Joe Rogan Experience #2569 - Bill Thompson

Before a high-pressure shot, talk yourself through every step out loud, or silently in your head. Name each part of the process as you do it: position, trigger, aim, breath. Keep the loop running so your mind stays on the task rather than drifting into anticipation or dread. The guest describes th
October 21, 2026 2h 47m
Summary published by 1% Better, updated October 21, 2026.
Joe Rogan Experience
Key Takeaway

Before a high-pressure shot, talk yourself through every step out loud, or silently in your head.
Name each part of the process as you do it: position, trigger, aim, breath. Keep the loop running so your mind stays on the task rather than drifting into anticipation or dread.
The guest describes this as closing the loop on the shot. When every moment of the sequence is accounted for, there is less room for panic to take over. Archery coach Joel Turner calls it the same idea with different words: make the shot a closed-loop action you could stop at any point, rather than something that runs away from you.
Episode Overview

Can you train yourself to perform under pressure, or does it come down to raw experience?
This conversation between Joe Rogan and Spartan Forge founder Bill Tanner covers hunting, archery, military training, and the mental patterns that show up across all of them.
Pressure and performance. The two discuss why archers flinch, how a SEER survival course strips away false confidence, and why people who have faced real pressure tend to recover from setbacks faster.
Closed-loop thinking. Joel Turner's coaching method and the guest's military shooting acronym both point to the same solution: talk yourself through a sequence to stay present instead of reactive.
Meaning and wiring. Hunting, fasted camps with friends, and coming-of-age challenges all tap into reward systems that social media and desk work rarely reach.
SEER stands for Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape, a military training pipeline that simulates capture and interrogation scenarios.
Main Insights

1. Talk yourself through the shot to stop the panic before it starts

When a high-stakes moment arrives, your mind can run ahead of you. Anticipating the outcome, worrying about missing, or simply feeling the pressure of the situation pulls your attention away from the task.
Both Joel Turner's archery coaching and the guest's military shooting practice point to the same fix: narrate every step of the sequence as you execute it. The guest uses the acronym STAB, which stands for Steady position, Trigger squeeze, Aiming, and Breathing. Turner calls this closing the loop.
A closed-loop action is one you could pause at any moment, like writing. An open-loop action, like a baseball swing, gets away from you once it starts. Archery shots can go either way, and that is when flinching happens. Keeping a running internal commentary holds you in the present and leaves less room for the mind to spiral.
2. Accumulate pressure reps before the moment that matters

The guest's argument is simple: people who have been in genuinely difficult situations recover from new pressure faster than people who have not. This is not a character claim. It is a description of how exposure shapes response.
He applies it to archery, hunting, and the military alike. A screaming bull elk at 40 yards will unsettle almost anyone the first time. A person who has already dealt with pressure in other areas of life will get their feet under them more quickly.
The practical implication is to choose something hard and do it consistently, whether that is jiu-jitsu, difficult hunts, long-distance shooting, or anything else where the outcome is uncertain and the stakes feel real. The experience builds a reference point your nervous system can reach for when a big moment arrives.
3. Direct your attention only to what you can actually affect

The guest traces this habit back to childhood, when his mother took him to AA meetings and he heard the Serenity Prayer repeated every week: accept what you cannot change, act on what you can, and know the difference.
He describes applying this in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere when situations deteriorated. Rather than spiraling, he would ask: what can I do right now? He could get on the radio. He could do specific things. So he did those things.
He is careful not to claim this as his own wisdom. He adopted it from someone else. But he credits it as one of the most useful habits he has developed, and he passed a version of it on to his daughter the night before this conversation.
The same logic applies to archery: focus on position, trigger, aim, and breath. The things outside that sequence are not yours to control.
4. Recent repetitions matter more than total experience

The guest hunts whitetail deer and deliberately kills one or two does before focusing on a buck. He has been hunting for 25 years, yet he still notices elevated adrenaline when he has been away from it for months.
His point is that it is not just reps, it is recent reps. The skill needs to feel like a normal part of how your mind works, not something you are dusting off.
This shows up in archery too. A few days without shooting and the first arrows feel slightly off, even when they still land well. That slight unfamiliarity is enough to make him pass on a difficult shot at an animal. The standard he holds himself to is whether the action feels automatic, not just whether he is technically capable of it.
5. Choosing something genuinely hard reveals what you are actually made of

Several threads in the conversation return to the same point: people who never face real difficulty carry a quiet uncertainty about their own capabilities. The guest connects this to a range of modern problems, from anxiety to a lack of direction in young men.
He is not prescriptive about the form the challenge takes:
Jiu-jitsu, where you get submitted repeatedly by people who are better than you.
Fasted hunts, where the camp does not eat until someone kills an animal.
Military training, where situations are deliberately disorienting.
Farming, where the work is physical, finite, and done.
The common element is that nature or the activity judges you, and you find out something true about yourself in the process. He cites Plato's argument that going through life without testing the full potential of the body is one of its great losses.
Frameworks or Models

Closed-loop versus open-loop thinking in high-pressure execution

Joel Turner, a former SWAT team member turned archery coach, distinguishes between two modes of executing a physical skill under pressure.
An open-loop action is one that, once started, runs to completion on its own momentum, like swinging a baseball bat. Once the swing begins, you cannot stop it mid-arc without it going wrong.
A closed-loop action is one you could pause or stop at any moment, like writing a sentence. The pen stays under your control.
The problem with archery under pressure is that shots can slip into open-loop mode. The mind anticipates the release, the body reacts to that anticipation, and the shot goes wide.
Turner's method for staying in closed-loop mode:
Talk yourself through every step of the shot sequence continuously.
Name each element as you execute it: position, aim, breathing, trigger.
Keep the internal commentary running so no part of the sequence becomes automatic or rushed.
The guest uses a military equivalent called STAB, which stands for Steady position, Trigger squeeze, Aiming, and Breathing. Both approaches work by keeping attention anchored to the current step rather than the anticipated outcome.
Four stages of competence

A model for how skill develops from ignorance to mastery, which the guest references in the context of learning jiu-jitsu, hunting, and building technology.
Unconscious incompetence: you do not know that a skill gap exists. You are not aware of what you do not know.
Conscious incompetence: you become aware that the gap exists. You can see what you are missing but cannot yet close it.
Conscious competence: you can perform the skill with deliberate effort. It works, but you have to think about it.
Unconscious competence: the skill is integrated. You execute it without conscious attention.
The guest notes that once you reach stage four, the process resets when you take on something new. He argues that deliberately returning to stage one by learning a hard new skill is one of the most beneficial things a person can do for their mind.
Notable Quotes

"It's not just reps. It's recent reps. You know, it's like having the amount of repetitions like recently to the point where it's a normal natural part of your psychology, the way your mind works."

Bill Tanner
"I think the strategy might be just have a bunch of big moments. Have more big moments in your life. More instances in your life where you have to deal with pressure."

Bill Tanner
"If I can't affect something, I don't worry about it. Like if there's nothing I can do about it."

Bill Tanner
Action Items

Suggested exercises inspired by the conversation.
1
Build a closed-loop sequence for a high-pressure task
Think of a recurring activity where you tend to choke, rush, or lose focus under pressure, whether that is public speaking, a difficult work deadline, or an athletic skill.
1. Break the action into 3 to 5 discrete steps.
2. Give each step a short label, a word or two.
3. The next time you do it, say each label in your head as you complete that step.
The goal is to keep your attention on the current step rather than on the outcome. Notice whether naming each step changes how much the pressure affects your execution.
2
Do something hard enough that the outcome is genuinely uncertain
Pick one activity where you cannot guarantee success and where failure has a clear, immediate consequence.

Options might include:
- Signing up for a beginner jiu-jitsu class and attending consistently for a month.
- Attempting a multi-day fasted hike or hunt with a group.
- Entering a local competition in a skill you are still developing.
The point is not to suffer. It is to create a reference point your nervous system can draw on the next time something important feels overwhelming.
3
Audit where your attention units are going
The guest treats his daily attention and energy as a fixed number of units. Spending them on things he cannot affect is a real loss.
1. At the end of a day, write down the top three things that occupied your mental energy.
2. For each one, ask: could I actually do something about this, or was I just circling it?
3. For anything you cannot affect, note it and set it aside.
This is not about suppressing concern. It is about noticing how much time goes toward worry versus action, and whether that ratio serves you.
4
Return to something as a deliberate beginner
The guest and Rogan both describe the early stage of learning a new skill as unusually good for the mind. The beginner state forces attention, reveals real gaps, and produces rapid feedback.

Choose something you have never done, or something you gave up before gaining any real competence. Commit to enough sessions that the initial frustration passes and you can start to see what you actually do not know yet.

