Transcript for #1833 - Tim Kennedy

You're calling me your standup was the first time the first one I've been to and.

Yeah. Everybody was cool. It's weird that it's on sixth street.

Yeah. Amazing stuff and really weird stuff.

Because you came here. Everybody I just, they're like, Where's Joe at? Oh, just moved it to Austin. It's like you shut your mouth. We're on a flight last night coming back and the Southwest person who obviously lives in Austin. They stopped in Austin then flew to San Diego and he's like, and everybody that that is going home to visit in San Diego, please stay. Like he said that over the intercom on the South West flight and I was like, I like this guy.

I've been trying to buy land and I keep I mean, and I'm coming in high well over and then you know, still losing out the realtor's a cast and we from California just pay cash and 30 percent over.

I'm in Cedar Park. That's where headquarters is. And that used to, if you're in Austin, Cedar Park was like the absolute hill bill north. And now it's just north Austin. Yeah. Just everything is just slowly.

I just did six months of that program. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes a big difference. Oh my god, yeah. Yeah. It's not fun though. It's not a part of fun. It's obviously mobility in your focusing on circulation and the knee. So it's not good for the ego. It's not fun for the ego because the weight that you're doing for the squats in that style of squatting, to have your knees over your toes is way less than if I was going to be a meathead and going squat. You know doing the lunges. It's trying to get that deep deep forward lunge to get in the all the way of the toe and then all of a sled poles and all slushes and she's like gah Lee can I just do some athlete things you know I know it's healing so I'm going to be a better athlete, but it's still not fun

Yep. I have the match that I'm on right now. a level of killer that I've never imagined existing in names that I didn't even know. And then go the Donna heard that squad.

Yeah. They, uh, Rob's being really rad. Three workouts a day on those mats.

And so cool. Yes, you know, you have Oh, this guy's a two-time Olympic gold medalist. What's up? You know, hey, Satoshi. And as he mulls me, like we're in the cage right here on it, and Satoshi was just beating me up, and then Roy McDonnell was getting ready to fight, beating me up in a GSP's traveling in, and then obviously like Gordon, and then the Shonjie Roberto team at six blades, not but three miles away, you have the 15 team with Craig Jones. So like one through 20, the best grapplers in the planet are in Austin. And check Matt guys are here.

Yeah, give her take 10 miles. You can open a new gym.

I dripping's open. I just opened my gym in Cedar Park. So, you know, there was 10 miles, Sean J. Roberto is the closest, you know, kind of big gym and six blades and that was on 183. So he was, you know, it's a 20 minute, 15 minute drive to him. Somebody's gonna, somebody over there is gonna pick that gym, somebody over here is gonna pick this gym.

What are those? In light of everything that's been happening, I've been screaming from every building I can get on that, you know, we need to prepare America for what is happening now. And so sheep dog response, like the company mission statement, is to train and equip people to preserve and protect human life. With that in mind, we do everything from fighting, shooting and medical to try and make sure everybody that comes to this course is teachers, law enforcement, all of them get the basic fundamentals of really the things about saving life. And we have been, I mean, cheap dog response. We have, I think, 180 or 210 courses this year. And if you go to the website right now, it's like sold out, sold out. So like, I can't, I'm not going to lower the quality of training because everybody needs to know the right things as we look at a ball day and the lack of training and the response and the broken systems and all the things that went wrong in there. You know, I'm like, I literally teach every single day what the answer is to all of this and you can only train so many people in a year.

Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, that's the responsive reactive side of it.

Which is really important. We have to make our schools hard targets. We have to get individual individuals to be responsible and be able to protect themselves. Our basic entry course for teachers and for everyone is called Protector. Protector one course. And we shoot, we fight how to keep blood in the body, you know, turnicates, packing wounds, and then the biggest part of situational awareness. And that's all preventative actions where I see something that could be going wrong. I'd prefer to go upstream to the root cause of what is causing some of this violence, mental health and these broken young men, and try to fix the individual. We have to do all these things with our schools. I've been writing non-stop since these last shootings have been happening. The four D's about how to make a school hard target. What are the four D's? We have detection, denial, entry, deterrence, and then you actually have defend. Of those things, identifying what a problem is and trying to deter from the outside. Limited entry, you know, how our headquarters are set up, it's difficult to get in here. It doesn't look like a place I want to try and get in. The bushes are the landscaping's in a way where I'm not going to have access to the windows. You know, like there's in my building when you come to the front door and you get lead in, you're in a kill box, you know, you get lead into a lobby and then that lobby, you can't get past the lobby and then the lobby, there's somebody that will let you into the next room. And you're stuck there in less somebody lets you in. The defend is obviously the last course of action where teachers or law enforcement are going to be protecting their kids. There's lots of different solutions to that. They have cameras that can have pepper balls and lasers that can blind people, but ultimately it's the individual that has to be trained to be able to protect those children. And in that like preventative model of going upstream to fix the problem, we could currently, we could do two things at once, right? Like we can make our school harder targets and we can train teachers and we can get law enforcement to respond correctly while we start talking really about what is causing these young men to be broken.

Yeah, but it's a bunch of things that nobody wants to talk about. We're going to be throwing stones, Hollywood, video games, social media. It's more divisive than ever on social media. You get in this echo chamber with your own ideas and those echo chambers and their crazy ideas sometimes when you are able to curate and editorialize the feed that you get back. So they're only people, like if I'm struggling and I'm just following angry, hate rhetoric, and that is just building. And so my thoughts are then magnified and compounded by other people reaffirming my own belief system. And in the algorithms, then they put in something that then enrages me. So it's like bias confirmation, bias confirmation, bias confirmation. Oh, and then here's something for me to interact with because they want us to interact. So, you know, the more emotionally driven we are in social media, the more we participate in it and the longer that we're on it. So those algorithms are really just dangerous. That's one. Hollywood, where You know, I love Matthew McCawney and I love his position and I love him as an actor and I love what he had to say and I love that he wants to protect schools and children. You know, but like how many movies has he been in where he had people on their knees and he executed him in the face? You know, you can't be on this moral high ground and then be a hypocrite. So if Hollywood is perpetuating, you know, I've never let my children practice putting somebody on their knees and shooting them or watching them.

Yeah, what movie is he done there? Um, it was that guy Richie movie.

Yeah, you know, he's he's an action star and he's a great actor and and and I really love what he had to say and how we all do have to come together and find solutions. You know, but if like Liam Neeson is out there being, you know, hey, we should get rid of guns, but I'm gonna take the next $10 million contract for Netflix to be in the next action film and my kill count's gonna be 110. I mean, I don't, right. I don't know if you can be in that position of moral authority to talk to me about what you should be doing with firearms.

No, he's a great example of somebody that, you know, morally and ethically really walks the line of truth and integrity.

Yeah.

Yeah, sitting still. So recovery for me in between workouts, you know, Greg Jackson would lock me out of a gym. Like, you know, you can't train five times today to him, like get out. So I would have to do something and, you know, he'd be like, no, don't walk this Andy mountains. You know, like, don't go up the trail. Can you just do something?

Yeah. So like video games was a way that I could just sit there, throw on, you know, the pressure cups on my legs are ice something why why would sit there and relax and we'll come in games with your play I loved first person shooters, you know, call of duties. But being a shooter and having, you know, obviously been combat a bunch of times, it was artificial. I still wanted to go out and shoot, you know, shooting definitely and training and dry firing and practicing is that cathartic process, like really scratches that itch of wanting to drill and train. What I experienced was afterwards, I actually had more like pent-up energy, you know, because I'm doing like these all these intense things, but it's this artificial experience that, I mean, like jerking off compared to going with your partner and having an amazing intimate experience, two totally different things.

I was, yeah. Tell the story, oh man, so I'm in New York. Last week on the book tour, I walked into a coffee shop and were like right off time square. And I walked in and I asked the barista for an oat milk cappuccino, which is my favorite beverage. And my wife, I asked if she can have a cafe Olae with oat milk and the barista and I say it just like that. I'll have a oat milk cappuccino please my wife like a cafe Olae. And my wife is really shy. And it doesn't even like to talk to people. She doesn't know to include, you know, people at a restaurant. So she oftentimes, like, can we order for me? So I wasn't man answering for her.

And the lady corrected me calling her my wife and said, you mean partner? No, no, no. This is my wife. This is my wife. Oh, and she would like a cafe Olae, please.

That's how people say it forever. So I literally do whatever she wants. And that's how she'd like to be referred.

Especially this one.

I'm not ready for it.

It has been a non-stop attack on You know, the vernacular in verbiage that we use, you know, in every form, in every opportunity, you know, in Twitter, like, on Instagram, and it's telling you, it'll like populate sometimes ask you, like, would you like to add your, your pronoun, or, um, it's like, I don't care. Sure, you know, whatever. You just have to tell me how it works.

I've spent most of my adult life protecting groups of people that can't protect themselves. So I totally sympathize and empathetic to trying to protect everybody and their beliefs. But it also stops where you are. You don't get to project that belief onto my beliefs because I have my own beliefs. You don't need to protect my beliefs. I can protect my own beliefs. But let's just...

