#262: Tim Kennedy on Individual Freedom and Responsibility During The Crisis

Tim Kennedy is the Founder of Sheepdog Response, a company focused on training in self-defense, martial arts, and weaponry. Kennedy is also a Ranger qualified Special Forces Sniper with almost 20 deployments under his belt. Prior to his retirement from professional mixed martial arts, Tim was ranked among the top Middleweights in the UFC, while also fighting in almost every competitive MMA league that exists. Tim has been featured on many television shows, most recently “Hunting Hitler” on the History Channel, and Hard to Kill on the Discovery Channel. In this conversation, Tim and Anthony discuss the historical examples of crises being used to reduce freedom, the importance of civil liberties and personal freedom, where Tim has seen the aftermath of freedom being taken from citizens, how stupidity is not illegal, and we cover a number of recent examples of potential violations of the constitution that are concerning. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. Visit try.blockfi.com/get-50/?ref=pomp50 to get started with BlockFi today and earn up to $50 in BTC when you create an interest account and make a deposit of $250 or more. ===============================

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Tim Kennedy is the founder of Sheepdog Response, a company focused on training in self-defense, martial arts, and weaponry. Tim is also a Ranger-qualified, Special Forces sniper, with almost 20 deployments under his belt. Prior to his retirement from professional mixed martial arts, Tim was ranked among the top middleweights in the UFC, and also fought in almost every competitive MMA league that exists. Tim has been featured on many television shows, most recently Hunting Hitler on the History Channel, and Hard to Kill on the Discovery Channel. In this conversation, we discuss the historical examples of crises being used to reduce freedom, the importance of civil liberties and personal freedom, where Tim

• 0:52Anthony Pompliano?

  has seen the aftermath of freedom being taken from citizens, how stupidity is not illegal, and we cover a number of recent examples of potential violations of the Constitution that are concerning. I really enjoyed this episode, and Tim didn't disappoint. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly cover today's sponsor, BlockFi. Right now, they're running a special. You can go deposit $250 in one of their interest-bearing accounts, and if you hold it there for three months while you earn interest at up to 8.6% APY, they'll give you $50 in free Bitcoin. If you deposit $250 or more into their interest-bearing account, hold it for three months, they'll give you $50 in free Bitcoin. It's a no-brainer. Use the link in the description if you want to sign up. There's about five days left before

• 1:36Anthony Pompliano?

  this special ends, so go check out BlockFi, and deposit $250, hold it for three months, and you'll get 50 bucks in free Bitcoin. Alright, now let's get into this episode with Tim.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got Tim. We've got lots to cover today, so thanks so much for doing this.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 2:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You are in Austin, Texas. What's a COVID-19 quarantine like down in Texas?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Um, so I run a defensive tactics and security consulting company. Out of, out of the property that I live on, I live on land. So it's kind of like a ranch and a farm. You know, so I have maybe 900 pounds of hunted meat. I have wells and solar. You know, like my, my day to day has not changed much. I have to interact with people less, not because of me, but because of them. So, uh, yeah, like I still shoot three times a week. I still train six times a day or six times a week. You know, I'm still up early and bed late, so.

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw you posted on Instagram. You got your chickens, the new coop and everything. It, it seems like just business as usual.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, those ladies are lucky, man. They got, they, they like tripled their, their, their square footage, so.

• 3:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Brats.

• 3:19Anthony Pompliano?

  But before we get into the conversation kind of around, uh, personal freedoms of liberties, maybe just give us a quick rundown of your background. You, you've done a whole bunch of different things and then we can get into kind of what Sheepdog is as well.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Okay, um, so I guess. I have been in like the protecting, serving. And saving business my entire life. My, my first job was a firefighter EMT. I did that from 18 until 23. Uh, I was in grad school when nine 11 happened. I had just finished the police academy. And I went. From my job to the recruiter's office at about 10 a.m. to stand in line with about. A thousand other people to try and enlist. Um, so that was my nine 11. On nine 11, they gave me a deferred, uh, delayed enlistment.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  So I could finish grad school and, um, and then I went in as an 18 x-ray, which is a special forces recruit. Which means I get to go straight to special forces selection. And if I get selected. After basic infantry school and airborne school and a couple of preparation schools. If I get selected, I get to go to special forces training. If I finish special forces training, I get to go to an O D A. So that was, uh, 16 years ago. That I was selected and for the past fifteen and a half years, I have been a Green Beret and filled the job of a sniper, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, a lot of FID, which is foreign

• 4:53Speaker 02

  internal defense and J-sets joint combined exercises for training. Well, I'm throwing those acronyms out there because those will come become relevant as we start talking about developing countries that are kind of following our playbook about when to grab liberties. So I've been in in places like Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica and Dominican Republic after horrific earthquakes and tsunamis and I have seen what governments can do in these times of crisis. And obviously being alive and being an adult during the time of the Patriot Act when nine eleven kicked off. So aside from my military career, I have I'm an entrepreneur. So I own

• 5:36Speaker 02

  six different businesses. Three of them are in kind of one is a government contractor. So we go and do jobs for the government, security jobs. And then we have a security consulting company. So somebody comes to us and says, hey, I have a problem, whether that's private investigating, bodyguard work, or physical protection of them. Like that's something we also do. And then we also have a training company where we like last year, we trained 2000 Americans in how to deal with a situation like we're experiencing right now. It's like that is my full time job. That's what I do. The other companies are Ranger Up, which is a military apparel line, Woobie Shoes, which is, I think, the best kind of

• 6:21Speaker 02

  tactical shoes out there. And then Relentless, which is a full body.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Meal supplements, replacement system for idiots like me that travel and work a lot.

• 6:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so you know, as kind of somebody from afar, I think one way to summarize a lot of what you've done is just around like individual responsibility. And you had the military experience, you've done that for a while. You've got these private companies, obviously you're operating in kind of various ways. But you also took a period of time and fought in the UFC, etc. Maybe just describe a little bit about that period of time and then we can kind of wrap it all into what you're doing now.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yes, it's hilarious that I like skip over what I guess a lot of people know me for. I fought professionally for 17 years. I fought for the world title and Strike Force twice. So I fought for the UFC, I fought for Strike Force, I fought for IFL, I fought for the WC. So the largest fighting organizations on the planet, I was a contender in all of those different fight leagues. And then I did a bunch of television on History Channel and Discovery Channel. I had my own show called Hard to Kill, which was kind of survival-ish. Dirty jobs meets like jobs that will kill you, kind of. And then a TV show where I went around the world trying to hunt Nazis and guys that maybe escaped the Nuremberg Trials.

• 7:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you have lived a life I think a lot of people wish they could. But I think your resounding message is you've got to kind of put the work into be prepared. And you're still operating today as a Green Beret?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm actually just got back. My one of my last, one of the last flights in from where I was. I think there were two flights after the flight that I was on to come back kind of pre-COVID. So I mean, I barely snuck in before shutdown of international flights from these places.

