Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 445 - Tim Kennedy
Episode Date: November 10, 2020Tim Kennedy is a former pro-MMA fighter, and an active, Ranger qualified, Green Beret, Special Forces Sniper with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other locations around the globe. He has bee...n featured on the HISTORY Channel's show, ‘Hunting Hitler’, as well as the Discovery Channel’s series, ‘Hard To Kill’. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: https://drinklmnt.com/powerproject Purchase 3 boxes and receive one free, plus free shipping! No code required! ➢Freeze Sleeve: https://freezesleeve.com/ Use Code "POWER25" for 25% off plus FREE Shipping on all domestic orders! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by friends over at Piedmontese Beef.
Real quick, I have to give a huge shout out to my boy in SEMA. Dude, you looked fantastic for that photo shoot. What were you eating for your meal prep?
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Because you know those.
Yeah, so the flat iron, I believe, is like 46 grams of protein to only four grams of fat
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Who is talking about masks?
Was that Chappelle? Did you hear Chappelle on S sire live no that was uh bill burr right recently
chapelle was talking about mass he's like i don't know why these people got a problem with mass he's
like they got no problem put on a mask when they wear a kkk hoodie oh okay did you see that stuff
i don't i don't remember seeing that no man he went all in he was crushing everybody though
it was great it was good i liked that that it. That was Chappelle on Saturday Night Live?
Yeah.
Yep.
Saying the N-word and all kinds of stuff.
Was this recent?
Yeah.
It was this Saturday.
Oh, no.
I didn't see it.
Shoot, that sucks.
Did you see the Bill Burr one?
That was like three or four years ago.
That was good.
Yeah, he was going all in, too.
Oh, God.
That was great.
I think it's cool, man.
I think it's good.
People, fuck, man.
People need to voice their opinion.
And then people need to not get crazy upset about it.
Just an opinion.
It's okay.
Yeah, no.
And then you would imagine Dave Chappelle has some different opinions than Bill Burr, right?
I mean, they have different lives, get different experiences.
So one guy is going to say one thing from one side, one guy is going to say one thing from another side.
But actually, if you look at the two of them, actually, a lot of what they were saying was very similar.
I can't wait to hear it.
Both of them were just talking about people just with, you know, what I would consider is just some irrational thought processes.
But it was good.
They were both they were both really funny.
And they were both like, you know, you know, politically charged, too.
You know, there was some there was some like rather than just humor.
There was some deep meaning behind a lot of it.
Yeah.
No, man.
Social media is just a trash bucket right now.
Every time I go on like Facebook or something, I see just people arguing about bullshit and people getting mad at people for having certain viewpoints, even though they used to be friends or even though they are friends on social media.
It's just like it's so ridiculous everyone's trying to shut everybody up yeah and
really like uh a lot of things are pretty insignificant too they're really just i guess
they seem like they're amplified right they seem like they matter so much to us but uh i guess
there's like a lot of things that people just never really maybe thought about before. There's not even like in the entire world, there's not even like a shared sense of purpose on like why we're here and like what we're supposed to do.
Like there's a little bit like and you get some of that through religion.
And I think that might explain why people are so religious is because there's a lot of like rules and religion that tell you to be kind to one another and things like that but there's really not a lot of there's not like a goal to like move everybody
forward or to you know there's really not like i said a shared sense of purpose that i can think of
that unifies everyone and i'm excited to talk to tim kennedy today because he talks a lot about war and war is like, nobody wants war,
but you know,
I,
I think sometimes,
unfortunately,
I think it's necessary who's to enforce it or who's to decide,
you know,
there's war who's to decide,
you know,
via like Twitter on,
you know,
what's a,
what's a valuable tweet to the world and what's not,
you know,
but if we don't have a shared sense of purpose or there's no like overarching theme or thing then how do we know where those lines are that's the thing about
who makes the lines yeah no but that's the thing about the we don't have a shared sense of purpose
it's like in the u.s everybody finds their purpose via what they see on twitter or facebook or the
shit that's fed to them like i mean I forgot how we had this conversation with,
but like,
you know,
if you're on the right,
you start getting all this stuff fed to you from different right groups.
Right.
And therein lies your social political purpose.
And you just dive right into that because you don't have much else.
Same thing with people on the left.
It's like,
they feel that they have this purpose and it's just like,
people are really just trying to chop off each other's throats it and they don't want to find any type of common ground
and that's why it's just i know tim has a lot of insight on that he's he's spoken a lot about like
um other countries info like infiltrating our social media and planting stuff and just letting
it fester it's really crazy i didn't
used to really believe that stuff until like recently it's insane it really is yeah i think
i think this uh maybe day and age i guess like any if there is anything different about it it
maybe just eye opening that a lot of the stuff that has been fed to us over the years probably
for many years may all be kind of bullshit you know know, or a lot of it might be kind of bullshit.
And then even when it comes to the election, I mean, look,
there has to have been fraud in voting forever.
I mean, since it's been set up there.
And how deep is the fraud?
I don't know.
It's probably even, right?
Because it's probably like, I don't know, there's probably people cheating on this side and people cheat on that side probably kind of i don't know
balance itself out somewhat ish right i mean people are going to cheat and then to say that
the people on the left wouldn't cheat or the people on the right wouldn't cheat like it doesn't make
any sense yeah uh is there you know larger cheating at play that is really deciding everything i guess
that would be the question. Right.
And they thought that with Trump and Russia.
And now they,
there's some people that speculate something may have happened with this election,
but I don't know.
I don't know if we'll ever know.
I don't think we will.
Like,
I mean,
unless he gets those recounts when he actually gets something going there,
but it's,
it's set.
It's done pretty much.
So I think there's a lot to learn from Trump.
I think, you know, he may have just, you know, he might have just taken his shovel and just dug himself a hole that he just couldn't get back out of.
You know, he said, like, maybe 10 too many dumb things that, you know, set him off in the wrong direction.
I mean, some things he said were kind of taken out of context,
but there are things that are hard to come back from.
You say certain things about certain ethnicities or certain people.
It really hurts people a lot and it offends people and gets people pissed.
And they, they, they, they want to like, hold onto it.
Cause I don't think people know much about politics.
I'll admit that I don't know much about it.
I try to follow some of it, but I also think it can be a giant waste of time because it's hard to figure out the truth anyway.
Yeah.
And so if one person just says something I disagree with, that's easier for me to be like, I'm kind of more against that guy than I am for this other guy.
It's like an easier decision, I think.
It's an easier decision.
think it's an easy decision and then like if you just if you focus on what an individual says at one point but then you forget all the things that they've said in the past right i think you might
know the situation i'm talking about i like like with trump um there's a debate where they're like
you need to you need to uh uh like say no to white supremacist or whatever right right and he didn't
say anything denounce it yeah denounce it right but then there are all these clips in the past
where he blatantly said that it's like people can choose to pay attention to that one situation or choose to pay attention to all the past situations.
So it's just what people want. But, you know, one thing I'm really curious about is like Trump's not going to say what you want him to say.
He won't. Which he really he won't. You could spoon feed him something. He's going to say the opposite of what you want him to say.
he won't you could spoon feed him something he's going to say the opposite of what you want him to say i like that i i kind of do too i like that i'm sorry but like you know this election it
don't get me i don't know if i'm wrong or not i didn't pay attention to the numbers in the last
one but it was a margin of three million votes right right right isn't that really fucking close
yeah it is like that's that's that's kind of scary like there is a massive just like
there is no shared idea of who we should have in office right now.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's pretty,
it's pretty darn close.
Oh Jesus.
And then if there was actually some fraud on both sides,
there's fraud going on.
But yo,
this is going to be an interesting next few months before Biden takes office.
Cause Trump has already started a bunch of fire everywhere right now.
He's got like 70 days or so before January 20th.
It's and I guess we'll kind of see.
Yeah.
I saw an article like his wife is trying to tell him to calm down or some
shit.
Yeah.
She,
I don't think she really liked being part of it.
You know,
I don't think she really liked being a first lady.
Then there's talks of Trump running again. wait is that possible yeah i didn't realize that
talks of him reloading and running again damn i mean him and biden aren't too different in age
but biden will be like 78 or something or no or maybe eight 82 yeah yeah yeah trump will be 78
at that point i think man shouldn't there be like an age cap i'm sorry definitely be an age cap Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how much you've been around little kids, but I've been around little kids for quite some time over the last decade or so, or maybe even longer.
My son's 16.
So, yeah, it's been like nearly two decades almost.
And being around my nieces and nephews and stuff, the way they can remember stuff.
And Andrew will tell you the way the way they can bring stuff up.
You're like, it's like scary.
You're like, whoa, they have like a they got that shit in like a file cabinet.
But it's not as fresh in our memory. You know, it starts to, I don't know. I don't know what
age it starts to kind of fall apart, but it definitely, uh, if you're, you know, over the
age of 70, I think things are, you know, I don't think that it means that you can't be effective.
I don't think it means you can't be awesome, but you're probably not optimal. Once you get to be over 65, I think, you know, that's when you're allowed to collect your
social security checks and stuff.
Right.
So, yeah.
Plus you're just out of tune with like the actual time, you know, probably way out of
tune, way out of tune.
I feel like I'm out of tune.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't know what's funny.
Somebody will show me something.
They'll be like,
yeah,
yeah.
And they'll be all pumped up.
And I'm like,
cool.
And they're laughing their ass off.
I'm like,
I is,
I'm missing something. Clearly.
I'm,
I'm clearly way off.
I started,
I'm only fucking 28 and I've started to feel that gap with like someone in my life who's
like 24.
They,
they,
they've,
they've shown me some things.
I'm just like,
I don't get it.
Like what, why is this entertaining entertaining why do you like this i feel like you and you i'm like what
i shouldn't be this out of touch you're hanging out with two uh people that are too old that's
what happens didn't you used to think that like you're like ah i'm never gonna get out of touch
with stuff oh yeah right yeah i've always thought that you always thought it was so stupid that
older people didn't know what the fuck was going on the fuck is going on
you're like why are they so old
yeah my thing so like i actually kind of missed like a weird portion of childhood because my
brother and sister were both it's like uh seven and eight years older than me or maybe eight nine
so when i was like young
in school like i would tell jokes or like do things that would go way above like my classmates
heads yeah it's like oh you're all stupid and then eventually like in high school it kind of
continued and stupid yeah but like then you know like so when i was like you know like 10 i was
acting like i was like a teenager yeah then i like 10, I was acting like I was like a teenager.
Yeah.
And I was a teenager.
I was acting like I was in my mid 20s.
By the time I got to my 20s, it's like, oh, shit, like it's boom.
And then all of a sudden now I'm like, man, these kids listen to terrible music.
Grouchy grandpa.
Yep.
That's me.
That's definitely me.
But in regards to like Trump and all that, like like i like what rogan was saying on the podcast
episode that you you said that i would be i'd probably be into mark uh the gad sad episode
when he was like when we have these um these debates when we ask joe biden like like hey are
you still going to be uh like whatever co-signing uh fracking and he's like no absolutely not
and he's like well here's absolutely not. And he's like,
well,
here's this video that shows that you say that you're still going to do it. So what do you say to that?
And they say,
you know,
I think that would be cool.
Like,
it'd be cool to have like a long form debate like that.
I think that'd be just,
that's so important.
Cause yeah,
you can lie right then and there.
No one's going to fact check you.
