Tim Kennedy - Big Tech Censorship Is Jeopardising Our Freedom of Speech & Making Society Weaker

Full transcript: Tim Kennedy on London Real

3:04 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tim Kennedy, the former professional mixed martial artist, green beret and serial entrepreneur. You served as a green beret sniper in the Special Operations Detachment and toured in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Army, you were deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and were an honor graduate from Ranger School.

3:23 For your service, you were given the Bronze Star Medal awarded for Valor Under Fire. In your first fight in the UFC, you defeated Hodger Gracie via unanimous decision and earned wins against Michael B. Sping and Robbie Lawler to hold an MMA record of 18 wins in 24 fights. You were the founder of Sheepdog Response, a tactical training and self-defense company, and the Apogee Academy and online mentorship program with the goal of turning curious children and to the leaders of tomorrow.

3:48 Today, you are concerned about our right to freedom of speech and believe that big text continued censorship will set a dangerous precedent that could potentially lead to violence and anarchy. Tim, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for everything you always do and say. I appreciate your use of freedom of speech.

4:07 As yours as well. And I follow you on Instagram and I’m constantly watching the stuff that you put out, at least the stuff that I get to see on that feed because I’m sure a lot I miss because of the algos. But there’s so many things I wanna talk to you about today because there’s probably six really strong points that you’re constantly speaking out about. And I’d love to jump into it. I actually wanted to maybe start with Ukraine because it feels like you have such a nuanced perspective of that war.

4:35 I know you’ve been there. I know you believe fights against communism are just, but I also, you also disagree when people wanna throw our kids into wars that maybe they don’t understand or aren’t doing the right way. So I’ve seen a lot of your different tweets, pictures of you and your son. Let’s jump into it. How do you unpack your feelings about what we’re doing in Ukraine right now?

4:59 Yeah, as much as I hate communism, I hate war as much. And I don’t think being able to, these things are mutually exclusive. And I think some people, When you’re looking at especially social media, which is a really difficult place to have nuanced conversation, forget that these are very complex topics. Can I as a father wanna keep my son out of war all the while want to fight against communism? Absolutely, right?

5:27 And there’s degrees about how to have these conversations. I’ve worked in Ukraine as part of Save Our Allies, a humanitarian organization that was going to the front line to deliver humanitarian aid. We evacuated an incredible journalist, Benji Hall. His book, Stave, just came out. And everyone in his car died but him, and we were able to get him from Ukraine into Poland, flying from Poland to Germany, where he got emergency medical care that saved his life.

5:58 So I have seen firsthand what communism does to a country. I have seen that it rots with corruption. And so, of course, I hate that. But having worked in Ukraine and seen also the waste, the fraud, and us inching closer and closer to World War III, can we sit and debate? Can we find resolutions outside of war?

6:25 Can we hold a firm line of saying, no, these were sovereign state lines. It was illegal that you came into this country. This is not your land. This is Ukrainian land. and figure out ways that does not involve World War III with China, Iran, Syria, and Russia.

6:44 And, you know, coming out of 20 years of war, I don’t wanna go back to war, and I truly don’t want my children to have to fight in another one. You said you went to the front line and saw mass graves and stuff, and I mean, I still have a hard time understanding that it’s like really close to us over here. You got a hot war where we seem to be repeating all the lessons we didn’t learn in the end of World War II. I mean, what was it like there? I mean, it’s the worst that humans can do to each other and would have perfected our ability to kill each other.

7:18 You know, it is void of any form of humanity. I was at a battalion of Ukrainian soldiers of infantrymen at the front lines. There was this tiny stellar, not even a stellar, It’s like a well of canned goods that was all the food that they had for an entire battalion. They were rotating guys from the front lines back to Kiev to get medical care, to then be shipped back to the front lines. You had baristas and mechanics that were stepping over trenches as if it was World War I in trench warfare.

7:57 Warfare is uniquely horrible, and that’s what they’re doing in a lot of those front lines right now. It’s heartbreaking to see us, I say us, the human race doing this to each other over land, but it’s also inspiring to see the leaders and the courage of some of these Ukrainian soldiers that are fighting to protect their family and their homeland. Again, another really nuanced thing, you know, a lot of, you know, as kind of a libertarian constitutionalist in the United States, me just saying anything nice about anyone in Ukraine, people are like, Oh, he’s a neocon.

8:39 No, he’s pro war. You know, this guy is like, no, there’s that’s not what I’m saying, you know, there’s there’s there’s an even in war, there are beautiful moments of humanity and courage. And I saw that on display of men and women protecting their homeland and fighting fiercely to protect what they view as to be their rightful sovereign country. Yeah, it’s been impressive the way they defended it. I know they’ve been funded and supported, but it’s still, it’s been surprising for everybody.

9:11 What do you make of some of the atrocities committed by the Russian side? Do you chalk some of that up to like really green, really young soldiers, not well Trained a propaganda war or is that just what happens in war where just the worst comes out in people? No, I mean the America wants to fight this big maneuver war the war of World War two right the war of tanks and Battleships and you know large brigades and battalions in in movement Unfortunately, that’s not the war that we’re ever gonna fight again. You know the war that we’re gonna fight moving forward is again It’s a proxy war You know, it’s it’s a war against Corporations it’s a war against ideas and propaganda. It’s information it’s it’s it’s war of evil and genocide and name-calling and blames and And that’s what we see in Eastern Ukraine right now you see Did you see genocide?

10:09 You know and Effectively if they can’t own the land they can erase the ideas and you erase the ideas by killing the people So you see, you know, these Russian schools that are opening up in Eastern Ukraine that are teaching that Ukraine doesn’t even exist. They’re already teaching this next generation of they they’re on sovereign Ukrainian land, but their Russian school is being taught by Russians that Ukraine doesn’t even exist. And that’s that’s the battle of these ideas.

10:38 And that’s the the mass graves, the there’s lots of them, you know, they’ve already confirmed multiple war crimes all throughout Ukraine, of them killing entire villages, of them destroying garages and burying people underneath it. It’s just absolutely horrible. And then now you’ve got these drones. Is it weird to see that? Because I don’t know if we ever saw an evolution where there was, maybe we did, maybe you did, where there were these like Iranian drones going against civilians in Ukraine, and it just seems like a bad dystopian future.

11:20 Yeah, we’re in it. We were so comfortable, you know, I’m in Austin, Texas right now, it’s 75 degrees outside, I’m about to drive up north into the hill country. And the contrast of just a few weeks ago, when I was in Eastern Europe, seeing people stare and seeing the hollow underneath their eyes of sleepless nights, knowing that if you’re between the ages of 16 and 45, you’re gonna be drafted. And, you know, feeling, if you go to Poland right now, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, these people are in, where’s the next, where’s the next frontline, right?

12:01 It’s Ukraine right now, had they been successful, had the invasion gone the way the Russians had wanted, are we looking at Poland being the next country to be invaded, was Slovakia next? You know, obviously they own Belarus, it’s Belarusia right now. You know, so the geopolitical climate there, when you start getting the Eastern Europe, it is, and if you’ve ever been to Kiev, it’s a beautiful first world city. It’s a metropolis, you know, it’s the cobblestones and architecture that looks like you’re in Spain, you know, that it looks like you’re in Madrid.

12:36 And then you see buildings that have been destroyed and machine gun fire and bullet holes in the sides of walls. They try to go and clean it up and fix it immediately, but some things, especially some of the historical buildings, that’s just damaging scars that are gonna be there forever. And that was from an invasion a year and two months ago. You know, it’s really difficult to process being in a first world city like that, being in proper, a proper European city and realizing that it was under Russian war fighters control one year ago.

13:13 Yeah, you said it had an opera house. I think the point you were making was like this, this is not a city that was used to seeing this type of warfare and that’s what was happening. How does this end, Tim? And, you know, the Russians view this as a strategic fight that has to be won because they view NATO as a assault on their sovereign security. So as NATO has been expanding and new countries have been going into it, Ukraine was on that short list pre-invasion.

13:54 And there is a resolution within NATO that you can’t join while you’re at war, which they are. Finland, Czech Republic, Poland, all these being recent additions to NATO. Russia sitting there, if you just juxtaposition and switch your perspective to being Russian, you’re sitting there in Moscow, and you watch what was the Atlantic, NATO, Atlantic, that has slowly moved east, and east, and east, and east. Now there’s only one country buffering you from NATO, and they view NATO as aggressors.