Pay attention to what changes in your confidence and focus during that period compared to activities you have long since mastered.
Full Transcript
Read or copy the complete episode transcript.
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Put the microphone in front of your face so we can use this. What are you saying? Some people think the stuff about the Roadster online was like, you know, it's not real. It's 100% real. My friend was there. I'm even like, words are tough. You have to use your words very carefully. Well, here's the thing. Will it be available in the general public? Right. Probably not. No. How could you use it? How could you make that legal where you have a car that can fly over other cars if there's a traffic stop? Like, I'm trying to, I guess what some people are saying, it's like, you know, a test model car. Like, this will not, this is the version. A concept. A concept car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, first of all, it probably won't be released anywhere near when they say it's going to be released just based on what he's done in the past. I mean, the Roadster, there's a lot of people that paid $250,000 for the Roadster in 2017. I know a guy who did that. Yeah, I know a guy who did that, too. And, like, imagine you did that back then and you were expecting that car. You got a completely different design. I mean, a completely different looking car. Now it has the fucking Lamborghini doors. And it flies. What? This guy's nuts. He's so out of his mind. He's got too much money. He just does whatever the fuck he wants. I'm not with the people saying it's fake with wires and stuff. Some people said that there was wires on cranes. No. I'm not buying that. No, well, there is already a car that does that trick where it can go upside down. There's this race car. God, I forget the name of it. It actually has a fan underneath the bottom of the car that acts as a suction. And this car does insane lap times. Because it's absolutely glued to the ground. Perfect handling. Yeah, perfect handling. And it's only a one-seater car. McMurtry. That's it. Let me try to find a video. Put some headphones on. Watch this thing. See if you can find. It's a hyper. Yeah, see, that's it. It goes upside down. This thing is literally crazy. It blows away all of the lap times on every single racetrack. Because, first of all, it's really light. Really tiny. Has insane power. Because it's all electric. And it has so much suction at the bottom that it can go upside down. So they were the first ones to at least demo this type of tech. And they did it on this car. Like, this car literally has so much suction. Give me some volume so you can hear this. So, this is a literal suction cup underneath the engine that's allowing this thing to hold its entire body weight. Which has got to be, like, I would imagine at least close to 2,000 pounds. What if it's one of those carbon fiber bodies? Even if it is, with the engines and the batteries. So, if it was a combustion engine car, maybe it could be under 2,000 pounds. Like, there's a few Porsches. Like, they make some really old, like, resto-mod Porsches from, like, the 1960s and early 1970s that can get under 2,000 pounds. Like, there's this guy that worked for... God, I think he worked for Bugatti or something like that. One of those crazy high-tech car companies. And he built a car that was completely the opposite. He built a car where he stripped everything out of it. He made, like, a 1969 Porsche. Stripped everything out of it. Made all of the panels fiberglass. And he got it to, like, 1,800 pounds. Wow. And the idea is, like, that is, like, the most visceral driving experience. The most connected you are to a car. The lighter they are. The heavier they are, they can get really crazy with performance. Like, my Tesla's probably, like, 4,000 pounds. But it just, it's like a time machine. Isn't the Cybertruck, like, 7 or 8 or something like that? Well, that's even bigger, right? I have the Model S. But the Cybertruck is all cold stamp steel. I think that's the type of steel. But it's incredibly heavy. I ordered one of those, and then I ended up pulling out. What happened? I kind of regret it. I don't know. I just, I wanted one. I loved it. I just like the idea of it. It's very seldom that I would look at a car and just smile every time I looked at a car. And every time I looked at that Cybertruck, I just smiled. So I was like, I kind of want one of those. And then I put the money down, and my wife was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I want one. I've always been a Ford guy, so I've got, like, a Ford Tremor, which I love that truck. And so I put the money down, and then I started hearing, like, other guys got them. And they're like, oh, there's some issues and bugs being worked out. So I was a coward, and I pulled out. I shouldn't have done it, but I did. Well, you can get one now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're making, I'm sure they make them better now. I'm sure they've figured out whatever the kinks were. It's like any other thing. The first generation, it's going to have kinks that have to be worked out. There are some issues where people are, like, pulling the panels off, and some of the panels were, like, literally glued on. But they fixed all that stuff now. So this is the thing in the air. Honestly, though, completely honestly, I like the look of the original model better. I do too. I think it looked cooler. The original Roadster, it looked more like a modern supercar, and that looks more like a Lamborghini. It looks like a Lamborghini had a baby with a Cybertruck. Right. Yeah. And not even like a new Lamborghini. Like a Lamborghini from the 90s. Yeah. Which are cool. Like a Countach. Yeah. It's just, like, that one is sick. That's slick. That thing's sick. That looks amazing. That's the, I mean, maybe they could redo that. I don't know. It's a crazy world. These things are weird. It's weird that you can get a car that goes 0 to 60. That is going to be real. It's going to go 0 to 60 in under a second. That's fucking insane. Well, at that test, it was 0.9 seconds or something like that. Yeah. That's crazy. That's like, you're going to liquefy your insides if you go any faster. Well, it's half the speed of sound. Right? I mean, it's full top speed, rather. It's top speed is half the speed of sound, which is just insane. I think it's like top speed is over 300 miles an hour. What is half the speed of sound? Is it like 380 or something? I said 360. 360? That's insane. That's fucking insane. I mean, I like going fast, but I don't know if I want to go that fast. I like going fast, but what I really like is the feeling of a car. Unless you're a race car driver, all the how fast you go is all horse shit. They're all fast. Every car is fast. You want to like the bargain. This is like the absolute best cool car bargain. Get a Ford Mustang GT. My favorite car of all time, and I've been saying this for years, and I've never bought one, but my sister and her husband used to race Mustangs, and he had a 71 Ford Mach 1. Oh, great car. With the big back end. And he eventually turned it into like what they call a super calm funny car. So it became alcohol fueled, and the only thing that was original was like the back end, but everything else got replaced over time. It was a funny car, essentially. But I've been in love with that car since I was like eight years old. I just look at that, and I think to myself that is muscle car par excellence. Like it's the perfect. Yeah, and those cars aren't the best to drive. No, no. They don't handle that good. But it's the feeling that you get when you're driving them. It's like you're driving a ride. Like when my kids were little, they used to love this one ride at Disneyland. God, what is it called? It's based on the movie Cars. It's like you get in a car, and you're kind of steering, and you're going on. It's like you're on tracks, and you're going around. Like the Lightning McQueen car type of thing? Yeah. I forget. There's two car rides. There's one car ride where you're not steering. You're just in a car. It's like a roller coaster. And there's a car next to you, and you're supposedly racing. This one's different. This one you get in these little cars. You actually do kind of steer them. And they're fun, and it's not fast. But it's like loud, and you feel the steering and the engine. Like that's what I like. I like cars that engage you. There's a visceral connection. There's some sort of a mechanical connection. You feel it. This show is presented by DraftKings. Think DraftKings isn't available in your state? Think again. The cage is set, and DraftKings keeps the full card at your fingertips in one sports app live in all 50 states. Download the DraftKings sports app and use the code ROGAN. 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So the – I guess, like, the expectation would be at some point you might be caught or captured. So there's all these different courses that they send you through in order to, you know. That makes sense. Sure. It's like seer school on steroids. But one of the courses was for, like, a week and a half, all you do is learn how to drive. They have rally car instructors come and teach you how to drive and, like, how to do trail turns and how to, you know, navigate a course. And then you do on-road, off-road. And, like, they put you in all kinds of crazy scenarios. Like at one point they drive you up to a checkpoint and you've got a bag over your head. And they put you at the checkpoint and they say, all right, we're going to take this bag off. When we take the bag off of your head, react to the situation like it's an operational scenario. And you can employ whatever you need to do. Like, they basically just want to see how you do under pressure. But it's part of the car course. So you're at this checkpoint. And, you know, for me it was, you know, the guard started freaking out and then they're shooting blanks and stuff. And basically they just want to see – because they teach you exactly how to do it. Like you plant your left foot or – yeah, you plant your left foot. You stand up. You get behind yourself. And then steering backwards and, like, how can you navigate a serpentine in reverse in a car while under fire and get out of a situation. It was a lot of fun. The courses were a ton of fun. And you learn, like, from the best drivers in the world. And like everything in life, you think you have a conception of how these things will be before you get into them. It's like golf. Like I really – I got into golf years ago because I was told I would suck at it. Because I was a rugby player at the time. And it was my father-in-law said, you're not a golfer. You're a large blunt instrument. Like, go keep playing rugby. And so I was like, fuck this guy. I'm going to fucking be as good at golf as I can. So, you know, at first I was trying to lift the ball or I was trying to overcorrect and prevent a slice by really strengthening my grip. It was actually, no, you got to hit from the inside to the out. You got to transfer your weight here. You actually – if you want the ball to go high, you need to hit down on it. And it was the same thing with cars. If you want to drive fast, keep your tires in contact with the road as much as possible. Use the brake to front load the weight. Because we were driving Interceptor Impalas in the course. So it's like most of the weight is in the front. So you want to apply brakes through the corners. People think fast and furious is like the fastest way to drive a car. I should say the public consciousness. Obviously anyone who has ever been around a race car driver or watches race cars knows you need the wheels in contact with the road as much as possible. You try to draw a straight line through the course and navigate that straight line. So if you're cutting corners and stuff like that to keep the cars as straight a line as possible. Steer as little as possible. Don't oversteer like you always see in the movies. Like people are oversteering like the car. It's like, no, like the guy in the course was like, never oversteer. If you have to put one hand over the other, you're failing. Feed one hand. Feed the wheel from one hand to the other and take a trail turn. And if you oversteer, you're going to lose contact with the ground and you're going to be slower. So it was all these opposites. I guess the point is… Opposites of perception you mean. Yeah. You have a perception going in that this is like a fast. Like when I get really good at this course, I'm going to be, you know, what do they call it? Like in fast and furious when they're, you know, taking a really tight corner and their back end swings out and the car is squealing. I can't remember the slide. Drifting. Drifting.  Like you think like, you know 25 30 year old me at the time was like this is what I'm going to be doing by The end of the course like no apply the brake and take the tip turn Correct. Turn it correctly keep the wheels on the ground. Yeah, that's the key is knowing the limitations of the car and being able to Avoid doing that. Yeah, but it's been around quicker. It's been the case for me in life Anytime I learned something at a very high level like even with archery like the slower you can pull the trigger on the release and And My instinct would be like snap slap it and some people slap it and do fine But for me, it's the same with long-distance shooting like when I take a long-distance shooting course pull that trigger so you almost can't even anticipate where the where the Where it's going to fire at what point it's going to fire Like manipulate the play and pull the trigger as slow as possible And that will be the most accurate shot you're going to take if the shot surprises you at nine times out of ten It's going to be more accurate than a shot that you've anticipated Right because you're anticipating recoil. Yeah, there's there's a caveat to that the caveat to that is there's some very high-level archers that win a lot of big tournaments that Do what they call command trigger for sure and I think what's going on there is those guys learned how to shoot a surprise shot first and Those guys almost all those guys those target guys. They use a hinge Yeah, and or the at least sometimes they use a hinge a lot of them use thumb buttons now But and they use a thumb button like a hedge just load it up with back pressure until it goes off yeah in a surprise shot, but there's there's guys like James Lutz and there's a Few these Kyle Douglas Tim Gillingham. These guys win giant tournaments and they command shoot Yeah, yeah, so they shoot what they do is they put the pin over the and they know how to stay stable Yeah, and they've done it for so long and they have tremendous back pressure on the trigger or on the the bow They're pulling. Yeah, and then they hit the trigger when they wanted to go Yeah, they can keep their shit together And I think it's it's a mental thing the real problem with people in target panic is two things one If you're in a tournament like in your shooting if you're getting target Like those guys are shooting if people have never seen a Vegas round. So what a Vegas round is You have three targets and you're shooting at 20 meters and you're shooting you're trying to hit a dime at 20 meters 30 times and so that's how you get a 300 score. Yep. This guy Lutz just shot 719 so he out of 720 720 is possible So at a 72 arrows this motherfucker only got a nine once and he's command shooting Yeah, this is the thing. It's like so it's not it's not a steadfast rule Yeah, but to overcome the pressure of that anticipation and flinching That's when people turn to a surprise shot. I Think the pressure is the problem It's not the technique of releasing because if you show someone how to shoot a bow and they put the target They put the pin over the target. They hit the trigger For a while, they're good at it, right? So what happens what what what makes them not be good anymore? Well, it's clearly their mind. Yeah, it's clearly the pressure. Yeah, and so I think Maybe you can be just as accurate if not more accurate using a command shot but you need to understand how your mind is working and you need to understand how to mitigate pressure and How to stay calm, yeah, and I think there's only a few ways to do that There's just strategies that you can use you can learn techniques But the reality is when a moment a big moment hits you you're gonna freak out So I think the strategy might be just have a bunch of big moments have more big moments in your life More instances in your life where you have to deal with pressure and that kind of tracks with everything else in life The people that have dealt with pressure that understand pressure and and know how to perform They can kind of do anything you can kind of go from that and be involved in all sorts of other things that involve pressure But if you don't know pressure at all And then all of a sudden there's a screaming bull elk in front of you at 40 yards Yeah, and all you've been shooting at is a target. Yeah, you're gonna panic. Yes, especially if you're not a pressure person Yes, now if you are a pressure person, you're probably still gonna freak out the first couple of times Yeah, but eventually you'll figure it out. Yeah, your road to figuring out would be a lot quicker Yeah, if you've dealt with pressure in the past, that's what I think I honor with Spartan Forge We have a guy on the on our ambassadors. I guess you'd call him. I don't like any of the terms He's a guy that we trust to consult for us on features in the app and then he'll talk about the app But his name is Levi Morgan. Oh, he's a fantastic archer And just spending time around those guys They definitely have a way of because we had an archery competition a couple of years ago everyone in the company and he was part of it what's funny is This now if we were to do this nine times out of ten, this guy wouldn't win But one of my engineers is this killer named Evan Freed and he and Levi or in the final like 20 guys started this archery competition It was the two of them at the very end and Evan beat him. Oh my god. I couldn't believe it weaponized autism He's one of them he's one of them I mean, he absolutely was a stone-cold killer and then we did it with these other guys at an attack event like a total archery challenge We went how much did he beat Levi Morgan by I mean he won I don't remember exactly what the Delta was, but he won That's crazy and nobody could believe it like everyone looked at him like John freaking wick for the life For the rest of the week and like who is this guy that just went and shot at the king and didn't miss And Levi's the best in the world and like I said if they had done that nine times more right right Levi would have won The next nine but for one moment maybe for one moment. He was Prometheus I don't know that see there's that we're going back to the mind again if he can do it once Why can't he keep doing it? Yeah, maybe I mean there you go Evan Maybe you should quit as an engineer for me and go and be a professional archer There's a lot of these rules that people have for things and I'm like well who invents these rules other people and a lot of times people invent rules to sort of to kind of Rationalize or deal with their own struggles, right? So they invent rules of like what you can and can't do what you can and can't get away with What works and what doesn't work? You don't we know what works if you try it and it works Yeah Think Draftkings isn't available in your state think again The cage is set and Draftkings keeps the full card at your fingertips in one sports app live in all 50 states Once the cage door closes Everybody has a pick Draftkings keeps you close to the pay-per-view card from the first walkout to the final horn Make your calls as the card unfolds download the Draftkings sports app and use the code Rogan new customers can spend five and get 200 in bonuses within 21 days That's code Rogan spent five get 200 in bonuses in partnership with Draftkings The crown is yours gambling problem call 1-800-GAMBLER 1-800-MYERSET Connecticut called 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org on behalf of Boothill casino in Kansas Bet tax pass through may apply in Illinois 21 and over void in Canada event contract trading with Draftkings predictions involves risk of loss Availability varies predictions offer void in New York bet to get bonus bets that expire in seven days trade to get predictions dollars that expire in One year $50 in rewards issued every seven days via click to claim for 21 days one non-withdrawal reward redeemable terms at DK NG co slash offer limited time offer nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability varies by state I hear it's a that's the heuristic which is something I talk about all the time is People come up with a good enough way to do something that works for them. Yeah, and it might not work for everyone well another Example of this would be Ken Haynes. He doesn't he really slap the mm-hmm whenever he fires He kind of pulls it slowly back, but he does it's a definitely a command shot Yeah, but then again look at first of all his ability to deal with pressure. Yeah, right He runs 300 mile races does all this crazy shit on top of that. He's been a hunter for 30 years Yes, yeah, probably more probably 40 now, right? So he's been hunting most of his life, and he's had so much experience pulling the trigger on animals. Yeah, yeah, and that reps It's all about reps. It's all about reps with everything in life, and it's all about it's not just reps. It's recent reps you know it's like having the Amount of repetitions like recently to the point where it's a normal natural part of your psychology the way your mind works I'll do that with whitetail hunting is I always make sure I try to kill two or three doe Before I really start zeroing in on going for a buck Because if a bucks the first thing I'm looking at and it's been nine months since I've hunted or six months or whatever since I've Hunted I'll still get it I've been hunting for 25 years, and I'll still freak out but fever or get the adrenaline drop. Yeah words I don't usually get the I've never really gotten the adrenaline drop when it's happening, but as soon as that arrow is loosed Then I'm like Just like freaking out like I don't even know what happened well at least you can keep it together before the arrows loose because that's where Most people fall apart. I mean I've seen Professional you know I don't want to call them professional hunters But people that make their living as hunting influencers And they have these videos And you can watch them on YouTube and they're shaking like a leaf when they're drawn back their bow and they're like wow this guy's been Hunting for 40 years. Yeah, and he still gets jazzed up. Yeah, there's something about that I think it's why we all want to keep hunting right because it's probably why I do what it well It's hard to do for sure, but it's wired into our you know Whatever however we evolve however we Established over time one thing is true Is that we were able to stick around and have success because we had these groups of hunters that would go out and hunt for? The tribe yeah, so there's wiring in us 100% that that that hunting might be the only way or one of the few ways To tap into that and in a way that your body immediately understands fishing is too. Yeah fish I always bring well I have these comparisons that I do is one of the reasons why I say I never go to protests because protests are like fishing This is why like fishing is a part of your DNA like you get a little kid when my daughter was five was like the First time I took her fishing when she caught a fish. It was like so excited. Oh, oh, oh, it's in you It's in you You know that catching this thing means your your body's rewarding you with all these good feelings and good endorphins because now you're gonna eat Yeah, you're gonna be able to feed your family. You're gonna be able to survive When you're protesting and everyone's walking down the street chanting and cheering that's too much like war Yeah, that excites the part of the brain that thinks we're supposed to smash Starbucks to crush the patriarchy Yeah, or whatever the fuck you want to do light things on fire when you see people behaving with you know air quotes mob mentality What is that? I'll tell you what that is. That's war That's your body's ability to recognize that it's you with a bunch of other people that are supposed to be on your side You're in a life-or-death situation and you're against another team and you're marching and chanting and screaming Everybody's hyped up and next thing you know violence breaks off and everybody gives into that feeling Giving into the kind of behavior that would be almost impossible to imagine if you were by yourself Yeah smashing someone's car window while you're by yourself walking up to Starbucks with a Fucking traffic cone and breaking the window and diving in and throwing things off the shelves You would never do that while you're by yourself. Why are you doing it with this giant group of people? Yeah, it's it's the war thing It's just like the fishing thing. Yeah, you know like it's in you. It's that circuit. Let's go you start black lives matter Whatever it