Harsh Truths From A Special Forces Master Sergeant - Tim Kennedy (4K)

Tim Kennedy is a Special Forces master sergeant, former professional UFC fighter, and an author. There's a lot of doomerism in the world. Assumptions that things are terrible and they're never going to get better. I don't agree, and neither does Tim. Expect to learn how we can fix the American military’s recruitment problem, Tim’s first hand experience of what’s really going on at the southern border, the wild stories of unknown military heroes that we should know more about, how Tim plans to fix the current education system, the state of veteran mental health, the best preparation routine every tourist needs to know before travelling abroad and much more… - 00:00 77% of Young People Are Unfit for the Military 06:02 The Important Role of Wise Grandparents 09:22 Young People’s Views on Conscription 17:08 The Armed Forces Needs New Messaging 21:20 Is Too Much Freedom Making Us Weak? 27:08 Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare 31:25 The State of the US/Mexico Border 41:30 Strategies for Solving the Immigration Crisis 47:53 The Reality of Being in an Armed Conflict 59:29 Men Who Couldn’t Bring Themselves to Shoot in War 1:04:07 A Soldier Tim Wishes Everyone Knew About 1:13:43 When Tim Ran Out of Ammo in a Gun Fight 1:16:24 How Do You Rest During a 5-Day Conflict? 1:21:27 Why Terrorists Use Civilians as Body Shields 1:28:25 What Does it Feel Like to Be Shot? 1:33:54 How Tim’s Experiences Have Shaped Him 1:40:03 Common Recurring Memories of Conflict 1:47:49 The Current State of Veteran Mental Health 1:59:08 What People Suffering With Trauma Need to Hear 2:07:32 Why Smart Guns Are Lame 2:11:02 The Problems Facing Education in America 2:28:06 Greatest Principles for Raising Kids 2:34:41 Why Tim Thought Israel/Palestine Would Have Been Much Worse 2:38:11 Thoughts on Vivek Ramaswamy & RFK Jr 2:42:50 How Much of Political Division is Stoked By External Actors? 2:48:34 Where to Find Tim Get 30% off your first subscription order at https://HVMN.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a 20% off all Momentous orders and up to 32% off new customer subscriptions at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Seventy seven percent of US seventeen to twenty four year olds could not join the military. The American Department of Defense recently did an analysis of seventeen to twenty four year olds and found that seventy seven percent were unqualified to serve in the military, due mostly to obesity, drug abuse, physical health, or mental health. Almost half were disqualified for more than one of those reasons.

• 0:20Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. This is, um, when we talk about strategic level issues like national security problems. Anybody looking at that number? From, from the SEAL teams to the Green Berets to Ranger, those all are, those select their populations from a larger general population from Combat Arms. Combat Arms gets their people from this larger population of people. So like, as the, as the, the arrowhead gets a little bit more narrow, the availability of people to fund these small groups, to these middle sized groups, to these potentially larger groups are just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. This is, um, we're gonna lose to everybody if this trend continues.

• 1:06Tim Kennedy?

  We just can't, we can't win wars with the bodies that we have.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  Because the catchment area of the normal people feeds into the catchment area of the normal soldiers, feeds into the catchment area of the semi elite, into the absolute elite, and if the bottom rung of the ladder, which is population is bad, that trickles all the way up to the very top.

• 1:23Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the Department of Defense is always, um, a parallel. It, it's just a reflection of what society is at a large. Right? When you look at society at large right now, they are just that. They are very large. They're obese, they're gelatinous blobs of broken minds. Um, they don't know if they're a boy or a girl. They definitely have never jumped out of a tree before. So when they go to airborne school and they land on a static line jump and they break both their legs, it's because they've never done it before. You know, you and I grew up chasing kids and like smacking each other with sticks, you know, and this generation hasn't done that. So they're just weaker in every form of the word. I know every generation says this, but

• 2:04Tim Kennedy?

  right now statistically, we've never had a data point to point to, to show like that it has ever been this bad. So now I know like the, the World War II guys were like, ah.

• 2:16Tim Kennedy?

  Those Vietnam guys are a bunch of pussies, you know, and the Vietnam guys are like, oh, man, those GWOT guys are a bunch of pussies. And the GWOT guys are like, man, all these millennials and Gen Z's are a bunch of like, but they really are. But this is a real big problem, and we don't know how to fix it.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  How much do you lay at the feet of the population with this? Because lots of people probably would like to be fitter if they knew what that would feel like. They would like to have better mental health if they knew what that would feel like they would. But they weren't aware, they weren't given the tools, there are distractions and environmental issues, technology, screens, social media, porn, video games, all of these things are relatively new inventions that didn't have to be contended with by World War II or Vietnam or even early millennials. So how, how do you think about it sort of individual agency versus environmental stimulus and restrictions and stuff?

• 3:06Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I think it's a combination of both, right? I don't think you could point to a specific thing and be like, this is the thing that's causing the biggest problem. You know, from social media to pornography to, you know, iPad, screen time, diet, like the food that we're eating right now is poison. Literally, the things that are in our food is illegal in most other countries, but it's legal here. They're not allowed to export it. You know, if you go to Japan or you go to Italy, a bunch of American foods aren't even allowed to be imported there because they know the things that that are in them are so disgusting. There's a, there's a hilarious video meme of these Italian moms comparing American pasta to the pasta that they make. And they could not be more dissimilar. They're like, this is not pasta. Like, we don't know what these ingredients are, but this is not

• 3:51Tim Kennedy?

  like, we use flour and a little bit of salt, you know, and we throw some eggs in there and, and we, and we, and then here's the process of us making pasta. And like, this is poison. So it's, I think it's a combination of a whole bunch of things. And then the society culture problem is another gigantic piece. We have

• 4:13Tim Kennedy?

  The culture of being an American has changed in the past 30 years in a really negative way. You know, where it used to be family first, you know, like the nuclear family was was the cornerstone of American society. Like there was the motivating, the motivations for a male figure in the household. Like he's going to be a provider, he's going to be a protector, he's going to preserve his family, you know, like he's obviously going to be sex driven. So he's like trying to be a masculine person in the household. Since on the opposite end of that spectrum, the woman would would embrace being feminine. You know, the kids respected the parents. If you look at pop culture right now, like Chris, could you point to a single television show that paints a parent in a positive light?

• 5:00Tim Kennedy?

  I mean, think of every single show on Netflix, Disney, Amazon, the longest running show currently.

• 5:07Chris Williamson?

  It's all flawed, even the heroes in superhero movies are it's Suicide Squad. Right? It's a Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds. No one can just be, I mean, the closest thing that we got was Top Gun, I guess. That was it.

• 5:21Tim Kennedy?

  And he's, he's, he's broken, but that's definitely an anomaly. Like that's on the outside of the average, that's the outliers. You look at Homer, like the longest running cartoon TV series right now. When you go into his brain, he's motivated by three things. Beer, donuts and cluelessness. You know, he's the idiot in the whole entire family. And, you know, from Modern Family to.

• 5:48Chris Williamson?

  Family Guy.

• 5:49Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, every single one of them, like the parent figure is the most disgusting, despicable person there. So of course that's going to naturally be eroding the view of this generational passing of information. That generational gap from grandparents to children.

• 6:05Tim Kennedy?

  Used to be very commonplace, right? Like I learned how to magnetize a screwdriver. I learned how to charge a battery. I learned like the tricks and the trades of like how to hold a hammer and how one hammer was different than a different hammer and that hammer was specific to a job. And, you know, while my dad could have taught me that, it was actually my grandpa that did that. And I was able to receive that easier from my grandpa than it was my own father. And that's how it has been for hundreds of years until now. Now you see no

• 6:36Tim Kennedy?

  kind of cross pollination of ideas from one generation to two generations ago, from like the grandparents to the grandchild. And that's tragic. There's a huge loss of information there.

• 6:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, the desire for people to move out at age 16 or 18 or 20 and be in a different country. I mean, I say this as someone who is in a different country, but pan-generational living in some commune-style, small village would have been the way that everything was done. Do you know what the grandmother hypothesis is? It's one of the reasons or the evolutionary justifications for why women go through menopause?

• 7:10Tim Kennedy?

  No.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Right. So there's a question to be asked. Most animals aren't able to continue to reproduce while they're, their reproduction doesn't stop while they're still alive. Their capacity to reproduce doesn't, it ceases at the same time that they die typically. Whereas for humans, you have this weird period, you know, 40s for women, 40s to 50s where they're still about. So you'd think, well, they're a drain on resources and they're no longer contributing any more kin. So what are they here for? And the argument is that human child rearing is so complex and allo parenting needs to be done, which is the shared parenting of kids from mothers to grandmothers to aunties and close friends, that what you actually need is a grandmother

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  in that sort of matriarch, head of the household position, who is able to deal with the interpersonal, political backbiting of, you know, 10 women below her that are part of her family and telling them what to do and helping to raise the children and coordinating stuff like that. So that's a very important role whilst not still continuing to produce children. So it's like, it's so important to the way that humans develop, that it's literally built into female biology.

• 8:19Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  That's how important it is.

• 8:20Tim Kennedy?

  You see it culturally, you know, if you go to Native American tribes, when a girl is having her first period, the grandmother would take that child away and

• 8:31Tim Kennedy?

  Teach her all of like, okay, this is how you take care of yourself. This is during this period of, you know, five to seven days. You're going to be drinking extra water, you know, like this is, this is how you clean yourself. And you go down to South America, a bunch of cultures down there. They're actually like traditional tribal periods where that granddaughter would go to the grandmother and she would spend a week or two weeks with this grandmother, learning all of the, the birds and bees of life. And the, that transfer of knowledge about how to raise a child, about how to take care of their body, about what this cycle looks like. Like what is going on in America where now we look at this, the prior generation as these old, broken idiots that you can just walk up to on the street in, in New York and slam him in the face, which we see all the time.

• 9:17Tim Kennedy?

  It's, it's been an erosion of respect of these other generations.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  There's a, an interesting trend. I found this article about conscription for Gen Z and some of the feedback that Gen Z gave about that. "I'm going to war for Rishi Sunak. Give your head a wobble. I've got things to do," said 23-year-old TikToker Charlie Malo in a widely shared video she posted on a platform over the weekend. "I'm gay," she continued. "I'm northern and I will play those cards." 26-year-old content creator I.A.M.A.P. uploaded a similar video. "I'm sitting here naked, eating a bowl of yogurt," she begins, "reading about how we might have to go to war. They want to send me, a little girl, to the front line. The army is simply no longer seen as a moral endeavor. As a 24-year-old, the last war in my living memory was not a barnstorming defeat of the Nazis, but rather a series of wars and invasions in the Middle East, exposed as failures and widely thought to be based on lies.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  The belief held by older generations that the British Army is solely a force for good in the world does not stand up anymore. As Gen Z would put it, the military propaganda is not propaganda-ing."

• 10:17Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. The, um, one, what an entitled little pricks. How, how sad is that? There, there, there should be a yearning to serve. I, I've found nothing more meaningful in my life than finding opportunities to do good to somebody or for something that is bigger or better than myself. And I've, as a, as an individual, have found growth in those, in those times, more so than anything else in life.

• 10:47Tim Kennedy?

  But a whole bunch of people right now don't want to serve anyone but themselves. They want to build a brand, you know, they want food delivered to their door. It's just so short sighted in realizing that sometimes it takes time to develop who you are as a person and that development comes from struggle and failure and service. On the military front, you don't think that those young men and women coming out of the Great Depression had things to do when they learned that Nazis were flooding across the borders throughout Europe? You know, you don't think that during the Korean War, as America has the largest economic

• 11:28Tim Kennedy?

  boom in history, in the history of our species, that those, that Americans didn't have something to do besides fight communism in a land that most people had never even heard of before? You know, go to Vietnam, you know, the ones that were then conscripted, the draft occurs and hundreds of thousands of people had no choice but to go serve their country. You don't think they had better things to do as, as like the Great Awakening of, of cultures happened in the 60s and 70s?

• 12:00Tim Kennedy?

  You know, we're, we're fighting for civil rights, we're fighting for the rights of women, we're fighting for transparency within the government, you know, we, we lose one of the greatest presidents our country's ever had. Like, all of this is in real tough times, but I get that you want to sit there naked and eat your yogurt. But you think that that's more important than what was happening previously? Like, they didn't have other things to do? It's, it's, it's so pathetic and childish. I just look at it like a petulant child.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  How would you fix, or how do you think about fixing the culture and the populace's perspective of the armed forces and service?

• 12:37Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I think it's a communication problem on Department of Defense side. I think we failed to clearly show what we do. You know, like, people look at my resume and be like, man, that guy, all he's done is adult life has gone overseas and killed. That's the furthest thing from the truth. There have been periods where I had to do that to, to create stability and security within a nation, but why? Why were we doing that? It was to... Give that place an opportunity to exist where democracy could have a foothold where a hook could be set and that place had a chance to live. The better, the more secure and the more stable a world has, a country like ours that is built off capitalism, has more countries to do commerce with.

• 13:22Tim Kennedy?

  But on the human, on the human rights side of it, with stability and security comes opportunity. Opportunity for young girls to learn how to read, for young men to find occupations besides working within terrorism or slinging, slinging some form of human suffering. And we have to communicate to that gay girl eating yogurt naked on her couch. What does it look like to serve? And I think they'd be blown away to realize that we go to the, some of the most downtrodden cultures on the planet and give them a chance. We give them opportunity. We create something that they've never had in their, like if you were born in America, you won the lottery. You know, like you're, you're in the safest, richest planet, place on the planet to have

• 14:07Tim Kennedy?

  ever existed. Like you look one continent to our east, slightly south, and you can't go to a country that doesn't have, when I say like third world poor, I'm not talking like favelas in Brazil. I'm talking like they're one meal away from starving to death. And starving to death, when we say, man, I'm so hungry, I'm starving. Starving to death means like you are so malnourished that if you even eat a meal, it might kill you because your body can't process the calories that are in it.

• 14:37Tim Kennedy?

  They've never seen suffering and, and human desperation like we see all over the world. And we get to go to that place and give them a chance. It's like, how do you tell a girl that's sitting there on Tik Tok? I don't know.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  I think the presumption, what it sounds like the presumption is, is this is, you know, colonial powers, it's something to do with oil, this is, you know, the military industrial complex trying to take over some country. It doesn't sound like aid, it doesn't sound like liberation, it doesn't sound like assistance, or medicine, or healthcare, or any of those things. What it sounds like is just more colonialism going on, white people invading brown people. That's what war is.

• 15:24Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Colonialism has existed for forever. And some of the greatest things to happen to some countries were them being conquered, and then settled, and then commerce occurs, and then for the first time, that country isn't tribally just killing each other. It's really easy to like, label any form of expansion of a country, or an idea, or a culture negatively. There are cultures that are better than other cultures. I know we're supposed to be like super inclusive. I could list a couple dozen cultures that are so disgusting and so evil, where, you know, a 67 year old man can have five, 10 wives, and guess what, those wives

• 16:09Tim Kennedy?

  are little girls. As soon as they have their first period, they're eligible to be sold and married to this dude. You please tell me that it would not be better for Britain, or for America, or for Mexico, to go over and settle that country. It would be 100% better, and the people there would be better off for it. But like, oh, we have to appreciate all these cultures, we definitely don't, we like, assume any of these. No, there are better cultures. And the world would be better off, and it'd be a more peaceful place. Not, not everybody has to be westernized, that's not what I'm saying. But there are evil ideas, and there are evil religions, and there are evil cultures. And man, I just wish that, but there are also shared values. You know, there are norms that are beautiful, that

• 16:53Tim Kennedy?

  transcend cultures, and transcend countries, and transcend borders. And those ideals like murder is wrong, rape is wrong. Those ideas are not wrong in some cultures. Well, those cultures are evil.

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what needs to happen from a messaging perspective. It certainly needs to maybe highlight at least two things that I can think of, one being

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  Honor in making a bad place better. And the second one being the sort of heroism and sense of purpose and meaning that people who do that get, because it seems strange that an entire culture, an entire generation can talk about meaninglessness, purposelessness, hopelessness, you know, 60% of teenage girls say that they have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness. I think 30% of girls in that same age bracket have seriously considered taking their own lives. If that's the case, surely one of the things that a lot of people in the armed forces say is the most meaningful thing, probably maybe except family, that they do, well, that seems

• 17:59Chris Williamson?

  like a pretty good antidote to me. But I guess what it sounds like, what it looks like to people who haven't had the messaging put across in the right way is, oh, this is just hard things for bad ends.

• 18:17Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. I don't think there's anything more dangerous than a young man or woman without purpose. There's, there's nothing that will destroy and erode that person's future than their lack of purpose. There's also nothing more beautiful, and I'll just talk to young men specifically, than a young man with purpose. You know, like during the Holocaust, when those rumors started coming across the Atlantic, that Jews were being put on trains and taken to no one knows where, but nobody sees them again. But we see towers of smoke coming out of these places like Auschwitz. And young men are like, no, fuck

• 18:58Tim Kennedy?

  no. Yeah, I'll, I'll storm beaches, I'll climb cliffs, I'll jump out of airplanes for the first time behind enemy lines with equipment that's never been used before in a, in a, in a form of warfare that's never been tried, because this is my purpose, is to do good. Where is that? We see on the opposite end of that spectrum, young men without purpose, that then get angry and get bitter and they start having resentment against specific groups and people, whether it's the color of their skin or their religion. And then they walk into a school or a church or a movie theater and they start hurting people. That's a broken young man without purpose.

• 19:39Tim Kennedy?

  But a man with purpose, man, you know, he's gonna, he's gonna figure out that you can fly a plane off this little tiny island in North Carolina, you know, he's gonna figure out that he can step off this ladder and jump into almost weightlessness on a surface of a moon that nobody stepped on before. Like, that's purpose. What was the purpose? We're in an arms race against the Russians. The space race was an arms race, but that was purpose. It was an idea that we can do something significant to improve America.

• 20:10Tim Kennedy?

  Fill yourself with something more important than yourself and pour everything that you are into it and the, and that's purpose. And with that, like, like, I'm filled with purpose and I'm filled with joy and I'm filled with hope and I'm filled with love and I'm filled with grace, but all of that is a byproduct of purpose. Like, you can't be sitting there like, I'm depressed, I'm thinking about suicide, you know, like I'm feeling hopeless. I could give, I could write a thousand different ideas that you could, that you could dedicate your life to and it would be a life worth lived, living. Like, go, go and do great things.