14:32 Of course you wanna go in there and protect your own sovereign border, and you do that by invading. So from the Russian perspective, this makes total sense. But for the rest of the world, we see genocide we see mass graves we see war crimes and we see the illegal crossing of a sovereign border this invasion and uh… and and we were just screaming why what why do this and uh… how do you reconcile these two very different ideas the two very different opinions this this russian and you know kind of nato american alliance view it’s uh…

15:06 That’s a hard one to to try to to break down in and find the resolution Yeah, and Putin’s in a position where he can’t really stop because that threatens his sovereignty, which threatens his life potentially. I mean, they’re backed into a corner, and so this will probably just drag with potential threats of nuclear action. What are your thoughts on that? Seeing the Russian soldiers and their equipment, Russia, Russian military, they’re a third world military with nukes, third world in the worst of ways.

15:41 You know in Africa genocide happens often war crimes happen often and you know and not often do we Look down there and be like ah That’s so terrible. Oh my gosh the things that that happened there You’re like it happens in the Middle East and you don’t see us screaming for war crimes and tribunals Because it’s it’s it’s so frequent but then it happens to, I mean, let’s just say it, to white people in a European city and, oh no, not, let’s, everybody had, people have to seek justice for this. It’s unfair, but it’s because it’s happened so rare there.

16:21 That does happen in third world countries and Russia, their military have, have the discipline of a third world country, but they also have nukes. So it’s the worst two combination that you can possibly have third world level discipline where they’re doing crimes against women and children, atrocities, war crimes, genocide, all the while, they also have nuclear weapons. So this is a bad combo. Yeah, really bad. All right, so we just watch and wait, and then obviously it’s probably in re-election’s interest for the White House to keep us at war because that probably helps popularity.

16:58 I’ve been told the Western media has been given this line of Ukraine’s winning, Ukraine’s winning, but when I have experts on here, they say that’s actually not the case. Do you have a thought on that? Like you said, it is an information war. Everything is, I guess, these days. Yeah, I mean, define winning.

17:18 So Ukraine has successfully rebutted an initial evasion of a gigantic, you know, nearly world super power. And so like, is that a victory? For sure, you know, at what cost? The Ukrainian military has suffered so many casualties and I’m not gonna put numbers out because I actually don’t know which ones I’m not supposed to share and I can share, but in percentage wise, in comparison, Russian soldiers have lost such a minute amount of their resources and their actual combat fighters in comparison to Ukraine.

18:00 Russia can do this for a decade. Ukraine can do this for months, you know, and this long drawn out war is exactly what the Russians want and for a long drawn out war, the Russians are winning. Yeah, it’s what they do really well, isn’t it? And then a bunch of stuff was leaked recently that was kind of maybe telling the truth that the Western media wasn’t too happy about that kind of divulged some things about Ukraine’s actual resources and I think it was a little less than maybe people had talked about or hoped about.

18:30 And so I guess we’ll just see what happens. Yeah, I mean, the it’s definitely not wrong. I don’t think anybody that isn’t, you know, being spoon fed the truth from whatever news network they’re paying attention to, you know, when you start pulling back a couple of letter layers and, you know, the leaks said that the Ukrainian casualties were higher and Russian casualties were lower through exactly what I just said the resources that have been spent by Ukraine to fight this initial invasion were much heifer than initially reported. So the flowers and positivity of this is how this war is going continue for it to go fantastic especially all through the way of this next presidential election. It’s just disingenuous and inaccurate.

19:27 You mentioned communism there, which is something that seems to become a popular form of potential government in America with maybe some of the younger folks that are socialism. Can you just talk about what it’s like to hear people having those conversations and be questioning some of the ideas of capitalism? I think you said once that, yeah, in theory, communism sounds great. Everyone has a job. Everybody contributes.

19:53 You’ve seen the reality and the reality is it’s mass graves, it’s starvation, it’s tens of millions of people’s killed. I mean, that’s what the track record is. Can you just talk about what it’s like to be in America now? Are people actually having those conversations? I’m over here, Tim, I don’t know.

20:07 How do you feel about it and what’s it like? Yeah, I mean, there are current political congressmen and congresswomen that define their views as socialists. And, you know, you said the track record, to be perfectly clear, every single instance where it has been implemented, it has ended with violence and genocide. So historically, you cannot find a single time where you’re like, ah, well, it just wasn’t a – and then the same argument always comes out that, well, it just wasn’t applied the correct way.

20:45 We’ll be able to do it better this time. Well, go to Venezuela right now and try to stand in a bread line to get some food. Go to Russia right now and try to break through the caste system of the oligarchs that are directly connected to the Communist Party. Go to China right now and see if you have any say about your life, especially when they’re welding your door closed because you’re not going to do the thing that the government is telling you to do. You’re going to be trapped in your apartment until you start to death.

21:11 That is the power of communism, and it is absolute controlled by the government. The idea is the opposite for what the United States was founded on, where the control and the power stands on the individual and the people. So the people should always have the ponderance, the people should always have the oneness of all responsibility and power should rest upon them, which is why we have our beautiful constitution which supports those individually determined powers to the people.

21:40 The freedom of speech, our right to the Second Amendment, our freedom of the press, our due process, real limited search and seizure. All of these things are not like given to us. These are our unalienable rights. These are our rights as individuals, which is opposite from communism, which is the government has all control and all power, and then we give you what we think that you want. Once you see what that looks like in real life, in practice, in a real world, You’ll see the depravity, you’ll see the egregious, horrific atrocities that happen to humans when a government has all power and people have no say.

22:21 And which way is that going in America? Are people coming back around to understanding that property rights are important and freedom of speech is important? Or does it feel like you’re losing ground? And does it feel like the younger generation is being educated in our schools and universities? By the way, my daughter’s just started university in Boston, and I’m a bit terrified him that she’s getting brainwashed But like are you worried that over time?

22:45 This is going the wrong way that America is gonna believe more in this socialist view I mean, it’s felt like it’s been going this way for a while and It’s it it has felt that this has been a losing battle for a while. You know the universities and our public school systems They have, it’s been a propaganda machine that they’ve been feeding these lies that are not supported by fact or by history about what socialism and communism does. And this utopian idea of, oh, this is what it looks like when it’s so inclusive and everybody gets along and everybody has a job and everybody has a standard of living, and the minimum wage is set to a degree where everybody can live.

23:31 When that happens, it removes any motivation by the individual. When everybody has the same, no matter how hard you work, everybody has the same outcome, it removes the individual’s drive to achieve or succeed at anything. Because I’m going to have whatever substance I’m going to have, and me and my comrades are all going to live the same level. That makes sense to a lot of people that have no drive. That makes sense to a lot of people that have no initiative.

23:58 It makes a sense to a lot of people that are just lazy, and it’s not fair to all of the other brilliant young men and women that want to aspire to do amazing things, that want to innovate, that want to create. I feel that our schools have been broken, both our universities and our public school system for a while, and I don’t know which way the ship is going to be turning. I’m fighting as hard as I can to keep it turned towards the direction of freedom because there’s nothing more beautiful than sovereignty of an individual.

24:35 And it’s not just the socialism, capitalism, it’s gone to all sorts of other very strange levels of gender, of obviously all the issues on the environment and it’s just gone to all sorts of other things. I mean, I think somebody tried to put it in a nutshell and they said the left inherently hates ourselves or is this narrative that humans are bad and we’re doing the bad things and we need to punish ourselves for being bad. And then kind of the conservatives are more like, no, we’re not just bad and we’re not necessarily doing the wrong things.

25:12 We just have to look at it in a different way. First, I thought that was a very simplified way but the more I think about it, it’s like maybe that is closer to being true. I don’t know, what do you make of it? Also, I’m watching from over here, it hasn’t come here yet, but like the day some teacher comes to come in and start telling my sons that are five and six, that you know, the man’s having the baby and stuff, like I’m pulling him, I’m taking him out. And so I, yeah, what do you see happening there?

25:38 As dangerous as it was to talk about the lab leak, you know, we’re saying, you know, if you go back to 2019, 2020, you and I were so cautiously trying to split hairs about how do we talk about being real that maybe this horrible virus did come from a lab. We would’ve been banned off of everything. That is almost what it’s like to talk about anything trans in the United States right now. If I went to a teacher in California, the parents don’t even have a right to know what the teacher is talking to the child about regarding their sexual identity all the way down to kindergarten.

