Tim Kennedy - Lessons Learned Through Pain

Tim Kennedy is a Green Beret, Special Forces Sniper, Army Ranger and Professional MMA Fighter. Tim has spent most of his life fighting. Whether that's been against kids in kindergarten, Special Forces selection officers, UFC champions, enemy combatants, ISIS, or his own compulsion to make a mess of his life. He's seen his fair share of pain and discovered a lot of insights through it. Expect to learn whether Tim has ever used BJJ in a combat situation, what motivates him to put himself through the discomfort he's endured, why he refused pain killers throughout his entire MMA career, why he swam a mile out to sea after getting two women pregnant and thinking he had AIDS and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get £250 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Scars & Stripes - https://amzn.to/3z1bons Follow Tim on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/timkennedymma/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mma #timkennedy #combat - 00:00 Intro 00:41 How Tim’s Childhood Shaped Him 05:26 Is Extreme Ownership Negative? 11:58 Tim’s Military Deployments 24:19 Comparing the Octagon with the Military 29:32 Tim’s Motivations & Sacrifices 37:47 The Loneliness of Natural Selection 40:23 Where to Find Tim - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Tim Kennedy?

  When I was fighting in the UFC, I would never let the doctor ever use any painkiller anytime he had to stitch me closed because I wanted to feel that pain. Because I made a mistake in there in the octagon and I didn't want to dole the pain because there should be a consequence for that pain and I wanted to remember that pain in the future.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  Tim Kennedy.

• 0:20Tim Kennedy?

  America! You're fucking here.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  I made it, man.

• 0:23Tim Kennedy?

  Do your thing.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  I made it. I'm here, I did make it.

• 0:25Tim Kennedy?

  I'm pumped.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. What's happening?

• 0:28Tim Kennedy?

  Just busy bee as ever. Getting ready for this book and expanding freedom, preserving and protecting human life.

• 0:38Tim Kennedy?

  Man, just like the purpose of man, I guess.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  I knew that you'd done a lot and then reading the book, it feels like you've lived maybe between four and five lifetimes to fit everything in.

• 0:47Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, my mom is absolutely positive that if reincarnation's a real thing, I'm a cat and that I have died nine times already and that I've broken the cat nine life rule because clearly I should have been dead more than nine times already and I've lived at least nine lives.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Talk to me about what's driven you through childhood to get to where you are now, the sort of person that's in front of me.

• 1:10Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, the, I'm dumb. That's a big contributing, a big contributing factor is I'm dumb. I'm really stubborn and I can't stop. And when you put those things together, you, you have this kind of relentless pursuit of, in my case, it was a purpose and an idea and like it didn't matter as a young man without a fully developed frontal lobe, you know, like making lots of bad decisions. I still kept moving, right? Even almost drowning when I was, I don't know, trying to kill myself or not, but swimming out into the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles, just try to like get another chance at life. I just kept swimming, you know, getting blown up in Afghanistan, just kept moving.

• 1:55Tim Kennedy?

  You know, pissing off my teammates in Iraq, being a young ignorant narcissist, I just kept moving. So, yeah, just kind of this adventure that is life, that's full of failure and lots of struggles in my life, I just kept moving.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  Do you know where that comes from? Is that something that's just in you? Is that, do you feel like that's heritage?

• 2:19Tim Kennedy?

  I think a little nature and a little nurture, you know, uh, my family, I'm surrounded by greatness. You know, my, my grandpa came from the greatest generation, you know, World War II hero, you know, literally dropped bombs on Nazis type guy and um,

• 2:38Tim Kennedy?

  survived the Great Depression, you know, the patriarch of our family and setting everything up. And then my dad, a heroic but undercover narcotics officer, my big brother, all my uncles, Vietnam War, like I'm surrounded by greatness.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Some strong genetics in there then.

• 2:52Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, just like some strong stuff. And then in the environment that I grew up in, ordinary was just not accepted. Like, plain average was just not ever an allowed state of being, you know? It was, uh, high achievers and everywhere I looked and um, doing anything else besides the best that you could do was just not enough.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  Did you always know that you wanted to be in the army?

• 3:22Tim Kennedy?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was, uh, at North County Christian School. Um, the same school that this jerk made fun of Laura LeCary, because she had a new haircut that looked kind of boyish. And um, shame on her mom for putting that bowl on her head and then cutting her hair, but that's what happened. And um, and he made fun of her and I followed him up onto the playscape and I punched him in his mouth and I pushed him off, which broke his arm and I got paddled in the...

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  How old were you?

• 3:52Tim Kennedy?

  I was four.

• 3:55Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And um, but in the same time period, we journaled, like, and I still have this journal today. It's like this little tiny, you know, like, has wallpaper glued on the outside of it. I'm not sure if all kindergarteners or kindergarten made their kindergartners do this, but inside of it, it's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And like, who is your family? What does your house look like? And you draw all these things. And what do I want to be when I grow up is a picture of a camouflage guy jumping out of an airplane. And a dude wearing a martial art gi doing karate.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me.

