when I look at what we do in those in those in those countries and I'm I'm not thinking about it in theory. Right. I'm not thinking about in theory. I'm looking at it saying this is what I saw this in my first hand experience and this is what I kind of looked and being able to reflect on it for the last five, six years and of, you know, left the military and the government be able to reflect on it and really ask a lot of complex questions as to why do we keep doing the same thing over and over and over again?

And it's frustrating because I understand what it takes to stabilize these countries. I see it and I also understand what doesn't work. And we're doing a lot of shit that doesn't work.

When the hard part with that, I think is there's been such a diversion away from the wars that no one actively thinking about how many U.S. soldiers, men and women in the military are currently deployed. It there's so much going on in the nation that that conversation's not even happening. I'd venture to say most people like, oh, we still got people in Afghanistan and they're going out on missions and stuff. And it's yeah, it's like an injustice to not have those conversations about what's the end goal, what is the success criteria for Afghanistan, because I'm sure they want to go out and and do their job and they're willing to risk their lives for it.

But what's the job?

And you don't really see any of that coming out of what what what that mission, what the end goal looks like. And if there is an end goal, why are we there kind of thing? And I'm not I haven't heard it like even from friends there on the ground like that date.

They have a they have our international strategic counterterrorist objectives, which is to deny sanctuary for any terrorist organization. And I'm sure that we could pull it off. But at the end of the day, we're occupying a foreign country with our military. We should be talking about this on a national level as to what what are our goals, what are our objectives, what are what our success criteria, and when the fuck do we get out of this place? Like we should be having that conversation on a regular cycle because guys are still dying and we're still spending a lot of money and we're still spending a lot of our time and lives with the men and women that serve our country.

These people are still getting wounded and killed in places like Afghanistan, and we're not having a national complex conversation about it.

And it's it's crazy to me. It seems certifiable. Like as a country, it's like you and you guys are crazy.

You need to have this conversation.

It almost seems like it's too uncomfortable for people to discuss, and particularly because it's going on for so long, since it's happened since 2001, it's so long. It almost it almost seems like people just it's too much.

They don't wise us. I don't know. They just keep moving, you know, it almost seems like that. And then obviously someone's taking advantage of that and profiting off of it.

It's a conversation. You're going to have kids that are going to Afghanistan that were from the from the first wave of soldiers that were fighting in Afghanistan. You're you're having children, their children. They were born. Yes. After September 11th and now they're there.

Now they're there to to me, as a guy that served in both of those countries and to me as a guy that loves our country, we really need to have that national conversation with everybody and say, is this this is a generational war, everyone. Is this something we really want to continue to pay for with our blood and treasure? Is this something we really want to do? And. I think when obviously, you know, I'm biased, but I think these are the important issues that we should be discussing, right.

So how much more do we really have? Do we really have the patience for not necessarily the patience, but how much war is really acceptable? And how do we elevate and have these complex conversations without the interference of people that ultimately profit from war to which is a I think that's that's the conversation we have to we have to take that out and have this as a society. And they don't want to have the interference of people who profit from crime.

And that is something that's happening and it's happening behind closed doors. It's not happening in a transparent way. We can clearly see where the decisions are being made. It's happening by the influence of the politicians that are being influenced behind closed doors.

Absolutely. And if they're being influence behind closed doors are also being influenced overtly through.

Yeah, I would say they're overtly being influenced by, you know, think tanks and, you know, studies that are funded by, you know, large institutions that are geared to profit from this.

So instead of the government spending its time really investigating and looking at complex war plans and how we pull out of these places, you know, we're we're trying to figure out, you know, how we can change memos so we don't offend anybody. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. I never expected this conversation to go down this road, but it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I didn't either. Actually, we started when we started.

Really? Listen, for the next fucking 20 minutes, we started talking about coffee and eating the right foods and shit.

That's the beauty of podcasts, right? Yeah. It's crazy to just get a chance to talk.

Let's wrap it up with Daniel. I mean, is there anything else you could say to people? Is there anything people can do about this? Is there anything that you think people should be aware of that they're not other than what you just said? I think, you know, honestly, I don't know, I don't want to be defeatist, I think that it's one of those things and you've talked a lot about it in your podcast. I think the expectation for us to expect more out of our our politicians, I think in in sourcing different different types of information from a wide variety of people.

I think for us, this is white noise, right?

When you look at all the white noise issues that are out there, we have big issues. You know, we have big issues. How the fuck do we get off this rock? If there's a bigger rock coming towards us?

That's a big one. Holy shit. Do you think we should figure that one out? I don't know.

But these are complex conversations that I think we should hold our leaders accountable for sticking to the hard problems and having those conversations versus these ridiculous sideshow white noise conversations that ultimately are just a distraction from from what we as a nation should be making or government do for us.

It's just such a complex wave, such a complex Web browser. So there's just so much there's so much to think of.

It's almost impossible for a human being to look at the whole picture from from above and see all these different factors that are playing against each other.

Oh, absolutely. I think we're it's mind numbing when you start to critically think about one thing and then. Yeah, but jillion things that are going on in society, it's.

Well, that's how you get this, right. Yeah.

And and good leaders are not financially motivated, which is almost impossible. Possible. That's the thing. It's like getting the money out of politics because if they look at this and they go, well, it's futile already, you might as well just profit from it, right?

Well, this is when politics stop becoming a service to your country. It became political gain and monetary gain because you can get paid well when you find out politicians that they they make 100000 dollars a year, but they're worth 100 million bucks.

Yeah.

How how was that possible? Yeah.

And everybody's like no one nobody no one says, hey, get in front of us and tell us exactly where you got that money. Yeah. Break it down.

Tell us why is your husband worth this much or why is your wife worth this much. I understand you're only worth that much, but your wife's worth fifty million dollars and your kids are all worth 50 million apiece or whatever it is.

How does that happen? Yeah. And yeah. And why is like, why are we just like whistling and like looking around and pretending this stuff doesn't exist yet. No. Because he works for one hundred thousand dollars and you're like he paid one point three dollars million in his tax filings. What's going on here, man. Fuck is going on.

Man Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate.

Thanks for everything, man. Thanks for the way you guys run your company. Thanks for the ethics and just the way you guys carry yourselves.

I appreciate you guys very much. And thank you. Appreciate everything at. It's awesome. All right.

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