Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Mass Surveillance, AI & The Death Of Mainstream Media - Andy Stumpf About this episode Andy Stumpf is a former U. S. Navy SEAL, extreme sports enthusiast, public speaker, podcaster, and author.
At some point, you’ve inevitably traded your personal information for the sake of safety and security. But just how intrusive has government surveillance actually become? And why is there so much support for increasing this scrutiny among young people?
Expect to learn how Tucker Carlson destroyed main stream media overnight on Twitter, why 3 in 10 Americans under 30 support the installation of cameras in the home, if we are on the brink of an Alien invasion by UFO’s, Andy’s biggest lessons from his time in the Navy SEALs, whether army selection has become too tough or too easy and much more...
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#military #SEALs #surveillance
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00:00 Intro
00:42 Why Tucker Carlson is Crushing the Legacy Media
04:27 AI & Automation’s Role in New Media
12:48 The Future of Mainstream Media
22:17 Increasing Surveillance Inside Homes
34:20 Are We Raising the Softest Generation in History?
38:20 Is it Too Difficult to Enter the Military?
47:30 Discerning the Truthfulness of Alien Sightings
1:04:00 The Rise of Prepper Culture
1:08:58 Gun Culture in America
1:20:21 Andy’s Experiences in CrossFit
1:34:27 Lessons on Business from the Nuclear Football Operation
1:38:46 How Andy Achieved Extraordinary Things
1:51:43 Where to Find Andy
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Transcript 22,172 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States government. I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that. I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where if a government knows more about you, you are actually safer as a people. I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows about you, probably the less secure that you are. I don't have any wisdom, but I certainly will tell people what I think regardless of what they may think about it and how it lands with them. And if you don't like the answer, don't ask me the fucking question.
0:35 Chris Williamson? Good stuff. Andy Stunt, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
0:40 Speaker 00 Thank you for having me.
0:41 Chris Williamson? Primetime ratings last night, CNN, 569,000, Fox News, 1.73 million, MSNBC, 1.86 million. The first episode of Tucker Carlson on Twitter, 82 million in 20 hours so far.
0:57 Speaker 00 So basically an ADX increase over what would be considered traditional mainstream media.
1:01 Chris Williamson? Yeah, of 40, 30x over all three put together. Yeah.
1:08 Speaker 00 Wow. Um, where do you get your news from?
1:14 Chris Williamson? Mostly the internet.
1:15 Speaker 00 How do you select your source and how do you bounce? You know, we're in an interesting time, a time where I think people have more access to information than in the history of humankind. And it seems like every day we're through that envelope or threshold even more.
1:31 Speaker 00 I have seen it in myself. I've seen it in other people. I'm sure you have too. The pros of the internet is you can find anything you want to. The cons of the internet is you can find anything that you want to. If you go there pre-cocked or with some type of confirmation bias, let me just tell anybody what they're going to find on the internet, exactly what they're looking for. And you can get lost in fake news, literally like satire sites that sometimes are so ridiculously good, they're hard to tell that they're satire, fucking totally here for it. Um, you'll come on to traditional media outlets like the Fox News, the CNN, and if, and I'm sorry if this day and age of people don't realize that everybody and that message is bought and paid for. I don't know how to help you because it's right there in your face. You'd have to be blind and not see it.
2:16 Speaker 00 And I don't have a problem with people getting news from either one of those sources. Let's just recognize there's a slant on it and a bias. And also they're in the business of selling ads, just like TV. So it leads you at this place. Where do you get information? Do you go on to Substack? Do you go on to Twitter? Do you go on to traditional media outlets? How much do you have to balance it against the other side to determine that the information that you're getting is actually legitimate or real?
2:42 Chris Williamson? Did you see the debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Douglas Murray a couple of months ago?
2:46 Speaker 00 No.
2:46 Chris Williamson? You know Malcolm and Douglas as well?
2:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:49 Chris Williamson? And it was a discussion around mainstream media basically needs, it's not something that you should be able to trust. And there were some really interesting arguments from both sides that there are constrictions and guidelines around what you can and can't do with traditional media that are unrestricted when it comes to the more new media. But that also brings with it degrees of freedom that people can take advantage of. It's a really, really interesting discussion. And I think the sort of terminally online world sees new media as this bastion of free speech, which gets itself close to the truth because it's no longer encumbered by any of the rules and procedures and the bought and paid for and so on.
3:29 Chris Williamson? But I think if everybody took a really close look at it, the incentives are different, but they're still not exactly pure.
3:36 Speaker 00 Free speech and truth are not always synonymous. And I think people have to be really cautious with that. I don't have a great answer for myself as to where you even bounce ideas or resources, especially in a world where like I've just recently started playing around with chat GPT, holy shit. Or image creators, holy shit. And these are in the, in like what will be viewed in the very near future as their infancy.
4:03 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
4:04 Speaker 00 If they're that good right now and it can really fool intelligent people. I feel like Skynet is just around the corner.
4:16 Speaker 00 We are mere inches away from just getting buttfucked by robots. That's what it's going to look like.
4:24 Chris Williamson? I have a friend who sells silk pillowcases and bamboo sheets on Amazon. And he has been Amazon funneling and building his business up and so on and so forth. It's very effortful to do. And he got ChatGPT to write his sales page for him. And then he used Mid Journey to create the photos that he needed to do for the image listing. And the increase in his sales that he's had is absolutely absurd. And he showed me, look, these are the other top five competitors for bamboo sheets and silk pillowcases in the United States. And look at how much better my images are. He said, well, because I wasn't constrained by reality or physics. I was able to just perfectly dial in exactly what I wanted through Mid Journey.
5:07 Chris Williamson? And I got ChatGPT to write the prompts for Mid Journey. So you've got AIs telling AIs what to do.
5:13 Speaker 00 So I literally, the day before yesterday, this is the seventh of June, I think. On the fifth of June, I tried Mid Journey for the first time. Because I kept seeing articles about it. And I was thinking, how could I make? I'm like, could I improve YouTube thumbnails for the podcast messing around with this? Because oftentimes, as I'm sure you or your staff knows, I kind of want to have a certain feel. So I'll just Google image search. I'm not Google image search shit. I'm going to create it in a day and a half. And I'm going to be super upfront on this. I'm an idiot. I am not an intelligent person. I can like, I can wrecking ball my way through life.
5:54 Speaker 00 In a day and a half, I have already created some images that were beyond what I was even thinking was possible.
6:03 Speaker 00 And that's 1.5 days. I mean.
6:06 Chris Williamson? With the least experienced user on the planet.
6:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:10 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's terrifying. I think your point when it comes to talking about media heterodox, new wave, whatever, is that you're going to be able to propagate a lot more news stories that are going to be automatically generated. Maybe this is the bulk of reporting, the boring stuff that just needs to be done, potentially will come from ChatGPT or some of the sort of automated system, which has been trained on the biases that humans have. So it perpetuates and propagates those existing biases. So yeah, man, this this Tucka thing is is absolutely fascinating. You know, for, I think, Matt Walsh's What is a Woman? That the Daily Wire released over the weekend to celebrate the start of Pride Month.
6:49 Speaker 00 That's right. They released it. The Twitter allowed him to put it up.
6:51 Chris Williamson? Correct. And Elon Musk retweeted it and pinned it. That is potentially the most viewed documentary in human history now. Because it got hundreds of million, I think a hundred million plays over the weekend.
7:05 Speaker 00 That's insane.
7:06 Chris Williamson? On Twitter, the most viewed documentary in human history.
7:09 Speaker 00 I think that's a metric for how much people don't have faith anymore in traditional media sources. I truly think that it is. My concern is with the AI, whether it's a good thing or bad thing, at some point, my thoughts will always shift back to weaponization. And the volume of information that that AI can create and could get the snowball rolling downhill before people could actually backtrack and figure it out. For most people, it seems like their their deeply held beliefs are about one click deep. And it's usually the first search result. So if you got a volume of information heading in the wrong direction that was legitimately untrue. And I think it's a very fair thing to say that the the Western world, however you would want to define that has, you know,
7:54 Speaker 00 there's an access to every belief system and there's an access to those belief systems and those belief systems are also looking at AI and leveraging AI and weaponing, weaponizing AI. I don't know if we're intelligent enough as a species to survive.
8:07 Chris Williamson? Well, think about this way, right? You make content on the internet, as do I. What you're trying to do is find a balance somewhere between exactly what you want to talk about and what your interests are. And some degree of what's going to be at least partially interesting to the audience. You don't want to compromise yourself so much that you get audience captured. But you don't want to be so nichey and completely solipsistic that all you do is indulge yourself over and over. It's a blend between the two, right? There is a third participant in every conversation that is the audience member that's listening. What you're trying to do is, in some regard, in varying degrees, reverse engineer what the audience wants, right? That's at least you're conscious of what the audience wants. So.
8:47 Chris Williamson? Creators try to do that and then algorithms try to deliver content that people want to it. So the creator predicts what the algorithm needs based on what the audience wants. Now you can remove the creator altogether and just go algorithm direct to consumer, right? Because you have no restriction on how many different iterations of content and images. You remember the Cambridge Analytica thing, right? Where there was custom built memes around the exact pain point that these particular subgroups had around Hillary Clinton or whoever it was. And we're going to target them and create them and do all of the rest of them. But there's still a guy somewhere sat working out what meme to make, what text to use, dragging the image in, creating it, putting it out there.
9:31 Chris Williamson? You could have individual, I know Andy's profile and we will make a meme or a series of memes just for him. So I think, yeah.
9:41 Speaker 00 But wait until the AI can replace that individual and then you have AI teaching other AI.
9:46 Chris Williamson? Correct, correct.
9:47 Speaker 00 And then we have to go beg a robot for a water ration every day.
9:50 Chris Williamson? Yeah, well, dude, I think, I think it's, yeah, it is. And when you think that within the space of probably three years, it wouldn't be surprising if most of the content created on the internet is no longer human generated. If you think that the internet is a cesspool at the moment, at least you know the content that you're consuming was made by another person.
10:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:12 Chris Williamson? In the future, it very well might be the case that it's a rarity to not have an automated, oh my God, this is a post from a real person as opposed to an automated bot of some kind. There's already social media where you need to upload images of your face. I think maybe even Instagram has this for verification now to ensure that it's not bots. So you have to put a photo of your face up and maybe a photo of your ID up. And what this does is it ensures not only is it the same person, but if you try and duplicate it, you can't have more than one account or some other, some such, which is trying to restrict bot activity. And that's just now.
10:47 Speaker 00 I mean, in one and a half days on Mid Journey, I feel like I could create both of those things.
10:53 Chris Williamson? A full universe.
10:54 Speaker 00 Give me a half an hour and I could create both of those things.
10:57 Chris Williamson? He's a new person.
10:58 Speaker 00 I mean, what is it? What happens when it gets to the point, if we're not already edging towards it already, where people are questioning every piece of information that comes at them because they don't know, they don't know if it's biased.
11:11 Chris Williamson? I think we're already there.
11:12 Speaker 00 I think we're already there too, but I don't know, I don't think we're training for it to get better. I'm concerned that we're trending for it to get worse. And where does that land us? Where do people go at that point to actually get information about the world that they can trust?
11:25 Chris Williamson? Well, you you mentioned at the beginning that the issue that people have is now an abundance, not scarcity, right? There's too much information, not too little information. And very quickly, the, over the last sort of 30 years, the skill set that was most advantageous to a human went from someone who was able to seek out information to somebody that is able to discern information, right? It's now all about can you work out how legitimate this is? Can you do your sources or your checks? A video from a friend of mine went hyper viral as he was talking about,
11:58 Chris Williamson? America is the third highest country out of 193 nations worldwide in gun crime. And if you were to remove the five largest cities for gun crime from that, we would move from third down to 190th or 189th or something like that. Took me one Google search to find out that that's not true. That's not even remotely.
12:15 Speaker 00 Sounds great.
12:16 Chris Williamson? It sounds fucking amazing.
12:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, like, oh, fuck, well, let's just cut these cities out of the US. Problem solved.
12:21 Chris Williamson? Oh, and there was like a little bit of a, they're mostly blue cities and blah, blah, blah. And don't get me wrong, dude, if I'd heard it and I've propagated tons and tons of stuff like that. I heard this like little zinger, let me get it out there. That sounds cool. But yeah, that's you with your human biases. Imagine if you had a custom purpose built viral machine that knew exactly the way to deliver it, that knew exactly what was going to trigger you. But going back to the Tucker conversation, right? You, as somebody that's been in this great nation longer than I have, how likely do you think it is that more and more of the news guys, I think Trevor Noah recently left his show. I think he was released or maybe left. Tucker Carlson, obviously released by Fox and now doing his own thing.
13:07 Chris Williamson? What do you think the future of these sorts of news organizations would be? If people can go and make 40 times the entire primetime ratings by going in and YOLOing it themselves with a couple of students and a nice garage setup in the house, maybe we don't need mainstream media anymore.