• 20:48Chris Williamson?

  A lot of that's from service, it seems.

• 20:50Tim Kennedy?

  Exactly.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  But the point is that in the modern culture, get that thing inside of you. Go on.

• 20:56Tim Kennedy?

  Okay.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  Put it in.

• 20:57Tim Kennedy?

  You sure you want this?

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 20:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, come on. I know I'm always like, hard already and they're like, do you want me to do, I'm gonna give this guy

• 21:03Chris Williamson?

  Don't say you're hard already. That's, I mean.

• 21:05Tim Kennedy?

  Not like figuratively, I'm not, but also literally, I meant.

• 21:12Tim Kennedy?

  That's good.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  That'll do.

• 21:13Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  That's what we want. You'll be dialed in now. Oh, yeah. Feel that coursing through your veins. Um, so we have a culture which is very individuated, very individualized. Um, people are atomized from their family, from their culture, from their history, uh, and from each other as well. If you're living in, if you're. Fucking citizen number 233,000, living in your pod, bleep bleeping away. That shared sense of purpose, it doesn't surprise me that that's not the case. But you look to other cultures that are competitors. You know, this Gwyneth Boghul, one of my friends, wrote an amazing article about TikTok. And the spinach talk equivalent that they have in China is showing people being proud of their country

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  and people doing cool science stuff and people building technology and young people.

• 22:00Tim Kennedy?

  Pornography bad, sleep good, family good.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, video games, have you seen when they can play video games in China? Yeah, it's between, I think, 7pm and 9pm, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

• 22:10Tim Kennedy?

  Four days a week, two hours a day.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Tim Kennedy?

  That's it.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  And it's outside of those times, it's just not on. It's like you can't, you know, it's like the fucking someone's unplugged the power. That the ultimate parent. It's, it's wild and thinking, okay, is this, is what we have now with the degrees of freedom? You're someone that very much, you know, wants people to have freedom and has fought for it a lot.

• 22:34Tim Kennedy?

  I like that freedom stuff.

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  But that multiplicity of options and lack of constraint just causes people to sort of race to the bottom of the pleasure stem, right? So you and this, there's a bit of a, there's a paradox going on here that some of the authoritarian dictatorial

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  tendencies are actually enabling the population in some ways to be better.

• 22:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I, I will never say that the government is a solution for anything. If we think that it would be a better idea, solution to give the government authority to go into households and say how much time they should be on screens or who they should call. Like that goes against every ounce of I, what I, what I believe and what I think it means to be an American. For, and then the preamble of the constitution. We the people, like the people really were badasses. They carved their existence out of the wilderness. You know, they fought bears and they fought Indians. And then they were told that they were going to be taxed a certain amount. And they're like, no, and then we'll throw this tea in the harbor.

• 23:42Tim Kennedy?

  And they're like, okay, well, we're going to have this little problem in Boston and an American's going to get shot. Now you pissed us off. We're going to kill all of you and we're going to kick you off the continent. Like we, the people were a bunch of badasses. There was individual responsibility for those people. They're well read, they're well traveled for you to vote. You had to be a landowner. You, you had to shoot a gun. You're required to own a gun and to train with. You weren't required to own a gun. To own a gun. If you were, if you were a voting member, you had to own a gun and you had to train with it. And there was a dedicated day off for the entire country. Every single person. Wow. Had a dedicated day to go out and train.

• 24:23Tim Kennedy?

  And there, there were some inherent responsibilities to being a citizen, to being we, the people. Now we're just like, every, somebody's going to do it for me. Somebody's going to take care of this problem. Somebody's going to solve this world problem. Somebody's going to tell me how much I'm supposed to eat or what I'm supposed to eat. That responsibility, we've just been handing over bit by bit for the past 40 years. And now we don't know how to take it back. And responsibility is where freedom comes from. You can't be free unless you are self-sufficient. You cannot be free unless you're individually responsible.

• 25:03Tim Kennedy?

  You can't be free from the government being able to tell you how you're supposed to be healthy unless you're healthy. Like I can look at somebody saying, hey, you need to put this in your body. And I'd be like, no, I don't. I'm freaking jacked and I'm going to live until I'm 100. Hey, you need to put this in your kids' bodies. I'm like. My kid has a six pack, can speak a couple of languages and plays five sports. Like, he doesn't need what you're giving him, man. Like, he eats free range chicken, elk, bison. You're like, he, I promise you, whatever you're trying to give him, he doesn't want. And, but we can do that because we're in a position of authority as with sovereignty. And then take that into any other category, whether it was intellectual or education. And like, hey, you have to be educated in this way.

• 25:47Tim Kennedy?

  No, the way that you're educating those kids is dumb. All of the kids that we educate are way smarter than your dumb kids. I don't want what you're trying to sell us because we do it better. But that's sovereignty. And that is us taking back those freedoms and taking back, um, and taking back that authority. And be like, you don't get that. You, you, you can't tell me what to do because I do it better.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

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• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get a 30% discount off your first subscription order by going to the link in the description below or heading to hvmn.com/ModernWisdom. That's hvmn.com/ModernWisdom. One of my favorite books has just been turned into-

• 27:10Tim Kennedy?

  Good.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  You like it? You don't need to turn it around each time.

• 27:12Tim Kennedy?

  Okay.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  It's looking at you. It can stare at you. Ah, yeah, it's Moorish. So, uh, one of my favorite books has just been turned into a movie. Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. You know this?

• 27:22Tim Kennedy?

  I do know it.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  So have you seen the trailer for this? So do you know who Alan Ritchie is? He's the guy that played.

• 27:28Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  So jacked out of his mind. Henry Cavill is in it. It's directed by Guy Ritchie.

• 27:33Tim Kennedy?

  Also jacked out of his mind.

• 27:34Chris Williamson?

  Directed by Guy Ritchie. So it's going to be sexy. It's going to be cool. And I can't wait. But as you know.

• 27:41Tim Kennedy?

  True story.

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  You've read the book. Yeah, of course. This is why I, this is like this sort of renegade spirit is so cool. So the beginning of World War Two, the British being the prim and proper gentleman.

• 27:52Tim Kennedy?

  You mean a monocle and a bow tie. Go out, take a tea with a run of them crumpets.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 27:56Tim Kennedy?

  You know?

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  Spinning, spinning a cane.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  At the beginning of World War Two, Winston Churchill realized that the only way that we could beat the Nazis was to play dirty. And there's a quote from one of the other high ranking officials in the British government that said, if this is what it takes to win, then I am prepared to lose. That was what he said, that there was a degree of.

• 28:17Tim Kennedy?

  Hang that guy. I don't know who that is, but they should hang him in the street.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, so I think, you know, this was really the inception of guerrilla warfare being used at scale for advanced military.

• 28:27Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  And.

• 28:29Tim Kennedy?

  Or that's the beginning of special forces.

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct.

• 28:32Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that's.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  And for both the US and the UK, although done separately.

• 28:35Tim Kennedy?

  And the Canadians.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 28:36Tim Kennedy?

  Like this is the, this is the beginning of it all. So I'm very, very familiar of.

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  So, but just thinking about that, thinking about, okay, so there was like the British sensibility of doing things right was so powerful. It was such a compulsion that the guys in power would have rather lot. There is a tendency, a leaning toward this is so unethical. It's, to them, it was like fucking sarin gas or fucking mustard gas or something. It's like, we're blowing up bridges. We're using, they created the Limpet Mine in that book as well. And they're doing it with aniseed balls wrapped in condoms. And it's just, it's, it's fucking great. I can't wait for this movie to come out.

• 29:18Tim Kennedy?

  We're going through this right now though, Chris. A hundred percent. So. And history always repeats itself. There's a great book called The New Rules of War. And currently, America does not have the appetite to do what it takes to win the wars that we have to win. But we can't even call them wars, right? So we're currently fighting cartels, syndicated criminal groups. We're fighting wars via proxy against terrorist organizations in proxy nations. So not direct state on state conflicts, but rather like state versus this group of people that are living in this area of this other country that are being financed by one of our enemies. That's war, though.

• 30:00Tim Kennedy?

  Like if that, if our enemy is financing a bunch of different groups and militias to fight us in these really inhumane ways, we're at war with that country. But America can't recognize that. And the things that we would have to do to win this war in this new kind of way, we're not capable of doing. The drone warfare, the AI that we're having to use to be successful in Ukraine. Americans are, wait a second. So that drone is going to go kill a human and it's making its decision on its own? Yeah, it has to. Because once it leaves this point of departure, it can't receive any signal from us because it's been blocked. And it has to be able to be making those decisions by itself.

• 30:43Tim Kennedy?

  Similarly, like if you go down to the Mexican border, we're not just fighting immigrants. That's not what this is. We are, you're an immigrant. I'm an immigrant. Literally every single white person in this whole entire country is an immigrant. With that said, there is an immigration process for us to come here. We are fighting cartels that are not just smuggling people, smuggling terrorists, smuggling drugs and smuggling guns. They're smuggling in ideas and we're at war on that border. That, for a country to be a real country, it has to have a sovereign border. There's literally an amendment in the constitution saying that we have the right to defend ourself and our borders. But we're not and we're being invaded.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  What's happening on the US Mexico border at the moment? You've spent some time down there. Give me the, I think, was it in December? 300,000 potential immigrants were stopped. That was the number that were stopped?

• 31:39Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but the getaways is the number that nobody talks about. So 300,000 people were stopped and then let in. How many weren't stopped? How many just got in? Is it more than 300,000? What do you think? Oh, yeah, I 100% know it's more than 300,000. So like the number of people that we caught is going to be a small fraction and then of the number of people that made it across without being stopped. When you look at the vastness of that border and where the wall is, where our ports of entry are, um, where the river is, it is porous beyond belief. You can, I, I've crossed that border like 25 times in a week, both sides, like, you know, like I'm in Mexico, you know, like my phone says, welcome to Mexico.

• 32:24Tim Kennedy?

  Like it's going to cost you $10 a day to be here. Welcome to the international program via Verizon. And I come back and it's like, hey, welcome back to the United States. I'm like, they can do this all day long. So the ones that we're catching, the, the ones that we catch compared to the ones that make it through is a very, very small fraction. The ones that really don't want to be caught, the way the cartel will push a bunch of people that they know are going to get caught. Because if you just think of the, the, okay, I'm the commander. I have X number of resources. I have a hundred troops at my disposal. Of course I want to do counter interdiction. So I want to stop drugs. I want to stop human traffickers. I want to stop, um, sex enslavement. I want to stop weapon smuggling.

• 33:06Tim Kennedy?

  As I'm at the river in Del Rio and I have a thousand immigrants cross at one time. How many of my hundred soldiers do I need to use to deal with those thousand people? All right, so I've, I've one guy receiving, right? I'm gonna put them in the lines. I'm, I make some choke points. I funnel them into a specific area, use some concertina wire to make sure like I have an orderly way. 50 guys, 75 guys, right? So now I have 50 to 25 guys left for me to use. And I have this entire area that I have to be covering. But the moment that those people start coming across the river, there's the same time that five guys jump into the river with bundles on their back. And then another five miles up the river, two boats get pushed across with a bunch of

• 33:47Tim Kennedy?

  Middle Eastern and Eastern, Eastern European guys that are being smuggled and trafficked across. And then five miles down the river, there's a bunch of young girls that are 11 or 12 that are going back into Mexico that they kidnapped in El Paso. Okay, with.

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  The whole thing's coordinated.

• 34:03Tim Kennedy?

  Tell me how to distribute my lat- remaining 25 guys. Also, the thousand that start coming across, the cartel dudes are just gonna grab a couple of little girls and throw them in the river. They're gonna grab a baby and drop it in the drink. They're gonna take a dad, just trip him with a kid on his shoulders, and they're all drowning. Do you want my soldiers to jump in with body armor to start swimming after them? This is the reality every single day across the whole entire river, and it is the largest border in the world. In the world is our border, on our southern border.

• 34:34Tim Kennedy?

  Canadia, Canada to the north, gigantic border, Mexico border to the south.

• 34:38Chris Williamson?

  Need to stop those Canadians coming in. That's the important thing that no one's talking about.

• 34:41Tim Kennedy?

  Those. I got hopes for their next election, though.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, can you explain, you know, for the people who haven't been down to the Mexico border, what is the, is it all, uh, demarked in some form or another? Is there some type of, or is there elements where it's literally just this is a piece of land and you can wander across?

• 35:05Tim Kennedy?

  A lot. Texas has mostly private land.

• 35:10Tim Kennedy?

  So that the border is on somebody's ranch.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  Right. Fantastic.

• 35:16Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  So, guys, welcome in.

• 35:19Tim Kennedy?

  In some cases, but I mean, those ranchers, the, the,

• 35:23Tim Kennedy?

  the cartel charges, we'll say like a ticket. So if you want yourself and your family to come across your, your,

• 35:34Tim Kennedy?

  Ecuador right now, kinda spicy. Cartels took the whole entire thing over. I'm not sure if you saw two weeks ago, they're like, they were killing news hosts in the news station while they were on the street, killing a bunch of people in the street and targeting government officials and judges. And it was happening like in real time, live on the news. So you have legitimate asylum seekers that are on the run from cartels. They move through Central America and they come up to the Mexico border. They pay the cartels to allow them to cross, or they pay them extra to facilitate them coming across. This is an endless.

• 36:16Tim Kennedy?

  Cycle of revenue for the cartels. Like it costs them nothing to produce. They don't have to smuggle in drugs. They don't have to kidnap anybody. People are just walking to them and they, they on the south side have created barriers where you can't cross without permission. And if you don't pay them, they'll kill you. So there's, there's in some cases, physical barriers and in some cases, psychological barriers where you know, if you point this part by this point of departure, you'll be executed without a wristband, like your ticket. I could show you what those wristbands look like. Those wristbands color coordinated kind of tell you, I got a round trip. I have multi-trip, I have single direction. I'm allowed to go through this area.

• 37:01Chris Williamson?

  It's super sophisticated.

• 37:02Tim Kennedy?

  Super sophisticated, all color coordinated and across this, on the southern side, all agreed between this cartel that's working with this group, with this cartel, with these traffickers and

• 37:18Tim Kennedy?

  it's, it's unstoppable, the way that we're currently trying to fight it, fighting it. It's just, we're not going to win.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  What is a way that would make it stoppable?

• 37:32Tim Kennedy?

  So when the Chinese built the Great Wall,

• 37:36Tim Kennedy?

  they recognized that any barricade without observation isn't a barricade. So I can build a wall, but if there's not something there observing that thing, it's not really a barricade because I can do whatever I need to do to get over that barricade. And there's nothing to stop me. So there's, like all problems, there's not a single solution, unfortunately. The wall creates choke points. It forces people to go through specific areas. And in those specific areas, uh, we can set up to interdict those people. Now, there's a misconception that there is this

• 38:18Tim Kennedy?

  Barrier stopping people from crossing. There's not. And additionally, there are ports of entry. There are legal places where anybody to include people like Mexicans can just walk across the border. They can walk up and say, hey, I'm going to be working. Here's my visa, or I'm going to be working at this ranch. My mom lives across the street. And you know, some of those borders, when they were set, some families lived on this side, some families lived on this side, and they've been going back and forth all the time.

• 38:47Tim Kennedy?

  But there are so, there are so many hundreds of thousands of people that have flooded these areas that it creates a humanitarian crisis and it creates this logistical problem of how, as we, the United States government and Department of State, how do we process this number of people? We can't. Which is what exactly what the cartel wants. And the surges that happen from the executive level, so the White House right now, they changed some policies and the word gets out that it's open borders. Everybody comes and everybody's coming.

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  What was the word that got out that made it seem like it was open borders?

• 39:23Tim Kennedy?

  You get money when you cross, you know, we'll give you a couple thousand dollars. We'll give you a bus ticket to the inland. We'll throw you on a plane and bring you to the city that you want to go to.

• 39:35Tim Kennedy?

  Well,

• 39:37Tim Kennedy?

  instead of you, if you're an asylum seeker, when during the Trump era, for example, if you came in and you were caught, an asylum seeker that just crosses, they'll then just on the inland be like, hey, I'm looking for residency here. If they're stopped on the border, they'll claim that they're asylum seekers. Well, we would make that person wait either at the country of their crossing or the country of their origin for their case, for their asylum case to be heard. Now they get a date, come back in like six months or 12 months to your court hearing for you to learn about the process of your asylum case.

• 40:20Tim Kennedy?

  So there's, there's only motivation for everyone to come here to the border and then they get an automatic pass in.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Because there's no penalty.

• 40:28Tim Kennedy?

  That's right.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  It's like universal asylum. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. You might have heard me say that I took metassosarone from 495 to 1006. And two of the supplements I used throughout that were Fadoja regrestis and Tongkat Ali.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  I first heard Andrew Huberman talk about the really impressive effects that these have on testosterone, but the problem is, most supplements don't actually contain what they say. Momentous make the only NSF certified Fadoja Agrestis and Tonkat Ali in the world, meaning that even Olympians can use it because that is the level of testing that these products are put through. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee, so you can buy everything completely risk free. Try it for 29 days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back, no questions asked. Right now, you can get a 20% discount off everything site wide, including all of the products I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below, or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's live M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  wisdom. What's happening with these detention centers? That was a big news story a couple of years ago.

• 41:34Tim Kennedy?

  They've always been there. Like, there were more detention centers and larger detention centers during Obama than there were Trump. That's kind of a play of numbers, though, because so few people tried to cross during Trump because they knew that they're going to be kicked back to their country of origin. You know, just a couple of days ago in New York, did you see the video of the immigrants that were attacking the NYPD officers? Oh, this is horrific. The police were trying to deal with a small problem with involving a bunch of immigrants, and the immigrants attacked the two police officers. The two police officers end up grappling on the ground against a couple of them, and then the whole entire crowd came up and started soccer kicking the police officers. And it turns into like

• 42:19Tim Kennedy?

  this. I mean, it's a hard video to watch. I'm actually about to post it today, because I wanted to get some more context as to like, what was the initial call? Why were they there? Like, they were there doing the right thing. There were actually crimes being committed, and they were there to like, try and keep the peace as good police officers. And then it was escalated, not on their end, but on the illegals' end, and then they ended up getting like skull stomped. This is foreshadowing of what's going to be coming like this. This is just a tiny little taste like those are just immigrants. Those weren't even bad actors that were trained and are hoping for an opportunity to do America damage because tens of thousands of them came into this country over the past couple of years.