is, whatever it is, you know, no Kings, whatever it is You start marching downstream free Palestine, you know, these fucking buildings are keeping us from free in Palestine You want to light them on fire and that's what people do It's it's a normal part of us that allowed us to survive. Yeah 2026 with tribal warfare Yeah that we needed that circuitry and that feeling that you get from catching a fish Multiply that times a thousand for archery elk hunting. Yeah, it's it's off the charts the highs and the lows There was a deer I was chasing. I'm more of a whitetail hunter. I've only been elk hunting twice I want to do it more I just haven't had the time and I lived on the eastern seaboard most of my career as in the military So the option of going West and elk hunting wasn't in the cards for me So I mostly white tail hunted but a couple of years ago. I was hunting a Public land buck in the Allegheny. That was 12 years old. Where's the Allegheny? Well, it was actually wasn't actually than Allegheny was east of there But it's North North Central, Pennsylvania would have been the better way to say it But I just say Allegheny because that's near there. It's farther. It's farther east of there it's actually a couple hours east of there, but um, anyway, I was hunting up there and There's buck everyone had knew about and he was old and huge and at one point he was like 170 inches And that's pretty big for a public land whitetail buck huge and everyone knew about it And I was going up into this area To hunt where there he had been historically during the rut Thermals were wrong in the area thermal draw was pulling and or it was rising still and it should have been pulling at this point So I was like, this is a bad spot like where he's at. He's gonna smell me coming in So I'm just gonna walk to a different part so I walked to the front of the mountain and just went up there where I knew the thermals would be better and He was on a doe and I was still on the ground. I hadn't even got climbed a tree yet I was on the ground and He was pushing a doe into like a ditch and then he popped out and when I saw him I was like, holy crap That's him. Like that's the monarch. Everyone called him the monarch and I was like, ah, like I'm so like Freaking out. Anyway, I pulled back and put it right in like double lunged him at like 35 yards and I had like an adrenaline drop for like 25 minutes afterwards I couldn't even call my buddy to come and help me drag him because I was so I was freaking out so bad and It was it was a consequence of like three years of knowing this buck existed or that he was in the area Mm-hmm and then you put all this time in like way more time than you should to chase this animal and You you have this goal and then all of a sudden it's in front of you and you're like I can't believe this is happening This is happening and then I always say the same thing I used to say in the military when I was shooting which was to kind of get into my Zoning out mode. We had this acronym Which was stab steady position trigger squeeze aiming and breathing so every time I'm at full draw I say to myself very silently I'm just a steady position Slow trigger squeeze aim breathe and then I always breathe at the perigee of my breath. So I'll take a big breath in I'll breathe all the way out so there's no air in my body and then slow pull and I when I say that when I remember to say that to myself then it's kind of like Any panic or anything kind of fall away and I'm just focused on the task of steady position trigger squeeze aiming breathing But it happened for like 25 minutes afterwards, you know, have you studied any of Joel Turner stuff? Uh-huh No, I know who he is. We've talked on Instagram a couple of times I mean, I've watched some videos but to say I've studied him or I know the whole story. Oh, that'd be inaccurate Well, his strategy is essentially what you just outlined just with different words But the same the same thing he he says you should talk to yourself through the entire shot So do you make this a closed loop thing? Yeah instead of an open loop thing And so what that means is an open loop things like swinging a baseball bat once you start to swing it you're swinging it yeah, it's going and Closed loop thing is something you could stop at any moment like writing when you're writing something down You could just stop that pen at any moment. It's not like it gets away from you, right? So the thing about an archery shot is it can kind of get away from you and that's when you flinch and that's when you're Six inches off the mark. Yeah at 20 yards and you don't understand what happened and it's that's what he teaches people to avoid and he was a SWAT team member and he would teach people proper techniques in order to I mean he learned Psychology and he learned like what's going on in the mind in order to be able to execute in those situations That are extremely high stress hostage situations like you had to shoot somebody that was holding someone hostage, right? He's been in those things and he realizes that that's a life-or-death situation that can be mitigated by a certain amount of understanding of What's happening in the mind and what causes open loop or closed loop thinking? And so what you're doing is instigating closed loop thinking by talking to yourself the entire time Yeah so by Having every moment controlled and every moment calm and you have a system and you're actually saying that system through your head That's what keeps you in the present in the moment instead of just panicking like a lot of people do we've all seen it People just freak out. Yes, and some people don't understand what is happening in their mind So they just repeat these things over and over again and they have good days and bad days and they don't understand where the bad Days are coming from and what is it? Well, this is your mind got away from you and sometimes the mind can just run amok Yeah, it can just take it like that's why people have anxiety attacks I mean, yeah, maybe some of the reasons why people I don't want to say but I don't know why people have anxiety attacks but some people have anxiety attacks because they start thinking about Something and dreading it and then it builds up in their mind and then all sudden it's just a runaway train inside their brain and they haven't developed personal methods for stopping that and mitigating that kind of stress and and Recognizing what's happening while it's happening and then talking yourself down off the ledge and just Peace of mind getting getting yourself to a peaceful place. Some people don't have those strategies So the moment something goes sideways, especially if they're not used to pressure the moment something goes sideways It just runs away from them. Yeah So lots of people say lots of things about me. I remember Andy on here talking smack about me being Captain America of autism That's the first thing that Andy's the best he's I mean I talked to Andy almost every day He's become one of my closest like I shouldn't say closest friends I should say someone I regularly talk to and he's good for me because he's kind of the opposite of me in ways like he Like like my wife and I are good for each other in the way that she worries about everything. She's worried right now She's sitting outside worried out of her mind right now about something probably something. She hasn't talked to me about I almost worry about nothing Until it becomes something that's important to me. Like if someone asks me to do some work or something that's particularly important Then I care about like, okay this work will represent me. I got to do it as diligently as I can My representation reflects on my family. So then things I start caring about things But if I do have a superpower, I would say it was imposed on me in a weird way by my mother My mother was a alcoholic and would go to AA meetings and drag me along like when I was really young and She they would say their serenity prayer at the beginning of every Alcoholics anonymous meeting which was God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change courage to change the things I can and wisdom to the difference So I'd be standing here and watching these people tell these insane stories like I went on the seven-day bender I'm from Missouri. I woke up in Las Vegas and I just be like, what am I doing here? I'm like nine years old. Like what is what is happening? But that did stick with me and I would say that's one of my superpowers is if I can't affect something. I don't worry about it Like if there's nothing I can do about it Like I just had a conversation with my daughter about this last night. He was worried about teenager things I was like look, you know, I've told you the serenity prayer your Alma my mother used to tell you tell me Like try to just live by that and that kind of goes to the things we're talking about with shooting is Let's just focus on the things we control Mm-hmm and let's develop a heuristic or a way to get through this closed-loop system that you're talking about and for me It was a heuristic because it was just something the military taught me that worked particularly. Well, I didn't know all the psychology or stuff That you're talking about it there But I would say if I had one superpower, it's my ability to just not care when I can't affect the outcome That's very wise. I wouldn't say yeah, and I wouldn't say it's my wisdom It's something I adopted from someone else But it served me particularly well in life because whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Philippines or Africa or anywhere else I was in like a shady situation. It's like okay. This is going horribly. What can I focus on I can get on the radio? I can do this I can do that. Like let's do those things and let's get out of here And so it's it served me really well So well, I think that's the proper strategy for navigating life correctly I I think the opposite like just freaking out about everything every time it happens. That just doesn't it doesn't serve you I think What we're talking about early is an issue to like think about all the things you just said all the different places you were where? things went sideways like Most people don't have those experiences and that's one of the reasons why most people are not resilient and I think you need a certain amount of very high-pressure situations in your life in order to kind of To Galvanize your character. Yeah, you know, they're not who you are. Yeah down. You don't know who you are Like we've all seen these guys They get in fistfights online and they these videos online and they don't know how to fight and yet they talk themselves into this fight They because it's almost like they want to believe and they want to convince this other person They are fight and then they think they're gonna be able to do it and everyone's watching I'm just gonna hit this guy and it doesn't work out No, and they wind up a highlight reel and everyone makes fun of them And then their life is literally ruined now when I was a kid if you got your ass kicked No one knew but you and the guys who kicked your ass. Yeah, and it happened all the time for me It was like every two or three weeks somebody be getting a fight Yeah fighting was so common for me growing up and like in a farm town in the middle of North Dakota Oh, I'm sure the highlight of our month nothing else like if the school bully and someone else threw down or whatever and that guy won or like Right, it's just like this is awesome but everybody got over it after a while and you forgot about the fight because there'd been ten other fights since then and Life moved on Yeah Now if you get your ass fucked up in a if you go to talk some shit to some dude in a convenience store in front Of his girlfriend he KO's you with a can of something like that. Someone's got the thing in your face like oh shit Yeah, knock the fuck out the internet remembers they remember forever and all your friends Remember all the people that hate you remember you become a meme Yeah, it's a way more difficult time to fuck up than ever in the past But it's one of those things to where I said this. Well, I just did Annie's podcast like three weeks ago But it's like essentially we can if you don't force You said talked about resilience, but if you don't force The the harshness of nature upon you like if you don't adopt it and try to put yourself in situations Where things will get hard so you can find out who you are You can do this in a multitude of ways, right? You can do it with jiu-jitsu You can go to a jiu-jitsu gym and get your ass handed to you time after time and just understand like, okay I'm not the badass I thought I was and there's a whole wealth of things that I can learn for the next 50 years And so you're adopting something or like hunting my friends that I do we do fasted hunts together We were going to do this one this year, but Spartan Forge kept me fasted fasted so what we do is we take a cooler we pack it with drinks and food and accoutrement like salads and stuff like that and then we get a Yeti and we lock it and then one of the wives has the code for the Yeti and she doesn't give us the code for the Yeti until We kill something so we have to send her a picture of a dough or send a picture of a buck or something like that And so we'll just have salt water and we'll fast for two or three days and then you know Somebody kills a dough finally like there's in the past when we do there'd be five or six of us So someone's gonna kill in the first few couple of days. The shortest time was ever like 36 hours along this time I think we went four days and you're just hunting fasted and That's the best feeling in the world when someone texts and says like dough down It's like when you're three days into like and I'm a heavy guy so I can go a long time without food Like I usually do a quarterly fast where I'll go The shortest is usually two or three days and the longest I'll do is seven days But isn't that different when you're out hunting like you're burning off a lot wears it down a lot quicker Yeah, yeah, so like by day three you're hurting and so we we have always killed within was except for one time We've always killed within three days but the sense of community and we talked about the wiring that it taps into like when you're sitting around a fire with like five six people and Nobody's eaten and now you're texting the photo and you're opening the cooler And yeah, you will want to you want to cry almost you're like, oh man, you're the best I just I can't believe you did. This is the best day ever Oh my god, like you're just you're feeling like you're on top of the world This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace I know because I use it. That's right Joe Rogan comm is powered by Squarespace It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder SEO optimization tools and Seamless checkouts with mobile pay links head to Squarespace Comm slash Rogan for a free trial and when you are ready to launch use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain This episode is brought to you by the farmers dog Here's a fun fact Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are Overweight, isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? 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I know but that's what we're wired for and we're missing that I mean, this is one of the reasons why people are so attracted to like These videos of people who survive or Videos of subsistence cultures. Yeah in the naked and afraid all that stuff There's a reason why we're attached attached to those things I think it's because that Those human reward systems are the strongest purveyors of happiness that we have currently available to us Yeah, because we're not really wired to get happy from an Instagram video. It happens like we get happy a little but it's different It's not the same happiness. It's a very temporary. It's not a body happiness Like you shoot an elk at 60 yards and double lung it and watch it tip over that kind of happiness is there's nothing like that Yeah, it's nothing like that. That's a different thing. That's a survival thing. It's built into your DNA But the point I was making was if you don't choose something Like choose to eat Well choose the train Choose the hunter choose did you Jesus you or choose just to get a degree in something really difficult if you don't adopt those Things then like nature reality will judge you and you're gonna get fat and old or have no meaning You're also gonna get anxiety Anything? Yeah, almost anything and everything the people that I know that freak out the most about things don't do anything difficult Right, and they're the ones that are freaked out all the time about things that I'm like, let's walk it off You're gonna be fine One of the things that works really well for my wife is I'll tell her to do something creative when she's feeling the anxiety she'll like paint or Draw or build something or do something? And that's great to be a good way to get like the creative juices flowing and just like complete something Because I think one of the other problems is that we work both of us work in the tech industry and The jobs never done like when you're building software you're building things like it almost never it gets finished It's always like we're done with this thing it's on to the next thing so you don't get that sense of like You know North I would go back to North Dakota every year and just farm and drive beat trucks for like two weeks I'd take vacation to go and farm and drive beat trucks like do harvest because I just liked it being done And most times I donated the money to my church So I just go home and drive trucks for two days 12 hours a day beat trucks where I'm following a loader Putting beats into the back of the truck and driving it there just because I was like I did three fields this week I feel awesome. Yeah, you worked. Yeah, I worked. I did physical labor, and it's finished That's the best part about is the works done. Well. There's something about that stuff. That's very appealing to people That's why Yellowstone's appealing right these people they they have to run these cows, or they're gonna not survive I mean right that's why we like you know these people that live as trappers, and they live in the the fucking Siberian mountains yeah, there's something about that stuff. That's just built into To us. I think we're probably more evolved for that than we are for what is going on today So it's it's satisfying the same circuitry we talked about before Yeah which is really what we're made for which is interesting because like you recognize this yet you're in tech and You have an awesome application for phones. Yes, but the goal of it is to get people out I was right. That's true. Every time your tech is actually yeah, very good for people that are outside Yeah, it actually helps you and because people have less time They can scout at home or like when they really want to get out into the woods or that you know September 13th and they fly in two days. It's like or I can go scout this mountain Digitally find out places. I want to go and look at and then mark them and then get on the app but I always tell people when we're developing the app to like there's a bandwidth between the brain the thumbs and a phone and The amount of I'm trying always trying to maximize that bandwidth So the less time that I have to interact with an app in order to get more information I've increased bandwidth, right? So less buttons less time Just let's just get them the information they need and get them focused on the woods because if I hadn't my way about it They wouldn't pick the phone up once they're in the woods It goes in their chest pocket or their rig or whatever and then they're hunting That this is my the apps that I'm building like we're just about to implement an awesome Thermals feature that we've been building for a long time and we can act now accurately map thermals so when you're elk hunting and you see like a you know I'm waiting for these thermals to switch because where these elk are Where these elk are at? The Sun is hitting the side of this mountain Thermals are rising from the bottom and the wind is coming from the top So there's no way to get to these elk. So I need to wait for the thermal switch. So with this Update we're gonna put out first on the web You can pick a day time of the year you can go historical and look up historical weather So you can say these elk were in this area. I dropped this pin now I'm gonna place this marker here and I want to see how the thermals are acting in the area This is what kills most hunters. It's not understanding how thermals work, especially white tails and elk hunters They don't know how the thermals work or they don't understand it or they've never gone in the offseason What we're talking about with people that don't know what the fuck we're talking about When the morning is happening when it's cold and early in the morning All the wind is going down the mountain When it gets hot then all of a sudden the ground heats up and then the wind starts going up the mountain Yeah, so when these animals are below you as you're coming down the mountain They're gonna smell you immediately because all the smell is coming down. So you have to approach them from the bottom Yeah And then when they're above you if it starts getting hot out you got to get above them and you got to get above Them quick or they'll blow out. Yep. Don't blow out of there. They'll stay and they could smell you from forever away I've seen animals smell me from a hundred yards away. Yeah, I've seen I've seen good data on studies and a buddy of mine He used to take a friend of mine. He died in 2017, but he's a prolific whitetail photo He took photos of whitetails. He had a deer pen and There was a mountain that was a three-quarter mile away from his property in New York And when those does came into heat all of the bucks would gather at the base of this fence To smell the wind coming off of this mountain of these does that were three-quarter mile So you think about that like how well they can smell and so yeah, we're putting this thermal feature out But the thermal feature the reason I bring that up is because it's designed to be used at home So you can map the thermals for an area you can put in the temperature you can put in the wind speed And this engine beautifully maps exactly how the scent is going to move around on this mountainside Can I ask you this does it vary depending on east or west slope because of his east slope it the thermals arise quicker, right? Yes, and yes because the Sun and the incidence of the Sun because what we had to build into this was an extremely high-resolution topographic layer we had to Have this engine, but then we also had to put like canopy cover into this Oh wow So it modulates differently based on the type of canopy that it's in whether it's elk on the side of a hill or it's In the open air or it's elk inside of a bunch of hemlocks or not hemlocks Aspens or something like that it's gonna change how those thermals work, and I've been using it just the other day I've got these spots with whitetail It's a little different because the Bucks know where these thermals are as Bucks get older and we'll get off the whitetail deer I apologize, but you got me hyped up on no. I love white Number one most hunted big-game animal. I know I just mean hunting writ large people I doubt most people want to hear me talk about here, okay People like hearing people talk about things that are very fascinating to them, and I think people that don't understand hunting Especially people that think it's easy. You really don't understand. What it is They really don't understand how complicated it is particularly bow hunting, but even right think rifle hunting is easy good fucking luck Rifle hunting is not easy. It's not easy that there's so much territory You have no idea how big the mountains are when you get out there. It is insanely hard. Yeah, it's all hard Yeah, yeah, it's a little easier than archery in that you can be 300 yards away and accurately shoot, okay? Still not easy. Yeah, not by the that's like saying that boxing is slightly easier than MMA boxing is not easy Shut the fuck different It's they're hard things to do and especially to do them Well and to understand all these like when I first started hunting when Steve Rinella took me That's that mule deer that I got right there in 2012. That's when I first started hunting Immediately I was like oh my god This is so much more difficult, and there's so much more to learn than I ever understood this layer upon lay It's so complex especially be good at it And I'm not that good at it I mean, I'm successful at it But it's also a lot of it because I use really good guides and people help me and yeah, and I can handle pressure So and I'm in shape, so there's those things, but I'm learning things all the time I'd say like if I was a hunter if it was like a jujitsu belt I'd be like a high level purple belt. Maybe a brown belt. Yeah, but I'm not a black belt. Yeah, I know the difference There's like when I hunt with cam Haynes. I'm like oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know anything. He's a six degree black belt He take he shows me things all every time I've known that