13:25 Speaker 00 I think we're through the looking glass on that one. I think that Tucker and just those numbers alone speak to how much people are looking to a traditional source. And the traditional models, I mean, I think they're mired in bureaucracy. I have been to the Fox News Studio a few times. I've done a couple of written pieces for them and a couple of in-person stuff. And it is a large building with a massive amount of people that is constrained. You know, they have, they do have different journalistic thresholds and barriers that they're going to need to at least be able to clear, to present information and ideas. But they're way slower and there are 100% soft and probably hard boundaries on what
14:08 Speaker 00 their hosts can say, what they can do. And I'm sure that the money is good. I have no idea what they, what they make, but if somebody wants to go out and have complete flexibility and autonomy and probably actually make orders of magnitude more money by being on their own, why would you mire yourself in bureaucracy when you can put together a small team and be, you know, the first person through the door and then reap the benefit of that?
14:31 Chris Williamson? Are you on a network, your show?
14:33 Speaker 00 Uh, no, just the internet.
14:35 Chris Williamson? No, but you know, you know what I mean? Like an iHeartRadio?
14:38 Speaker 00 Uh, no, I put it up on the, just the normal.
14:41 Chris Williamson? Any sponsors that you do, you handle yourself, either through an agency that's working like as a consultant for you?
14:47 Speaker 00 Uh, I used to go through the agency route and then just due to my relationship with Evan at Black Rifle, I just streamlined it and was like, you know what? How about we just do this?
14:55 Chris Williamson? So my point being that even within our world, the new media thing, there are varying degrees of people being bought now. If it comes to networks and stuff like that. The people that are listening that are concerned, my favorite creators on iHeart Radio, maybe they're part of a globalist conspiracy. Those guys, they help with production. They help you get guests and they sell ads, right? Like, they're not, they're not really
15:16 Speaker 00 It increases, yeah, it increases your reach largely in the experience I do have with those things. There are other platforms and maybe those platforms, whatever, they fall into whatever the globalists or whatever it might be. That doesn't mean you as somebody who has content on that platform is a part of that.
15:31 Chris Williamson? Correct. Yeah. My point being that even within that, you found it easier to streamline even what is already quite a streamlined way of working. So for somebody like Tucker, I would be really interested to know why Twitter, apart from the fact that you can reach what will probably hit 100 million plays in 24 hours, which there's no way even on YouTube that you could do that. If you did 100 million plays on YouTube in 24 hours, you'd be the number one trending video worldwide on that site.
15:58 Speaker 00 Of all time, probably.
16:00 Chris Williamson? Mr. Beast's Squid Game video did somewhere in the region of 70 million, but that was a movie level production that was custom built for virality. Tucker just, I mean, it was a well crafted monologue. He was actually talking about this dam explosion. Have you seen this? So Tucker points to Kiev's possible role in the Kharkovka dam burst. So if it was intentional, it was not a military tactic. It was an act of terrorism, Tucker said, commenting on the incident. Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more. And for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it. So basically he's saying maybe this is a false flaggy type thing. The water level below this dam has risen by 12 meters, which is
16:44 Speaker 00 That's gonna change some neighborhood layouts.
16:46 Chris Williamson? Fucking city.
16:48 Speaker 00 It's what used to be a city.
16:49 Chris Williamson? Yeah, correct. Correct. You're now, your granny's now at the bottom of a lake.
16:52 Speaker 00 Totally.
16:54 Chris Williamson? But my point being that he's able to talk about stuff that he wants without any restriction. I don't know how he's monetizing and I would love to know why he chose Twitter apart from reach. Reach is self evident. Is he being paid? There's no ads as far as I can see. I do play for Twitter Blue, which means maybe I'm ad free. So perhaps there would have been pre-roll ads running before it. Maybe people that have watched it that don't pay for Twitter Blue can tell us or whatever, if they saw ads. But you didn't do a, this episode is brought to you by anything. There was no ads running partway through.
17:23 Speaker 00 It could lead to that. I mean, I don't, I don't know a whole lot about Tucker in the world that he comes from. I'm gonna assume he was well taken care of when he was at Fox. So the move. Might actually be to drive awareness before the monetization. Can you imagine the hammer you could swing in negotiation like, oh, hey, by the way, I do about a hundred billion plays in 24 hours. So here's my rate. Oh, you don't like my rate? Next.
17:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah, dude. So again, for the people that don't know this world, I would guess you could probably charge between a $10 and $20 CPM on that. So that's per thousand plays, which is a fucking ungodly.
17:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:00 Chris Williamson? Amount of money.
18:00 Speaker 00 Let's just multiply that by a number that has a lot of zeros.
18:03 Chris Williamson? Yeah, correct. And I, you know, it doesn't matter how much Tucker was being paid at Fox.
18:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:08 Chris Williamson? I can guarantee it wasn't that much. Nobody, nobody fucking talks.
18:12 Speaker 00 No.
18:12 Chris Williamson? Those sorts of numbers.
18:12 Speaker 00 But I don't think he's in a rush to monetize.
18:14 Chris Williamson? No, no.
18:15 Speaker 00 I think his move is probably build.
18:18 Chris Williamson? Accumulate.
18:19 Speaker 00 Build foundation, because then you can take it. Then you're the, you're the captain of your own ship. You have your hand on the wheel and people can get on board, but you get to tell them what stateroom they're in as opposed to the other way around.
18:29 Chris Williamson? Yes. And think about it this way, Tom Segura that does Your Mom's House, he pivoted from comedian, comedian with podcast, comedian with very well-produced podcast, comedian with podcast and other podcasts under it to now network. So he is vertically integrating himself further and further back up the chain.
18:45 Speaker 00 Smart.
18:46 Chris Williamson? Yeah. And that, you know, I don't know who runs, who directs the editorial policy at Fox News. Something tells me that I've never seen them on TV and I don't respect them as a creator.
18:55 Speaker 00 Oh, they're not a creator. I bet you it's a lawyer.
18:57 Chris Williamson? Probably.
18:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:58 Chris Williamson? But I respect Tom Segura as a creator. I know that he understands the craft. So I go, oh, yeah, that, that network has legitimacy. And Tucker Carlson will be able to lend legitimacy to other people that can believe. It's the same with Ben Shapiro on the Daily Wire.
19:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:10 Chris Williamson? Right? You know, Shapiro, Jeremy Boring, Jeremy, not necessarily front-facing, but you know, he can, he's done well-crafted adverts and I've seen him on podcasts and he can speak. And, you know, in a world of, uh, social media where people want that behind the scenes thing, they want to know Kim Kardashian's dog's name and they want to know where Zac Efron goes for coffee on blah, blah, on his Instagram stories. I think that that's, I think that gives a degree of resonance.
19:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. I'll be curious to see what he does with it. I mean, what, I guess the better metric will be, how does the second video do?
19:43 Chris Williamson? Well, if the if the algorithm's anything to go by, that would be one other thing that I haven't heard anybody talk about. One of my friends brought this up to me. Elon Musk pinned the What is a Woman documentary. It's a tweet. Elon Musk's 20 year old child recently went through gender transition.
20:04 Speaker 00 Really? I did not know that.
20:05 Chris Williamson? Yes, officially. I think that might be a name change or some sort of intervention.
20:12 Chris Williamson? No one, as far as I'm aware, has brought up the fact that Elon is quite sort of forthcoming and vociferous about his stance on trans stuff, especially around children. I wonder how much of that is driven by a personal investment.
20:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:32 Chris Williamson? Adds another sort of.
20:33 Speaker 00 Families get ugly, right? People who tell me that, you know, they have a perfect family. It's like, let's go back a few generations. Let's shake the branches a bit. I can tell you right now, mine's got some interesting branches, as do they all. So who knows? I mean, who knows the dynamic between father and child? Are they close? Are they antagonistic? I mean, you've all seen both. You know, the I watched that documentary. I don't find it to be controversial. It's a man asking a legitimate question, looking for information, valid, reasonable, articulatable responses that can be defended. Bring your idea, let's bring it into the light, not the shadows. Let's investigate it. Let's ask questions
21:13 Speaker 00 and see what remains. But yeah, I mean, that's a that's an issue that I can't in the people that I have talked to, even inside of the trans community and the limited interaction that I have had, the answer is very widely. So it, you know, who knows what's going on there between child and father. And it's also not uncommon to have family members who have diametrically opposed beliefs, which is awesome at, you know, Thanksgiving.
21:43 Chris Williamson? Well, I think political leaning is 60% heritable, which means that you do have most of the family in one direction.
21:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:51 Chris Williamson? And then the outliers perhaps in another.
21:53 Speaker 00 Load them up with some cocktails at holiday parties and lunch, just work it out.
21:57 Chris Williamson? I did Friendsgiving last year, which was way better than Thanksgiving.
22:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:01 Chris Williamson? Because you actually get to choose your friends, but you don't get to choose your family.
22:04 Speaker 00 This is a very true statement. This is a very true statement. Yeah. Families get wild. I get it. I don't know a single person who, like, again, if you dig enough, far enough back, you're going to have issues that are oftentimes insurmountable.
22:18 Chris Williamson? According to a new survey from the American Cato Institute, three in 10 Americans under 30 support the installation of cameras in the home to monitor wrongdoing. Strikingly, the figures were markedly different among the 18 to 30 cohort. Three in 10 support the installation of surveillance cameras. We can probably also map this to emerging support for intrusive digital surveillance on the growing body of studies indicating that faith in and support for democratic norms is falling with every generation, even as the same group turns against open debate and academic freedom. In other words, there has been a pronounced turn away from the foundational liberal norms and towards a baseline of authoritarian control and surveillance in the name of safety, care, and the avoidance of harm. Cato report speculates that this shift is generational, noting that the over 45s have a markedly different attitude to surveillance and suggesting that this is likely connected
23:03 Chris Williamson? to the growing prioritization of safety. If you're used to interacting on social media and you're used to unaccountable authority and you've grown up partially online, you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy, for example, allowing social media to track your behavior in exchange for access to the digital services that enable your virtual social life. Three in 10 want home surveillance inside.
23:23 Speaker 00 Who decides what's right and wrong? Who decides what's the appropriate? I have three kids. We're just getting into birthday season. My daughter just turned 15. My middle son will turn 18 next month, and then my oldest son will turn 20. Wildly different. And it's just different between having boys and girls. There's a way that, and I learned this lesson the hard way. You know, I can talk to my sons in a tone of voice, and not that I am aiming to do so, but I mean, you get frustrated as a parent, right? There's times where you're just like, you're at your wits' end. And there have been times where I've been very sharp and direct with my sons. I made that mistake one time with my daughter, and I watched her kind of wilt away. And she was quite young, but I learned my lesson in that moment.
24:05 Speaker 00 So for me, I kind of have a, and it's a floating scale as they evolve as human beings too, and their processing, but right and wrong, who decides in that surveillance?
24:17 Chris Williamson? What is wrongdoing?
24:18 Speaker 00 What is wrongdoing? What, what's the difference between wrongdoing and difficult parenting decisions that you have to make? Discipline, it like, and by discipline, I'm not talking like Jaco, get up at 4:30. I'm talking like, take a nap, Jaco. You know, I'm talking like, discipline, disciplining.
24:38 Chris Williamson? Put your dishes away.
24:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:39 Chris Williamson? Again.
24:40 Speaker 00 Or, you know, hey, you snuck out of the house at 13 years old and you were gone for two hours and I caught you coming back in. Oh, and it looks like you're shitfaced. These are hard parenting things that you have to deal with. The idea of surveillance, I think it was a quote from Thomas Jefferson. It came up on my own podcast not too long ago, but it's essentially in a nutshell, I'm sure you've heard it, is those who are willing to sacrifice a small amount of freedom for an increase in safety are deserving of neither or security. And I, it's such a slippery slope. First off, I don't think most people have any idea how much the government is capable of collecting on them right now.
25:20 Speaker 00 For most people, if you're listening to this, you need to assume that anything you do on an electronic device is at least being held somewhere. I don't think we have enough people or the computing bandwidth to look at it in real time, but we absolutely do retroactively. And people go, oh, we know the government can't do that. There's rules in the constitution. It's like, okay, listen, they're, go onto the internet, which you're probably spending most of your life on, and actually you're consuming this content on it anyway, and Google the partnerships between America and our allies and what we do when we want to flirt the constitution. We have our allies look inward because they have, your country might be a little bit guilty of this, Chris. We might have a partnership with a couple of people across the ocean that have access to the same data that can look in because they don't have to worry about the constitutional rights of American citizens.
26:06 Speaker 00 I would imagine that we have a reciprocal agreement with them as well. There are ways around all of this stuff. I have tried to teach my kids since they had access to electronic devices that anything you do on an electronic device lasts forever and you should be aware of that. And I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States government. I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that. I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where if a government knows more about you, you are actually safer as a people. I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows
26:46 Speaker 00 about you, probably the less secure that you are. I mean, I'm sorry, if you look at what's going on in the FBI, and I just had an FBI agent who retired after 20 years on my podcast, and he was talking about the shift in the higher levels of the FBI. Government organizations can be weaponized in directions because of what the government knows about people and their beliefs, and they shouldn't know those things.
27:13 Chris Williamson? How so? You got an example?
27:18 Speaker 00 The websites that you visit. Are you a member of the NRA? Are you a member of this or that organization? Did you visit this website? What have you posted? What do you post about? What type of things do you? They can get a really good profile about who you are as a person. And these large organizations, people forget often, I think, that they're just a conglomerate of individuals. If you get a large amount of individuals that all think the same way, pointed in one direction, the result that you're going to get from that is going to be biased. And I think people are so willing to allow the government to look into their life. In my opinion, the government should know almost nothing about you and I, but we should know everything about the government and what they're doing.