• 8:25Anthony Pompliano?

  As an aside, I read an article this morning, there's a couple that went to the Maldives on their honeymoon. And they didn't get on the last flight. And so they now are the only people at the resort, but they're having to continue to pay every night. And they're afraid it's going to bankrupt them. And so they're like stuck in paradise was kind of the thought process, which sounds cool until you realize like, hey, that's pretty expensive. And there's no end in sight of when you can come back.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's kind of back to individual responsibility of like, yeah, this is really nice. I'm just gonna, you know, take care of myself and stay in this like resort place until it doesn't work out and you forget that you have bigger responsibilities.

• 9:05Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So I want to kind of get into this conversation around you are one of the strongest proponents, the most vocal proponents of kind of the American ideals, American freedoms, etc. You've literally dedicated your life in various ways to either one, protecting that right as kind of a direct action in military etc. But also two through sheepdog and the training you guys do, training both law enforcement and also just average Americans on how to protect themselves, their families and those ideals. But you mentioned this idea that during times of crisis, there are incredible overreach by governments, not just the United States government, just governments around the world. Let's kind of go back in history and then maybe bring it to the present day, whether you want to

• 9:48Anthony Pompliano?

  talk about the Patriot Act or some of the things that you've seen in other countries where that overreach has kind of presented itself and how you've experienced that or seen it.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the greatest examples, truthfully, is Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler used an economic opportunity where Germany at the time was destitute, they were hurting, and they really had no esprit de corps about who they were and an identity. And well, I think ninety, ninety-five percent of Germans in 1943 would be against the gassing of Jews. They were carried in this momentum and this power and this thrust of nationalism versus patriotism. Those are kind of different things. And, and also the cry of the general population

• 10:39Speaker 02

  of needing to do something and fear. So after World War I, you know, the, one of the most horrific wars in human history, where really, where we had really-

• 10:54Speaker 02

  mastered the art of killing other humans. Um, with gas and, and machines and, and bombs. This was the first war where we could kill in a, in a mass scale. And, um, the horrors coming back from that, there was fear and, um, and some, even some of the same fears that we have right now is, uh, am I going to have money to pay for my food? Am I going to have money to pay for my home? Am I going to have money to pay for clothes for my kid to go to school? Those same fears existed then. And

• 11:25Speaker 02

  the Germans, the German people were running for solutions and they didn't know what those were. And up came lots of different possibilities. And one of those was, um, the National Socialist Party, which was led, um, by Adolf Hitler. And we saw where that went. Um, we could go time and time and time again throughout history, where we see people that are struggling, people that are, um, sometimes starving, sometimes just in fear, and they are looking for a solution to be given to them. Long story short is nothing can ever be given to you. That's it. Like everything that you want and everything that you think that you want is really on the far side of hard work. If they're going to give it to you, that means they have to take it from somebody else. There, it doesn't, like money just doesn't come from, from nowhere.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  And they're like, ah, we now have free education or we now have like free healthcare. Like if it's free, that means they took it from somebody. And freedoms are one of the, the most difficult things to, to perceive as a commodity. Like food and education and healthcare, those are like, those aren't these existential concepts. Those are tangible things that we can, we can pick up, right? Um, that we can go and like get a prescription or that we can put in our mouth. Um, but like the freedom of speech or the freedom to paddleboard or the freedom to, um, assemble. Um, th- those are things that we think we understand until the government says, no, you can't do them.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  And then you go, oh, wait. How does this really apply to me? Um, I've, you know, working in South America, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, also three great examples, just in the past 10 years where we have seen, um, through economic crisis, people give up their civil liberties because they think they're trying to find a better solution, but that better solution ends up being this more of this like horrific nightmare where you're living in purgatory where like, oh, I don't know if I have enough money for food. Now it's like, not only do I not have enough money, I'm not allowed to go buy it. I have to go wait in line in front of a store with 2,000 people in front of me for a chance to get some because the government is going to provide it.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. That was kind of a tirade, but those are historical examples.

• 13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but what I think that you're really highlighting here is there's what I'll call like overt, um, you know, kind of, uh, stealing of freedom where literally I'm going to say you can't go do something, right? And you know, and I both know like there's a, a land, a line in the sand, right? And so, Tim, you can no longer leave the state of Texas would be like an example of something. But there's also things that are done kind of in the shadows, right? And this is where you get, you know, in a country like Venezuela, uh, kind of the hyperinflation. What it's really doing is it's just stealing the wealth of, you know, the average citizen and it's enriching people who own the real assets, uh, the government or the dictator, et cetera. And so I think what you're really talking about is less about the structural, like economic things that are done because those aren't really, uh, immediately seen by the population. They just know, hey, bread's a little bit, you

• 14:28Anthony Pompliano?

  know, more expensive than it was yesterday. And after, you know, a couple of months of that, they realize, wait a second, it's doubled in price. But the things that are really, really, I think aggressive, uh, and especially happen in times of crisis are these like overt, uh, encroachments on freedom. And so we're seeing a couple of examples now, and I'll just kind of go through, uh, a few examples that we're seeing and maybe you can riff on them. Uh, so the one that, uh, got me to, to reach out to you about doing this was, uh, there's this paddle boarder in LA, uh, he's in the water and absolute epic video where you've got, I think, two or three lifeguard boats, like flying around the ocean by the pier, trying to get this guy. And he, and he's just giving them the moves, man. I mean, he's just paddling right around the boats and they eventually caught him and arrested him. But just kind

• 15:10Anthony Pompliano?