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that video of a bunch of people on a plane refusing to sit down because someone was being deported?

• 43:06Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  And it turned out that that person had been involved in gangland shootouts and all manner of fuckery.

• 43:13Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. 10 days ago, uh, live news near Eagle Pass, another common.

• 43:22Chris Williamson?

  Texas?

• 43:23Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, another common smuggling point. Uh, this news host is talking about all the immigrants coming across and this guy in pretty decent English walks up behind. He goes, you don't know who I am, but you're going to know my name. And you're like, what is going on here? Facial recognition ties this guy to 82% that he is a multi-time terrorist that was in Gitmo. And he just walked across the border. He's live on television as this terrorist just walks into America and is bragging that everybody's going to know his name. That was, that was almost two and a half, two weeks ago, a week and a half ago.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  What would you do? What would you do to try and fix this problem? You've mentioned that you need to have presumably more staffing, more funding to be able to train people up to be able to do this.

• 44:07Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. So this isn't a border state problem. This is a nation. This is a national problem, right? So the governor of Texas is using state resources. He, he approved Operation Lone Star, which is using Texas National Guard soldiers to protect the border. So he is using tons of tech of state funding to, to protect the Texas border. It's not just the Texas border. This is America's border, but a whole bunch of, you know, most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.

• 44:45Tim Kennedy?

  Are bearing the burden of this immigration humanitarian crisis. But the other 36 states are kind of, or the other 46 states are just kind of like hanging back being like, huh, sucks to be you guys. But then we, we bust a couple of busloads up to them. They're like, oh my God, we're like being overwhelmed. I'm like, we sent you 500 of them. Do you know what it's like when you have 300,000 that just came across your border that are in your country? What would I do? I would finish the wall. I would make certain areas impassable. That's concertina wire. That is armed guards. That is men on horseback.

• 45:25Tim Kennedy?

  That epic photo of those border patrol guys that he was actually using his leads and they thought it was a whip because people are idiots and they actually don't know how to ride a horse.

• 45:36Tim Kennedy?

  Censors, drones. We have the solutions. This is a fixable thing. We just don't have, yet again, the appetite to do what it takes to close that border. Once the border is closed, we open the ports of entry. Department of State funds and Department of State is doing the best they can with the very restricted resources they have. So imagine like the White House is telling Department of State, hey, you have to be, to be doing this. And Department of State's like, we don't have the resources and we don't have the means to facilitate this number of people. Then the White House is like, hey, everybody come over here. And Department of State's like, we can't. So these ports of entry have to be opened and the systems have to be fixed for us to be able to process more people in a more strategic way.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  Didn't someone rip down a ton of razor wire? Wasn't that a big deal like last week?

• 46:26Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  Two weeks ago.

• 46:27Tim Kennedy?

  So the federal government is, there's, there's like competing efforts at the, at the border right now. So Texas is saying the border is closed and the federal government is saying, no, the, the border is open. So the federal government is coming down to the barricades and the barriers that Texas has put up and said, we, you can't have those. That goes against federal law. And Texas is saying, no, you can't do that. Like this is Texas land and we are closing the borders. So if you're not going to close the American borders, we're going to close the Texas border.

• 46:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, they're literally like federal law enforcement is coming in and doing the opposite of what the Texas law enforcement is doing. Wild.

• 47:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's conflict. Brian Callen told me that he tried to trick you into believing that he was asleep and you stood over him and said, do you know how many people have tried to pretend that they're asleep as I've stood over them?

• 47:24Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Tim Kennedy?

  I love that guy, but he did get up and he did go to the water with me and then he did wrestle with me on the southern coast of France in the sand.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And I, um, I started like leg riding him from behind and put his face down in the sand. And while he was like trying to and ineffectively trying to get away from me, I was like drawing hearts in the sand and his face is like this. And I'm like, I'm drawing hearts in this. It was awesome. What a great, what a gem of a human.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  For the people who haven't, almost no one really that's listening who will have been in any kind of kinetic armed encounter, what's it actually like to be in a firefight? What's the sense of that? Like what? Just describe what's going on.

• 48:08Tim Kennedy?

  Fear, chaos, anarchy. I mean, it's like, uh,

• 48:15Tim Kennedy?

  it is so not like the movies, you know, it's like John Wick's just like doing like some cool artistic violent ballet and they're, it's, it's, um,

• 48:27Tim Kennedy?

  smells like shit. Uh, you know, the, the smell of human flesh being burnt, whether it's a bullet going in it or an explosion from an IED or an RPG, um, you know, the diesel from a Humvee or RG33, the smell of gunpowder from a 50 cal machine gun, the, like, those are all hard smells. And then, um, you know, when, when there's overpressure from, you know, a machine gun or a bomb or a grenade or an AT4, it of course kicks up the dirt and.

• 49:04Tim Kennedy?

  But it's the fine dirt. It's not like the heavy, good soil like on farmland. It's like the gross moon dust dirt.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  Human skin.

• 49:12Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And so you get these really weird, not natural smells mixed with very earthy smells. And smells are a trigger for a lot of people's memories. And that earthy with mechanical with burning thing are like really overwhelming sensations. That's the smell portion. And then there's like what you're seeing. And the fog of war could not

• 49:43Tim Kennedy?

  like fail to express how hard it is to see what you're seeing. You know, you've heard that expression, the fog of war and people trying to remember back to battles. And they have a really hard time explaining what they're seeing. It's because I don't think your brain can process what you're seeing. You know, your, your, your brain can't process like your friend just got blown up and he's burnt over here. And there's a guy up there that's shooting a bullet at you. That's from a machine gun position that's going to kill you. You know, and like the vehicle that or you're just in is like shredded with a bunch of wait, those holes in the front of this vehicle weren't there a few seconds ago. And that's what that sound was. And but your brain's trying to process this all the time, all the while, like adrenaline, adrenaline and cortisol is just exploding through your body.

• 50:27Tim Kennedy?

  It's, uh, it's war as hell. Uh, and the fog of war are apt expressions to try to, in a succinct way, say it's fucking chaos.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  So it's not, it, it, yeah, chaos is the right word, that there's no degree of pause or control in what you've just described, but presumably that's what tactics and preparation are for.

• 50:51Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 50:51Chris Williamson?

  It's to allow you to be able to wrangle what's going on and actually have some sort of process that you guys are moving through.

• 50:58Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. I mean, that, that's why we do tens of thousands of reps of an emergency reload of my rifle, right? The bolt locks to the rear. I feel the bolt. My, I feel my, my magazine getting lighter as I'm shooting. Then I literally feel against my chin, the bolt lock to the rear. And I feel the little catch stop that bolt from traveling back forward because the follower is pushed up by or pushed up the, the bolt lock by the follower of the magazine. So I know my gun's empty. I dropped the magazine. I insert a new magazine. I dropped the bolt. I re-grip the gun. I find my sight and I press the trigger and all that happens in less than a second.

• 51:33Tim Kennedy?

  My brain shouldn't, can't do that. Like, I can't cognitively think about doing that process, but I've practiced it, you know, tens of thousands of times that it just happens. And when we start maneuvering and we have a group laying down suppressive fire while another group is flanking, or we have one group move up to an oversight position to start laying down suppressive fire while another element goes, like, these are all rehearsed responses to known problems. And, uh, and that's why the most elite units on the planet have so much time to train and so many resources to facilitate them

• 52:11Tim Kennedy?

  training. Go ambush Delta Force. You know, like, go give that a whirl. You know, like, real bad plan, you're all gonna die. Send as many people as you want and just know that you're not gonna get any of them back. You know, like, cool, go deal with SEAL Team Six on the water. That's a good idea, you know, or like, go kidnap an American and drag her into the desert and then use a cellphone and see how that works out for you. Um, you know, these, these, these are all stories of SEAL Team Six, like, dropping into North Africa and going and rescuing this beautiful blonde NGO worker and killing literally everybody on the ground. True stories. And, uh, it's because they've done it thousands of times.

• 52:53Tim Kennedy?

  Thousands of reps, thousands of jumps, thousands of time rounds on down on the range. So when that chaos happens and you're scared and you're full of fear, you're just doing the thing that you've always practiced to do. And if you do it, you'll live. If you don't, you're gonna die.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  So I understand the moving things that you have to do from system two deliberate thinking into system one automatic thinking. It's what you did in the UFC, right? Someone throws a punch, you don't think, oh, that's a left jab, I'm gonna like slip. Yeah, I'm gonna move a little bit. I'm gonna move, I'm gonna move. Uh, it just happens, but... Presumably in a firefight, it's not just reaction and response. There's this sort of system one thinking where you're just doing the things, reloading the weapon. But then there's also the, you need to use some cognition too. So what about that pulling in and pulling out? Thing? How do you utilize a little bit more of the analytical brain if you've just cortisol and adrenaline?

• 53:53Tim Kennedy?

  Well, those systems and those processes are built within the military combat unit. You know, so while you have the fighters, you also have the, you know, we'll just use a special forces O D A. You know, you have operational detachment, Alpha, it's like the 12 man A team.

• 54:13Tim Kennedy?

  Within that team, you have two guys per job. There's four main jobs, which are the eight men that do the body of the work. The other four guys are leaders in some form or fashion, and each of them take a certain piece of the pie on the leadership role.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Like, is that one for each two?

• 54:33Tim Kennedy?

  No. So the team sergeant, he's kind of running the eight guys. He's the, the E eight that is like the battle hardened. He's the most senior N C O on the ground. And he's feeding the information to the eighteen Bravo, the, the weapons guy, to the communication guy, to the engineer who's going to be launching mortars and rockets. And to the medic who's making sure like all the, the, the team and their foreign fighters are all working in unison. And then you have, you know, the, the intel guy who's kind of feeding information and helping the team sergeant. But he's also feeding information to the team leader, the team leader's on the phone, talking to command, getting

• 55:13Tim Kennedy?

  maybe some air support. He wants some fixed wing fast movers, or he's looking for some rotary wing support, or he called an A C one thirty. So they're all reacting, but they're reacting in their piece of the pie. And some of those reactions are that team leader, the, the captain. If he picks up the two forty machine gun and hops up on top of the back of the Humvee and he's like, I'm the warrior, you know, like, sir, you're fired. That is not your job. Your job is to go get on that radio and to call higher and get a support. Similarly, if that team sergeant isn't directing and coordinating the men to respond to, you know, the threat or the ambush in the right way that they've rehearsed and they've

• 55:58Tim Kennedy?

  planned, then like he's not doing his job. So each one of these awesome jobs has an awesome role and the individual responsibility of that person to understand that role and then to be able to execute that role in this hell that is war during the fog of war is so freaking badass. And that's why you, it's one of the many reasons why I, you know, I look to like the Marcus Latrells and the Andy Stumps and the Jacos and the Evan Hafers and you see them be like incredibly successful in business. You're like, of course they will. Because look at what they did beforehand in all of these different roles as they moved up the

• 56:38Tim Kennedy?

  military ladder and filled every single one of the roles on the way up where like they'll go run a Fortune 500 company or they'll go start a brand new one and you know, and then bring it public and solve it for a hundred, few hundred million dollars. And here's my face of surprise. You know, like they could do anything.

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  What do each of the four pairs of people do?

• 56:58Tim Kennedy?

  So you have the 18 Bravo. He is a weapons sergeant and he's kind of responsible for base security, the initial, he's like the warrior. These, I was an 18 Bravo. So I'm being slightly biased here. They're the best. And so then the 18 Charlie, he's the engineer.

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  So there's two of each of these?

• 57:21Tim Kennedy?

  There's two of, there's a senior and a junior.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 57:23Tim Kennedy?

  So the, the guy that's been on the team longer and then the team gets the junior guy and he is the mentor to him. He's shown him all the things that he needs to know and preparing that replacement. And the senior of each of those jobs is also looking at the four other roles, like the 18 Fox, the, the warrant on the team and the team sergeant, and they're all kind of being positioned and trained to then fill the next role above them. The engineer is the explosives, the building, is the bridge good to cross? Is this building stable for us to fight from? If I'm going to be setting up the camp, here's how I'm doing like the logistic resource of refits and refuels. 18 Echo is the communication

• 58:08Tim Kennedy?

  guy. So satellite communication, line of sight, communication, FM, all of the things that we need to do, shoot, move, communicate, medicate.

• 58:17Tim Kennedy?

  Then leads us to the 18 Delta, which is the Special Forces Medic. And there's two of them. They're, they're like a PA, like um, slash paramedic. That's really, really good at trauma.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

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• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get a year's free supply vitamin D plus five free travel packs by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink AG1.com slash wisdom. That's drink AG1.com slash wisdom. I was reading about some rumors of the number of soldiers that had been deployed. Perhaps it was in World War Two, but it could have been in one of the later wars who didn't fire their rifle or purposefully fired their rifle over the heads of the enemy. Well, how much truth's in that?

• 59:45Tim Kennedy?

  There's truth to that. We, we have this wild phenomenon called non-shoot snipers. So guys in combat arms, he goes to the only casualty producing school within the military sniper school where they're actually just teaching a person how to kill another person.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  The only casualty producing, right? Because the only role that you have or the primary role that you have, spotting as well. It's like observing and feeding back information.

• 1:00:09Tim Kennedy?

  But ultimately we're also teaching a dude how to take crosshairs, figure out how to take a bullet and put it into somebody and make a hole.

• 1:00:18Tim Kennedy?

  You have lots of military schools. I'm about to go to one that's like six months long and that is not a casualty producing school. Leadership school. It's like lots Ranger School, not a casualty producing school. That's a leadership school. Safartech, that is not a casualty producing school, even though you learn a ton about how to shoot, move, communicate, meditate. That is how to rescue somebody that is a hostage. You go to Safalic, Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat. That is how do I do war in a combat area or in an urban area. It's like each of them building necessary skills within that special operations unit. But sniper school, teaching somebody how to make a hole in somebody far, far away.

• 1:01:00Tim Kennedy?

  The no shoot sniper comes from combat arms, goes to sniper school, goes to war and can't pull the trigger. And it's not common, but it does, it happens. And, and this is just my personal opinion. I, I think it is, uh, for a couple of reasons. One is the, the equipment that we use, just like I can see you here very, very close. You know, like I can see your skin. I can see your pores. I can see the vents on your neck. You're like, that's how intimate it is when you're looking through a 20 power optic.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  So it humanizes the target.

• 1:01:33Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And I'm watching them breathe and I know I'm going to have a bullet flight of two to three seconds. So I actually have to be watching how you're moving. So I need to know where you're going to be in two to three seconds from now. So I'm like learning so much about you and how you move. And it really connects me to you, which is one problem. And then the other part is the, the thing that we've known throughout all war, which is some people just can't do it.

• 1:01:59Tim Kennedy?

  It's not for everybody.

• 1:02:04Tim Kennedy?

  Have you, Hacksaw Ridge, have you ever seen this movie, read this book, Medal of Honor recipient?

• 1:02:11Tim Kennedy?

  He was a conscientious objector. He would not hold a weapon. This is during World War Two. He would not hold a gun. He said he wouldn't do it. It was against his faith. And during one of the island invasions in the Pacific, he rescued like

• 1:02:29Tim Kennedy?

  hundreds of Americans and get shot, get stabbed, gets blown up. And he just keeps going up this cliff and grabbing these Americans. And everybody at the base of the cliff has no idea who keeps lowering down these Americans. And they find out that it was this guy that they've been trying to kick out of the unit because he wouldn't fight. And not everybody needs to fight. There's a

• 1:02:57Tim Kennedy?

  There's a beautiful poem written about the warrior. There's a hundred men that go to war. Eighty of them shouldn't even be there. You know, like they're just bags of blood. They're going to be running forward to die.

• 1:03:12Tim Kennedy?

  Ten of them are going to like, they're the men that are going to carry the war. Like they're the ones that are going to go out and fight. You know, and then there's the remaining 10 and then they're, they're incredible. They're brave, they're courageous, they're leaders. But then there's the one, right? There's the one that's going to bring all the men home. And that's the, that's the Marcus Luttrells. That's, that's the Dakota Myers. That's the, that's the extraordinary, that's the Andy Stumps. You know, like you know, some of these guys.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  I texted Andy this morning.

• 1:03:42Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, great human. This is Andy's.

• 1:03:44Chris Williamson?

  It's nice origin.

• 1:03:45Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah, but I stole it from him.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right. You actually took it off his back.

• 1:03:49Tim Kennedy?

  No, no, he, he laid down and set it down and I took it and I put it in my bag and then I left with it.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  Right, so if Andy's looking at you thinking, that's a familiar looking.

• 1:03:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I was just sure if it was his or Denver's, but I'm like 90% sure that it was his.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:03Tim Kennedy?

  So like 90% that I stole this.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  That it's nice.

• 1:04:06Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, it is nice.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  Uh, is there anyone, you've mentioned Marcus Luttrell, Dakota Meyer. Is there anyone that you have heard about or you served with? That you wish their story would be better known? Is there someone or the incidents that you wish that you could sort of bring to public light more?

• 1:04:25Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Chris Williamson?

  Give me some.

• 1:04:26Tim Kennedy?

  Roy Benavides.

• 1:04:29Tim Kennedy?

  All right, you're not gonna believe this one. Okay, Roy Benavides, he's in Vietnam. He's a Texan and he, uh, he's sitting on a Ford base and he listens to a special forces O D A. He's a special, he's a Green Beret getting a gunfight. He's like, whoop, this sounds bad. Helicopter goes in to try to get some dudes. He gets scuffed up, comes back with a bunch of bullet holes. And Roy runs up to the helicopter. He's like, hey, I'm gonna go with you. Take me back in there. He throws a bunch of guns and ammo in there. The helicopter takes off.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  On his own.

• 1:05:00Tim Kennedy?

  On his own, flies him back to where the O D A has almost all been massacred. He goes, starts leading the remaining men that are all busted up. All of them are wounded. Most of them are dead. He gets them to start fighting back the Viet Cong and starts pushing them back. He gets all the men together and they start surviving for a little bit. Helicopters are trying to come get them out. Through the course of it, I think he gets like 70, 80 or 90 bullet wounds, fragmentation from grenades and bayonet wounds. He kills a dude with a rock, kills a dude with a bayonet. There's a portion where one of the helicopters is trying to take off, but it has so much.