26:23 So the parent has no authority to need or want to know what they can want to know. They just won’t have the authority to find out what the teacher is saying to the child or what the child is saying to the teacher about their sexual identity. That is insanity. That is absolute bigotry and that is, in my opinion, grooming. So we are, and it’s one of many topics, you talked about the environment, you know, the current religion of Wokism to include transgender, all the things.

26:58 Basic common sense from history and science have just been thrown out the window for whatever you want to believe is the truth and your new reality. That’s fine. You can believe whatever you want to believe. That’s the cool thing about being American is you can have the freedom to have those own thoughts and those own opinions, but you don’t get to tell me what to think. And I know that biologically we got two genders and I don’t care what you think you are.

27:23 You can, you can believe that and I’ll respect that and I’ll treat you like a human and I’ll love you regardless as my neighbor. I’ll mow your lawn if you need help. You know, if you want me to do whatever you need, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll support you to do that. But you do not get to project that onto me or my family as to what my freedoms get to be. And we have definitely the pendulum has swung so far into this radical idea that it is people are speaking out and laws are starting to be passed.

27:49 And most important, parents are starting to fight back. They’re going to school unions, they’re pulling their kids from schools, they’re starting private schools, and they’re doing everything within their powers to compete against these radical ideas that are bad for the family and they’re bad for the kids. Well, it’s good to hear there’s some fighting back going on. I know, well, you had been starting Apogee on our last conversation, I think three years ago.

28:12 I wanna get an update on how that’s going. But like you said, you said it perfectly there. I think in America, we’ve always believed that everyone has the choice to be who they wanna be, whatever you wanna be. But when you start trying to project those ideas onto our children and us, I guess our children were super sensitive because they can be shaped really well. When you’re trying to project those, that’s when people stand up.

28:36 But I guess their argument is, oh, now you’re discriminating me. And that’s the one that’s the way they try to hide behind that. And it sounds like they’ve ridden that pretty far in some states. And you’re just coming out and saying, no, it’s not that, but you can’t push these agendas if that’s not what I want for my children. Yeah, that’s right.

28:56 Yeah, and not what I want. It’s also what the children want. They’re saying, you know, a six, seven, eight year old It’s like, Oh, a little girl’s like, man, I think I’m a boy. Um, and you know, we start giving them chemical castrations and puberty blockers, um, because this little girl that could also say she’s a unicorn wants to be something, um, that’s the beautiful thing about being a parent is that they can have any beliefs and they can be swayed and persuaded in any direction because they’re so impressionable and they’re so beautifully innocent that that, that is why it is the job of a responsible parent and a responsible adult to protect these children, just like a kid will run out into the street. Just like we won’t let them buy alcohol in the United States until they’re 21. They’re not allowed to vote until they’re 18. But they can make a decision about permanently mutilating their body. It makes no sense. And it makes no sense in such a damning and damaging way to these children, and to their mental health for their life moving forward, because these are irreversible things.

30:01 There’s no, there’s no common sense human on the planet that would look at a young child. That’s you know, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old. It’s like, man, I think I’m going to be, you know, this specific gender. I’m going to make this permanent decision right now. And you’re going to be like, that’s a great plan.

30:17 Let’s do that. I’m going to give you, you know, a surgery and chemicals to facilitate that. No, what we’re going to do is we’re going to wait until your frontal lobe fully develops. We’re going to wait for you to like, you know, get healthy in your own skin and figure out what you want to do. Maybe get through these crazy hormones of puberty and then maybe start making some decisions.

30:35 And it is so evil. It’s just evil, what we’ve been doing to children for the past few years. And it’s everywhere. Disney puts it in their cartoons. Bud Light puts it on their cans.

30:51 That’s a bad move, Anheuser-Busch. But you’ve seen it everywhere. It’s just been this constant assault on rational, logical thoughts. Yeah, I’ve seen it in the movies. I saw the Nike thing, I saw the Bud Light thing.

31:07 I mean, again, over here, that hasn’t hit Britain. They say it won’t, but I don’t know. We usually, about five years behind you guys. But it’s just so hard for me to watch and believe it. I mean, look, America is filled with intelligent people, people that were born in this country with this multiple hundred years of value.

31:26 Do you ever think, Tim, like how can these people think something that seems so illogical? Do you ever try to put yourself in their shoes and say, how can that happen? Is it because they’ve been divided into this team and they all subconsciously just choose the same values and they have to fight? Like, have you ever thought about that? Because it just doesn’t even make sense to me sometimes.

31:46 Yeah, I’ve thought a lot, Brian. You know, just who the hell was Hitler? Who was this dude, this absolute asshole that, in the early 30s, was able to sway an entire nation to go on to commit genocide and to conduct a holocaust where a nation stood behind them, the SS, to be like, it’s all right for us to go into Poland and for us to create entire blocks where we start murdering people in the streets, throwing them onto trains where they go gas them and burn them, but a country was behind them for that to happen.

32:21 What was it that, that allowed this mass psychosis of people to go with something that was so illogical, that this was something that was so inhumane. What was this thing? And we’ve seen it time and time again, we’ve seen it throughout history over and over and over where we have accepted these radical, dangerous ideas and we’ve allowed them to happen. And it’s my mass psychosis happened during COVID, you know, and it’s happening right now where a small group of radical ideas have perpetuated and made their way into regular society and I cannot understand how it happened in the 30s where then we saw the Holocaust in the 40s, how we saw the Cold War that went from the 60s all the way through the 90s.

33:08 These were radical ideas that brought us to the brink of war. I’ve never seen America so divided in my lifetime and divided over the dumbest stuff. We’re divided over the dumbest things right now, as we’re looking at World War Three, where we’re losing ground to China, where we have our southern border that is currently being invaded by absolutely everybody on the planet. But then we’re arguing over about a rainbow on a beer can. You’re like, wake up, America.

33:35 It’s time for us just to get back together and realize that we have been the most powerful country for the past hundred years and let’s come together and figure out how to continue to make this this world a more peaceful and prosperous place. Yeah it is a mass psychosis and I guess you could go deep on it and find out why it happens. Sometimes people are sometimes scared to speak out of it because then they’re gonna lose their group of friends if they had tried to be rational then it goes into your subconscious brain to where you just believe it and then you end up choosing red or blue and then you just simultaneously adopt 99% of of those policies without giving it your own thought.

34:13 I guess there is a history of this, right? But it’s weird to see it play out. Maybe America needs a common enemy once again to wake up because China’s coming to eat everybody’s lunch and, well, it’s already doing it. And winning. And winning, yeah.

34:28 Yeah, they’re winning. They’re already winning and they got a long timeline and they’re gonna grind away here and it’s, yeah, it’s not looking good with the current divisions. Not, not very good at all.

34:43 We have, we, we, we got to get our act together. Does it need to come an enemy? Would that even do it? I mean, Japan knew in 1940 that to be very careful

34:59 Not to wake the sleeping giant, that is the American people. And, and then Pearl Harbor happened and they were like, Oh, we messed up, man. Boy, did we mess up, you know, in two nuclear bombs, two atomic bombs later, and us beating them all the way back to Tokyo through every single island throughout the entire Pacific. That is what happens when you push the sleeping giant too far. We have been so comfortable.

35:26 We have gotten so lazy. We have gotten so fat. We’ve gotten so gelatinous. We’ve gotten so obese. We’ve gotten so careless about protecting our freedoms.

35:34 We’ve been giving them away for convenience for the past 30 years, every opportunity for a little bit of security and a little bit of convenience. I will just give up absolutely everything. I remember my grandma taking her phone off the hook and unplugging it before we talked about the president in any way, shape or form. And now our phones listen to us 24 seven, we’re being fed ads and we’ve just accepted that there’s actually no presence of privacy or security in any element of our life.

36:00 I have not accepted this because I still remember what it feels like to have sovereignty, both technologically and of my mind, where I’m not being advertised and being fed propaganda from every single source, whether it’s a private corporate entity or the government that’s telling me what I need to be thinking about what’s best for me and my family. Last time that happened, no, I mean, no French, Brian, but we went and picked up muskets and we fought every single person that was not aligned with these ideas of freedom off of our shores. So like, not to go like 1776, but don’t push America too far over freedom.