guy for 12 fucking years and every time we hunt together He shows me something new and I learned something new some new approach some new way to handle a situation This is what's going on. They're gonna do this. This is why they're gonna do this you got to know that We got to get ahead of them. Yeah, like there's things he knows that I I don't know and I You only learn with time and with studying and when it becomes the primary focus of your life and for me It takes over my life around June around June. It just takes over my mind Yes, I do other things, but I'm thinking about September same thing. I was when I was driving yesterday I saw my family. I'm like I'm watching the leaves change all I can think about is I want to be in those trees, right? Yeah, it's it's there's something about well anyway to finish the point on the thermals I marked some of using this model I marked some of my best whitetail hunting spots in the mountains and then I mapped the thermals and looked at the thermals and it was it became apparent why deer were using these routes because of an old wise whitetail buck knows he's getting thermals from like 320 degrees are funneling into this one spot based on the predominant wind for the area all these things that the app can tell you and it's like Oh, that's why he's always been in this spot because he knows the whole mountain before I ever steps a foot on it He knows he knows if there's a hot dough on that mountain. He knows that there's hunters on that mountain He knows if there's anything on that mountain He doesn't smell it and it really has opened my eyes like I can't wait to get this feature out so people can see it but the goal to put a bow on this is to get people out and experiencing it because I think it's a great mechanism for a coming-of-age for young kids Like hey, you know, you're you're 14 or 15 or whatever. I'm gonna treat you like a man from today We're gonna go out and kill an animal and eat it together and get a bunch of guys together For men, I think it works for women as well. But I'm saying particularly for young men. We've kind of lost coming-of-age rights or we've kind of like, you know in Native American tribes you study or Viking or all these other they had a time in place where it's like now you're a man I'm gonna treat you like a man no more excuses, right? And we've kind of put that off and we kind of spoke about this last time but it's something that I think we desperately need for young men because and for adults even who haven't really Chosen to start acting like men and I can say I act like a child all the time. So I'm not a perfect, dude, but The military was that for me? So mine got kind of outsourced But it's I think it leads to a lot of problems that we have in society today Like things my grandpa used to bitch at me about when I was a kid like 100% there's a lot of people who are never truly tested and They live their life with this just cloud of uncertainty Constantly hanging over them and this yeah, not this lack of understanding of their capabilities and how they can expand those capabilities That's the thing about being tested is that you realize like oh I fell short. I'm I suck at this. This is not my thing I got to learn how to do it and then you learn and then you realize oh I can expand my Potential in all things. Mm-hmm. I learned it from martial arts. That's what that's what happened with me when I was young I got into martial arts when I was 15 like really heavily and that it became my whole focus and it changed my whole The whole way I approached life. I realized like that pressure and Big moments and things that are difficult are good for you. They're blessings. Yeah, and you learn about yourself from those things Yeah, I think I talked about this with Andy, but I think it was Plato Was not only known for his great thinking but known for his excessively good wrestling ability Really Plato means broad or broad shoulders. That's what his name meant And he said it's one of the worst things in life to go through life and not understand the full potential of the human body Like to not push yourself physically to a place where a you understand the actual capability of your body to make it through a situation And then be to understand what type of person you regress to when the chips are down Which was another thing the military gave me it wasn't like something I had this profundity and I went out and searched for it it's like I'm in a seer course where I'm being pursued by, you know operators and Because there's there's a regular seer courses in the military and then there's graduate level seer courses And that was kind of what is a seer course how to survive evade resist escape Okay, so in the initial one, which is kind of more for pilots and aircraft crew members They teach you how to survive in the wild How to evade capture like if you're being pursued and then if you're caught how to resist torture Enhanced interrogation methods that type of thing and then how to escape so you get kind of like a watered-down version that a lot of people go to but then This high-risk officer pipeline or if you're in JSOC and other organizations, they put you through like a real deal Holyfield one The one I went to was like three weeks and they teach you Picking handcuffs how to escape from a trunk how to escape from a house how to improvise like make firearms shotguns How to you know dress a squirrel and eat it, but they put you through like like a week I think was actually six weeks maybe Four weeks, but you two weeks of training where it's like you just sit in a place and you're picking handcuffs You sit in a place and you're learning how to get out of a trunk you sit in a place you learn how to like Conduct polish on what you're wearing So if you have to if you're spotted by policemen and you need to change how you look, how do you polish yourself? So you change your appearance if they've got an APB out for a guy in a gray shirt and a black pants How do you change that quickly? then after they teach you all that stuff they throw you into an operational scenario where you're just being pursued by a bunch of people who do this for a living and You know My evasion was like I think like 12 or 13 miles to the Appalachian Mountains And you're sleeping on the ground at night, and I actually had a crazy It's the only thing that ever happened to me So I wasn't an invasion People are going to make fun of me for the story, but it's fine I was in the Appalachians and I Was like on day two or three or maybe four or something like that and I'd eaten very little Before I left the town that I was in To get up on and they teach you like how not to just walk a trail You basically serpentine snake a trail and so, you know where the trail is You can still orient yourself, but you're not following the trail because that's going to make you easily caught So you're running and when they started the the operational scenario You're put in a trunk of a car with a painting outfit on your handcuffed and your zip tied So you have to first defeat all of those restraints So you're learning that you learned how to pick the cuffs you learned how to get out of duct tape or or these other things And then you learn how to pop the trunk From the inside whenever it's not built to be popped from the inside now They have all those latches that you can pull and just jump out But they'll put you in like an older vehicle and then you have to evade So now you're running from people who are chasing you and the local authorities know that you're part of this course And they're also if they see you they'll also Pursue you so you quickly learn how to change what you're wearing whether that's going to like a Walmart Donation point and reaching in and grabbing clothes or you know what at one point in the course I just put my whole bottom half in a mud puddle So my white outfit now looked like I had black jeans on in the dark So you learn all these like, you know little things to do and then you do the evasion part Well during like day three of the evasion report and I still don't know if this is a dream or if this happened I'm pretty sure it happened. I'm 80% sure it happened But I hadn't eaten for a few days and I thought I ran into hikers on the Appalachian Trail So I came to an area and there are these people sitting on a log and again, I don't know if this is a dream I don't know if this is because I hadn't eaten for days or because I was being tracked or I was under a lot of Pressure, but I had like a quick conversation with them and they're like well We're gonna go to sleep and I was like, okay like and they had along the trail They had these like little open-faced cabins, right? And so I saw them go into this open-faced cabin and and go to sleep and then I started a fire and Slept on the ground next to the fire and I just told them all I'm just you know They give you a cover so you can just tell people what your cover is while you're in there when you entered when you interact with people and So I did all that. I started a fire. I'm sleeping by this campfire I wake up in the morning and it was a big dirt area. So I wake up in the morning I looked over there like three hours later. This was like 2 a.m When I got there and it's like 5 or 5 30 now and I look up and I'm like, oh, they're gone already Well, that's weird. So Like I start the fire again quickly warm myself up to keep evading and Then I looked at the ground. There are no footprints anywhere So I was like wait, did I see people here last night or not? Like did this happen or not and I'm like freaking out I'm like, I'm not seeing like there should have been dirt. Like I thought they were sitting on a log. There's no log here So when I was debriefing after the course I told the you do a debrief with like us like with a doctor Who's monitoring everyone because at one point you're being slopped around or you're locked in these cages Or you're locked in like at one point the government detention part I'm locked in a cement block like you're in a cement room where you can't stand up. You can't sit down It's too thin for you to like get on the ground and they're playing this horrible freaking music at the top behind your head It's like violins that make no sense. You're in there for like eight hours And so you really start getting like have you ever done like a like a dunk tank or like a tank where it's dark? Yeah, so start provision. Yes. This is what this is. It's sensory deprivation. Oh, you can't lay down. You can't stand up You can't get comfortable because it's only like five and a half feet tall It's too thin for you to lay on the ground They're playing this music in the back of your head and this is after you've been evading so you've been captured So you're dehydrated you haven't eaten and I was like seeing worms everywhere and I was like kept telling myself You're hallucinating like I was seeing like all these snakes inside of there like all this awful shit is happening to you And so I talked to the doc afterwards. He's like, oh no, I've heard this story like 15 times Do you hear the story of people meeting people that weren't there meeting people that weren't there or having an experience or being in a place? because they do have you with a GPS sensor and like a In a fanny pack So that if you get lost or you get turned up or hit by a car or something like that They know where you are But they don't use that to chase you or they're not supposed to And so he's like, yeah I debrief guys who thought they're in like different parts of the city or they were thought they were in a different area altogether Or they get lost and turn around they're dehydrated It's like when you're not eating for a while You've got the stress of being chased by people who do this for a living you haven't had any water or no reliable meals You're stressed out and you've been running for three or four days like you your mind starts doing things to you So I still to this day don't know if a that was a dream be I hallucinated those people or see they were there And just like the dirt was gone in the morning guys You know, I'm into ketones and I rock with ketone IQ, but here's something that blew my mind throughout history You see all these civilizations talking about fasting and how good it can be for your body and brain I honestly feel sharper when I do it That's because when you fast your body starts making its backup fuel ketones They burn clean last long feel amazing and they help you with focus and mental clarity, but fasting is really hard So what I need is stay sharp. I take ketone IQ It delivers the same super fuel your body naturally makes when fasting right to your brain They help me drop in the laser like focus when I want to stay locked in and think clearly and that's the beauty of it You get the benefits of ketones without having to fast. Finally, you can pick it up at CVS Nationwide and your first shot of ketone IQ is always free So head to your local CVS and try one for yourself or go to ketone Calm slash Rogan for 30% off your subscription order, but maybe they're interdimensional travelers Maybe they're interdimensional. It's it's possible if you were an interdimensional traveler, why do you have to look like an alien, you know? Yeah, you've got the ability to come here from another dimension I think you probably have the ability to look like Elon Musk I think it's highly likely that Elon Musk is an interdimensional traveler, but something along those lines. He's something Yeah, there's but that's my thought about aliens in general Like I think if they were amongst us There's no way we would ever know If they have the technology to do the things that we think that they're doing, right? We are woefully inept to try to comprehend or understand what it is They're doing or who they are what they're doing, right? And why wouldn't they be able to imitate us? We're simple and there's also so many different models of us to choose from there's so many different versions of us that you could draw from and create a compilation and you know make an artificial person or An image of a person or just affect someone's visual cortex to the point where they don't see you for what you really look like Yeah, for sure that seems like simple compared to traveling interdimensionally, yeah or traveling interstellar Yeah, if they really do have these gravity drives that can instantaneously transport you from one galaxy to another I think they could probably pretend they're a person Yeah, I mean we we can screw with our own perception all the time and then people explain it to you and you're like Holy crap. I didn't even realize that. Yeah, the two faces looking together with the vase There's a there's one of the align where it's like it's a block with like a black bar in the middle, uh-huh Yeah, we did that the other day. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I won't retell the story. Oh, we've done it twice. It's incredible So what is that called again? Yeah, yeah, so you could your perception can be messed with and if you think that one's nuts Yeah, if you think you're in control of your faculties you rest on a limbic system in a central nervous system That's been around for a long time and it's very patterned the way that it Metabolizes reality and our ability to mess with that is I wonder what? Evolutionary advantage if any there is in being able to hallucinate When you're tired, I think there's probably something to do with well Well, I'm not an expert on this But I know that dreaming is particularly important when it comes to that stage of sleep cycle is where you store memories So one of the things that happens when you're not sleeping for a long time is your memory is one of the first things to go Mmm, because you need those stages of sleep in order to remember things No, that makes sense because when I'm sleep deprived my memory sucks. Yeah I mean, I think dreams have tremendous amount of function. I myself am a huge bully it's probably one of the things I believe in most is Dreams and this is gonna sound crazy coming from somebody who makes us living doing engineering but I do think that the collective subconscious and the individual unconscious We're resting on millions of years of learned lessons that we can't possibly be born with And so they pop up out of this collective subconscious like you see a person you just get the ick You're like, I don't know what I like this guy. I don't like this guy, right that lessons probably happened to your ancestors 10 million times and Something is popping out of that substrate that you don't have full access to and is telling you that because it's a heuristic that has been adopted over a million years of evolution or 300,000 years or whatever you think humans have been around for That story's been told a million times and I think dreams it doesn't make sense to me And again, I'm not the expert on this but it's stuff that I think about all the time actually, I was Back in the day, I was trying to impress my went now wife and she's a mathematician and she you know went to Johns Hopkins Super smart like just outside of the normal distribution of people Especially, you know a woman who's really into mathematics. It's just not normal or it's not, you know There's far more many men. I'm gonna get shit on for this I meet way more men mathematicians than I do with women and I'm sorry I don't control the fabric of reality, but it seems to be the case. I'm just observing things observing patterns Anyway, she's a mathematician you covering all your bases. Yeah Well, dude doing your podcast the first time so much hate. Yeah, you gotta stay out of the comment I don't know. I don't go to that. I didn't read your car. Are you getting the hate DMS? Oh, we'll stay out of the DM. Yeah. Well, I won't you know on close those off. Anyway, yeah But uh, oh Yes, so dreams I Will have a problem in my life and so the reason I was talking about impressing my wife she was in the chaos theory and she's reading all these books on chaos theory and So I went on YouTube to watch some videos about chaos theory And I actually this is an origin story for me of types of a type I actually saw a Jordan Peterson video, but it was not about chaos theory is about chaos and order like it was like It was one of those but I didn't know so I clicked the video and this is before he blew up this was like You know when he was just posting stuff on YouTube So I watched this video and my goal of watching the video was to get into understanding chaos theory But what I ended up doing was getting into Carl Jung because I watched one of these first videos So I haven't a very addictive personality So I read it started reading every Carl Jung book I could like the everything about the collective unconscious the red books everything that he wrote and And really got into two dreams and this might be a self-fulfilling prophecy It doesn't matter because it's particularly useful to me, but I'll have dreams where and I used to you know have a psychologist that I talked to when I was in a Kind of a depressive state years ago, and he was I made sure to hire one who was a union So I would document my dreams and say here's what I had a dream about and It just became astonishing to me that my dreams were trying to tell me things and from an evolutionary standpoint It made sense to me that your body wouldn't just present you fuzz like a TV screen That dreams would have an evolutionary function where you're able to draw on the lessons of the past And you could call that the collective unconscious you could call that the Holy Spirit of God You could call that transcendent reality. It doesn't matter, but there seems to be something to dreams I'm convinced of it because I still document my dreams to this day and When things are happening in my life the dream will be telling me like here's where you're at this is what you need to do and then we watch these dreams manifested in reality through a Particularly good book or a particularly good movie, and it's tight It's tugging on that same string where we're watching something and people have done this better than me But you're watching something and you're not understanding what you're watching, but you know that you love it Mm-hmm, and you want to keep watching it and it's because your unconscious is telling you There's a lesson here for you And I'm gonna make you keep watching this until you understand what the lesson is and the example I always give people is let me tell you a story and the story is about a guy who's innocent, but he's sentenced to death and He had a collection of disciples that followed him around And he taught them beautiful things about the world and the fabric of reality and gave them appreciation for life He was he he died and was reborn or raised from the dead But also passed through to this world through a woman's womb and He's a fisher of men So I'll tell people that story and I'll be like what story am I telling you like when you tell me the story of Christ It's like no telling you the Shawshank Redemption It's the greatest movie of all time per, you know, IMDB per Rotten Tomatoes, it's a perfect movie I'm not saying Stephen King wrote that book to retell the Christ story what I'm saying is is that story is a very base story a story of The complete perfect man who's innocent of a crime who's tried and killed for that crime But reborn and that's because in the collective unconscious and in our lives We need to undergo those same things like I talked about before you have to force nature and reality on to you and adapt to Them and suffer a little death like a even an ego death like you had a system the system failed now it's time for you to recalibrate that system and Then be reborn into the world And so I think all of those things are tightly coupled when it comes to dreams when it comes to media that we consume stories that hit with us and we don't understand why and I'm and great art is art that's made in the and the artist doesn't even know the story that he's telling he just is Can it's just has a compulsion to tell the story and so they write it down and we don't know like Stephen King It's great author. I love consuming his stuff But he's more of a vessel to the unconscious Then he is somebody who just thinks up great stories. Well, he wrote a lot of his stuff basically unconscious Yeah, you know some of his great. What do you mean by that? Well, he doesn't even remember writing Cujo Great movie. Yeah, great book. I didn't read the book is fantastic. I didn't read the book. He was heavily Drinking and doing drugs. Yeah back in those days Yeah, and he would just get blacked out and write these books. Yeah, and I think it was Carrie too, right? I'm not sure what he's got a bunch of his books where You know some of the best ones where he was just obliterated when he wrote. Yeah, and that was a way into yeah He's talking into that get away from himself Get out of his own way and tap into that thing because that's one of the things that creative people always talk about Yeah is getting out of your own way. Yeah, and yeah, you know finding that that zone Cujo drunk super cocaine induced a yeah. Have you ever seen the movie at maximum overdrive? No member of writing the book at all Yeah, I did King wrote of it between 81 and 85 while deeply dependent on alcohol and cocaine one of the best books It also wrote books like The Shining Pet Sematary and the top Tommyknockers during that era while regularly consuming alcohol Cocaine Valium Xanax marijuana and even mouthwash. He's openly shared his memory on writing. Yeah, it's in the book He often had a stuffed cotton swabs in his nose stopped cocaine induced nosebleeds from dripping onto his typewriter Fuck yeah Meanwhile, so I was best stuff diving into unconsciousness and then like a hero coming back with something a Story, have you ever heard of the hypnagogic state? No, yes, I have but I don't remember what that term is I have a perplexity describing Salvador Dali's use of it because I found a few people that did it But I was getting really into dreams too and was having some weird sleep deprived Visions and I found that this is a thing that smart people I guess tapped into Ha being half awake and sleep-deprived. Well, I told you about the news radio writers I've told you that yeah. Yeah, and so the the writers on news radio They didn't do drugs, but they would stay awake So they'd stay awake to like 3 o'clock in the morning and then start writing the scripts Wow yeah, and everybody was just like delirious and They would write till like 6 7 in the morning we would show up to do the table read and these guys were still awake from the night before so I've written into and Hilarious shit because they were just like it's like they were high but they weren't high and they would write these ridiculous absurd scenarios and really hilarious lines and They were do they were purposely doing it under sleep deprivation to induce that state Yeah, and that I think is a you know, it's gonna sound paradoxical to say it but that's a heroic action, right? Like going into going into the unconscious a place where you're either depriving yourself hurting yourself But you're you're you're diving into the mud the the the water. Yeah, and you're pulling out something great Like it goes to what you said about fishing like Christ said I'll make you