  of your take on it was like, hey, enjoy your 60 day free trial of communism. So like, what's kind of the thoughts there?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Well, there was some great response where like people like yourself recognize that. So communism, unless you've been to places that are socialist or communist in nature, I'm not talking like, you know, people talk about Sweden or Finland or Denmark is that's all I'm talking about. I'm talking about like Taliban. It can be a form of socialism. Think about that. Al Qaeda and ISIS can be can be forms of socialism more so than any of these like north eastern, northwestern European countries. So that is where your kind of entire existence is is being dictated by you for the greater good of everyone else with you.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  So the government tells you what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to do it, and when you're supposed to do it. And the reason for them telling you this is so that it's it's fair and even for everybody. There's there's some two inherent problems with that. One, it removes all individual motivation for success. So I have no incentive to go and be successful at something because if I'm incentivized and I get more than the next person, they have to take that away from me. So the next guy next to me gets the same amount regardless of how much work he did. So that removes my initiative and my incentive to go do something. This specific paddle border. You're you're joking about leaving Texas as a line in the sand. That is a line in the sand now.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  People from Louisiana cannot come into Texas. Like we, I mean, we're literally talking about east and west Berlin right now. Where the government just said, here is this arbitrary line. You people are not allowed to cross it. Not not for any other reason besides we said so. And it's for your best. It's we promised it is for the it's for the best of everybody, not for you. Not for you necessarily. I don't care if your grandma is going through chemo and it and you're the caretaker and you live in Beaumont and you're trying to get to Shreveport. That's not my problem. Really, this is just for everybody. So you just you're just gonna have to let your grandma die because we care about everybody, not you.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  So paddle border LA. It's cool that you're bringing up LA because that had another specific example of a direct infringement. The LA County Sheriff, he told all of his deputies to go to the gun stores and close them all down because he did not think they are essential forms of business. So essential businesses were ones that kind of sustain your living and your kind of health. He looked at gun stores as not one of those things and he told his deputies to go and close those things down. Fortunately, Superior Courts and federal governments kind of stepped in and said, hey, you can't do that.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  You have to allow these guys to continue to operate business and we do view these as essential businesses. Even more hilarious is he circumvented that and tried to go through a court of appeals within California to then limit what they were allowed to do and then he sent business inspectors to make sure that those specific businesses were following the CDC, WHO and state guidelines so then they could shut them down on, you know, like, process indiscretions about like the distance that one customer was standing from the next customer. Insane. So, back to LA.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Dude is on the Pacific Ocean on a paddleboard. The only people within maybe a thousand meters are the people trying to arrest him. So I'm not talking six feet. We're talking like a thousand meters, you know, like just over a half a mile, three quarters of a mile. And there are like, there's lifeguards trying to come in, there's LA County Sheriff's deputies on the beach with bullhorns, there's LA County boat cruising out on the on the far side of the breakers. And the crime this dude committed was, he was paddleboarding.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  So if we're gonna try and say, okay,

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Patriot Act, great example of the government being, okay, let's go grab as much as we possibly can. Why they like motivations were pure. I think that they were trying to do the right thing, where which is try to stop another attack. You can't help but but look at what was that Star Wars movie? Or Empire Palpatine, who's like Darth Sidious, the worst dude ever? When when the Senate gives him like the authority to go declare war and start the clone army? He's like, oh, with this great responsibility at the end of these trying times, I promise I will give all of this power back. And then he's electrocuting people with his fingers, right? Like metaphorically, that's hilarious.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  In reality and historically, that is exactly what happens every single time. Somebody gets power, it's never given back. And they they accept in times of these these extreme circumstances, it's always incremental. Right? Like the Second Amendment, nobody's ever gonna come kick in the door and say, give me all your guns. But what they will do is enact another law, enact another restriction, enact another

• 20:49Speaker 02

  high capacity ban. We're gonna change the name of something. We're gonna add that this is the Child Protection Gun Safety Act. We're going to say that, okay, you can own your guns, but you can only buy this much ammo, and then you have to do a background check. So like every single time, it's just a little bit more, a little bit more. And this is the constant struggle that we have to push against until something like this happens. Then the government goes, ah, this is a great opportunity to take whatever we can, because it's like, what it's like, it's all you can eat buffet. Give me the First Amendment, give me the Second Amendment, give me the Third Amendment. Matter of fact, I'll just go through every single one of them and grab as much as I can at this moment, because people are in fear and people do dumb things when they're scared.

• 21:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the things that is really interesting, so you talked about kind of that Louisiana-Texas border, right? One of the other examples is in Rhode Island. The governor tried to shut the border, right? And when she couldn't shut the border, lawyers basically said, hey, that's unconstitutional. She then went to, okay, well, I'm gonna do one better. We're gonna put police on the highway. If they see New York plates, we're gonna pull those people over for having New York plates. And then we're gonna take the military and the police, and we're gonna have them patrol transportation hubs. And oh, by the way, if you're a citizen in Rhode Island and you know somebody came here from New York, call us and we'll go visit them.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, just, just nuts.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we should take, I don't know what the emblem is for New York, but maybe like the Yankees or, or like the Jets or something. And we should take that and have that sewn onto everybody's shirts and like, but like in a yellow material, maybe even like a star. Yeah, maybe not even like the New York Yankees thing, maybe just like a star, like a star of David, just have them sewn on their shirts. So then we know who they are and we can just go grab them up.

• 22:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Nobody's ever thought of that before.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 22:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you then take it a step further, right? Cause I, I agree with you that like the paddleboard thing is like pretty ridiculous and you watch it. And if you're watching it from the, the sense of like, we're spending all these resources and literally there's boats chasing a paddleboarder and he's kind of giving them the shakes. Like, okay, we can laugh about it, but there is some serious aspect to it. But then when you go to Kentucky where a judge ordered a man to wear a, a GPS enabled ankle bracelet because he had been ordered to quarantine, he had been in contact with somebody who had been infected and he kept violating it. So the solution here was let's literally put an electronic tracker on your ankle and therefore we'll know if you leave quarantiner. It just feels like the lawyers are gonna have a field day with this stuff once it's all over.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, and I hope they do. Um, while I hate that we're in a litigious era of society, and I think that is another way that we're kind of eroding. Um, I'm all for anytime you enact a new law or set a new precedent, an old one has to go away. Um, you know, like any, anytime you keep adding on to this, you're like, you, you get this count compounded J curve and then this exponential growth of law happens and then ultimately everything comes crashing down because no, that's a different conversation. Um,

• 23:49Speaker 02

  yeah, a bunch of problems. The first is that when

• 23:55Speaker 02

  you, you start looking as these,

• 24:00Speaker 02

  these, these individual examples and use that as leverage to hold a greater group of people responsible. Um, that, those are anecdotal examples that they're like, that is not a representation of the greater community, right? The greater community is trying to do the right thing. But when you take individual examples and use that individual example to circumvent law.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And then try to take the larger population and erode their freedoms or their rights because of one idiot and the greater people are letting that happen.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  You can just get used to more of the same because once they do it a few times, they'll continue to do it every single avenue and an aspect that they can that they can grab.

• 24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and this is where I think you get kind of this intersection of the personal responsibility and the freedom, right? What I mean by that is like you and I are relatively young, relatively healthy compared to others and therefore we have the responsibility to ensure those in our lives are taken care of, but also you're taking risk. If you go outside today and you contract coronavirus, right? That's a choice you made. You got infected and you have to deal with ramifications. And so I think that there's this debate across society, right? At what point are you endangering other people versus just endangering yourself? And when you overlay the personal responsibility, most people actually are doing the right thing. But these, you know, I call them like there's stupidity and there's just douchebags.