Yeah, I mean back to mental health. I think with Shooters, you see a reoccurring theme. You see broken nuclear families. These young broken men are mischievous, serious, masculine elements of who they are. When you look at them and I'm profiling, I'm generalizing here. You see a very similar young man every single time. He's weak, he's frail, and he's broken. There's nothing more dangerous than a broken, not healthy, masculine figure. You know, testosterone's a beautiful thing. And one of the great things about the military is they, you know, they enhance and they build all of this kind of ability to do very efficient violence. You know, but they also show you how to control it and how to manage them. And the vertical of the chain of command and when is appropriate, you know, here's your rules of engagement. So it's very controlled and by the by this process, this arduous refiner's fire of shaping a human into a weapon that you have a healthier thing. You have this healthy, beautiful masculine thing that is very, very different. If you look at me and all of my friends and the special operations community, these are healthy, great men that love their wives and they love their children and they love America and the warrior society and the warrior culture It's like this nice balance of their fit. They get great night's sleep. They are very good at violence. I mean, Jordan Pearson, you know, himself said, like a good man isn't a useless man. A good man is one that is capable and strong and powerful, but knows how to control it. And I couldn't agree more. And when you look at these young, broken men, you see the same trend over and over again and they are missing these important moments that shape them as men and then they have testosterone and they have strength and they have violence and they've never known how to channel you had martial arts I had martial arts I had the military we had really healthy ways to burn that kind of growth and learn you know getting our asses beat on the mat and learn discipline yeah

It's weird. As a new crane a week ago, and the men there have been hammered for resistance, you know, being on the border of Russia, obviously, they've known what was coming for a generation. And they have been training relentlessly for the past 20 years. And the young men that you can walk down the streets of Kiev and Maripole, Nipro, and there is not a fat human in sight. You know, there is not a complacent human anywhere to be seen. Every single person there has been hardened, just in body, but also in mind. And then I flew from there to Amsterdam, direct back to LA, or back to Austin, which is cool that we have a direct to Amsterdam now. And the moment the plane lands, I get off, I take five steps out of the gate, and I'm like, oh, I'm back in America. There's just like weak, soft people everywhere.

Yeah, that's actually probably good for them. Especially when they're bad at bad choice, that will negatively affect us. My insurance rates are very, very high because my insurance has to pay for a lot of unhealthy people. Obviously COVID just went ramp it through the community of unhealthy people. I changed nothing about my life. I still worked out every single day. I still went to the gym every single day. I still flown helicopters every month.

And almost two years in. And it took, I'm not gonna tell you how I got it, but it was really hard for me to get it.

When I finally, I was, I was really excited. And now you're not going to tell me how you got it? No, because I got somebody in trouble.

I felt sick for like four hours. I hadn't slept in two days as working on the border.

Yeah, and I was working, and then I came back, and I was like, is it, because the border has like this moon dust all along the Del Rio River? And so I was like, is this just, because that's outside, you know, running and chasing people? So, like, is this just moon dust in my sinuses or do I feel like crap? And I kind of had like a headache, and I never lost my taste of smell or smell, and I was like, I'm gonna take a test, and I got a positive, I was like, oh my God, I got it. And then I put on sweat suit and I got my assault bike, you know, I burnt a thousand calories in an hour, which was pretty rad. And then I came in and the worst part of the whole experience was like, I went to my wife and I was like, well, I don't have to go to work for a couple of days. What are you doing? And she's like, you, are you insane?

Yeah, literally have COVID. It's like, but, uh, is it? Anyways, then I tried and then she got mad at me.

So Yeah, with 20 something deployments overseas, I've never seen anything like Afghanistan during the fall of Afghanistan. I don't know who was at a strategic level, not anticipating that the Taliban, every time that we moved and inch on the ground, that the Taliban would not move and inch on the ground. So, my self and all of my peers, all my colleagues, fully forecasted what was going to happen. So as soon as we started collapsing that ground, there was no doubt in any of our minds that every inch of ground that we gave up was ground that the Taliban was going to take. So we gave up, you know, Candahar and Bogram, the two strategic military bases, that means that we just gave up the rest of the country. We have been at war there for 20 years and multiple trips over there. We have lots of friends that deployed with us there. You know, Afghans have a special operations unit called the Commandos. We worked alongside them. Our interpreters are obviously from Afghanistan. So they live in Afghanistan, but they work for us. These people have security clearances. They love the idea of democracy and freedom. They love the idea of a free independent Afghanistan. They want their daughters to be educated. And those ideals that philosophy does not align with the Taliban. So as Taliban start taking over Afghanistan, our my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends and asking me to go contracting companies saying, hey, I'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy. But none of it was altruistic. None of it was the right call to action. It was lots of people, yes, it was going to go and save life, but it was for money. And I was just waiting for, I don't know what I was waiting for. I wasted two days trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here. To my phone ring, I was in the middle of writing this book, and I was with Nick Palmishano, who is my co-author on this book. He's sitting next to me, we're working. My phone rings, Chad Robasho calls me, and he was a Marine Special Operations guy that had multiple deployments there, and he had a translator named Aziz, and Aziz worked specific to special mission units, like the tip of the spear type units. And Aziz had already been told that they're coming to find him. And Aziz was on the run with his family. And they were very, very explicit about what they're going to do to his wife and his children in front of him before they kill him. And then like Aziz's friends start being murdered. And so Chad calls me and says, hey man, I'm going to go get Aziz. Can you help me? And I said, yes. along the way. At the same moment next to me, Nick is talking to a young woman named Sarah Virardo. Sarah is this like powerhouse. She runs the Independence Fund, which is a military veteran nonprofit that takes care of severely wounded veterans and give them chairs like track automatic track chairs. Her husband is one of the worst. This is a weird title hold, but he is one of the worst wounded veterans that are from the Afghan war that's her husband and she's the provider and care and sole care provider. She takes care of him. And he was wounded in Afghanistan, so her heart is like just, but she has lots of friends in the government. So in this moment, we have the right kind of two people. I have a good mission. I know what I'm going to do. It's morally right and somebody has to do it or Aziz and my friend's friend is going to be murdered. And I have a method. Sarah can get us routes and approval from the government. So the four of us started this NGO called Savor Allies. And that literally that phone call was the beginning of what is now, you know, what was the most successful NGO movement in an NGO, a non-government organization, a non-profit. So save our allies like that call initiated it. Nick and I were on a plane into the Middle East the next day. We flew into the UAE the Crown Prince was like the most generous host that you could imagine. One of our friends used to ride motorcycles with the Crown Prince. And he said, I will give you a C-17 plane. If you can land it, fill it up with a perfect manifest of people and get it out. I'll give you another plane. And that was the initial promise. And 10 days later, we moved 12,000 people out of Afghanistan. 11% of everybody that left the country during the evacuation. Me and three of my friends on the ground and 12 of us total in the Middle East moved. Everybody remembers people hanging on to the landing gear of aircraft and falling to their death. That was peak Afghanistan withdrawal. That is when we got there.

And it Taliban's going to Taliban. So they are definitely doing their thing, but it was the the desperation of the people trying to find a way to live. So at each of these gates, A neo operation, it's a non-combat, non-combatant, evacuation operation, it's a military operation with a neotex place. They keep calling it a neo. But that's if the military ran it. And if the military ran it, you would see, you know, a special forces unit with a big like the Ranger Regiment or 82nd Airborne that come in that build this huge exterior perimeter that controlled the ground strategically, then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are coming in and planes are coming out and we're building manifests, we're confirming that everybody that goes on the plane or the right people. This was not a Neo. This was run by the State Department. So, instead of that big strategic military operation, instead of think that airport became an embassy. And like in the movies, you're running the embassy and if you get in, you're like, you're safe and then they'll get you out. That's how they started treating H.K.A. the airport in Kabul as an embassy so the military just secured the perimeter of the embassy the airport and anybody that got on the airport was able to get out except the military wasn't allowed to go outside of the airport so all the people in the city of Kabul were stuck That's where we had to come in. So we had to go out into Kabul and grab the people and then smuggle them past the Taliban to get them onto planes. And to answer your question, that perimeter of the base where the gates, there's tens of thousands of people that were lining up here. And they maybe walked a few days. So by the time they get there, they're dehydrated. They have nothing there. There's no food. There's no water. The Taliban, if there's too many people, they'll just take a magazine and just dump it into the crowd to move them back or to like crowd control them. They'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people. The women, they would, they would float babies like you're at a baseball game with a beach ball. They would float the baby towards the gate and then hope in the hopes that a Marine or a soldier would reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety. And when that didn't work, the moms would take the babies and they'd try to throw them over the walls. Well, guess what's on either side of the wall? Constitina wire. There's fucking Constitina wire on both sides of this wall. So these babies would land in the wire And we're in the middle of moving hundreds of people at a time, like smuggling them past the Taliban. And I'm stepping over a baby in water or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt alive by the Taliban. You know, one of the teams is they went out into Kabul. And they just missed it by seconds. They're going to go pick up this woman. That was a journalist for the Afghan news organizations. But Taliban got to her first. They pull up the Taliban see these guys in the car. They drop her on their hood of the car and they execute her on the car as they just look at the dudes in the car. There's nothing that they can do. Just executor. This was every day. So when I said a level of desperation, I've never seen before. I mean, this is like no American, no American can imagine that type of desperation. And that was everywhere you looked.