• 4:29Tim Kennedy?

  I'm dead serious.

• 4:31Tim Kennedy?

  So there's a couple of things that are happening here. One, I very, very early on knew right and wrong and that I was gonna stand up to bullies. And two, I kinda knew what I wanted to become. And the journey to become that was long, arduous.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  Meandering.

• 4:46Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  Meandering, I got distracted.

• 4:49Tim Kennedy?

  Lots of living.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Tim Kennedy?

  Before I finally, but man, I got penalized every time I went astray. You know, like I knew.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 4:56Tim Kennedy?

  Like, thinking I had AIDS. That's, that's a good example of it. Knocking up a bunch of women, another great example of it.

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  That was prior to the swim out to the ocean, right?

• 5:06Tim Kennedy?

  That's right, that's right, you know? Uh, wrecking my motorcycle. I'm not saying that my, my grandpa died of emphysema by my choices, but it felt like it. You know, like every time that I wasn't doing what I was put on this planet to do, I was, the, the consequences of those bad decisions, like had serious repercussions.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about this a lot recently. So radical responsibility, you know, Jaco's put this forward, taking complete responsibility for the things that you do. I do sometimes wonder if there's such a thing as too much responsibility, where you take responsibility for things that you don't have responsibility for. And it sounds like maybe that creeps in.

• 5:43Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, there, there might be a little creep. Um, but you absolutely in the extreme ownership Jaco approach to this, if you look at all of the things that were going wrong in my life, almost all of them were my doing. Like there were my choices and the repercussions from those, you know? Like I go to an orgy with a bunch of girls after a fight and one of the girls has HIV and she walks into the gym, it's like, hey, I have HIV is like, cool. This is on me. There's no other blame there, right?

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes, it wasn't somebody else's penis.

• 6:10Tim Kennedy?

  No, a hundred percent.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  My penis.

• 6:11Tim Kennedy?

  My penis. Um, you know, like putting babies and a few different women at the same time, like there's nobody else, nobody else's penis and they're like, that's mine. And, uh, you know, like a failure at work, um, like indecisiveness in school, like all of those things were, those are my decisions. And then compounded by. You know, as we deal with stress, external stressors, you have coping mechanisms and, and those things are the, how you deal with all of these different struggles. Well, the really important ones to me at the time, one of them, my grandpa was dying in front of me. You know, every breath was just slightly less than the prior breath. So, you know, my motorcycle, that was mine. It was me that crashed that.

• 6:54Tim Kennedy?

  You know, like I'm going down 90 miles an hour on highway 46. You know, like that's a, that's a me choice when that meth, sure, that meth head pulled out. You know, like had I been going 55, I could have been able to stop. Instead, I, you know, did not. So I definitely hear you, but I'm going to go ahead and accept ownership for the vast majority of the problems in that specific time period.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So then when you do decide to get into the armed forces, you do decide to join special forces. Is that the beginning of a path where you begin to take a little bit more responsibility?

• 7:27Tim Kennedy?

  I love how you're like putting in a lot of, um,

• 7:31Tim Kennedy?

  the adjectives and pronouns in there because I was not yet like beginning to absolutely. I was beginning, I was starting. This was like definitely not a turn. In the hero movie, this is not like that moment where there's like hero music.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  Not the call to adventure yet.

• 7:48Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. And it's like, oh, I mean, he's going to do the right thing now. That's not happening.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  No, he's going to continue to fuck up for ages.

• 7:53Tim Kennedy?

  Ages.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Episode five, like season 10, he might start to get things a little bit less shit.

• 7:59Tim Kennedy?

  A little bit. Yeah. That's how this, that's how that journey was. So lots of really shameful, regretful moments with lots of humbling experiences.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So I've heard you talk about this a good bit. I've heard you talk about the fact that sort of shame and reflecting on deficiencies, situations where you didn't know enough, do enough, have the capacity, that that's one of the driving forces for you.

• 8:22Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  But for a lot of people, when they have that shame, it causes inertia, right? It doesn't cause movement.

• 8:30Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that's dumb.

• 8:31Chris Williamson?

  But you understand why that might happen?

• 8:32Tim Kennedy?

  No, it's dumb.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about that.

• 8:34Tim Kennedy?

  So if I like step on a grill and the grill is, I don't know, let's just say, how was the temperature of a grill? 400 degrees, 500 degrees?

• 8:42Chris Williamson?

  Too hot.

• 8:43Tim Kennedy?