Let's not get it wrong.
Both of them lied multiple times. That's what they do but that's the thing like you can't really be
called out on it on the spot and then people really have to dig to find out oh biden lied
about this oh trump lied about this and it's not good right so we it's hard to say exactly where, you know, Trump went wrong because he did a couple of things, but he really did get the celebrities against him quite a bit.
And that couldn't have helped, you know, to have people that have like hundreds of millions of followers support the other candidate.
I think that might have been a little bit of a blow that kind of happens in general anyway.
Yeah.
You know that, you know, the Democrats are kind of more Hollywood ish.
But yeah, but that was pretty severe.
I think in this in this particular situation.
And then I think like the the border regulations and the stuff he said about Mexicans and stuff.
I think just I just think it just he couldn't come back from it, you know, saying said about Mexicans and stuff. I think just, I just think it just,
he couldn't come back from it,
you know,
saying they're rapists and stuff.
And then he,
he was not really saying that everyone in that culture does that.
He's talking about like that gang.
What's there?
Right.
Something with a number.
And he's talking about,
you know,
illegal aliens and stuff like that.
But it's all,
it's,
it's,
again,
it's just too,
it's too hard to come back from. So hard to explain all, it's, it's, again, it's just too, it's too hard to come back from.
So hard to explain yourself,
you know,
when you,
you,
you basically put your,
you're trying to put your foot in your mouth,
but you already said something that you probably shouldn't have said.
Yeah.
It should probably framed it differently and maybe it would've been okay.
But I don't know.
And it is,
um,
like interesting how people like receive some of the information.
Like,
um,
I can't,
I think Mark Loebliner or somebody that he had retweeted was talking about like, Oh, interesting how people like receive some of the information like um i can't i think mark lobe
liner or somebody that he had retweeted was talking about like oh now that joe biden's going
to be in office he's going to like mandate masks or he's going to lock everything down for three
months and then you talk to someone else and like hey is that true no no he wants to open everything
up but everyone has to wear masks and you have to do like the um like where they like they can track who you are and stuff like that contact tracing yeah that
would that thing there so it's like again like me being on the outside like i don't know
like what's what so like it's hard for me to really like like is that is this true is that
true like i'm not sure you know so it's real you know frustrating that's just
you know my bad on my part but hey check it out snap there we go fucking tim kennedy
no we're getting to see him walk through his house and everything this is great
we cannot hear him uh it's not on my end
we'll get him in a second, I'm sure.
Tim's iPhone X.
10.
There he is.
We can't hear you quite yet, if you're able to hear us at all.
Hopefully we'll be able to hear you.
Oh, you know, that actually might be me.
Oh, hold on.
There we go.
Now we got you.
I think we got you.
You got me?
Yep.
We got you.
Fucking awesome.
I don't know if you remember this, but...
Chicken, what's up, chicken?
Oh, there we go.
Sick.
Nice.
Getting some eggs, huh?
What? Chicken? Well, we go. Sick. Nice. Getting some eggs, huh? What?
Heck yeah.
Well, we lost the chicken.
I was actually in the middle of reinforcing the protection measures of their fighting position.
Hey, get off it.
Bunch of assholes.
A raccoon reached through, grabbed it by the foot pulled it up
to the fence and then it bit off its head
like an asshole for no reason besides
just to kill it
damn raccoons are so cute
no they're not
they're trash animals
they literally live off of trash
and they amuse themselves
by killing helpless prey where do you live at Tim animals like they literally live off of trash and they amuse themselves by
killing helpless prey.
Where do you live at Tim?
Texas.
Cool. Yeah. It looks beautiful there. The weather looks good.
Oh yeah. So it's a little toasty. I'm looking forward to,
to a little bit more moderate temperatures.
Awesome. Great to have you on the show today. Really appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for coming
on.
Kind of first question out of the gate is
I
love your story. I've heard you on Rogan.
I've heard you on Tim Ferriss' show.
I've heard you on a wide variety of
shows, but I think there's
something special about a lot of
people that decided
when 9-11 happened to, I don't know, I guess
take matters into their own hands and go and start
to defend this country. So what are some things that led to that? I know you also
talked about when you were really young how you drew a picture of
a guy like jumping out of a helicopter or something, parachuting out of a helicopter.
So has this been something that you've kind of, mean it's a weird thing i guess to dream of to run around with a gun and and be at war uh but are these some things that you've dreamt of
since time you were a kid yeah i don't think it's a weird thing i mean i think if you if you went to
a five-year-old and they don't say it out loud because you know the social constructs that we have where you know they look at what their parents say and what their sisters
say you know and like what their teacher says and they're not even allowed to bring a toy gun to
school because they're going to get suspended and if you really went into a little five-year-old
brain and you're like hey what do you want to be when you grow up it would be some weird combination of Velociraptor,
Honey Badger, a Navy SEAL Ranger,
martial art Bruce Lee-looking helicopter pilot.
And there you have it.
If you got inside a normal five-year-old boy's brain,
so yeah, at five, I fully thought that I was going to be a navy seal special forces sniper karate master and um and most people grow up where they don't
um ever do any of the things they dream of as being a kid right they end up as an accountant
or an architect or a garbage man. And those are awesome professions for adult.
But if you never matured past five years old, like myself,
you pretty much just have to do what you remember that you wanted to be.
Did you set out to have a goal to be an army Ranger?
So I'm to clarify,
I'm a green beret that went to ranger school and those are very different
things army rangers in in my opinion in most guys at regiment are just guys that are in
army ranger regiments got it uh i believed fully that i was going to be like charlie sheen
and tom cruise and top guns had a love child, and that love child was me.
So I was going to be a Green Beret that flew F-14 Tomcats.
I like this quote.
It's said by a guy named Jim Rohn, and he said something to the effect of
his mentor said to him,
Hey, I think you should set out to be a millionaire because of, because of what it could make of you.
Did you kind of dream of,
of wanting to become a green beret or of wanting to do some of the things that
you do currently and some of the things that you did to like make something of
yourself or to become something?
No, I mean, I knew, um, yes, I dreamed.
So initially, uh, when I was in college i was going i wanted to be clarence starling from silence that's what i wanted to do uh i grew up in a household that
had very clear morals and ethics and right and wrong good guys bad guys um and so i i had a very clear delineation between good and evil and you're not like the greater
good or any of that bullcrap I'm talking like real evil and you know seeing my dad come home
after fighting meth heads heroin drug dealers you know people that really ruin other people's lives
and the toll that it took on him,
but him still going up to getting up to do the same thing.
Um,
in the late nineties,
I think the only version of real evil that Americans knew were serial
killers.
So that was like the embodiment of what evil.
So that's what I wanted to fight.
I wanted to go and track down serial killers and make sure that they saw justice.
You know, from the Jeffrey Dahmer types
to Rex Krebs, which was a serial killer
that killed in San Luis Obispo when I was in college.
And that had a real profound impact on me.
And I thought that was the worst form of evil up until 9-11
on 9-11 when i watched americans you know they're like hey should i go back in this building and
burn alive or should i jump to my death when i saw that i was like never again never okay i see a
new type of evil i don't know what this evil is i don't know how to
you know we didn't know radical or fanatic uh terrorists at the time we didn't know what that
was um we didn't understand insurgencies really we didn't we didn't have a name to
um the head of al-qaeda as bin laden yet we didn't know that zarkawi would rise to power
we didn't know any of that all we knew was americans were jumping to their deaths so they
didn't burn alive and on that moment i was absolutely utterly without any amount of
restraint going to find that kind of evil and put it.
And I'm curious about this because a lot of Americans, you know, we're that aren't in the military.
Obviously, we're just here.
We're comfortable.
We're going through our daily lives.
We don't think about things that go on overseas.
We don't think about things that go on in the military.
And you're talking and speaking about like all this evil that is over there. Now, even up to this day,
how do you feel that going over there and having all those experiences you've
had?
I know that there must've been things that changed your idea of what's over
there, but how, how has your, I guess,
perspective of war changed by going through that?
That's a great question.
If anything, I said
I really understood right. And it further solidified
morality. It further solidified just.
When I say just, I mean true justice. Not
rule of law or letter of the law, but intent of law, right?
Like the difference between Mala and Say, which is something that is inherently evil, and just like a dude crosswalking.
Totally different thing.
And in war, you not only get to see the most disgusting aspects of human nature, what one human can do to another human is testable,
disgustable, and you would think that you would lose faith in all humanity. But what you also
get to see is the most indescribable acts of selflessness, of courage, of humanity in those moments right and the contrast could not be any further apart you
know you you see a soldier running over to jump on top of a kid that he's never met before and body
um shelter that little kid's body with his own body and his body to make sure if bullets are
flying a bomb goes off a plane is going to come in and crash,
that soldier's running to jump on top of a peasant kid in the middle of nowhere, middle.
Like, why would he do that? Right? Like you hear, what's your one job to make it home alive? That's
not true. No, like your job is to be human and to protect what we know is right and um we say to serve your country with pride
that's what that is that's it's it's watching another man give his life for another man no
greater act there be than one man to give his life for something else and you see that time and time again, instance after instance.
You know, we have no more food on the truck,
but you watch a kid walk up to your truck and say, food, food?
Like, they're going to give them whatever you have,
whatever you have,
whatever that last little bit of food
that you had in your pocket,
you're going to give it to them.
And it really solidified how special
our country is you said we live in comfort we're here and you you don't see all the things
overseas well i do i see them time and time now 28 different trips overseas i've taken in the
uniform with the right with a flag on my shoulder.
And every single time I go over there, I come back home and I look at this country and the petty, pathetic arguings of petulant children about the most inconsequential things ever.
And I laugh because we're so lucky.
We are so blessed that we can argue about what gender goes on. You know,
that we can argue about whether this new episode of some TV show didn't have
enough characters of a specific race.
I'm like,
God,
we're so lucky.
What an awesome,
what an awesome thing to argue about.
You know,
this is cool.
Keep arguing. This is, this is cool. Keep arguing.
This is, this is really cool.
This is cute.
I like you guys.
Do you ever get resentful or have you ever gotten resentful where you're like, man, these
fucking people, they don't understand.
They don't, they don't understand what has happened.
Or even when you hear some of the things from some politicians and stuff, you're just like,
man, these guys have no clue what they're talking about.
You just want to punch him in the face.
I definitely want to punch the politicians in the face.
I never want to punch America in the face.
I want to hug a bunch of Americans.
Like when I was watching the Portland burn to the ground,
um,
you know,
and they're pulling over statues of Abraham Lincoln.
And you're like,
you guys are insane.
Um,
I don't,
I don't want to like go see him in the face.
I want to go hug him.
You know,
I'm like,
it's okay.
I love that you don't know what real evil looks like.
And the fact that you're projecting this evil onto a guy that fought evil,
that is a,
sorry,
I have my phone like,
that's a really
cool again what a fortunate
lucky moment to be in
but it's
like I'm gonna I would love to sit down
with each and every single
one of them and pour them
a cup of coffee give them a hug
and be like okay let's talk
about whatever issues you have
because they're just
your issues now when it comes to politicians there's some real evil out there where you know
it's never their sons and daughters that are going overseas to do these these wars um they just send
the poor and they say and they say and they send the passion and they send people with ideals and beliefs and then they come back.
Um, and I think it's, it's going to be ironic because we have the lowest participation in politics by veterans ever in the history of our country.