Our ground team, there's myself and three other like personal recovery experts, we're there total for 10 days. And did it dissipate someone did no no just got more desperate So everybody that was watching on television they saw curated, controlled information is way worse on the ground. So what looked like this, a semblance of an assembly line of planes taking off and planes coming in, that is inside a controlled environment. That was in on the base. Outside, if you go 1,000 meters outside of the wire, it is just chaos, anarchy, apocalyptic level madness. You know, like really, really, really total Taliban experience out there.

Whatever one of the guys with us is codename sea spray. He didn't eat in those 10 days. He lost 20 something pounds in the 10 days that he was there. And, you know, he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just because he didn't have any enzymes left in his stomach to break anything down. You know, when you're running out of the wire to grab a family and come back in, You don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over, but you still see it. And that's the thing that tortures my mind is, I still saw it all, but I didn't have the time to address it emotionally, think about this dead body I'm stepping over, because I'm really busy trying to get to this family. Then I went get to this family, and I confirmed we had to be really judicious in how we confirmed who the people were. If I brought back one person that wasn't the right person to bring back, I would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission. If I bring back one radical terrorist. That's not escaping, but trying to get to the United States. And everything would be for not. So we had a really deliberate department of state, department of defense approved manifest that would go officially through the government. They would submit all their paperwork. They would have, you know, digital versions of it. So I would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to meet me. And then once I met up with them, they would have a far recognition signal. That would be not to give up the tradecraft, but they'd have a way to let me know that that is the right person, and that then would come face to face, and then they'd have another thing like a secret word that they had to sneak into a sentence, and that's a near recognition signal, and then they have to give me their documents, and the documents have to be real, and it has to be the right person, and the same ones that were submitted, so cool, I got the right person, so come on, I got your family, why are these other 40 people with you? It's like, it's my cousin and her family and it's my brother and his family and it's like, they gotta stay. You're coming with me and they're staying. Sorry, you can get in the car. You can't. You have five seconds. Then by that time, usually the Taliban have spotted us and it's a foot race to make it back into the wire before they catch us.

They're murdered. or used, the other pilots and their doctors and their engineers, and they run the sewage system. They run the electrical plant, so they're trying to get out, but the Taliban want them to stay, because all the infrastructure that's built there are operated by people that were friendly to the Americans. If they want their power plant to work, They have to have all the engineers that ran it. So they don't want them to leave. They don't want the pilots to leave because their airport won't work. They don't have anybody to run their air traffic control. They don't have anybody to make sure the water purification system works properly. So they're trying to keep all those people there. But all those people know that they'll then be slaves to the Taliban. So they're trying to get out. And that's the tough catch 22 position that we're in.

But yes, I mean the level of frustration I've never seen anything in it like it in my lifetime in the military where there was that many many men and women from the military so active and unified and we have to do something you know the I'm never going to forget my countryman's response to Afghanistan and Ukraine, the generosity of just America. It's a different thing from being that nationalist compared to being a patriot. These patriots were throwing money to pay for gas on planes. helping us buy buses to position out in Kabul. Like we literally bought buses that we would put in intersections to have people meet there and they would bring that bus on to the air base. And none of this would have been possible without the UAE and the Crown Prince and the Sheek without their generosity. And then without the American people just stepping up and veterans especially, they just, I've just never seen it. So as angry as I am as to the way that we strategically did that withdrawal. I have never been more proud of the American people. It was amazing.

You kind of focus at the work. I love Mr. Rogers. I do. He said this thing. People, parents were asking, what do we do in light of like all these terrible things that are happening? And he says, look to the helpers. You will always see people doing good work and helping. And I really take this. I don't know if I don't know how that works, really in the brain. But I didn't focus on I saw all the soldiers from the 82nd being so brave and I saw all the Marines on the walls, you know, protecting all of these people trying to come in and trying to find the right people. I mean, their children, you know, they're 18, 19, 20-year-old young men and women that volunteered to serve and then here they are thrust into this apocalypse like scenario. And they're just, they're so, so incredible. Um, I look at them. You know, I look at the, I look at my team. I, Sean G was our ground force commander, C spray and Dave. You know, I look at them. I, I see there are their eyes just sunk in in from not sleeping for six, seven days in a row. And, uh, but they're still going like a, I look at that, you know, I look at that 80 second guy as I'm like, I mean, can you pick up this constant team of wires so I can slip slip underneath here with this little kid. He's like, yeah, bro, picks up like, that's rad. But when the bomb goes off at the end of August, that was what we knew going to be the end of us being able to be effective. And going outside the wire and grab people and bring them back in, the base just was going to get locked down. And that was starting to hurt. That's when I realized So our list kept growing, right? I said, we moved 12,000 people in 10 days. Think about 12,000, you've been to our arenas with 12,000 people. In 10 days, we put them, we confirmed who they were, which is a miracle in itself. Thank you, Saravarardo. So Savar allies found these people, confirmed who they were, got them approved from the government, and then put them on a plane and flew them out in 10 days. But after the bomb happens, and we are limited in our ability to be effective, and this list is growing and growing and growing. This, that is when like my soul just starts dropping out the bottom, because the list grows and we're not bringing anybody else in. So Sean, G.R. Groundforce Commander, you know, listening to him, tell Sarah, she's like, well, what's the point of still being making this list? So we know who we left behind. And I was just like, this is dumb. This is really bad.

$40,000 on our list, I think. Do we have any idea what happened to them? We let back Americans. They're in the control of the Taliban if they're alive. So we're still actively working. We have been, so we have now moved 17,000 people total out of Afghanistan. We've moved another 5,000 people since Afghanistan became fully under control of the Taliban.

We're very sneaky.

Yeah, and we have, so we like Lily Pad. Once you get them out, you take them to a place, you know, Qatar, UAE, Pakistan, and you stage them there as you work through the Department of State immigration process. And immigration right now is a pretty tough thing to work through. You Gordon Ryan, you know, is a great example. His amazing wonderful wife, you know, he's trying to get her process through legally. My best friend, Nick Paul Michano, who wrote that book with me, his wife, it took her two and a half years and she did everything perfect, two and a half years with a green card to become an American citizen. You know, so we have 5,000 people that are stuck in this process. A little shout out to some of the senators that are pushing to extend the SIV application. So that's the special immigration visa. It's a special visa for people coming from war torn countries. It was going to end where the SIV visa wouldn't be applicable. And some, you know, Mike Walts and Senator Tillis and the guys like that are stepping up like, no, no, like we have a bunch of allies still that are stuck. Let's, let's figure out what to do with them first.

There was a date. that was set on the campaign trail that we would be pulling out after 20 years. And so on September 11th, 2021, when I say we America said that we were going to be leaving Afghanistan and to stay true to those campaign provinces and You know, I'm not against leaving Afghanistan. You know, I didn't want to fight in Afghanistan anymore. I don't think anybody else did. And having been there for 20 years, whether it was a good war, a feudal war, that's first strategic level people to argue about, but the way that we left, that was really problematic, obviously. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, it happened in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. You know, we have, I mean, you go all the way back to soon as you, he tells you how to, to retreat. You know, if you can see other instances where we did it poorly like Dunkirk, I kind of, the, the Englishmen not stood up and hopped on private-owned boats and crossed the channel. You know, there's a good chance that all of great Britain would have fallen to the Nazis. You know, that was a bad plan. So it's happened multiple times, but I don't know why. We just don't seem to learn from history and then we just bury history intentionally. It's bunkers.

Yeah, it's kind of insulting a little bit. You know, Memorial Day just happened and And I think about all of the amazing men and women that have fought so bravely for this country. And I'm like, ah, so what are we doing to make sure their sacrifice was worth it, right? Or are we really moving for the ideals that it is to be an American? And I think being an American is a beautiful thing in the ideals that this country were founded on are beautiful powerful things. And, but then it

It's not appreciated and totally taken for granted.

It's one of the biggest clusterfucks in the history of this country, in terms of, that was the largest evacuation in American history, like ever. And it was, there's no way, I would love to be able to put numbers, but there's no way for us to assume or guess the type of atrocities in the number of them that happened outside. The ones I saw firsthand, It would take pages of this notebook. And there's thousands of soldiers that saw that every single moment. And that was just within I's distance, you know, who knew what happened three blocks in where the actual Taliban checkpoints were. So every route into the base was controlled by the Taliban. and every military expert on the planet, whoever controls the outside perimeter actually controls that ground. So the Taliban controlled the outside perimeter, so they controlled the airport. Everybody that got into that base was either able to circumvent like get past one of the Taliban checkpoints or had to go through it. You know, it's like, oh, thank you for this passport. What is your job? Your occupation is you are a plumber. You can't leave. You know, oh, you worked for the Americans. I have you on this list. You cannot leave. And then you're just with a Taliban.