  Okay, it's hot, right? And I'm standing on that grill and I'm burning. Why would I stay there? Like, there is a beautiful purpose to pain. And a pain is a thing that moves us. Emotional pain, like you get cheated on by your girlfriend and you're like, ow, that really, really hurt. I'm gonna go ahead and break up with this relationship and I'm gonna look for different characteristics in the next partner. Cool, got it? I am going to pick up this paper the wrong way and it gave me a paper cut. Ow, that really hurt, right? Like, I'm gonna pick up paper differently to know not to get a paper cut the next time. I'm not gonna slide my finger on the long edge of the paper. Like, so pain has this really, really important purpose and I don't know why people dull it. People like intentionally avoid it. People deny that it ever happened.

• 9:28Tim Kennedy?

  They ignore these mistakes and they ignore these failures, they ignore these struggles and they disc- and then like 30 years later, they're paying a few hundred thousand dollars to talk to a counselor to like work through these experiences. Or, or just hear me out. Acknowledge that they're real and that everybody has them and move.

• 9:49Tim Kennedy?

  And things get better. You don't burn alive on that grill. You don't cut your hand on paper. You don't get cheated on in the next relationship and you slowly start having this improved life over just acknowledging that pain serves a purpose. And instead of dulling it with whatever pills you're popping or whatever you're drinking, whatever yoga class you're doing, and they're all, all different ways to dull it, just be real and be present. And it's, it's a shame in 2022 where we curate and editorialize everything about our lives and we hide our failures and we use a, a new filter to disguise our blemishes on our face or the scars and, and, and lines around my eyes, you know, like, there's a lot of living here. I want to know it.

• 10:35Tim Kennedy?

  When I was fighting in the UFC and in Strikeforce, I would never let the doctor ever use any painkiller anytime he had to stitch me closed.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you get stitched closed by some dude with a cigarette in your face?

• 10:50Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

  A twine or some shit?

• 10:52Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that was, that was pre UFC. Yeah, I think it was fishing line. I'm pretty sure it was fishing line. He had a bone necklace hanging from his, his neck. That was at an Indian reservation long before I-

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  Cardboard on the floor and bits of rope around the bar and stuff.

• 11:05Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. But like this at Strike Force, IFL, WC, UFC, you know, like they had proper doctors and stitching us up. And matter of fact, the, I think his hashtag's like UFC doc. And he, he sews up everybody and he tweets often about how uncomfortable he was stitching me up. Cause I would sit there with my eyes open as he's, as he's closing my cheek. And he's like, no, I'm gonna give you a local. I'm like, you give me a local, I'm just gonna walk out and I'm gonna be the way that I am. Or you can stitch me up. And, and he's like, I never knew what to do with this dude. But then I'd just sit there and Tim wouldn't move and I'd sew his face closed. Cause I wanted to feel that pain.

• 11:46Tim Kennedy?

  Cause I made a mistake in there in the octagon and I didn't want to dull the pain. Cause there should be a consequence for that pain. And I wanted to remember that pain in the future.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the difference between your first and your second deployment when you went away. Because the first one, you were a part of a team. And the second one, you were very much-

• 12:06Tim Kennedy?

  Alone.

• 12:06Chris Williamson?

  On your own.

• 12:07Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  Give me a sense there because there's kind of this romantic lone wolf, like no fucks, no support needed kind of thing, right? That can be put over the top of a character like you.

• 12:19Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  What's it like that first time? What's the genesis of that? And the reason I ask this is there are a bunch of people listening who think fucking yes. Like I want this. I want to be a sovereign individual with agency who goes after it and gets after stuff in his life. But the first time that you go, that first beginning of the rock, moving up the hill can be pretty uncomfortable. And I want you to hear your sort of sensation around that.

• 12:42Tim Kennedy?

  And it's supposed to be uncomfortable. You know, the, the special forces ODA, the operational detachment alpha, which is like the 12 man A team, right? Like the TV show, the A team, like it's, it's, it's the collective of- All of the best and the brightest put into a team. The motherfuckers of the motherfuckers. That's right, dude, and they are hammers. Like, I walk down halls of heroes. And these guys are giants to my left and to my right, both emotionally, physically, mentally. Like, they're just the most incredible humans on the planet. And, um, and I'm the weakest link. You know, I am the newest, I am the weakest, I'm the slowest. Um, I'm the fastest to judgment, I'm, I'm the quickest to anger, I'm all of the things that I shouldn't be.

• 13:24Tim Kennedy?

  And the refiners process, you know, like on, on my war table up there, if we started playing with all of the instruments of violence, all of them were forged in a really similar way, in a really violent way. You know, they, they took a clump of something, they heated it and they pounded the impurities out of it. And that's what a team does. You know, like I showed up as a lump of uselessness and through time, through grace, through forgiveness, through suffer- suffering, through... I mean, I guess now they, uh, they call it hazing, but like, that's part of the process. That, um, that shape. Expedited learning. Yeah, and it is so important, so important.