And I think you're looking at decisions being made by these ignorant assholes that are making these decisions out of selfless position and that don't understand what selfless service looks like, that don't understand what sacrifice looks like. And even worse, they're making decisions for other people that will never have any effect.
I've been in countries where I was present for the first time.
Any adult got to make a vote for who is going to lead their country.
Think about that.
Imagine being a 35-year-old man, and you're going to vote for the first time in your life.
Crazy.
I've been there for that.
You know, you mentioned that you've been in other countries where democracy just started happening in those places. And you also mentioned that this is now going to be one of the first times
where we have like the fewest amount of veterans in office,
um,
or have having positions in office.
So I'm curious,
do you see any type of similarities with what's going on in America in terms
of,
I guess the separation,
uh,
like how,
how divided our country is. Do you see any type of similarities
between that right now and any type of other country where there is a lack of democracy
potentially? Yeah. I mean, um, one of the unique things, even though a lot of opposing views are suppressed by
the media or the tech, you can still get your voice
heard more now than any before, than any other time
before. I don't want to
skip over that. It's a travesty where one side has the opportunity to silence the other side.
That's a bad thing.
Never in history has that ever been a good point where you're like, I don't like what those other people are saying.
So we're just going to not let anyone else hear it.
Or we don't like any of the other things that the other side has written down.
So we're just going to burn them.
Or we don't like what the other person, the other side has written down. So we're just going to burn all the books. Or we don't like what the other person, the other side is videoing.
So we're just going to bury that or ban those things, those thoughts, those ideas.
That's a super dangerous precedent that has historically turned out to be a catastrophic idea.
And that pendulum of freedom is swinging so far over to the radical censorship side.
Usually the people don't respond well.
And so read history.
Do you think this country is kind of like more screwed than ever before?
Or do you think it's that's more a byproduct of what's going on via social media?
than ever before? Do you think it's, uh, that's more a by-product of what's going on via social media, the just kind of, uh, I guess like hype people talking about this being the most important
election of all time and all these different things. Do you agree with any of that? Or do
you think, you know, being somebody that has studied history and served our country, uh,
what are your thoughts on that? We had Jews in the millions being walked from their homes to a ghetto,
from the ghetto to a train, from a train
to a concentration camp, from a concentration
camp to a gas chamber.
And we were voting on what
president was going to lead us to fight
fascism overseas and
inspire our men and women to
storm beaches and climb motherfucking
cliffs. If you, for a second,
think that we just had the most important election in our lifetime, you're insane.
Like if you go back to a country divided where you actually had a geographical
line where a bunch of people thought that blacks should be able to work in
cotton fields for free as slaves.
And then we're going to vote a person to power that is going to the first time
in American history.
We'll leave up to the four founders
ideas of all men being created
equal then you are motherfucking insane
like you could I mean time after time
again from
the Great Depression
to World War II to Civil Rights
to the Vietnam War to the initial
invasion to Iraq
or after the two towers
crumbled when radical
Islam flew planes into the most important iconic pillars of American
capitalism.
And you think that right now,
because we had an outspoken reality television star and a 70 something year
old guy that might have dementia as our candidates that you think you just
had the most important,
like how,
again,
America,
you are so gosh darn cute
like so cute that you think that this is the biggest moment in history no come on now you
mentioned a couple times right and wrong how do we how do we distinguish and how do we determine
right from wrong and how do we maybe end up with that universally? Is that how we end up with war is to try to impose right and wrong.
Um,
cause there's some things that are clearly wrong,
but it's hard to say sometimes from our society,
what's wrong versus the way someone else might do something.
Yeah.
I mean,
when it comes to like,
like,
like stuff,
like can two dudes get married?
I don't care.
Did somebody say, be able to tell them not to get married no do i think it's a bad idea yeah it's probably not a great thing
that you guys can't reproduce um there's a higher instance of depression and um potentially
transmitted diseases amongst that community that's not my business do whatever you want
that's the point of being american right like i as a christian does that mean that muslims shouldn't be able to go to their
place of worship we should make laws about that right no hell no we shouldn't you can do whatever
form of religion you want right i will make my gay neighbors a cake from marijuana with love
winds on the top with a gigantic rainbow and i will celebrate every bit of their freedom
so right and wrong okay don't steal from somebody else okay that's that's pretty straightforward um
don't do violence to another person or their property okay that's pretty straightforward
like rape um even like getting into my, my lane of freedom,
whatever I want to do, as long as it's me and mine and my lane of freedom,
and it doesn't affect you in your lane of freedom. Cool.
Don't make any laws about that. Do whatever you want. Like that's,
that's the part about being American.
And if there was one thing that I think all Americans could get unified on,
like it's not defining what right and wrong is.
It's defining what freedom looks like.
And if we're like,
Hey,
be you brother,
be you,
be happy,
be American,
be free,
whatever that looks like for you.
I,
I will jump on a,
on a grenade for you to do that.
I will go over there and do the most detestable acts of horror so that you
can do that.
On that idea of freedom, you know, nowadays we were just speaking about how like, you know, speeches, certain certain individual speech is being suppressed.
Right. So there is a lack of freedom of speech there.
And I know that social media kind of makes things a little bit.
It's it's dark waters because you don't know.
Can these companies do they have the power to do that because it's their company etc but when we're
looking at that people's freedom of speech on certain sides being suppressed um how can
how can we get anywhere if we're not able to actually talk about things like there are certain topics
where we can't if we speak about it even um it'll be suppressed or it won't get out to as many people
as it should uh how do you how do we do that yeah so discourse is the tech companies right now are for i don't know why um intentionally dividing us so we feel and
seem further apart than them um you get to curate and editorialize your own
feed so you only get to hear the things and the people that agree with you. So you only get to hear the same ideas that you want to hear over and over
and over again.
And you're in this echo chamber of insanity.
Like I can't think of anything closer purgatory than taking me with my own
ideas and reinforcing them with a bunch of other people that are saying the
same thing.
Like that would drive me freaking insane,
but I don't know why,
but a bunch of people
do that um and then anytime that anyone has a different idea or a different point of view
that idea by the tech companies facebook twitter youtube instagram those ideas are suppressed. So that's not a bad thing because I know it sounds crazy.
Yeah, it's really, really dumb that somebody from San Jose, California is sitting there
and thinking that they understand my life here in Texas, um, with,
you know, pushing 20 years in special operations. And they think that they could curate what I
should be allowed to say to the rest of the people, the people, the people, but I think America,
um, we are proud backbone people. Like we're strong. And right now there's a lot of people that are happy
that opposing viewpoints are being suppressed that are opposing viewpoints are being censored
and they're like yeah it's okay because those ideas are hateful or they're bigoted or they're
racist or they put whatever title they want onto the ideas that they don't like so they can think that they're in the moral high ground in their you know they're in their high
tower um in this aloof position and be like it's okay that those idiots are being censored because
nobody should hear that stuff anyways and that might work for a little while but um when an idea never reaches any resistance when an idea never faces true
discourse or debate that idea never truly takes shape and that idea is put into practice
we get to watch fate and why i i never would have hoped that policy policymakers would take an idea, be able sounds like a really bad idea until that policy fails.
Until everyone's like, oh, no, I can't pay 60% taxes because I have to feed my family.
And this doesn't make sense.
Education, health care for all, education for all, a salary to be an American citizen.
All of those ideas, once they come to reality,
oh shoot, somebody has to pay the bill.
And that bill is American.
And Americans are like, oh man,
I wish somebody would have said something.
But they couldn't.
And then they have to deal with the consequence.
And then that beautiful pendulum of freedom starts swinging back the other way.
When it comes to a bad thing,
when it comes to a COVID-19,
um,
did you take exception to some of the things that have happened with that in,
in accordance to,
uh,
the normal freedoms that we're used to?
So I did. So I didn't do any of that stuff. Um, I live in the country, I have chickens and cows and,
um, you know, like, but I didn't want to pass COVID onto my compost pile.
I work out with the same guys every single day that go back to their families that have breastfed babies and wives that have
six packs. The only people that have been
negatively affected by this have been a very vulnerable
segment of society that should absolutely be protected, that we
should take extreme measures
to make sure that they're safe um but like me and my family like if i if we walked outside and i
showed you my love my um 13 month old baby she's a bowling ball with legs like you could take a
hypodermic needle with covid and inject it into its neck and that baby would poop it out moments later. With
no negative side effects whatsoever.
She'd probably be laughing
and then try to eat the needle.
Have you
seen
Legends of the Fall or
Last of the Mohicans?
If I showed you my five-year-old
son who has hair down to the middle of his back
with a stick, he's five five and he has a six pack
he does jujitsu and he boxes
he speaks Spanish and he plays the piano
and like right now if we walked out
he's sitting on top of a pirate ship
with a come and take it flag
and he's holding a laser gun
and I can see him
and the thought
that there is something
he
can we just talk about the real issue,
which is obesity and immunity systems in the United States?
Like if we talked about those issues, like the first thing to close were gyms and gyms
are like people that are healthy.
We're the only people not getting sick.
We had, um, COVID go into a special forces.
I can't tell you which specific class it was but it was
it's a very elite class within special ed one of the instructors brought in covid and all 91 students
in that specific class got covid all like wildfire through all of them and um not a single one of them knew it they were all asymptomatic
every single one that's insane that makes sense though what about the rest we're talking like the
pop top zero one percent right like these guys are all adonis greek god-looking dudes and um
you know they're out there doing 20 miles a day with 60 pounds of weight on
their back as they're trying to track down a bad guy through the woods and even with that with
their immunity system being drained like that you know only getting three or four hours of sleep
every other night they they still were not even aware that they were sick.
What about the rest of society?
You're in your own bubble out there, so that's great.
But what about people have had to shut down their restaurants and gyms and so forth?
Business owners, does that kind of piss you off as somebody that has defended the country and tried to keep things as free as possible?
Do you think that that measure was necessary?
Do you think that matches up with what was going on or what are your thoughts on that yeah i i own five businesses i didn't shut down for a day all my employees work every single day we took precautions out of respect but like
i don't care who you are you don't get to shut down my business and you walk in and try to find
me like like i will see you in the supreme court and And I'm going to look forward to that fight. Every single phase from that local justice,
all the way to superior court,
finally to the appellate court,
then finally to the Supreme court.
When I can take that ruling and shove it all the way down your
authoritarian dictator,
asshole,
it'll go down your throat to your ass.
Yeah.
I think that's gravity.
Yeah.
That would work out that way. Yeah. I mean, like, yeah, you know, it'll go down your throat to your ass. Yeah. I think that's gravity. Yeah. That would work out that way.
Yeah. I mean, like, yeah, that's,
we don't, don't allow them to do it. Don't do it.
Like we just had a huge election and if you did not vote your,
if your local government was doing some shady,
shiesty things to small businesses and you went out there and voted
to keep them in power,
I'm sorry.
Let's talk about that pendulum of freedom
again because it will keep swinging and it
will keep going until finally people
wake up and they're like, oh,
this really sucks.
Yeah, it
is un-American. It is anti-freedom.
It is idiotic to be able to walk in to a hair
salon that's owned by a lady and that is how she puts food on her family's on on her family's
dinner table and be like you have to close your doors i mean you can serve nancy pelosi but you
can't serve anybody else so So yeah, that is horrible.
But don't let it happen.
Fight it all the way to the superior court,
all the way to the Supreme Court.