• 1:05:35Tim Kennedy?

  They overload it with the wounded and dead. He's running alongside of it with a machine gun, providing support with his body and a machine gun laying down, supporting fire as this helicopter is trying to take off. Helicopter comes back again. He gets the last remaining bits of equipment. He gets the last few men back onto the helicopter. He's the last guy to come. He gets jumped. Gets stabbed with the bayonet, takes the bayonet out, kills the dude, kills a couple more dudes, hops in the helicopter and falls over. They, the helicopter lands, he's covered in blood, he's covered in mud. And they're like, this dude's dead. They throw him in a dead body bag so they can throw him in the morgue. And as they're zipping the thing up, he goes. And he spits in the doctor's face. He couldn't talk. He'd been so wounded. There's nothing that he could do

• 1:06:21Tim Kennedy?

  besides spit on this dude to let him know that he was still alive. He's like, oh my God, Roy Benavides is still alive. That's a good one. You know, Shugart and Gordon?

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:06:29Tim Kennedy?

  Black Hawk Down?

• 1:06:30Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:06:30Tim Kennedy?

  Ah, okay, I'm gonna do this without crying.

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Good luck.

• 1:06:37Tim Kennedy?

  You're familiar with the Black Hawk Down, Battle of Mogadishu. They're in there to get this.

• 1:06:42Tim Kennedy?

  Terrorist leader and the plan was for Delta Force to come in on top of this building. The Rangers come up to create a perimeter, security perimeter around this building while they find the bad guy inside, move him to the vehicles and they all drive out together. That was the plan. Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face. Guys get in, they get the bad guy, Rangers arrive, helicopter gets struck by an RPG in the tail, helicopter crashes. This then begins this horrific battle against a bunch of different terrorist organizations, all trying to kill the Rangers and Delta

• 1:07:26Tim Kennedy?

  Force that are now trapped in Mogadishu. And it's a, I mean, this is a fight.

• 1:07:33Tim Kennedy?

  Thirty, forty to one odds in ratio between terrorists to American operators. Shugart and Gordon are two special forces snipers that are in a helicopter providing overwatch. One of the helicopters that gets shot and crashes is getting overrun by all of these insurgent militia terrorists. They see on the ground that this helicopter, that some of the people inside of it survived the crash. And they see small arms fire, they see flashes from these guys trying to protect themselves. They get on the radio and they're like, general, we'd like permission to go in and protect these guys. If we don't get down there, they're going to get overrun. We can see everything. The general's like, negative, you do not have

• 1:08:18Tim Kennedy?

  permission. You cannot be put on the ground. And they're like, understood.

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

  Why did they not give permission?

• 1:08:24Tim Kennedy?

  So they call again, five minutes later. They're like, if we don't get on the ground right now, everybody in that helicopter is going to die. The general's like, no, denied, you cannot go down there. You see better than we can that there's no way for us to get you out. If you go on the ground, it's just going to add to the problem. It's two more people. They get a third time. Sir, with your permission, please allow us to get on the ground. We will fight to the helicopter. We will create a perimeter, a security perimeter around these guys, and we will protect them until we get a time to get these guys out. The general's like, I don't know when that's going to be. If you go on the ground, I can't send the Rangers to you. I have no more helicopters to send to you. I have no resources to go and rescue the people in that helicopter.

• 1:09:09Tim Kennedy?

  And Durant, an amazing book, the pilot that was in the helicopter. He tells in his book, the most dangerous time to be taken captive is like the first few minutes. There's like this bloodlust, this like rampant rage. So the helicopter crashes, right? And like, think like you're an insurgent, you're terrest on the ground. We got him. We got him, right? Like you're rushing in, you're just killing everything. It's like, there has to be this lull if anybody has a chance to survive. So Schugart and Gordon talk the general after three efforts into putting them on the ground. These two Delta Force Special Forces snipers from my, from like the school that I went to, it's the best sniper school on the planet.

• 1:09:51Tim Kennedy?

  These dudes fight from their info point to the helicopter and they kill literally everybody. Like if there was anybody within 200 meters that was holding a gun, they went on the ground leaky of blood and dead. They get to the helicopter and this is all explained in Durant's book because he was the one that survived. He was the one that they went to rescue. He was the one that they ultimately gave their life to save. And they did just that. They grab him, they drag him out of the, out of the helicopter. They bring him into the building. And then they go back out to the helicopter. They give him an MP5 and they say, anybody that comes in behind us, stop them because we're going to fight to slow. Cause like this big, huge surge, like this, uh,

• 1:10:35Tim Kennedy?

  like you've seen like where riots kind of start getting that energy and like people start pulsing. Fever. Yeah. So that fever is there and they're just trying to keep it at bay. And they run out of rifle ammo. They run out of, they start acquiring weapons off the ground and they run out of that ammo. And they end up with pistols and they're like bare knuckle fighting these guys and shooting the remaining pistol rounds as they have. Before ultimately they're both killed and they save his life. And Schugart and Gordon knew, and I, that's the, this is the, this is the hard one.

• 1:11:16Tim Kennedy?

  They knew they're gonna die.

• 1:11:19Tim Kennedy?

  Like, there's not a, there's not a way that you're sitting in a helicopter like that and like, we'll survive this. When that question is, there's no greater thing than to lay your life down for another service, right? Here we are, full circle.

• 1:11:35Tim Kennedy?

  They knew that they're gonna die for the chance to save a dude. I've asked myself this question a thousand times, like, what would I do? And I don't know.

• 1:11:47Tim Kennedy?

  Shugart and Gordon.

• 1:11:51Tim Kennedy?

  Pretty rad men. I could go on for hours telling these stories, because if you, if there's a part of you that is lacking purpose, sometimes you can find inspiration from somebody else's purpose. And there, I mean, there's been times where I'm like, looking at Israel, like, do I have to go over there? Is this where I really need to go?

• 1:12:15Tim Kennedy?

  And those questions of like, should I be there is, is, or am I just another pawn to these large strategic influences? Should I be at the Mexico border? Should I be in Ukraine? Should I be in Afghanistan?

• 1:12:31Tim Kennedy?

  But maybe that purpose is just to be part of something that's bigger and better than yourself. And then the answer is yes. Here I am, send me like an IZEA 68.

• 1:12:40Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

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• 1:13:42Chris Williamson?

  There was a story that you had when you run out of ammo as well. I seem to remember hearing that from you.

• 1:13:48Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that's not a great plan. If you're in the military, as best you can, never be in a gunfight and run out of ammo. That's a, yeah, that was in Erzgon Valley, Afghanistan in 2008. We got blown up and uh, we've, they couldn't get ammo resupplies into us. The gunfight was so intense. We have RG33s, we had Humvees, we had supporting special forces commandos that were with us. We ran out of ammo. Like, that's wild. That's a gunfight.

• 1:14:21Chris Williamson?

  How long was that firefight?

• 1:14:23Tim Kennedy?

  Three days in, a couple of days out. So maybe five days cumulatively of gunfighting.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  What you mean in and out?

• 1:14:30Tim Kennedy?

  So we were moving a group of Czech special operations into this firebase called Firebase Anaconda. And we had to go through this valley to get to Firebase Anaconda. And the topography was really advantageous for the Taliban. And like, everything was kind of stacked against us, but we had to get this unit in there because Firebase Anaconda had been isolated. If you Google Firebase Anaconda, they have, I think, two or three times been overrun by the Taliban, like, climbing over walls and they're fighting for their lives.

• 1:15:04Chris Williamson?

  Who the fuck chose to put this thing there?

• 1:15:06Tim Kennedy?

  That's a great question.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  That's a stupid idea to put it in this like-

• 1:15:09Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, it's a bad spot. They're also surrounded. They're, they're close enough where foreign fighters are easy, easily, that, that area is easily accessible to foreign fighters. It's just like the perfect storm and the worst place to be. ODA 782, little shout out to you guys because they held that base better than anybody ever has throughout the whole entire GWAT. And it's my, my two best friends in the world, their old ODA. But we're trying to get the Czech special forces to Firebase Anaconda. And you had to pass through this valley. And that's where we got blown up and attacked and ambushed. And then we had to fight for a while. And then once we got to Firebase Anaconda, you know, we had scuffed up, you know, we killed like

• 1:15:50Tim Kennedy?

  three, 400 foreign fighters and Taliban on our way in. Like that really, like, we kicked a hornet's nest. So then all of the other organizations were sending all of their people because then they knew that we had to leave. Because our job was to bring those guys in. We left. I put this in my book, and I can't remember it off the top of my head now.

• 1:16:12Tim Kennedy?

  We left with a couple hundred trucks and we arrived with like a couple dozen.

• 1:16:19Tim Kennedy?

  That was crappy.

• 1:16:23Chris Williamson?

  So if you're in a situation like that where you need to be fighting for five days straight, like you can't be awake and functioning well for all of that time. So you're trying to grab 30 minutes of rest whenever you can.

• 1:16:37Tim Kennedy?

  I don't remember like trying to get rest. Um, I remember being underneath a Humvee.

• 1:16:45Tim Kennedy?

  And I woke up and I don't know how I got underneath that Humvee and I don't know how long I had been underneath that Humvee. And I heard like, so there's somebody like shooting towards you, which is like, and then there's somebody shooting at you, which is like,

• 1:17:02Tim Kennedy?

  the snap. And then there's.

• 1:17:03Chris Williamson?

  Why is the snap?

• 1:17:04Tim Kennedy?

  The snap is, is the bullet crest, like coming past you.

• 1:17:08Chris Williamson?

  And right. It pushes the air.

• 1:17:10Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And then there's bang. And that's like, the bullet is so close. You hear the bang of the rifle. You hear the pop of the supersonic. And then you hear the literally the hundred and 15 grain or 250 grain thing going past your face. And I'm laying there and I hear as it like goes past this Humvee and hits something metal in my vicinity and I wake up and then I was like, ah, and uh, I had, I had overpressure sickness. So I was like shitting my pants.

• 1:17:47Chris Williamson?

  What's overpressure sickness?

• 1:17:49Tim Kennedy?

  Something where it's like being concussed and it's not being concussed. It is being concussed.

• 1:17:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:55Tim Kennedy?

  So like a bunch of small concussions from explosions and IEDs and RPGs and 50 COWs and AT4s, like all the things that we're shooting at them and all the things that they're shooting at us. All of those things go with air and that's happening around your head. So that sucks. Um, and then we're at altitude and then I'm sleeping underneath a Humvee, which is probably not a great place.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  While shitting yourself.

• 1:18:16Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. While you're shitting yourself. Um, I smelled, I bet. That was pretty stank.

• 1:18:26Tim Kennedy?

  Anyway, so yeah, I don't know when I slept. I just like occasionally would wake up and when I was writing that scars and stripes and I went back and I talked to a whole bunch of people that were there with me.

• 1:18:39Tim Kennedy?

  One of my friends, Mike, he died in 2019 Afghanistan. He was with me. He saved my life that day. Mike Goble, I walk up to a door. I don't know how he knew this.

• 1:18:49Tim Kennedy?

  Cause I woke up, I walk up and I'm about to push the door open and as soon as I touch the handle of the door and it's a push door, he shoves me and he and I always like were kind of physical, like we're all almost always going to fight over something stupid. I got mad at him because he was carrying a pistol through a village and he wanted a pistol kill. And I was like, you're sitting on a machine gun. Why would he be holding a pistol? Put your pistol away. And we ended up fist fighting. The team sergeant came over and separated. It's like, we're always like really rough. So he shoves me and I like fall back and I'm like getting ready. Like we're in the middle of a gunfight and I'm about to like start a fistfight with him because he shoves me and the whole door starts getting shredded by machine gun fire. There's a PKM on the other side and I don't know if he like heard the bolt drop. I don't know if you heard the selector switch, the safety getting pulled. I

• 1:19:34Tim Kennedy?

  don't know if he just had like an intuition, if there's a sixth sense divine intervention. He shoves and the whole door just starts getting shredded. Mike Goble. And

• 1:19:47Tim Kennedy?

  hero. I wish everybody learned about him. There's another multiple tours, you know, countless lives he saved, more people he rescued, like hero.

• 1:20:00Tim Kennedy?

  Mike English, I can't even say his last name because everybody, because he's still in. But

• 1:20:09Tim Kennedy?

  the fog of war, when I went back and talked to all these guys, they remembered a whole bunch of things that I didn't remember and we, in some cases, the things that we remembered were in conflict of each other.

• 1:20:22Chris Williamson?

  I thought it happened this way. No, it didn't. It happened that way.

• 1:20:25Tim Kennedy?

  That's right. Like there were a bunch of women and kids that got hurt after that door got shredded. Because when that door got pushed open, I saw a machine gun barrel sticking out of this tiny little window. And I take a grenade, a frag grenade, and I throw it through that window. The grenade goes off. And a few seconds later, I hear a bunch of women and children screaming. Now, a few seconds later can be anything in the brain in war, right? That might have been 10 minutes. But I remember it being like very shortly after, like it was a response to my grenade. On the outside of the building, my friend Mike K was on a big, heavy machine gun pounding this, this compound where there he saw a bunch of insurgents fighting out of it, specifically that room where those women and children were.

• 1:21:07Tim Kennedy?

  So for 10 years I lived with like, I'm the one that hurt these, these, these people that had been used as body shields by the terrorists. And he, for 10 years, had assumed that he was the one that had hurt everybody and he was living with that for 10 years. We both did, right? Like it's war. That's.

• 1:21:25Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about that? That's certainly one of the things, you know, when people hear stories like that, especially if they're not familiar with collateral damage and the imprecision that happens, especially when you're going house to house, especially if the terrorists are using civilians as body shields, or if you're just going door to door with things, it's families and people in that.

• 1:21:50Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about collateral damage in that way? The fact that, you know, there's someone who didn't do anything wrong that is in the midst of two people trying to kill each other?

• 1:22:04Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Obviously, America wants no collateral damage.

• 1:22:11Tim Kennedy?

  If you go back to World War II.

• 1:22:16Tim Kennedy?

  You launch a surprise attack against us in Pearl Harbor, and we fight you all the way back to mainland and take every single island that you used to own, and then make it ours. And then we tell you to surrender, and you don't, and we drop a nuclear bomb on you. Then we tell you to surrender, and you don't, and we drop another nuclear bomb on you. And we tell you to surrender, and if you don't, we're gonna drop another nuclear bomb on you. Like, that's winning a war. That's, that's winning a war in a way that we can't, we don't have the appetite to win wars anymore.

• 1:22:50Tim Kennedy?

  The moral equivalency of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Taliban and Al Qaeda and ISIS, they intentionally use civilians as shields. They intentionally use hostages as shields. They intentionally manipulate the battlefield for

• 1:23:09Tim Kennedy?

  the moral consequence of the fighting force that has to fight against it. They want to hurt our souls. They want to hurt the civilians. Because if the civilians get hurt by us as we're trying to be strategic and targeting the bad guys, not that, not, we don't want any collateral damage at all. We want zero. But they make it so that it's impossible for us to be successful without any form of collateral damage. And that's exactly what they want, because that, that continues. It's another spoke in the wheel of their propaganda machine. So then they say, like, look, all these women and children were hurt because the Americans or the Israelis came in here. No, no, you did that on purpose. You're hiding a rocket launcher at a hospital. You're hiding a bunch of arms in a school.

• 1:23:53Tim Kennedy?

  And then you put all the kids in the school, and you wanted us to target it. And then you leaked out information that those weapons were in the school. And that, and then you also leaked out information that high-level leaders were there at the specific time. So of course, we targeted that time to get the high-level leaders and the weapons. But then you put kids in there. Anybody that tries to conflate this moral coexistence between like the Hamas and Israel's response, you can just separate them in this one specific idea. One group of them are hiding behind civilians and they use that as leverage and opportunity to create more propaganda. The other group is doing everything in their power to limit civilian casualties and any form of collateral damage. And the line of departure between those two could not be more clear.

• 1:24:35Tim Kennedy?

  Anybody that says anything else is ignorant and totally doesn't understand it or is so in confirmation bias, trying to support a set of beliefs that are not based on fact. They cannot be more dissimilar. And shame on anybody that conflates those two.

• 1:24:52Chris Williamson?

  I was speaking about the Nagasaki bomb blast. Do you know The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Ercard?

• 1:25:00Tim Kennedy?

  No.

• 1:25:00Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I gotta, I'll get this book for you. It's my favorite nonfiction sort of real life story. So this guy is a Scottish dude who goes to Singapore in World War II. Japan enters the war. He gets captured by the Japanese and for the next four years goes through more than I think pretty much anyone that I've ever read about. So this guy is put in forced labor for the best part of two and a half years. He's made to help build the bridge over the River Kwai. He's basically permanently got every tropical disease, including dysentery for all of this time. He's being mistreated. Then one of the camp guards tries to rape him.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  So instead of allowing him do that, he kicks him in the nuts and runs away. He then gets locked in a tin box in the middle of the sun to basically just cook to death. Doesn't die. Then after that gets put onto one of these Japanese hell ships, which doesn't have the Swiss cross on the side. That gets torpedoed by an American submarine, doesn't die. Finds a small piece of flotsam and floats in it, has to fight a Japanese soldier in the water, one in like a little bucket and the other on this piece of flotsam, doesn't die, lands ashore and is free briefly, but then gets recaptured.

• 1:26:21Tim Kennedy?

  No.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  Put back to work, gets knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki, still doesn't die, and then for 50 years keeps quiet by order of the British government and finally writes this memoir to bring the Japanese to account for the atrocities that they went through, because we had the Nuremberg Trials, we had this sort of call to arms for what Germany had done, but the equivalent thing didn't seem to happen in the same way for the Japanese.

• 1:26:44Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Chris Williamson?

  The book is outrageously good. It's called The Forgotten Highlander. Outrageous.

• 1:26:49Tim Kennedy?

  I'm in. Yeah.

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  It's really good. Um, other thing as well, I remember there's this great, is it, um, World War II, the front lines, it's on Netflix at the moment, so they used AI to colorize.

• 1:27:01Tim Kennedy?

  Oh, I heard about this.

• 1:27:02Chris Williamson?

  And make 4K, all of this sort of archive footage, which is very strange, because you're not used to seeing old and timey war in a more vibrant sort of real way. It's always, archive footage has this, it gives you a sense of distance by it not being as sharp, right? You, you were talking about the sniper is able to see the face, the, the expressions of the person, and it humanizes them. This really humanizes the story.