• 14:07Tim Kennedy?

  So that first team, that first deployment, I'm surrounded by the best and the brightest. And I'm learning painfully what it means to be a team member. Thank God for that, because I would be dead in Afghanistan. Many times over. So many times, had they just not shaped who I was, how I'd respond, how I would think, how I would speak. Uh, not just capability and lethality, but also survivability, durability. And then you go off on your own. Yeah, yeah. Um, not by design, I was supposed to go over as a sniper team, but, um, my teammate, my sniper teammate had a...

• 14:50Tim Kennedy?

  So in the military, there's this like ever existing joke about the girl that cheats on the guy while he's deployed. And we actually have a name for her. And so that's what happened to him. He deployed and his What's her name? Jody. Jo- oh, I've heard that in movies. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's pretty, it's pretty there. So like every time Joby or yeah, what is it? Jody or Joby? Um, every time that that soldier goes away, she's looking for the next convenient guy. And that, you know, it was all pretty strategic for, for him and for her. So when he left, she drained his bank account and, um, you know, filed for divorce

• 15:33Tim Kennedy?

  and sold all of his stuff. So, you know, he's in war and in crisis mode. And thank God, special forces, for once, they never do this, like actually cared about the soldier. And they're like, there's no way he could have been combat effective, right? Like, World War II, it's like, sorry, bro, you're already in Europe, like, enjoy the beach, hopefully you can make it up it, or you're dead. Um, this was, this was really cool of the army to bring him back and let him recover his life a little bit. So it wasn't so catastrophic. Yeah, but for you. Yeah. What about you? Yeah. So for me, it left me with nobody. Dick in hand. Yeah, just looking with a big smile and be like, what can I get myself into? What

• 16:16Tim Kennedy?

  kind of trouble can I find? And I don't know if the stars had aligned, if, if fate is real, but I ended up being assigned to the Coalition, which is like this group of special operations. And I was put directly under one sergeant major who was like, kind of directly in charge of me. And he was the liaison for all of these special operations units. So every time, like, the British or the Can SOF or the Australian SOF, any time those guys would be stepping out the door, uh, you know, there was a USASOC Level One, special forces sniper, that was happily ready to be both a liaison, a reconnaissance,

• 16:59Tim Kennedy?

  or a sniper asset for those teams. So it was like, my wet dream, totally coming true. I got to go work with like, the coolest international forces on the planet. And it's like me, you know, like, it's just me. It was cool. Until it's not cool. When, uh, you know, it's cool when everything's going right and you're kicking ass. And, uh, and then it's super not cool when you don't really have a team. The bomb goes off, IED explodes, vehicle in front of you just vaporizes, killing almost everybody inside of it. And ending up on top of your hood. And this was like the beginning of a multi-day gunfight. You know, and I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm with some Americans, but I'm mostly with the Czech special forces and,

• 17:44Tim Kennedy?

  and like, I don't have my own team, you know, like, um, like, nobody put me in for a Purple Heart because there's nobody to write a reward for me. Like, I don't have a captain. You know, there's nobody to put me in for anything. Because like, there was no team. There's nobody, like, thank God I had friends and brotherhood. Because Mike Keller saved my life. Mike Irish saved my life. In this particular battle? Yeah. Mike Goble saved my life. I mean, one instance, I had like divine intervention. Is this where you run out of ammo? Oh yeah, that happens. But you run out of ammo within like 20 minutes of it? Oh yeah. Like you, when you think that like a special forces detachment could run out of ammo, like, how is this possible? Like, be surrounded by 400 Iranian freedom fighters, um, foreign fighters, and, uh,

• 18:29Tim Kennedy?

  they're not fighting for freedom. They're fighting for enslavement. I don't mean that word freedom. People call them freedom fighters, but they're really like, what's the opposite of freedom? I don't know. That's the type of fighters they are. Okay. So insert that word. Yes. The antithesis of freedom. Yes. Pricks. Anyways, so they're kicking our ass. I'm like crawling on the ground, eventually trying to find ammo, but Mike Keller, when the vehicle in front of me explodes and, uh, like, you know, pink mist everywhere. Humvee lands on top of my Humvee. My Humvee starts backing out to get away from this Humvee as like RPGs are scoo, like skipping off of my hood and rounds are like ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And the side of this Humvee is PKM rounds are just like ting, ting, ting, ting. Mike Keller gets up to the side of this hill.

• 19:14Tim Kennedy?