Do whatever you need to do to make sure you have the freedoms
that you're afforded.
Now, also be a human.
My neighbor, two doors down,
she takes care of her mom
that is going through chemotherapy man i love this one
and uh we do shopping we go and do the shopping and i go and i pick up all the food i get clorox
wipes and i walk wipe down every i mean a box of cereal when in my life did i think i was going to
be taking a clorox wipe and wiping down a box this year you know um that's what i'm doing and when i walk that food
inside i'm wearing gloves i'm wearing the little uh painter booty wraps and a mask with a little
sheet because i like i love this woman right and it's like the right thing to do um now i will go
and i will lick a banister at a subway station and i'll come home and kiss kiss all of my kids and they'll all be
fine but when i'm gonna for that that percentage of of the population that is vulnerable to this
like protect them like that's our job but don't come and tell me what i can do with my family
get out of here so i'm curious man because like you haven't i guess you haven't yet been in a
situation where they have tried to force you to shut down like certain business in California here.
They're they've forced them like small businesses, jiu jitsu schools, etc.
They've been trying to force them to shut down.
Not with a gun, just as the government saying you have to shut down your business temporarily.
But with the way that shutdowns have been going, if things did get to a place where there's a second wave, right, and more shutdowns are said to be happening, what would your advice to businesses be?
Businesses that need to stay open because tons have failed already.
But what would your advice be?
What would you advise people to do if more harsh mandating does happen?
I mean, so one,
one believe in capitalism,
believe in the entrepreneurial spirit.
So my company,
one of my companies,
keep our response.
We're a defensive tactics in person training.
Like you come to our headquarters and we show you how to fight.
I show you how to take a gun from something.
I show you how to keep a gun in your holster,
like knife,
you know, like pretty awesome stuff. Um, show you how to keep a gun in your holster, like knife, you know,
like pretty awesome stuff. Um, well, I can't do that in person.
So in January, no, it's February. We're like, all right,
film every single block of instruction. And let's,
let's figure out how to do this virtually where every single student can still
be able to attend all of these courses. Um,
and they can have a choice to do it online to do it in
person if they do it in person let's take some measures where like they and a training partner
are isolated six feet from everybody else and they only train with them that one partner
or maybe we do it in pods where like a group of four people work together or we have like general
population where like the the last 10 that really have no family members
or friends that are vulnerable segments of society,
they can go and train together.
I don't care.
So we took a bunch of measures.
We pivoted really, really, really, really early
and put out a ton of virtual content,
live streams every single day.
I put out a workout that you could do from home every single day. I put out a, a, a workout that you could do from home
every single day for the months of, for the months of April, March, April, May, and June
for four months, you could have gone to shoot guard response and you could have gotten an
entire workout regimen that you could do from home seven days a week. And, um, our company grew 411% in six months, that company, not my other company, like that
company.
And it's because like, if you build fax machines right now, and you've been doing that for
20 years, you probably need to pivot, right?
Like, sorry,
fax machines are done. Right. Um, and like we,
we evolve and we progress and, um,
and society changes and needs change and the consumer change and your job,
uh, whatever your mission is for your company. So mine,
the mission for one of my companies is to preserve and protect human life.
Well, I can't do that when there's nobody in the building.
So how do I meet my mission statement? I'm going to have to pivot.
What do you think of President Trump's presidency? Like, you know, it appears that he's lost the election, even though he's not giving up on it quite yet. What do you think it's done for the country in terms of making things
possibly better?
And what do you think it has done for the country potentially making things
worse?
I don't know.
I was deployed in 2016 when he was elected the first time and I didn't get
to vote for him um and
i would have i wouldn't have voted for hillary clinton exclusively from a military thing um
because the the clintons just have a really hard history with military
which is
I'd explain but that would take a really long time
I don't know any military person
that can remember Mogadishu
or Benghazi
or Iraq 1
and be like alright
I can have a Clinton for president
so
that's I don't know if any person in a
republican office would have been anything would have been called anything but device
um and i don't think it's because of president trump um like the people in Portland or Seattle
or Kenosha or Louisville,
it could have been Dan Crenshaw, it could have been
Rand Paul, it could have been, I mean, insert any
conservative name into that office, and I still think they would have been doing the same thing anyways.
And so then if it's not the president's fault then whose fault is it that it's being so divisive like could it possibly the onus be on the people i mean maybe like if you could put
anybody's name into that position that had a different viewpoint than everybody else that was rioting, then maybe it's not the president's fault.
Maybe it's the rioters.
You know, maybe it's them that are being divisive.
Just putting that out there.
If it's like everything my dad used to say, like, if everyone else is wrong and everyone else is doing the wrong thing, maybe you should take a second and look at yourself and make sure the thing that you're doing is the right thing.
And I don't think that could be any more relevant than today where no one looks to see if they're to blame, to see if they're responsible.
I love Jocko Willink. He always is like,
I look at myself as the problem first. And I see what I need to solve in me before I look out and
figure out what I have to solve out there. And you can apply that to everything from COVID,
where it's like, okay, before I start telling somebody else to wear a mask,
before I start telling a business to close,
let me look at me. Oh shoot. I'm 400 pounds. I have diabetes. I have six comorbidities,
but I'm telling that person to wear a mask. Maybe the problem is not them. Maybe the problem is me.
It's a really great way of looking at it because, um, I mean, a lot of people in my life are,
I know of people who look at Trump and they're like oh snap everything that's going on right now that's bad in the country
all comes down to what trump's done covid what he his decisions that he made with coronavirus is
because it it's the cause of where we are right now which honestly doesn't make any sense but
like that seems to be the view from people. Um,
the majority of the problems we have are because our,
of our current former president, it's kind of wild.
It is wild.
Um,
you know,
if something's going wrong with business,
I don't look at the president and be like,
Oh,
look what you've done.
Like I look at myself and I look at my business and I see what I should
pick. Right. I, if I'm in the gym and I fail at a thing, man, stupid president,
if he would have done that, I would have got this deadlift, you know, um, like how idiotic does that
sound? It's, it's, it's, it's the ravings of a petulant child. But if you take responsibility, individual responsibility, and you look at yourself as the successor or failure hinge point, things could start going really great for you.
Actually thinking about that idea, you still see it on social media all the time right now.
You see videos, especially with what's going on with police in the country right now.
Videos are spread of shootings, right?
And people are very quick to blame police for those types of situations immediately.
It's rare that you see individuals take a look at what the suspect was doing, unless the individuals that are talking about that are police.
So there's
a lot of divide going on there right now i've heard you talking about solutions and making
solutions to that problem right now uh with the headset i you can probably talk about that more
than i can but i am curious of your thoughts of what's going on in that realm the police
in this country right now how you feel about that um i probably know
personally 5 000 police officers and within like the greater network of
law enforcement that i train um i've probably worked with 30, 40,000 law enforcement officers, um, low estimates because we do a few thousand every single year.
I've been doing this for 17 years.
Um, my dad has been a police officer for 34 years.
My brother is a deputy, um, in Monterey, California.
He's a sergeant's detective detective sergeant i don't
know which one it goes for um so i've been i've been like around this world my whole entire life
and they are the most selfless heroes unappreciated hard-working loving caring amer caring Americans I've ever seen.
And they get shit on nonstop.
You know, when you're like, nobody really talks about what happens,
what happened before the shooting.
And they're just judging the police officer.
You know, let's get back to that individual responsibility thing
where that guy that is a three-time felon is committing a fourth felony and has a knife
and just tried to stab somebody and is running back to the car to get another knife.
And the person that called the police is the victim from the last felony. And,
but then we're going to blame the police that show up and try to save the people there.
but then we're going to blame the police that show up and try to save the people there.
It's insanity. Let's just make sure we put the onus of responsibility on the proper person.
If I'm driving down the road and I
break a bunch of laws, for example,
how old am I? I was a kid and I had a
toy gun and we were driving to the movie.
And I'm in top,
I'm like the super toy gun with like the big orange cap at the end.
And I'm in the backseat. I'm not old enough to drive. I think I'm,
I'm like 12 and old enough where I should have known better,
but I was like pointing and shooting the cars as they go by. Anyways,
somebody didn't like that. They called the police.
The police pulled me over and everybody knows who my kenny my dad is and they run the plates
and they're like oh that's my kennedy's car they call my kennedy and my kennedy's like
well do whatever you're gonna do they're like well we're gonna take him in he's like okay
so they they yank me out of the car. They take me down to the police station.
They search the car, and they're like,
that's a toy gun.
And I'm like, man, I'm freaking out.
I don't get stuffed up, but this is kind of rural, country road policing.
And it's all on me.
Onus is on me.
I'm the one responsible.
I'm the one that was doing something that I probably shouldn't have been doing.
And whatever the consequences were,
like, I was going to get them.
And my dad sure as hell was not going to step in there
to do anything about it.
Go back a couple more years
where I'm in jiu-jitsu class
and I've been beating on a bunch of dudes that I normally
beat on and I get caught in a submission and I tap, I get up and I, I just scream the F word
and my dad's in there watching. So I think I'm 13 now. And, um, Barry Smith and Terry killer
walk up and they both have a scream of sticks. And I'm not sure exactly which one racked me up inside the head with
essentially a smell of baseball bat, but like smacked me. Not, not,
not like, Hey, you naughty boy. Don't do that again. I'm talking like,
I don't know how I wasn't bleeding out the side of my head. And you know,
you see white, you know, you think you got flash knocked out. Yeah.
I remember I,
all I could see was
red because i was going to turn around and fight everybody and i see my dad and i'm like oh you
just wait my dad's going to come out here and he's going to straighten you guys out and my dad's
sitting there and he folds his arms and he looks at me son that's your problem he didn't say it
but he let me know that like that's not my problem that's not his problem that's your problem he didn't say it but he let me know that like that's not my problem that's not
his problem that's my problem because i'm the one responsible for the thing that just came out of
my mouth i'm responsible for the thing that i did i'm responsible for whatever actions i committed
and everything else is secondary to that but let's first look at the problem now are we a perfect
country no have we reached the ideas and the ideals that were written in our beautiful founding documents by our founding fathers?
No.
Those are ideas that we should continue to aspire to.
We're all made to create an equal.
Everyone has the same equal chance.
And right now, I don't think that's the case in a lot of cities, especially urban cities.
If you come out here, if I got a black neighbor next door, he has the exact same chance of the school as i if i
you know like compared to my kids like everybody but like when you get into like downtown baltimore
or detroit or some areas of southern california um like it's hard and um
i would love to figure out ways to fix that. And I know really great ways to fix that,
but nobody likes them or nobody wants to talk about them or rather those
ideas are suppressed.
But let's also look to law enforcement.
They're human and they're imperfect.
Now,
could there be unconscious bias?
Absolutely.
Could they need more training?
Absolutely.
I know that is the case.
And for sure, um, special operations, they train 90% of the time for 10% of the work
where law enforcement, they do like 95% of the work, maybe even higher, like 99% of the work. And they get to train 1% of the time.
That is not a ratio that is going to ensure success.
And it's also not a ratio that you're going to be able to identify problems with an individual and be able to fix.
That has to happen through training.
And training is just not happening.
Would you mind expanding upon those ideas that nobody,
nobody wants to listen to?
Yeah.
You guys got any Koreans friends?
Yeah,
for sure.
Yeah.
They got kids.
Yes.