• 1:27:27Tim Kennedy?

  Not sure I can handle this.

• 1:27:28Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's pretty rough, but it's also fascinating because it's so much more immersive.

• 1:27:33Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Chris Williamson?

  Um, if the Japanese hadn't, uh, decided they were going to surrender, the US was basically preparing the largest land invasion in history.

• 1:27:44Tim Kennedy?

  That's right.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Right? And they were, I think they were still unsure about whether or not Japan was actually going to surrender, because it was like, we will fight to the last man, woman and child.

• 1:27:53Tim Kennedy?

  The emperor said that behind every single blade of grass would be a Japanese soldier or a civilian with a sword behind every blade of grass in Japan, in, in the mainland. So America, when we looked like, why would we drop two nuclear bombs? Um, that would have cost, that cost fewer lives than.

• 1:28:13Chris Williamson?

  It would have been millions.

• 1:28:14Tim Kennedy?

  That's right. So like, wait, dropping two nuclear bombs saved millions of lives? Yes, it did. Try to explain that, you know? Welcome to 2024.

• 1:28:25Chris Williamson?

  What's it like to be shot? Have you been shot?

• 1:28:27Tim Kennedy?

  I have.

• 1:28:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What's it feel like?

• 1:28:28Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Um, well, so I've never actually been shot in war and, uh.

• 1:28:35Tim Kennedy?

  And for me protecting, um, it's a really weird thing seeing a barrel pointed at you and then seeing the flash. Um, I was obviously in body armor and I, and I was being really particular. So I like rolled my shoulders back and I was holding, I was standing like this and I pulled my chin back because I didn't want any like slag or things coming up into my neck or into my shoulders and my arms. Um, I have seen friends get shot in war and I have obviously shot people, um, on like the receiving end of

• 1:29:10Tim Kennedy?

  in a gunfight, uh,

• 1:29:14Tim Kennedy?

  so one of my friends had a, uh,

• 1:29:18Tim Kennedy?

  a round go through like his groin and it missed his like femoral artery, um, but his like balls started like swelling up. So like a little bit of slag, like a little bit of, I like, I think trap, like went up into his, not sacs. So they started like bleeding in there and like started getting really, we had to air, we had to air vac him out. But he didn't realize that he'd even been hurt or hit until like he had a gigantic set of balls, you know, like he was still like,

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't like that.

• 1:29:50Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Like what is going on down here? And, um, there in Band of Brothers, there's this amazing scene where

• 1:30:00Tim Kennedy?

  this guy, this grenade goes off and he looks down and he sees that he's bleeding below the waist and the medic runs open and he's like, got you. And he like cuts him up, cuts his trousers open. He's like, hey, bro, you're good. Like, hey, your, your dick and balls are still good. Stay with me. You got the will to fight now. You're like, it was like this essence of when you think about warriors, um, like they're warriors in every sense and their manliness and that masculinity are very much yeah, entwined with their, their psyche.

• 1:30:30Chris Williamson?

  Don't get your dick blown off if, if best is possible. Yeah.

• 1:30:35Tim Kennedy?

  But to the bullet question, like mostly like, did I get, I got hit, you know, like, what the fuck? Did you see this? You know, like they didn't even recognize that there's a bullet hole in their arm. Or like, I'm trying to use my arm. It's not working.

• 1:30:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, I guess you've got this cascade of hormones, the cortisol, the adrenaline, all the rest of it. So it's just like, I don't know. That's why, that's why I was so interested to work out. How much pain versus how much surprise there is? I have this sort of idea. I snapped my Achilles, which is the most traumatic injury that I've had. Pretty nasty injury. Yeah. And the first thing that I felt wasn't pain. It was surprise. I was like, did I? Why is my leg not? And I thought to myself, I wonder how many people, you know, we think about your final moments on this planet being you thinking of your loved ones or you in pain or you in fear or you in whatever. I think surprise will be up there as one of the leading emotions that people pass away with.

• 1:31:35Chris Williamson?

  Did I just get fucking?

• 1:31:38Tim Kennedy?

  I hope so. That's a great way to go. You know, when I'm hunting, I try to be a really ethical hunter and, uh, you know, I, I even try to be on the left side of surprise. You know, that animal's just sitting there eating grass.

• 1:31:53Chris Williamson?

  Dead before it has chance to be surprised.

• 1:31:55Tim Kennedy?

  What, what was that? Oh no, there's nothing. Can't even figure out what it was because it's just blackness now.

• 1:32:02Tim Kennedy?

  I don't know. I can't think of a time where I was hurt in, I mean, even in the fights in the UFC. You know, cut wide open, like this was Robbie Lawler. This was Yoel Romero. This was Jacare Souza. You know, like I got one from Luke Rockhold right here.

• 1:32:21Tim Kennedy?

  And, and after the fights, the UFC fight doc, he'd come to stitch me clothes. And, um, he'd walk in with like a local and like, I don't, I don't want that. He's like, uh, I was like, no, I'm serious. So my face closed and I never let, let him give me any form of painkiller. I wanted to feel it, but I didn't really feel it. And then in the cage, I definitely didn't feel it.

• 1:32:44Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like a really hard thing to do, but your body is just producing so much.

• 1:32:49Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And also, I mean, there's a bit of me that wanted to feel it. Like I made this mistake. I want to, I want to remember this mistake, like the purpose of pain. I'm writing a book right now called The Purpose of Pain. And, um, the lessons that we learn from pain are, I think, the most important lessons. Emotional, emotional pain, you're like a bat out of my league. My K that crazy Latino girl, that's like an 11.

• 1:33:12Tim Kennedy?

  I'm totally gonna be with this one. And then she tries to stab you at night. You're like, maybe you bat it out of your league, bro. Like, go with the seven.

• 1:33:21Tim Kennedy?

  And similarly, like, I touch a stove and I burn my hand. I know that not to touch the stove again, you know, like, I think back to all the mistakes and the humiliation and the shame that I made as a young man. And now, as I'm hoping to be an improved man, I'm like, I don't want to do that again. I remember what that embarrassment felt like.

• 1:33:39Chris Williamson?

  You've worked quite hard to try and, and, you know, we've spent a good bit of time together since I've been.

• 1:33:44Tim Kennedy?

  Not enough, by the way.

• 1:33:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:33:45Tim Kennedy?

  That's your fault.

• 1:33:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is my fault. But I passed my driving test finally, because there's no license equivalency. But that means I can drive up and see you up north.

• 1:33:52Tim Kennedy?

  Okay.

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  You spend an awful lot of time trying to do everything the way that you want to do anything. Whether it's with alcohol, with training. We did a session. He came up to me in Roka. I hadn't done any cardio work in quite a while. And it was a pairs workout of that was gonna last maybe thirty minutes or something in four stations, three stations. He came up to me and he pointed your finger in my face. And you said, there's one thing that we're not going to be, and that's last. That was quite motivating. My point being, do you think that you're a good man now? Because you have this backdrop of not believing that you were a good man.

• 1:34:34Chris Williamson?

  When you think about you, who do you see? Do you see the old Tim? Are you still paying reparations? How do you, how do you think about that?

• 1:34:45Tim Kennedy?

  I mean, what is it? We'll get philosophical. Like, what is a good man? I think a man should always be judged by his actions. And obviously, if you, if you look back to periods of my life, my actions were not in support of being a good man. I mean, even some of the motivations of when I was going overseas, like, all these idealistic things about, hey, you can go and make a place a more stable and sovereign nation. You can give them democracy. Like, those are really great ideas. But there was also a twenty-five-year-old version of Tim that was like, I want to go and get in a fight. You know, like, I want you to say something so I can knock your teeth in. Like, I'm happy to be a bouncer. At the door for the opportunity to do violence. All of those obviously are not great characteristics.

• 1:35:29Tim Kennedy?

  And so even though I was doing good things, I was looking for an opportunity to do bad things. Now, if we are what we do, what are the things like if anybody were to take a step back and look at their life? And you're spending eight, 10 hours a day. Working at a job that you don't love, to go back to a woman that you don't appreciate, to be around kids that you don't want to feed and nurture and be intentional with. Are you a good person? I don't, I don't think so.

• 1:35:58Tim Kennedy?

  But you could have that exact same situation where you're working eight to 10 hours a day to be the best provider you possibly can. For the woman that you love, that you know she needs to. That you want to be able to support and provide for and put, you know, good food on the table for the kids that you love. To support them going to club score sports or to a private school or to get them out of this crappy public education that they're in. Like the only thing that changed there was. The action is still the same, but the purpose was different. And so now for me. My purpose and my actions are in alignment. And they, they didn't used to be. And now I very much try to, to have those things be complimentary.

• 1:36:38Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like you led with action and then allowed the intention to kind of catch up to that.

• 1:36:43Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the wheels were always spinning, but the car wasn't always pointed in the right direction.

• 1:36:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's the easiest way to do it. One of my friends, Alex, talks about.

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  I felt much better about myself when I started judging myself on my actions, not on the thoughts that I had. And I think that that's a really good first step, especially if someone.

• 1:37:03Chris Williamson?

  Is unsure about how virtuous they might actually be deep down. Where maybe they're cowardly or maybe they're untrustworthy or maybe they don't fulfill their potential or maybe they shy away from hard things or whatever it might be.

• 1:37:17Chris Williamson?

  The first place to start, I think the easiest place to start is to just change the things that you do and then allow intention to catch up after that because dude, it's so hard, it's so hard to change our sense of self, you know, how long have you worked at it to try and basically, you know, pay recompense, you know, this kind of like

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  life of flagellation, like self-flagellation in, in service of something to be like, and finally, maybe I'm a good man.

• 1:37:44Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Chris Williamson?

  But I think it's way easier to start with action than it is to be like, I think I'm a good man and then this is going to go ahead because you're always not going to know.

• 1:37:53Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I could not agree with you more. When, when people are asking, and I get asked all the time, man, what should I do? I'm like, do anything, just start.

• 1:38:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Tim Kennedy?

  You know, like, cool, you want to be a police officer? Well, start developing the characteristics that make you a good one. Start learning grace in different cultures. Join jiu-jitsu, start shooting, learn what it means to be like somebody that wants to protect somebody and sacrifice a portion of themselves at the, for, for, at the expense of themselves for the benefit of another. Like, these are things that we have to have in somebody that is a servant. Who you want to go into the military? Learn another language. Like, if you are not planning your future, somebody else is going to be planning your future for you. So if you don't know what your purpose is, sometimes you can just start doing things that will make you a better person and those things will give you purpose. And that's okay. Sometimes the cart is before the horse and that's okay. You know, like,

• 1:38:47Tim Kennedy?

  I didn't know as a firefighter EMT first, then I went to the police academy to become a police officer, you know, to go and hunt down serial killers. And then nine 11 happened and I enlisted in special forces. And then from there, I went to other specialty schools to go to special units. And then from there, you know, like I started these gigantic NGOs that go and rescue people over the planet. And now I'm working within the military in a military capacity and like my official role to like save soldiers and help with recruiting and to talk about messaging and clearly communicate how great of an organization it is and how wonderful it is to be part of this organization and to do something impactful that means more than yourself. If you take a step back, you're like, I mean, he's always kind of been going in this direction. The wheels were always spinning.

• 1:39:31Tim Kennedy?

  It was been imperfect. And now that there is momentum and a little bit of experience and plenty of failure. Now, now there's we're starting to see positive impact. But man, it took 25 years.

• 1:39:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a slow, you know, to chip away at whatever sense itself and to adjust the course. It is like moving a freighter.

• 1:39:55Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Chris Williamson?

  It's one half degree every single year. And you're like, right, okay. And finally, I can actually get this thing to swing around. Are there any? You mentioned that memory before of I thought it was the grenade and he thought it was the machine gun. That's obviously something that's played on your mind. Are there any other memories that sort of a common recurrences for you or that someone who got away, someone who didn't?

• 1:40:18Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Oh, man, we could go, we could spend hours talking about this, Chris. The, uh, there's a squirter out of a house in Iraq.

• 1:40:26Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:40:26Tim Kennedy?

  So you go to this building and you like attack this building and it was a bomb maker that's like this IED bomb makers house. And I was myself and this other colleague of mine were on one side of the house. And we see this guy running down this road. Now, we were fairly confident that that guy came from this building. And if he came from that building, he's a military aged man outside during curfew and came from a target house.

• 1:40:56Tim Kennedy?

  Does he fall within our

• 1:40:59Tim Kennedy?

  engagement rules? Yeah. He does. This is like peak war. This is like we're 100% ROEY able to shoot that guy. We didn't. We go to a follow on target and we get in a pretty good fight.

• 1:41:17Tim Kennedy?

  Clearly, that guy, and this is an assumption, I don't know this. But I think this guy went and told them that we were coming and they got ready for us to come. That weighs on you like that was my fault like why didn't I just press the trigger? Um, and shoot this guy in the back at night. I see your eye twitching. It's a hard question and it's not a question that I wish my son is ever asked, but like that's the question that I was asked. I mean, you go back another 10 years, um, a 19 year old firefighter EMT. There's a school, uh, van, this missionary van that's driving on the 101 and, and just north of San Luis Obispo, California, um, just south of Atascadero, California.

• 1:42:00Tim Kennedy?

  The driver falls asleep, maybe 70, 80 miles an hour and the car spins and tumbles out of control and these women and children in this 15 pack van are just launched out of every single window. And when my fire truck arrives on scene in the middle of the night, um, you know, I grew up in this area where it very kind of agricultural. When we roll up, the dust was still settling and through the emergency lights and the headlights, it created like

• 1:42:32Tim Kennedy?

  a horror film kind of aura, you know, like the, the dust, you can't see everything. But man, I can still smell the fall, dry grass and I can still smell the, the no moisture in the, in the soil. That was like hanging in the particulates in the air and I can still hear, you know, we shut off the siren. As we roll up on the scene and I don't know how we didn't run over people because bodies were everywhere. And thank God we didn't. We, uh, we get out and I can hear, I see what we call walking wounded. There's people wandering around, holding their arms that are like dislocated and broken. You see these compound fracture, this guy like holding his leg and, um, but then we hear like the moans of a child.

• 1:43:13Tim Kennedy?

  Not the screams of a child that is hurt, but the, the pain is so serious, they can't even cry anymore. That's a different sound entirely and, um,

• 1:43:25Tim Kennedy?

  That truck, we just go to work. I'm a young firefighter, EMT. I don't know anything. You know, I graduated from EMT school and the Fire Academy six months ago. And I had this really senior paramedic, an engineer, his name was Tom Way. And we start working on all these people and you know, we're trying to stabilize these people and we're trying to triage. Who's going to be evacuated first? I remember I hear Tom on, get on the radio and he calls to station number one. Cause there's two fire stations and a Tascadero. He's literally like, just send everyone. You're like, if they can get on a truck, if they can get on an ambulance, get them here, every volunteer, every paid cold firefighter, send everyone. You got 15 people.

• 1:44:07Tim Kennedy?

  Let's just say it takes four or five people per body. You know, you need a lot of firefighters and paramedics and EMTs. So I start working on this little girl. She's 11 maybe. And everything on her was, was hurt. You know, like I couldn't see an inch of her body that wasn't broken. And um,

• 1:44:30Tim Kennedy?

  I'm strong. I was, you know, I was a professional athlete at this point already. And I can't remember,

• 1:44:38Tim Kennedy?

  I remember telling myself like, how do you touch this girl without hurting her? Like, how do you help her without causing more damage? Like, um, she's not breathing right. It was like this raspy inhalation, um, with broken ribs. And Tom Way comes over and um, Tom goes, I have this Tim. Go find someone else. And he just pushes me and it like launches me. And um, I go and I start helping, I start helping triage and separating and segregating the people that are going to be immediately transported and the, and the ones that have to be like evacuated directly to the hospital. And I thought that that girl died my whole entire life until four years ago.

• 1:45:23Tim Kennedy?

  And um, and I thought Tom, in his wisdom, was trying to save a young man from the failure of saving this little girl's life. The last sentence of this, of this chapter in my book, when I found in the research of this book that that girl survived, was fucking Tom Way. That guy not just saved me, but he saved that little girl. And um,

• 1:45:49Tim Kennedy?

  I play back, had I stayed there, had I been that stubborn boy that I knew that I was, and I tried to save that girl, I would have killed her. But fucking Tom Way, he comes in, he saves this 11 year old broken girl. And I go off and I do the thing that you'd expect an 18, 19 year old guy to do, which is like, you know, grab people and carry them to ambulances, you know, I'm like hairy.

• 1:46:10Chris Williamson?

  You're a blunt tool.

• 1:46:11Tim Kennedy?

  That's right.

• 1:46:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Tim Kennedy?

  And um, maybe I lived with that for 25 years of I killed that little girl. I get home that night, I'm covered in blood, you know, and I walk in the front door. And I remember my dad, he comes to the door and he's like, uh, Keith Agasson, who was the captain at the time, he had called my dad and said, hey, Tim had a real tough call tonight, um, just make sure he's okay. And I walk in the front door and I was like, hey dad, I'm gonna go take a shower or I'm gonna go to bed. And my dad's like, uh, why don't you go take a shower before your mom sees you? And I'm like, no, I'm fine. I'm just gonna go crash. I'm covered in blood and mud.

• 1:46:55Tim Kennedy?

  And I was gonna go fall down on my bed and I didn't realize I couldn't walk, I couldn't breathe and I was, and I was crying. I actually never said anything to my dad. I was just trying to move past him to go to my bed. You know, talk about like, emotional and mental overload. And my dad recounting this to me, he's like, you never said anything to them to me that night. I just tried to move you to the shower to get you cleaned up and then lay you down. And this was the first time that I ever personally experienced, uh, you know, post traumatic stress.

• 1:47:29Tim Kennedy?

  And in my family, we'd, we'd experienced lots of different forms of, of death and trauma. But this was something that was like very me. And I remember like they, they said I had to go to, you know, a, a group trauma class. I was like, I don't need to go to that. And my dad's like, bro, you're gonna go to that. And um, yeah.

• 1:47:49Chris Williamson?

  You've been working with a lot of veterans at the moment on this stuff. What's the current state of veteran mental health? What are you seeing in them? And what about yourself as well?

• 1:48:04Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the um. It's been really hard. After 20 years at war, there's a failure of, I think there's a feeling of failure. So GWOT, Global War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa.

• 1:48:21Tim Kennedy?