  Mike Irish, who is driving, he's like, "Oh my God, those guys are still alive." So he like hops out of the vehicle and was like, "Mike, where are you going?" So he runs back down to where we just got blown up. So I hop out of the vehicle very begrudgingly. I did not want to go with him and I was really mad that he was being heroic. And he runs down there and we get down there. I'm carrying my sniper rifle at this time. I have an SR25 sniper rifle with suppressor on the end of it. And we're trying to pull these bodies out from underneath this overturn Humvee. When the assault line of the Taliban run across the ambush zone, which we call the X, like the kill zone. And all this Taliban, they're like 10 feet from me, 10 feet. And I'm trying to move my sniper rifle as I'm holding this half cut off body

• 19:58Tim Kennedy?

  that's dripping bile and crap and blood all over me. And then, I'm sure I'm concussed at this moment, but the thing that really gives me the real concussion is Mike Keller in the 50 cal M2 machine gun turret position.

• 20:16Tim Kennedy?

  This is God. Like, I don't care what you believe. There's only one way that you can describe how Mike was able to use a machine gun with a 50 caliber machine gun and shoot rounds around Mike and I and vaporize this assault line. They just, like, there were people there. This isn't like movie like Rambo and there you like, you see guts flying through the air. It was like there were, there were, there were people right here and then there were no more people. Like, they just disappeared. Not like Pink Mist in like an HBO movie where like a sniper takes a shot. I mean, they were just like there and then they weren't. And that was Mike shooting 50 cal rounds, like zipping them up and around. Weaving them between his teammates. Yes, wild, wild.

• 20:57Tim Kennedy?

  So we drag these soon to be dead bodies up and we try to save them for a while. They ultimately die. We get a few ammo resupplies. We have AC-130 gunships, F-15s, F-18s, F-16s, Apache helicopters. Like, when you, um, actually, I think they made a movie called Broken Arrow. They did, right? Yeah. Like, broken arrow is a term where if you are a ground force commander and you say "broken arrow", this like goes all the way back to the, like, the Colonel Custer days, where you got surrounded and if you don't send every single resource that you have available right now, we're all gonna die. That's what that term means.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's the Hail Mary call of all hail Mary.

• 21:42Tim Kennedy?

  That is like, if there is a plane in the air, it comes to me. If there's a helicopter that has enough gas to come here and has one bullet left, it will fly with-

• 21:50Chris Williamson?

  There's a guy with a hammer, bring him.

• 21:51Tim Kennedy?

  Yes. Yeah. Cool, you got a screwdriver? I'll take you.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  You're on.

• 21:54Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. That is what this call means. So when they called, um, "broken arrow", it's like, "we're all gonna die. Every single one of us is not gonna make it out of this valley." And, uh, so then, like, it changed slowly from all of us maybe dying, probably dying, to everyone around us dying and us still thinking we're going to die. Which leads me to then Mike Goble. I'm walking up to a door where I think we're three days into this gunfight. I still haven't slept. I still have a concussion. I have like, I have hours of this gunfight that I don't remember.

• 22:34Tim Kennedy?

  I have moments where like, we crest a hill and I find the support camp for the Taliban and there's like, a bunch of Taliban in front of us. I'm now somehow in a Czech vehicle? Like, I'm with the Czech Special Forces? Like, I left the Americans-

• 22:47Chris Williamson?

  This kind of sounds a little bit to me like some of the after-parties that I've been back to. Like, this is the same discordant story of like, and then before I knew it, I'm in this villa and then I'm on a golf course. I have no idea how I got here and I-

• 22:59Tim Kennedy?

  No clue.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 23:01Tim Kennedy?

  The brain's wild.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 23:03Tim Kennedy?

  Especially when it's like, damaged.

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 23:06Tim Kennedy?

  You know? And, uh, I'm walking up to a door and we just got shot at from this compound. And Mike Goble, it felt like he hit me. He shoved me so hard. Both hands, like, like a rugby slam, double leg, Jon Jones takedown, like, insert the most athletic movement you can, most violent. He shoves me in front of this door and we kind of split apart as his energy pushes me back. The energy of him pushing me back pushes him back and then the door disintegrates as machine gun rounds just trace through here and splinter this door.

• 23:47Tim Kennedy?

  I never heard a bolt drop. I never heard a weapon go from safe to fire. There's no way that he heard it. Cause when you, when we finally get in this door, we find the machine gun nest. It's about 20 meters back inside this compound. So there's no explanation to how Mike knew that this door was about to get disintegrated.

• 24:07Chris Williamson?

  Did you ask him?

• 24:08Tim Kennedy?

  He's dead now.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Did you get to ask him before he was dead?

• 24:11Tim Kennedy?

  No, we fought. Uh, we got in a fistfight like two days later. Yeah.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  Best of friends.

• 24:16Tim Kennedy?

  Best of friends.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  All right. So these sorts of situations, does that make stepping into the octagon to punch somebody else in the face under a relatively now restrictive rule set with a guy in there whose job it is to make sure that if anything close to serious happens, that everything stops? Does that make that seem a bit like, I don't know, not silly or farcical, but kind of tame?