No, because it's not comfortable to talk about like mental health. It seems like all these things that we should be talking about. We don't want to talk about because they're like kind of bummer topics, but they have to be. We have people left in Afghanistan and we have some of the people that we got out of Afghanistan that are trapped in these lily pad countries that can't make it back. I'm not even saying they have to come to the United States, but we have to do something with them, right? Like we, I personally escorted a couple hundred into Albania, like amazing, uh, George Soros's son. I was got to meet him and he paid these were all, I think they're really employees or they're on an internship program in Afghanistan, but there are a lot of them were Afghan Albanian dual citizens and, uh, He peep toward Sora's junior paid for these guys to bring back to Albania. So I took a plane full of a couple hundred people and flew them into Albania and this is one of the wildest things. I get on a C-17 bomb has gone off, you know, like about 13 Americans die. The base is shut down. I mean, it is like, it is a fortress now. Nobody's coming on. Nobody's going off. The plumbing is going out. There's no more clear clean water. They're taking tractors and driving overnight vision and rifle so we don't leave him behind. I'm watching like a boot marine take a pickaxe and go into a helicopter and just start destroying the helicopter. And yeah, like a black hawk or a little bird. And as like an aspiring helicopter pilot that would love to buy a helicopter. And I watch it and destroy a secoreski. I'm like, you know, like, destroy me. And like this is happening all around us as a bomb is going off and you know here gunfire and things are burning we're starting to destroy all of our sensitive documents and we're just collapsing down this base. I get on the we pack a C 17 full of people C 17 wrap closes I have to get on a military C-17 because my plane out, which was a private jet that we had set up as our emergency evacuation, it crash lands in Pakistan. As it's flying into Afghanistan, it has an engine go out, so it has to do with other emergency crash landing into Pakistan. And now I'm sitting here in Afghanistan.

I don't know how I'm getting out. I have no idea. And so, fortunately, the militaries amazing, you know, and they took care of us. And so they flew the four of us volunteers, where I'm not there in any military capacity. I'm fully there as a civilian working for an NGO, I'm approved, government, I'm approved, government nonprofit. So with authorities all the way up and down. And then I get on this military C17 and the ramp closes. And is that like last little bit of Afghanistan light? Finally, leaves my vision. I turn around and I see these 400 people sitting on the floor of a C-17. They've never been in aircraft before. They've never left Afghanistan before. That vast majority of them, and I'm thinking about all the people that we left it behind, and the way that you leave a combat zone is way different than the way that we take off from an airport. This nice, gradual slope, the way the military planes take off or land. It is like full power straight up, and they start doing these maneuvers to make sure that they don't get shot out of the sky. So all these people in this plane are freaking out and the old women who are exhausted and dehydrated, they start passing out and just some people get to understand of who these people are that were bringing out. I'm like, hey, I need a doctor. Is there a doctor in here? Like 17 people stand up. You know, all some Americans, some Afghan doctors, there was like an orthopedic surgeon, there's a vascular surgeon. And so like they all just come in and that's who's on these planes. These aren't just, I know it's really easy to like, oh, they're these brown people from the Middle East. That is so racist and wrong. Like these are amazing humans that are educated and they speak English and they just happen to be trapped in Afghanistan. They just have to be a born and then trapped in Afghanistan. And then the plane lands, and we're figuring out what to do with all these people. And like, hey, we, we already have a place to move this next group. So I got a couple hours of sleep. I got a little bite of food. And I hopped on another plane to bring these these people into Albania. And I take them to Albania. And there's this beautiful resort. on the water that Mr. Soror's junior had financed. And when I get there, these kids are out in the grass and they're playing and they're drawing and they're giggling and they're laughing. And it was just, my brain couldn't compute like these people were just, I just brought these people out of Afghanistan. It was just Really, really cool. The resilience, like how beautiful of a species we are. They had mental health teachers there that were already present for these children to start working through this experience. They just had pretty rad. Fuck.

No.

Yeah, but want to swear they good luck.

Yeah, I don't know. what kind of message that sends our current allies. Yeah, you know, if if if you're and just to the rest of the world.

What are we? I think Afghanistan was a contributor to Putin's enthusiasm to go into Ukraine. He's like, what are they going to do? They're not going to do anything. in one of the military bases that the two kind of big ones were or can't harm Bogram. I think it was Bogram. The general, the Afghan general that ran Bogram base, American forces in the dead of night, loaded all of their people and the stuff that they could carry into the planes that they had, left the base. He woke up to an empty base with Taliban just driving onto the most strategic piece of land in the whole entire country. And the Taliban just like walk into the arms room, open the door, and start grabbing ARs off the, off the racks. If the military just left there. Night vision, PBS 31s, you know, Taliban's like, woo, Jesus Christ. Yeah, infuriating.

40, 70 billion. I don't know. That is a really Googleable number. Is that a verb now? Googleable?

tens of billions of dollars. I don't remember the exact number, but it's wild.

I mean, that's that's all on the public relations department of the government to do on on the voter side, like the only way that you affect changes by voting. So the consequence to bad policy is the people choosing people that enact different policies.

That's wild to me. So I'm a radical centrist. I look at these two fringe sides and I like, bro, you're crazy. I'm just like in the middle of being like, oh, who here thinks that Afghanistan is a wreck? bunch of people raise their hands okay cool who thinks that we should enact legislation to protect schools and spend money to be able to harden our schools and address mental health and like everybody raises their hand not a single hand is stayed down right and they're like um who thinks that it's a great plan for Russia to be able to take uh land that leads up to NATO countries you know Loving NATO or like like Ukraine don't like Ukraine think that they're corrupt any of it like everybody is like yeah, I don't want communism at my door and then you go well who thinks there's a problem with immigration right now and I mean obviously in Texas every Texan is gonna be like bro, there's a crazy problem Like everybody generally is like, yeah, I think the immigration system is broken. Let's figure out how to fix it. Even if you're like, no, build the wall or no, let them all in. Everybody still agrees that there's a problem with immigration. We have to fix it. So in the middle here, just a bunch of people with a lot of issues that we all agree need to be fixed. And then I guess we can't have a conversation because we are so divided about what the best solution is.

Yeah, I just released this documentary called No Help Us Coming. And you know, it addresses that specifically, you know, there. Like, it's all up to you. You know, as as Trado and and Gavin Newsom just landed in California and had a thing last week and there's like pictures of them together and you're looking at like the draconian level. legislation that is happening in Canada and in California similarly and then the number of people that are just running for their lives to get away from those types of you look at Australia and you're like They had concentration camps in Australia. Is this real? Is this 2022? I guess it is. And well, they were quarantine camps.

Why can't? Why can't? Why data is a weird, especially around mental health right now, trying to learn about suicide and depression and anxiety and the type of prescriptions that are being prescribed post and during COVID, the things that I'm seeing in the world right now are very, very scary because people are not both physically and emotionally healthy. We're in a really dangerous moment where we either turn a corner and start making good decisions about being individually responsible about our health and mental and physical health. or I think we're going to have some really serious repercussions. We're seeing it already, like the insane rise of suicide and substance abuse. And the veteran community right now, they're not even reporting the data of veterans that are in suicide and active duty suicides because they are so high they don't want people to know about them. You know about this? How high is it? So 18 to 35 year olds are the most vulnerable population that are just coming back from a deployment for suicide. And they have seen an 80% increase. 80 by the way, there's like 86% increase in suicides in that group of people coming back from combat. And what do they attribute that to? Every coping mechanism that should exist for a healthy human, right? Like, I get good sleep. I exercise. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I have sex with my wife. You know, I have great friends. I have an amazing family. These are all healthy coping mechanisms that are in place for like a healthy, well-adjusted person. They're coming back, you know, they haven't seen their wife. They've seen a whole bunch of stuff. They can't go outside and exercise, you know, two years of containment where gyms are closed. You know, they can't even go on the base on the gym on base for like the past year and a half. And crazy. Crazy. Well, I mean, not only is it crazy, but then you're breeding crazy by creating an environment that breeds crazy. Yeah. And then we know what the byproduct is. Like this is unprecedented mental health problems within the veteran community. So, you know, if on Instagram, I'm posting all, hey, here's the suicide hotline number. You know, here are ways to seek help. You know, find a friend. I just two days ago in Washington, D.C. We did a rock around the mall in Washington, D.C. I did a post as it hit come out from mental health. We had a hundred people just show up to go for a walk. with, you know, 40 pounds on their backs and I'm not trying to kill him all. And it could help you way. So they could kill themselves, you know? And all of those things like community and sweat and friendship and laughing, like those are all really great things for humans to experience. And none of that has happened for the past couple of years. Yeah. And heaven forbid that we talk about it.

startling statistic by 2030 23 times more people will die of veterans and soldiers will die of suicide then died in the whole entire combat time of the past 20 years.

So we I'm just preaching the gospel, go outside and exercise, go find a friend. There's nothing wrong with calling. Then the legislation, people like, well, maybe we enact some red flag gun laws to protect these people. But no, no, what you're going to do is not, you're going to prevent them from going and seeking help. Because they're going to be scared that there's no there's not going to be any due process to get them off this list once you get them on this list. And then you'll take their stuff. They'll never get it back. Now they're not going to do it. So whatever thought they might have had about going and getting some help, now they're not going to do it. So great. Like you just made the problem worse.