  Now we're standing on the backside of it and we're, the reason that we're there is questionable. The actions that we took while we're there is questionable.

• 1:48:29Chris Williamson?

  Support of the people that you were fighting on behalf of is questionable.

• 1:48:32Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the people coming home that should be receiving us as servants to this country are looking at us like

• 1:48:43Tim Kennedy?

  abominations, you know, like we're, we're broken.

• 1:48:45Chris Williamson?

  It was the same in Vietnam to some degree as well, right?

• 1:48:47Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah, very, very, very similar. I was just talking to a Vietnam vet about it. He's like, man, I'm, it's like I'm

• 1:48:52Chris Williamson?

  Right there with you.

• 1:48:53Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I'm living through all this again. That's what he said exactly, almost verbatim. He said, man, I know what you're feeling.

• 1:49:00Tim Kennedy?

  And

• 1:49:03Tim Kennedy?

  so there's regrets and yeah, they're, they're struggling. Active duty is struggling. Young men first coming back from deployments are struggling and then men that want to go on deployments, but then missed it because timing is really hard. Like a, a unit will deploy and you arrive to the unit and your unit has already gone. That unit then gets, um, has some casualties and returns. The guy that didn't go has a ton of survivor's guilt.

• 1:49:29Chris Williamson?

  Even though they didn't survive, they missed.

• 1:49:32Tim Kennedy?

  They missed.

• 1:49:32Chris Williamson?

  Misses guilt.

• 1:49:33Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, but I mean, that it's

• 1:49:35Chris Williamson?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:49:35Tim Kennedy?

  It's the same thing. And those guys are also dealing with a bunch of, like, they didn't actually experience any trauma.

• 1:49:41Chris Williamson?

  But they didn't even get to contribute.

• 1:49:42Tim Kennedy?

  That's right. And it just eats and, and eats at their soul and it, you know, it's, it poisons that the vessel.

• 1:49:50Chris Williamson?

  So just to interject there, have you got any idea?

• 1:49:55Chris Williamson?

  Why survivor guilt would exist, like adaptively, evolutionarily? What is that there for? Is it that you've seen other people pay a price that you should have paid and you're concerned about not carrying your weight within the tribe? Do you think that's what it is?

• 1:50:14Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I mean, evolutionary, if, if we look

• 1:50:18Tim Kennedy?

  I should have been stronger. I should have been better. I should have been more equipped. I should have been more capable. All of those things are responses to survivor's guilt. And if you weaponize that, then in, you know, in a tribe, if, if, if the, the tribe's warrior goes to a battle and he comes back and they do okay, or maybe they could have done better. And he comes back and he has like, I wasn't fast enough. I wasn't strong enough. I didn't, I couldn't throw my arrow or I couldn't throw my spear far enough. I couldn't shoot my arrow far enough. All of those things forces him and motivates him to come to become a better person. So like, I think there's some elements of that. So survivor guilt? Yeah, a lot of it. And

• 1:51:04Tim Kennedy?

  we've done a really terrible thing in America, which is told people that there's easy fixes to hard problems, where you can take a pill and you're going to be better. You know, you can be, take a pill and you're going to be less fat. You can pick up your phone and you can have food delivered. It's just a lie. And when it comes to mental health and physical health, those things seriously overlap. When people look at me, I, I think often as I'm, I'm a crazy person because I'm, I work, you know, with how, how you do anything is how you do everything. Well, I do everything this way so I can deal with all of the stuff that I've seen and I've done. You know, like I work out every single day because I need

• 1:51:46Tim Kennedy?

  to stay healthy. I eat clean. I sleep well. I'm all like the litany of all these millions of little things that I do to make sure I'm a healthy version of myself is so I'm also a mentally healthy version of myself. One of my friends I was just visiting a couple of days ago, you know, he starts going through divorce. He stops eating well, stops exercising, starts drinking a little bit. Like you, you see the, the writings on the wall and every single one of those steps. It's just one decision. Any one of those things is okay. But when there's 10, 12, 14, 16 of them, then they're all compounding, creating more depression and more instability on the mental health side. He can't cope with it any longer. And then he's like fantasizing about suicide and this

• 1:52:31Tim Kennedy?

  easy exit. And he's trying to make, you know, a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And We see it time and time and time again. The only way that you can stay on this side of right is being faithful and intentional in all of these little tiny things. So yeah, I'm spending a ton of time on in this area trying to encourage, man, go outside. You know, go ride motorcycles, go be with your kids, you know, go grab your wife, take her on a great date and um, you know, like have a great night with her and then have a great night's sleep and then wake up with a smile on your face and go to the gym and then go hop in the sauna and then go hop in a blue cube and do like some legit cold water immersion.

• 1:53:14Tim Kennedy?

  And every single one of those things just makes you like your coat of armor gets a little bit thicker and a little bit stronger and I'm and of course there's chinks in my armor like I like I have days that I struggle and uh, but like I also watch these arrows just like bink. Pussy, you know, try to launch another one and I try to give this armor to other people because like it's a really great feeling when you don't, when you're not living your life in fear and you're not struggling with depression and you're not, you know, it's so freeing to be sovereign.

• 1:53:51Chris Williamson?

  What are the US Armed Forces getting right or wrong with their post-operation treatment and care for veterans?

• 1:54:02Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, they're realizing it's a total human optimization, right? Like it's not, uh, hey, I'm going to put this guy in counseling. That sure absolutely helps, but I'm also getting them, giving them access to great gyms. I'm going to give them access to dieticians. I'm going to like, we're going to be revamping the whole entire uh, CZ Cologne, the former CAC, the Senior List Advisor, the Joint Chief of Staff. He just recently retired. He has this great program where he's going to go across all of Department of Defense and, and he's a freak athlete, special operations guy, tier one level dude. He's going to all of the different organ, to all the different departments and changing how they view food. So like if you walk into a chow hall or uh, the Air Force calls it a dining facility.

• 1:54:48Tim Kennedy?

  Um, you know, like there's not a fast food aisle where you can walk up and I want, you know, a cheeseburger with fries. That's not an app. That's not an option anymore. Well, it is right now. Um, you know, you could get like spaghetti and meatballs. No, like, go get a chicken and a salad fatty. Um, and like the soda pops gotta go. Um, all the sugary sides, the desserts gotta go. All that fried stuff's gotta go. Um, like there's gonna be some pouty faces about it, but like, that's what you have to do. That's, so they're doing lot, a lot of things, right? Um, the military gives a ton of really great tools to a person. They teach them leadership. They teach them communication. They give them grit. You know, they give them the tools to make

• 1:55:31Tim Kennedy?

  quick, critical decisions. Um, we also now recognize that we give them bad habits. You know, we give them addiction to caffeine. We give them addiction to nicotine. We give them, um, bad sleep habits. We put them in places just like Native Americans when we put them in the worst plot of land on the planet and hope that they do. Okay. Like you take a soldier and you drop a soldier into a, a not hospitable place. Um, that soldier is going to climatize.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  And compensate.

• 1:56:00Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. In the place that he's in, like, have you ever been to Colleen?

• 1:56:04Tim Kennedy?

  It'd be a fun experiment for you. So if you drive one hour north to Fort Hood, now Fort Cavajos, it's a gigantic army base. That's one hour north of Austin. The city that's just adjacent to it is called Colleen. It is the most depressing place on the planet. There's car dealerships that target soldiers with 25% interest rates for their, you know, 2019 Mustangs, you know, there's strip clubs, there's, um, storage facilities that they, you know, soldier's about to go into employment. He has to put his stuff in storage and they're like, oh, but you don't have good credit. That's okay.

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

  It's a parasitic industry that's built up around the base.

• 1:56:44Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. To, to take advantage of young men that don't have experience or a fully developed brain.

• 1:56:52Tim Kennedy?

  It's wild, man.

• 1:56:53Chris Williamson?

  That's rough.

• 1:56:54Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, um, I was talking to Michael Punky Higgs. Do you know Michael?

• 1:57:01Tim Kennedy?

  No, I know that name though.

• 1:57:02Chris Williamson?

  So he was Master Chief, wherever, wherever they, Master Sergeant, whatever.

• 1:57:07Tim Kennedy?

  Those are two very different things. One's in the Navy, one's in the Army, one's amazing, one sucks.

• 1:57:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I can't remember which one it is. I feel like one of them, is that not the guy from Halo as well? Anyway, um, he has been doing psychedelic treatment, but he, he just sort of took me through a bunch of different challenges. And there was a lady that I'm friends with and her husband's been struggling PTSD post as a veteran. And, um, Ibogaine is the particular substance that they were using. And, uh, she and her husband have been battling alcoholism on his side for a long time. He's been trying to cope and back and forth 12 step program, all the rest of it. And they heard this episode, this is maybe three years ago now. And she said, would you be able to put me in touch with Michael? And sure enough, we did. Uh, and the husband went and did this treatment. And as far as I'm aware, this is like a rough psychedelic.

• 1:57:54Chris Williamson?

  It's 24 hour, incredibly deep, very existentially painful. And it does, uh, resets to the brain that are more powerful than most other, pretty much anything. Uh, and now he's back and he's flourishing and all the rest of this stuff. But it's like, it's not, it's not a one stop shop for everyone. It's not, I would just throw loads of drugs at them and they'll fix it, change the diet, change the friends that they've got with them. It's this global omni approach.

• 1:58:18Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. The Army or the DOD as a whole is allowing psychedelics for, I mean, which is wild. You know, like we're so slow to get there. Um, I have a bunch of friends. I've never personally, um, experienced any drug and, but I have a ton of friends that have, you know, traveled outside of the United States because it wasn't allowed here in the United States and dealt with some really serious trauma via psychedelics. And they came back transformed humans. I mean, they were like broken, depressed, suicidal alcoholics, woman, womanizing, like broken men in every way, shape and form. And they come back, I'm like, Easy, you know, like I literally want to be around you all the time.

• 1:59:02Chris Williamson?

  Reset.

• 1:59:03Tim Kennedy?

  Completely. And now they're like back to the amazing young man that I remember 20 years ago.

• 1:59:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you wish, if there's someone listening that has served or just someone that's suffering with sort of trauma in their past, would you wish that more people would hear or realize?

• 1:59:17Tim Kennedy?

  You're not alone. You know, there, there's every, everybody that has served in some form or fashion, especially in war, is, is carrying baggage, emotional trauma. And, um, and you're, you're not alone. Not just that other people experiences, but other people care about you. I think that's a big thing that everybody needs to know is like, you feel so alone and isolated when you're in these really low moments. It's just not true. You know, like if you go, if you're gone, Michelle Young, this stunning, beautiful staff sergeant in the army, just committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. She's supposed to be in Las Vegas with us a week. She's been in this community. She was a fitness influencer. She's like blonde and just like bikini supermodel. She committed suicide two weeks ago and her, her

• 2:00:02Tim Kennedy?

  daughter had her 12th year birthday, says, she's a single mom. Honey, I'm so proud of you. I love you. Happy birthday. A couple of days later, she commits suicide. What was she going through that she felt so alone? You know, and she had to have, right? Unbeknownst to her, there were, there, there are thousands of people that know her and support her and wanted to be there for her, but she felt alone and it, and it's just not true. So everybody listening, like the thing that I want them to know is they're not alone. The other big part is that individual responsibility part. Like we're, like we're saying, sometimes you can just start doing little things and tiny little steps hap, that

• 2:00:44Tim Kennedy?

  happen consistently over time. When you're in that moment of crisis, you put a little bit of time and space between you and a bad decision, just a little bit. And you wake up in the morning and you walk outside, we've been here in the rain, you know, like I want to go outside and run in the rain so bad, you know, and I want to see the sun come up tomorrow and I can't wait to go see my four year old tonight on the ice and I can't wait to go home because I'm making pulled pork sandwiches for the, you know, for the family and it's, they're going to be dynamite. Um, you know, I can't wait to get weird with my wife and like all of the things that I can't wait for are because of a bunch of little decisions, make me look forward to tomorrow. And even if.

• 2:01:22Tim Kennedy?

  You know, I go home and I pull a cork tonight and I, and I pull a couple of drinks and I start thinking about um, the mistakes that I made, the friends that I've lost. Even that one, that bad decision, or a few of those bad decisions can't hold up to all of the other things that I've done right.

• 2:01:37Chris Williamson?

  There's momentum.

• 2:01:38Tim Kennedy?

  That's right. And I want to carry that momentum into life and into hope and into another day.

• 2:01:45Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that the momentum goes in both directions.

• 2:01:47Tim Kennedy?

  Right.

• 2:01:47Chris Williamson?

  Right. It doesn't just go when things are going well, it also continues when things are going poorly. And that's the escalating spiral that people find themselves in.

• 2:01:58Tim Kennedy?

  And I, I say there's no easy solution. But if you are really in crisis, you like 911, there's a phone number 988 now, you just pick up the phone, hit 988. And it's like the 911 for you being in a bad, unhealthy place.

• 2:02:13Chris Williamson?

  A risk to yourself.

• 2:02:13Tim Kennedy?

  That's right. You pick up that phone, if you're a veteran, you literally just press the number one and it takes you to a veteran

• 2:02:22Tim Kennedy?

  that specifically wants to know you and know about you and is, and is trained to talk to you specifically. Wild. We've never had this before ever. Like this just happened this year. Pick up the phone, hit 988 and it goes to a mental health hotline. And if you're a veteran, you press one and it goes to a veteran to talk to you.

• 2:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Wild.

• 2:02:41Tim Kennedy?

  Sick.

• 2:02:42Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about bad decisions, what was that story of ISIS making a credible threat against you?

• 2:02:47Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, what a bunch of cowards, though.

• 2:02:52Tim Kennedy?

  So this is like peak caliphate, you know, ISIS is taking over northern Iraq and they're starting to gain ground and they're capturing people and art and American arms and they're selling it on the black market. And like a bunch of land that we had fought for, we are losing to ISIS.

• 2:03:10Tim Kennedy?

  They were also trying, you know, they, they had radicalized a whole bunch of mosques in the United States. And I get a call from the FBI saying that ISIS was trying to recruit somebody locally to find me and my family and where we lived

• 2:03:29Tim Kennedy?

  to come and kill us. And I was like,

• 2:03:34Tim Kennedy?

  That's it. Can you say that again? They're like, yeah, we're, they're trying to find somebody locally to kill you and your family. I was like, that's fucking sick. That's such great news, dude. I've been traveling all over the world. What you're telling me is that these idiots are gonna come to my house in Texas? So I call my friend that works for Fox News, like, hey, man, can you put me on live? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, all right, check it out. So my address, so I get live on Fox News and I say my address live on Fox Television. I was like, you can send absolutely anybody that you want to my house to try and kill me and my family. Just know that you're never gonna get them back. I'm gonna kill them all. How did this go down with your wife? She was so mad at me. Yeah, she likes, she's like, I'm out. And she like popped smoke just for like a day, but then she came right back because you know,

• 2:04:20Tim Kennedy?

  I got the goods and no, not really. She was really mad. But um, not, it wasn't surprising that they, of course, they're so tough when there's like 20 of them and they're attacking a village that's unarmed with a bunch of little girls. They don't, they don't even like deal with one man that would like stand up. When I say like be that somebody, um, in every situation, it always only takes one person. Fear is contagious, but so is courage. You know, when one person stands up and is like, no, this is wrong. And then somebody else is like, yeah, there's something off about this. I agree with that guy. And then it just like a tidal wave of courage just spontaneously combusts amongst all these people.

• 2:05:05Tim Kennedy?

  And they're like, fuck, no, you can't do this. Um, you know, I had hundreds of people being like, we'll sit up on your street all night long. You know, we're setting up rotating guards. And I was like, I don't want that, man. I need a conus kill. Like, what do I gotta do? What's a conus kill? Oh, yeah. So, um, when you go out- Remember you're speaking to a muggle. Yeah. When you go outside of the continental US and fight abroad, you are oh conus. Right. So like getting, fighting and killing a terrorist in Afghanistan. Right. Um, that's just like a war. Oh, conus. Yeah. Oh, conus. But if you're in the United States and let's say you're in-

• 2:05:45Tim Kennedy?

  Kovina, you're at a Christmas party and this terrorist that has been radicalized walks into this Christmas party and plans to kill everybody because they think Christmas is bad because it has to do with Jesus, you know, and they're like, and you're like, wow, Kona's kill.

• 2:06:03Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:06:03Tim Kennedy?

  Sick.

• 2:06:04Chris Williamson?

  Have you got one?

• 2:06:05Tim Kennedy?

  No.

• 2:06:05Chris Williamson?

  No. Ruined it.

• 2:06:07Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:09Tim Kennedy?

  Loser.

• 2:06:10Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and was there any, was there ever any more comeuppance about that?

• 2:06:14Tim Kennedy?

  Nah, the FBI was pissed at me for a little while. Um, the news was pissed. My wife was pissed.

• 2:06:21Chris Williamson?

  But you were excited.

• 2:06:22Tim Kennedy?

  I was, I was. I was hopeful.

• 2:06:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Chris Williamson?

  You immediately went on whatever it is, like bigguns.com and got more.

• 2:06:28Tim Kennedy?

  No, I didn't need any more. Yeah. Hope's not a plan. It just didn't pan out to be anything. Super funny story. I was in the USADA, um, the United States anti doping pool because I was a professional athlete and I was driving home during this period and I see this car and I kind of lived in this area that there's not a lot of through traffic. So I see this car, you know, following them, makes a turn, makes a turn, makes a turn. Like five turns later, they're on my street and they slow down as I turn in my driveway and he pulls up in front of my house. And by the time, you know, he puts his vehicle into park, he has a gun at his face.

• 2:07:07Chris Williamson?

  Right. You would have shot the USADA guy.

• 2:07:09Tim Kennedy?

  That's right.

• 2:07:11Tim Kennedy?

  I imagine there's. I'm USADA. And he's like, ah, all right, let's go get my piss.

• 2:07:16Chris Williamson?

  I imagine that there's a lot of athletes that would have probably quite liked to have shot the USADA guy.

• 2:07:20Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they were.

• 2:07:21Chris Williamson?

  Pretty sure John Jones would have probably been able to shoot the USADA guy. That would have been a solution for him.

• 2:07:26Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. I don't think he needs any more drama. What a talented athlete, though.

• 2:07:31Chris Williamson?

  Uh, BioFire, have you heard of this? So it's a smart gun that was invented by a guy who started working on it after the Aurora Theater shooting. Uh, fingerprint and facial recognition.