Well,
they are the kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Have you, have you ever seen what their household looks like when those kids come from home from school from 3 until 6 p.m.?
Oh, they're doing homework.
They're doing.
And I'm not talking like just the homework that was assigned by the teacher, but they're also doing a whole bunch of other memorization that aligns with that homework.
And then they go and they play with like the Rubik's cube for their break
before they go to their swim practice,
where they also have to do memorization and their mom is sitting by the pool
in between laps.
And then they go and they play the piano and their breaks from their piano
practice.
They're doing their math extracurricular homework.
And that's normal in that household.
Yes. That is, extracurricular homework and that's normal in that household yes that is i'm not joking with a korean brother and a bunch of nieces that that i just told you their afternoon every single day
imagine if that culture was the culture of a black family in baltimore
so if that were the culture how long would it take for that family to change what success looks like
for their household now am i saying culture is the only problem absolutely not are there a bunch
of other problems like access to information access to a pool access to a piano like i don't
know a kid in in like the poorest areas of the bronx i can can walk in and
take piano lessons or take swimming lessons or even those who are rubik's cubes but the culture
of wanting to succeed and then having the parental to parental units that are there to support that
those those are recipes for success so if you look at a community and we put in more security,
when I say security,
I'm talking police officers.
You're taking a bunch of police officers.
You go to the poorest,
most destitute neighborhoods
and you provide security and safety.
With that comes more commerce.
With commerce comes more education.
With more education becomes more commerce.
So more businesses come in,
more small businesses open in, more small businesses
open with more small businesses. Those employers want to see their employees.
Like I invest in my employees. Like if I have an employee that wants to go and take a course or go
and get his MBA, I will bend over backwards for that employee to be able to expand and grow as an individual. So commerce comes in. Well,
first you have to have security and safety. And because with that commerce can exist.
If you're coming in, smashing my windows and throwing bricks through it and looting it,
I'm not going to open business there. I'm going to go to the city next door that has
law and order. And then I'm going to open my business there because now I'm actually going
to have a chance. So I opened my business. I hire some employees locally because they have
to come in and work. I start making money. I start hiring more employees. I open up another
division and then I hire more employees. Now I have to have a manager to oversee those employees.
That's going to probably be an internal promotion. So that one of the former employees from the last location, I'm going to promote to a management position, then maybe even
a directorate position. And that's, that's real money now. So now we have three different tiers
of income that happens in five years. And with that, I need that guy to get an MBA. So I'm going
to encourage him to maybe take some online courses or some junior college nighttime classes on business or accounting, finance, economics, shipping, fulfillment, e-commerce, any of those things.
But I now need a graphic designer.
I don't want to hire somebody that doesn't understand my business.
So I'm going to take one of those kids that I see twiddling on the computer all the time and be like, can you do that?
Go to school and uh
and learn about like the things that you're doing but that's called graphic design he's like i know
graphic design is oh sorry cool for sure i'll pay you to go and and in not even in one generation
in one decade we changed the landscape of a block and that all started with more police officers providing rule and order,
safety and security.
So commerce can help with commerce and culture,
the right culture.
You can turn a corner in some of these areas that have been poor for
decades,
where they're just waiting for the next riot to happen.
And then lo and behold, 40 years later, another riot happens,
and we just condemn them to another 40 years of poverty.
We could continue that historical repeat,
or we could give them a chance.
We could believe in law enforcement.
We could put law enforcement in there.
More police officers, more rule and order, more rule and order,
more security, more security, more commerce, more commerce, more prosperity, more prosperity, more education, more education, more commerce.
And it is an endless cycle of success.
Tim Kennedy, the rational honey badger.
So was this was some of this part of your goal as well to have this side of yourself like you're obviously educating yourself very heavily or was that just sort of part of the part of the process?
I mean, you're a savage, right? Like you're you're teaching people to disarm people with knives and guns and you've been in battle and you've done all these kind of savage, tough, really sort of brutal things.
been in battle and you've done all these kind of savage, tough, really sort of brutal things.
But then you also have a mindset behind it that I think is wonderful. And I think is,
is rational. Like you're, even though you could be irrational and take out a lot of people or cause a lot of damage, you have a very rational side to you.
Um, I think when you look at, I'm, I'm not special. When you look at I'm not special
when you look at all
warrior societies through history
from the samurai to the
Spartans from
the Spartans to
the greatest generation
climbing cliffs and storming beaches
where you also see
balance you see
philosophy and art um you know you
when i say art i'm talking like real masterpiece arts people that poured themselves into the craft
with with complete utter conviction and passion um you know some some of the landscape water prints
watercolor prints from japanese samurai cultures are some of the most beautiful paintings that exist today.
When you look at the Greek and the Romans and the science that came from those warrior cultures and my philosophy and art.
You're like, this is incredible.
There's balance there.
Like, yes, it's funny
because a lot of people see the business Tim
or the television Tim
and they really forget that there is a savage,
hairy-handed, knuckle-dragging,
covered in my own blood,
smiling, loving every moment of this violence.
And they forget that that's, that's
okay because there is another part to that. I have seen, these are not ideas that I came up with.
These are ideas that I have seen put in practice all over the world in countless countries.
And I have been able to, I've been fortunate enough. And this is, this is a conjecture where I think this might work in a place that is facing poverty.
I have gone to places that are absolute third world country destitute.
When I say third world poverty, this isn't like, you know, I'm going to take my welfare check and go and try to see how much food I can get.
I'm talking like they have never seen real clean water ever in their life.
I pop this is, these are different levels of poverty. And I've gone to places where it was
like that. We opened a school, we helped them open five or six businesses. We created a secure
government locally to be able to ensure that those businesses and that school remain safe.
And I come back a year later, and there's 25 businesses.
Then I come back another year later, and there's an entire regional commerce that's going to the next largest city.
And there's like 100 businesses, and there's five schools, all the kids now can read what nobody could read four years ago now everybody can read
what happened overnight rule order security led to prosperity
like this this is yeah you know it's when you were talking about the, the culture, right.
Um, and that specific conversation, once you, once you started talking about it, um, I knew where you were going and that is absolutely correct.
We've had, I've had this conversation with a lot of friends that are, we're all black and we've had this conversation before,
but when we try to have this conversation on a broader perspective with more
people,
it's something that gets shut down rather immediately because it's,
it's,
it's very scary to take that type of personal responsibility because like you,
you then think,
how are you going to change culture?
Right.
It's,
it's a very difficult thing to do, but it's, it's necessary. It's necessary to literally change that aspect of the culture.
If you want to see things move forward, you know, the movie interstellar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You guys got daughters.
I do.
You do.
So that whole movie is a love story
penned about a father to his daughter.
Like the only thing that could transcend time
and ensure success was a father's love for his daughter,
his daughter's love for her father.
But there's one particular scene
where they're trying to dock one of the spaceships
that's been damaged.
And if they don't dock,
they're not going to be able to take humanity.
And Matthew McConaughey, he's in pilot position, and he's talking to – I'm getting goosebumps.
He's talking to the computer, and the computer's like, it's impossible statistically that you're going to be able to do this.
He's like, yes, but it's necessary.
Statistically, I could not agree with you more that it is really really hard to change culture
it we have proven that there are things in place to keep the poor poor to keep those in poverty
in poverty the only way that you can get out of that the only way that you can change that is to
is to take the onus of responsibility, individual responsibility on yourself. I came from a single person working in my household, my father, who was a police officer making $30,000 a year.
I own six companies.
My brother and sister are equally successful because they believed in hard work and individual responsibility.
believed in hard work and individual responsibility.
And I challenge absolutely everybody that if you take the responsibility on the individual
and look at how can I fix myself?
How can I fix?
All these problems are my fault.
How can I fix them?
Then some really rad things happen.
You know, like everything you want
from freedom to success to prosperity
is on the far side of hard work.
But you have to do the stand work.
And it's OK if we all have different starting points.
That's that's something that people come back to.
You know, well, you got to head this way.
This is where you have, you know, this is where you have some advantages.
Easy for you to say.
That's what they say.
that's what they say yeah and i i think we could have all everybody could have the same starting point if we subscribe to these ideas in one generation but or we could just compete
we could be complicit perpetuating the same nonsense and enabling people to live without responsibility on themselves.
Now, for those that have, you know, the Bill Gates and the Jeff Bezos, like,
should we be able to say, all right, you had it so good. You have such a better opportunity.
You have to go and help these other people. No, we shouldn't tell them they have to.
But now as somebody that's like, that's kind of beginning to see success i want to help people and i want to
see other people reach the potential that i know that they're destined for and
i think it's completely un-american to demand that somebody
has to help but i don't know anybody that once they become successful,
doesn't want to help and they want to help in their own way.
Like,
do I think the way that Bill Gates or,
or Oprah,
the way that they help is idiotic?
Yes.
Like if you gave me that money,
do I think I could turn countless communities into rich,
flourishing,
prosperous,
prosperous communities for sure.
But they're trying to do their own thing and I'm not going to tell them how to
do it. So you, you know, you keep going on YouTube. Um, you know,
you give me a little bit of Jeff, Jeff Bezos money, you know,
like I'll turn Baltimore around in a heartbeat, but, um,
but I'm not going to take money from them. That's,
I think that's un-American.
Do you have a, do you have political aspirations yourself?
Hell no.
Got a chance, zero chance.
It's tough because then it just kind of puts you in the same boat with everybody else, right?
Makes you a politician.
Yeah.
I mean, there are politicians um dan crenshaw uh is is a good example that john
jones um another good example of that um like they don't view themselves as politicians they
they still view themselves as the person that got blown up at a bunch of shrapnel or bullet got put through their eyeball and they have to wear a patch
or they crashed a helicopter and they had to survive for a few days.
You know,
um,
you know,
I have great respect for John McCain.
And,
you know,
at some points he started viewing himself as a politician and there was
decades of service.
So I was like, man, what an incredible person.
And he's still a person that I'm remembering to be incredible and a selfless servant.
But at some point, he started viewing himself as a politician, and you could see the decisions that he made change.
And so I wish we could get a Jocko Willink in, in, into some office.
Um, Nick Palmashano, uh, Matt Best, Evan Hafer, like there, there's some great veterans
out there that would make, but they just won't, you know, because they could never be politicians.
That might be the best thing because they would never view them as though they would
take a really long time before they viewed themselves as a politician and then they'd have
a safety button where they would allow me to come in and yank them out of office because i reached
that threshold i'm a politician now i gotta hit the tim button and then i come in and rescue do
you think uh kind of back to what you were mentioning a little bit earlier do you think
it's just really important that we just care about one another more?
The United States, you know, the comfort level of what we have and the comfort level of what we have in certain communities, we don't care that much about.
It seems like we don't care that much about what's happening in certain communities, even within the United States.
But outside the United States, it's been kind of an American thing
to be very naive to what the hell's going on in the rest of the world. When I've traveled before,
I tell people flat out, I'm like, Hey, I'm an American. And I don't know, I don't know anything
about your culture. Please enlighten me. Please, uh, you know, let me know, you know, some of these
different things, because I, I've, I feel like I've been, uh, that I haven't researched it much.
I haven't looked into it much.
Why should we care so much about what's happening in another country?
Why should we care if the children aren't getting education?
How does that, I know why, but how does that, how does that impact us?