fishers of men and that means I'm going to dive Into the water to the abyss. I'm gonna pull out something of value and everyone gets to eat and be happy And that's the that's the hero story par excellence is People going into unsavory conditions making sense of an unknowable environment Recalibrating themselves and then returning that's always the story in the book right the hero gets defeated in the beginning he has to go through some type of Self-transformational period which often like Star Wars he's in the swamp or Thor Ragnarok he goes this upside-down world where he has to fight the Hulk who's his friend or any of these movies they have that and then there's the return of the king where he sets order and makes everything right and Dreams, I just it's one of the most valuable things to me And one of the things that kind of sucks about it is is and Jung talks about this is once you start to really learn and live Like you try to become a better version of yourself. You'll actually end up dreaming less, but when you do dream the dream will be more Dense and but the layers of the dream get more The dream is never just to solve one problem. It's usually it's many problems stacked on top of themselves So say that again when you learn more about yourself when you start listening to the dreams and you start living like you dream less Well, not not necessarily the better lesson is if you start listening to your dreams and you start orienting yourself based on the feedback that you're getting from the collective unconscious or the Word of God or the voice of God and You start setting your life in order and you start acting like a better person The need for dreams is not as profound. Well, how does he make this determination? Does he do is he running a study? How many people is he looking at is he dealing with his own personal experiences? So I read this and I think it's called This episode is brought to you by zip recruiter Have you listened to the radio lately or maybe you've been catching up on your favorite sports podcast or even this? Podcast chances are you've heard a lot of zip recruiter ads zip recruiter is everywhere because great candidates for your role are also everywhere and They know to take their job search to zip recruiter Meet them there with zip recruiter.com slash Rogan to try it for free Immediately after you post your job zip recruiter smart technology scans through thousands of resumes and it shows you the most qualified and interested Candidates first no wonder four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day But you've got to go to zip recruiter.com slash Rogan to post your job for free Again, that's zip recruiter.com slash Rogan. Oh, and if you forget where to go Don't worry, you'll hear another zip recruiter ad soon enough This episode is brought to you by eight sleep There are so many people out there who swear by the pod by eight sleep the smart mattress cover that goes on your existing Mattress, but have you been on the fence? Now's the time to get on board. Why? Because they've just released pod 6. I'm gonna make it real simple for you. Here are the pod 6 headline upgrades It's a 50% smaller hub. So it'll fit under most bed frames It features 20% faster temperature relief with 9 times more biometric sensors in the cover. It starts at just $1,999 The lowest starting price eight sleep has ever offered and if that's not enough this pod cools each side of the bed independently from 55 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit Use code Rogan at eight sleep comm slash Rogan for up to $200 off the pod six I think this was in the red book, but I'm not sure or it might be I can't remember which might be man in his symbols It doesn't matter. But what what what he's basically saying is the dreams are there to provide you input and corrective measures and to let you know the Archetype that you're acting out and then once you start setting yourself in order A good marker is you're no longer dreaming. In other words, you're doing the right thing now So your dreams don't have to keep giving you this feedback, huh? Jamie can pressure test me because I might be wrong and I don't want to say something wrong on this podcast of all It's like This is taken from something. He said it's almost like that But it's dreams balance the conscious mind if you're waking mind is overly rigid hyper rational or arrogant The dream will supply emotional vulnerable or contradictory imagery to restore equilibrium interesting self-portrayal of the psyche Jung saw that a dream was a spontaneous self-portrayal in symbolic form and of the actual situation in the unconscious They show you where you truly stand psychologically without the ego's filters Yeah dreams Drive towards wholeness and self-realization So what I got from Jung was the more you start to become more of a whole person and you engage in the self-realization The yet less utility the dreams will have and therefore you'll have less of them So in other words if you're doing well by yourself, I understand this But I don't understand how you'd be able to study this unless it's all completely anecdotal from an individual Yeah, you're one person and your thought process Especially as a psychologist and a psychoanalyst is going to be very different than most people. It's like to say that It's got to be people that always dream like there's people that have very vivid lucid dreams Yeah, and they're they're able to cultivate those Yeah and I would also say Jung falls out of the distribution of today what most people engage in is cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT is Not what Jung was doing like Jung was far more radical and I wouldn't say the most peer-reviewed guy in the world So it just it and it could be like anything else in life a heuristic That doesn't necessarily the right way And the reason I say that is because heuristic is something that's not the right way to do something when it works for you It's the right way to do things for you And it just might be a useful heuristic to me But it certainly I can think of just you know a dream even I had last week where I wrote it down and went back to it the next day because I woke up at Like 4 in the morning. I wrote it all down woke up the next day and looked at it It was like smacking me in the face Like what the dream was telling me What was that? Is it personal? I mean, I can talk at it at a high general level, but it is personal Problems with legal with some legal stuff and You know, I'm almost through it but it's taken a toll on me for about a couple of years and we got some resolution That was some of what I wanted to see and some of what I didn't want to see and that night I went to bed pretty angry. And then I had a dream where I was on a train and There were these people that were like rendezvous people all over the train and they were like, you know biker looking guys kind of rough and They were making fun of me or they were telling me I wasn't shit And then in the dream, I met a woman and I was like, hey, I really don't know what's going on in this dream Like or I'm not in this dream in this in this place. Like can you help me out? And she was like, well, you kind of have to learn what's going on here on your own like and so at one point a bunch of gunshots came from the outside of the train and I grabbed her like as the guns were shooting and I put myself in between her and the gunshots where they're coming from and Then she said when we got up and like the gun stopped firing. She's like, okay, I can help you out some here And she started telling me things about this this this train world that I was in and then a guy came and challenged me whose name was also bill, but he looked like old like an old bearded guy like an old like biker beard guy and We started fighting and I put him in an Americana And which you know, you know, you can't you can't do that And Which you know you anybody who knows that a fight shouldn't succumb to an Americana. What are you talking about? Well, I'm saying like, you know, I'm fighting like a blue belt. I try to hit him with a you know, a basic jiu-jitsu move He's gonna fuck my world up. Oh, I don't know about that. Well Andy would guys that Gordon would or maybe guys high-level black belt. Well, I don't know It just seems I get caught in Americana's all the time Maybe I don't know more than I do But I put him in an Americana and I ended up not that this is possible but I ended up compound fracturing his elbow happens all the time and He didn't quit and the woman told me as I was fighting She's like not only does he have to say uncle you have to accept that he is submitted before it's over And so he was like, I'm not done and I was like, oh my god so we keep rolling and I he tackles me and I get into a guard and I and I put him in an arm bar and I break his arm with an arm bar his other arm and then he's like, okay I submit and then she's like now tell him you accept his submission And so I was like I accept your submission and then and then later in the dream like I get off this train This is a crazy fucking. Yeah, and I wrote it all down I can show you it on my phone when we get out of here cuz I woke up at 4 a.m And wrote it all down and then I got out of the dream and I ran into my wife and my wife said I'm going to get on the train as well, and I feel like I need to Go ahead and test myself or get into the world and I was like, baby Don't like don't do that. Don't get on the train. Like it's not a good place to be. It's it's horrible Don't do it and she's like, I feel like I need to do it and then I woke up So the dream like I immediately knew just from like the self-study and I'm reading these things The train was a framework for the legal system. In other words, there are these There are these people that speak terms you don't understand It's got a it's got its own direction and inertia and gravity and you don't control where the train train goes just like you don't control where a courtroom or a Judge or the justice system goes you are subject to everything that's happening in that train and they're going to say and do things that Don't make sense to you and that you're going to need someone else and like it said up there a compensatory a compensatory function for men is usually an anima character and anima relation is You know you I've heard you talk about this and what you're describing is anima integration But essentially men need to first become men and once men become men then they can start integrating anima and what what a way easy way to say this is a Grandfather or a man needs to grow up and become hard. He needs to be disagreeable. He's a fight He needs to learn how to push himself and test himself and instill these masculine features into him Once he's done that then he can be the old grandfather. That's got like a granddaughter on his lap Or or he's emotional with the grandchild or he's starting to learn really more about his wife But he first needs to learn himself. So he has to harden his masculine his is His masculine features before he integrates anima features, but anima features in movies Or in books or in all of these things It's usually a character like if you watch the movie Wolverine or not Wolverine if you watch the Logan movie He's got a young version of himself. Who's a woman who has no ability to speak so she lacks logos She lacks some an ability to express herself in the world and as she starts to integrate and get closer to To Logan Who's this masculine character? She finally adopts logos and starts to speak towards the end of the movie and even starts speaking English and so and because they're the same person she's a clone of him You you would say that's the anima part of Logan that he needs to integrate before he can defeat the bad guy in the end of the movie so this anima character on this train who is is you know, a particularly good lawyer or someone who Understands this world that I don't understand And I need to show them something Like protecting her from the gunfire before she starts telling me about this world and how it works in other words I have to I have to use that compensatory relating function in order to understand this train that I'm on that I've got really no control over and that the stakes of this fight were far bigger than I ever thought they were and that the Person that I'm fighting which is not the person I'm fighting in court or not The person that I'm fighting in life was actually me and there's a part of me that I was experiencing that dream Who's not willing to give the fight up? He will fight until his he's gotten a Americana until he's got a broken arm until he's got an ankle lock and he can't walk Anymore, my dream was warning me about taking this to the end And if you take this to the end, it could be bad or it could be good. We don't know Well, it can consume your life. It could consume more. Yes and consume millions of dollars and consume everything else and so my dream was readying me and saying look you're at a threshold where you have to Where you have to open yourself up to parts and really learn the justice system and really learn these things Or you're not going to be ready for the fight and the fights not against the other guy the fights actually about you're against yourself and and so that that that's the sense that's the nexus of the dream the dreams not telling me about the future it's telling Me where I am at this point in time. So it's it's very useful to me these things And we see them reflected in media. Like I said, um and that Logan movie I talked about he actually fights himself And that himself that he fights the clone. Have you seen the movie? No, he's got no logos he can't speak and He and this daughter or this clone of him has no logos and he cannot speak and they're moving from south of the border Which is this like chaotic desert wasteland up into North Dakota actually in the movie Which is this like Garden of Eden type of place and it's there It's just like buddy travel story across this place where he has to integrate these parts of himself in order to finally defeat his shadow Self, which is a union thing, which is this other Wolverine with no ability to speak Who's this animalistic version of himself and only then in the end of the movie? He's you know, it's really the story of Moses But in the end of the movie He's literally hung on a tree and Killed by his own shadow self and then only then can this new version of him this animate integrated version of him Go north into Canada and live freely. So it's it's one of the highest-grossing Marvel movies of all time I think it made over a billion dollars But it's telling a very old story in that old story that it's telling is an ascent of a mountain like Moses to go up And get the new law, but it's also an ascent of the mountain to that that will ultimately lead to your crucifixion But it will save everyone else that you love. It's like, you know, the the Jews in the wasteland land. It's this death and rebirth story that it speaks to a very deep level in people and even as engineering minded as I am and as scientifically minded as I am, I can't dispense with something when it's as useful as it is. There's just something there that keeps scratching at me and I can't let it go. And it's part of my addictive personality. Like I said, I've consumed like Eric Neumann and Carl Jung and Freud and Adler and all of these great authors who wrote about all of this, the perseverance of the human soul under extraordinary circumstances. You can't dispatch with these things because it got these people to where we are today. And there seems to be some truth there. So well, it's undefinable. And it's very strange. Whatever the dream state is, it's there's something going on there that's very odd, very, very odd. And I don't dismiss it. I don't understand it. I don't dismiss it. But I'm very wary of people who are clearly defining it like mapping the territory. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know if you have the ability to do that. And I don't, you know, I think people want to define things that are undefinable, because it gives them comfort, for sure. But there's a structure to things that, you know, they can, they can say, Oh, I get it. Now. I don't know if you're ever going to get it. I think it's the same thing that you get when you hear from people. When I was 16 is the only time I've ever done drugs my whole entire life. And I can now say this that I'm out of the military. That's outrageous. I've never done anything. But when I was a child. Meanwhile, you're doing drugs, right nicotine. When I was a child. Some friends, some friends gave me mushrooms. When I was like 16. And it was a crazy experience. And it also I won't tell the story, because we've already done this once. But it also led me to an updating of my system and an understanding of who I am. How come you never did it again? I was in the military. How can we don't do a security clearance? I don't know. I just I'm not saying I wouldn't. All I'm saying is, I'm so hyper focused on what I'm doing now that I don't I don't. There'll be a time and a utility for it. There'll be a time and place for it. And I do think I've talked to lots of veterans, other guys who have done like the what they go to South America, and they do Ibogaine. And, you know, I talked to one guy who said, you know, he had a ton of antidepressants and medication and stuff. And he went down there and did that when he got back, he threw it all away, and he was better afterwards. So there's definitely value there. But again, that's that. That's that pattern of diving into unconsciousness and diving into these this world that will judge you. And some people come back better. Some people come back broken. Some people overcook the goose. I'm not sure. I think I would probably do it. One day. I'm just so busy building. I would worry. I also worry about my mind. Like I also know I would never do like a cocaine, or I would never do like some of these other drugs, because I'm really already highly strung. I'm already hyper focused on things. Yeah, that's why I've avoided Adderall, even though it's very interesting to me. I would never be able to get near. I mean, I do not want to try it once. I do nicotine because it helps me think it's the only thing that can make me focus like when I don't do too many a day. But when I do them, it's usually when I'm trying to think about a problem or like zero in on something. Whereas other people like makes them feel like giddy or high or whatever. I get no feeling from this other than like it just. Yeah, it's a definite nootropic. Makes the world focus in. And I had it when I was in Iraq on my second tour to Iraq, I started doing like mint skull because we'd convoy like a long ways. And there wasn't anything to do. It's not like we had a turtle box or a Bluetooth speaker in the Humvee. You just had six hours of driving in front of you. So I'm going to throw a skull in just like mint skull. And but then I started brushing my gums away. So I quit. And then when this stuff came out, I was like, oh, I get to get the nicotine without the without brushing my gums away. Sign me up. Right. Yeah, it's very addictive to people. It's interesting. It's it's this stuff. These pouches have come out of nowhere. I get off of them every once in a while. Like I'll switch to there's this one that I use that's got no nicotine in it. Ultras? Ultras. Yeah. So I'll just do like that for like two or three weeks. Yeah, those are great. And then. That's just nootropics. Yeah. And so I'm not, you know, wired up like the first day is always like this kind of sucks. Like I want one. I don't have like the come down that most people have where I'm like, I'm going to kill someone if I don't need one right now. But I do get I do get disagreeable. I don't I think it's biological, man. I can just stop taking them. I took them like when I was on vacation, I took off 10 days and no problem at all. And I do that all the time. Take three, four days off. Doesn't irritate me. But I think that's biological. I think some people have that weird thing and some people don't. And some people they it gets in their system to the point where they need it all the time. And some people don't. I've heard horror stories of people. I've also heard horror stories of people with other stuff that I find really troubling, like kratom. kratom is a big one. What is that? I'm sorry. That's that weird fucking it's kind of an opiate. And it's everywhere. It's in those live free drinks. And those there's a lot of different like, they banned the synthetic version of it from gas stations. Now. People are buying this stuff and convenience stores and weird sketches. Is it an opiate? Yeah, man. You can buy in a grocery store or a convenience store. You can get it from a leaf, right? It's from a plant called the kratom. kratom leaf. I don't know what the plan is. But this stuff has become very popular. And I've heard horror stories of people going to like, you know, a quote unquote health food store, like a juice shop. And they have these little live free drinks. And they go, Oh, this must be healthy. It's in this place. And you drink it and you're fucking vomiting. And it's like, you feel like you're on opiates. Wow, I've not even ever heard of this. Yeah, it's interesting. Because there was a guy that he had some real problems with opiates. And then he started telling me that we got off opiates got clean. And then he was telling me about kratom that he takes kratom. And I say, What is this stuff? And so while at low doses, it acts almost like a stimulant like caffeine. And then at higher doses, it's, it's more relaxes you. And I'm like, Okay, like, well, how much do you take? So he told me, well, you know, if you want to take a couple of them, like before a podcast or something, try it. And I did. I was like, this is kind of interesting to a couple pills. I was like, it is it's kind of like a little stimulant. No big deal. And then I said, How much do you take? And he said, Well, before I wake out workout, I take 10. So I said, What? I go, you take 10? I go, What does that feel like? I don't have a problem with it at all. So I took 10. And I called him up and I said, Hey, man, I go, you're high. I go, you're getting high. This is you're not sober. Like this is not a sober thing. You're this I'm high as fuck right now. It was a weird high, because it was a high that didn't seem to affect my motor skills. So it was at the studio, I did it. So I worked out have no problem working out. It didn't affect my cardio, it didn't affect my ability to lift weights didn't affect anything. And then I was playing pool, it didn't affect my ability to play pool either. It didn't like fuck with my motor skills, like alcohol will. What do you feel like when you're on it? Like, Oh, it's so it's weird. It's a weird high. But whatever it is, it's a high I was like, dude, you're high as fuck. If you're taking 10 of these, like you're not sober. And, you know, I think there's a bunch of people that have had problems with opiates that don't recognize that this takes them down that same road. And then I know a lot of people that are heavily addicted to kratom and can't get off of it. Wow, like friends. I have one good friend who takes it every day. He's taking drinks bottles of these things. He's drinking like six a day. I was like, fuck, dude, that's crazy. This episode is brought to you by chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but chime is doing something different. And it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them are choosing this over traditional banks. 