Yeah, I'm sure. You know, I think I'm a pretty healthy person, but there's no doubt that there'd be like, just to piss him off, you know, like 1-800 be a, be a snitch.

Oh, they're wild.

Yeah, a bunch of our, so Matt Best, Evan Hafer, Jared Taylor, Mike Glover, Colin, Colin on, like all of those guys. If you click on some of the people that are, there's about five or six hundred of these pages. And there's somebody that has built this big huge infrastructure to target us. And they are troll comments. There's somebody writing in perfect English, whether that's a Russian bot, a China bot, or an actual just crazy troll. And they have dedicated meme pages and, you know, saying outlandish wild things, you know, like, yeah, that Matt Best is anti-2A, or that, you know, Tim Kennedy hates freedom.

In that confirmation bias, where you have this kind of preconceived notion, and then you go out and look for anything that supports your wild ideas. If I think the number 17 is my magical number, I can go out and I can find the number 17 on a freeway site. I do it. You know, I do that's my magic number, right? And then I'm driving down the road. I turn left into a residential area and I look down at my speedometer. at 17 and so like you start getting this belief and it is the most dangerous thing in confirmation bias especially when it has crazy ideas like anti freedom ideas or like hating a specific person and you're looking for reasons not to like them it is dangerous for investigators on the law enforcement side, like they, we have specific measures for detectives to prevent them from using confirmation bias. You know, where I think, I think you're guilty. So I'm going to start looking for evidence that supports my belief that you are guilty.

Yeah. He had to break somebody have enough inner development or, you know, personal skills to acknowledge that they're wrong. Right. Like that just happened anymore.

I love throwing darts at social media in that same confirmation vein. You know, when you curate your own feed and you're following a bunch of pages that it reaffirms those beliefs and that's dangerous where you're not getting any outs, you know, I follow people that I like way disagree with. So I can hear their ideas, so that make sure that my ideas make man, that's a great point that she just made. Maybe I want to look into this and then I take a little peek or I could be a psychopath and I could block all of those people that disagree with me and then only follow all the people that agree with me and I'm getting weird articles, but I'm like, oh, but that's an article, that supports my, this crazy idea that I have and that's an healthy.

The inquisitive mind, you know, where I want I'm going to always assume that I don't understand this thing, and I want to know more about it regardless. Well, you just due to it, too. Like, I've been due in due to it, too, forever. And I feel right now, like, I'm relearning all of due to it, too, because due to it, too, has evolved so fast in the past few years. And I'm going up to, like, the Jean Carlos and the Gordon Ryan's and, and, you know, What is this thing that you just did? So I've been doing just you for 30 years. What is this?

Or I could go back to my own gym and be in the big fish in my super tiny little pond and never adapt or never grow or never learn anything new. And when you do that intellectually, where this is what I think and this is what I know, but I'm never going to subject myself to anything different. Like how dangerous is that?

There's so much to learn. And then John, Dan, hurry, sitting there. And he's like the wildest on this spectrum brilliant nerd. He's like going through these steps. And I'm on the mat and I know him about to drill it. But I want to run off the mat and go grab a video camera and record it so that I can end then write it down. So I would have any chance of remembering all of the details that he put into it. Right. You know, and then I Palabrandau, who is like, I'm a oily graci black belt. And he's like the graci who might as hear. I've graci might as see to park. He owns graci might as south. And like I'll go back to him and like we'll be trying to drill these things these things together. I'm actually useless, man. I don't even remember how to do that.

Yeah, Gordon and John both have like online tutorials that are really amazing.

Yeah. And they're like so easily easy to consume. Yeah. It's it's format or well. It's filmed well. The audio is good. Yeah.

Yeah, it's um, he and I are going to be cornering Roy McDonald and uh, in the PFL. Yep, on the PFL. Where's that? It's in Atlanta on July 1st and so getting Roy ready for this fight. First of all, that guy's a monster. Roy is awesome. Roy is not just a great human. I love him to death and his wife is beautiful and such a great woman. But he is evolved as now. I mean, he's always, you know, the Robbie Lawler, Roy McDonald, one of the best things. I forget that fight. Anybody who's never seen it go and watch it. He's clever. Fight that just happened like incredible. Those two fights for me are like number one and number one.

But Roy right now physically is a freak. So I have to I'll go in right here and get beat up by him and at the 10th planet gym and then I'll step out and somebody else will go in with him and then John and I will be coaching him and getting the opportunity to coach a fighter with John also gives me a new layer kind of peeling back the way that his mind works and he is he is truly brilliant you know he's he's a great human he's a great coach And you jits you, but he's also a great fighter, like he understands how all of it works and putting it together. Best book for a single person is, is pretty neat.

My least favorite thing to hear from him is when I'm training with a person, and that person that I'm training with does a great thing. John is like, a great job Gordon, you know, like Gordon Ryan, great sweep. I'm like, I just got, I'm about to get smashed.

And very Ryan. Does he go great great job, Tim Kennedy.

That has come out very often. Just laughs at me.

I do my conditioning in their morning class time, and we set up our bikes and our roars and our skiers so we can just buy osmosis, watch technique as they're doing it. So I'm like on the skier, just like this, this creep, just staring I'm just staring into your eyes as I'm just going my heart rate's up in the yellow, you know, and they just let, you know, it's like me and Shane and Sean Apperson. I'm that old school approach where I do my boxing separate. I do my muiti separate. I do my wrestling separate, and I do my jujitsu separate. And then I do MMA where I try to put them all together. But I try to develop each of those pieces as, like, a kind of a traditionalist.

Well, because I really love, um, I love like the sweet signs of boxing and, you know, the footwork is different than what we do when we tie. You know, and there's, there's parts. But then I get to go and paint my MMA pitcher and put it all together in my style. But the, uh, like, if I'm, for me getting better in jiu-jitsu if I just did MMA and I'm not, you know, no-gui and gui, slightly different techniques. The way I'm going to position my hip for a camor is going to be different. I don't have the friction, you know, I don't have a belt to grab to prevent from them from rolling forward. Like these are just slightly variations, different variations. Like I like doing it really specific to each of the respective arts.

If I want Lama Shake of Footwork and I'm only doing Moitai. But that footwork is really really useful in MMA, but I'm just doing it in MMA in Muiti. I'm never going to get the good footwork that I need to be a good boxer. And I'm not going to get the good head movement because the head movement in Muiti is way different than that in boxing. And I'm not going to learn how to put my shoulder on the right position to protect my chin where I can keep my lead hand low unless I do just boxing. So if I want to take those very unique elements of boxing and then integrate it into my striking style, I do have to train that thing individually and then implement it into my style.

Have you? You and I are both old enough to remember the pan craze days. Oh, yeah. I have thirty fights in pan craze. Half of which were knockouts. Wow. You know, like I put people to sleep with palm strikes. With palm strikes. Yeah. You know, the army combatants tournament, which is like this arduous hell of a tournament three days. First days grappling second days pan craze, third day is MMA. And violent violent pan craze fights with high level fighters.

I teach, I call it making soup, where you take the back and it's nice when we're in my gym. I have a judo sub floor, Fuji mats, they're springs. I think there's 16 springs underneath every one of our floors. Yeah, like you're on an Olympic judo floor. And padded walls, air conditioning, we got fans. It's just the most conducive environment for it to be nice, safe training. You and I step out into that parking lot, the whole world changes about what jujitsu should look like. Right. So making soup is when I take that back mount, you know, I just take their face and I push it into the ground. You know, like I only need an inch for me to break his orbital socket and his nose on the concrete, you know, and then like once those teeth and a little bit of, you know, the cerebral spinal fluid drips out of the nose, you know, and a little bit of the blood and gum and saliva, like that all gets mixed in front of this, this guy's face before the darkness slowly closes in, like, blah, blah.

So Yoshi threw me, you know, Olympic gold medalist. It's just threw me to the ground over and over and over again, Dan and her. He's like, how beautiful. And I, because I was on the receiving end of it, he said, how beautiful is it? for how effective it is that he can just take somebody and put them on the ground. Yeah, it's really beautiful. How are his submissions? Not definitely not his, I don't think he ever attacked one time.

And he had great control. He was really hard to get out from under. He's really strong. He's this gigantic head. Yeah, he's huge. You know, his hands are, you know, his grips are, he's like five, ten, two, sixty, right?

Yeah. He was, he was, he was hard. Very Mark Hunt asked. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. But it's so, it's such a sweet, sweet heart to train with. He was great. But being able to, you know, I can knock you out with my fist or my elbow or my chin or my knee. But he takes the earth. And he's with the earth. With the earth. Yeah. Yeah, the earth is big. The earth doesn't move when you hit it.

You take it a stubborn dumb object. Me and then you're taking a movable and a non-moving object like the earth and like. Yeah.