Um, I mean, we're humans first, you know, like, well, I love being a barrel tested freedom fighting American, you know, like I bleed red, white, and blue, and I love being a barrel-chested, freedom-fighting American, I bleed red, white, and blue, and I love being American,
I am a human.
We could hang back in 1939 and be like,
I don't know what's happening in Germany,
but it's really weird that they're taking all of these people
and making them stow gold stars on their chest
and then putting them into specific areas and quarantine them.
That doesn't sound cool.
The 1940 rolls around and they're like,
man,
I'm not sure if it's true.
It might be fake news,
but it sounds like they're moving all those people into concentration camps.
That's not very American.
You know,
1941 rolls around.
There sure is a lot of timidness in these concentration camps.
It's probably nothing.
Just fake news.
We'll just ignore it.
I hope your blood is boiling because no American, no human can be sitting there being like, they're gassing and burning 6 million Jews.
Not okay.
Right?
China.
6 million Jews, not okay, right?
China, throwing a bunch of Muslims that they don't agree with into concentration camps and making, working them into sweatshops, not okay.
Venezuela, people lining up at food lines for miles upon miles, hoping that they can get a little bit of bread to feed their family for the $200 that it costs in this inflated economy that it created thanks to socialism. Not a great idea.
Totally not okay.
If we don't
address the human issues
abroad, they're just destined
to happen here. If we don't
look at what radical
fanatic ideas happen abroad,
they're going to fly planes
into our buildings here. If we aren't humans of integrity, morals, and ethics with individual responsibility, then
who are we? If I'm not going to love mankind, if I'm not going to love...
The greatest gift that you can give is to sacrifice yourself for someone else.
I'm paraphrasing and simplifying, but it it's giving your life for a friend or just sacrificing for a friend, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you the golden rule.
That is who we are.
And if you're not on board with that...
I need to kind of take that clip that you had right there. on board with that. You know,
I need to kind of take that clip that you had right there.
And,
uh,
there's a bunch of people that I'm going to send that to because I have,
I know there's a lot of people in my life who are like,
we're spending all of this money on the military yet.
We have all this lack of education and poverty,
et cetera,
and all these things we need to deal with on our own ground.
Why are we even out there?
That was literally a perfect explanation as to why it's important.
It's important.
I want to ask you this.
Oh,
go ahead.
And not to,
cause your motivation should be for that,
but it can also be selfish.
Like if you were just a selfish business prick that's okay too because
a secure stable africa means better economics for the united states a more secure stable europe
is more money for the united states every place that has rule of law with security and safety means that there's more commerce.
More commerce means
more money for the United States.
Like if you want to talk GDP, the more
exports we're going to have are into more
environments that have commerce.
Into more cultures, into more geographic
regions that have commerce.
So if you like from global to regional
to
just all the way to the near, the more secure that area is, the more commerce they're going to have and the more business.
But that should not be your motivation.
Where are you going to start?
My my buddy here in SEMA, he is a jujitsu practitioner, but he's in the sport of jiu-jitsu, so he's kind of a pussy, right?
Can you explain to him why he's being a pussy about it?
Sports jiu-jitsu is really good.
We had these two, I'm not going to throw them under the bus, but we had two very, very high level. I'm talking world champion level grapplers, black belts that were attending one of our courses. And we were fighting for these guns and I had control of the gun and he rolled underneath to try and reap a heel hook.
I'm sitting here with a gun, and I'm like,
popping him in the head with a gun as he was trying to get through for this footlock.
And it took him like 20 seconds for him to look up and be like,
Bro, we're fighting for a gun and um
i will throw this guy under the bus because he's a friend and uh we have this really great
purple belt and he's former military uh but now he's been in publishing for about 10 years. And his name is Tucker.
And he came to one of our courses and he's a good purple belt,
like is going to be a brown belt very soon, but very competitive.
And we were fighting for a shock knife.
And he said, and these are his words,
that he had never felt so helpless on the mat ever.
And it was, I mean, it's all the same stuff, right?
Like I'm still controlling.
I'm still fighting for position while I'm fighting for control of the weapon.
But he got killed 25 different times.
Now, in one month from now or one month from then he became a fierce like if you
dropped a gun or a knife on the mat between him and somebody else he's gonna kill that other guy
99 times out of 100 um so your ability to turn the corner and and use that type of training into
real life situations is is is incredible but if you think that like the worm guard is going to
help you in a fight against me if you're going to like barabolo me and be like all right i got this
stick move i'm going to use the donkey guard and you're like i'm like are you trying to have sex
with me like is this proposition um i'm gonna i'm afraid it's gonna be
violent it's gonna be short and it's gonna leave you with a really
sad face i was gonna ask the funniest image
because a baron bolo is like this little circular move i just picture somebody
trying to baron bolo somebody and just pop and he's looking at him like
what are you doing no or you stand up it's stomp on their
head that's what i
liked it yeah just like just like a soccer ball kick or uh the american history x um you know
where you put your mouth oh yeah yeah curb thing yeah like just one of those type of stumps why
somebody's trying to do a little break dance move underneath me i'm like that's really cute yeah you know when you when
you talk about guns like i was raised in a household the guns were not part of our culture
or whatever you know we were scared of guns um i shot a gun for the first time a i think a few
months back in a range with a buddy of mine who was like you're doing jujitsu you should also
learn about guns that gave me a lot of respect first was like, you're doing jujitsu. You should also learn about guns. That gave me a lot of respect. First off, honestly, for law enforcement, because the target
was like, I don't know, 10 feet away. I thought I'd be able to be pretty proficient. I missed that
shit like six out of eight times. Like I wasn't even on target. And then I was like, wow, like
I need to learn how to use the damn gun. I need to get a license and do that. But I feel like if
more people actually learned how to use weapons, we'd probably to get a license and and do that but i feel like if more people actually learned how to use weapons we'd probably be in a better place oddly enough
and learn to respect them yeah i really agree also but look at you man like you're smart
you're an athlete you're trained like those are a lot of things that, that really lend themselves. Like, I sound like I'm complimenting you before I kind of come back around and slap
you. But, um, even though you sucked really bad with a gun, um,
you have all of the things that you could be really good with a gun.
Imagine if you didn't have any of those things,
like you're dumb or you're fat, um,
or you're breathing really hard
because you're out of cardiovascular shape. And now you have to make a decision about
which person you're going to shoot, which one's the bad guy, which one's the good guy.
Like you're not even able to do any of those things because you don't have a chassis that,
that is going to put yourself into a position that can make that right decision.
I wish no legislator would be allowed to make a law on anything that they that they don't understand.
That'd be cool. Yeah.
When somebody is like about to make a gun law, they're like, all right, this fully automatic machine gun that has a high-capacity magazine.
And I was like, that's a revolver.
You're holding a revolver.
That is not a machine gun.
There is no magazine.
And the last person to use that was Dirty Harry.
Please stop talking, and no one should ever allow you to talk about guns again.
Everybody, all his aides, don't let him talk about guns and definitely don't let him write any laws about guns because he's freaking clueless.
But I don't know.
Hey, open invitation.
You can come and shoot with me anytime.
Oh, snap.
Yep.
Yep.
That would be wild.
You got to come to Texas because I'm not coming
there with my guns. That's fine. That's perfectly okay. We're in California. Tim, I would like to
kind of finish up with this, knowing that you're a sniper. I don't have any idea of like what that
looks like, but what I do know is that I see a lot of people kind of living their lives a little
bit behind and they struggle to manage their weight.
They struggle to get in enough exercise. They just basically, I see a lot of people struggling
with like motivation. And I think a lot of times what's behind a lot of this is just the fact that
they do fall behind and that they're trying to do so many things. These things are kind of viewed
to them as being difficult because they're trying to do so many different things at once.
They're not really kind of concentrating,
not getting themselves prepared.
I think if you're prepared that it,
it kind of eliminates motivation in some ways.
Could you talk to us a little bit about like what it's like to be a sniper and
what kind of preparation?
I mean,
there must be a ton of preparation that goes into that.
And there also must be a ton of patients involved in that process.
Yeah.
And you used a whole bunch of words that I'm going to summarize into one word.
You talked about patience, talked about hard work.
You talked about preparation.
All of that sounds like discipline.
So I don't think there's a real thing as motivation.
Like I don't, I don't get up and I'm like, man, I'm super motivated.
Like today, for instance, I was doing, um,
fart looks to warm up and I ran with my buddy Shane Steiner who is wicked
fast just so we can be super embarrassed.
We did a whole bunch of a hundred meter wind sprints.
And the last one after he had beat me by about 20, um, yards, I'm sorry, a hundred yard
wind sprints. Um, after he'd beat me about, uh, about 20 yards every time he gave me a 20 yard
head start and then he beat, um, at no point was I waking up this morning and be like, I'm so excited to go work out with my NFL fast friend that is going to
every single movement, make me look like an eater. And there was no motivation there, but there,
what there was, was discipline. I had a scheduled time to meet my scheduled workout partner with a
scheduled program. And then we workout partner with a scheduled program.
And then we were able to execute that program.
And that all happens because of discipline.
Like sure.
I could pick up like,
uh,
a Jocko Willink book or a,
or a Goggins book or,
or,
um,
I'm trying to like to think of motivational speaker people,
but I don't know.
Cause I think the original,
it's not
there's not motivation there is discipline and you there's no way that back to your to patience
that overnight you're going to watch ounces or percentages of body fat roll off your body man
if you're behind you're going to have to have patience and you're going to have to have belief, but most of all, you're going to have to have discipline. And
I would do anything to see a 1% improvement in any area of my life. Um,
I'm fighting for like, for my draw speed on my gun, I'm talking
moving decimals over two times before you get to see where an improvement is because i was able to
increase the efficiency of a drawstring or when i'm trying to add weight on my deadlift or shave
off time on my two mile run um there's not a one percent there's like a point zero zero something
percent improvement and i'm fighting for that little bit of improvement. But a normal person that's behind, that's like 20% body fat, that's 25% body fat.
You can see a 1% improvement every single week.
If you got out and walked, the first time you can walk around the block.
The next time you get to walk one mile.
And the time after that, maybe you walk and then you try to jog in between every other light pole,
or you see the mailbox and you try to fast walk to the next mailbox,
speed walk to the next mailbox, and then recover the one after that.
And then the next thing you know, you're running around the block and then you're running a mile
and then you're freaking Davidid goggins you know where
you're a disgusting obese 300 and something pound black guy and now you're an ultra marathon navy
seal it first started with this
love it. started crossfit that that bled into all these other things in my life and it's all because i was i got good at crossfit is there one of your disciplines that you're like this actually bled
into a lot of the discipline that i have in the rest of my life what do you have one like that
jiu-jitsu and fitness really um because you don't get good at them fast you don't you're going to be disciplined you're going to be strategic you're
going to have a plan if you're going to if you're going to if you're going to be good at any of
those you know jujitsu or fitness and those kind of complement each other obviously but um
if you take that same discipline of,
I'm going to get up at 6am and I'm going to go work out after that workout,
you're not going to want to eat a bunch of this. You know,
if you went and grabbed a bag of Cheetos and a beer after you did a bad-ass
workout at seven o'clock in the morning, um,
I'm going to tip my hat to you. Cause that's amazing.
Cause there's nobody that's going to do that. Right.