36:36 But we’ve been giving it up inch by inch for the past 30, 40 years. Yeah, and COVID was a little microcosm of that, right? It’s like, oh, I’m gonna take a little bit of your freedom away, I’m gonna take a little bit more, a little bit more, well, I don’t wanna start a problem, I guess I’ll just go along, I’ll go along. And then you wake up a year later and you’re like, oh, what the hell just happened? I gave up everything, now you have my health, Now you have me doing stupid things, now you have my kids scared, and then it’s easier to do the next time.

37:07 And that’s the microcosm, now you look at the last 20 years of America, and then it’s like, it’s gonna get easier and easier. Talk about the overweight, talk about the lethargic, because that’s going into your military. And you posted something recently that said, the military standards have dropped because they can’t get enough recruits that don’t have this 36% body fat or less for men. Yeah, I mean, that’s your military, Tim. What’s happening there?

37:36 What do you see? Yeah, so currently, we have the lowest eligibility of Americans that could serve in the military. So we are so, whether it’s drug use, criminal records, or their health. It’s mostly, the vast majority of it is their health. They’re not even eligible to serve.

37:59 So because of that, because our pool, our population of eligible soldiers, airmen, Marines, to be in the military is so small, the Air Force is the only one to do it. The Army and the Marines and the Navy, I don’t think would ever lower standards. I was very surprised to see that the Air Force did it. But that is exactly what they did, Brian. They lowered the body fat, the BMI level of who’s allowed to be in the military.

38:26 They lowered it so they would accept a fatter soldier because so much of America is fat. It’s damaging us in every way. When you’re obese, and I’m not fat shaming, and whatever health situation you’re in, I will love you, but we can also, just like there’s a man and a woman, there is healthy and there is unhealthy. Being obese is unhealthy. Being obese is the main indicator for almost every single health concern that can give you early death from cardiovascular, from even mental health to carcinogens, your likelihood to have cancer.

39:12 All of these things are impacted by obesity. You want your insurance claims to go down, be a healthier society. You want us to spend less money on our military, be a healthier society. We as a society are the least healthy that we have ever been in our country’s history and it is bad, bad, gross. How do you change that?

39:36 If it is, it’s probably not you because you literally try to kill yourself every day with your CrossFit workouts and training to get a… was Rory, you were training on his last fight and like all the crazy stuff you do at ROKA and everywhere else. Like the average American, why is it going the other way? Is it because these corporations come up with the next food product that’s bad for us? They come up with the next thing where you don’t have to move a muscle even to get to your car?

40:01 Like, what is it? Is it that? Both of those things happening? I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I don’t think there’s a single indicator.

40:10 There’s not a single data point for us to point to, to be like, oh, this is the reason why America got so fat. Your diet has a big part to it. As a society, it’s gotten very comfortable. We’ve been a very successful company for a very long time now. So with prosperity comes convenience.

40:28 You don’t have to do the hard work that we were accustomed to earlier, building bridges and building buildings during the Industrial Revolution. So we’ve also just got lazy. We’re lazy. And there’s nothing good that comes from being lazy. And there’s a lot to lose from being lazy.

40:50 And you don’t see a lot of really obese people in communist countries because they only get so much food. It is a bad byproduct of it. When you look at a society, you’re like, oh, there’s not a lot of fat people in Venezuela. It’s like, yeah, they don’t have a lot of food. They have no opportunity to eat.

41:14 Here, we are so prosperous. We are so free that people just are lazy. And there has been a recent, I’ll say revolution of health and fitness. The Jocko Willinks, David Goggins, Joe Rogan, guys talking about how fulfilling life is when you’re healthy. Everything’s better when you’re healthy, food tastes better, sex is more fun, sleep is deeper.

41:43 Your ability, your activity to play with your children, your productivity at work. There’s not an area of my life that is not improved because I am an extremely healthy person. And I know people will look at the workout, they look at 60 minutes of my day, they’re like, oh, why would you do that? That’s not, that doesn’t look fun. But do you know what, the other 23 hours of my day are so enriched because of it.

42:10 And I just, I wish I could give people what it tastes like to eat the ribs that I smoked last night, you know, to then go and have an amazing night with my kids as we’re playing lacrosse in the backyard, to then have a fantastic night with my wife before we went to bed, to then sleep a powerful seven and a half hours to wake up with a big smile on my face, you know, with my three-year-old calling to bed with me, like that is what it’s about. Those other 23 hours are so worth the 60 minutes of pain that I have to endure for my workout. Yeah, I know that feeling.

42:43 I mean, for me, I struggled with drug addiction for a long time, and when I got sober, I actually started training jujitsu back in 02. And I used to make jokes to myself because I’d go train hard every day for an hour, two hours, and get my endorphins, and I’d be like, oh, you’re just still a drug addict, Brian, because you got your endorphins, and then the rest of my day was amazing. Like you said, I could eat well, I liked being around myself, I was in a good mood, And so it’s worth going into that pain, and then when it’s natural and you have to earn it, then it actually is a healthy addiction.

43:15 But yeah, I mean, when I don’t train, I don’t like being around me, period. Nothing’s as good. But it seems like that message isn’t getting through to America, and it’s going the other way. So again, I’ll say, is there gonna be anything that’s gonna change that, or is it gonna have to break before it gets better? I mean, tipping points and breaks are sometimes the catalyst that are necessary for real change.

43:43 When somebody looks at their pocketbook and they realize how much they’re paying, like Americans right now paying for their health insurance, it’s stifling. As an employer, my businesses have what me as the employer having to pay a large percentage of the medical care for insurance for all the employees and then out of pocket expense that all the employees have to play, the only person that’s making out here is the insurance company. And the insurance company has to charge that much because the society is so unhealthy.

44:15 And I don’t know at what point the society is just like, yeah, this isn’t sustainable. You know, yeah, this isn’t going to work. I don’t know where that is, but it feels like we have been on a fast track to get there. Well, there’s always a new drug that can fix your obesity and heart problems, right? So, and maybe that’s another episode where we’ll talk about that cycle.

44:42 Is there just a lack of the truth being told out there? I mean, you mentioned people like Jocko and Goggins and Rogan and you, and I do feel like there’s a young, probably mostly male population that craves the truth, Tim, you look at one of my most popular guests on the show. It’s Dan Pena, 78 year old, former military guy who lives up in his castle here. And he literally yells at people for a living. And people love it because he’s like the grandpa that we all once had that gave it to us straight.

45:10 I feel like the truth is the most valuable commodity and most priceless and rare commodity these days of looking at someone and saying, you suck, you’re fat, you need to go work harder, you need to get a job. I mean, is that an issue of what we’re having here, as opposed to, everyone’s okay, you’re gonna be all right. You’re, you know, all this stuff. I don’t know. Am I on to something here?

45:34 No, Brian, you’re right. I’ll just do sports. You know, I can’t take a nine year old on the field. That’s not good. And be like, you know, you’re doing great.

45:47 You know, keep it up. He’s never gonna get better. Like he will stay as he is for the rest of the time that he plays that sport uh… and then he gets out there and he plays a game and they get smashed you know he gets no goals he he’s embarrassed you know he walks in front and and he’s he’s fed those same lies by his family where it’s like oh that was okay but he sees through that uh… and he’s either gonna live in a lie and he’s gonna be can get placated by society and by the coaches and by his family And he’s going to stay that same, not improved, evolved human and that forever child.

46:31 Or there’s this other road and it’s not the, it’s not the funnest road because you sit there and you wallow in the shame of losing. You realize what it felt like to struck and strike out. And then you go home and you practice and you spend a little bit more time on the mound. You spend a throw on the ball a few more times, get on the ice and hit the puck a few more times. Whatever that modality is, where did that sport is?

46:49 You remember the pain of that defeat. You remember the pain and the humiliation of that shame, and then you work to improve. And then, then the rare thing happens. You score. Oh, man, it feels so good.

47:02 It feels so good. The most compelling moments in my whole entire life has been the times that I failed or I lost. And it made the wins so much sweeter, to be standing in an octagon and have my hand raised, You know, to be called a champion, you know, to earn that black belt, to go on to, you know, to be part of the special operations community and become a green beret and a ranger and a sniper. You know, it was always one failure away from making that mistake that would ensure that I never became that thing that I aspired to be.