28:04 Speaker 00 And it's completely backwards right now.
28:08 Chris Williamson? Dude, it's scary. It's scary stepping over here into America. You guys have a much closer read, even if you think that most Americans aren't sufficiently concerned about what the government knows about them and aren't sufficiently aware. It's a conversation that is much more surface level, much more front and center. In the UK, it's just, it's not a real discussion. We don't have, we don't uphold the virtues of freedom from tyranny and all the rest of it, in the same way that you guys do. Now, I have no idea about whether our government is or is not surveilling us as in-
28:42 Speaker 00 I can answer that for you. Yes. 100%. 100%.
28:51 Chris Williamson? Well, there we are. Fuck it. We should, we need to have a conversation, Britain. We need to have a conversation about freedom. But, I mean, the, especially the thing about looking at your surveillance inside the house, and you make a really great point that who determines what is or is not acceptable behavior. You know, we've said for quite a while, when it comes to having conversations on the internet, are there topics that should be beyond the pale that you're not allowed to talk about? And even if there are topics that you can talk about, de facto, you can't talk about them because of the sort of response. If you start bringing up race and IQ, that's not going to be allowed. If you start bringing up stuff to do with antisemitism or conspiracy theories to do with certain ethnic groups, that's also not going to be particularly well liked. And, you know, maybe very good, very good reasons
29:32 Chris Williamson? that it's hard to work out who is a good actor that's genuinely having a good faith interested conversation to try and find out truth, and who is a bad actor that's trying to be the front end of the funnel toward a KKK march, right? It's difficult to pass apart those two.
29:46 Speaker 00 I think the better question is, would you rather have conversations that may not be agreeable to people happening in public, or have those same conversations that are still going to happen occurring in private? I think as a society, we are better off having them occur in public. My theory is pull things into the light. If you push things into the shadows, you can't really see what's going on in there. And I think it creates an environment and room for things to turn quite sour.
30:11 Chris Williamson? Correct. Well, the problem with censorship and the reason that it doesn't work is that it doesn't stop people thinking things. It just means that they no longer are truthful about the things that they think.
30:22 Speaker 00 They pick and choose where they tell the truth.
30:23 Chris Williamson? Correct.
30:24 Speaker 00 As, I mean, as we all do, but on issues like that, it's, yeah, I would rather know-
30:31 Speaker 00 The racist that lives next door to me than be surprised by it years down the road.
30:35 Chris Williamson? Yep. So, well, you know, there is still, even for the best meaning amongst us, a degree of pushback, a potential risk of cancellation, retribution in one regard or another, when you talk about these things in public or online or whatever. But in the safety of your own home, when you're talking about this, you have a wife that is interesting and philosophically can have really difficult discussions about cool things. We had a chat around a pool a couple of weeks ago about the dysgenic effect of abortion. So the fact that abortion is more easily accessed by people who are richer, people who are richer are better able to do family planning, which actually means that restricting access to abortion
31:18 Chris Williamson? encourages more working class and underclass children to accidentally be born off the back of this, which actually means that you are propagating more poverty than you are propagating more rich people. And there was maybe a conspiracy that restricting this could be done from top down to ensure that we have enough workers to continue to do the jobs that are laborious that the bourgeoisie don't necessarily want to do.
31:41 Speaker 00 Great word.
31:42 Chris Williamson? Bourgeoisie?
31:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, I love it.
31:43 Chris Williamson? Fuck yeah. But you go, okay, that's like talking about dysgenic, that's the literally the opposite of eugenic. That's pretty sort of triggery word. Then you're talking about some stuff to do with group conspiracy. You're talking about, you know, class differences and all of the rest of it. Fascinating comments. Some super, super smart people sat around like three world poker stars and a bunch of other people. And I was like, fuck, this is awesome. Really, really engaged in this conversation, listening to these people explain a topic that I didn't really understand. But if that was part of this new home, at home installation surveillance thing, and the child or the young daughter who doesn't like the idea that mom and dad have got the friends around talking about this with poker
32:23 Chris Williamson? players, they press the button that I would say, I want to report this for thought crime or whatever.
32:30 Speaker 00 And Tom Cruise comes in and you're fucked. He puts a halo on you.
32:32 Chris Williamson? Yes, yes, correct. Oh, that's what was that? Not premonition? What the fuck?
32:36 Speaker 00 Oh.
32:37 Chris Williamson? Majority report?
32:38 Speaker 00 Yes, yes.
32:40 Chris Williamson? Fuck yeah.
32:40 Speaker 00 Also, let's say we allow, let's go down this pipeline.
32:44 Chris Williamson? Yes.
32:44 Speaker 00 Let's say we tell the government, for whatever reason, we lose our goddamn minds. And we say, you know what, US government, we're going to let you put cameras in our homes.
32:54 Chris Williamson? My asshole is wide open. Please enter.
32:56 Speaker 00 Do you, seriously, I am a gape.
33:00 Chris Williamson? What a word. One on the board for bourgeoisie, one on the word for gape. Referring to yourself as a gape. It's like, oh, my fucking god.
33:12 Speaker 00 That's all I got for today, people. I'm out of here.
33:14 Chris Williamson? Good.
33:15 Speaker 00 What do you think the odds are of them ever saying, you know what? We should take these back out. You know what? This is enough. We have cameras. You know, but these are, these are 1080p. We need to upgrade this with some 8K. And honestly, you know, we were only kind of getting some camera views.
33:32 Chris Williamson? How about the bedroom?
33:33 Speaker 00 We need a bedroom and we're gonna need the audio too, because you know, what if people are using nonverbal? What if it's nonverbal abuse of things that are incorrect? I don't know the history of, of in the US of giving the government an incredible amount of power, which in my opinion, observation cameras in, in the homes of citizens is one insane, but an incredible amount of power. I don't have an example of them willingly giving it back. That is a razor blade that every step that you take, you are gonna cut yourself.
34:04 Chris Williamson? It's like a ratchet, right? It clicks down and it's like, okay, it can only go one direction.
34:09 Speaker 00 And it's not a good direction. Yeah, that's a tourniquet that you're putting on and putting on and putting on and putting on. And next thing you know, your limb is getting sawed off in, under the guise of safety.
34:19 Chris Williamson? So I think the interesting part there was if you're used to interacting on social media, you're used to unaccountable authority. And if you've grown up online, you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy in exchange for digital services that enable your social life. It definitely seems to me that this sort of generalized risk aversion, this optimization for convenience, comfort, safety over freedom slash genuine privacy.
34:47 Speaker 00 Well, they, they don't know a world without it.
34:49 Chris Williamson? Correct.
34:49 Speaker 00 You know, my, all three of my kids, again, they, they didn't grow up. My daughter probably the most.
34:55 Chris Williamson? Digitally native.
34:56 Speaker 00 Digitally native. My son's not, not a hundred percent, but not as much as my daughter. They don't really know or understand a world without that device and what that device can create for them. It's hilarious when I explained to them going to the library and looking for books about, you know, the career I wanted to go into when I was younger. They're like, why would you, why would you do that?
35:15 Chris Williamson? Or ringing a friend to tell them where you'll meet them. Because once you're out of the house, you have no other way of getting in contact with them.
35:22 Speaker 00 One of the most hilarious conversations with my middle son, I was explaining to him a pager. He goes, that's the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life. Oh, wait a minute, a number that I have to call that goes to a device that beeps you and you'll call me on another device? Why wouldn't you just combine those? So I'm like, yeah, well, the apes were still figuring it out.
35:38 Chris Williamson? It took a while.
35:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:39 Chris Williamson? Steve Jobs wasn't born yet.
35:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, he truly thought that I was from the dumbest species in the history of man when I was explaining a pager to him.
35:49 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Yeah, man. And, you know, if you've spent all of this time with at your fingertips, the most controlled, I could, I choose what I get exposed to, anything that I am exposed to, which is remotely objectionable, I can report. So why can't I report things in the real world? If most of my social experiences occur online, most of the interactions, most of the stuff that I consume happens on the internet. On average, Americans spend three hours and 43 minutes per day on their phones. For Gen Z, it's going to be way, way, way higher than that. That's spread across the entire nation. 20 years ago, that time didn't exist. So where's it come from? It's been squeezed out of real life experiences, right? So if you spend most of your time consuming things on the internet
36:33 Chris Williamson? and there's a report button or a block button or a mute button, when you're walking through the real world and you get exposed to things that you're not happy with, well, I can't, where's the fucking?
36:44 Speaker 00 I also think you steal your ability to develop resilience through the hardship that you have to experience growing up. I mean, growing up is not an easy thing. And I don't think it should be easy. How old are you?
36:57 Chris Williamson? Thirty-five.
36:57 Speaker 00 Okay, so I got 10 years on you. I'm the person that I am today because of the experiences that I went through. My parents went through absolutely no effort to try to make my life devoid of things that were challenging. If actually, if I look back on it, as a parent myself now, I'm like, holy shit. They actually, for one, I thought I was Jason Bourne growing up. I'm like, I was, I was the Jason Bourne, but I failed a chromosome test. So I was a little bit short on my, you know, spy ability. I got away with nothing, but they let me get away with a lot because they had some
37:37 Speaker 00 boundaries that they were letting me operate inside of because they knew I had to fail. They knew I had to suffer the consequences of that failure. They knew that not every social interaction was going to be great. They knew I was going to have conflicts and therefore have to develop conflict resolution skills as I was growing up. I tripped, I fell, I scuffed myself up, and I learned from those things. And I think if you rob people of those opportunities, you are developing the softest generation of human beings possible. And that's not, that's not what I want for anybody. It's not what I want for this nation, for any nation, or the world in general.
38:11 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I saw, I quoted this in my newsletter this week about the stats of how few Americans can join. Seventy-six percent of American adults aged seventeen to twenty-four are either too obese to qualify or have other medical issues or criminal histories that would make them ineligible to serve in the US Armed Forces without a waiver.
38:33 Speaker 00 I wish that number was higher.
38:38 Speaker 00 I'm being dead serious. I hear people, I'm all about inclusivity. Like, I don't have a problem with inclusivity. It bothers me when it's inclusivity for inclusivity's purpose and just for, just so we can say we're inclusive. I think that the military should be very exclusive. I think it should be extremely difficult to be able to join and proceed down a pipeline that you want to go down. Because at the end of the day, you, I look at, what is it that you want to do and what are the standards for that job? What are they based off of? And I can only speak through the lens of my own previous military experience. The standards that are, that our job was based on and that we were held to came from the battlefield. And I don't give a shit about your woke ideology because none of that matters when you're covered with your friends' brains. Not a single stretch of
39:23 Speaker 00 that shit matters whatsoever. All of those ideologies and all of these platforms and ideas that people want to put onto the military just so they can say that they did, I think that they should be removed. I think it should be super hard to get into the military. We should exclude most people from it because they don't meet the physical standard, the... Whatever standards are listed with the intelligence standard, the educational standards, all of those things, that's a good thing. I think we are headed down the wrong path when we just start opening the doors up and letting all of those people in, because that is not a military that is based to operate in the environment that the standards are based upon.
40:00 Chris Williamson? I had a conversation with Heather McDonald, who has written a book called When Race Trumps Merit, and she's talking about how affirmative action for different ethnic groups is causing meritocracy to kind of be thrown out of the window. And it's kind of, it's really uncomfortable, actually, to kind of go through, because there's a lot of pretty sort of harsh and disquieting stats that you start to learn. But the main thing that I realized was, most people, most sane people, wouldn't have a problem with the military having an incredibly rigorous standard for entry, because they understand that if you get this wrong, mortal danger is on the other side of it, right? If you have somebody that is unable to keep up with the rest of their platoon, because of their physical fitness,
40:41 Chris Williamson? or because they've got diabetes, or because they've got a gluten intolerance, or whatever, that person puts themselves and everybody else at risk. But really, almost all industries are just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind away from that. So she used this example of underrepresentation within Alzheimer research or Parkinson's research. But the problem that you have, if you start to do an excessive amount of affirmative action in that, especially if you completely disregard or mostly disregard meritocracy, is that you slow down Parkinson's and Alzheimer's research, which is directly impacting people's quality of life.
41:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:19 Chris Williamson? So, okay, it's not mortal danger, but it's like health span, lifespan.
41:25 Speaker 00 It's mortal danger for some.
41:26 Chris Williamson? Precisely. So you go, okay, and then, so at which point, all the way down to the checkout operator, you know, like, at what point do we say that this doesn't have a, operating based on merit, doesn't have a place to be within the system? It's really hard to find a line at which you go, yeah, it's about there. It's about the person that professionally does cro- crochet, or fucking bakes cakes, or something like that, you know?
41:52 Speaker 00 I mean, I, I think that the, the conversation should be had and it's probably going to be a shifting scale depending on what you're talking about. Um, you know, should it be as difficult to join the military as it is to work at a Dunkin' Donuts? No, right? Like, we need to be able to have a sliding scale. We're an advanced species. We have the ability to think. Let's use that skill a little bit more.