• 25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And being stupid or being a douchebag isn't illegal. It's just you're stupid or you're a douchebag. And so how you try to balance that in society, is it through social pressure, right? Or is it actually where people eventually just turn and say, I am so fearful that I'm willing to give up my freedom because I want to keep those people in their apartments, in their homes, etc. It's just a really, really kind of bad conversation when people aren't optimizing for the freedoms because they're so overrun with the fear.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that you should, fear is the worst emotion ever to base

• 26:11Speaker 02

  decisions about freedoms off of, right? And when, so individual responsibility, is it my choice to go outside? Yes. And the idea of individual responsibility is, so I'm a libertarian, like, not like a crazy libertarian, maybe a little bit, but I believe that nobody should have a say in what I do unless what I do affects somebody else. Negative.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  So if I go out and I get Corona, that's my problem. Where Corona gets kind of gray, hazy is because of the number of asymptomatic people that there are. Where you can contract Corona and I don't know that I have Corona. And I can still go transmit to other people. So I'm negatively impacting other people. So under this idea of kind of individual responsibility, I can't just have the consequences for my actions just happen to me. Because supposedly, and I'm putting a little asterisk, supposedly, one fifth to 25% of people are asymptomatic.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  So I could, if I don't know, go out and spread it to other people.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  What is, I think, an element that people aren't considering is the beauty of capitalism. And how capitalism can really be the equalizer to this conversation. Where if you're calling them douchebags or a selfish person, if you are seeing a business or a person that you don't like what they're doing, you get to vote with your dollars. And that shapes the success and failure of that business. And I think a lot of people have looked at entrepreneurs, people like me, who have been saying, we are not thinking about the second and third order effects of this pandemic.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Because what I'm balancing is the cost of lives versus what is the number of people that are going to die from the virus. So that's going to be whatever hundreds of thousands of people that might die potentially. And who those people are versus the other group of people in the second and third order effects that could die from the, not from the virus, but from the second, third order effects. So you shut down, I'm just going to use Disneyland as an example. So you shut down Disneyland, Disneyland employees, let's just say.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  A hundred thousand people. Of those hundred thousand people, how many of those people had any savings in their bank accounts? Not very much. The average American has about $400 in his savings account, his or her savings account. So that's not enough to pay for one month's rent. So if this goes on for more than one month, they can't pay their rent. Um, so we fortunately are able to, I say fortunately, asterisk, we can freeze evictions and bankruptcies. So me as a landlord, I can't kick somebody out because they're not paying me, but I know that they still will be paying me. And that person knows that that tally is continuing to grow and that hole that they're in economically is going to continue to get deeper.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Now, socioeconomic conditions are one of the largest influences to suicide, to depression and to drug abuse. So the poorer somebody gets, the more often you see depression, you see suicide and you see drug, drug and alcohol abuse. Um, the percentage of suicide grows as does the, so the more drug abuse and alcohol abuse there is, the more socioeconomically disadvantaged somebody is, the more likely they are to have suicide. So now as this pendulum is swinging and the second and third order effects of people losing their homes after they've lost their job, the business is not going to come back. You know, like, um, the McDonald's that was on the corner, it was already barely making enough money as it was.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Now they're definitely not, not going to be making enough money. They're just not going to reopen. You know, McDonald's is going to relocate to a different place or maybe not even, right? Chipotle not going to open. They're going to pick and choose where these new, what stores are going to be opening. That is going to have a profound economic effect. And those people that have been, were just two before, now they're truly struggling. So it actually hurt my feelings a little bit when I looked at your comments, when, when you asked, what questions would we ask? And one of the guys said, why is Tim Kennedy so insensitive to the, kind of like the, the minorities or outliers of society?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Truth be told, the second and third order effects are going to be more damaging to those people than anybody else. So if you, if you really strategically and economically look at what I'm trying to do and how I'm trying to save lives in this conversation that we're having, we could seriously be losing way more people through suicide.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Drug overdoses and alcohol abuse and the kids that are going to be homeless. And like, we know what happens when somebody loses their home, like how hard it is to get back off of the street. Now you're going to have how many kids that are going to be homeless? Like, nobody's even started to calculate the economic effect of these second, third order problems. I mean, we're talking way more than 100 or 200,000 people, way more. You know, we're talking up into the millions if this trajectory of what we're doing to our economy continues. So this isn't an economy versus lives conversation. This is a lives versus lives conversation. And then what is, what are those lives going to look like regarding freedoms that are going to be eroded during the snatch?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  So there's, this is a complex nuanced problem and people are just making it oversimplifying and like, oh, it's lives versus economy. No, it's not. No, it is not. Don't, don't call me like this hypocrite that I'm, that I'm being an asshole just because I'm bringing up the economy. I'm bringing up the economy because I'm trying to save lives because I know what happens. Look at Venezuela and ask how many lives have been lost when the platform, the strategic solution to this economic disaster is socialism.

• 32:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, one of the things that I don't think people quite have wrapped their head around. So this may be two, three weeks ago, I wrote something where I went back and I looked at the Great Depression unemployment numbers. And in 1929, the start of the Great Depression, unemployment was 3.1%. We were just at 3.5 at the end of February. So very similar, kind of very low economic. It went from 3.1 to 8 to 15 over the next two years and then eventually went up over 20% like everyone knows and kind of cites those numbers. But three of the five years of the Great Depression, it was sub 20% unemployment. We already have seen in the last two weeks, 10 million new unemployment claims. And so we're already hovering in that kind of seven and a half to eight and a half percent, depending on how you count it, of what's actually been reported.

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  That's not actually the true number because there's many more people who aren't actually reporting it. And so if you just use that number, let's just say that 10 million people in the last two weeks have filed for unemployment. Those are service workers, hospitality, restaurants, all these things tend to be lower socioeconomic. There's actually more people who have lost their jobs than have been confirmed to have coronavirus in the United States. By at least, you know, 5X. And so it's just, you start to get into this thing of, I think to your point, like the lives versus lives. It's not just a one for one. We're actually talking about many more people are being affected economically than we understand yet on the virus side. And that doesn't necessarily mean the virus isn't real or isn't bad. It just means that there's two sides to this conversation.

• 34:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And a lot of people don't understand the second side around the economic component and how that affects lives.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna add more wind to what you're saying here. When you're talking about unemployment numbers, you're talking about one working body. But that one working body typically has two to three people that are living off of them, right? So a single household is gonna have maybe, you know, 1.3, 1.4 workers per household. So you do have stay at home moms or stay at home dads. And then they have, you know, like what right now in America, we have 2.1 children per couple. So, you know, we're talking three people per worker. And when you're talking that you're having three to four, maybe even five times the number of people that are filing for unemployment and have Corona.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  That's just the people filing for, you know, unemployment. Then you have to multiply that number by another three. So now we're talking about, you know, maybe 30 million people that just lost their source of income. And then if we're just gonna keep talking numbers of that 30 million people, once that, like, how long does it take that 30 million people who were already poor in industries that are not gonna be coming back for them to be homeless? And then once they're homeless, how long does it take for things to go really bad? Where you start seeing upticks in crime, where you see upticks in drug abuse, you see upticks in suicide? It's, it's, it's, we're, we're talking weeks. That's how fast that happens, weeks.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I think people have, going back to this idea of like, if you start with these slow little stealing of freedom, it also happens with how people are told about a bad situation. So first it was, we're gonna shelter in place for two weeks. Then it was, let's add another two weeks. Then it was, you know, hey, here's another week. Now we're hearing Virginia, DC, a bunch of these states are saying June 10. And the reason why June 10th is so important is if you go back, let's call kind of when people started to really take this seriously, middle of March. You're now talking about March to April, April to May, May to June, so three months. Vons, ninety days where those businesses are not going to be turned on. Even if they could on day one, turn them back on, hire everyone back and start paying them. You're going ninety days.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  There's very, very few people in this country who can go ninety days with no income and be okay.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ah, man. There, there's people that, that, that can't go a week.