47:37 And so you have these two options. You have these two roads. You have the one that’s It’s less traveled right now, and it’s the straight and narrow where I’m going to commit myself to hard work and to discipline and to regiment. I’m going to identify the failures of my life, and I’m going to work hard to improve. Or I’m going to be complacent, I’m going to lack discipline, and I’m going to be a forever child where I want to be told, oh, I’m going to make whatever lies that I want to live in be the truth for me.

48:06 People will feed me those truths because of the society that we’re living in, but it’s up to the individual to choose which path that they’re on. And the thing about those truths that kills me is that nobody wants to shame them or tell them they’re wrong and everybody wants everything’s gonna be okay. But the real world tells you those truths every fucking day in full volume, right? If you’re not a man that has accomplished things and are proud of yourself and have all these things mastered, women will want nothing to do with you.

48:39 In business, capitalism doesn’t care. It will not reward you if you’re not out there being the best. And so while no one will tell you to your face that maybe you suck, the world will tell you sooner or later. And so I look at sometimes these people that are like, oh, you’re being too hard or you need to be nicer, you need to love them for who they are. And I’m like, okay, but sooner or later they’re gonna get the message and they’re gonna get this rejection and failure and then you can deal with this future depression or maybe it’s too late then.

49:09 But I mean, yeah, the world has a funny way of getting the truth to you in these ways, right? Yeah, man, but you have to listen. And this disease of entitlement where you get to blame, you’re not paying attention, like my business is failing. Ah, man, my business is failing because they don’t like me because I’m a Christian white man. than my business is failing because, you know, insert whatever blame I want.

49:42 Instead, it was a bad product, Tim. Like all you had to do was have a better product that was for sale for the right price that I marketed in the right way that I had a fair margin for me to actually then build an inventory to sell more of said great product. Or again, those two choices, me learning from my mistakes and choosing to find a better version of myself for the easy scapegoat entitlement out of just passing the blame and that other road, the straight and narrow one, that one is so enriching and fulfilling.

50:17 The other one is full of despair, mental health problems, depression, suicide, gender dysphoria. You get to choose. Yeah. Now you’re right. Yeah.

50:30 As one of my mentors, Dan Pena says, he says, you can pay me now or you can pay me later, that you will pay me. And it’s a similar thing here. You can get the hard truth now or you can spend the next 40 years of your life as it grinds you down with all these other ways of you getting it. But you’re gonna get it, I think, either way. And look, I mean, if anyone’s read your books, Scars and Stripes, or even looks at some of my moments in the past, I mean, you got some hard lessons early on that you were fucking up your life, right?

51:01 You got some real things like, And I mean, I woke up in a hospital room in 2001 after an overdose and they’re like, okay, you almost died, you know? Here’s the news, are you gonna do something about it? All my friends left me, my girlfriend left me, I lost my job. It was like, here’s some feedback, maybe you should change your game. And so I did, and then when I came back, it was like one of the greatest accomplishments in my life.

51:24 Talk about the book briefly because I think a lot of people were surprised him to hear you had such this checkered past because we kind of knew that the later version of Tim, who was the Green Beret, that incredibly successful MMA fighter, the things you do with Apogee, but when I heard even some of those stories and I knew some of them, I didn’t even actually think I was hearing about the same guy, but you were quite an unruly teenager, right? Yeah, but I mean, look, yeah, I was just a bad human. Look at you in your good suits.

51:58 Think back to you in 2001. about every single one of those micro-decisions that led you to that overdose. Every time that you’ve been placated, every time that somebody had just given you the easy answer instead of the hard truth. We’ve been talking about this whole entire conversation, it’s the exact same for me. Scars and stripes, so the stripes in the military are your rank, but more importantly, it’s the things that you have done to earn that position. Usually, it’s mistakes that you learn through, so that’s how you earn your stripes, and the same way that you earn scars.

52:28 The scars on my face from my fights, the scars on my hands from my mistakes, the scars on my knees from my motorcycle crashes, the scars on my heart and my soul from failed relationships, from wishing and wanting but never doing the discipline and the regiment and the dedication to see that thing come to reality. That whole entire book is … A lot of people were surprised because it’s full of my mistakes. It’s full of my failures. why I had to have my buddy Nick write it with me is because I couldn’t have such truthful introspective into all of my mistakes and be held accountable for those mistakes. I needed somebody else and one of my best friends to do it with me. And so you know, obviously, it’s a New York Times bestseller. It’s been a huge success. And I think it’s been a huge success because people are starving for truth. They’re starving for real experts. And they’re starving for people like you and Joe who will just go out and say what they know is the truth, but people are so scared to say it.

53:29 You know, like, Oh, I can’t say that. I remember being in this exact building, talking to the, to a couple of very good friends about a kind of like, it was 20, 2020. And I was like, man, this, this BLM organization, there’s something off about it. And but I can’t say it, you know, because like, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a white guy. And I have a ton of black friends.

53:52 I want to support them. They deserve justice. And what’s happened to them is unfair. We’ve got to figure out how to do it. But this organization is wrong.

53:58 But if I don’t hashtag BLM, I’m going to be ostracized. And now, three years later, we find out they’ve embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve bought $10 million mansions. None of that money went back to any of the communities. I couldn’t see it there because I was scared of the repercussions of saying something that I knew to be the truth.

54:19 And that’s just another example of the failure of me that I’ve had over my whole entire life where there were times where I knew what the right thing was, but I just didn’t do it. I didn’t do it because I was a coward. I did it because that’s lazy. I did it because I was a selfish entitled little prick, and I write about it in that book in Scars and Stripes. And, but then like you and like me and like Joe, like our lives have these tattered pasts of all of these mistakes, but then here we are now having learned from those mistakes, having owned those mistakes, and then the man to stand up and look at those mistakes in the face and be like, I’m gonna change this about myself.

54:56 To be a better father, to be a better man, to be a better husband, to be a better employer, to be a better soldier, just to be a better human. It’s super inspirational, congrats on the book, and I’m so glad you had a co-pilot in there. When I do my films here, I have a director and he’s become a good friend of mine, but he’s the one that always says, like, Brian, we gotta put this in the movie. We gotta go here. And the problem is, is even though I wanna be objective and I wanna tell the truth, your subconscious is always protecting that ego and you won’t tell it at all, right?

55:32 I think you had a moment in the book where it was one of the hardest things you said you had to write in there and it was just like, you just had to put it out there and it’s the hardest thing to do. It’s really important to have someone that can push you there, right? Yeah, it is you should surround yourself with those people and anybody that you know You have the crabs these people that are just holding on to dragging you down and there’s people that are just play kidding You’re telling you the lies that you want to keep here But never the truth that you need to hear get those people out of your life. Just cut them out You don’t need them. It’s too short You know this finite time that we have on this earth find people that will speak truth in your life I want the best for you and the truth is always the best and I appreciate what you’re saying about the pressure like like you said during 2020 with the BLM movement I mean, I appreciate your honesty that even you still feel the pressure to do certain things and we all feel that.

56:22 And sometimes there’s so much pressure and there’s so much craziness going on that you’re like, all right, maybe I’m just gonna hold off on that right now. And who knows, maybe that was the right decision at the time, I don’t know, but none of us is pure. We’re always trying to do the best thing every day, but we can’t always do it and that’s okay. And people need to hear that message too. Yep, the truth.

56:44 Tell me about freedom of speech, what you’re feeling on social media, the concept of censorship and self-censorship, because you’ve talked about that too. You know, I mean, you run a lot of businesses, you do a lot of good in the world, and you can’t have your account being shut down. So the self-censorship is the crazy thing. And, you know, social media is really good at it. I always say, we’re coming out with a documentary film in about three months, Tim, that talks about everything that happened to us in 2020.

57:09 And we’re gonna go deep on some of these concepts a big tech censorship and self-censorship. But you know, it’s funny, first they drop down your views and your likes, and then they take away your monetization, and then if you’re still a really bad boy, they’ll give you a strike or take you down, and then if you really don’t listen, they’ll take you off the platform. But most people don’t make it that far, and they just censor themselves. Tell me what that’s been like for you.