• 2:07:45Tim Kennedy?

  Lame.

• 2:07:46Chris Williamson?

  And it only fires if the right person's. What do you think of smart guns?

• 2:07:49Tim Kennedy?

  Lame.

• 2:07:50Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:07:51Tim Kennedy?

  Well, they're stupid. I don't want that. Um, so can my wife shoot my gun?

• 2:07:57Chris Williamson?

  You add users to the profile.

• 2:07:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Uh, who controls that profile?

• 2:08:03Chris Williamson?

  You suppose?

• 2:08:04Tim Kennedy?

  Just you? Like safes that I'm only supposed to access unless the FBI calls the manufacturer and gets permission to gain access to my safe without a subpoena or warrant? That happened this year.

• 2:08:14Chris Williamson?

  Probably not as secure as that. You got subpoenaed to?

• 2:08:16Tim Kennedy?

  No, I didn't. This was something that happened this year. I'm just giving an example of if anybody else has. So this Second Amendment thing, nobody gives me authority to this inherent right for me to protect myself and my family. The government is not saying that I get to protect me and my family. This is my God given right to protect me and my family. This is not somebody has access to a program to give me the tool to protect my family. I just have this right and I have, should have access to any tools that I deem necessary to protect myself, my family, my property, and even more by extension, freedom. So against a tyrannical

• 2:08:56Tim Kennedy?

  government, but over government overreach, you know, it's not just like hunting sports and me and my family. This is hunting sports, me and my family. And if the government gets too big and gets too nosy into my life, this is what happened in 1776. Like, we were pretty cool until we weren't cool. And then you guys started asking too much of us and then we said no, and then we killed all of you. That's it. I know this is a hard thing.

• 2:09:20Chris Williamson?

  It's a very difficult day for me. I've survived two July 4ths since I've been here. I actually wore a T-shirt that said, "Happy treason day, ungrateful colonials." I wore that on July 4th last year.

• 2:09:33Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. It's a hard thing to wrap yourself around unless this, this is what pumps in America, should be pumping in Americans' blood. It's like, we are rebels. We have always been rebels. You cannot tell me what to do. There's nothing that you can say to me. Every single one of those beautiful amendments and that fantastic, one of the best pieces of words ever put together in history is the Constitution. And it says that those are our God given rights and nobody has a right to control those. The freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, like overreach to you coming to my home, like due process, the right to bear arms, all of those things are my rights. So like, no,

• 2:10:14Tim Kennedy?

  I don't want a system. I don't want a fingerprint. I don't want facial recognition. I want a cannon. And I want a Gatling gun, minigun attached to my motorcycle and I want a tank and I should be able to have it.

• 2:10:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure the Black Rifle guys have got a minigun attached to a Tesla.

• 2:10:32Tim Kennedy?

  We did that.

• 2:10:33Chris Williamson?

  Is that you?

• 2:10:34Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I mean, no, no, that was Matt and Jared.

• 2:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Right, but you've played around with, right, okay.

• 2:10:40Tim Kennedy?

  We were trying to talk Elon Musk into building a trebuchet that would launch a Tesla.

• 2:10:47Chris Williamson?

  At what?

• 2:10:48Tim Kennedy?

  At anything.

• 2:10:48Chris Williamson?

  An enemy.

• 2:10:50Tim Kennedy?

  No.

• 2:10:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God. They're sending Teslas.

• 2:10:53Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. I mean, any electric vehicle should just be launched into the stratosphere, except Teslas, because they're pretty fast.

• 2:10:59Chris Williamson?

  They're pretty cool.

• 2:11:00Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the state of the American education system. This is something you're spending a lot of time thinking about and assessing at the moment.

• 2:11:10Tim Kennedy?

  Well, we'll go to the genesis of it, which is as an employer and as a senior non-commissioned officer, me looking at the people coming to work for me in either one of these occupations and looking at this population of this generation and be like,

• 2:11:27Tim Kennedy?

  you're dumb. Like, you literally are an idiot. You have, you can barely read. You have no way to collaborate. You have no creativity in you. Like, there's, there's not even a speck of genius in there. And there's no grit. There's no teamwork. There's, you've, you've, you've been taught how to be a consumer. You've been taught how to sit there as a lemming and go through some systems and processes of like, sit here, use this pencil, use this paper, write this way, do this thing, you get this grade to take this test to then say that you've passed that level. What, how is that applicable to real life?

• 2:12:10Tim Kennedy?

  How can somebody go through public education and then think that they're going to be usable in the real world as a creator, a designer, a teammate in any form or fashion, in any industry? They're not. They've not been taught anything useful. They don't know how to balance a checkbook. They don't know how to change a car tire. They don't know how to fill up a car. They don't know how to, like, they know nothing about the world. They don't know how to do a spreadsheet for a profit and loss statement. Like, the second graders in, in, in our school.

• 2:12:42Tim Kennedy?

  Take a product, they design the product, they take the product to market, they market the product, and then they go back to the school and they give a presentation about the performance of that product in the market. So we had this adorable little girl take a bunch of mason jars. She went and bought kinetic sand and then she went and bought toys that were themed. She took a loan from her parents for a couple hundred dollars and she built a bunch of these mason jars. Some had astronauts and like space things in them. Some of them had like mermaids and fish in them and she used blue sand. Some of them were like green sand and brown sand with dinosaurs and she sold them for $25 at the farmer's market. She made a couple thousand dollars. She paid her parents back

• 2:13:27Tim Kennedy?

  the few hundred dollars that she took a loan from.

• 2:13:30Chris Williamson?

  And then went bowling.

• 2:13:30Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And then she went back and briefed her P and L on the performance of her product.

• 2:13:36Chris Williamson?

  How old is she?

• 2:13:37Tim Kennedy?

  She's nine, right? And do you know how it do for a 20 year old that could do that? She's a nine year old and I argue that that the presentation from that nine year old is a thousand times better than anybody than any resume that's come across my desk in the past five years. Nine year old. In that same timeframe in this project, we had a kid that went to his parents ranch and he would spend hours in the afternoon collecting antlers and horns from all the different wild exotic animals that they have on their property and he was building furniture with them. So he made like a lamp and he cut them and put screws on them so you could use them as hardware for like dressers.

• 2:14:20Chris Williamson?

  Right. I was thinking that you were gonna say that a nine year old had tried to construct a chair. That might be a high risk thing to sit on. I'm not sure how, yeah.

• 2:14:28Tim Kennedy?

  Really like really cute usable things. And of course his dad helped him and he took this and sold those things, launched an e-commerce market and was selling them online on Facebook Marketplace. He was selling them on, he had like three or four different online ways for him to sell it and made a few thousand dollars. And then we had this other kid that went and took sticks and he thought that that stick looked like a gun. And then he tried to sell that stick as a gun and he sold no sticks. And he went back and he saw his two classmates that made thousands of dollars that put effort into their products and then he sat there embarrassed and his parents were mad.

• 2:15:09Tim Kennedy?

  And it's perfect because that kid just learned the best lesson he could possibly learn, which is failure and what it looks like to have effort and discipline and intentionality. And somebody that actually practices the, the process of what we are teaching them about how to launch a product and in his embarrassment then motivated him to go and do better on the next release. And, but he learned that lesson at nine. I learned that lesson at 35.

• 2:15:40Tim Kennedy?

  So Socratic and project driven learning, Socratic, uh, this is not new, Socrates, this idea that this learner driven environment, you take a bunch of young people and you allow them to lead the education process. So they're making millions of decisions in a day, what chair they're going to sit on, what pencil or pen they're going to use, what kind of paper they're going to be used, if they're going to be using an iPad to be taking their notes. Ultimately, like they have to perform, like here's the things that you have to do. Um, if you want to go outside and play, okay, show me your work. You didn't do your work. You actually have to sit back down and do your work. They're pissed, right? Well, you're over there in the corner bouncing on that little Bosu ball, not doing your work, but Johnny is

• 2:16:23Tim Kennedy?

  over there and he sat down, he put on his headphones, started listening to work, music, and he knocked out his work and he's already outside playing. So in a day, they're making all of these, you know, hundreds, if not millions of little decisions on their own. They're not being told where to sit. They're not being told how to do the work. They're getting, they're given the tools, they're guided. So we don't have teachers in the studios. We have guides in the studios and just like Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, all of them were guides. They were literally like mentors to these young learners trying to learn how to critically think. And three years ago, we opened school number one. Last year, we opened our online mentorship program when we recognized that this is working. We just need to give the

• 2:17:08Tim Kennedy?

  keys to the castle to as many people as possible. Then from the, my, my partner, Matt Boudreau, just a dynamite hard worker, like everything that you'd want in an educator, realizing from the online mentorship program that the benefits of the brick and mortar environment that is conducive to learning.

• 2:17:29Tim Kennedy?

  How do we give not just intellectually everything that they need, but then also physically like, hey, here's a space for you and your family and family is a key word here because we really do believe that the nuclear family is the strength behind a young person learning. Like if you think that you could take your kid and just drop him off and you're going to be given back the product that you want without you putting some form of effort. And if you have, if you don't have skin in the game, if you send your children to Caesar, you will be given back Romans. I don't want a Roman, right? I want to be intimately involved in what my children become and nobody cares about them more than me. So as

• 2:18:15Tim Kennedy?

  the online mentorship program exploded, this year will open 50 new apogees in the United States. And then I promise next year, we're going to open 200 more. And then the next year we'll open 500 more and I will defund and abolish the Department of Education in the next five years. Like it's gonna happen.

• 2:18:36Chris Williamson?

  What's the problem with what they're doing?

• 2:18:38Tim Kennedy?

  They're not doing anything. What, when was the last time that you've seen an American school? The kids are not learning how to read. They are failing math. Our ASVAB scores, I hate that I have to keep going.

• 2:18:49Chris Williamson?

  What's ASVAB?

• 2:18:49Tim Kennedy?

  It's the military entrance exam. It's, it's like your SAT when you graduate to see how you stand against all of the other kids at your grade level on an equal playing field to get acceptance into college, except that those acceptance levels are different per gender and per skin color. That's idiotic, but that's the way it is, not merit based. That's a completely different conversation I'd love to have, but it's not the one that we're talking about right now. The test for kids going to the military, we were talking about how fat they were and how mentally unhealthy they are and also like their substance abuse and some criminal history. They're also dumb. The ASVAB scores have been dropping every year for the past 25 years. So the kids are getting dumber.

• 2:19:33Chris Williamson?

  You have a litmus test. You have a yardstick and measured against the same thing.

• 2:19:40Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:40Chris Williamson?

  That changes, but the difference.

• 2:19:42Tim Kennedy?

  And it looks like this.

• 2:19:43Chris Williamson?

  And presumably the ASVAB is being fucked with less than entrance exams for universities because those are more male.

• 2:19:51Tim Kennedy?

  This is just a standardized testing that's given, the exact same test has been given to, you know, Millions of kids at this point across this nation for the past

• 2:20:00Chris Williamson?

  Decades.

• 2:20:00Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, for decades.

• 2:20:01Chris Williamson?

  So you've always got this barometer that you can measure this generation versus 20 years ago.

• 2:20:06Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, so like as

• 2:20:07Chris Williamson?

  Not good.

• 2:20:08Tim Kennedy?

  Not good. This is, this is a problem. And then, you know, when you look even here in Austin and Texas, Florida, they really are, and I really hope that Texas does push through the school voucher program. Arkansas already did it. Florida is going to be doing it. The school voucher program is so you, if you own land here, you pay property taxes. That property taxes pays for the school that is in your zip code.

• 2:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:20:37Tim Kennedy?

  If your kids don't go to that school, it doesn't matter. You still have to pay for that school that you don't use. But what if you have kids and then you pay for those kids not to go to that school? You pay extra and then you pay the same amount as everybody else in that zip code for that school to exist that your kids don't use. So you're being, you're paying twice for education, even though you're only using half of it. The school vote, school voucher program is there's money allocated per child. And that money is a tax credit that's given back to the parent so that they can use the money how they best want to for their child. Maybe it's to send them to public school. Maybe it's to send them to a specific kind of school because that kid needs a specific kind of education.

• 2:21:22Tim Kennedy?

  Some of it like whether it's going to be Montessori or it's going to be Socratic or it's going to be like whatever the form it's going to be. It's going to be tailored to that child and the money is going to follow the child. It's, it's been brought up in Texas multiple times and it's almost passed multiple times. So the Apogee program, Apogee Strong Online, apogestrong.com, our school here, Apogee Cedar Park. So we're a North Austin school and we have, anybody can apply, like literally, you know, we're, we're taking applications right now for 2024 school year and every corner of this building is magic.

• 2:22:00Tim Kennedy?

  Like there's giggles, there's laughter, there's joy, there's Harry Potter, there's comic books. You know, there's, there's drawings on the walls, there's engineering schematics, there's new designed tanks.

• 2:22:15Chris Williamson?

  How well, at what age do you take them up to?

• 2:22:18Tim Kennedy?

  I mean, college.

• 2:22:20Chris Williamson?

  Right. And how well are the, I don't know whether you've done this yet because of how short amount of time you've been around.

• 2:22:26Tim Kennedy?

  We outperform everybody in every metric of measurement.

• 2:22:29Chris Williamson?

  Including college applications?

• 2:22:31Tim Kennedy?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:22:34Tim Kennedy?

  Our, our kids dunk on everybody. Literally make everyone else look silly. So when you're at the university and you're in reviewing all of the applications and you have, okay, this SAT score. This kid is coming from this school, you know, he was, he or she graduated with this GPA. They were involved in these extracurricular activities. Cool. And you're comparing that against all other kids in that same format. And then you get a packet and this kid has been working, started his own business.

• 2:23:15Tim Kennedy?

  He is apprenticed in this very specialized program. He has letters of recommendation from these Fortune 500 companies that he has been working for and advising and consulting. He also has higher scores than everybody over here. And he has the same GPA as everybody over here, but for some reason his essay is so dissimilar to everybody else over here because it's real and life experience.

• 2:23:43Chris Williamson?

  So it's the, the standardized testing that I think people have skepticism around whether it be.

• 2:23:51Tim Kennedy?

  First of all, those should not exist.

• 2:23:53Chris Williamson?

  Standardized test.

• 2:23:54Tim Kennedy?

  How, how does that help you?

• 2:23:57Chris Williamson?

  It is the equivalent of the ASVAB that you need a barometer up against. You can measure everybody else in a way which is standardized. Or else it's like, okay, well, this person wrote an essay and this person did a piece of art. How many pieces of art is this essay worth? It's the reason we have currency. We have currency to make ease of exchange and comparison.

• 2:24:16Tim Kennedy?

  But if the whole entire point of this entire organization is to prepare this population for the test compared to this group of people that is preparing the entire population to be constructive, contributing members of society, but then still perform the same on the test. Which group of these two comparable groups, which one would you like to to select from? A or B?

• 2:24:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, obviously that one.

• 2:24:41Tim Kennedy?

  Obviously, right?

• 2:24:42Chris Williamson?

  If you can achieve the same, you still need the test at the top to be able to.

• 2:24:47Tim Kennedy?

  It's the easiest thing. And they perform at the same on the standardized testing. And I'm even arguing that they so surpass all other metrics, all the ways that you can measure their performance, they end up being not even comparable. It's like apples and oranges. It's like these useless kids and these like extraordinary anomalies and these unicorns that like you can't hire and accept fast enough. That's currently what we're experiencing. And there's data because we're not the first school to do this. This has been acting here in Austin started it.

• 2:25:22Chris Williamson?

  Acton Academy, Montessori.

• 2:25:24Tim Kennedy?

  Jeff Sandifer. Yep. You know, there's lots of heritage data, legacy data to support this. So it's not like I'm creating anything new. I did not create anything.

• 2:25:33Chris Williamson?

  Doing it in a different.

• 2:25:34Tim Kennedy?

  I literally just like, I took a lot of the best of a bunch of different forms of education and then I made sure that family was the center and the nucleus of everything.

• 2:25:45Tim Kennedy?

  So like, we go after the parents. Like, if you think that you're going to be part of the apogee family and you're not a hardworking, fit, intentional father, like you're joking yourself. We had thousands of people apply to open schools and we literally just like opened an Instagram or Facebook and we see a fat bodied soft dude that's sitting there pulling a Bud Light next, you know?

• 2:26:09Chris Williamson?

  Imagine your kid not getting into school because of you.

• 2:26:12Tim Kennedy?

  As it should be.

• 2:26:16Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. It's interesting to think that when you go to

• 2:26:21Chris Williamson?

  when your child goes to school, you go to school again as well.

• 2:26:24Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Or at least care, at least like want to be.

• 2:26:32Tim Kennedy?

  Yesterday, I laced up my skates, grabbed my hockey gear and hopped on the ice with my four year old and my eight year old. Do you know how long I've been on the ice?

• 2:26:47Tim Kennedy?

  For as long as they've been on the ice.

• 2:26:49Chris Williamson?

  Right. Do you suck?

• 2:26:50Tim Kennedy?

  I suck. I'm terrible.

• 2:26:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:26:53Tim Kennedy?

  But man, I can, I can, what? That's not true. I'm literally better than every single dad there.

• 2:27:01Tim Kennedy?

  Every single one of them.

• 2:27:02Chris Williamson?

  Because they're not on the ice?

• 2:27:03Tim Kennedy?

  Cause they're not on the ice. I was playing tag with my four year old on the ice yesterday and I'm, of course, I'm like, I watched a bunch of YouTube things and there were specific drills I was trying to do while I was playing tag with my four year old, like how to, and I'm skating forward to turn left and then skate backwards and then turn right and skate backwards. Like those were all specific drills that I had looked up. So I went on the ice with intentionality, not just to play with my daughter, which I wanted to do, but also develop as a person and as a skater. So I can in some way, shape or form, at least show my, my kids that I want to be involved with them.

• 2:27:34Tim Kennedy?

  And I was, I was wearing half lacrosse gear. You know why I own lacrosse gear?

• 2:27:39Chris Williamson?

  Cause you fall over a lot?

• 2:27:41Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, because my kids play lacrosse.

• 2:27:43Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:27:44Tim Kennedy?

  Like I've never played lacrosse. I've never played hockey, but I'm gonna do it because they're interested in it. You know, like if my daughter, please don't start, but wants to learn how to

• 2:27:59Tim Kennedy?

  play the cello.