I mean, fuck. We, uh, back to leg locks in the ground. I was teaching a course in New York, a sheet dog response course. And there was a couple of black belts that that were in the course. And we're fighting for guns and knives, the rubber guns and knives. And, um, that I'm in half guard. And I take, you know, he had the weapon, the gun in his arm and his, uh, waistband. And I under kind of he was covering it with his arm and I pulled it out the back so I now have his gun and he like dives he like dives underneath like he's gonna go for a leg lock And why you have the gun? Oh, why have the gun? And I'm standing over him. And I'm just like, so I tap him as he's, you know, like I, I'm good at like locks and I'm just like moving my feet. So he's not going to finish, but I'm like tapping his forehead with the gun. And he still had it processed. Like as he's like having this piece of plastic, kind of in the face, and he like, finally opens his eyes and the realization that I'm tapping him in the face with the gun that as he's diving for a leg lock, you know, how dangerous sports you should do is to combat you too. That's why I love that combat you did too. It's adding a degree of realness.

Haley O'Gracey. Oh, yeah, I'm hoiler told me as we're talking about jiu-jitsu evolving. I mean, my dad would say that if somebody can touch your face while you're doing jiu-jitsu, that you're doing jiu-jitsu wrong.

That's, I love having the, our jujitsu gym, crazy who might have seen a park is in our Sheep Dog Response Building in Cedar Park. So they're, you're always reminded as like the special forces guys walking by, you know, as this like Marine Recon guys walking by, as this Navy SEAL is walking by, like they're all good level fighters, MMA. They also do jujitsu. So when you're out there like, You know, Jean-Color Baudonis and is teaching the evening class super talented black belt. They're still like, I'm walking by, you know, like 220 pound hairy hand-a-dude with like chunked up hands and scar tissue around his eyes. Like don't don't forget where we are and what this is.

law enforcement. If you're in law enforcement, you don't train your jitsu. Let's shame on you. Like period. You have to go and learn it because it is a superpower. And this is why I tell them, like a trained person touching an untrained person, that untrained person. has no choice over what I want to do with their body. I can do anything I want to it. I can effortlessly put their hands behind their back and put them in cuffs. I can move them cautiously and gracely and kindly to the car as a trained person. It is so powerful to have that control over somebody else. If you're on that protect and serve mode, it is your obligation. It's your duty to know it.

It's awesome. You opened all of that with a guy that trains really hard.

Yes, you know, you're trained really hard. Whatever whatever it is, your modality is, if you don't do that thing hard, you don't train that thing hard against a fully resistant opponent, then you're going to be good. But if you do, man, you're a force.

That applies with all training. Whatever theater that we're traveling to. Ukraine, Afghanistan, the military and special operations, they train that skill set, the basic fundamentals so much that you can take these guys and put them anywhere and they perform at such a high level. It's because of the training because it is so rigorous, it's so arduous. doesn't matter where they go. They're still able to do whatever the mission is.

Yeah, so what we're experiencing right now is a byproduct of what society is forced police to become. they're demonizing military training for law enforcement and then obviously we just experienced defund the police and you know nearly every large city has seen a crazy rise in crime and the ones that these large cities that defunded their police to include Austin you know we've we've never seen the homicides like this you know getting the Chicago's in the Boston just like this is so scary and how does it make any sense that I'm going to provide this group that I want to protect us with less training and less funding but then still want them to be a better product to be able to protect us. And then the people that they're protecting, I'm going to disarm, so the people coming to save them are untrained and unprepared, it's creating this disastrous situation. It's not like I want to prevent rapes from happening, so me as a good person, I'm going to like chop my penis off. Like, that's the dumbest argument you could ever make. Like, that's not going to prevent rapes. It is going to empower people or preventing consequences for a rapist to try and rape somebody. You know, it's not cutting the genitals off of every man. Right. That's crazy.

I think it's ignorance. I think the first thing is society, culture right now. We have been We've been a masculating the law enforcement for a while. We want a kinder, softer, gentler, and I get their dealing with mental health and we can have specialists that can come in and deal with somebody having a mental health crisis. But we still need men and women that will run towards the sound of gunfire and know what to do. Yeah. And we don't right now. We have been weakening them and we have been making them ill-equipped to respond to that. And then I think you've all day is a great example of not properly trained with broken systems that are not ready to do the right thing. and we will have more of that unless we get them the right training and we get our schools to become hard targets and then we go upstream to the origin, the genesis of these problems which is mental health with the individual. If we don't do those things then it's never going to, it's never going to be fixed.

I believe it is this, it is a large cultural shift. You know, the nuclear family where, you know, mother and father are loving the child and trying to make that person be a healthy, adjusted human. That has been demonized. So, with a broken family comes often a broken person. masculinity, it's been attacked and on-stop, and we've demonized any kind of masculine attributes, let's in every way try to feminize men, and that feminine man is a dangerous thing when it comes to violence. On the spectrum of being a man, we have very feminine men and I love them and they're fine and I'll take care of them. and that there's nothing wrong with that. But a broken one is a dangerous thing. Any, any broken thing, especially one that's capable of violence.

Bullying, cyberbullying, social media, video games, movies, all of, when I say it's a cultural shift, it has to be this large effort of all of us being like, these are not things that are healthy for us to have a healthy society.

That's another very difficult group of data to find is the number of shootings that were prevented by somebody with a gun. It's really, I mean, as somebody that runs a training company, I'm always looking for, not just answer to those examples, but data for me to be like, okay, what was a good thing that happened? What was a dangerous thing that happened in the AAR of, I wanna AAR every shooting, like an after-action review. I wanna look at the things that they did right and the things that they did wrong. I wanna sustain the things that they did right, and then I wanna make sure that we address the things that they did wrong. So we in training have a better system. And we're trying to do that with shootings. And it pops up for a second. Like there was a shooting at this mall in San Antonio. And somebody in the parking lot, the guy gets out of the car, he's walking towards the mall and somebody spots him and ends up confronting him. And it was concealed carrying and stopped this guy from doing this active shooter. It was impossible to find. any of the information about what happened. And that's very common place about how difficult it is to find that type of data.

And then if I'm looking for an argument for me to say how dangerous firearms are, I just automatically grab gun violence in its entirety and don't understand or break them. I don't take that one extra minute to go a layer deep to understand what the real numbers look like.

Yeah. First, if you're out there, I love you. If you've been bullied, I'm sorry, but find one of us because we'll talk to you. Yeah.

I've like personally experienced that, you know, like I've had, um, I was in Moral Bay, California, took all my clothes off, um, and swam due west into the ocean. You know, I had a couple of women pregnant, I thought I might have HIV, um, you know, I lost back my pro-fight, you know, like dark, dark moments, and Swim, mile two miles out into the fog. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Trident water in this cold water. And I'm in the fog now. Like, I couldn't see the rock anymore. I couldn't hear the waves anymore. I have no idea which way the coast is. And I just had to sit there and tread water. There's one of the scariest moments in my life. And the coldness, and I wanted to live so bad. I never, I wasn't thinking about killing myself. You know, like I just was so, I just needed a moment. You know, I needed a baptism. I need to be like a phoenix rising to the ground.

at least. Yeah. I mean, I'm a good swimmer. My dad was a Olympic level swimmer.

Yeah, especially in Moro Bay. If you know if you're South, if you're on the north side of that rock, the current from the south side of the rock through the breakers, I mean, this is some powerful current. You know, I swam for about 45 minutes, so that, I mean, that's a mile and a half at least. And so I'm in just treading water in the fog, but I ask naked and thank God, somebody saw me walking to the water. And moral base, like a retirement city, and so I'm assuming, I'm just imagining, I never knew who it was. This old woman went and called the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard boat, this is one of the earliest chapters of my book is describing, like this is kind of 9-11 happened very shortly after that and woke me up as I need to do something. And this Coast Guard boat comes up and this captain has his legs dangling off the side of the boat. He's like, hey, what are you doing down there? My arrogance as a young man like our frontal lobe not developed clearly at this moment like I'm swimming no shit I even even in that moment I'm a sarcastic little prick and he's like so so what's going on? So I give him like a summary a little executive summary of my life right now. He's still in the water. I still in the water. He's just talking to me as I'm trying to water and I'd give him the update and he's like, man, I was gonna offer you to get out of the drink, but quite frankly, I just stayed down there. I'm like, oh my god, what a dick, right? And it's like, yeah, but it's real cold. And he like, leans over and he's like, I see that. Like, you are, it's just like, just these mental punches of me treading water, been out here 45 minutes, 53 degree water in the fog. You know, think God, he didn't run over me. And he's like, I'm only offer one time if you want to get out of that water. I want to get out of the water. So we throws down one of those cargo nets on the side of the boat. My hands could barely work. I clamber up the side of the boat with little claw hands. And he put one of those navy wool blankets. They're green. And it's just pure wool. And it felt like millions of little needles stabbing me in my back. And it was like the most wonderful feeling. You know, so I sympathize to that feeling of darkness, but I also have seen the other side of it, and I wanted to live so bad and feeling all that pain all over my back. I used the most wonderful feeling to know on a live. You know, I never... And so I get what that darkness feels like, but I also know how beautiful life is after that.