They're going to be like, man, I want a little bit of avocado maybe some egg whites and um i want a
good cup of coffee and i'm ready to hit the next thing they got this energy right they get to work
your boss looks at you and you're like what's up with you you're like yeah you just get back
from columbia you're acting a little uh extra energetic you're like no man i just feel good
what do we got going on today and then that thing bleeds into the next thing. The next day, well, first of all, you get home that night and you're like, Ooh, I am tired.
But then your wife walks in and you're like, okay, I'm not so tired anymore because the
testosterone is a little high because you exercise that day you ate clean. And then you did a bunch
of work. And now you're like, you're going to do that thing that dudes do where you're like,
Hey, I think you're a beautiful lady what's going on later and then
you have the best night of sleep that you've ever had you just had great sex you had a great workout
you had a successful accomplished day then you go to bed your head hits the pillow and you're out
and the next day you wake up gets a little bit better the workout was a little bit harder you
got a little bit more done at work then you came home and you got to spend a little bit harder. You got a little bit more done at work. Then you came home and you got to spend a little bit better time,
quality time with your kids.
Cause you had a little bit more energy.
Then your wife walked in the room again.
You're like,
Hey,
pretty lady.
She's like,
Hey,
what's going on with you?
I'll tell you what's going on.
And then like,
just got a little bit better.
Right.
And then you slept just a little bit better.
And the next day it gets a little bit better.
And the next day it gets a little bit better.
And the next thing you know, like shit has gotten real.
Sex is freaking amazing.
You're a beast in the gym.
Everybody at work is like, dude, this guy is rad.
I love working with him.
He has the best positive energy.
And like you're prepping your food and you're, you're packing out your meals.
And you're like, dude, next I'm going to go hunting because I not only want to like prep
my meals, I want to hunt my food, I want to harvest my own food,
I want real low-fetched, wild organic
because I know what that means.
Things get even better.
Then you've got to really start figuring out ways
to get any better because you didn't think you'd get better,
but then it's better now. That's what it's like.
Makes sense.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I really appreciate it. Where can people find it?
Where can people find out more about your books and some of your businesses?
Um, I'm on this side of freedom.
So y'all can come over here and hang out with me anytime. Um, uh,
keep dog response is, uh, kind of what I'm working with right now.
We're going to be launching a company,
a new private school here in Cedar park called Apogee Cedar park. Um,
and it's going to be a,
a kid,
a kid,
awesome school.
Um,
tell us more about that.
What is it?
What is that about?
And so I'm gonna start with a sad,
sad,
sad sob story where I was duct taped.
Well,
I first belted to a bench.
So I finished my homework and then that didn't work. So they belted me and then duct taped. Well, I was first belted to a bench. So I'd finished my homework and then that didn't work.
So they belted me and then duct taped me to my chair at school.
So I would do my work. Um, I'm old.
So at the time that's not really bad. Uh, but I was just a normal kid.
And the fact that you think that you can take a kid
and you can make him sit down for seven hours
and memorize a bunch of bull crap.
I don't want a kid to learn to know.
I want a kid to learn to be and to learn to do.
Those are totally different things.
To learn to know, who wants that?
I don't want that.
I don't want to just know stuff.
I want to know stuff so I can do things and i can be things and and the only way that that comes to the realization to fruition
is letting somebody do and let somebody be and that's what the school is it's it's allowing
kids to find their destiny to find their own path and And, um, and then most importantly, to have the tools and resources
to be able to see that to the end. And, um, there's no, there's no participation,
participation trophies in the school. There's no high fives for mediocre work.
They're their success and their struggle. And there's not parents being able to do homework
for kids. There's kids failing and that's okay.
We're,
we're,
we're getting back to,
uh,
that pendulum swinging back this way,
right?
Where we've been handing out trophy medals and,
and pat on backs for mediocre jobs.
Like we don't sell,
I can't celebrate mediocrity and,
um,
neither,
neither will these extraordinary kids that will understand what failure
tastes like and failure um
having stood in a ring watching my opponent have his hand raised and be called the world champion
failure tastes real bad you know i don't like the taste of failure one bit um but sometimes
you need to taste it so you can know um why you
strive so hard for success is this school a little bit like is the school a little bit like uh acton
academy with uh our friend mark that set us up yeah yeah yeah this this is this is apogee
and acton school in cedar park god um i don't have their uh trademark license agreements um counter executed by them so
i didn't want to throw acton out there and tell us that i could got it we're going to be an apogee
we're going to be an apogee school by acting cool yes absolutely awesome man congratulations on that
i think that's i think that's incredible my son is is actually going to that school actually starting tomorrow because I had him check it out a few weeks ago.
I'm kind of a big believer in not really forcing my kids to do too many different things.
My son's 16.
So I try to steer them down a certain path, and I've tried to just teach them.
And then as I taught them, I try to, uh,
I try to back off as much as I possibly can, I guess.
But in this particular instance, I went into my son's room and I said, Hey,
I want you to check out the school. I met this guy, Mark,
had him on my podcast and so forth. And so we went back and forth.
And my son was like, yeah, I'll think about it. And I said, okay, well,
I'm not going to leave the room until you say yes. Basically,
I want you to go and check it out for like two days. And he was like, okay.
And so kind of for the first time I shoved them into something a little bit
more than normal.
That's awesome. Matt Bordeaux,
who is an incredible American and a Patriots.
He has a bunch of schools in Northern California,
Afton schools,
and he and I are working on a project together specifically for young men,
not reinventing,
but rediscovering what it looks like to be a young man.
You know,
we have so many historical examples of these incredible young men climbing the
outside scaffolding of the Chrysler building and building, um,
the Golden Gate Bridge and plummeting to their death or digging the Panama or
the Suez Canal and fighting yellow fever and, um,
freaking alligators and crocodiles, um, or like the least of their worries,
but we're actually a word and
young men need to rediscover what it feels like to have passion and belief in something
um so matt burdeaux who is an a an incredible man and a mentor to so many young men. Um, he was one of the reasons I am opening in a cat and active Academy,
but we,
we have a separate project called the Apogee method.
That is specifically for,
for young men to rediscover manliness.
And,
uh,
we're that,
that'll be coming out next year.
Pretty cool.
I love it.
Who better to be a part of it than you?
This is awesome.
Yeah.
I need to go to that school.
Fuck.
I
will retake a whole bunch of blocks of instruction.
But yeah,
because you never
you can never be comfortable. Right.
Thanks again for your time. Really appreciate
it, man. Absolutely.
All right. Have a great rest of your day.
Yeah.
Fucking awesome, man. Wow. man absolutely all right have a great rest of your day yeah fucking awesome man wow yeah man that was that was fucking great yeah thanks shout out to our boy matt i think i said mark
i think he said matt i thought i might have messed it up
anyway uh yeah it was great that he uh set us up with uh tim today that was um a lot of great stuff
was said right there and you know i think it's interesting how you have somebody like that who
says things so simply right and then sometimes someone else will come along and say oh well he
you know he doesn't get it it's so much more complicated than that like the stuff that he
said about uh helping like inner city kids and stuff like that and that's what you usually hear you usually hear people say
you know i can't really be they can't really be done that way and you hear that all the time and
i think at the moment it seems like all that we do a lot of times within those situations is we
just kind of hope and pray for that uh those children and those people in those situations that they just run
into like a mentor or someone to,
you know,
spark a lot of the movies that you see where they have kind of a storybook
ending.
It's like that.
It's like the person that happens to run into a teacher or a coach that
really cares about the kid.
And then the kid excels and he's able,
but not everyone runs into all that. Yeah. fortunate enough to uh run into people like that so there
needs to be uh something else in place to assist and and honestly man like when he started going
into that like those types of conversations are it's it's very very very uncomfortable for for
individuals to be like yeah that is a problem To take that responsibility and say, yeah, we actually, we need to work on that. Because the narrative right now, the easiest way to do that is to say, hey, there are all these cops in this area are the cause of the problems, or the government that caused this and this and this. That's why there are these problems here. But it's, it is a, he,
he simplified a lot of it.
And if you just look at that,
like there are a lot of little nitty gritty things that,
you know,
you can try and argue with there,
but in essence,
he's pretty correct there.
You know,
it,
it's just,
it's so uncomfortable to speak about those things and nobody wants to do it
because there's going to
be outrage people in those communities are going to be pissed off and it's it
it's something that i i hope we can find a way to move in that direction but it's like there's
an overcorrection going on where we're in one direction and it's going to take a lot of
shit to bring us back right yeah he said a lot of great a lot of great stuff and um
i really love the fact that he was you know talking about kind of at the end there when he was
just or throughout the whole podcast really he's just talking about taking responsibility
that's the biggest thing just like shoulder it you know and then some of the other stuff that
he was talking about with just discipline um it's just, man, it's like those things are so important.
You just can't go on without, you know, having to start to develop some sort of discipline,
you know, and to shoulder responsibility and to say, you know what?
A lot of these situations are my fault.
Some things are out of your control.
Clearly, you can't control who your parents are.
You can't control what color you are. you can't control where you're born you know there's a lot of things that you can't
control but there's a lot of shit that you can that you have at least uh some decent control over
yeah for a lot of for a lot of people that just does come down to their decisions you know the
decisions that they make um me and my friend were having a conversation
about this uh socially in terms of like people in different types of communities and and i'm
usually on one side where i'm just like yeah okay everybody does have a different starting point
everybody has advantages and disadvantages but like we are in america like it's great that we're
here in a place where there is mobility.
If you can make the right decisions, you know, and yeah, it's more complicated than that.
But at the end of the day, it's like it's still better than being somewhere else, you know.
So a lot of times people don't even know of the hardship that people have faced.
You know, someone's like somebody be like at the end of their life, like your grandfather, your great grandfather, somebody something like that.
Someone say, yeah, you know, he fought in the war and he did this, this and this.
And you're like, oh, I never heard him say anything about it.
It's because he didn't care.
It's because he did like not that he didn't care.
It's just that he didn't want to sit around and complain about it or say, hey, this is a disadvantage that I had because I got injured doing this or whatever.
They just kind of just keep on going on.
They figure out a way to put one foot in front of the other. They take responsibility for the situations that they were in and they just do the best
they can with it.
I think ultimately, I think ultimately people are trying to do the best they can in the
circumstances that they're in, but they tend to blame it on other people.
And I think that's where we can really get in trouble.
So I was thinking about the other day, though, is I think, you know, you know, just learning
tiny bit of stuff about like the stock market more recently and knowing that the stock market
always advances.
So it might go up and it might go down.
But over the course of like 10 years, it pretty much trends upward.
And then, you know, the more decades that go by it trends upward even more and i think the united states does that too
i think the united states continues to get better and better i think i think all things do i think
you know just about um but i think the united states in particular like yeah shit comes and
goes and you heard about uh tim mentioning our history and
some of the things that have happened in our past and how he didn't feel that this election was the
most important election and i would have to agree with that we've talked about this on this show
before how there's been other situations and circumstances that have been uh maybe could be
viewed as being worse or more impactful than what is going on at the moment.
But in general, things are going to continue to always get better.
And while I didn't vote for the person that it looks like is becoming president, I'm going to support it.
I'm going to back it. And I'm just going to say, hey, you know what? That's great.
Maybe some of the people that did vote for Biden will feel better and maybe they'll get some of the things that they want and maybe it will just lead us to something better.
Maybe it shows us more things that we don't want.
I don't know.
But I always thought that.
President Trump being in office was going to disrupt things.
And kind of drop a giant bomb on the United States in some way and really just kind of stir things up a little bit or not even a little bit, a lot of it.