• 24:43Tim Kennedy?

  Yes and no. Like I would walk into the octagon overly, overly relaxed.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  And do you think that that was contributed to by your time in tennis?

• 24:51Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Like Leo Korolinski, when I was fighting for the IFL, I remember the first time that he ever saw me fight. He's like, what is wrong with you? Like you need to be excited.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  Many things.

• 25:02Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Like you need to be, you need to be excited or like nervous. Like what are you doing? I was like, Leo, it's fine, bro. Just like, go sit down. I'm gonna go fight in a minute. He's like, you are gonna go fight in a minute. Can you like recognize that you're about to go fight? I said, yeah, yeah. Go out and knock the guy out in the first round. Leo, can you be cool now? So it took like 10 fights for Leo to realize that like, meh. But everything's even in fighting. You know, so while I would walk in so, um,

• 25:31Tim Kennedy?

  relaxed, you know, not stressed, the weight class is very specific. You know, your opponent is picked so that you guys have a competitive fight. Cause nobody wants to watch, you know, like Mike Tyson fight a, you know, a prime Mike Tyson fight a 43 year old fat white dude that came off the couch. Like that's not interesting. They want to see like two apex predator peak athletes go head to head, you know, gorilla versus bear, you know, lion versus polar bear. Like that's what we're looking for. So.

• 26:04Tim Kennedy?

  Even the referee, like his purpose there is to make sure that we not just are safe, but that we also fight under the constrictions and the limitations that are the rule set. Which makes it very competitive, especially when you start getting up to title fights and, you know, like I spent the last 10 years of my career ranked top 10 in the world. It's like I'm only fighting top 10 guys, you know, like the Michael Bisbings and the Robbie Lawlers and the Jacques Ares. And that's, you know, that's hard. There's no, that's hard.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between training for fighting and training for violence? Training for combat violence?

• 26:47Tim Kennedy?

  No difference. Training is training.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  I mean, have you used BJJ in a combat situation?

• 26:55Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah. Yeah, in Iraq. Kind of humiliating story, so I'm not going to tell all of it. I'll just give you the high points. We do a callouts. We go to a bond maker's house and we tell everybody, "Come out. This is not in the book." And almost everybody comes out, but one guy stays in there and we ask the family, "Who is this and why is he in there?" And they're like, "He's crazy." The language barrier, it was difficult to determine if he was like jihad crazy or if he was like special needs crazy. We later find out that he was the latter.

• 27:34Tim Kennedy?

  And so when I go in there with my team and we do a direct action like hard knock assault, you know, like flashbangs, like this guy, as I turn the corner, I'm the number two guy. Number one guy goes right. I went left. It was a center fed room. And this guy was like, "Raaah!" And he like came. I butt stroke him, breaking every bone in his face. And then like he grabs onto me as he's falling. And in my mind, he's like grabbing all of my stuff on my kit, right? Like I got a knife here. I got my pistol here. I have some flashbangs. I got my grenades back here. So I kimura, I grab his arm, I grab his wrist, I reach over his arm, I kimura, and I break every bone in his shoulder, his arm. Like everything is like turned to dust and powder.

• 28:16Tim Kennedy?

  But the kimura is a jujitsu move and I just did it in violent war settings. And I get this very great technique. To do in competition, it works just fine. Kamora is also the best technique for weapon retention. Like, we use goose necks and finger flexes to wrist locks to get weapons and knives out of people's hands. We use the Americana when we're in mount position. We use knee on belly to give me a chance to like, look around and make sure. It's like, yeah, it's a lot of similarities. And the brain and the body are shaped in the same way. Like, training's training. And the reason that you see so many high-level athletes in special operations that are coming from really, really violent-type sports.

• 29:01Tim Kennedy?

  You see lots of wrestlers, you see lots of water polo players, you see lots of rugby, lots of football. They're coming from environments that training like this is really normal. So when they go to Special Forces selection, or they go to the Q course, they're like, "Yeah, this is cool."

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  "Yeah, I've been here before."

• 29:19Tim Kennedy?

  "Yeah, I've been here before." Everyone else is like, "What is going on?" Like, "My feet have never felt like this." "Then I did two days in Texas during football camp. This isn't anything."

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  You're spinning a lot of plates. You're headmaster of a school now, sheepdog response.

• 29:37Tim Kennedy?

  Headmistress, don't pronoun me wrong.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, used to identify, now identifies as headmistress.

• 29:42Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I'm the headmistress of the school.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  There's someone listening to this that thinks, "This sounds fucking dope. Like, I'm motivated, I want to be this person, I want to have control over my life. I'm gonna set my alarm for 6 a.m., I'm gonna find a BJJ to post to me, I'm gonna do all of this." 5:30, sorry. 4:30 if you're Jaco.

• 29:57Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that's too early.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's got it wrong.