• 36:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  A week, like the majority of, um, so.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Uh, God has blessed me and I'm, you know, I'm not going to go into that, but I, I right now am as. I'm trying to not stay like in the black. I'm trying to like stay right at the line and hire as many people as I can. Because I had people even like in, in, in my immediate circle that have been laid off, have been furloughed. And they are, they were one week. I mean, it took five days of no work for them to be like, hey, man, you have anything for me to do. I was like, we'll figure it out. Like, yes, let's, yep, come on, bro, let's figure it out. Um.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  One week. Now, you're talking ninety days of no income. Um.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Ju- it, that, that's a hard thing if you've never been poor. If you've never like lived paycheck to paycheck. Um, that's, that's a hard thing to understand where you get paid and you go and buy like enough white bread and the crappiest peanut butter and, uh, whatever brand, um, you know, from Kroger or Vons or, or Costco, not Costco, because they can't afford a membership. Um, can they get the cheapest that will last the longest? Um, and that's paid every single paycheck. Now you take one paycheck. Immediately they don't have any food. Immediately. So now they would go out on the street and ask for money or they'd go and get a second job.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Um, but there's nobody driving and there's no jobs to be found. So.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Not only do they not have any food, but they have no additional opportunity to, to try and to make up for that deficit. So now we're in the slippery slope of, you know, thirty million people that are now immediately thrust into poverty.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  There's not really bouncing back from that. When we look at the similarities in the Great Depression numbers, how long it took for us to come out of that, it's a frightening thing. So when you're having conversations and people are having conversations about lives versus the economy, that's not what it is. You know, it's really like it's lives versus lives and freedom. And, you know, I really do want to highlight when you said like, it wasn't just shelter in place. It was first, try to practice social distancing. And then it was, okay, try your best to stay home. Non-essential businesses stay closed. Then it was shelter in place.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  And then it was in some places, you know, like church congregations, not only

• 39:14Speaker 02

  can you not congregate in social distancing? If you do, here are the new laws that you're going to be violating. And, I mean, so like, I have a lot of land. Let's just say I wanted to, on top of this hill, put a big microphone and say, all right, church, we can meet in my field. It's a beautiful day. I have X's and all of the X's are measured to be six feet distance from everybody. So you have to stand on your X. We'll all worship together, regardless of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, whatever. Because that's the point. And, like, we can't do that. Think about that.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Like, the government has said that we cannot assemble. We cannot assemble even in the limitations of distance. We cannot assemble in da-da-da-da. And the few ways that we're able to converse about this is kind of through social media. And that in itself is a limited form of of our ability of free speech. Because every one of those different...

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Platforms to communicate has its own agenda and each of those limits what kind of conversations can take place and who can be, who can participate in those. So really like the first amendment is gone.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  In in a month, it took one month for us to be like, ah, okay, we don't need that one anyways. Yeah, we don't.

• 40:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think part of this is like the right to assemble, right? The right to free speech. And you start walking through, like you said, every single one of these amendments and you start to see how it almost feels like there's an entire pocket of population. I actually don't think it's the majority, but there is a pocket of population. When you or I or somebody else says online, wait a minute, timeout, you're violating the constitution by doing X. Whether it's the paddle border, whether it's Rhode Island, you know, you can't go to Texas, whatever the example is. There's a ton of people who say it's for the greater good, right? And kind of falls back on that fear and this whole thing. But what I try to remind people is like, the constitution's not a sometimes thing. Or it's not a, hey, you can apply the constitution when it's convenient for you guys.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you don't want us to have the constitution, you can basically take it away. And that element of like, it is a persistent right to freedoms. I think is getting lost in some of this because that that feeling of temporary component, right? Like, oh, this is only for a few weeks. To your point, either one doesn't come back. Or two, there's such a loss of freedom and civil liberties that it just doesn't look the same when it comes back.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  No. The, you know, the argument about the, it's Hugh in Instagram or Twitter. If you hashtag constitution or bill of rights, you know, your audio automatically penalized. You know that?

• 42:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not know that.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Not I'm serious. Try, try it. Do the exact same tweets. And do like a hashtag bill of rights or hashtag constitution or both of them. And then do the same tweet without those and see which one has more likes and more retweets. It's a fascinating little experiment that you have to do. You have to kind of do it blind to your audience. So you have your legitimate, so you'll see in the algorithm that you're automatically penalized for using them. So an argument about the constitution is anytime that it's brought up, like it's, it's just annotated. It's this yellowed, expired ideas that were, that were founded and written by a bunch of land owning racists, slavers.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  All is idiotic, but most importantly is that we have the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court's sole purpose is to view the Constitution as a living document. And they, through current times, they apply it to what is happening and how it is relevant to like the current day, current conversations, current vernaculars, current verdicts, everything about current makes the point of the Supreme Court, the only purpose that the Supreme Court has, is to be able to interpret the Constitution to current day. So it could not be any more relevant now than it was in 1776. Like, it is as relevant in this day and as important as it was at the founding of our country.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And it is, it is a very dangerous precedent when we willingly, the, the, the point of the Supreme Court is to be able to, somebody complained, so me, as a Texan, um, trying to drive to Louisiana, or a New Yorker trying to drive to New Hampshire, and I get pulled over and I get arrested. And they say, um, here is your ticket, or here are your handcuffs, you're gonna go sit in jail and then we're gonna move you back to New York, or, hey, we're gonna let all of the, the prisoners go out of our jail, um, because we don't want them to contract Corona, but then we're gonna be arresting and finding people because they're breaking our new laws.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Um, and then one of those released prisoners comes over and rapes somebody, awesome, I'm gonna sue the crap out of the government. Anyways, eventually it ends up at the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court looks at what Constitution, um, how the Constitution applies to this argument. And, um, but there's so many things that have to happen before it gets to the Supreme Court. And that's the, the, the ever so slight erosion where we just lose these kind of microscopic