Yeah. I don't believe in God or whatever I do, but I know There's no way to describe why I'm not dead. When you go through my life and you read moments like this, you're just like, this is not possible. From Afghanistan, just this last August, to Ukraine, to combat tours, getting blown up in Afghanistan and multi-day gun fights, periods of time where I'm crawling on the ground, trying to find a magazine that has bullets in it, because I've run out of bullets. When you start going through this, you're just like, this is, But moments like that, you know, God's pretty right. Thanks, man.

Yeah, so I mean, back to confirmation bias, right? Like I can have my belief, so I'm looking for examples that support that construct, but I think objectively, if you take a step back and you look into every religion, you know, and if we're looking at karma, people that do good and you see good that comes back to them. However, that happens. I now, I believe that I know what I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm supposed to be equipping and training people to be able to preserve and protect human life. I know that.

You're a really bad, horrible person. You hear it like it.

Really easy! Then you look at these giant, you know, the jockel willinks, you know, and the Glover Texara's. There's not a nicer human than Glover. Right. You know, like the kindest sweet, he and I trained together when he was a purple belt. When he first came to the United States, first time that he had, you know, his crappy little visa and walked into the pit and was at slow kick boxing, just mopping the mats with all of us. You know, I was at the time we would have to drive from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara to train with the closest purple belt.

He's talking. Yeah. I'm going to hurt you.

We, uh, I did it standing in combat to a guy that tried to grab some stuff off my kit. And the Commora is like the best technique to defend. And somebody's trying to take stuff off of you. Like law enforcement, it's one of the first techniques that they should learn about how to keep their weapon on them, right? Block the wrist, reach over, grab their own wrist, bring their wrist back behind their head. And in like a snap, I break literally every bone in his whole entire arm and dislocate his shoulder and his collarbone snaps as his face hits the wall and it breaks all the bones in his face, you know, and I, you know, I have grenades and flash bangs and knives and a gun on my body armor. So you can't take that stuff. But like it was that fast. His whole arm held never used again. It's wild.

Yeah. I don't want to. I'm never going to experience that. I'm going to tap way early.

He has a slow cast rate, like submission power. You know, you have, there it is.

I like flexing the whole body. I can't breathe.

Wow, that's crazy. And how's that possible? I don't know if it's like John Hackelman old school, you know, we would hit board sometimes, you know, it would hit bags without gloves sometimes. I know boxing coaches right now like don't listen to Tim, you know, keep your gloves and wraps on, but like there's something to that. There is something to that. I've never broken my hand in any in any way. It's crazy. Yeah.

You know, I had to show to Conquerodian there. I, you know, Japanese jiu-jitsu, I had Taekwondo. So there was like lots of form strikes, boards, and all those things just developed.

Really great. I wouldn't rap.

I was put the gloves on. And I probably had 20 or 30 fights. You know, Indian reservations kind of pre real sanctioning before states were allowing MMA. What was the logic that there's less padding? No, I like to feel and grip and grab. You know, I didn't have like the the Winkle John's and the Gibson's to wrap my hands perfect like they do now. You know, like the early fighting would literally use like boxing wraps and the tape our hands. I've just we didn't know we didn't know any better. So I was like, I don't, I can't grab like this. You know, and I definitely can't punch like this. So I'd rather wear, you know, big hands. I'd rather wear like a medium sized glove that I just have to force my hand in. I'm wearing a smaller glove. So my hand can get into different angles and I definitely can grab a lot easier. Yeah.

Even like Chad Mendes, you know, his, his, he dominated that whole entire fight. You know, he comes out yet a couple of cuts, you know, he's swollen up, but I, I love it.

Yeah. I think it because it prolongs action. I guess you get more violence. You get more punchy punchy.

I love it. My favorite, my favorite Jason may have Miller. We had two fights against each other. The first one we were allowed to like pride rules, you know, soccer kicks, knees to the head, where was on it? It was ECC elite cage finding championship, wild eight man tournament. We had Dennis Kang, Jason Mayhem Miller.

in that Amen tournament, he's a killer. That fight, mock the map with Jason Mayhem Miller. You know, I just crushed him on the ground, knees to the head, soccer kicks to the head. You know, he's trying to fight off his back. And I'm just like eating his legs up, he shoots a crappy shot, you know, a little snap down on the north south, you know, as he's belly down, just dropping knees to the sides of the top of his head, one fight, you know, then fast forward two years. I think we're the same person slightly different rule set. and it's proper MMA, and I lose a split decision, but you see us in almost the exact same positions with the same, but I just wasn't allowed to do damage in half the positions.

I got put my hand on the ground.

I was undefeated in the smaller cage. So anytime I get away. I would chase like Luke Rockhold. You watch that fight or on the big cage. And I'm chasing him around the whole entire fight. And he's peppering me with good footwork and outside strikes. And then we get to the little cage with Melvin Menhoff and Robbie Lawler. Both of those fights were in little cages. And you watch how that fight went down. Like a pitball on top of them. And I just and totally different. You give Robbie an extra five feet of circumference. That dude's going to be blasting me from the outside of that south paw with that nasty cross, the whole entire foot. No, thank you.

Was running from the UFC.

I was making so much more money. No. My first fight in the UFC, I made half the money that I made in my fight. The one fight before that.

Wow. Yeah. And zero sponsor money. You know, like, punch or money.

No sponsor money. Yeah, Roger Gracie was my first fight in the UFC. I had one fight was hot during the UFC was that in strike force. No, Roger was my first fight in the UFC.

Wow. Super scary moment when I shot a crappy single leg and he took my back. I had a lot of crazy on my back. This is not according to plan. Like Greg Jackson's like you're dumb, Tim. You're so dumb. Why did you do that? You're not supposed to do this.

I was really torn between going with Bob Cook and A.K.A. or going to Jackson. It was when I lost to Jacques-Rae. It was a really close fight. I really thought I won. I won on every measurable matrix, but I had big small and closed eye, and Greg was there, and Greg was like, you really missed real key moments in preparation, and how you executed your game plan. Yeah, you're not wrong. You need to be in a real fight camp. I can help introductions. I can literally contact you with American top team. I was French with Bob Cook and I thought about going to California. But I had so much baggage and bad decisions from when I lived in California that I thought would be a bad idea for me to go back there. So I was looking for the real professional big fight camp and Jackson and I have just really similar to Dana her now, like I really just really appreciate that intellectual approach to martial arts. And you know, it wasn't just fighting, it wasn't, you know, sweats and staff on the mat. It was like, hey, let's take a moment and think about what we're doing here as a martial artist. So that just really drives with me.

I don't want to do it. Fuck that. My jujitsu gym is like proper traditional like everybody wears white geese except you got one day where you get to wear your competition blue gear if you want but it's all it's a white gee gym. You know like we're about old school, bowing at the beginning of the class, bowing at the end of class and you know everybody's like checking fingernails. Everybody got the odor in.

So I listen to a couple interviews of them recently. And, you know, he's my era of MMA. And some of my peers from that era have struggled with TBI and CTE. And, you know, you hear it and how they talk. And they struggled being entrepreneurs a second life after fighting. Right. You know, Miller, great example of how traumatic and dangerous it was substance abuse and violence and B.J. sounds great. He was articulate, he had, and back to issues, he was like talking specifically about issues. I know the Hawaii Party systems weird because he kind of just have to be like only one party is going to be voted. So you have degrees of one party and he had just talking about issues as like All right, BJ.

Yeah, one of a, I, a guy in my, that works with me at Sheepette Respond to his name, Siyako. great black belt, like super talented, very Yaku-Kalili. And he has a large Hawaiian family, you know, and some of his kids, he's adopted and just how poor some areas of Hawaii are and how little resources they have for, you know, substance abuse and Like, he's just a great human and, you know, he's a real martial artist and he just did the right thing and taking care of, he just has a beautiful family. He's a great example of all of the things that are broken about Hawaii. As with Tulsi in New York last week, you know, we're talking, you know, she's, she loves politics and she's pretty passionate about all of them. But listening to her talk about broken Hawaii, I mean, it's just like,

She is. And she's like right now I'm just kind of doing this. She's doing like the media tour. So I think she did like 10 TV shows last week. Got to go to dinner with her. And it was it was it was it was fun because we talked we went to this Indian restaurant in New York I went I did a signing at the Barnes Noble and we come across the streets and have dinner with her in this Indian restaurant it took us four and a half hours to get our food and normally I would yeah normally I would have been outraged but instead I got to spend four and a half hours with Tulsi and and just talk you know we talked go to the store and buy the ingredients they had to have what the fuck yeah We talked to human traffic counter, human trafficking. We talked school shootings. We talked, you know, her career. And it was just fun to, um, a she and I do not agree on a lot of, you know, a lot of things. And it was, it's fun to be with somebody that you don't agree with and, you know, the cream rise to the top. And the, the better ideas as we kind of flush these out. And it was cool because we were both doing a lot of media, um, you know, that I think the next morning I was on Fox and friends and we were, You never know what people are going to ask you, you know, like whatever hot button topic they're looking for a sound bite. So, you know, the night before her and I are just kind of running through all of these ideas and these problems and it's something that I wish all Americans did more frequently. Yeah. You know, oh, you disagree with me. Right. I don't hate you. But I would have talked to you. What do you guys disagree about?