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I just walk Yeah, two years ago, or three years ago, my sister Jenny died, maybe even longer four years ago, and then my sister Heather, who was most like me in the family. In other words, like we both wanted to get out of North Dakota. And she married into a great family, like one of the best families I've ever seen, and then got on antidepressants. And then I believe when she got off the antidepressants, it was really rough, like a really rough time for her. And she got addicted to methamphetamines. And then ended up leaving her family and going up to like Fort McMurray, Alberta. And she was up there for like seven years and wouldn't talk to any of us. And her and I were very close growing up, we were the most alike, and that we just wanted to leave North Dakota and see the world and do things. And and so while she was up there, she was at like a rehab facility. And this wacky fucking Canadian America's Top Hat place, they would give them meth once a week. What at the facility? Yeah. And so she either stored up her meth, like didn't do it one week and kept it and faked it or got some from someone else, but did like a critical amount of meth and killed herself at the facility. And, and they would give you man, they were giving it. I mean, why were they giving Jamie, you can look this up. But there's a term for it. And I don't remember what it was, because I asked the same question. Because her brother or my brother, ex brother in law, her husband, Rick told me, and I was like, why are they giving it to people? And he's like, well, they wanted them doing it like in a clean, safe environment instead of like out on the streets. And I'm like, how about we just get them off of that shit? Like, can we all agree that's bad? Yeah, what a strange strategy. This is the strategy that they employ in a lot of these cities, right, where they give people access to drugs that are safe. And they also give them clean needles and crack pipes. This is something that you see, particularly on the west coast. It's a very common thing in the Pacific Northwest. There's a bunch of these places that will give money, they'll give you drugs, and they'll give you needles. And the idea is that you're providing them with safe access. Well, it killed my sister. Well, she killed herself. But I'm saying, you know, my family's just the story, not the story of it. There's good people in my family, very good people that I love very much. So I'm not trying to smite my own. But we have a problem with addiction. Dude, a lot of people have a problem with addiction, whether they believe it or not. You know, I think addiction is a normal part of human behavior. And I think there's probably an evolutionary aspect to that. I think addiction is what allows people to get very focused on certain things. Like, like, to become a good hunter, what do you have to do? Well, you have to be very addicted to the idea of hunting. Yeah, you know, and I think that same sort of pathway can be very destructive. And it can be very destructive. Like you can get addicted to gambling, which I've seen a lot of people get addicted to gambling. Or you can get addicted to drugs and alcohol. You know, there's this guy that I knew that was a world class pool player, like one of the best in the world. And he hurt his back in a car accident and then become addicted to pills. And my friend Tommy said this best, he said the same thing that made him great at pool, made him addicted to those fucking pills, like he couldn't put them down. He was just invested in those pills. He wanted to take them all the time. And he died of a drug overdose young. And this is a guy that never drank, never smoked, was clean, sober, and was just his number one focus, which is being the best pool player in the world. And I think that thing that we all have, especially some people have, in in spades, I have it is I become very addicted to things. Yeah, me too. It's very focused on things where it consumes me. Golf did that to me. I don't golf anymore. But I got to where I was like a six handicap, which is a fairly good golfer. What are you Jim? I'm about 14 15 so I just shot a play I had played for the first time in a few months the other day and just shot like 12 over which is like a good golfer, but there was a point when I live in Hawaii that I was like You know I shot a couple of par rounds like one or two over and I did this solely because somebody told me I was too much of a fucking gorilla and I'd never be good at it That was the sole reason every time I was practicing I'm gonna show him. I'm gonna show him so ridiculous I'm gonna beat it and I like devoted my whole life to it and then when I got really good and I was Better than most people I ran into I lost all interest. I Hardly ever do it now. Really hardly ever do it. It's how am I that's it's a really weird It's happened to me a couple of times in life where I would go down a road of addiction It just fortunately the addictions were in like positive kind of You know positive control loops Where I would get into something hard and then once I felt like I had a certain level of mastery I'd move on to something else Well, that's probably the part of you that wants to learn something from scratch again to go through that same process Yeah, which is that's the most important part I think the most difficult part is the beginning the becoming a beginner at things I think is very beneficial a white belt. Yeah, it's very beneficial to you to learn that there's something that oh my god I know nothing about this. I'm terrible at this. I have so much room to grow Yeah, whereas something that you've been doing for a long long time It you know, it becomes more of like fine-tuning. Yeah, and this slow incremental improvements rather than Understanding this is like enormous sea of information that you're not you don't have access to yet Yeah with golf. It was like I'm hitting the ball straight Moving on that's nuts Like next thing Bow hunting is though is something I haven't exhausted and obviously technology is something I haven't exhaust Well, I think bow hunting is so variable, too There's so many different things if every shot was 20 yards and every animal stood still it would be boring you'd get bored of it Well, yeah, I don't think you get bored of it, but it wouldn't have the same appeal that it has where? It's completely chaotic One of you doesn't even know the game you're playing that's the animal, you know, it's it's playing a different game It's game is survival it's looking for predators and you are a predator but it doesn't understand how you're doing it and your your Your thing is like to get to a position where you can execute Execute a shot and do it right and then the amount of time that you have to put into it I think is the real thing for me. It's like the understanding that Look if I take a few days off of archery and I go and shoot my first few shots are a little shaky a lot of times I'll still you know, hit the ten ring at 60 yards with you know a few days off, but It feels a little odd It feels doesn't feel a hundred percent locked in and then I have to do it again till I'm locked in and if I had to shoot an animal like that Like if I had to shoot if I had a very difficult shot on an elk at like 70 yards and I hadn't Shot a bow in two months. I would not take it. I wouldn't be able to right which is nuts, right? I've shot Thousands of arrows at 70 yards effectively in a lethal zone Yeah and yet I Wouldn't be confident that I could do it where there's a lot of other things that I would be very confident that I could do If I hadn't done in months, right? It's weird it is weird and I think because of that because it's such an Engrossing and involving process the process of archery in particular and then bow hunting at the extreme Level of it. I think there's two different extreme levels of archery There's target archery, which I think is extreme mentally, but it's still a stable static shot a static target versus bow hunting Which is non-static moving enormous animals and all their senses and all the different things that are involved wind all the factors elevation Changes, there's a lot of stuff going on. They're moving. There's a lot of things happening that you never can master it No, there's no mastery. You can get more effective than you used to be and there's different ways to do it Mm-hmm, like I've got like I'm a very analytically mind bow hunter. I like breaking everything down Understanding the thermals rise and fall the Sun first light last light. What are these thermals gonna do on this hill? Where's this buck coming from? Where's the doe bedding? Where are the scrapes outside of that doe bedding? How do I get downwind of them? How do I avoid the parking lots? How do I do all of these things? I've got this other buddy. His name is Johnny Stewart, who is just a deer Like I'll go scouting with him this guy kills two or three big bucks every year and you would think This guy must have like a system and he's just like this feels like a place where they're deer I'm like, well John, what are you talking about right now? But like just the way this place looks to me what's the pattern recognition? Yeah, but yeah But he's pulling it from a place where he he can't cite to you what's going on, right? Whereas when I walk into a spot, I'm like, well, I've got three intersecting trails that come here. There's you know, doe bedding over here I've got two scrapes here. The thermals come up at 830 So I want to be I want to wait for the thermal switch before I get into my stand Otherwise my scent is gonna paint this side of the mountain and he's just like this looks good It's interesting that there's there's people that are System-oriented and then there's other people that are instinctive. Yeah, that that's a big factor in striking So in striking one of the things that I find interesting is some people who are great strikers and by strikers I'm talking about martial arts. Yeah, some people have a system and they're really good at like Showing their system and teaching their system and other people can't quite tell you what they're doing, right? They just know how to do it They know how to they know how to like do something at varying speeds in order to fuck with someone's Perceptions their timing and reads. Yeah, and they just do it instinctively and it's just they've done it They've done it so many times. They just know what they're doing, but they can't teach it. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's so strange Especially when you talk to people who are at that very high level like I think you know But I've become pretty good friends with George st. Pierre Mm-hmm and when you him and I bear hunted last year together and I spent basically a week with them and I Didn't do jujitsu. I did it mixed martial arts in the military. I did combat as we called it in the military for like seven Eight years, so it was a little different like you would learn the basics But then it would get into all right now that you've got him in this position You can stab him hurt now that you're in this position You can break contact or like just so there was a combat nexus to it, right? that wasn't strictly jujitsu there was more to it and but like talking to him and then just like messing around or seeing like how he applies pressure or what he's doing or How he's a great wrestler and how he integrates these other things. It's just When you deal with these people or like with Gordon, it's like you're at a level that's just I couldn't ever get there even if I hoped to and Even if you could explain to me What's like in other words Gordon could pin me in a position and say here's what you got to do I still can't do it You're saying like to him to him And so they're just at such a level that even if they are are able to articulate it to you You're still not getting there because you don't have everything that it takes to bridge the gap from here to there. Well Gordon's very Systematic, you know and it comes from his teaching under Donahue like Donahue John Donahue's I think the great mastermind of jiu-jitsu he has a very Specific systems and he breaks things down like they're very technique oriented and then there's there's things that you just learn From over the course of training. There's the flow of it all Yeah that you learn from it, but Gordon is like a great example of someone who's an amazing teacher as well as an amazing jiu-jitsu competitor because like his a big part of his income comes from his Instructionals selling instructionals. Yeah, because they're so good. Yeah, he I mean the thing that's interesting to me about Donahue is like He's almost like a first principles jiu-jitsu guy Like when you hear him talk like he breaks things down to like very elemental levels where it's like, what is the point of jiu-jitsu? What are you doing with jiu-jitsu? What are you trying to establish and it's like, right? I'm not even thinking about these things, but he's like because I think his backgrounds in philosophy right or something like that Yeah, Columbia. Yeah. Yeah, he was he was a professor. That's it's crazy to that transition Was he a professor was he was definitely was a PhD I believe and then started doing jiu-jitsu because he was a bouncer and Wanted to learn how to fight It's like I probably should learn how to fight because he was a powerlifter at one point. I'm in a rugby player Oh, yeah, and then became obsessed and you know Became the greatest coach of all time and he's like a character from a film Yeah, really like doesn't it doesn't exist in real life because he's a guy wears a rash guard everywhere At a wedding He's I mean, but he's a real eccentric it's not like he's trying to be eccentric It's like he's either this or he's a bad guy in a Bond movie Okay, so it's six degree black belt arrived the United States 91 to study at Columbia University's philosophy PhD program After arriving in New York Donner was introduced to Brazilian jiu-jitsu continued training at the Academy became teaching classes as well while Gracie Henzo Gracie was traveling for competition and So did he finish his education and did he start teaching PhD? Yeah Master's degree in philosophy was pursuing a PhD. Mm-hmm. Okay And so that's when he became obsessed. And so while he was attending the University He worked as a bouncer in various Manhattan nightclub. So I've elevated his education but a little bit that's I thought he was teaching but he When he started teaching jiu-jitsu, he's like sleeping on the mats Like he's he was there all day long every day another addictive personality Not just that but a man who is obsessed with the you know, the Japanese term Kaizen. I've heard you talk about it Yeah, Kaizen is you? Continue to improve on one thing Constantly where it's this never-ending cycle of improvement And this is his philosophy that applies to jiu-jitsu. This is this continual cycle of improvement, you know, there's a there's certain applications that people seen like the the application of Kaizen in engineering for example, like a good example is like they take a specific platform and Continue to work out like a good example is the Nissan GTR. Are you aware of the Nissan GTR? Yes Okay So Nissan GTR is one of the best examples of that where it is essentially the same car for 20 plus years Yeah, and they they don't change the body shape. They don't change the Geometry they don't change the way it's all-wheel drive sports car but what they do is continue to refine it to the point where it was just fucking dialed tweaking just Constantly improving it and just dialing in dialing it in for the further brother and if you get like a 2025 I think was 2025 or 2026 was the last year they made the GTR and you compare it to like one that was released in the 19 God, what was the first GTR? Was it 2000s? Was it I? Think it was late in the late 90s. I thought but maybe early 2000 might be early 2000 so I think it's in the 2000s, but it almost looks the same, but there's so much better and That's that's the same with everything. I mean Kaizen as applied to mixed martial arts As a whole like if you looked at mixed martial arts as a whole All of these individuals that are competing in it and all these individuals that are pursuing it and teaching it and and studying it They're essentially Doing that they're taking this thing. They used to be this chaotic thing where You know, there was certain strategies that people had, you know one guy was a brawler or the other guy was a grappler to get you down on the ground punch in the face a bunch of times and then they're expanding the possibilities to this like Insane level where you're seeing people now that are like on the Dana White contender series that would be absolute world champions in 1994 right and these guys haven't even entered the UFC yet, right? You know because the level of the game so far this constant pursuit of excellence and then this competition this Boiling pot of competition where you have I mean how many MMA athletes are there worldwide now? Who knows huh? It's got to be in the hundreds of thousands of elite MMA athletes world I mean when I say elite, I mean like guys who can fight professionally I would I would say this problem in me They might not all be fighting professionally yet, but they're at that level when you introduce amateurs and you think about how many Thousands and thousands and thousands of gyms there are and out of those gyms how many people have like people that are at a very high level Fuck it's crazy. So this is a new thing Like I I say this all the time, but it really is accurate Martial arts have evolved more in the last 33 years than they have in the last 33,000 years and that is true because from the time the UFC came about in 1993 I mean the Brazilians were way ahead the Brazilians were way the Gracie family in particular way ahead of the curve They were pursuing this and looking into this in the 1940s and 50s Like Ilio Gracie was having mixed martial arts competitions in the 1940s You know They were having what they called it Valley Tudor It was anything goes and they were having fights in the ring in front of large groups of people Long before the UFC was ever around, you know Hicks and Gracie famously had them when he was 18 years old When he became the champion of the family, I mean he was he was defeating much larger people when he was 18 Yeah, I remember watching that back in the day to you like peak UFC not peak, but it's big now I still go to it now, but watching like GSP in his heyday back. Mm-hmm stuff like that. It's just we get well That was peak emergence peak emergence. Yeah, I think emergence was like 2005 on so 2005 was the ultimate fighter and It's very rare when one moment really sort of defines the growth of a sport But you can find that in MMA and in that one moment was the Stefan Bonner Forrest Griffin fight In the finals of the ultimate fighter on Spike TV Got millions and millions of people watching it like more than anything anybody had ever watched on Spike TV Yeah, and it was just because it was so good It was so crazy and you see the rise of people watching it They could they could track the ratings in real time So people were calling their friends going dude, you gotta fucking watch this turn on Spike TV. This is crazy Crazy and they were watching it and it it changed the entire course of martial arts forever Yeah, that one fight. Yeah, I mean for me the one that my watershed moment was like GSP Bisping like watching When GSP went up a weight class, mm-hmm and what year was that? Somewhere around there. Yeah, what's went up to middleweight? Yeah, but for me it was just like okay now I'm obsessed because this guy's just done so like I thought I love GSP. I know him, but I didn't think it I didn't know him at the time. I just thought I don't know. This is gonna be tough just to watch somebody go up another weight class and go and win in this like I Just it was amazing. It was by the way. GSP is not even a big welterweight You know GSP when you look at welterweights today GSP is the size of a large middleweight or excuse me a large lightweight today a Large 155 pounder today. I think he walks around like 160 right now or something. Well, that's light I think he's heavier than that. He's in the 80s. Is he maybe in the maybe even in the 90s? Well, it's depending on how much he's weightlifting and what he's doing. I thought it was less but he's definitely heavier than that But in his prime he would hover around though the high 190s and then cut down to 170 Yeah, but he was beast in that fight TV. There's guys now like do you you follow? Closely like top contenders not closely not like I should know not as closely as I should I mean I'll watch the big events or like, you know, there's this cat Michael Morales. He's one of the scariest guys in the 170-pound division He's a fucking monster like a really really dangerous guy and he's Enormous, he gets well over 220 well over 220 and gets down to 170 I think I just cuts at the last minute. No, he cuts it slowly over time But then he rehydrates and reinflates and when you see him inside the octagon you like how The fuck and I don't know how many times he can do that. So that is tough on the body Very brutal on the kidneys. It is essentially a Death's door event you're getting to death's door You're getting to death's door 24 hours before you have to fight in a cage and then you're rehydrating yourself and replenishing yourself Not 200% by the way. No, you can't you're not. Yeah, there's no way so this is how big Morales is He's fucking enormous dude, and he's so powerful He's absolutely huge for the weight class when you see him. He looks like a light heavyweight He really does cuz he is I mean, he's basically like 220 pounds now He looks like a big middleweight when he's in there, but yet somehow or another he makes it to 170 and he's undefeated And it not just undefeated in the UFC Starching people and he's a wrestler who very rarely wrestles and he has a judo background very rarely uses that It's kind of like Geisha, right? She just engaged. Yeah, he doesn't way but this guy is much bigger and just a real seek-and-destroy Welterweight and one of the absolute top contenders terrifying human. Yeah, I just meant that Geisha was a really good wrestler And yeah hardly ever seen wrestling, right, right. Well, it takes a lot of energy to wrestle people That's part of the problem in order to grapple and constantly shoot and taking people down It's one of the most energy intensive aspects of MMA like shooting on someone you're exploding a lot of energy and then you're Wrestling with them. So you're you're grappling with all their strength using technique and leverage And then you have to hoist their body up in the air and slam them to the ground get that take down and you can Only do that so many times which is one of the reasons why I'm a Rob is so fucking Extraordinary is the fact that that guy can do that full blast for five rounds. It's insane His his cardio should be studied in a fucking laboratory because he's a real freak Yeah, he's a real freak but very few people have that ability. He breaks world-class fighters like, you know Umar Nurmagomedov, like when he fought him like he's like he almost click couldn't believe this guy was still doing this like deep into the fifth round like it was just so crazy his his his work output and Most people don't have that. So most people when they're really good grapplers, they develop a style That's like a mix of grappling and striking because there's time even Khabib like one of the rounds with the Conor McGregor He never shot for a takedown Yeah, it's the round that Conor won and it's because he just chose to stand because he had to like realize like, okay I burned so much energy in the first couple rounds going after this guy taking him down smashing him I can't keep this up I have to take a round where I don't burn off as much energy and let my body recover a bit Yeah, that the White House fight. I watched that from my cabin out in North Dakota The event at the way, so I was alone. I've shown you pictures in the cabin out in the middle of nowhere It was my father's cabin That I bought back in the family like four years ago Rebuilt it from the ground up and I was like, I'm in the perfect place to watch this fight I was so hyped up like watching the whole thing. Like my son was coming downstairs I was like not now much of the fight like leave alone watch the fight. I was cheering. It was crazy I just remember watching Ilya talk. I think he was on your podcast. Wasn't he saying he was just gonna decimate Keiichi. Yeah, and That it was he thought it was gonna be easy and I said man I don't know how you could think it and a lot of people were saying to me like when I was saying Justin has A huge chance and they were go. Oh, you're hyping this fight up. I know what you do like Ari Shafir accused me of that It's like oh, I know what you're doing. The guy was gonna lose you're you're saying he has a chance I go. No, he has a real fucking chance. He's insanely durable is extremely experienced in very high level competition Against world-class fighters and he's been in the deep Trenches where you're in hell Like if you're in a war like the wars that he had like with Dustin Poirier had a war He had that war with Max Holloway He's been in those trench wars where it's four and five rounds You've been beaten up fucking three rounds your body's broken Yeah, and you're exhausted and yet you have to persevere and press on he's a freak of nature. He's amazing So Tyler from archery country, it's good friend of mine. We were in Vegas for the paddy fight with Geisha. Mm-hmm that you were gracious enough to invite me to and We were I don't gamble and but we were leaving a casino We were there for some reason and I think I had like a hundred bucks in my pocket So Tyler and I were like, we're gonna go back or go. We're gonna go to the fight I think actually we were going to the fight So I sat down like a three card poker table and I was like, it's an easy game Let's just play like I got a hundred bucks. Let's just do this So I ended up getting up to like a thousand dollars at this three card poker table with Tyler So I was like dude, like let's just leave like we've got the money like let's just get out of here So we're walking out of the casino and he says hey, why don't we put money on the? Geisha fight tonight against Pimble it and I was like, okay so I had like download an app and we went to the thing and like Place the bet at the place and we both were like we got a bet on Justin like it's got to go this way It's like, you know cuz and he was the underdog. He was yeah He was the underdog for sure because I got paid I put down 500 or something like that. Wow, that's crazy You certify that but I'm 99% sure because I got a big payday on it. I made like I think I got 2,000 bucks Or maybe 1,500 or something like I do not know why he'd be the underdog. Yeah Yeah, there's howdy Pimble is a favorite and Justin