42:17 Chris Williamson? Did you see that, um, criticism around Navy SEAL selection being too harsh, uh, as SEALs were sprayed with tear gas and forced to sing happy birthday?
42:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
42:29 Chris Williamson? You see this video?
42:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's fucking awesome.
42:32 Chris Williamson? What do you thoughts on that?
42:34 Speaker 00 Um, I mean, I say that a little bit tongue in cheek. First off, anybody who's been through that pipeline has experienced that. And there's a few ways that you can look at it. Uh, from my understanding, what I will say is this, from my understanding, from what I have heard from other instructors that were there, those particular instructors, instructors were a little bit off the reservation. And this can happen because instructors, again, you wear this blue and gold t-shirt and your hat and your shorts and you roll your socks a super dumb way. And it's just people. They might all look the same to the outside perspective, but just because you're an instructor or even a SEAL, doesn't mean that you're a good person by any stretch. You get the wrong person in the wrong role, bad shit is going to happen. So the amount of CS
43:17 Speaker 00 gas that they were exposed to, from my understanding exceeded what the, um, what do they call it? It's a, God, of course, I can't remember right now. It's every, it's an evolution cheat. So everything that happens in SEAL training, that the room for imagination is almost non-existent. It's basically like pull the three ring binder. Here is what we are trying to accomplish. It's like, you know, the mission statement, here's what we're trying to accomplish. Here's our boundaries. This is the evolution. This is what it is. This is how long we're going to do it for. The students don't know this. So as a student, it's very chaotic. I didn't know this until I went back as an instructor. I'm like, holy shit. Like basically every day.
43:53 Chris Williamson? There's limits to this.
43:54 Speaker 00 The limits are unbelievable and the safety net should be incredibly robust, but also invisible to the students. There's a portion of that training, like, yeah, you may, maybe you should feel like you're going to die. You're not going to die. We're not going to, we're going to do our absolute utmost to prevent you from dying, even though it does happen. Um, but there's a psychological test there as well. It's a physical and mental crucible. So. I have no issue with people being exposed to CS gas because I was exposed to CS gas. Uh, the third phase of training occurs out on San Clemente Island, which is where that video came from. The problem I have with it is the training and those evolution sheets, and again, those standards. You can draw a very precise breadcrumb trail to the why.
44:39 Speaker 00 Why do we expose people to CS gas and training? Well, because one, it's very common and the first time that you're exposed to it probably shouldn't be for real. So what do we need to do? We should expose it to people in a training environment where we can have a robust medical staff. Problem is from my understanding, they involve people in that that actually weren't necessarily directly involved in the training pipeline. They exposed them to far too much gas. And one of the biggest issues I have with it is that there was some fucking idiot there filming it with a cell phone. Do your job because I tell you right now, filming it for your Instagram page is not your job. And I don't know what you think is going to come from that. And the reason they make you sing happy birthday is that that requires you inhale and exhale. It's the same, they, they do that. Is that what you did?
45:23 Speaker 00 Uh, we didn't, they didn't have a sing happy birthday. They, there's all these like frogman songs that you sing when you're in training. And they'll just have you do something that increases your respiration. Because there's some people out there that can hold their breath.
45:40 Speaker 00 Now that holding your breath in an environment like it's still, it's on your clothes. It's, it sucks. What's it like? What's, what's? It burns. Um, have you ever, uh, well, I was
45:52 Speaker 00 my sister one time had like a little mace spray thing and I had, I don't know, I had it in my pocket and I sprayed it on myself and then wiped my eyes. I was gonna say, have you ever done that? But most people haven't because they're not idiots. No. So it would be, it's, uh, it burns. You, it, it really burns. Your eyes water an unbelievable amount. Within a few seconds, you'll be questioning how it's possible that your body creates as much mucus as coming out of your body. You cough, it can make seem like people, it's hard to breathe. For some people, they describe it as as they're inhaling like flames from this like very hot. Is it is it going to kill you? Unless you have an underlying medical condition, I think it's so highly unlikely. Does it feel like it's going to kill you? Probably to some people. And that's the point.
46:35 Speaker 00 We have to expose students to those things that they may be exposed to overseas. I would rather have a student have that experience and know the cognitive decline, the physical decline, the emotional decline, and the impact that it's going to have on their ability to do their job in training before it happens in real life. Now, if the instructor staff went 1% beyond what is on that evolution sheet, then they are wrong for doing that because that evolution is based on that real world requirement. They use 5x the gas or 10x the gas, then they should be punished for that particular activity. But the the evolution in and of itself is essential. Now, somebody looking at that on Instagram could be like, oh, well, that looks like torches.
47:19 Speaker 00 Like, you don't know anything about this job. You're I'm not saying your opinion isn't valid. I'm just not going to pay any attention to it because you don't know what you're talking about. Unidentified anomalous phenomena. Are we talking about aliens? Yeah. Fuck, yeah. God, I hope they're real. Yeah. Why are people scared of aliens? I would have one on the podcast. Yeah. I don't know what the fuck we'd talk about. But I mean, if there's aliens out there, which I think there are mathematically, I think it's improbable that we are alone out here. It's a our ability as a species to think that we are so incredibly unique shocks me sometimes. If they're here visiting, I have to believe that they are more advanced than we are. I would assume, and obviously technologically, because they're covering a distance that
48:04 Speaker 00 we are not capable of covering. It seems like they are able to evade detection to a degree, and I would honestly guess that if we are seeing them, it's because they would want us to see them. But both of those things combined lead me to believe like if they wanted to fuck us up, they probably already could have and would have. So. I don't know. I think maybe like we're the comedy planet to them. Like you win a prize on some other planet. They're like, dude, you just won the best prize ever. We're going to send you to this other planet and you're not going to believe the shit that you're going to see. And so they come and they watch and they laugh and they go back and they tell tales of how dumb we are. But it doesn't work like, like, let's get on like, this is awesome.
48:45 Speaker 00 Sit down and like, have a chat with me or like Bluetooth to my mind or however that works. I'm not interested in the probing part, you know, but like, and I don't know why that was such a narrative early on.
48:55 Chris Williamson? Kind of like a Freudian thing, that wasn't it? And I got taken up into the sky. They levitated me up and the first thing that they did.
49:02 Speaker 00 Always right up the ass.
49:03 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
49:03 Speaker 00 It's like, they were, they were forced to be a gape.
49:08 Chris Williamson? A gape, that's it.
49:13 Chris Williamson? It's using a verb as a noun.
49:15 Speaker 00 You have so few times in life to use that word that I think you should seize.
49:19 Chris Williamson? As much as possible. Let's get it in a few more times before we finish up. So David Grush, this guy.
49:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
49:24 Chris Williamson? That's the dude.
49:25 Speaker 00 Yep.
49:26 Chris Williamson? I've watched a good bit of stuff on him and his story.
49:31 Chris Williamson? In your professional opinion.
49:32 Speaker 00 Yep.
49:33 Chris Williamson? How reliable do you think that this particular person's story, security access, clearance, all the rest of it is?
49:42 Speaker 00 So I have very limited knowledge of him. I actually was exposed to his videos for the first time yesterday. In a very, in a very brief article. So he was in the air force. I think he was an intelligence officer. He held a T S S C I clearance. And apparently he worked for a program that was peripheral or directly involved in identifying UAPs is what I think they call, call it aliens. You know, military officer, cool. Intelligence officer, great. T S S C I clearance.
50:13 Chris Williamson? What's up?
50:14 Speaker 00 It's top secret, special compartmentalized information. And. It sounds like a big deal, but honestly, it's not. I mean, if you look at the, uh, not too long ago, there was a National Guardsman, the, the intelligence leak. He was, uh, he had a T S S C I clearance and access to these databases because oftentimes, you know, to hold certain jobs, you have to have certain clearances. It's the same clearance that I had when I was, uh, at the SEAL, uh, SEAL Team on the East Coast and it takes about two years to actually get the clearance. So oftentimes you'll get the job and they'll just give you an interim clearance, meaning you have the clearance and access to the stuff as if you, it had the background investigation had been complete, but then it takes like two years to catch up to it. It's not an uncommon clearance. It's cool to say and
50:56 Speaker 00 write out, I go, top T S S C I clearance, he must know everything. I was read into, with that clearance, in the course of 17 years, I was read into a few programs that offline, I can give you a few Google search words and you would literally be able to find the information on the internet. People's thoughts that Jason Bourne is like out there. Maybe there is, in my experience, that's not the case. It's a combination and like this vice of like 60 people's careers jammed into one unique little coin and that's just not the way that it works. So I don't doubt that he might've worked on a program that was basically
51:35 Speaker 00 around, um, identifying unidentified shit in the air. Like, that's probably a good idea. Like, hey, we're kind of seeing these things that we don't know what they are. Let's put together some people to do that. From my understanding, that was nested inside of the Air Force. What he was referencing in the video and what he seems to be referencing when he kind of made like the, the tour of, uh, the media tour is, well, there's this other program and it's their job to actually collect things. And what I'm hearing is from these people, these senior officers, they are telling me about things that they saw. And for me personally, now we're talking like second and third hand information. It's like, listen, he's like, oh, we weren't read into this program and we weren't, we weren't allowed access to that one. And that's totally common.
52:20 Chris Williamson? The C.
52:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, the compartmentalization is totally common.
52:23 Chris Williamson? The C in his status, yeah.
52:25 Speaker 00 I. Was not read into programs that other people, the commands that I was read into because there's two things you have to have. You have to have this appropriate security clearance, but then also the need to know. Just because you have a TSSCI, doesn't mean you're like walking into a SCIF, which is like a room about this size where they keep all this dumb secret shit or access to programs. You don't just get to go like, oh, hey, yeah, I'll be in the SCIF for the next three hours and you're just thumbing through stuff.
52:50 Chris Williamson? Like a library.
52:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's not the way that it works. So if this guy's job, which I don't doubt that he held that job, and I don't even necessarily doubt that other people would be coming up to him and saying to him, hey, this is what I saw and this is what I did, but it's not uncommon that they are going to separate programs that might have something to do with each other. But the best way to keep a secret is to keep it compartmentalized and separate. Like, I'm sure that even when it went back to, you know, creating the Manhattan Project, I bet you there were people who were working on that project that years later were like, oh shit, I actually designed that.
53:24 Chris Williamson? That was me.
53:24 Speaker 00 Well, I designed-
53:25 Chris Williamson? That was my housing. That was my fucking-
53:27 Speaker 00 I designed that wire. They had no idea. Why? Because it was compartmentalized. Why? Because we were trying to keep it a secret. So I personally don't think that we're alone. I hope that we're not alone. Like, I would legitimately like, what's up, dude? Let's go have a beer. Alien, do you drink beer? Like, what's going on here? I don't think there's as much to be scared of as people may think, but these people coming forward like, I have all this secret information, and then I'm not going to actually give you a shred of it, to me, puts their legitimacy in question.
53:56 Chris Williamson? Anybody that doesn't have firsthand knowledge of something. But there's some other interesting stuff that in order to be able to communicate this information, he had to get, I think it's Department of Defense or Security, Homeland Security clearance to be able to say these things. And he was allowed-
54:14 Speaker 00 That's not much of a whistleblower then.
54:15 Chris Williamson? No. So he was allowed to say these things. They said, so they have determined that what he was going to say is not classified information.
54:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:25 Chris Williamson? Because he had to get the clearance in order to be able to get this out. At least this is what was reported on Fox News.
54:29 Speaker 00 So then what the hell is actually going on? Joe's theory is that they're trying to steal more money from us.
54:35 Chris Williamson? Who?
54:36 Speaker 00 The government. They're trying to distract us with aliens while they pass some other shit that takes more money from us.
54:41 Chris Williamson? Oh.
54:42 Speaker 00 He thinks it's a false.
54:43 Chris Williamson? Look over there. The aliens are over there. The debt ceiling. Nobody needs to see this.
54:46 Speaker 00 He is, he's landing more on, I think this is actually an intelligence operation trying to point our attention.
54:53 Chris Williamson? False flag.
54:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:54 Chris Williamson? In another direction. But a psychological false flag.
54:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:58 Chris Williamson? Well, here's the thing. What was, who was that, um, that president that said, uh, if only we were attacked by an alien force, we would, how quickly would humanities differences be forgotten? So it was maybe Reagan or somebody like that. Anyway, uh, the point being that at the moment, because largely life is very comfortable and there is no existential threat apart from the ones that people make up and population collapse. Uh, apart from the ones that people are concerned about that are in the news, the only enemies that people have are the ones inside, right? The ones internal to their nation. I actually think that if you were to say there is a, an alien civilization that's out there, we're not sure if it's hostile or if it's benign, you would actually end up with quite a bit of cohesion because for the first time ever,
55:43 Chris Williamson? humans' tribal biases are able to be deployed against something other than humans.
55:47 Speaker 00 Well, it's a threat for the entire population, just not one segment of the population.
55:51 Chris Williamson? Right. People are brought together much more over shared hatreds than shared loves. At the moment, there is more hatred than there is love, but if the hatred could be directed at something in the sky or somebody out there, you could white pill this and say, oh, this, it's, you know, there's actually a potential good that comes out of this. But yeah, I, I didn't know, man. It's, there, there's a lot of different people that are part of this story, like this lady that's involved, that was helped to feed David this information. Is this lady that's been a part of sort of a UFO truther conspiracy thing for many years?