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Like the tiniest, almost imperceivable portions of freedoms, granularly, just bit by bit, we get walked back. Sometimes it never even, more often than not, it never makes it to the Supreme Court. And the government and the local government, the state government, the federal government, tries to circumvent the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is the final authority on what happens with Constitution. So, these three little checks and balances before the Supreme Court is, are their opportunities to try and prevent it ever getting to them and just being able to take as much as they can bit by bit. Um, and, uh, like even the Patriot Act, you know, we keep referencing it.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  So, nine eleven, planes flying into some buildings, right? Uh, the Pentagon, the two towers, um, a bunch of heroes fight back and it crashes in a field. Um, you know, there, there might've been another plane that was looking to go to the White House. Um, and right after that, we realized, just like in Pearl Harbor, that we were blind to what was really happening, that we, that maybe the, the second worst intelligent failure of, since Pearl Harbor, was nine eleven. Um, we knew that there were these extremists, that there were these fanatic fundamentals, fundamentalists that hated our way of life.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  They had tried to do things before, but kind of unsuccessfully. And, um, so then nine eleven happens, three thousand people perish, and it gave the government every single authority. We, it didn't, we, the people, gave the government the absolute authority out of fear because we didn't want to see any more Americans having to jump out of buildings and have to make a decision, do I burn alive or do I jump to my dad? We said, no, we never want to see that again. I don't care what it costs, go ahead and do everything. So, we gave them access to our cell phones, to our emails, that we had no expectation of privacy through any, um, communication that happened not in person. And then we're like, well, what about in person?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Can the government, um, be able to wiretap things that would've been private or the expectation would've been private?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  And what level of authority would the government need, whether it's like a warrant? Or can we create a different type of judge that could provide those warrants in like these critical times, as long as it's supported this the greater good? So we just like started handing all of these freedoms away. The motivation again was great. You know, they wanted to stop a terrorist act from happening. We have never gotten those freedoms back. Now, if you know, we're having a conversation at the dinner table and we're like, hey, it sure would be great if we went to Disney World and had a great vacation there.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  And then two hours later, I pick up my Instagram and so lo and behold, there's advertisements for Disneyland and for Disney World and for a vacation there. Wow, that's fantastic. We know that happens, right? If I search it, cookies saved. That was so invasive 15 years ago. That would, we would have never imagined that that could have happened, that that would happen. I remember my grandparents, when they're talking about the government, they would take their phone off of the hook, right? And then they would have conversations, sometimes they'd even unplug the phone. If they, I know they roll over in their grave.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  If they could see now that what happens to, that we willingly accept this invasion of privacy, that there's not an element of our life that is truly private. They, I know my grandparents that fought World War II would come and stab me in the neck.

• 48:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that I really think through is this trade off between, you know, convenience and privacy or security. And I think you're highlighting it here of like, we all want the cell phone. So we walk around with it because we can call people, we can get on the internet, on Instagram, all that stuff. But it also provides now a tracking device, a listening device, et cetera. I don't think we've really seen kind of, at least across the American population, in certain examples, we've seen it, but not yet. Where those have been used to steal freedom of movement or kind of bigger kind of freedoms. We're seeing that now, though, where you see Google creating these tracking tools where they say, hey, we're going to use the

• 49:38Anthony Pompliano?

  cellphone data and we're going to be able to tell you, are you social distancing or not? And we're going to give that data to the government. And yeah, we may anonymize it, we may, you know, kind of aggregate it supposedly. But when you start to enter into that world where now that data isn't just let's start, let's stop terrorist attacks. It's now let's prevent you and me from going and meeting up with each other, really slippery slope, it seems.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, not even a slippery slope. That's too far, right? We're having private organizations that are enabling portions of our everyday lives and our, like for me, my, my phone is, is how I make my living. Like whether it's, you know, through photographs or through communication, you know, or through social media. And they have, they have weaponized the phone where

• 50:30Speaker 02

  like the distance of that I am from other people, how many people are with me, what we're talking about, like what is next? So first they're saying, how many people are congregating at what distance? And then, then are they saying, okay, well, not only are we going to, are we going to be intrusive about that? Let's also, here are some things that they're not allowed to do when they're together. So they're not allowed to, what, worship? They're not allowed to negatively disparagingly talk about President Trump or President Biden or whoever it's going to be like. Who knows, like, once that, we, we, we keep saying slippery slope. So that metaphor is like, after a couple of, once momentum negatively starts happening.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  And there's no way that you can stop the negative energy that continues down this slippery hill. So if this is a hill and you're on top of it and then you make a bad decision, you give up a little bit of your freedom, you're on this side of the hill. And then you make another one, now you've moved two times down, but this slope is super slippery. And now I'm sliding down and there's nothing I can do about it as I slowly go all the way down this hairy trollish arm and fall off.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  And it like that sounds seems like in this alarmist thing where like no slippery slope. That's what alarmists, um, that's what like preppers use as excuses to have a bunch of chickens and have a farm and have their own well and have their own solar and have a bunch of medical support. Oh, I'm talking about myself right now and I'm super happy.

• 52:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the reason I wanted to have you come on and talk about this, right, is uh, there's this weird balance between you're not the guy who's yelling and screaming, you know, fuck the government. Actually, you are enlisted in United States military. You are a trained Green Beret, Ranger qualified. You've spent, you know, what, almost two decades of your life dedicated to protecting the American way of life, American freedom, etc. And I think actually what people confuse is like those people who are in the military, police, fire, right, all of those that are sworn to protect the American way of life, they actually feel the strongest about this, right? That they're the ones who are saying,

• 52:46Anthony Pompliano?

  wait a minute, timeout. This is not what is supposed to be happening at home.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, but people look at my resume and they're like, oh, that's the guy that's gonna come kicking my doors to take a gun. Like, bro, you're insane, right? Like, I have watched my friends burn alive inside of vehicles that got blown up by IEDs, fighting to protect these freedoms, and you think I'm going to go and enforce the taking of those away from you? You're insane, right? Like, you're talking about the most passionate, um, freedom-loving group of people on the planet. It is your law enforcement, it's your firefighters, and it's your military, right? Because they have seen firsthand the suffering and the sacrifice that goes into the protection and the preservation of those things. And for the military especially, we go to places where these freedoms don't exist. So like

• 53:33Speaker 02

  every time I start having a conversation about, um, you know, capitalism versus socialism, just economically, or like the practice of communism as a form of government versus a republic. I was like, before we have these, have you ever lived or spent time in a place that practices a form of government that you're supporting? If you haven't, why don't you come with me for a few weeks? Because I have, and the whole entire time that we're there, the only reason I was able to survive was because the military was. In my food and water because there wasn't any there. If you wouldn't have got the water out of the the well, you'd have dysentery because it has been poisoned by all of the gross people that are around there because there's no food or water to be had. And everybody's fighting the same freaking well.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  It is. Clearly, I and everybody that every single one of my brothers and sisters that have has worn that flag on their soldier on their on their shoulder. You have confidence that we are the ones that love freedom. And that have died and have seen her and have seen our friends died protecting it and would happily die to protect. So. While. I work for Uncle Sam and I am proud to be an American Green Beret and to be part of the Special Forces Regiment.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  I am first and foremost an American.