Gage is younger. Wow. Yeah, so we put mine is 238. Yeah, it's crazy So we we Put that 500 a piece that we won playing three card that I won playing three card poker on Justin Wow And then we got paid and it was in like my Draftkings account or whatever or whatever that wherever the money got deposited I didn't even know how to get to the money. I just had 1,500 bucks there So at the at the White House fight I called Tyler that night that day of and I said, dude I'm just gonna put all of this money back on Justin again, and he's like, I already took my money out And I was like, I mean it was a hundred bucks and now it's 1,500 bucks So I put it all on them and he was the underdog again for the Ilya fight Yeah So I ended up being like 6k Wow I turned from $100 into like 6k and then I took it out and use it to rebuild my house So Justin I owe Justin my my upstairs. I paid for all the flooring upstairs from Justin's fists That's a good way to gamble Yeah, that's good. That's good. Healthy gamble never do it again, but it was awesome. I mean I had one run Yeah, I'm very conflicted about gambling because I've met a lot of gambling addicts I know a lot again because I come from the pool world, you know, and the pool world was filled with gambling addicts That was my first real exposure to people that are addicted They would go to off-track betting before they ever got to the pool hall And then they'd show up at the pool hall during the day. They'd have stories the fucking horse. I bet on this horse He didn't come in they were all addicts and then they will all be looking for action I mean either they played gin there's guys that would play gin or they play poker There was like a whole like elevated level where it's like seating and stuff where it was like above the pool tables where guys would Hang out and have card games and then they would gamble on pool games and everybody was just in action It wasn't everyone was in action and part of me is like, oh, you know gambling can be destructive, right? But it wasn't for me. So why is that? So, isn't it like isn't it a a personal control thing? Like isn't it like recognizing what's detrimental to you and what's positive? Isn't that a bunch of aspects of life like I'm pro alcohol too, but I recognize that people could become alcoholics Right, but isn't that also like a personal control thing? Yeah Like should you shouldn't you know what you you can do and what you can't do and isn't the real thing Learning how to control yourself I mean So I don't have any problem with gambling at all and I know way too many people who enjoy it to ever like come out Against gambling, but yet I have friends that are staunchly anti gambling and they think that these gambling apps are terrible I think these casinos are terrible and then we should outlaw all of it. I'm like, man, you're just shoving underground It's also people have enjoyed that since the beginning of time and then also coming from the world that I come from coming from the Pool world gambling is a huge part of how you get good at pool One of the things about pool is stakes like, you know the term pool it comes from pooling money together to gamble No, I did not know. Yeah, it's not called pool. It's called pocket billiards. So the original the original billiards game Well, there's a game that is also still played in a lot of Latin American countries, South Korea They're really big on it and it's called three cushion billiards and three cushion billiards is a game that you play on a table that doesn't have any pockets and what it is is you have three balls and The key is understanding Geometry and force and spin and how it affects the rails So the rails are all these rubber rails and in three cushion billiards you contact one ball and then you have to go three cushions Contact the second ball and then the the the original ball So you're contacting these these three balls, but also hitting three cushions, huh? Yeah, or to the two balls, but also hitting Hitting three cushions so you can't just hit one ball into another ball There's a there's a there is an old billiard game where they did that but it's a very boring game But this three cushion game is a much more dynamic form of it. So that's Billiards and then there's pocket billiards So pocket billiards is what people think of as pool is where you're shooting a ball into a hole Huh? There's six holes on the table So pool comes from the term of pooling money together to gamble on pocket billiards Yeah, so when you go to a pool hall, that's a gambling all that's what they were and so in New York City at the turn of the century the turn of the 20th century, I Think there was some insane number of pool halls just in New York City. I think it was over a thousand Wow, yep, and it was a lot of these guys, especially in the 1940s and Guys coming home from the war. They didn't have families and it was a bachelor culture and these guys They didn't want to be a part of society anymore. They just wanted to You know unplug unplug and be a part of this world of men where men got together and they gambled and they smoked and They talked shit and they and that's fun engaged in a lot of vice, you know There's and that was also when I was exposed to drugs like a lot of drugs. How old were you at this time? 23. Yeah about 23, maybe 24 when I really started playing a lot and a lot of these guys there's the first time I ever saw anybody do heroin Yeah, there was a guy who was a world-class pool player He had two nicknames. One of them was Buffalo Bill and the other one was water dog and this guy He was a world-class pool player who was also a heroin addict and what he would do is he would go into the bathroom and Everybody knew what was going on He would go into the bathroom lock the door shoot up and then he'd come out and he would sit on one of those billiard Chairs, so he'd sit on like it's like a big bar stool with like arms on it. You sit there like this I just pass out. No, just just zone down for like 20 minutes just high as fucking heroin and Then come back and then when he's back he was ready to play and his eyes his fucking pupils were huge That's what I remember. It was like he had gerbil eyes like shark eyes and he couldn't miss I mean it was insane watching him play he were playing there's a table in executive billiards in White Plains, New York Where I used to play table one had these tiny little pockets because it was the gambling table So the tape the pockets were just just shy of four inches So you couldn't fit two balls in them and they were very gaffy meaning like the way the angles were cut like it was like The way it was made was kind of haphazard the way they wedge these things in there to make the pockets tighter It wasn't perfect. I give you would hit the point a little bit. It would bobble out Yeah, it wasn't it was very difficult to be accurate on this table and this fucking guy could miss he was playing for $10,000 and I was watching this guy play stresses me out I was watching this guy play for $10,000 and he the other guy the guy who's playing this guy George the Greek who was a Famous gambler and George would be yelling at him this motherfucker. He can't play without his shit He's got to take that fucking shit. So he's trying to distract him while he's playing and this guy just He just couldn't miss just moving around the table seeing all the angles it's like to him the game was simple and it was just when he was on heroin and he had to do heroin and I ran into him years later. So I knew him in New York and then I moved to California and this was like 95 96 I was playing in this tournament in Bellflower, California. This is legendary pool hall that used to exist there. There's still one in Sacramento, but there's one in Bellflower that was called hard times and hard times was the Mecca when I was playing pool in New York Everybody was talking about hard times hard times with all the gambling was and all the great players the Filipino players would go there And is there this big Sunday tournament and so I would go and play in the Sunday tournament because anybody could play I just get Killed every week, but I'd go anyway Just to be able to play like world-class players and to watch and just have fun and Water dog was there and I go. Hey, man, what are you doing out here? And he's like, yeah, I took a trip I took a trip to California, you know, just try to get getting some action He goes I want to get in the tournament, but I don't have any money I'll go I'll put you in so there's only like I don't remember was 20 bucks 25 bucks to get the tournament Oh, no, and so I said I'll put you in he goes. Oh, but I gotta go get my shit And I was like what I go. Well, go get your shit. He goes. I need a ride I'm not driving you and he goes come on. He goes you got to give me a ride. It's fine. Don't worry And but I had a nice car at the time my first nice car at a Toyota Supra turbo. Nice. I loved it Yeah, I was like I can't drive they'll confiscate my car that you're gonna say highline You can get in real trouble and he wouldn't he wouldn't play like or he wouldn't accept that I wouldn't take him there. So I put him in anyway, he played sober deeply terrible He like he was angry like wasn't playing good like rotten Like you tell was a mess and you just guy could have won the tournament. 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Just go to the farmers dog Rogan this offers for new customers only I Grew up in Canada for a few years my trick three years and I remember reading it I don't know who this is and I hope Jamie can look it up for me Jamie if you don't mind But there was a story of a goaltender That would play on drugs and I want to say it was something crazy Maybe it was something simple like cocaine But he would take the drugs before a hockey match because it made the world look slower And it made him a better goaltender And he said it was like the ball of the puck became like catching a beach ball or something like that grant fewer That's him Edmonton Oilers and Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender So he publicly admitted abusing cocaine for about seven years or using it correctly. Why is he abusing? He used it correctly Rumors and reports circulated about cocaine use involving several members of the powerhouse Edmonton Oilers dynasty including a well-known 1986 Sports Illustrated report though fewer was the most high-profile player to face official league discipline Regarding well probably because he admitted it Right. I mean, I remember hearing him say like yeah, 1990 admitted it publicly Yeah, and I was a child then so I'd have been eight at that time But I was living in Canada where everything was hockey. Mmm, like you were not it was hockey night in Canada it was Molson Labatt blue and the whole like when I moved there I was in second grade and I only knew football and Coach was like, yeah, we only play hockey here. And I was like, I've never played hockey He's like, well you do now and I was like, well, we're I'm my mom. We're poor. We don't have any money This is like in a toilet is on cocaine. Look at that Hockey news Wow Shit, but all I did was watch hockey They made you and I told them I was like we can't afford hockey gear all of the kids on the team Donated a hockey bag full of gear the coach brought it to my house This is like a little town called Plum Cooley, Manitoba like east of Winkler small town 300 people and they're like you play hockey now and I started learning to skate and did that for like three years and it was just everything was hockey There was no choice in it. It was it was It's religion up there's total religion Yeah, and it was I remember hearing that story about that guy and it made me think of that when you were saying that and that's Strange, that's so strange that people get better when they're in these altered states Well, Ariel Helwani posted something on Twitter today that someone sent me because it was pretty interesting and it was about this guy who's a goalie see if you can find it and he's talking about how interesting and introspective this guy is and a Fascinating thinker and this guy's very intelligent. I don't know his name. I don't follow hockey, unfortunately, but he was talking about how he has to be in an unconscious state to play a goalie and that as When he's in his conscious state like he's joking around and talking to people and laughing and having fun with his teammates Then he's conscious and he's thinking he's thinking too much So he has to achieve this unconscious state in order to just react as to be a better goalie But it was see if you can find it like a flow state almost Yeah, and the way he described it was really interesting because I get that I understand what he's saying Because you you get that with everything like I cannot talk and play pool if I talk and play pool I'll play like shit. Like I'm talking to my buddies and having fun. I get frustrated I'm like, I gotta stop talking because if I'm talking I can't like listen. Yeah, this is the guy listen to this About 34 saves in your night just how you felt and what you saw as you looked out from your crease Yes, I felt nothing the The problem with me is that I have a lot of fun playing but when I start having too much fun It makes me into From an unconscious goalie to a conscious goalie and my conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie So I have to like let my unconscious brain do the work because it reacts a lot quicker When I'm having too much fun and I'm smiling and I'm talking to everybody and I'm hanging out What happens is that shifts me into more conscious? Brain goalie and then I can't react in time and then I'm slow I'm behind the play and then I give up seven goals, you know, but today it was just unconscious Like don't think about anything, you know, if you ask me how I made a save I think I have no idea just my unconscious brain does it and That's what you work in practice for, you know well you felt nothing during the game, but I wonder what you felt like after when you're doing the three stars and you hear the crowd and When the buzzer went that's what it's like Okay, now you can let it all go so you get a huge rush of like dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline and just like goosebumps It's the best feeling in the world. It's like the biggest reason why I love to play and Yeah, then you can just let it all out now. I can smile and enjoy myself But yeah, like TV timeouts in between period I'm like don't smile. Don't talk to anyone just focus on your game Let your unconscious brain do it and it was great What is this guy's name? Jamie? Does it say in aerials? Okay, I don't follow cocky anymore But it's the same as you were talking about with Archie when you're shooting a deer, right? Yeah, you're going through this process. Yeah, you're thinking you're going through it But it's like you're just trying to stay focused that after it's over. You're like, oh Yeah, now you can be conscious and aware of this moment. Like wow, this is insane. Yeah, it's a flow state and coolie Devin Cooley amazing The only other place that I ever experienced that was in the military Like we would plan for six months for an operation and do all this stuff Six months for an operation and do all this intelligence gathering going into an operation where blood and treasures on the line One of the operations blood and treasure. I like how you put that Well, that's always the state when I was collecting intelligence Those were always the stakes that I kept foremost in my mind is that collect this like blood and treasures on the line like our country's money and the taxpayer that has to labor every day to pay these fucking taxes and The blood of the people your brothers that you love are the ones that are going into this because I was like I said before I'm not the long tab or I'm not the cool guy. I was the nerd for the cool guys so I treated it like it was like the Like the outcome of the entire operation depended on me is always what went to my brain That was the only way that I went into this and if I wasn't totally locked in But when the when I would be on a hill or in a helicopter or in a Humvee watching an operation go down based off of my intelligence work I Would get into that same flow state I get with bow hunting bow hunting when I was retiring from the military I was so stressed out cuz I had no idea what I was gonna do that was gonna replicate Replicate this experience. I was like, where am I gonna get this flow state from and It dawned on me while I was in the military that helping hunters in the same way solve targeting problems as helping You know JSOC guys or Rangers or or Green Army guys? That Sense of completion that I would get at the end like when bad guys were dead or arrested or you know A terrorist operation was sunk Based off of all that work was just like the most addictive feeling in the world It's a very addictive feeling and that flow state that would get into when I was doing work That was particularly meaningful is such a hard thing to replicate. It's like a place you have to find yourself in It's not a place you can put yourself in You have to get there like start doing the work start putting things together start thinking here is Friend of mine taught me this a long time ago. I don't think you probably learned it in college somewhere Oh, I've seen this. Yeah stages of competence. Yes unconscious incompetence conscious incompetence unconscious competence and conscious completion Competence unconscious company is the last one the last one. Okay, so the idea is that you start from ignorance and We're all aware of a lack of knowledge of skill exists and then you go into conscious incompetence We're aware that a lack of knowledge and a skill exists We're unaware initially and then you go to We are able to use the new skill with effort So that's conscious competence and then mastery we're able to use the skill easily without effort It gets integrated. Yeah, and then it starts all over again when you learn something new Yeah, and that's why people are addicted to learning things new Yeah from the beginning beginner stage is very important Very good for the mind and becoming a beginner at new things I think is one of the best things a person can do especially a new difficult thing like bow hunting or Like jiu-jitsu or like golf or like any or yoga anything that's hard to do like learning it in the beginning It's very exciting and very good for the mind And I think one of the things that happens to people's they stop doing that and then their brain Atrophies, yeah their brain atrophies the same way your muscles atrophy when you no longer use it Yeah And that skill of or the the experience rather of learning a new skill learning learning a new World a new universe that you are now Engrossed in very very beneficial. It's so good for your ego to yeah, just I don't think as I get better at anything whether it's building apps military operations My limited time and doing things like jiu-jitsu like I just rejoined or was trying attempting to rejoin a gym But I'm gonna find a different one Just knowing There's a thing in life like when I when you get really good at something you actually start to learn how much you don't know Right. It's like you've just uncovered a new world of like, holy shit. I really don't know anything I thought I was getting towards the top and this was a false mountain and now the big like I looked at a mountain I started to climb I got to the top and I'm like, oh shit. This isn't even the mountain I was looking at that's over there Dennis McKenna had a great expression about this He said I'm gonna fuck this up, but it's essentially I'm paraphrasing it that as you expand the bonfire of knowledge it highlights the surface area of ignorance That's pretty good. Yeah, and that the more you learn and the more it expands this this Understanding that you have with the world you live in the more it highlights how much you don't know And that's why people that pretend they know it all are so fucking dangerous As the bonfire of knowledge grows brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes. That's Terrence I think his brother was the original. I think that someone's paraphrasing that I think they're attributing that to Terrence when it's Dennis, I think cuz I'm pretty I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Terrence is quoting Dennis Either way both brilliant guys. Yeah, it's like the it's like the yin-yang thing like have one foot in the Competence of you what you learned and then another foot in the unconscious Incompetence of what you don't know or what, you know You don't know and it's like one of those things too is like as you begin to learn these things you realize I almost become ashamed When I see how great I can be in certain like how good one of the things One of the things my grandmother taught me all of these pearls of wisdom that I come back to now because there's a Significant amount of time where I was being raised by my grandparents. My grandmother used to say be good for goodness sakes Hmm and as a kid, I was always like whatever grandma. Isn't that like Santa Claus? I don't be good I think it's from that song. I think that's right. I think that's right But she would always say like when I was fucking up She like be good for goodness sakes like just be good right? I threw that away, but she like put a seed I think Andy said I put that can of food on the on the in the pantry of my mind You come back to it later because now in my adulthood. It's like I'm always trying to You know be good, but also for no reward in itself like one of the things as funny story I always tell us when my wife and kids when I go to poison my children at McDonald's Every once in a while I always pay for the vehicle behind me So we'll go through and you know We have this thing and my kids are always like looking at the vehicle behind because I always tell the person at McDonald's like I'm paying For the person behind me I do this in other places in my life much more meaningfully But this is a good example and this one time The lady's like are you sure you want to pay for the people behind you and like my wife looks at me and she's like You know what's the problem? She's like it's gonna be like a hundred and seventy bucks or something and I was like well It's not a principle if I don't do it right now So I'm gonna pay for them and then as we're pulling away There's like big group of like, you know, a bunch of kids just going nuts that their food was paid for but I would often engage in those types of things because it made me feel good and that's probably the wrong reason to be gracious and As I've gotten old why is it bad to feel good though? Oh, you're doing a good thing and you feel good doing Self-centric about it And I say that all the time that there's something selfish about being generous yeah, and so now I try to do it with no expectation that the person will ever know who did it and My hope is that they'll walk around saying they're angels in the world or good people in the world that do like I'll never know Who this person is? So now I try to do big meaningful with things in that way But that was the pearl that my grandmother dropped me with be good for goodness sakes like I'm just being good for goodness sakes I'm not doing it because it's gonna inflate my ego. I'm not doing it because I'm gonna go tell people what I've done Like I'll never tell people these things. I'll use the McDonald's analogy because it's an easy one That's not like I'm not this benevolent guy, but trying to do it in that way It's just you know These old ways of doing things and these old sayings that people have Start to come full circle and you realize there's a ton of frickin profanity in these things That we can leverage and try to make ourselves better people by doing it. Yeah, it's interesting that idea that there's Knowledge that's in us that we don't know and that we've been given whether I guess is through genetics or lack of a better term or through Whatever soul transmission, but you know if you were that there's a young Chinese kid who did an experiment with moths and He ran this experiment with moths in the caterpillar stage and he found out that through the Transformation from a moth to a caterpillar, you know They essentially become like mush and then reemerge as a caterpillar once they go into the cocoon like this is a very intense Metabolic transformation where their body is like broken down to this mush and then becomes a butterfly that or a moth that this Knowledge is transmitted through that process and not just that but it's also transmitted to their offspring somehow or another He's proven this Epigenetics, I think it's yeah, but this kid proved this like physically with these animals with these insects See if you can find that It is something to do with lavender they used a scent and the scent When they encounter the scent they they developed this like they they had something where there was like a Vibration and when they encounter the scent there's an uncomfortable vibration they experienced so they avoided that scent and The he could prove that the moths had trans that it had gone from the caterpillar stage and the moths still retain that memory and then Also, it had been transmitted to their offspring. I believe