56:24 Speaker 00 Well, it's, so let's say that, let's play this out as if everything he's saying is true. So he was not part of the program specifically, but he's hearing that there is a program that exists somewhere nested inside of the DOD, that they go out and they retrieve all of these things. For one, that would be.
56:43 Speaker 00 An enormous operation. First off, you'd have to staff it and man it. So we're talking, you'd have to have aircraft specifically dedicated for that. So you'd have people up front flying the aircraft, you'd have people in the back of the aircraft, and the people in the back of the aircraft are going to be probably junior personnel. And my point in all this is like, the more people that see this, the more people that like, try to keep a secret among five people and then add a zero to that, and then add a zero to that. How is this?
57:09 Chris Williamson? Vector of leakage.
57:10 Speaker 00 That's what I'm saying. Like, you're trying to tell me that somewhere there it's nested inside of the DOD and they have a dedicated wing that's doing this and they're flying all over the place and nobody can give me one concrete shred of evidence?
57:24 Chris Williamson? Well, that's, you said earlier on about people need to be able to sort of hold two thoughts in their mind at once. This is a relatively difficult one for some people some of the time to do, which is the government and the new world order is unbelievably sophisticated and able to coordinate itself so that global health passports and microchips in our vaccines and aliens are able to be kept from us. And also, the government is so useless that I wouldn't trust them with anything and they are completely incompetent and all of the rest of it. It's like, yeah, which one is it?
57:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
57:57 Chris Williamson? Which one is it? Is it that they're able to coordinate a half thousand person operation to be able to go and retrieve the most valuable artifact of non-human origin ever discovered, even including meteors?
58:08 Speaker 00 In plain sight, we haven't figured it out yet.
58:10 Chris Williamson? And not a single, not a single verifiable leak?
58:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:15 Chris Williamson? Or is it that they're completely useless and nobody should ever be trusted and the government needs to get the fuck out of my life? I'm totally fine with both of those things being true, that there can be portions of it that do both. In my opinion, what is it? Hanlon's razor did not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. It's like, do not attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by people that just really, really, really are good at lying.
58:41 Speaker 00 Agreed. And, you know, there could be a third option somewhere in between those two where you kind of said it, there's a small, because the government and these organizations are just people. Would it be possible to find people that are super capable and competent and operate well inside of an incompetent government?
58:57 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
58:58 Speaker 00 Yes.
58:58 Chris Williamson? Well, that's the C again, right?
58:59 Speaker 00 That's what I'm saying. Yes, you could. But man, I
59:05 Speaker 00 My personal bullshit meter goes off pretty, pretty rapidly. And also, and I don't know why, there was something about the way that the individual was talking about it that just was like,
59:15 Chris Williamson? The good instincts?
59:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's like, I don't know, man. Maybe he's telling the, maybe he's talking about things he truly believes. Uh, but there was, there was something about it that rung off to me.
59:25 Chris Williamson? That's always something that I find interesting. You know, when there's a, a missing child and the parents go out and they do the press tour, there's this girl called Madeleine McCann in the UK, very famous child that went missing, I think in Turkey in sort of the mid nineties. And the number of conspiracies about her parents that they'd kidnapped her or they'd sold her into slavery, or they'd been negligent to her or some other bullshit, uh, which very well may be true. Um, and people were analyzing how they'd done their press conferences. And one of the interesting things I reflected on there is they were saying, these people are unreliable actors. Look at, nobody, nobody would act this way when giving a press conference about their lost daughter. I'm like, oh, sorry, hang on. Where's the fucking handbook of examples of how people are supposed to normally behave?
1:00:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, where's this dossier of studies?
1:00:13 Chris Williamson? Missing? Like, cause there's two, they've either killed her, chopped her up and, and spread her in the sea, or she's been stolen, right? Like,
1:00:21 Speaker 00 I can give you way more options than that. Let's be creative.
1:00:25 Chris Williamson? How you, you're the guy, you're the guy that would dispose of the body. So, but my point being like, how, how are you supposed to behave? Like, how do you behave? And the same thing goes for this guy. So, you know, in terms of some degrees of freedom, let's say that you do have these, you know, again, do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity, or perhaps,
1:00:43 Speaker 00 Incompetence.
1:00:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah, or culpability or, or believability from this guy. You know, he, he could be telling the truth. So you've been given this information by these people that have said that this is true. They seem reputable to you. Perhaps they also believe that it is reputable. Perhaps it's second or third hand from them. You don't know where it goes. What's the playbook for how you're typically supposed to be able to give an interview to the press, claiming that this is potentially the first alien craft? But the other thing, what was it? He said, he said something about there's been a non-human, you know, he almost read it like a novel. It was like, there's been typically there would be a pilot.
1:01:21 Speaker 00 Exactly.
1:01:21 Chris Williamson? And, you know, that's the same in this one. I'm like, is this a fucking thriller novel or something?
1:01:27 Speaker 00 Well, also don't forget, you know, both you and I, I'm used to being around cameras. Like, they don't bother me anymore. I could only imagine, let's say, let's again, go down the thought process of he, everything he has is the truth and he is actually trying to be a whistleblower and this is the first time he's ever had a camera in front of his face. You're gonna ask a little, you're gonna act a little awkward.
1:01:45 Chris Williamson? Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, NASA's got this panel for UAPs, apparently, and they are encouraging commercial pilots to come forward. Did you talk about this?
1:01:57 Speaker 00 No.
1:01:58 Chris Williamson? So this is pretty interesting. So NASA's got this panel, right? There's these UAPs that are happening. Again, this may be a part of the conspiracy to the false flag thing, but what they're doing is, it seems like commercial pilots, because they spend way more time in the skies than all militaries combined by a fucking huge margin, they observe a variety of strange aerial phenomena, but there is a stigma in the commercial aviation community around pilots submitting this.
1:02:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, because they're gonna think you're crazy.
1:02:32 Chris Williamson? In February alone, the FAA had 68 reports from commercial pilots. So this is NASA trying to encourage a cultural shift amongst commercial pilots for them to come forward so that they're going to be less reluctant to report it, because again, you're gonna be shunned and maybe mocked as a crazy person. And yeah, in February alone, the FAA had 68 reports of UAPs by commercial pilots.
1:02:59 Speaker 00 I think we should embrace it. I mean,
1:03:03 Speaker 00 If we're not alone and they want to come here, I don't think we're going to stop them. So let's embrace the fact that it's possible. And you know, the commercial pilots, yeah, I think for years, the stigma has been, oh, you believe in aliens. Tractor beam, huh? Probe. Yeah, I get it.
1:03:18 Chris Williamson? Dope.
1:03:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally. So I think, I actually think it's a really good thing. Um, I actually have quite a bit of flying experience and sometimes you see weird shit up there. Report it. And what you're going to get is probably the vast majority of those things are things that were reported that can be explained. But you might get a small minority of them where you can look into it and we could develop a better understanding of whether or not we are alone or not. Just, just tell the goddamn truth. If you see something you don't understand, it's unrecognizable, make a report on it. And yeah, I, I just, I'd rather lean into it. Make some popcorn, invite them down, like, why not?
1:03:59 Chris Williamson? Yeah, man, it's interesting that it's, everything seems to be picking up speed. Whether it be conversations about AI and recursive self-improvement, whether it's nanotechnology or bioweapons or natural pandemics or engineered pandemics or aliens or whatever. Um, I think the next five to 10 years is going to be a real fever pitch for stuff. Because if it keeps increasing, if it keeps.
1:04:24 Speaker 00 I mean, aren't we vertical?
1:04:26 Chris Williamson? Pretty, pretty, it's the inflection is feeling pretty, like the hockey stick is very hockey sticky at the.
1:04:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know how much more vertical that we can get.
1:04:32 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:04:33 Speaker 00 It's gonna, I would describe it as wild. It's gonna be a wild time. I'm glad that I live in a remote section of Montana. Maybe give me a little bit of buffer.
1:04:39 Chris Williamson? Is that where you are?
1:04:39 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah, up in the northwestern section. It's, I need, you know, just a little physical buffer. Not saying it's, they can come visit me there too. I actually prefer that they did. Welcome arms. Come on in.
1:04:50 Chris Williamson? But it's going to be a little bit, you're going to be later in the day. Yeah.
1:04:53 Speaker 00 It'll buy me a little time geographically, topographically to buy me a little bit of time.
1:04:58 Chris Williamson? What is your?
1:05:01 Chris Williamson? Opinion on this sort of, I'm seeing this more and more, especially since I've moved to America, this sort of very, it's not quite being a prepper, but it's
1:05:12 Speaker 00 Kind of being prepared?
1:05:13 Chris Williamson? No, it's like military lapping. It's like people, people that like to wear sort of tactical wear as casual wear.
1:05:22 Chris Williamson? People who are maybe non-military, but could be relatively wealthy, but spending a good bit of time sort of surrounding themselves with military or with firearms and doing lots of tactical training and stuff like that.
1:05:34 Speaker 00 It's a, it's a tenuous balance because it can absolutely be taken too far. I mean, the things that get reported are like individual buries a school bus and makes it into a bunker and lives out of that and is putting camel paint on every day and waiting in the bushes for an unseen government entity that's probably never going to come because they know you're crazy and you're isolated. It's like, oh, the guy's in this trench you get, we don't need to go out there.
1:05:56 Chris Williamson? Japanese guy, the Vietnamese soldier or whatever that wouldn't stop until, yeah.
1:06:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, there was one in Guam too. I think he finally came out of the cave like 20 years later. So that would be, I think, like the pejorative of prepper because it definitely, I think it does have a pejorative slant to it. But I also think that people should take a very holistic view of how much they rely on other people to be able to do their day to day. And if people do that, it's kind of shocking. I mean, water, power, food, housing, transportation, information, all of these things. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to have a diesel generator in their apartment
1:06:45 Speaker 00 and an HF radio set and 60 days worth of food and somehow you're siphoning like gutter water into your house into 55 gallon drums.
1:06:55 Speaker 00 There's a balance in between the, like, so there's A and B, right? There's, there's a balance in between. I think, and it kind of goes back to resilient, resiliency. If there was a catastrophe, and actually I was, uh, I was down here a couple of years ago when Texas got the, they had like an inch of ice on the ground and it was Armageddon. Snow, you know, it almost ground people.
1:07:15 Chris Williamson? Did these people are pussies with cold weather?
1:07:17 Speaker 00 Well, but not, I mean, there's, there's, there's that aspect of it. Let's remember who said that it wasn't me, but. But they're also like the infrastructure, like when the power went out for four days, people were losing their fucking minds. It's like you can actually prepare yourself even just through knowledge on how to navigate something like that. You don't have to have all of those things. I think you should have, I mean, so where I live, for example, is slightly different. There are places in Montana that can get a little western physically and metaphorically. And response time from first responders is going to be forty five minutes to an hour, depending on where you're at. You need to, in certain times of year, have the ability to handle your own shit until a higher level of care comes. And that might be a couple
1:08:02 Speaker 00 of days. So I think in that environment, you need to, at the very least, think in those considerations. But I just, I, I, I hate people who just willingly outsource everything that they need for their life to somebody else, and they don't take any ownership of it. And then there's the other foreign, like you're talking about, the people who want to wear, you know, military flair and regalia, and they want to talk about a civil war while they're posting pictures of themselves on the fucking internet with their optics on their rifles on backwards. It's like, I'll send you plenty of them. It's, it's a hobby of mine to look at that. And, you know, it's, I hate people who call, who are calling for civil war. People have no idea what it is that they are asking for.
1:08:46 Speaker 00 They have no idea what that that would actually look like. And for some reason, they seem to think that it would save the country as opposed to just destroy the country.
1:08:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah. I, I had a conversation with a friend who spends a lot of time shooting and is very responsible. And he sort of talked me through his progression that he had of becoming a gun owner and then becoming sort of competent and then proficient and then kind of where he's at now. And he was saying that he's fluxed in his desire for an incident to occur an awful lot. And it's kind of given him emotional and existential whiplash because of what's happened. And I mentioned to him, and I'm sure that you'll be familiar with this as well, that there are some people who spend a good bit of time around firearms. And when I'm around them, I get a sense of hunger.
1:09:36 Speaker 00 They want something to happen.
1:09:38 Chris Williamson? For something to kick off because they've done all of this training and they've spent all of this time thinking about the bad guy and. You you roll BJJ, you want to compete, right? You you do boxing, you want to get into the ring. You don't just hit the pads all the time. You want to actually. And I mentioned it to him and he said, I've actually become, as I've got super out into expert level, I've become more and more reticent around using my firearm, because I know that that's the last time I'm probably ever going to pull the trigger.
1:10:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:10:07 Chris Williamson? If I shoot a person, even if it's in the most unequivocable self-defense ever, I'm probably not going to be able to shoot another firearm again in my entire life.
1:10:17 Speaker 00 And you still may lose in civil court.
1:10:19 Chris Williamson? Yep.