• 30:00Tim Kennedy?

  That's just too much.

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  There's someone that's thinking that's what they want to do. But when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, they're gonna hit snooze.

• 30:07Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  What is it that's causing you to not hit snooze?

• 30:11Tim Kennedy?

  You can't relegate it to a single decision like that. You know, I've made like, millions of decisions leading up to, like, I went to bed on time. You know, like, I had an amazing intimate night with my wife. You know, like, she fell over sweaty and smiling. I went and hopped in the shower, came back in bed, and like, I'm gonna sleep hard, right? Like, not like, figuratively, not literally.

• 30:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 30:33Tim Kennedy?

  You know, like, perfect. Long day of work, had two great workouts, super productive, got to spend time with my family, had a fantastic meal. All of those little decisions led to that alarm going off at 5:30 and me popping up and be like, "Nice." And it's plain, uh, let's see, this morning was, uh... Life on Mars. That was my alarm this morning. And it's rad, you know, it's a boom and I'm up. Loving this song, ready to go after the day, but I wasn't ready for that alarm by it going off. I was ready by like thousands of other things that I did before that. So like you can't narrow it to a single moment. You have to look at the millions of other opportunities that you had to

• 31:18Tim Kennedy?

  make the right decisions and that trend, all of those collectively will start making a difference. We'll start mattering.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  It's about speeding up and slowing down. I think that if momentum is taking you toward a suboptimal place, a bad place, maybe all of your effort simply needs to go into slowing that momentum down for a little while. And you, it would be great if you could go and hit every workout and do all of these things, but you've probably got some bad habits that you could do with deprogramming first before you try to add some of the new good ones in. And that's going to happen step by step, by step.

• 31:50Tim Kennedy?

  Well, this goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning about like, how do you know that those bad habits are, are putting you in a trajectory negative?

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Because you reflect and it hurts. You feel the, the pain.

• 32:03Tim Kennedy?

  Fist bump. Yeah, that's right. Cause you remember the pain.

• 32:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been.

• 32:10Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, man, that'd be terrible.

• 32:12Chris Williamson?

  You feel the delta between where that person is and where you are. So something that I've considered, you've got this very heroic story. The book's fantastic. Lots of different things that you've done and achieved. And, you know, during the 15 minutes that I was late here, you've built a new gun and, and fucking organized a bunch of other stuff for your school and other things like that. What I'm always interested in is the price that people pay to be themselves, especially high achievers. What's the price that you pay to be Tim Kennedy?

• 32:44Tim Kennedy?

  Bad knees, money are trashed. Um, the emotional baggage, you know, like I, I watched like a,

• 32:57Tim Kennedy?

  I was watching the movie The Searchers with John Wayne. Not seen it. Dude, you need to watch this movie. Good. Yeah, it's old. It's old and it's raw and it's primal. Story, John Wayne, frontier, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona type. And they're homesteaders, building their existence, carving in Comanche, Apache land. And they see a fire in a, in a, a smoke trail in a nearby, kinda near, about a day's ride. And so they, they head out to check it out. And it was a lure to bring John Wayne away from his brother's house. Where his nephew, his niece, and his sister-in-law were all there.

• 33:41Tim Kennedy?

  The Indians come in, they kill everybody, they kill his brother, they kill his wife, they, they kill his nephew. And they steal this little girl. And John Wayne comes back to find their raped bodies and burnt male bodies. And like, this is early, this is 60s, and his missing niece. So, the movie The Searchers, is he then goes, this whole entire movie, it's about 20 years of this movie goes on. Where he's searching for this, that's about 15 years, this little girl. And he is a racist, violent man. He fought for the Confederate Army, now like, every InGen, red blood, half-breed. You can, like, you could just see the chip on his shoulder.

• 34:24Tim Kennedy?

  And you don't know by the end of this movie, what he's gonna actually do when he finds this little girl. Like, is he gonna kill her? Like, she is now an Indian. She's been with them for 15 years. And as he's like, running down, or he's, he's on this horseback, chasing this little girl. As she's running away from him out of fear of this white man. And he's trying to rescue this little girl. I am bawling my eyes out in, like, relating to so many things. Like, having been to so many places and having so many cultural questions of like, what is right, what is wrong? Like, what is right for him? Should he have killed all these people after they killed his family? Like, is that right? Is that justice? Is that vigilante justice? Is this, like, where's the justice here? And like, what is supposed to happen to this girl?

• 35:08Tim Kennedy?

  And, and all these questions, so, the, the prices. Bad knees, so scars and stripes is the name of the book. Like, there's lots of scars on the outside, clearly, as you look at my face, you know, my ears, and like my orbital sockets, my hands, my knees. You know, and then there are scars on the inside, there's plenty of them, and stripes in the military are symbols of you having experienced things. Like, your number of deployments, your time overseas, how long you've been in the military, like what rank you are, all of those things are, are testaments to who you are. It's like, what is the cost to be me? Like, there is a lot of pain.