57:32 I do it all the time. I actually posted something this morning on Instagram. I got a new really cool work tool, a gun, and if I post that, my account is immediately like muted to a degree, it’s shadow band. So I took the gun and I put rainbows over it, so the image is just me smiling, holding onto two rainbows. That is censorship.

58:00 I have to self-sensor because I know the algorithm will penalize me for not doing what they want me to do, which is like total lie. And, you know, we had to do it in 2020. I cannot wait to see your documentary. I can’t wait to push it to everybody. I hope everybody pays attention because it’s happening again. We’re living through 1984 right now, we are in a brave new world. And, and we’re going to be a Lord of the Flies if people don’t start paying attention. And so self censorship is, it’s where there’s these outside influences. And they’re all passive, they’re not telling us to do it exactly. But we know that if we don’t toe the line, you know, we’re going to be demonetized, we’re going to be shadow banned, we might get a strike, or we might be kicked off the platform, you know, and as a business owner, that costs dollars as a capitalist. But so I’m being controlled, I don’t have sovereignty digitally, because this outside entity is able to control what I want to say, and they’re doing it to me, subconsciously, they have done it in a psychological warfare of saying like, okay, you can’t talk bad about BLM 2020, 2021. Because Nike, you know, like, they blacked out their screen, and they have like, the swoosh that had like an extra black thing underneath it, right. And then like Adidas is donating money. And like, heaven forbid you say anything. All the while, you want to support the community, you want to support the black community,

59:23 But you just don’t know how to do it. Because the only avenue to do it is a corrupt one. You know, don’t say anything about the lab leak, don’t say anything about anything negative. And that’s happened about the vaccines. Definitely don’t say anything negative about the World Health Organization or CDC.

59:36 Don’t talk negatively about Disney, about Facebook, about Instagram, about Twitter. We learned in the Twitter files that specific government entities were going in and asking Twitter to have specific people censor during elections, that not just people, but journalists and entire news agencies were being de-platformed or having their accounts frozen to talk about things that we now know to be absolutely factual and truthful. Wild, wild. Did that boggle your mind to read those files?

1:00:10 Were you surprised? Oh man. I was a little surprised. I wasn’t surprised, but what surprises me now, I got in an argument with a friend recently and I was, and he’s like, hey, oh man, you’re just regurgitating a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. I was like, no, no, no, no, did you read the Twitter files?

1:00:26 He’s like, I mean, I read about them, about like, it’s just like these, these kind of like right wing conservative journalists that went in there and I was like, Oh, no, no, no, you’re, you didn’t read them. Just so you didn’t read them. And you have no idea what I’m talking about. And before we have a further conversation, why don’t you go in and read those files? He’s like, but like, they’re out of context. And they’re just going to, to like, to try and make an argument for a specific idea. Like, it’s just data, just go and read And he literally just wanted to stay in ignorance instead of going and finding out the information and all the Twitter Twitter files told us is That people are being specifically censored the ideas were being censored and they were doing it for political motivations and and to support specific propaganda ideas and and People like you that would say anything that wasn’t along those line that they would immediately be censored and punished because of it And we knew that Twitter do it was doing it if Twitter was doing it than YouTube was doing it.

1:01:25 If YouTube was doing it, then Facebook and then Instagram and that and everybody else. You know, and then if there was a new option for a new social media, like Parler, for example, that one got immediately de-platformed, de-monetized, and their account got taken off of the App Store, both the Google Store and the Apple Store. So like, there’s no way for you to win. This is what we are experiencing now in the new fight of the First Amendment. and We got to start fighting. We got to start fighting for our freedom of speech Isn’t it crazy how some people didn’t actually read the Twitter files?

1:02:02 I mean they did a nice news media blackout on that and I had similar actions Oh, I didn’t read them like how could you not read them? It was crazy to read the stuff in there First of all, the fact that Elon put him out there was was, you know, pretty epic But you know the weird thing Tim is that when I read him and I had another weird reaction, because I don’t know if you remember what happened to me, but in April, April 6, 2020, we had the second largest YouTube livestream in the world. 30 minutes later, for the first time in my nine-year history with YouTube, and I was a partner, I’d been down to headquarters, they were paying me money, they pull the video, first time ever, and I get in this big fight with them, but very shortly, Dropbox pulls my stuff, Dropbox.

1:02:42 So that means they’re watching the files in my Dropbox, then PayPal, then Facebook, then LinkedIn, and then a bunch of things just drop, drop, drop, drop. And I was like, that’s kind of weird, but I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I leave that to my guests. But when I read the Twitter files, I was like, oh, of course something could be coordinated. Because like you said, if the FBI is talking to Twitter, well, of course they’re talking to YouTube and they’re talking to all these other people.

1:03:08 So now I was like, oh, now it does make sense. And I had this weird fit thing in my stomach of, man, this was happening. And I was like, I can’t wait for the YouTube files to come out. And I’m sure they can’t wait either. Yeah, like never.

1:03:22 And the funny thing is, Tim, what I’ve been doing the last three months is uploading all of my 2020 and 2021 content on YouTube. And I mean, if they’re listening to this right now, bless. But so far, they haven’t taken a single thing down. And I don’t know. But the key words that were hotspots in 2020 and 2021 aren’t now in 2023.

1:03:43 You know, the things that you said, had you had those gone up in 2020 or 2021, you would have been de-platformed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And now, and that’s the tricky thing. So they did censor you then, and it’s awesome that we can look at them now, but we needed to hear it from you then. We needed Elon in 19 and 20.

1:04:02 And shame on anybody that hasn’t read those Twitter files and more importantly, taken what we learned from the Twitter files and then applied it to all of the other social media tech companies because they’re all doing it. Yeah, when I say tech companies, Google, LinkedIn, PayPal, every e-comm back door way to process an ex, like they froze people accounts, they kick, they demonetize people, they froze bank accounts. That’s the power that they have. And they’re all coordinating in it and you can read about it or you could live in ignorance.

1:04:35 Yeah, you have to see what was going on and so many agencies from the FBI to basically unnamed CIA to send it subcommittees, like everybody was throwing requests at them, trying to push a narrative about the Russia thing to where Twitter was even pushing back. And these people really wanted to believe that Russia was involved. They’re like, we see no evidence. And they’re like, look again, look again. And it’s just people need to read that and see what was going on.

1:04:58 The thing that blew my mind, Tim, is that when I started getting censored, I stood up and said, wait a second, I have the right to freedom of speech, okay? I know I’m in Britain, but I was like, where are my governments protecting me? And the government said, no, no, no, It’s a private company, you signed their form, you signed their terms and conditions, so you gotta take it up with them. And I was like, okay, I’ll go do that, we tried to sue them, we couldn’t sue them.

1:05:22 Little did I find out that they were violating my rights by going behind the scenes and telling them to take my content out. It was like the best of both worlds for them and the worst of both worlds for me. So yeah, people need to be aware of this and. Yeah, so how do we fight that? Yeah.

1:05:40 Yeah, how do we fight that? I mean, are people more aware now? I mean, you know, the blockchain is- It’s still happening. It’s still happening. The blockchain is talking about ways where we can have this to where it can be transparent.

1:05:58 I mean, even Dorsey said before he left that a private company can never do this properly because there’s always gonna be a corporate interest that’s gonna come back and try to do things for the benefit of the company. Obviously having people like you are. And I understand it for the benefit of the company, but they weren’t doing it for the benefit of the company. They were doing it for the benefit of the ideas of the individuals that were working for the company.

1:06:20 This wasn’t a bottom line thing. Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube wasn’t gonna make more or less money because they were demonetizing people. They were demonetizing people that were talking negative about COVID-19. So it doesn’t make any sense on the bottom line because that’s not what they were doing. They were de-platforming and demonetizing people that weren’t towing the line of specific ideas and that doesn’t have anything to do with the company because they would still make even more money, I argue that had they allowed those ideas to be on there, more people would have been on there, more people would have been arguing, more people would have been interacting and commenting and that’s more revenue for them on the advertising dollars.

1:06:55 So how do we, I don’t know the answer to this Brian, I don’t know how to fight this right now because and we’re in a fight for it. Yeah, and this is everything, because it’s the information war, or as Robert Malone said, it’s a fifth generation, you know, psychological warfare techniques being used, and this is a primary one. And again, it’s all about market share, so you go where the eyeballs are. And so you can’t say, I’m gonna go create true social or parlor, but if nobody goes to it, it doesn’t matter.