1:10:20 Speaker 00 I have, I have been around more weapons-based violence than almost every human being on the face of the planet. And I say that because almost nobody is actually exposed to it. But in the job that I came from, that was literally, if at the end of the day, if you refine everything down, and what is it that what was our job? It was to find, fix and finish individuals in locations where they thought that they were the most secure. To find somebody, locate them in space and time, go to their front, front door, and depending on how they behave, once we cross that front door, either take them into custody or fucking kill them. And if you do that for long enough, the last thing that you ever want to do is be around gun violence again. I don't want to, and Montana is a constitutional carry state.
1:11:04 Speaker 00 I carry. But I don't ever want to have to pull my gun out on a human being ever again. It is not, and I do agree with you, there are people who have this idealistic, like they're going to be in like, like doing a gunshot at the OK Corral. It's like, oh dude. And a good friend of mine, Mike Glover, who is actually the owner of Fieldcraft Survival, this weekend, we are doing some scenario-based training where I live up in Kalispell. And we did one a few weeks ago. And before that, I had helped him out at another one. And it's, it's, the morning starts with an introduction to pistols, and then my wife teaches an introduction to jujitsu. And then they do scenario-based training with somebody in a red suit that may have a gun. They may not have a gun.
1:11:46 Speaker 00 These people have a gun on them with simunition rounds, the wax bullets that sting like a motherfucker. Varsity move is to put them in the freezer the night before. That's an aside. That's a tip for anybody out there who's still trains with sim rounds. Put them in the freezer. You'll drop them like a sniper shot to the chest. The number of people who, that was their first time. Ever actually making a decision, should I pull this gun out and should I use it? And the number of people that would have spent their remaining days in prison for murder is startling.
1:12:18 Chris Williamson? What's a typical scenario?
1:12:20 Speaker 00 Uh, I don't want to give too much of it away, but I'll give you a broad one. You are in a parking lot and usually he'll pair this up with a male and a female. The female will have a bag in her hand and somebody starts approaching you pretty aggressively asking for money. Hey, and this is like usually coming out of a grocery store and you have vehicles on each side. So a little bit of a confined environment, somebody is coming directly at you. And go, the person's loud, they're coming at you aggressively. And the beauty of the last, uh, the last time we ran this is that the role player was actually a sheriff, a local sheriff, so he could really speak to, here's what's going to happen when law enforcement shows up.
1:13:01 Speaker 00 Uh, go ahead and show me your hands, turn around. So he could give that, and so the person approaches, I've seen it go down now three times. Every one of those times, the person gets shot, they do not have a weapon. Now, and there are plenty of times where that is completely and utterly justifiable. And I would also say in that situation, it depends on if you're a man and a woman. For women, absent an incredible amount of training, and even then there is a size, strength and weight difference that cannot be overcome. The only thing that you really can do to increase survivability is to introduce a tool into that environment, that levels that playing field.
1:13:40 Chris Williamson? Yep.
1:13:41 Speaker 00 So if it was just a woman, uh, and in some of the other scenarios, that was the case. And the results, it was interesting, they, they shoot early and sometimes they need to, to survive. But in this situation, it was interesting to see people go from zero to 100. I mean, to me, like the old fashioned Spartan kick in that particular situation would have been amazing because the role player was briefed, if they do anything that is hands on, go to the ground and the threat is over. It never got to that point. They get shot every time.
1:14:11 Speaker 00 It's a tough one and you gotta think about this from the perspective of most security cam footage is not going to have audio. So you have to think about this from 12 people looking at this, no audio.
1:14:22 Chris Williamson? Not hearing this person effing and blinding in your face and saying, give me your fucking money and I'm gonna kill you and I'm a blah blah.
1:14:28 Speaker 00 They don't hear any of that. Do you want to roll the dice and gamble with your life with that? Most people will go and they purchase a gun and another thing I think that should be required is actually a safe to put the gun in. It's just those two to me should be.
1:14:43 Chris Williamson? You have to have those in the UK.
1:14:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, it should be. It's a tool that's designed to take life and that's okay. Let's just treat it with the appropriate amount of respect. But, you know, it's, people will buy a gun, they'll train with it a little bit if at all, and they think that it's, for lack of a better term, a Harry Potter wand. They can pull it out and just boom and it's going to solve all these problems. I think the vast majority of time, if you were to pull it out, it's going to introduce problems into your life that you're going to spend years trying to navigate your way out of if you're even successful. It's not a magic tool. It is a tool, but it's not magic and there's a lot of pros and cons to it. And the people that I know who are the most versed in violence, whether it's with their hands or with tools, they actually want nothing to do with it.
1:15:30 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I remember Jocko video where he's talking about what to do if somebody gets aggressive in public.
1:15:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, run away.
1:15:38 Chris Williamson? Every single piece of advice involved, just leaving.
1:15:41 Speaker 00 He's a dangerous man. He does not, it's like, you know, we, I've been doing jujitsu now for almost five years and I go and I wear these like cool little pajamas with my buddies and it's like, let's not roll outside. Let's go get on this padding. And also like, we're going to play by the same rules, right? Like you're not going to punch me in the face and I'm not gonna.
1:15:58 Chris Williamson? No biting, no headbutting.
1:15:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally. I'm not going to grab your dick and twist it off. It's like, okay, we're like, we're friends. We're trying to get better. I don't want to go roll around in a parking lot. That shit hurts. Even if I know how to handle myself, I don't actually want to touch somebody who appears to be crazy because I don't know if they just bathed in their own shit. You know, I don't want any part of that. Like people who know the most about violence, understand how catastrophically bad it can go and you can also win a physical fight and a gunfight and lose in the grander scheme of things. Better to avoid at all costs.
1:16:32 Chris Williamson? Mike sent me a, did you get the bag? Did you get the pack of his new book? How fucking cool is that thing? That little?
1:16:39 Chris Williamson? What would you call it?
1:16:40 Speaker 00 Oh, the little.
1:16:40 Chris Williamson? Carry bag?
1:16:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, it has the little visor panels.
1:16:42 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so fucking cool.
1:16:43 Speaker 00 And so again, where I live, I need to have, because of the distance of, you know, to first response, I need to have the ability to at least maintain care or provide a level of care until a higher level shows up. So I have that stuff all over my vehicles and I hope that I never use it. I don't ever want to use that stuff. And I'm not hoping that, like, driving around every corner, like, ah, damn it, there's no T-bone wreck here. There's no motorcyclist with his legs sticking.
1:17:07 Chris Williamson? Well, that's an interesting point. The fact, if, if all that you wanted was to be able to be righteous, why are people not as excited for the potential to step in and tourniquet someone as they are for the potential to step in and shoot someone?
1:17:19 Speaker 00 The number of people I will ask.
1:17:20 Chris Williamson? Glory.
1:17:20 Speaker 00 Well, the number of people, they also have an unrealistic understanding. I'm not a fan of statistics because they can be highly skewed and weaponized as well. But if you look at something that you are going to carry on yourself every single day, I would recommend Band-Aids and tourniquets to people a lot more than I would guns. And I'm not saying that one is more valuable than the other, but if, I personally have come upon multiple wrecks in the US where I have rendered aid to people and zero gunfights.
1:17:49 Speaker 00 That's the stats that most people are going to live in. However, if you get into a gunfight, I hope you have a fucking gun because if not, it's not going to go your way. But you're so much more likely to be able to render aid to somebody and help their life than be in a situation where somebody's life needs to be taken.
1:18:04 Chris Williamson? Well, that's another point that I, I never really realized until I came to America, which is the externality of road rage and of getting pissed at somebody on the road.
1:18:17 Speaker 00 You tell me there's no road rage.
1:18:18 Chris Williamson? Oh, no, there's road, there's tons of road rage in Britain.
1:18:21 Speaker 00 Okay, I'm just checking.
1:18:22 Chris Williamson? But people are, like, it never escalates, right? Like, no one's, no one's fucking swerving over in front of your car and telling you to get out of the fucking car.
1:18:30 Speaker 00 Pussies.
1:18:31 Chris Williamson? Well, but when you're here, I regularly see, uh, I'll never forget it, man. It was the first week I arrived in Texas and we're pulled up at, at a junction and up next to us pulls up this massive Mexican guy, no helmet on, on, on a trike, one of those trikes, LED lights on it, music splaring. I was like, this guy's pretty fucking cool. He's had that big fucking tattoos all over his arms like this. And he had a fucking handgun, just open carry on his hip. And I thought, he gets to go wherever he wants. Like if he wants to go in front of us, he gets to go in front of us. If he wants to stop for a while and have a cigarette, he also gets to do that, too.
1:19:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:19:11 Chris Williamson? That there is an undertone
1:19:16 Chris Williamson? of mortal danger in America that I didn't notice in the UK. And now this may be because it's simply an alien place to me. It's new. I haven't acclimatized or the whatever. But the homeless population is more forthcoming and more dangerous by an absolute country mile. They're more shuffly, they're more schizy, they're more like come up to you and fucking try and do stuff to you.
1:19:36 Speaker 00 They'll get right up in your face. It happened, literally happened to my wife and I last night.
1:19:39 Chris Williamson? You go on Sixth Street?
1:19:41 Speaker 00 Uh, yeah, actually, we were close to Sixth Street.
1:19:44 Chris Williamson? Good guess. The epicenter of the crazy here in Austin.
1:19:48 Speaker 00 But here's the thing, like my wife is fucking on it. A woman came by, she was kind of getting aggressive to people sitting next to us. The woman came up and asked us for money. I took a tone of voice with that individual that indicated you're going to get one answer from me and one answer, and that's it. She continued on and like it started building like, you know what, let's get the fuck out of here. Almost all violent confrontations can be avoided.
1:20:08 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:20:10 Speaker 00 Situational awareness and just, you know, don't put yourself in a, it's like, you think something's going south? Go north. You know, get out of there.
1:20:19 Chris Williamson? Do you have a cross paths with dead Castro in the SEALs?
1:20:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah, we were, uh, I was a BUDS instructor and he was an SQT instructor. So same two, uh, two wheels of the same training vehicle.
1:20:33 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:20:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:34 Chris Williamson? What was that like? What was working with him?
1:20:36 Speaker 00 Never worked with him directly. So I taught basic, the basic training, basic underwater demolition slash SEAL, which is the six month pipeline. He taught SQT, which was SEAL qualification training. So think of it as initial crucible, very, very little knowledge about the actual job. SQT was, I'm not going to say a finishing school because you leave there.
1:20:58 Speaker 00 You have a lot of knowledge, but no experience. It's like an associate's degree. It's not a master's, it's not a PhD, like it's the most dangerous point in your career, actually. As I'm sure it is in law or in medicine, where you have a lot of book knowledge and zero street smarts. You're just super dangerous.
1:21:14 Chris Williamson? To be given some tools that are.
1:21:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, like a machine gun, you know?
1:21:19 Speaker 00 The most dangerous time in my career was when I knew everything, I would have told you that, but had done nothing. And they're like, here's a gun. I'm like, this is fucking everything I thought it was gonna be. Everything I thought it could be.
1:21:37 Chris Williamson? Fuck, yeah. Well, you were very heavily involved in CrossFit for a very, for a long time.
1:21:42 Speaker 00 I don't know if they would describe it like that. I worked for the organization for about eight years. I started off for about four years of that, teaching the conceptual foundation at the seminars. So giving the lectures and the weekend seminars. And then I transitioned after a deployment in 2010 to more of business, like sponsorships. I managed the charitable initiatives for a little bit. So much less consumer facing if the consumer facing is the deliverables on the weekends and much more to the business. And then was the pilot for Greg for two and a half, maybe three years along those lines.
1:22:16 Chris Williamson? Flying? Oh, wow. Really?
1:22:17 Speaker 00 Yeah. He, so CrossFit was founded, actually, super small world, like about eight blocks from the last house that I lived in before I joined the Navy. So I am from Santa Cruz, a super small beach town on the coast. And that's where CrossFit was started. But Greg had residence in Santa Cruz. He had a residence in Arizona and a residence in San Diego. And he was just on this, just diamond of death in the car. And I had gotten, when I left the East Coast Command and come to the West Coast to be a BUDS instructor, they were flirting with getting rid of actually winter hell week. They were trying to increase the throughput of the program. So they did one cycle where they didn't have a winter hell week. And I checked in. They're like, we don't actually have anything for you to
1:22:59 Speaker 00 do. So see you in a couple of months. And I was like, oh, fuck it. I saw an airplane coming in to land on my way home. And I literally drove off the, took the exit and found where they land. I was like, this looks like fun. Like, I guess I'll get my pilot's license. Didn't do anything with it. Greg calls me one day. He's like, hey, I remember you saying you had your pilot's license. This drive is just murderous. It's like eight hours each, each leg of that triangle. Go get all your ratings, get current again. And I'm gonna get an airplane. And so that's what I ended up doing was, actually, it was kind of that triangle, but a lot, a lot of the times just in the air instead. But directly for Greg and directly for, and I flew Dave, I don't, I don't know, countless times.
1:23:36 Chris Williamson? What was the glory days of CrossFit like from the inside?
1:23:42 Speaker 00 There were times, I mean, I guess my metric for that would be how many seminars they would sell and the velocity with which they would sell once they went online. I think the peak I ever saw it is they were doing five different seminars across the world. And probably 50 people at the seminar at a thousand bucks a head. When I was working for them and it would, they could, you could put it online. And if you had a phone, like a Shopify alert or whatever, it would just be like, like the velocity, it was unbelievable. It's just, he could take a shit and hundreds would come out. That's what I would do. It was, it was the demand so outstripped the possible supply. It just was everywhere.