Yeah, and I'm definitely like an American first strong foreign presence, you know, you know, we pulled out of Ukraine the military. The special forces goes all over the world and and trains militaries and and it not just at better equips and better trains that military, but it also creates opportunities for, you know, we have connections. You know, like the Czech Republic, I deployed with the Czech Republic with their special forces and horrible gun fights, wild rides, and those are friends that until we die, I will love those guys for forever. Then I go back to the Czech Republic. I go to their special forces base and teach some some human intelligence courses and do like this exchange of information. They Eastern European Eastern Europe. They had some different tactics than we used. So like this cool cross pollination of ideas and tactics and trade craft. And then I come back and I bring those back to my unit and some of those stay. But those relationships are built. When we left Ukraine, That training and those relationships and those contacts don't exist. So us coming in now trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to help you guys? We're like starting cold. It's like a cold call to do a sale. How difficult is that to then go to somebody that you're at the gym with all the time and you talk to and do you know, I just got this new thing. It's an awesome, you know, pre-workout, two totally different experiences. Success.

We're there. I mean, we're, we, I think we're all the way up to the 2016. So the agreements that the US government has with those countries, there's lots of different levels of them, what kind of participation and collaboration we're going to have. And, you know, sometimes some special operations can even come to the United States and go to our special forces, like they can go through our, our training. And like they can, as if they're earning a green break, go through every single phase and learn how we plan and how our tactics are. Like these are really good allies that we're going to be aligned with forever. British Australian, you know, at Ranger School, you'll see German infantry officers and you'll see Australian SAS guys. It's rad. And then they bring that back to their respective countries and all, you know, with rising tides, all ships will be raised. That kind of approach too. So, Tulsa and I don't agree on where, you know, we should be. That's cool.

I think it has a lot to do with the reason that you end up being, you know, my, my beliefs and my ideas. I'm always looking for an opposing or a conflicting idea which will either make my beliefs more sound or I'll have to take a second look at them because there's something wrong with it. And somebody like that is naturally going to be subscribing to you know, maybe more conservative ideals than over here where like this is my belief system and I don't as an isolationist like I don't with my ideas. I don't want anybody to disagree with me. And like, but I also with Tulsi and Bill Mayer's Bill and Mayor, Mar Mar. Yeah. They're Democrats. Yeah. And now, I think a lot of Democrats are looking at them like, are you guys Republicans? Yeah. Exactly. No, you're not. You're still Democrats, but the outlier fringe of that party has left them, like the whole, the line of rational just moved so much further away. And we're like a Bill Maran and Tulsi Gabbard are now like, centrists.

We're a two-party system with a, you know, nearly 50, 50 split down the middle. At no point would I, in that presidential position, like your job is to try to bring as many people from each respective side together. Yeah, bring everybody together. That not his approach.

And I saw a costume, a costume, a quartet is asked if she would support the president in a 2024 run. And she's like, you know, let's talk about the issues that we're trying to fix right now. And so would you support the president? You didn't answer me. That's what the journalist asked her. And she's like, you know we have issues right now that we need to address first and then she'll let her off you know but yeah crazy it's gonna be it's gonna be wild well it's it's 2020 or we got midterms right now yeah

I mean Unity would be nice. I'd rather I wish it was so much more about the issue than the individual where we could talk about all of the issues and find the candidate that has the best solution for those interviews.

the um that you crane bill never the forty billion dollars like up at every like oh yeah the corruption over there and I was like I'm like we can't throw stones right from where we are in our glass house of of corruption where you have a center that makes you know whatever two hundred thousand dollars in this worth forty million

Can we just do term limits and not let them get rich while in office from how they vote?

The same group that obviously was an Afghanistan. Save our allies. Do you read about Ben G. Hall? No. So he was a journalist with Fox News that got blown up in Ukraine and a couple of journalists that were with him died and he was horrifically injured. Our organization, Saver Allies, was the group that went in and found him, rescued him, saved his life, and then got him out of Ukraine into American level medical care. And then all the way, he's currently in BAMPS, like right here in San Antonio. And first it's so cool that journalists are brave like that to go and to go you know to go into Kabul to go into Ukraine to go into down to the border and to see what is really happening down there it's like little nod to them and but that guy no pain killer after he is is very very seriously injured his his his family haven't seen the wounds so i'm not going to explain them but you know, turn it gets on for hours and he has to make it through all these checkpoints and this is like peak invasion and they're able to get him out of Ukraine and save his life and like that ground team from save our allies that was so creative and how I'm literally went into the front lines, grabbed this journalist, you know, dead bodies around him got him medical care and then got him out of the country and before he died. and that, that, and you'll all your badass. Wow. Yeah, pretty right.

I'm surrounded by them. I talk about wanting America to be more healthy and fitter and stronger and individually responsible and able to secure a school, be able to protect your kids. I fully believe that. that we need to be better and where the weakest that we've ever been. But I'm like surrounded by, in the military, in my position there, I'm just surrounded by the best and most brilliant men that ever existed. Like these guys are so incredible. And then the guys that I work with, achieved our response, they're heart as servants, teaching teachers, teaching law enforcement, teaching civilians that just want to be better, mothers and fathers to be able to protect themselves and their families. Like how rad, is that they've dedicated their whole entire lives to this idea. If they'll teach 14 hour days, they'll come back into the office, start cleaning all the weapons, start cleaning the mats, mopping, sanitizing, you know, to do it all again the next day. It's so humbling to see how many great humans are out there and we so often just like focus at the bad at the expense of the good never being recognized.

It's so important! So I'm going to do it! The scars and streptis book that whole reason, like we dropped it right now is in this editorialized curated existence where Instagram, I'm using a filter to make myself look good. That whole book is about failure and struggle and every single one of the mistakes that I ever made. It is not this self-adjaculating memoir of like why I'm this amazing person. It is all the reasons that I'm not. You know, it's all of the reasons why it is normal for us to struggle. It is normal for you to not be able to deadlift that 500 pounds, unless you have conditioned yourself and failed and pushed yourself so your body in adaptation, adaptation, is able to do it. And we think exclusively physically when we talk about adaptation, but you're so on your brain and the total human condition is all part of it and you have to struggle. You have to see failure. You're failed at business. Now I've great businesses. You know failed at relationships and the pain of that failure like hurt. Being a 10 year old and wrestling for the first time and getting pinned in my first match and having to stand up in that gymnasium, that big, huge, a taskadero gymnasium and my dad is sitting right there. I could still see him right here on the side of the mat. You know, and that my head hung in shame as the other guy gets his hand lifted. You know, in wrestling it's just so fast. His hand goes up, but the echoes of that failure just resounding in my head is after walk, single elimination. My turn of it's over. You know, and if I had not experienced that failure, there's no way you'd see me fight for world titles. There's no way I'd become a black belt. You know, if you took that moment away from me and I got a participation trophy and we both got our hands raised, that moment's gone. Right and it is so important and you apply that with everything like I stick my hand on a stove I burn my hand I learn not to put my hand on the stove and that's that pain and that's that's process of failure that we're we're taking that away from this generation Yeah, it needs to be ingrained They need to understand that it's a benefit you have to look at those failures ago.

If you're out of shape, I'm never going to make fun of a fat person walking into the gym. So proud that you're there. But I will look at you walking into a crispy cream and making it another conscious decision about what your lifestyle looks like where I'm going to have to pay for your health care in a few years. Those are two very different things. I will embrace you. I will help you program. I will help you diet. People walking into through my doors. Some of them have never held a firearm in their life. You know, they don't know the first thing about situation awareness. They don't know where to park. They don't understand that they should park towards the front of the parking lot underneath the light and that they see somebody with their window down the engine off and they're sent their smoke into cigarette with the back end and they're looking at everybody walking through the parking lot. Maybe that person might try to mug you as you get out of your car. Maybe, you know, and it is these complete new ideas to them and watching their brains start firing, seeing these things for the first time, explaining why profiling and generalizing when it comes to protecting your own life is useful. And how the sixth sense is a real thing. You know, like that feeling where, do that guy look at me weird? And society, you're like, okay, no, no, I'm not going to look at that guy and make any assumptions about him because it's culturally rude or inappropriate. And I'm going to talk myself out of this. And then that guy assaults me. You know, like, not now this poor woman has been raped because she talked herself out of it. You know, and we can train, and we can sharpen, we condition, and it is the most beautiful magical thing to watch these people, teachers right now, just flooding, clamoring to us, and I cannot run enough courses, and you can see them starving, like, they want to protect their students so bad at such a beautiful thing. I own a private school. You know, I launched Apigee Strong and Apigee, our school, to address what's happening in schools, and what's happening with our young men and women, and seen parents walk in and be like, I get to be involved in what happens with my own child's education. Yes, you do. My son has to exercise and keep it journal as to what he's in what books he's reading. You know, and like, what? This is rad. And it is just the life. It is provided a second wind. I'm going to do this till a day I die. And I love seeing this realization that people can take control of their own destinies, especially around safety.

But you have to. I cry. It took me a day to get through three paragraphs. Oh, yeah. audio books man. That's why I'm never going to get in that stupid chamber you have in the back. Never going to do it. I just experienced a version of it.