1:07:22 So it has to happen on the Twitters and the other ones. Look, we have made some progress, because during that lockdown, everything was super, super left-leaning woke. At least Elon’s got Twitter, Spotify back Rogan and I I honestly felt like YouTube eased up when they saw that because they thought wait a second Maybe they’re gonna eat our lunch for us But it’s my nobody’s ordered Yeah, last month YouTube came out and you know, I have a ton ton of friends in the firearms industry and They would do gun reviews on YouTube like hey, this is a great farm. This is the new farm That’s going to the American military. Here’s some features about it. This is how you reload. Here’s the safety You know, and YouTube came out with, they changed the user agreement that said you weren’t allowed to load a weapon, you weren’t allowed to shoot more than one round a second.

1:08:13 And if you did those things, you’re going to get a strike against you. And that was just, that was a couple of weeks ago. So they still try to figure out ways and, you know, it was PayPal when they had the outrage when an internal document got leaked that they could find somebody that they found to be supporting any ideas that they did not agree with. They would find them, $300 to $3,000, they would go in and take your money if they found that you were supporting something, a radical idea that they didn’t agree with.

1:08:52 So that was just, what, five, six months ago? We are still in the belly of the beast of this fight, the fight for censorship and this, how do you reconcile censorship of a, of a private company with the first amendment? Like how does our freedom of speech with a private company and I am a capitalist and I’m a libertarian. So I do support, support a private industry being able to do the thing that they want to do. But if that thing is then a public service and the town hall where people are communicating and you are censoring, then you have to be transparent about how you’re censoring, in my opinion.

1:09:27 So if YouTube came out and said, hey, this is what we’re doing. If you’re a conservative, we’re just not gonna let you talk on here. You know, if you have ideas that you like or supported Reagan, we don’t like you. If you like Lenin and Mao, fantastic. We’re gonna go ahead and promote you in our algorithm.

1:09:45 But they won’t. And that’s where the disservice is, and that’s where the lie is, And that’s where I think people are starting to fight back because we know it’s dishonest, we know it’s not factual or accurate, but they just won’t come to terms that we learned in the Twitter pile that we knew was already true. So something that Elon just announced is that he’s making the algorithm public on how they sort everything, manage everything, and you can monitor your accounts even in real time.

1:10:12 So that’s a step forward. If we could force all of the companies to be completely transparent on exactly what they’re doing. Now, will we get there? I don’t know, but it’s a step because again, it’s more transparency than they’d have to really maybe own up to it. I don’t know, I’m just brainstorming here.

1:10:27 The other thing, Tim, is that we went heavy into the blockchain space for the past two years and I had some serious conversations with people that are kind of the Bitcoin fanatics. And the Bitcoiners are interesting because they understand that property rights, it all starts with property rights. And if you have the right to your property, freedom of speech actually flows from that. And if you go to the communist system where you have no rights to property, Well, pretty soon you have no rights to anything else.

1:10:52 And so the Bitcoiners are pretty into that because they can own these goddamn coins and the money can’t be printed, the government can’t take them away. So they talk a lot about this and how it can lead to the freedom of speech if you can have your money because PayPal shut my account down and if they started taking my money away, freedom of speech is a luxury when you don’t have any money is what I would say. Yeah, that’s right. Now we’ve got this whole CBDC thing coming in and this whole FedNow program that’s supposedly happening in July.

1:11:25 It’s probably one of the things we should be the most scared about. There’s actually a guy I’ve had in here named Chris Giancarlo, who used to be the CFTC head, and he is really big on this digital dollar initiative in saying that this is probably the one chance we have in human history to create a currency that’s not gonna be censored that’s based on all the American values of freedom or it’s game over. Because China’s rolled out their digital yuan and it’s scary as hell.

1:11:52 I don’t know if I’ve thought about this or if you’ve had conversations with people, but they’re trying to roll this out now and it seems like they’re trying to shut down crypto as well. Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the blockchain and Bitcoin and of all cryptocurrencies because it creates sovereignty. You know, sovereignty is the most extreme form of freedom. You know, and you cannot have sovereignty when anybody controls any element of your life, and property’s a big part of that.

1:12:19 You know, if the government can come and take my money, if the government can come and take my home, if the government can come and take everything that I have in my state, then what do I really have? Like, I don’t have sovereignty. If they can take my job because I don’t fall in line with them telling me to do something to take a medicine that they say I have to take, and if I don’t have that medicine, then I can’t fly on a plane, or I can’t, you know, go into a bank, or I can’t own a business, or my kids can’t go to school that is i don’t have sovereignty anymore and they have been very very very very effectively strategically eroding our forms of sovereignty property is the most extreme form of sovereignty and uh…

1:12:59 You know it it i hope at the end of the people who say this you go and look at what it looks like have a set social credit score attached to your money where you can even go spend money if you don’t do the thing that the that the Chinese Communist Party tells you to do, then you have no money. Not only do you have no sovereignty, but you’re gonna starve to death, as will your children, because your money has less value because you don’t do the things that they give you a score and a tally about what your value and what your money is worth because of the things that you do or don’t do for the party. Freaking frightening.

1:13:38 So, yeah, I have been tracking this very closely, Brian, And I think we’re in the same boat on this one. Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at what happens in China, you know, it kind of starts there and it kind of comes this way. So, you know, you look at what they do with the surveillance and the social credit score, and then some of the CBDC stuff, we have to be careful it doesn’t come this way. So, yeah, people need to get educated because like they could take all your money away like that.

1:14:02 They could find out how you use every single dollar. They could give you money that they restrict the usage of. I mean, it gets pretty dark. Um, something I just thought of, I wanted to ask you, uh, also before we go. Guns and the right to bear arms for maybe the first time ever, I just kind of linked that with you saying, I have the right to my property and they can’t take that away from me.

1:14:26 And maybe I just got the obvious point that you probably already know is that the right to bear arms gives you the right to defend your property and your sovereignty, and it’s all rolled up in one, right? Is that how that, that’s right. Is that, that is, that’s what it is. Okay. Yeah, man. It’s so it’s a testament to you. So many people look at the right to bear arms and they’re like, oh, these guys just want guns. No, that’s not it. It is so much more than that. It’s my right to protect what is mine. It’s my right to protect my family. It’s my right to protect my home. It’s the right to protect my land. It’s right to protect, you know, my freedom of speech. It’s my right to protect everything. But I have no ability to protect those things without means to do it. And the means to do it, having fought peasants, In the hills of Afghanistan, using lever-action rifles and muzzle loaders, do not tell me that a single man with a rifle is not dangerous, because they have fought the Russians, they’ve fought the British, they’ve fought the French, they have defeated the most powerful force on the planet, the American military, and it was peasants with rifles in the fields and the hills of Afghanistan.

1:15:31 So I am telling you that the power of a single individual protecting his or her property with a firearm is powerful, so don’t let anybody lie to you about it and try to take a single gun from you, because that’s the point of it all. That’s the point that the founding fathers understood so clearly, was it gives the power to the people to protect their rights, and the rights include property. The rights include the freedom of speech. The rights improve the freedom of religion.

1:15:58 It’s all intertwined, Brian, and it’s awesome that you said it like that, and that’s exactly the point of it all. I love your analogy about the peasants in Afghanistan, because you’ve seen the flip side of that and like you said here’s a guy with a rifle who’s motivated and he can be a powerful force and I mean look at Vietnam and what happened with that whole conflict and they’ve been fighting the French before that and they’re like okay we got some arms and we don’t want to go anywhere and look what they can do I think the reason that the Brits typically struggle with understanding the Americans need to bear arms is that we never went through that here you know You know, because the firearm really wasn’t maybe invented when we were struggling for power maybe a thousand years ago.

1:16:39 So it wasn’t woven into the DNA as a necessary piece. Maybe that’s why. So they don’t get it. But of course America was born on, the Brits coming into your house is illegal search and seizure. The Brits coming over there taxation without representation.

1:16:54 Basically just messing with everyone’s business. And the rifle, I mean, that was, that was everything, right? And so yeah, that’s, yeah, it’s arms to be specific. And I always want to say arms, arms, because the founding fathers used intentionally vague language. No, like we didn’t, we didn’t have telegram.