• 54:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, one of the things that really concerned me, this is probably the most egregious example I've seen. So there's this guy in Brooklyn, FBI goes in and they've confiscated a bunch of medical supplies that he had. Right. And and I'm not talking about like he had, you know, five masks. I mean, I'm talking he had a hundred and thirty thousand masks, you know, six hundred thousand gloves like. He had a warehouse full of medical supplies and there's a it's a highly complex scenario. So before everyone freaks out. He was selling them for, you know, seven hundred percent increases in price, all this kind of stuff. I'm going to put all of the medical supplies, that whole part of the conversation to the side for a second.

• 55:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But in there, he got charged with assaulting a federal agent because he coughed in the direction of the agent supposedly, right, or allegedly. And he allegedly also said that he was positive with coronavirus. And the first thing that went off in my head is is coughing going to be illegal in public, right? Do you kind of get so far down that slippery slope where? Again, in the age of coronavirus where fear kind of, you know, reigns, if you will. All of a sudden, can you outlaw coughing, right? Can you actually get to the point where people say, hey, I don't want you to cough in public and it's actually for the public good? If you cough, you've broken the law.

• 56:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And again, it's an egregious example, but that doesn't seem too far off because it's literally in an affidavit where a guy got arrested. And that's one of the charges against, right?

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Have you seen the videos of like the people intentionally going into supermarkets and coughing over the produce?

• 56:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And by the way, not not good. I'm not condoning it. I don't think you're condoning it, right? But adds to the complexity of this situation is when people are again being an asshole, right? And just doing things because they're idiots.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, is asshole illegal though? You know, and you know, the idea of I'm free and I can do things that I want as long as they don't negatively affect the person next to me. If I go and I cough on a bunch of vegetables and you know, fruit and that negatively affects the person next to me. I my favorite video is the guy goes, I think it was in, it looked like it was like in India. The guy coughed over a bunch of produce and the shop owner went over there and skull stomped him. I mean, he just came like just clocked him in the side of the head. The dude fell down unconscious and I I don't even know what happened after that. I don't want to know.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  But um, like, hey, problem solved. I I have no problem straightening out idiots in front of me. And, you know, and I will suffer the consequences of of what happens if if I have to like. I totally believe somebody can burn the American flag like I have fought for your right to do that. I feel as if that is a a complete protected form of of freedom of speech. Like you do that in front of me, I feel like I might beat your your teeth in. I might do that. And I've realized that I would get arrested for that. And cool, I'll I'll take that happily. You know, and that's kind of like

• 58:04Speaker 02

  where things get complicated, right? Where this is where this is this nuanced. The subtleties of what is free, what is protected. What I think we all need to do collectively is really rally around our freedom. And we need to logically and rationally start looking at those freedoms and figure out, okay.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Not for the greater good, but for my kids' good. Like, if you don't have kids, for your future children's good. What kind of freedoms do I want them to have? Do I want them to wait in breadlines? Do I want them to be rationed a certain proportion of water? Do I want them, like, if they don't cough

• 58:46Speaker 02

  into their shirt like this, that they could be arrested? Um, do I want them to be able to hoard medical supplies? Um, we do, we already have laws that prohibit somebody from price gouging. So, like, we didn't need to create new laws to attack somebody for price gouging. Like, those already exist. Um, like, there's a guy that had a huge storage of hand sanitizer, and he was selling them for a hundred dollars a bottle. Well, Amazon let the authorities know. The authorities shut down his Amazon site. And then he went and donated all of that, those hand sanitizers to local hospitals and local schools. Awesome. We already had existing laws. We didn't need to create new ones to solve a pre-existing problem. And sickness is not a new problem.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Pandemics are not a new problem. Viruses are not new problems, right? Like, this one is not gonna have, like, a tenth, maybe not even a hundredth of the mortality of something like the Spanish flu. Like, it may not even have the same mortality of the swine flu. So,

• 59:50Speaker 02

  take a breath

• 59:53Speaker 02

  and start realizing how much we're gonna be giving up for the, for the peace of mind of now.

• 1:00:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that, and I always try to be really clear, I don't think you or I are saying, like, the virus isn't real or it's not bad, right? We both wish that the virus was eliminated and social distancing. All these things are actually, like, good things, and it shows that it works. And, um, actually, people should stay at home and do all the things that they're being asked to do. That is being overlaid with the freedoms, but... Then people always go second step and they say, okay, what should we do? And what I always point them back to is I think folks who have been in the military, police, fire, etc. One thing that they've seen over and over and over again is good leadership. And what I mean by that is there's two ways to be a leader. You can lead with a carrot or a stick, right?

• 1:00:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And we have a lot of leaders across governments, local, state, federal, etc. That are saying, you can't do this, or you must do this. Instead, if we had a focus on more inspirational leadership, where kind of to your point, if you do this together, our community will be in a better place. And you inspire people to do the right things, rather than saying, we're gonna put you in jail if you don't do this. I think it's a very, very different path that you go down. But it takes strong leaders who know how to do that in order to get to that place in the world.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, you know, leadership is a tough thing right now. Because we're looking at politicians to be leaders. Politicians are the most selfish people on the planet. There, there, there's, there are very few politicians out there now that are doing it for the good of others. You know, you, you look at, you know, the Ocasio-Cortez's that were bartenders and now they're millionaires. You look at, um, on both sides of the aisle. I'm like, I said, I'm libertarian, I'm, I'm pretty much right down the middle of them both. I'm socially pretty left, economically, I'm pretty right. Freedoms wise, I'm like, pretty freaking down the middle. The, we, we're looking to politicians to be good leaders, but they've never led.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  And now we're in a, now we're in a time of, of struggle. And when you have to sit there and say, I'm in charge, I'm the boss. Here's the consequence of what's gonna happen if you don't listen to me. Like, you really realize that we have bad leaders. So as, as we're moving into 2020, um, towards the election in November, I really, really hope every single person looks at their both local, state and federal representatives and how that person communicated and led their constituents. And if you see this model of

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Poor leadership of them threatening, of them overstepping, of them liberty grabbing, of them taxing. Those are things, those four right there are slippery slopes that are very difficult to come back. So, you know, taxes and liberties are things that are always incrementally taken or added and then can never be taken or minus.

• 1:03:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see, did you see, was it the captain in the Navy, Captain Corsair? Did you see this?

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What were your thoughts on that? And for those that don't know, basically, a guy, he's a captain on a ship. He reached out to leadership and it's unclear whether he leaked that communication to the media, but basically said, hey, look, I've got people on my ship who are getting infected with coronavirus and I need help. You know, it was kind of an overgeneralization, but he was ultimately relieved from duty. I don't know how much you can say, but just any thoughts there?