• 35:50Tim Kennedy?

  Talking about scars and stripes, what's your favorite scar and what's your favorite stripe? Favorite scar is probably this one right here, Robbie Lawler. And he threw an uppercut, he's a southpaw. My head was on the center as I was doing a double leg against the cage. We drilled in training my head position probably 100 times. And in the fight, I thought I was faster, I thought I was better, and he blasted me with this uppercut, just like we knew he would, in the exact same way that we had gameplanned him to do it. And so I carry that scar and I prepared properly, I trained correctly, I had all of the knowledge

• 36:34Tim Kennedy?

  and, and, and resources to be able to not have this scar. But then I went on to brutalize him for 15 minutes and ultimately I win a pretty big, big fight over, you know, UFC welterweight champion. But like, so I wear this chunky scar on my nose with, with pride. And then, um, I think a lot of people would talk about their rank, or they'd talk about their combat stripes. In special operations where, like when you go through that book, when we went through the legal review,

• 37:07Tim Kennedy?

  Most of the names in this book are dead now. And, uh, most of my friends, like literally most of my friends, my sniper partner, sniper school, dead, sniper partner in deployment, dead, Mike Goble, dead. You're like, you, when you go through the legal review, the woman that did it, the lawyer was like, she started crying about 10, 10 names in, I was like, just wait till Memorial Day, like imagine how I feel, you know? So the stripes of me still just being here of, uh, which are your, your years in service? I'm proud of those cause like, like the song Rooster, you know, you can't kill me yet.

• 37:47Chris Williamson?

  What's it feel like to reflect on the fact that so many people that you admired so much that helped you become the person that you are now, aren't here to see the person that you are now?

• 37:57Tim Kennedy?

  And ironically, the ones that are here are the ones that just want to see me fail. So it's kind of wild, but, um.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  That's strange.

• 38:05Tim Kennedy?

  Isn't it?

• 38:07Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if that's selection somehow. I wonder if the ones, what is it?

• 38:11Tim Kennedy?

  I think about this all the time.

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  Die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

• 38:14Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I think about it all the time. It's like, why is this one, like that one, that one, why is that one still alive? And that one's dead. You know, like, yeah, it's wild. You go down that why, if that what if, why question, man, that is a dark hole. Yeah. Be the bottom of the bottle on that one.

• 38:35Chris Williamson?

  But that's one of the motivations for you, right? You say you don't want to feel helpless. You don't want to feel like you don't know. There's that story about, I think you were an EMT when you were 18 or something and you, you were trying to fix some girl and then the guy came over that knew what he was supposed to do and said, you need to find somebody else.

• 38:50Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, I got this.

• 38:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I got this.

• 38:52Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, Tom Way, Tom Way, I love you.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Is he still about?

• 38:56Tim Kennedy?

  He's still about.

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  Good man. We got, we got one.

• 38:58Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, there's one.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 39:01Tim Kennedy?

  And, uh, Yeah, that frustration of not knowing what to do and that helplessness is something that like, like that is a pain that like you'll carry forever. And that is a shame. That is a humiliation of like, standing there like, I don't know what to do. Like, had I trained, had I prepared, had I made more of those right decisions, I wouldn't be standing here. I would already be taking action and saving somebody's life. But instead, out of whatever selfish decisions I made prior, I don't know what to do. And now this person might die. So yeah, it's a big motivator.

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  What can you tell us about what you're doing next?

• 39:38Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, that's tricky. When does this podcast come out?

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  When do you want it to come out?

• 39:45Tim Kennedy?

  If we do it in like, two weeks, then I can say that I'm going to Eastern Europe.

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 39:49Tim Kennedy?

  Tomorrow, and that I will be going to work with Save Our Allies in a humanitarian assistance type role to help.

• 40:00Chris Williamson?

  Is this part of your NGO?

• 40:01Tim Kennedy?

  Yep. Yep. Yeah. Save Our Allies is a nonprofit, non-government organization that goes to contested areas to.

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  Are you lily padding these people out?

• 40:10Tim Kennedy?

  Yep.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 40:12Tim Kennedy?

  Some of them. Yeah. I don't know if like Finland, Romania, Poland, and Hungary count as lily pads because they're kind of just neighbors.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Tim Kennedy?

  Yeah, but it works.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  Cool, man. Tim Kennedy, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I love what you do. I'm very, very happy that I'm in the same city as you. I'm looking forward to connecting, hopefully after this as well.

• 40:29Tim Kennedy?

  For sure.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  Good luck, man. Stay safe. I think we need more people like you.

• 40:32Tim Kennedy?

  Thanks for the chat.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there. That's what.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 ninety minutes without parent.