But I think that stirring, I think that stirring of the pot is good.
And I think that people will look back on his presidency, not necessarily that he was a great president, but that he kind of changed.
He changed a lot of the groundwork forever.
And I could be for better or for worse.
I'm not sure. Time will kind of changed, he changed a lot of the groundwork forever. And I, you know, could be for better or for worse. I'm not sure.
Time will kind of determine that,
but it may have just showed people what they don't want.
Because since the time I was a kid,
they've always talked about having somebody that was like a gunslinger.
They always talked about having someone that really shot from the hip and just
kind of let loose.
And then they finally got someone to do that.
And everyone's like,
well,
we didn't mean like that. Yeah, this is is too much we didn't mean that like that crazy but i think in the end it will
lead to better things and i'm i'm excited to see what will happen in the next couple months well i
mean he did do that like it's like it's like a bunch of people got a an enemy that they could
like because apparently people from my generation this is the highest voter turnout for under i don't know 30 something that's awesome that is a great
thing like more people are being involved in our democracy now because thank have a common enemy
thank him thank him fucking thank him do a post right now put tweet it out oh my god and and the
thing is is like those people that are involved now, especially with seeing how important this vote was, apparently they're going to probably a lot of them are going to continue being involved in future elections and smaller elections that are happening.
Let's like that's probably something that will be maintained for a good amount of time.
So, so, Andrew, you OK, buddy?
I'm struggling over here.
You sick and I'm feeling good so midway through the podcast i had to run out and it was really bad so yeah i stayed quiet
the whole time i blame in sema i blame the amount of coffee i had without eating actual food
and then i tried like you saw me trying to eat that big old salad i'm like oh i don't feel good
i gotta get it all in here but you're not doing too bad. Otherwise, just some,
just some poop poop stories going on over there.
I wish it was poop.
Now I was puking.
Oh man.
Really?
It's not the first time that I've done that on the podcast too.
That's what's not cool.
Well,
it's,
it's fine.
You got to do what you got to do.
You made it through.
Yeah.
Well, I saw you closing your eyes a lot over there and like,
I don't know if you're like counting or what you were doing,
but I was like,
man,
I was like,
he's fucking hurting.
I tried to stay low so you guys couldn't see me, but I would look up because I'm listening to Tim speak.
I have so many notes written down here that are starred.
When I star something, that means I'm usually going to make it into a clip later.
But I look up because he's hand-holding the phone, and I just get nothing but motion sickness. I'm like, sickness i'm like oh yeah in the beginning when you're moving around so much yeah and i'm just bummed
because like dude i i wanted to jump in on a couple of those uh a couple of those different
topics but like i'm like two three steps behind you guys right now so i'm like ah but yeah so
apologies for that guys but that's why we do this together
buddy we can all pick each other up for sure down a little bit appreciate it yeah tim kennedy's
savage what do you guys think about what i i feel like some people might get a little upset at what
he was saying with the um like the korean family he's like now imagine i'm just saying like now
imagine a family in baltimore know, does the same thing.
Yeah.
I'm like, holy shit.
Like, he's absolutely right.
This is part of it was in Bruce Lee's documentary.
And I forgot why they I'm trying to think back to why they went that route.
I think they were just talking about his upbringing and they were talking about and Bruce Lee is not Korean.
I don't believe I believe is Chinese.
I could be getting this all wrong.
But the main point is, is that they talked about different ethnicities and they talked about his culture.
And they talked about what his culture did when they came to this country and what they victims of racism, which you can view,
there could be different degrees of racism depending on your color and
depending on the way that you look.
But despite them having their own hurdles with racism,
they said,
you know what?
We're just going to fucking outwork everybody that we're going to figure
out a way.
And again,
the circumstances are way different and the situations are way different for
every ethnicity.
And then also I think with the Chinese culture, they may have had more of they might have had to two parent family home in more cases than maybe the black family homes.
I'm not sure.
But it was it was something of that nature.
And I thought to myself, wow, that's that's really fucking cool.
And so what he's saying is why not adopt some of that method, and maybe some of that is not necessarily great either because it could be too much, but adopt some of those principles and bring that into that culture.
Yeah.
No, it really does all start with the family.
I mean, especially like the biggest, one of the biggest factors is having a two-family home.
start with the family i mean especially like the biggest one of the biggest factors is having a two-family home you know when you when you're only being raised by a mother right in most cases it's
a mother or in some cases just a father there's statistically there are a lot there are a lot of
things that make that go wrong not saying that it's not possible to be successful after that
i know many individuals who have been in single family homes including myself that have turned
out fine but having two parents
in the house is one of the biggest things. I think also to some families, um, they'll come
together more. So sometimes it might be a single family home, but you know, grandpa might step in
or grandma might step in. So, you know, somebody else kind of comes around a little bit more to,
you know, uh, pick up the slack, but it's fucking hard raising it's hard raising kids so
um not an easy thing to figure out but i thought he presented some really um i hope that in some
way i hope he does get involved in politics yeah like maybe he's not a politician but i hope that
he like an advisor or something maybe yes something like it just it seems like there's a lot of people
that are really gifted that have a lot of great information dr dr bo hightower comes to mind where that guy
was just killing shit on our show quite possibly i mean for whatever an iq test is worth i think
that he might have been the smartest person via like that type of testing that we've ever had on
the show i mean he's just like, it's insane. Yeah.
His memory, the history that he knew.
I mean, it was like, it didn't even make any sense.
We were all like, oh, I mean, he was unbelievable.
But somebody like that, you ask him if they're going to be a politician.
He's like, no, I'd get divorced.
Yeah. You know, my wife, you know, doesn't want me to have that responsibility.
So can't do it.
And there's a lot of people that don't want to,
you know, play that game and be in that position because of, uh, what it could do. Even my own son
who, who brings up a lot of political stuff all the time has great interest in it. I, you know,
I asked him if he would ever think about it. He's like, no, that would just make me a politician.
He's like, I don't want to do that. And so a lot of people don't want, don't want the job,
but hopefully, you know, as we continue to move forward, hopefully more people will want to get involved.
Maybe those New Jersey gym owners and people like that, where they're like, I think those guys are recognizing that they do have a really powerful voice and a really powerful story.
And maybe they'll take on a position of some sort to help make a better
changes.
Yeah.
It's,
it's really funny.
It's like the people that like,
even I think people have asked Jocko about that too.
He's like,
no,
it's just like having somebody like that who wouldn't hopefully ideally
wouldn't eat the political BS that those are the types of people that we
want there. Cause I bet you that Jockcko willink will become a politician of some sort so
um i think that's what happened with jesse ventura he kept being like no like i i don't think so and
then they're like no you're doing it like you would be awesome and he just kind of kept going
with it yeah even uh rogan you know he gets asked all the time. He's like,
F that.
He's like,
I have no aspiration to do that.
He's like,
heck no.
It really puts your life under a microscope.
But like,
honestly,
a lot of those people,
they'd be backed up so quickly just because of the power that they have behind their social
media.
And then the,
the types of people that are like figure,
figure Jocko did that,
right?
Yeah.
Immediately.
Rogan,
Tim,
all these people are going to back him up, including all of their
audiences.
That'd be kind of crazy.
Would be great to hear someone, uh, just to hear someone talk as much as some of those
guys do, I think would be, you know, makes it more, more interesting.
I think, you know, Trump or Biden or some of those guys, I mean, they do talk a lot.
Trump talks a lot, but he's not really really he's not really answering other people's questions.
Yeah. He's just talking, which is way different.
It's way different. Hey, you know, how did you raise your kids?
You know, like you're multi you're a multibillionaire.
You're building high rises in New York City.
Like how like how are you around for your kids? Or ask him about his divorce.
Or like, you know,
have we ever really seen him
answer questions about that
kind of stuff on the fly,
fucking live?
You know what I mean? And I'm sure he would do
well. And I'm sure that he would,
he's great at talking,
right? So I'm sure he would do well. But it would just
be interesting to,
to hear someone talking that way. Just real authentic.
Like the Kanye interview,
like at the,
and the first half an hour,
I didn't,
I didn't like it.
I was like,
I'm like,
man,
is this,
is Rogan going to ever step in and like,
you know,
really,
uh,
I guess add some criticism to some of the stuff he's saying,
but I thought Rogan played it really well because once he let him go like
that,
then he fucking really opened up and then they had a conversation back and
forth.
And it was,
it was amazing.
It's actually really,
really good.
At first I was like,
this is the worst interview I ever heard.
It was just going,
going,
going,
going.
But I think in the end it went great.
And I learned a lot about him and I like him a lot more than I,
I mean,
I always liked him anyway,
but I had a lot more respect for him afterwards. You get to how his mind works and you get to see um what he's for
what he's against it was awesome yeah it was cool that's it's really funny though uh because i told
you we were having i was having this conversation with andrew on like a few days after that interview
came out maybe it was two days after when we all met up and it's like is the same sentiment as
another homie is mine like when they first started listening to it they were pissed i actually liked
that i like that like joe wasn't really interjecting too much because i'm like you really did get to
see he's giving the microphone man yeah he got to go all over the place and come back it was it was
it showed you a lot about who he was it showed you a lot about joe rogan too because joe rogan
doesn't need to be all up somebody's ass because the show ain't about him.
The show's about other people.
Yeah.
And so he just let him fucking go.
And then Kanye talked about that.
He's like, you're not the guy in high school who needs attention.
You're going to be barking at me the second that this conversation starts. And he, he feels like that for most reporters when they talk to him,
that they are people that never felt popular.
They never felt liked in school and that they're,
you know,
asking him like questions from kind of a defensive side before the
conversation even ever really gets rolling.
Yeah.
Like,
how are you going to talk about,
you know,
making things more economical for people when your shoes are 300 bucks, you like and it's it's like well you're not even getting to
know the guy at all like you know get into a conversation first before you go and you know
start coming at them all weird you know i think that those types of conversations like you just
mentioned uh would show us i think that's why a lot of politicians are actually scared of doing
stuff like that like uh bernie sanders was on the interview joe and i mean bernie sanders was a really likable guy right it was a great interview
he just flat out seemed like a nice person yeah yeah right i mean even with kanye just seemed like
a nice dude you know for for whatever you know i think when you when you have a conversation with
somebody like that i mean it doesn't tell you everything about them, but it tells you a lot.
It tells you a lot.
The way they answer the questions, whether they get real defensive.
Kanye, a couple times, he almost kind of went negative on a couple things, and he stopped himself.
And I like that a lot.
I'm like, this guy's just not that negative.
He's just not going to get... He kind of went a little sideways a couple times on a couple things even just talking about the music industry and some stuff like that
and then he was like no I'm not
I'm not I'm not going to sidetrack this interview
I'm going to keep everything as positive as I can and he kept
going that direction I'm like this is fucking great
this is cool yeah I still haven't
gotten past the half an
hour you know where it was like
I was like oh man this is rough
it was just because that current
that commute didn't get past that.
So I still have to go back.
Got to keep commuting, bro.
Keep on trucking.
Take us on out of here, Andrew, and don't barf everywhere.
I'll do my best.
I almost got up again, but I'll fight through it.
Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode.
Huge shout out and thank you to Tim Kennedy.
That was an amazing conversation.
So thank you.
Please make sure you guys are following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram
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Strength is never a weakness.
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Catch y'all later.