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  So I have two conflicting opinions about this. First is me as a leader. So I'm a new special forces team sergeant, which means that I will have 12 special forces, 12 Green Berets that work for me. They're my family. I would do absolutely anything for those 12 guys and I really don't care a lot about people outside of the special forces regiment because these guys are mine. There's lots of guys like them, but these 12 are mine. And I would do anything for them. To include probably breaking the chain

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  of command to ensure that they're safe and protected. With that said, I absolutely believe that you should follow your chain of command and that you should push through the chain of command and figure out solutions within the appropriate, like, the military chain of command is tried and tested and proven true. And we have seen it through how many countless of wars, unfortunately. And we know that it works because we have used it successfully for like a really long time to defeat people all the way back to the British, stopping communism, stopping fascism, and, you know, stopping ISIS. So like, you could do it. I know those sound...

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  conflicting and they may not be mutually exclusive but maybe they are I don't know

• 1:05:18Anthony Pompliano?

  somebody here's what somebody said to me that I thought was a great articulation I think it aligns exactly what you're saying they said he knew by breaking the chain of command he would be relieved most likely and he still did it because he wanted to help those that that were on the ship and it was almost this like element of I know what I'm doing is wrong but I believe this is what I need to do to get help and therefore he almost then got what he already knew he was going to get by being relieved and I don't know how true that is but

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  yeah I don't either and if that's the motivation you know like kudos the man's awesome there's not many promotions that can happen after the position that he's in so there's and in and in retirement they can't your retirement is whatever highest rank you had so he's at the highest rank so he's not losing a lot if he gets relieved um he also you know like if you look at general mcchrystal who did a very similar thing he went to the press I think he went to look rolling stones and leaked a bunch of information and you know like his reputation was like that might have been he might have been had he continued without doing that regarded as one of the greatest military experts of this war on terror going down in fame is like a guy like Patton but instead you know he's kind of defamed but now he's like worth tens of millions of dollars and so you know these these arguments of like what what was the motivation is this guy trying to be a martyr so he can go on speaking tours later or was he truly doing it to be a zealot and a protector for his men possibly I don't know

• 1:06:55Anthony Pompliano?

  yeah I want to end up real quick with there's a recent I think it's a new york times article that basically talks about a number of these private defense or you know security companies throughout the northeast which which obviously you run a competitor but but these companies are reporting you know huge increases in interest both from can you provide me bodyguard services can you provide security for my building can you come out to my hamptons home and you know put somebody out in a car outside and protect my family and the thought process is a lot of these folks are super wealthy and they're worried about the looting they're worried about the crime etc first question is are you seeing any of that kind of increase in interest and then two how do you think about it from your seat in terms of like is that something that is possible here and is this something that's likely

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  So I'll answer the the second question first. No, I don't think it's likely at all. Well, I think it's possible. That's why I have guns and I have ammo and I have a security system and I have like a fence that you can't get through and standoff and like my property is inaccessible and it's not listed like all the things that I've taken to to ensure my family's protection like that's my responsibility and I'm going to do that to my damnedest. Um, I've also seen an uptick. Like I can't even express like I can't answer the phone or answer emails of the number of people that are asking that. Um, and the hypocrisy of

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  you know, the the Bloomberg during the town town hall where somebody asked him, okay, how can you be asking for populations to not have firearms when you are protected by people with firearms? And he has had the most hypocrite hypocritical response where he says, you know, essentially I need them because I'm important. And that that is not that is not a unique response. That is, that is a very normal response from everybody in positions of power. Where, okay, hey, I'm gonna fight for the the environment and I'm going to, you know, be a a tree hugger as best I can, but I am gonna fly on private jets all over the world.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  But it's because I'm trying to protect the environment, right? Um, so the hypocrisy continues down the same vein of people saying, uh, no, you shouldn't have a gun. Uh, I I love that, um, a lot of people have gone out and bought guns for the first time of their life and um, welcome to the gun owning family and community and I welcome you with open arms and I hope that you take that responsibility seriously. Because it is while it is a freedom, it is a huge responsibility and that means that you have to be trained. That means you have to be able to to store it properly to protect your family. That you have to know how to use it and when you can use it and all of the different laws that exist. Like, so there's a ton that goes along. Congratulations that you bought a gun. Welcome to the family.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  But now you have a long road of learning what that means. Um, but a lot of those people that have just recently purchased guns were adamantly against the private citizen being able to own them. And um, watching school shootings happen and watching active shooters in malls and and movie theaters, um, every single time one of those shootings happen, the government uses that opportunity to try and seize more freedom, specifically around firearms or ammunition. So, and and you can go, I mean, very back to the first one, you know, for you can, you can, I think the most popular or popularized one was was Columbine.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  You know, if you go back and look at every single one up until current day, every time that happens, there's an, there is an initial rush to to enact legislation to create a new law, um, to try and circumvent the Supreme Court to, okay, we'll limit in this way. Um, so we're not taking the guns, we're just taking the ammo. Um, we're not taking the guns, we're just adding a tax that's so insane, you can't even afford to buy the guns because of tax, that's already approved, so we don't have to go through the Supreme Court. Um, but ultimately, it comes all the way back to where we at COVID-19, where you're basing the subtle erosion of of your of your civil of your liberties because of your fear.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  You're looking at at the expense of the future for convenience now. And that's, that's a horrible, horrible way to look at it.

• 1:11:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Uh, it it's a thing where, uh, unless you've seen it, I don't think people, uh, understand how important what you're saying really is. Um, where where can people go find more about, uh, Sheepdog and kind of what you guys are doing on the on the training front, um, and and just kind of get connected with you?

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Uh, so Tim Kennedy MMA is all my social media stuff. And my company Sheepdog Response, um, we're we're on all the social medias, uh, the website is SheepdogResponse.com. Uh, we have frozen all in-person live training for probably another six weeks. Um.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  But we have virtual training, so you can like this evening, I'm going to be practicing some very specific drills. So by the time I get back to the range on Tuesday, I'll get this much better, you know, incremental improvement. So sheetdogresponse.com and sheetdogresponse for Twitter, Instagram, not Tinder, we're not on there. So.

• 1:12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you on TikTok? Are we going to see any Tim Kennedy dance videos?

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  I just started TikTok. I just, I did my first TikTok. And it's Tim Kennedy MMA. I was making coffee. I was really just exploring how to do it. I have two teenage daughters and you can see one of them is on, because I'm FaceTiming them while I was doing a TikTok. And I was like, hey, you're on TikTok. And she was like, I hate you. I hope you, she said some mean things.

• 1:12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Something tells me that being your daughter as a teenager is probably amazing and awful all at the same time.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  I hope so. That sounds perfect.

• 1:13:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, I really appreciate you doing this. I think people, more people need to hear kind of your thoughts on American freedom and civil liberties and hopefully we can prevent any more erosion. But we're living in an interesting time. So I appreciate the time.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thank you. Take care.

• 1:13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Thanks, Tim.

• 1:13:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.