BF Skinner also did this with rats Mmm, right with mazes, right? Yeah. Yeah and with the smell of cats, right something along those lines Well, the rat thing is really interesting too because this puts it right the Skinner, right? this also puts it into the the principle of morphic resonance, you know, like the idea is that you're So this is one one of the things they've shown is that if you teach rats on the east coast how to navigate a maze Rats on the west coast can navigate that maze quicker. Yeah. Yeah, this is you Rupert Sheldrake's work Yeah, strange very weird stuff because I think we're very We have this narrow-minded Perception of what knowledge is and what information is and where it is and where it's coming from It's like that thing that you said when you see someone you get the ick Yeah, like well, I don't know what you're getting like maybe you're getting there's maybe it's pattern recognition Maybe it's not maybe there's like a there's a sense that we have that's undefined Yeah that you can't put a ruler to or you can't put on a scale but there's something there that we're not totally aware of that allows us to stay safe and has been inside of us forever I think it's like a framing problem because like the Greeks would say the spirit of war and That I don't think they meant like a flying demon or something or like, you know They didn't mean that there's this God of war and he's a physical entity I think they mean this is a persistent thing a car across all classes of humans that no matter who they are This is inside of them. And so it's like a God to us It's a God it's a God because it rules us. We don't it doesn't have we don't have it. It has us Well, it's that spirit that comes out what I was talking about with protests. Yes, exactly Yeah, and so there's a the mob mentality thing. Yes this thing that happens to us Yeah, and so if that's why I say I don't make a lot of distinction between God the collective unconscious or transcendent reality it's this abyss of unknowing that we are fortunate to tap into every once in a while right and pull something out of it and Like it was interesting I watched your interview with JD Vance and you guys were talking about the difference between Like what he conceptualizes a demon and what you conceptualize as an alien and I just think that was a mismatch impedance I think you guys could be talking about the same thing, but you're using a Regionally accepted formal lexicon to describe it, but you're but you could be saying the same thing So perhaps what but I had a purpose to why I was questioning him on that Yeah, my purpose is that my perception was that he was signaling to a certain group of very religious voters Yes, I know, you know, I mean, yeah No, I and I know that's why I was so I don't know if I messaged you about this or not I believe I did but it blew my mind that people were talking shit that you had him on It's like why wouldn't you want the vice-president on like there are a bunch of comments like Oh So and so's here big freaking deal. Bubble. I was like look We're in a hot war and There's a lot of shit going on in the world And even if Joe's been told he can't ask about certain things like you talked about with Kamala I still want the guy talking for three hours. I didn't nobody any requests from him Well, I'm just saying even if that happened I still want those people talking for three hours because you can't sit for three hours and talk and not reveal yourself Right, like I mean things doth protest too much Like you will talk about the things that are going on even if you don't want to Just get the person talking and that's what I think is the beauty of this podcast for a myriad reasons. One of them is Everyone can come on here and just talk and people will reveal themselves in those three hours You'll get to the nexus of who someone is Over that three hours and that's why I want Bernie on here or I want JD on here I want Trump on here Kamala and when someone won't come on to the biggest podcast in the world Who's running for high office? Then we should dispatch with that person and it wouldn't matter if it was this podcast or another one The biggest if you can't sit there and talk about your principles and you're organizing Criteria of how you that way you metabolize the world and why you think you're the one who's fit to change it if you can't Talk extemporaneously about that. I don't want you in a high office because you're not revealing yourself, right? You're not revealing yourself. You're probably a construct. Yes, you're probably you probably have this thing that you're promoting this this image that you're pursuing and that you're trying to get the general public to accept that's Not Totally real. Yeah, this isn't Fox News for 15 minutes where you get to read the talking points, right? That's that's the issue with those things This is just not enough of an understanding of who that person is and in a long-form podcast You do get that understanding. I get why people have that sense. You shouldn't platform people I think that instinct is incorrect if I didn't like someone I want them platform No, but not only that the you already know them like they're already out there You're not gonna make them more popular They are who they are right but like there's certain times like the Trump interview was a good one where you never got a chance to see that guy talk that way in in a really a non-combative situation because almost all media that he did is either kissing his ass like on Fox News or trying to Take everything he said out of context. It was a binary. Yeah, and you know and You get a chance to see someone communicate for a long period of time I got so much shit about Trump after the podcast with you when I gave him like a c-plus or something Mm-hmm. That was a majority of my messages were there matter. Yeah, you don't understand Trump and what he's doing There's 4d chess here and you're not getting it. Oh, it was like 4d chess one is great and I was like, okay Please elucidate me on what's going on right now because I'm not getting it But because I was for him in the beginning and then when everything started going tipsy-topsy-turvy and I wasn't able to You know rationally predict what the next step was gonna be now. I'm the bad guy It's like look I just wanted like these five things and I'm not getting them. I'm getting one of them. Yeah Can we have a discussion about the other four? And so I just it's like you said people aren't gonna get changed Okay, there's no one's gonna listen to your podcast with Kamala and say you know what I was a right-wing guy You know before this podcast right now I think I might vote for Kamala But the thing is there are a bunch of people that she could have reached that are in the middle for sure Yes, that's where I think there was a missed opportunity And I think a lot of people agree to that or who want to know more about her like the one thing I'll say about I'll say a good thing about Trump. I've met him a few times. I was on stage with him in, North Carolina He's really good at like summing one up and someone on up something someone up quickly Like when I first met him, I like shook his hand. He's like, so you're like the AI guy. You're the AI guy And I was like, well, yeah, I mean I was a soldier in the military I kind of learned it while I was there and he's like Soldier I could see you being central casting AI. I don't think so and that was our conversation and I was like This guy's like he just summed me up in like a second like cuz I you know, I'm more soldier than I am that and He said some other things but that was about it. I just stood behind him on stage for a couple of hours, but You know It's he's got a ability. He's got this comedic timing, which I think is on like unheard of Pretty good, but there's other things. I just disagree with and that's it's a free world. Well to disagree. It's very clear That um, you don't have ultimate power as a president. No, you can't just do things. Thank God for it. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, I mean, that's what the whole process is supposed to be about. That's that's the reason why we have Congress and the Senate it's the reason why all that stuff exists. What do you think? What do you think we're looking at Gavin Newsom? No, and I don't think or someone like that I don't I think he's too much of a liability. I don't think they're gonna there's just too much going on with them Just I mean unless they were severely desperate I think it's probably going to be someone who's not tainted in the public eye Someone you know because we buy narrative so quickly We we hated or I don't say we a lot of people hated Kamala Harris as a vice president And then all of a sudden she was our Savior. Yeah, and they did that quickly Yeah, you know, there's there's a way that they can promote things Especially now through bots and social media and social media is infested with nonsense Yeah, it's infested with bots. It's infested with completely fake stories there's so many stories that I read like national news stories that are absolutely fake on X and That people just put up there and I think they're trying to discourage that somehow. I Think you know like you you don't get as much money from do because there's things like you get money from posting on X I don't but some people do like you you sign up and you it's people that make their living I knew they had that on Facebook. Oh, yeah, they have it on X. Yeah, okay people make their living with engagement But the bots are a real thing I can speak personally to that like I've pulled the string on the bot stuff Looking at how they get funded where they're brand out of the people that are behind them why they do them how they do them And it's such a real thing To a degree that people just don't understand how they're being being manipulated by these things. It's enormous It's it's an enormous market billions and it's it's Funded in ways that I think would surprise people And thank God for things like data links leaks and things like it where we can get to this information or just the fact that there's campaign finance laws and that Money has to be routed and accounted for in these types of things So that people can pull the string on and understand how things are being manipulated. It should be illegal It really should be I am all for people being able to express their opinions but it should be an individual's opinions or the opinions of an individual that represents an Organization if you're a spokesperson for an organization you want to tweet something Okay, no problem with that But I think that organized campaigns where you know, let's say in particular like there's some sort of big social issue some some some something that's going on in the world or some thing that involves our civilization our culture and then you have either a foreign country or you have an intelligence agency or you have a corporation that's funding This propaganda narrative this fake viewpoint and making it look like people are in lockstep with this And then you've got a lot of people that if that whatever that narrative is is attached to the ideology They identify with whether it's left-wing or right-wing Then those people will start parroting those points and you'll see it you see this like sheep-like behavior with people and it has a tremendous effect on how we view things and As a culture and I think it should be illegal. I think you should have to be a person post for yourself Yeah even if you post even if you're not named you should have to authenticate some way if you're going to enter the zeitgeist of public any of these types of things because I mean the other thing about Facebook and social media these are things that people don't realize is They can feed you the narrative and put it on the vector that helps you metabolize it in the best way In other words, if a public person is running for office and you might only agree with 10% of what this public person thinks There are ways to manipulate the algorithm. So you're only fed that 10% right? So you only understand this that you're only getting what you agree with with this particular politician and there might be 10 other things you don't agree with that you're not going to see unless you pull the thread yourself and Unfortunately, just a lot of people don't pull the thread themselves because they're busy. They have to make money They have families and so they're only getting one side of the story And then it's being monetized which is also really gross It's just super dangerous. It's super dangerous, but it's so super dangerous. It's super easy to manipulate us It's like there's never been a better time to use propaganda on a society than today Yeah, and I watch the ways I've been in the past how it's happened to me So it's like now I'm not immune to this even though I understand a lot of it how it's happening None of us are and you're certainly not immune to your algorithm Your algorithm in the echo chamber that you exist in they just constantly bombard you with one-sided opinions. Yeah Yeah, it's it's a weird time in terms of truth And you know and everyone has to figure out what's the best way for them to engage with that? My the way that I do it. I only look at things that people send me someone has to send me something interesting I'm not seeking anything out anymore. It's just too much. It's too negative. Yeah, and you'll drown in it You'll drown in it and it also takes away from your time It's it's such a time suck and such an attention suck and that will wasted. It's wasted energy and I always try to explain it to people in terms of I try to look at my Attention and my energy of the day as units. Yes I have a hundred units and if I spend 30 of those units concentrating on nonsense and horseshit I've wasted 30 units very precious units It's only a certain amount of days in a year and a certain amount of years in your life I was gonna say that about gambling the reason I don't like gambling is because if I throw down $100, that's an hour of my time and It makes me worried. Like I only have so much time. I'm like, I'm I'm throwing an hour away Yeah, I just threw an hour to this casino. I think I would gamble on fights if I wasn't involved in the UFC I think I would do that because I think I'm pretty good at it. It gets you into the fight Yeah, 100% if you got money on Gaijin, he starts to knock down Ilya to pour you like oh shit I was doing cartwheels in my living room. Yeah, but um it I just think about things as time And so when I had that three grand I'm like, well, this is what's would take me I think of my personal time. I bill it about a hundred bucks an hour. It's about how I look at my personal time So that's that that's time. I can't get back or I've just gained a bunch of time by getting that three thousand bucks So I get nervous when I think about getting rid of it Like I don't like to spend like that I want to be able to pull the thread and you said it is units. I would say money units It doesn't matter because time ultimately in the final analysis The only thing we can't make more of right at least I think to live a better life Use your time wisely and that is an old age old expression. I know that one of those pearls always Yeah, use your time wisely only so much of it. Yeah, it's so finite I mean, it's so funny when I I have days where I do nothing on purpose Where I just I'm burnt out. I've done too much and I just like to veg date I just like to hang out in front of TV and watch cool shit. I just want to be entertained Yeah, but I'm amazed at how much time flies by it was like sometimes I'll be watching Just YouTube documentaries and it's five hours later. I'm like fuck. Yeah, Kovac feels like yesterday, right? It does it does it really does. It's it's nuts It's nuts we live in a very unique moment in history and I think about to become even more unique In which ways with AI? Yeah, I think the way AI is going to transform society is going to be Unlike anything that's ever happened before. How do you think it's going to transform society? Well, I think jobs are going to be eliminated. That's a big one eliminated eliminated I think there's going to be no use for people for a lot of things that people do right now What time scale are we talking ten years maximum maximum? Yeah maximum in ten years the world's going to be unrecognizable. That's what I think So, how do you feel you think this will happen you think we're on that course already yes and that it that All jobs will be subsumed. No, not all jobs. I think creative endeavors are always going to exist Yeah, there's always going to be human beings are always going to have the need for human connection We're always going to want to see live sports or always going to see want to see live music live comedy is always going to Exist I think going to the movies is a great look sort of a community experience I used to love going to comedy movies comedy movies when they used to make them. Oh, yeah fucking Garbage woke killed comedy movies. Yeah We used to be able to go and you're laughing really hard with a whole group of people that you don't know Just like going to a comedy club. It's very similar in a lot of ways I was telling my wife about your comedy club and I said, it's the closest thing to 1996 That I can get to and she's like, well, what are you talking about? I'm like, well you lock your phone away you go in there there's no worry about someone's recording something people get to go on stage and talk shit and You're just you just feel like you're back in a place like no one's sitting there scroll I hate watching like people at dinner and both of them are scrolling their phones and you don't see any of that and it's just shit talking and fun and you're with your buddies and you're laughing and It's just a great experience And so I have a theory about AI with when it comes to what you just talked about So I think we're in agreement in at least one thing and I think what's gonna I think what's gonna happen is if you look at like the number one movie in 2020 or 2019 was like Avengers endgame or Avengers infinity war those two movies Highly digitized tons of CGI Everything's getting done in front of a green screen And it made you know, two billion dollars or over a billion I don't remember exactly what the number was and then you look at this last year and the biggest movie per dollar spent was Obsession which was made by a YouTube creator Who is doing stuff out of his basement a few years earlier? So I think you're to your point about people wanting genuine human interaction My theory as it pertains to AI is AI will become ubiquitous in certain ways it will run it will eventually Unfortunate fortunately or unfortunately run massive parts of the economy It will run a lot of things. But what but what will happen with? People will get sick and in a few years your daughters are gonna be able to send you an Avengers movie where it's you Are you Shane right now? Well, I'm saying like a with a prompt they'll make a two-hour movie and it'll just be the Avengers movie and it will look on indistinguishable from another movie and you'll get sick of that quick and Then people I think things like regional theater houses Well, my wife and I's favorite thing to do is go to the Nutcracker at Christmastime and DC at the National Theater Those things will start springing up and they'll be easier to spring up because to start a business to start an LLC if you have A novel idea you're looking at thirty to a hundred thousand dollars of negotiating red tape and government in order to start a business AI is going to make that Super easy and I think in a few years we're gonna see theaters I think we're gonna see I agree with Elon and that prices are gonna get way cheaper to make something production scale wise Amazon's gonna be you'll be able to buy a coffee table for a dollar or two dollars three dollars I think there will be a large deflationary effect where products are going to get cheaper and the quality of life will go up because more people will be able to buy cheaper things And if you're living for on ten thousand dollars a year You're going to be able to live really well in the coming years because of AI But because people will be able to set up businesses easier like craft tables Handmade things people setting up businesses. It will allow a rejuvenation of Creative endeavors and people with money or people who are making money in the middle income and above middle class income and above Will yearn for handmade things and because it's so easy to start these businesses We're gonna it's the same thing with people who have money now all my friends who have money now have classic cars A lot of them have lots of classic cars. They have handmade things handmade furniture all of these things There I think the market is gonna get flooded because people are gonna be so sick of highly stylized AI making thing Everything look awesome I think it's much more likely that in ten years if you and your wife and myself and my wife are gonna go out we're Gonna go to a regional theater house and watch Hamlet or some play or something like that Yes that will start with people with more money, but as more theater houses pop up and more creative endeavors I think people are going to be able to get creatively back into things and AI and my estimation will exist as like a utility in your house they're trying to not do that and ways that we've talked about but A good output for AI is it becomes a water heater in your house? You have your own personal GPU that you do your own training or your own things on or it does your bills for you? It takes care of the doldrums of life and it can do all of these things for you. It's ran locally It's not something that you go to open AI for or you go to At a large company name your large AI company a good output from AI would would be We have these open weighted systems that are available to everyone you buy your GPUs It goes in your basement your data never leaves your home. You're not out training some other companies AI It all gets done regionally and it handles your bills for you. It does your bank account it does all of the very rose-colored glasses It is it is but I see where they're the Human thing like human created stuff is going to be more valuable Yeah, that's the best possible best-case scenario people will be able to afford things if you're not making a lot of money and you Don't have a lot of economic output. You're gonna be able to live very well, I think If we don't get killed by the robots, I mean I just I don't see a path to sentience with AI in its current form Today, I guess it's my big That's another conversation that we're gonna have to have we have more time. Okay, that's a long one I didn't think there'd be a second time. So now I Believe you when you say that there's a third hundred percent. Let's definitely do it again. I really appreciate you having your brother It's always great to talk to you. You're a fascinating guy if I can do the obligatory Yeah, so Spartan Forge my company we've released to hunt plus updates tons of UI updates UX tons of features We're about to release that thermal thing that I just talked about before. We've got carplay. We've done a lot of things we've grown a ton and There's some too many features for me to go into there, but there's we just produced a film On YouTube about a engineer in our company. Who's also a gunsmith called Old soul we're doing a third one about my cabin That I purchased back And having my family out there and we're gonna have some veterans out there and race the Spartan Forge YouTube channel Yeah on the Spartan Forge YouTube channel And so we're gonna do one about my dad's cabin coming up here and we've got some great companies Hoyt is sponsoring it VPA archery, which have you shot VPAs before sure if you haven't oh you have yeah Best brought it. I love those broad heads. That's the arts. They make their archery country broadheads. Yes. Oh my god Yeah, I've been aiming for shoulder blades with those things on does right and bucks because you can just double shoulder blade It's a it's a great product. It's a great broad head so VPA Azio camo is another one and my buddy Joe Is runs as yo camo these companies are sponsoring us To produce these films, then we're gonna do a coffee table book with it, but we're trying to get into Reminding people why we hunt and why we're out here doing these crazy things and it's not about bloodlust or killing It's it's about the joy of Having a backstrap with your kids at the table like you know up until we run out of deer meat most of my kids has Died as deer meat And it's about that coming of age and getting back to our roots and engaging that circuitry that we talked about before And as paradoxical as it sounds I'm hoping to help people do that through an application But yeah, we're producing a lot of stuff, and it's also just reminding hunters. Why we hunt It's not just about the big racks and the bloodlust It's about food and tribe and beautiful shared heritage, so thank you again beautiful my pleasure brother. Thank you You Espolon tequila balanced delicious 100% a cabin 0% ego just add ice time and your mouth For real margarita ride the rooster Espolon tequila 40% alcohol by volume 80 proof copyright 2026 compel you America, New York, New York