1:24:27 Speaker 00 You know, then the CrossFit Games came about. Um, so like national TV, I still don't know whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing for CrossFit because it, the, what they are doing at the games is actually a really poor representation of what the actual CrossFit programming is. And it's, people don't, they're not even interested in having that conversation. They're just like, that shit looks crazy. I don't want to do that. It's like, that's CrossFit type exercises, but that's not really the programming. But it was pretty wild. I mean, I was sitting there at the table with three other people when they negotiated the first Reebok deal. The 10 year deal was worth about 150 million and I ended up managing that with a good friend of mine who was a like, uh, he was the lawyer, not a lawyer, but he was the lawyer. Um, is like a legal backstop, but it was, it was crazy, man. I got to see fully behind the curtain, which good and also bad. Many lessons learned.
1:25:12 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Yeah, man. It's a
1:25:15 Speaker 00 Which actually is how you and I ended up leaking open the first place.
1:25:18 Chris Williamson? Correct. Yeah. We have a mutual friend who managed to get himself into some sort of quasi litigious territory for reporting what was pretty, I think, well.
1:25:32 Chris Williamson? Circulated information about a bunch of the guys behind CrossFit.
1:25:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:25:37 Chris Williamson? Uh, and within not long of, of, of talking about this stuff had been hit with a number of different threats for litigation.
1:25:45 Speaker 00 I actually wonder if they would have followed through, you know, threatening litigation is one thing, following through on it is another, you know, libel, all of the things that you can be threatened with, they're predicated on you saying something that's not true.
1:25:58 Chris Williamson? It's also if everything is caveated with allegedly.
1:26:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:26:01 Chris Williamson? Or a story suggests a source close to.
1:26:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:26:04 Chris Williamson? You know, you can create a lot of degrees of freedom.
1:26:07 Speaker 00 I don't blame him for the decision that he made in my experience.
1:26:13 Speaker 00 There, they, it's hard to say they, because it's tough at many levels to separate CrossFit Inc., at least during the time period that I was working for them. Obviously now he's, he has moved on, it's under new ownership, and I think they just brought in a new CEO not too long ago. It's hard for me to say where the separation was between CrossFit and Greg during the time that I was working for them, but the legal aspect, the threat of legal involvement was 100% there.
1:26:42 Chris Williamson? Hmm. Yeah, I don't know, man. It's, it's strange that there are an awful lot of stories. It gives me the impression that a lot of the guys that ran, that were a part of CrossFit from back in the day, because it's a business that remained mostly the same from a time when the world, relationships within the office between men and women, sort of accepted tone of how people in positions of power related to the people that weren't in a variety of regards changed so, so much.
1:27:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:27:14 Chris Williamson? You know, from 2004 to 2018, it is worlds apart, right? You have a complete reckoning around Me Too. You have massive changes in terms of what people expect as, as workers, as employees in terms of their rights, social movements, the advent of social media and the expectation of, of what is and is not sort of allowable behavior. And, um, based on what I know, based on my bro science understanding, it seems like there should be a lot of people that ran CrossFit from back in the day wiping sweat off their brow for how close the Sword of Damocles came to fucking beheading them.
1:27:52 Speaker 00 NDAs are a special thing.
1:27:56 Speaker 00 Some of us chose not to sign them.
1:27:57 Chris Williamson? Ah.
1:28:00 Chris Williamson? So was there an offer of?
1:28:02 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:28:02 Chris Williamson? Cash?
1:28:03 Speaker 00 Yep, and I told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves.
1:28:07 Chris Williamson? Can you say how much the cash offer was?
1:28:08 Speaker 00 It wasn't that much. I didn't, you know, in.
1:28:10 Chris Williamson? Not, not.
1:28:11 Speaker 00 It wasn't. It was like probably like eight or 10 grand.
1:28:13 Chris Williamson? Now get fucked.
1:28:15 Speaker 00 Well, you know, my relationship with money as everybody's relationship with money has changed over time. You know, the, the best days in the US military, the first and the 15th, it's like, I got paid, motherfucker. Then you get out of the military, you're like, oh shit. This is a different, this is a different beast. For me, very fortunately, I had been double dipping and working on the weekends, teaching the seminars, and I was able to transition from my military career to working for CrossFit. But he was paying me more working for CrossFit than I was making in the military. You just, you don't go, you can make good money in the military, but you'll be solidly middle class. Right? And the amount of money that he was paying me when I got out of the military was more than I had ever made in my life. And it was, I'm glad that the experiences that I had
1:28:59 Speaker 00 occurred because it was one of the biggest lessons for me when it came to money and what it's actually worth. And I got to the point where I just resigned and went from, I was making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, that's what he was paying me, to zero overnight. And totally fine. I'm so glad that I did that. It forced me to be more creative. It forced me to find my own path. It forced me to this place where now I'll never work for somebody else again. I'm going to work for myself and I figured that out.
1:29:28 Speaker 00 And, you know, to bring it back to the, the CrossFit world, when he offered me eight grand, or he, of course, it wasn't through him, it was through the general counsel. It's like, go fuck yourself. Like, if I'm going to go from a hundred and fifty to zero right now, there's no amount of money in the world that you can ever pay me that's going to prevent me from telling the truth if I want to. And I was honest and, and he.
1:29:56 Speaker 00 I did an episode dedicated to my thoughts around it. And I was very broad and my thoughts still are the same. It's not actually my story to tell because people have said to me, well, why didn't you go more into specifics? And the reason I can't go more into specifics, or I'm unwilling to, I should say, is that it bumps up against other people. And I don't want to speak for other people. If they want to speak for themselves or they want to be heard, they are going to have to do that. And I can talk about the things that I saw. I can talk about the mistakes that I made. I can talk about the things that I wish I had changed or had done in the moment. And I can try to shed some light on what had happened in the hopes that other people can talk. And they did a good job with NDAs.
1:30:40 Chris Williamson? It seems that way, man. It seems that way. You know, an awful lot of stories on the internet about just what the culture was like. And I don't know, there was a, I got into CrossFit in 2016, 2017. Started taking a CrossFit check and was sold from there. And then, yeah, I kind of got to see, I think, the sanitization of the anti-marketing, anti-fitness industry movement to something that some people may call selling out to mainstream. Other people may say required sanitization that was needed to kind of, to kind of clean it up. But certainly, you know, from what I can see now, it's lost its way.
1:31:24 Chris Williamson? I think, I don't think that CrossFit has the cultural hold that it used to. The prevalence of things like high rocks, like high rocks should have never got off the ground.
1:31:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:31:33 Chris Williamson? Should have never, ever, ever got a foothold. And the problem is, as you identified earlier, that I can see with CrossFit, CrossFit tried to be three things. It tried to be a business model with affiliates, tried to be a methodology for training, and it tried to be a sport at the highest level. And you are always going to end up. Bouncing up against the priorities for each of those. And you saw this when Greg stepped in and started having 60 year old people doing bent over rows with jugs of milk partway through COVID, which I don't disagree. It's not a bad thing. It's supposed to be fitness for everybody, et cetera, et cetera. But that wasn't what people wanted to see. And then the sport of CrossFit came up against that. And that's also not necessary. The 60 year old people aren't going to go into your local CrossFit box and go and do the thing there. So what is it? And I think
1:32:16 Chris Williamson? it's very difficult to try and wrangle a beast like that. And then there's talk of ESPN deal, and then the buttery bros, Marsden and Hebes, they get let go and the entire media team gets let go. And then there's like, all of this stuff happens.
1:32:28 Speaker 00 It's a weird move. He comes in one day and fires his entire media team. And it was a we know, one of the tranches that they had in the organization. It's
1:32:38 Speaker 00 how fuck, there were some, there were some offices
1:32:44 Speaker 00 in that building that were barely big enough for the people in them and not nearly big enough for their egos. There was, there's, and I'm sure that's true of every organization, but a lot of the decisions, if you look at it from an outside perspective, like, fuck, that's probably purely a punitive decision that we're making, not a great business decision. And you know, when CrossFit first caught on, I found it in 2005. It was in comparison to what the rest of the strength and conditioning world was doing. It was revelatory. Not that they created any new movement. I can't think of a single movement that is actually proprietary to CrossFit, but it's how it was put together. The programming, there certainly was an essence of the marketing. I think you,
1:33:27 Speaker 00 you know, there was a reason that he used, especially 2005, where it's like, what are police doing? What are military doing? Fire? Like, great marketing. And those, and those communities did benefit from it as well. So I think that it was mutually beneficial. But If you don't evolve, I don't, you know, eventually you're going to die. And I remember in 2005, like you could not find a bumper plate in any 24 hour fitness or an Olympic lifting platform, you know, any of those things. Go into any gym anywhere now and try to find one that doesn't have a kettlebell, that doesn't have some type of object that you can lift. It's something other than a barbell or Olympic lifting station. So it
1:34:09 Speaker 00 it did revolutionize and change, I think, a lot of the landscape of strength and conditioning. But then the company itself kind of stayed the same. And I would, I would agree with you. Struggled to figure out, I think, what the messaging of the company was going to be.
1:34:27 Chris Williamson? There's a, a number of phases that you go through, says the guy that's never built a multimillion dollar business, but I've got lots of friends that have. And it seems like the nought to one million, the one to 10, the 10 to 50, the 50 to 100, the 100 to sort of 200, the 200 to half a bill, the bill, the half bill to one bill, so on and so forth. And at each stage, you need to be allowed, prepared to let go of the things that came along previously. And the problem is that those things gave you success in the past. So you, if you're sufficiently neurotic or overbearing, or a taskmaster or a tyrant, you're not going to be prepared to let go of them. And I have a number of friends that have got billion dollar businesses. And what they've done is been very, very
1:35:12 Chris Williamson? good at just getting out the fucking way and allowing people that are way more experienced than them to come in and go, look, let me dissolve everything that you understand about this, and then let me work out how we turn that into the next iteration of it. But if you're not prepared to let go of it, if you're not prepared to let go of what it was, it can never become what it's going to be. And if you start making decisions on the whim of whether or not someone wakes up hungover or grumpy one day and decides to come in You know, get rid of people or make comments or tweet things at inopportune times, you are going to be at the mercy of. And this is kind of the same. I learned about how the nuclear football works. Have you, do you know the way that it's like distributed between all of the different silos?
1:35:53 Speaker 00 No.
1:35:53 Chris Williamson? So this is fucking fascinating. So I wanted to find out from a CIA guy who worked in nuclear, like nuclear deterrent and nuclear armament division for a while. What was inside of the nuclear football? Inside of it, you crack this sort of wax thing open and inside that is the piece of paper and the piece of paper's got the codes on and the president puts the codes in. And I thought, what happens if there is a, I think it's called a moral objector, something like that. In each different silo, and there's maybe 50 of them around the US, maybe more. And in each of them, there's two people. And these two people are the most junior people in the CIA, right?
1:36:31 Speaker 00 Fuck, yes.
1:36:31 Chris Williamson? They are so junior. It's like, and they work eight hour shifts. So eight, eight, eight. That's it. That's your day sorted in pairs, right?
1:36:39 Speaker 00 Like in the silo?
1:36:40 Chris Williamson? Correct.
1:36:41 Speaker 00 Oh.
1:36:41 Chris Williamson? Yep. And get this, get this, right? So every single hour ish, it varies, but every single hour, an alarm goes off, codes come through, they have to type the codes in, both of them, both of them turn the keys, both of them press the button. Every single hour.
1:36:58 Speaker 00 Are you sure this story's true?
1:37:00 Chris Williamson? Come from a guy that's part of the CIA.
1:37:03 Speaker 00 Hmm.
1:37:04 Chris Williamson? Andrew Bustamante, the people, a lot of people have got a problem with him, but.
1:37:07 Speaker 00 I don't know who that is. This story seems wild, though.
1:37:10 Chris Williamson? So his argument was that you can have these moral objections, the story about Russia from back in whenever it was that dude decided, I don't think, I think, I don't think that they have sent all of these rockets over and then they don't. And he avoids, you know, a disclosure that could. Insect's dick away from nuclear war. The reason that this is stopped is because it's distributed. So this comes in every hour. You don't know where you're firing. You don't know if it's a drill or if it's real, which means that everybody is just in the rhythm of doing it, they're conditioned to press it. And here's the other thing, because all of them are on a network and all of them are distributed, if any one silo puts in the codes, it can fire from any of the other silos.
1:37:53 Chris Williamson? So if you've got just one pair out of, let's say it's 50 or 100 that say yes, that do put it in.
1:38:00 Speaker 00 It's go.
1:38:00 Chris Williamson? It's gone and you don't know where it's going and you don't know if it's real and you don't know if it's your silo or if you're pressing a button that goes to another silo and you don't know what city it's aimed at. And that just happens pretty much like within a bit of a play on the hour, every hour. And you've got to do that.
1:38:16 Speaker 00 I feel like we could get a better system going.
1:38:19 Chris Williamson? You should go and redesign it. That'd be great.