• 2:28:02Tim Kennedy?

  I'm gonna fucking learn how to play the cello.

• 2:28:06Chris Williamson?

  What are the principles for raising kids that you've discovered that you think most parents don't realize?

• 2:28:15Tim Kennedy?

  Time. They don't care about their stuff. They don't care about how clean your house is. They don't care how the

• 2:28:28Tim Kennedy?

  rest of the world views them. They care about how you view them. They care about the time you give them. They care about what meal you cooked for them. They care about what games you were sitting there cheering for. You know, the first, it takes about 20, 30 minutes to get dressed to play hockey. So my wife will leave first with whichever kid is going to be playing, get them ready, get on the ice, and I show up with the other kid 20, 30 minutes later. The first time that the kid that's playing scores a goal, the very first thing that they do is look up into the stands to see if dad is there.

• 2:29:11Tim Kennedy?

  You know, my, my big girls, the first time that they went on stage for whatever their performance were, and they looked out in the audience, and I wasn't there because I was overseas. Do what kind of like damage I did to those girls? You know, the, the A B test here of like me being here for every single one of them and me being absent for every single one of them. Like, thank God their moms are amazing. And they're like, those girls are just incredible and their resilience is astounding, but.

• 2:29:40Chris Williamson?

  Swimming upstream without dad there?

• 2:29:42Tim Kennedy?

  That's right.

• 2:29:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I remember I did a, I was a swimmer in school and I've got like this memory seared into my mind when I won the backstroke at the end of this big competition. I looked up and dad was there. Crazy. So fulfilling.

• 2:29:58Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:59Chris Williamson?

  There was an idea I came up with after I sat down next to Tucker Max at dinner about nine months ago or something.

• 2:30:05Tim Kennedy?

  Love that guy.

• 2:30:06Chris Williamson?

  So he's a good guy. He's cut from the same cloth as you. So I'm going to take you through this now. So it's called the fuck you family.

• 2:30:13Tim Kennedy?

  Okay.

• 2:30:13Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you money is a meme, but it's also a truth. There is an amount of wealth that you can achieve where typical restrictions and conventions no longer apply to you. You don't need to suck up to the gatekeepers. You don't need to do things that you don't want to do. In extreme situations, you don't even really need to follow the law. Similarly, fuck you freedom is kind of downstream from fuck you money, but also can be achieved through cultivating a lack of resilience on other groups. There are no restrictions on where you can travel to and when and for how long. You don't need to show up to work on time or work at all. If you're sufficiently well structured, you don't even need to care about the state of the economy or the power grid or the wider world. But I've recently learned about another type of fuck you liberation, one which is significantly cheaper, more accessible, more common, and maybe even more powerful. The fuck you family.

• 2:30:56Chris Williamson?

  Many fathers I've spoken to have told me about how their priorities were completely changed upon starting a family. All the previous status games they played seemed petty. The admiration and gamesmanship they used to play in an attempt to impress people in power or those with status seemed juvenile and shallow. Much of their anxiety around whether people liked them or thought they were cool evaporated. The only people they needed to care about impressing were now asleep in their house. To their kids, they were the coolest, richest, strongest, most heroic person on the planet. And that gave them a very type, powerful type of liberation. It seems to me that much of what young men get up to are surrogate activities until they finally find a family. This isn't to say that all fathers become placid soy boy hippies or that having kids neuters your ambition. But it definitely seems to open up a new realm where they care far less

• 2:31:40Chris Williamson?

  about the flotsam and jetsam that used to occupy their lives.

• 2:31:45Tim Kennedy?

  Bro, that's it, man. That's it. But that's also the definition of sovereignty, though. You know, it's like I keep hammering this idea of sovereignty, like I'm, there's nothing external that can touch anything internal. And internal is me and my family, the nuclear. There's, there's no government body. There's no medical organization. There's, there's nothing that can affect my family. And I love the, I mean, it's profane, but like this fuck you idea. It is, it's so to the point and it's so on the nose and it's so correct. And there's nothing else that more important. I totally agree. Once you recognize this.

• 2:32:29Tim Kennedy?

  That guy driving the fancy car that gets out, that's like, you know, he seems so pathetic. And the guy that's like, hey, I just got this new raise at work. You know, I just got this promotion. I'm like, I pity you. Like, I, I, I feel sorry for you. You know, the guy that's like trying to build the brand and like, like it's so good online. You know, it's his social media. He has, you know, a couple hundred thousand followers right now. And I'm just like,

• 2:32:52Tim Kennedy?

  I want you to experience that because that is indescribable. That I can't, like, that is a drug that can never, um, you can't have enough of. Like, you'll never be satiated from the thing that you get from giving back to your family.

• 2:33:06Chris Williamson?

  What would you say if there's fathers listening who don't think they have that, that they haven't been fulfilled? How can they reconnect with their, with their kids and that sort of sense of purpose for their family?

• 2:33:15Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, because those little, the little bits, like it's not, there's not a handle that you pull and all of a sudden, you know, like, how many practices do you go to a week? How many games do you go to in a month? How many, um, afternoons while they're doing homework? Have you sat there at the kitchen table with patience and grace? And tried to help them? And I'm like, what do you mean? You don't know what five plus five is or five times five is, you know, like, every one of those opportunities is an opportunity either hit or missed. And when you take a step and look at like, there's thousands of them in a month and

• 2:33:52Tim Kennedy?

  just start hitting more of them, 1% more and then 2% more. And fortunately, like, if you've been a bad dad, all you can do is go up. Like, all you can do is get better.

• 2:34:03Chris Williamson?

  The bar's set quite low.

• 2:34:03Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, I, I, I try really hard to be a good dad. And I go to my wife like last night, um, as we're having like pillow talk time. It's like, how can I do this better? You know, how, how can I be better? And, you know, she's like, more time, you know, everybody wants you to do something for them, you know, but we want that too. And how you allocate that time, I realize that you can't be you without doing these other things, you know, if, if the Bahamas kickoff with this terrorist group that's taking advantage of.

• 2:34:37Chris Williamson?

  The Bahamas?

• 2:34:38Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Chris Williamson?

  Like.

• 2:34:40Tim Kennedy?

  Anywhere that there's money and tourism, there is criminal organizations that are looking for opportunities to take advantage of them.

• 2:34:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:34:47Tim Kennedy?

  You know Venezuela could pop off, Central America, you know, even Peru with Ecuador and Venezuela and.

• 2:34:55Chris Williamson?

  Honduras, all right, I'm going there next week.

• 2:34:57Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 2:34:58Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Thank you.

• 2:34:59Tim Kennedy?

  You got my number though.

• 2:35:00Chris Williamson?

  Kennedy, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim, you said the terrorist weather report came back negative for Honduras this week. I would like to tell you that your predictions were incorrect.

• 2:35:09Tim Kennedy?

  You enrolled, oh, you're, um, so there's a program called STEPS, which is the state something, what does it stand for? It is the Department of State's tracking of you as a tourist traveling abroad. So you get notifications from Department of State.

• 2:35:26Chris Williamson?

  You told me about this before. It's literally like a weather report, like how dangerous is.

• 2:35:29Tim Kennedy?

  It's an important thing to do, but that's before you leave. But then, once you're overseas, they, they know that you're there. So they, they ask for like your travel dates, like what day do you arrive? So then a person like me, when I go to Department of State and I say, okay, how many Americans are currently in Israel that aren't, that are tourists that need to get, because if you go to October 7th, and we didn't know if this was going to go high and right, like, is Hezbollah going to be coming in?

• 2:35:57Chris Williamson?

  You, um, you said that you predicted it being more kinetic than it was, which it's still very kinetic, but you thought it was going to be way worse.

• 2:36:03Tim Kennedy?

  Well, I, um, Israel, man, I know people get so mad. Israel's done a really good job keeping this not going full regional warfare. Hezbollah wants an excuse to come in. The Houthis wants an excuse to come in, you know, like every single one of the pro Hamas, Iran, Taliban, Al Qaeda, every single one of those organizations has been looking for an opportunity and enough popular support for them to come in. Israel is doing the best that they can to target specific terrorist sets in Gaza that conducted the most heinous sets of rapes

• 2:36:44Tim Kennedy?

  and murders and tortures and current by, I mean, probably since the Holocaust. This is the worst thing that we've seen happen to the Jews since Hitler was gassing them. And so Israel is doing the best that they can with the really difficult situation that they're in. But I thought that.

• 2:37:04Tim Kennedy?

  The north border was going to kick off. I thought that the West Bank was going to kick off. I thought that Egypt would gotten a little bit spicy on the south border. I thought Jordan would have gotten a little bit more. So I, the reason that we were there, of course, was to get Americans out. But like, had it gone a different direction, which is this slow grinding war, Hamas wanted this to go kinetic. That's what they wanted. That's why they did it the way that they went. Like, the reason they went out and raped everybody they could and tortured everybody that they could is because they wanted a overwhelming and overbearing response by the Israelis. With an overbearing overwhelming

• 2:37:46Tim Kennedy?

  response by the Israelis would have given them a ton of propaganda to then go to all of the other nations and be like, look what Israel is doing. These disgusting murders. They've killed tens of thousands of us poor Palestinians trapped in here. You're the ones that did this. But that's what they wanted. And now that it didn't happen, now they're, they're kind of like, crap.

• 2:38:11Chris Williamson?

  What were your thoughts after spending time with Vivek? You got to catch up with him recently.

• 2:38:15Tim Kennedy?

  Dude, I love that guy.

• 2:38:16Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:38:17Tim Kennedy?

  Because everybody has their beliefs. I have my beliefs. And I think I know why I believe what I believe. He can articulate why. I got a bunch of time with him. And he can explain, not just the reason that he has those beliefs, but then he can also articulate what he thinks the solution is to the problem. That is a very different thing than what's currently happening in politics, right? Somebody goes up there, like Trump gets up there and he's like, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Biden gets up there and he's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, they're spouting all this rhetoric. But who is walking up and be like, this is what I believe. This is why I believe it.

• 2:39:00Tim Kennedy?

  This is the solution to the problem. And I'm going to articulate the steps for us to be able to accomplish it. Blown away by, by the depth of his understanding in a world that he's never worked in, which is the American government. Crazy.

• 2:39:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he verbally is incredibly fluent, like very, very canny communicator. I like some of the stuff I've seen on Twitter where he does his debate prep videos. Have you seen this? And it's him topless doing like forehand smashes on the tennis court or doing burpees in his house. He calls it debate prep and it's, you know, a counter signal against the fact that he is taking care of himself physically, which I don't think he can say for much of the rest of the presidential.

• 2:39:49Tim Kennedy?

  Or Kennedy. Kennedy looks good.

• 2:39:51Chris Williamson?

  Kennedy's jacked. We had dinner with him.

• 2:39:52Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, he's a big boy.

• 2:39:54Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the, um,

• 2:39:57Tim Kennedy?

  there, there are some rumors that Trump was looking to Kennedy as a running mate. And I was like, what would that look like?

• 2:40:07Tim Kennedy?

  I'm just so frustrated with American politics right now.

• 2:40:10Chris Williamson?

  But it's about to get more intense the next, whatever, nine months.

• 2:40:14Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:15Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why are you so frustrated?

• 2:40:17Tim Kennedy?

  We're

• 2:40:23Tim Kennedy?

  after Pearl Harbor.

• 2:40:27Tim Kennedy?

  The, the leading general of the Japanese military is quoted in saying, we have made the worst mistake possible. We have awakened, we have awoken the sleeping giant, which is the American people and we gave them unity.

• 2:40:44Tim Kennedy?

  And America united is like an insurmountable force. Nothing in history has ever experienced or seen what we can do when we're together, you know, from World War One to World War Two. And then you see what happens when we're broken and divided and fractured and when the Vietnam and GWOT and our current economy and mental health and obesity and the broken family.

• 2:41:10Tim Kennedy?

  And both sides, like the Republicans and the Democrats are just fighting for portions of a pie and not even portions of a pie. They're, they're, they're fighting on these outlying groups of these radical ideas and playing into these fringe beliefs, but not even paying attention to like the core ideas that are America. And I would really like a united America. And I think we're way more united. There's like 5% on either end that are pretty radical. Like, no, you should not be cutting body parts off of prepubescent children because they think that they're a thing that they're not, and they're born

• 2:41:55Tim Kennedy?

  the wrong thing, you know? And similarly, like you should not go and kidnap a governor because she doesn't align with your political beliefs. Like, from the far right to the far left, these are fairly obsolete groups. The other 90% are like, man, I want to live my life. I want other people to live their life. You know, like, cool, you want to marry a dude? That's fine. You know, like, don't tell me what to do with my kids and don't tell me what to call you because like, that's my choice and that's my belief. So as long as your beliefs don't extend into my beliefs, we're good. As long as your freedoms, you can have any freedoms that you want, don't extend into my freedoms because I should be able to have any freedoms that I want. I think most Americans are like that. But

• 2:42:36Tim Kennedy?

  right now, we're just being segregated and divided by ideas and these, um, identity politics is just so petty and so pathetic and so divisive.

• 2:42:49Chris Williamson?

  If it's not, the thing that I keep on asking is like, how, how much of this is coming internally and how much of this is being motivated by out of country actors?

• 2:43:01Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:03Chris Williamson?

  At the very least, there's stood on the sidelines cheering.

• 2:43:05Tim Kennedy?

  Oh, no, no, not the, like, they're, they're, they're pain, you know, millions of bot accounts that fuel the algorithms. Social media companies are also seriously to blame for this. Tech companies, Google, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, um, is wild that we can be like.

• 2:43:25Tim Kennedy?

  Well, Twitter is kind of doing okay, but besides them, YouTube, all of them, the way that the algorithms work is they want conflict. They want people to stay and to comment and to like and to share and to get enraged and get pissed. And be like, no, you're stupid, you know, and then um, they say that these community guidelines, but the truth is they want people to stay on there and use that that medium longer. So of course, our enemies are sitting there pumping funds and pumping resources and pumping fake accounts into those conversations to sway the idea one way or another. While the tech companies are wanting that to be chaos and anarchy because they benefit from it

• 2:44:08Tim Kennedy?

  because they get more money on the marketing dollar side. And all the while, the only people that are being hurt by it are the people. So that sucks.

• 2:44:17Chris Williamson?

  And internally, in terms of the politics, it's just small land grabs and backbiting. I found out I had a Dean Phillips on, he was the guy that founded, he discovered Belvedere vodka and then built it and sold it with his family and then did Talenti Gelato as well. And built it and sold it to massive exits. And he's now running for the Democratic nomination up against Biden. And I spoke to him and he was telling me that current, current Congress people spend more time raising funds, like 25 hours a week, just raising funds because it's an expensive game to be able to play. That they spend more time doing that than they spend doing anything else.

• 2:44:59Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Yeah, our political system is broken. And the funds that they're raising are coming from PACs and super PACs and they're coming from lobbyists. You know, like I'll donate if you do this thing.

• 2:45:10Chris Williamson?

  To scratch back, scratch back.

• 2:45:12Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that all has to go away.

• 2:45:16Tim Kennedy?

  Elected officials being able to be in the stark market, nope. Elected officials with multiple, more than two terms in office, nope. You know, the Pelosi's that have never had a real job in their entire adult life and they came in to make a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, but they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There's a problem, you know, and the problem is our American polit- political system. It's like, all of that has to go away. The, the, and if it doesn't happen, you know, we're, we're, our beautiful republic, I think, is at jeopardy.

• 2:45:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's scary. It's crazy as well, because obviously I moved over here and I have loved my time in America. It's so good. I, the culture is fantastic. The people that I found are fantastic. I love Austin as a city. And it seems like that is swimming upstream against structurally what's happening in education. I don't know anyone who looks at the American education system, even the most ardent, like supporter of the current thing and goes, yeah, we're really doing this right. No one thinks that it's, it's happening well at the moment. And then the same thing goes when you look at politics, no one, no matter which side of the fence goes, apart from maybe the people that are invested in continuing to keep that going the same way, looks at it and goes, yeah, this seems like a really good way to position a super powerful free nation. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:46:31Tim Kennedy?

  Put that in my pocket.

• 2:46:32Chris Williamson?

  Exactly, yeah. So it really does seem like putting all of the difficulties in the way of something that's supposed to be really great and just curtailing it and nerfing it and neutering it and shaving off the edges over and over and over and over again. But there's only so long that that can keep happening.

• 2:46:52Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I'm more of like, what I want to do with the tax code, which is take the whole entire thing, douse it in diesel and then burn it. And then from the ashes, we can build something new. That's what I want to do with kind of the education system and the political organization in American politics.

• 2:47:08Chris Williamson?

  One step at a time.

• 2:47:10Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I mean, one fireball at a time. Yeah, I don't, I don't think like the gradual steps of change are going to work right now. You know, of course, there's big things. If you added term limits, if you added age limits, if you removed lobbyists, if you remove super PACs, if you removed corporations being able to contribute, if you removed.

• 2:47:34Tim Kennedy?

  The quid pro quo behind the scene deals.

• 2:47:40Chris Williamson?

  Is that something you see in your future? Would you want to make a, you don't want to make a step into politics? That's not Senator fucking Tim Kennedy?

• 2:47:47Tim Kennedy?

  No, no, there, there's a, there, there's like a period of my life that I don't think could be understood by most Americans. Yeah, there's

• 2:48:02Tim Kennedy?

  leaving active duty and when I was fighting professionally, also working as a contractor for government contracting, you know, those are hard things to explain.

• 2:48:14Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:48:15Tim Kennedy?

  It will come public, you know, and then.

• 2:48:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 2:48:18Tim Kennedy?

  And that's like.

• 2:48:20Chris Williamson?

  Tim, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming through.

• 2:48:23Tim Kennedy?

  Appreciate you. Thanks for being flexible for weird times. We're busy dudes.

• 2:48:27Chris Williamson?

  Always.

• 2:48:28Tim Kennedy?

  Workouts, boxing, swimming and some electric motorcycling.

• 2:48:34Chris Williamson?

  All of that sounds great. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff you do?

• 2:48:37Tim Kennedy?

  Uh, the constitution.

• 2:48:40Tim Kennedy?

  Reference that first and then, uh, Tim Kennedy, anything with a verified thing. Anything else besides that is not me.

• 2:48:49Chris Williamson?

  All right. So that's it. I appreciate you. Thank you, man.

• 2:48:52Tim Kennedy?

  Take care.