1:38:21 Speaker 00 I feel like you and me over one cocktail and a cocktail napkin could improve this plan.
1:38:26 Chris Williamson? I'd be completely down. If the Ministry of Defence or whatever the equivalent is over here, the nuclear people.
1:38:32 Speaker 00 I think it's the DOE in the US.
1:38:34 Chris Williamson? DOE, yeah, I knew that.
1:38:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:38:36 Chris Williamson? Once I learned the name of the people that make it, make the decisions, they can come to me and I'll help them make the decisions.
1:38:41 Speaker 00 I'm here for it.
1:38:41 Chris Williamson? Fuck yeah.
1:38:42 Speaker 00 I'm in.
1:38:43 Chris Williamson? I've heard you say that you don't consider yourself to be extraordinary, consider yourself to be extremely ordinary.
1:38:50 Speaker 00 Correct.
1:38:50 Chris Williamson? I actually heard you say.
1:38:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:38:52 Chris Williamson? How is it then that you've managed to achieve some extraordinary things?
1:38:59 Speaker 00 You know, I think probably the most exceptional thing that I've ever done in my life was graduating SEAL training. It's the odds are not in your favor.
1:39:10 Speaker 00 And at the same, and in the same breath that I will say that I think it's an exceptional thing.
1:39:17 Speaker 00 It's not that big of a deal, which is obviously a statement that is opposed to the one that I previously made. The SEAL community. Is a community of extremely ordinary people. They are the most ordinary, run-of-the-mill, could find them at any street corner in any city in any state in the country. They are asked to do occasionally very exceptional things. SEAL, the stats on SEAL training, about 75% of people who attempt it don't make it through. So I would say that that's probably something that would be considered exceptional. But the only thing that I did
1:39:59 Speaker 00 to graduate that was to just keep showing up. I mean, there's physical standards, don't get me wrong. Like you have to physically be able to do running, swimming, pull-ups, push-ups, all of the requirements. And you take some tests and training, like there's a diving test, a dive physics test, explosive calculations test, all of those things that would be associated with that. The barrier to entry is not high. You'd actually have to try to trip and fall. But I kept showing up. I literally, I just kept showing up. And everything else that I've done in my life has been, to a degree, if you look at it, what I'm doing right now, what I'm very passionate about and I enjoy doing, especially because my, the fact my wife participates in it, is jiu-jitsu. How do you get a black belt
1:40:44 Speaker 00 in jiu-jitsu? I don't have a fucking clue, but I'm pretty sure if you just keep showing up and you pay attention and you do what the people are teaching you, if you extrapolate that out over enough period of time, you're gonna eventually, one day, have a black belt tied around your waist. And people are gonna say, that's exceptional. And I think that it is. But you didn't just arrive at that. I enjoy skydiving. Not hard. You can make some really visually appealing videos and images and you can make things appear to be more difficult than they can be, but it's just gravity. If you get out of an airplane, I'm here to tell you, after 8,500 jumps, gravity is gonna work. Eighty-five hundred jumps? It's not that many. Trust me. People who work in the sport, who've been jumping
1:41:24 Speaker 00 for as long as I have had, have been, would have 25,000, 30,000, 35,000, like true professionals who work in the sport. I've been skydiving for 24 years at this point. But it's like, if you don't pull your parachute, you're gonna die. If you pull your parachute, you're probably gonna get the chance to do it again. Flying an airplane, kind of the same thing. Like when you first go and you learn, you have to, like, there's a knowledge base required and a practical skill. And you incrementally continue to go and learn more. And it's just... It's not, there isn't, there is nothing exceptional about me. I graduated high school with about a 1.8 GPA. I played sports in high school at what I would call, and I think everybody else would call a mediocre level. I was on the team, wasn't really making the highlight reel.
1:42:09 Chris Williamson? Fiercely mild.
1:42:10 Speaker 00 Fear just competitively average.
1:42:16 Speaker 00 Just deeply competitively average. I'm not going to win any aptitude test. I'm certainly not going to win any physical test. I think the only skill that I probably refined over time was just, I'm not, it's hard to get me to quit. I just keep showing up unless I realize what I'm doing is utterly meaningless and then I'll shit can that thing immediately. Uh, but that's, I mean, that's really it. It's, I'm not exceptional. Anything that I have done is achievable for people. Whether or not they want to apply themselves in the same way, that's the variable. That's it.
1:42:49 Chris Williamson? Yeah, there's a, a quote from James Clear where he says, consistency won't guarantee success, but if you're not consistent, I guarantee that you won't be successful.
1:42:58 Speaker 00 I mean,
1:43:00 Speaker 00 for the 75% of people who don't make it through BUDs, they chose not to show up one day. They made a choice that terminated that. And the people that graduated, they showed up the next day and it was really hard. It's a hard training program. And you learn how to deal with that. And then you show up the next day and the next day and the next day.
1:43:16 Chris Williamson? I watched a documentary about the backyard ultra race. Have you seen this?
1:43:21 Speaker 00 I have watched, is that the one, the crazy ass, like long 24 hour one?
1:43:25 Chris Williamson? Yes. Okay. Well, it goes, the one that I watched finished after it was approaching 36 hours.
1:43:31 Speaker 00 I think we're talking about the same thing.
1:43:32 Chris Williamson? Point something miles every hour on the hour. Yes, correct. Yeah. The guy that created, I think it's the Barclay Marathon.
1:43:39 Speaker 00 That's the one I'm familiar with is the Barclay.
1:43:41 Chris Williamson? So it's same dude, okay, crazy guy. Uh, and he didn't like the fact that people won the marathon. He wanted to create a marathon where the marathon always won.
1:43:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:43:51 Chris Williamson? And so he created this thing and there's a great documentary. It's a tiny YouTube channel. But if you just search Backyard Ultra, I think it's in New Zealand or Australia. It's about three weeks old. Read really great breakdown of what's going on. And this dude who it's his first ever one, he's not a pro or anything. He takes this guy to the absolute limit and both of them are going in that's stepping up to the line at the start and they're fist bumping. But the guy, this fucking awesome little section with the dude that runs it and he's sat on this like shit camping chair, this crazy savant of a race programmer. And he says, most people don't quit during the race. Most people quit on the chair.
1:44:30 Speaker 00 Hmm.
1:44:30 Chris Williamson? Most people don't quit.
1:44:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, they don't want to get back off the chair.
1:44:33 Chris Williamson? Precisely correct.
1:44:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:44:35 Chris Williamson? Yep. They don't quit while they're while they're running.
1:44:37 Speaker 00 That's the thing.
1:44:37 Chris Williamson? They quit because they sit down.
1:44:39 Speaker 00 The, I would say the number one time at BUDs where people quit is first thing in the morning. They just, they quit at the beginning of the day before the day even starts. It's uncommon, except during hell week, for people to quit mid evolution. They just, they get to the point where like, you know what? I don't even want to start. I'm not even going to try. And that sucks. It, I've been around a lot of, when I went back as an instructor, I spent a lot of time with the students who had given up on what they would express as their life goals. And it's, you're talking with people who are in probably their lowest emotional state that they may ever get to in their life. And even in that moment, shortly after, you know, there's the, you ring a bell three times and you
1:45:19 Speaker 00 do have to fill out some paperwork. But regret, regret is the single most expressed emotion from those people, even in just the moments right after.
1:45:30 Chris Williamson? I spoke to Goggins a little while ago about this, and he was talking about the difference between the person who rings the bell and the person that doesn't. And he was saying that there are people that he knows who rang out of BUDs and decades later, it's still something that plagues on their mind.
1:45:50 Speaker 00 I've run into them.
1:45:51 Chris Williamson? Defining moment of their life, this.
1:45:52 Speaker 00 I've run into them. I've run into students who I was putting through training and as an instructor, you see hundreds of students. So the, there's no way you're going to remember the people that, so I have not remembered a single one of the students that has come up to me, but I have run into them and just the, fucking in airports. Hey, instructor stomp. I'm like, hey, just so you know, you can, you can actually call me Andy at this point because I've been out of the military for 10 years.
1:46:15 Speaker 00 And they will say like, I wish I had this happen to me at the Denver airport. Guy pulled me, I was literally head down, walking, I, you know, AirPods in, just cruising around. Guy tapped me on the shoulder, stopped. So you're not gonna remember me. You were working on the hell week shift, the shift that I quit. And I think about that every single day since that happened. I'm like, what year was that? It's like 2006. This was last year.
1:46:43 Chris Williamson? I have a friend, Alex, and he posted something a couple of days ago that said, the heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. And I think that the weight that people deal with when it comes to regret and rumination and what could have been. But when you, you know, we were talking earlier on about differences in degree, not differences of kind. And what you realize is that all of the things that you choose to do in life are like that, you know, whether you choose to hit the snooze button in the morning or not, whether you choose to eat the cookie, even though you promised yourself that you weren't going to eat the cookie. So largely those scenarios are just a value judgment about the story you tell yourself about what it meant to you. There is no objective reason about why that particular thing is
1:47:28 Chris Williamson? any different to hitting snooze in the morning. Now, it may have caused you to go down a different sort of life path. It may have been a particular inflection point that could have moved your life in a different direction. But all of us are failing forward on a minute by minute basis. The name of the person that you forgot, the lack of sleep that you could have done, the fact that you picked your phone up before you saw sunlight, even though you know that you shouldn't and you know.
1:47:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, fucking Huberman, shut up. Stop talking negatively about the things that I enjoy.
1:47:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah, this is my life. And, you know, all of these different things, the different opportunities that we have to fail or to succeed are largely a value judgment. But it does make you realize, like, if you want to make the most of life, you need to have a degree of resilience and you need to have a degree of consistency. Because without that, you're just going to continue to regress back to the mean, you're going to regress back to the path of least resistance, which is, you know, ringing the proverbial bell, each different challenge that you come up against.
1:48:30 Speaker 00 I mean, it's very common saying how you do anything is how you do everything. It, there's obviously such a huge difference between hitting the snooze button and, you know, ringing the bell in BUDs, but I, I agree with you and I think, you know, resilience is something that can be built over time and for the people who are successful, who go through SEAL training and make it out the other end of it. And again, it's not like the most difficult thing that you can do in your life. There are other, like fuck, go climb Everest, right? Like you, it could be your thing, whatever your thing is. The first thing you have to do is decide what is important to you and what is not. And what, if you can put, for me, when I was a very young man, like, this is what I want to do. And I started making decisions and some of them were about, I would
1:49:14 Speaker 00 get up before going to high school and go run on a treadmill, literally at 24 hour fitness, because the information I could get at the time on BUDs, because the fucking internet wasn't around, was that you run a lot. I'm like, okay, here I go. I'm gonna go run on a treadmill. But those decisions, you build momentum when you start making those decisions and they become easier. And for me, that was a very magnetizing pull. I, and, and I don't, it's atypical for people to know what they want to do as young as I did. However, that bit me in the ass when I got out of the military, because I realized I hadn't really thought much past about.
1:49:49 Chris Williamson? Cultivated anything else.
1:49:50 Speaker 00 It's like, oh, wow. I've focused all my energy on something that I no longer do anymore. So, but again, that was a different challenge. But the lens of my life, even in high school, was viewed through, is this gonna help or hurt me on what it is that I actually want to do?
1:50:07 Speaker 00 People, if they can, in my opinion at least, if they can find something that they have a goal of that nature, whatever it is, it really actually does, if you can even define a goal like that, to pick something that you care about enough, that it's gonna modify your behavior, it makes not hitting the snooze button that much easier. But it starts with, what the fuck do you want to do? Define, scare the living shit out of yourself and pick a goal that you think you're gonna fail at. If you can tell me, like, because I'll ask people, like, they'll say, well, you know, how do I find motivation? I don't know. What are you motivated to do? Oh, I don't really know. Like, how can I possibly help you find motivation if you can't even define for me the end state?
1:50:48 Speaker 00 Or somebody will, I want to lose 10 pounds. I'm like, come on, like, clearly you're 200 overweight. Like 10, 20 pounds? Like, no. How about you tell yourself you want to lose 200 and you scare the absolute shit out of yourself because you think you're going to fail? Now you've arrived at a goal that we can talk about. And view your lens or view the world through that lens of is what I'm doing helping or hurting that? And that's a tough one because the snooze button's awesome. I like to hit it sometimes. I sleep my ass off, but I didn't when I was younger because all I wanted to do was be a seal. And you, and you have to realize at some point in time that it's not the world that's going to make those choices for you. And it's not the world that's going to decide whether or not
1:51:29 Speaker 00 you're successful or not. It's your own actions and how you talk to yourself and how you frame your goals and the actions you take upon that that are going to make the difference. And it, it's not easy, but it's not exceptional either.
1:51:43 Chris Williamson? Andy Stumpf, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if you want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing? Find out all of your content.
1:51:48 Speaker 00 I wouldn't follow me if I were you guys.
1:51:53 Speaker 00 I don't know. I'm into some weird shit. You can find me on social media channels. It's just my name, Andy Stumpf 212. And then my podcast is called Cleared Hot and you can find that on all the platforms.
1:52:04 Chris Williamson? Fuck yeah. Andy, I appreciate you. Thank you.
1:52:05 Speaker 00 Yep. Thank you.
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