1:17:12 We didn’t have telephones when they said that freedom of speech was paramount. You know, we didn’t have Twitter. We didn’t have Facebook. When they said that, you know, that, that freedom of speech is, is, is, you know, we didn’t have churches that were occurring online where you could go and it’s your place of worship and watch it on your iPad. You know, they just defined and protected religion.

1:17:31 So they were very intentional in using the word arms because they didn’t know what was going to be invented. Things were being innovated and invented at the time where they had muskets then, they had cannons, you know, then they had chain guns, you know, then they had Gatling guns, like that hadn’t been invented yet. But they knew that the arms were the important thing to protect all of it. And on the wall in my office, I brought back a British muzzle loading rifle that hangs on the wall of my office and she felt response.

1:18:00 And I brought that back from Afghanistan and there was a young boy that was carrying that to war. He was part of the Taliban. And that rifle, I look up there every single day and I look at it because it was a 13, 14 year old boy that was walking with the Taliban and he was carrying a muzzle loaded rifle from the 1800s and he was fighting the most elite fighting force on the planet, American special operations. And it’s a reminder what one man can do with a gun fighting for his own land.

1:18:30 And it’s scary. Wow, that’s powerful. How is the fight for the right to bear arms in America? Is it going the same way everything else is? Is it still difficult?

1:18:42 Everything’s under attack right now. Every freedom, you know, I could walk over to my gym bag right there and I can pull out a copy of the Constitution, I keep with me everywhere that I go. And there’s not a single line in a single one of those amendments that’s not currently being under attack. And we need patriots to start fighting for their rights again. Amen to that.

1:19:11 You got me all fired up, Tim. All fired up. Just wanna close and talk about schools because starting a school is no joke and you’ve been doing this now for three years plus, I think. What have you learned? What do people need to know about what you’ve learned with Apogee, what you’re doing, about how we educate our children, what’s important?

1:19:31 All that. Man, I mean, what’s important is your kids. You know, they are everything. They are the next generation. They are our next innovators.

1:19:40 They are our next Beethovens. They are our next Elon Musk’s. You know, if we wanna cure cancer, if we wanna go to Mars, it’s our children that are gonna be doing it, it’s not us. And they are so vulnerable. It is our job to protect them.

1:19:52 It’s our job to protect their minds. It’s our job to protect their bodies. And we have been very woefully failing at both of those things. So I started Apogee. There’s two branches of it.

1:20:05 There’s ApogeeStrong.com, which is an online mentorship program. And then there’s our physical campus, Apogee Cedar Park, which is here in Texas. We are packed and we are growing. We’re opening our first two new studios. Since we’ve opened, we’ve been sold out and a waiting list.

1:20:23 So appagestudapark.com is where people are applying to go to our physical campus. And what I’ve learned is there’s nothing harder than creating an environment that is free from anything besides an opportunity for children to learn. That’s all a school needs to be. It needs to be free from every external source of propaganda, negative ideas. These are brilliant young minds that just need to be given a spark.

1:20:55 They need to be given a spark and a passion for learning to become intrinsic. I can give somebody a fish or I can teach somebody how to fish. I’m teaching these young learners how to think on their own so they can learn for the rest of their lives. Every time I’m around our kids and I go around other kids, I’m like, there’s something wrong with that kid? Nope, that’s just a regular kid that is being forced to be a consumer and a lemming. And then I see my little entrepreneurs and I see these little brilliant savages that are figuring out ways to ask questions that I don’t know the answers to, you know, and neither do any of the guides. It is the most rewarding, fulfilling thing to take these kids out of these failed educational systems and put them into an environment that’s free from everything else besides the opportunity to learn how to be a critical thinker. And man, it’s rad. It is rad, Brian.

1:21:54 Okay, when’s the London branch coming? I can yank my kids out of their school and put them in yours. Start it, man. I mean, that’s what I tell everybody. Like, everyone’s like, I don’t own any of these ideas and I will share an open book about what we did, what worked. Man, first year was really rough, but on the staff side, on the parent side, on the curriculum side, second year’s better, third year’s It’s just gonna be even better and we’re just gonna keep getting better.

1:22:18 Like I tell everybody, man, take your kids out of school, homeschool them, start an own or start your own school. Those are your options right now. I know, gosh, so important too. Last thing, school shootings, we see them continuing to happen. They’re very hard to watch.

1:22:33 How do we fix this? I know you have some ideas on that. Yeah, man, I wish I could swipe up and go to my notes. I was writing last night until late into the night. I was I’m gonna do a YouTube thing probably today and it’s gonna be a little clickbaity cuz I’m gonna say you’re never gonna Be able to protect your school But I’ll expand until you never be able to protect your school with easy answers Right now that the two things that have to change is there’s this dangerous mental health crisis happening in the United States Where our society is broken. It’s divided, you know, you see these broken young men that are acting out violently Recently, we’ve been seeing trans shooters with mental health problems that are coming in and shooting people that they view to be enemies of their own ideas and identities.

1:23:18 That’s one big piece. There’s not an easy solution to mental health in the United States. The other problem is the access to people being able to get onto a school and access these children. The only way that you’re going to stop a good man or an evil person from doing violence is a good man that’s better at it. And I’m not baiting or asking anybody to try, but try to get into my office.

1:23:43 You know, like go give it your best junior college try and see if you can make it past our little kill box where you walk through the front door and you’re stuck inside of a bulletproof room that has cameras and on the other side of those walls is a bunch of dudes like me. You won’t make it two feet and truth you won’t make it out of the parking lot. I’m not gonna talk about what we have at my school but my school is safe And my school is safe because I took intentional measures to ensure that you’re not gonna make it out of the parking lot, getting near my school.

1:24:15 And I think you can do both of these things at the same time. You can make school safe and you can address the mental health crisis that’s happening while preserving the most important thing, which is our freedoms. And those things have to happen collaboratively. How do we protect our freedoms and our right to bear arms while we protect our very innocent, our very innocent kids in school. And so what’s next for you, Tim?

1:24:42 You’re not running for office. You’re gonna keep putting information out? Why aren’t you running for office? Oh yeah. I mean, you’re gonna read my book.

1:24:51 I just, I don’t wanna bring the shame of and accumulation of my past under my family. You know, I don’t want my three year old, my eight year old or my now grown daughters having to answer uh… about my mistakes uh… and everything gets public you know that so it’s already made in public yeah it goes to a new level uh… i think people reading a book have grace you know there’s there’s no love in politics and uh… and they come for for me and my family and not all my mistakes are in those books there’s there’s many more that mistakes in the book uh… just help tell a story. And then the other mistakes in life are just bad.

1:25:38 And so you’re looking at any and all ways of making change from your continued, you know, military service to teaching to posting content to all the other crazy things you do. Yeah, so saber allies, I kind of have like, you know, in the middle is the idea this mission to preserve and protect human life. And then there’s these lines that you could draw out directly from it. The school, Apogee Cedar Park and ApogeeStrong.com, that’s the educational wing of it. Me empowering people to learn how to protect themselves, that’s shaped our response. Save our allies is the philanthropic wing. That’s why I went to Afghanistan to help effectuate those people and to go to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid. On the military side, me continuing to serve, but I can’t talk about who I work for now.

1:26:26 But I have the humbling opportunity right now to talk to the most elite leaders in the whole entire military about the things that we’re talking about throughout this. So in the center is these ideas and then obviously creating content, social media, TV shows, all of those things are happening. All of them support this specific idea of being able to preserve and protect human life and to expand freedom. That mission in Afghanistan sounded really heavy, Tim.

1:26:52 And really traumatizing. And I often wonder how you really process that stuff because, you know, I haven’t seen you get that emotional when you were telling Rogan that story and you didn’t even tell us half of it. I know you didn’t, but I mean, I don’t know. How do you deal with stuff like that? Are you, have you done it so many times?

1:27:10 Or is the truth is you just don’t deal with stuff like that? Neither of those, just like you can live in the lies you can live in the truth. I deal with that stuff. I talk about it. I have friends that I can confide in. I cry. I hold my kids. I exercise. That was some of the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. Ukraine was equally horrific. I can deny what I saw. I can live in the post traumatic stress and have it buried, or I can be a real human and sweat and laugh and cry and struggle and address and be whole or broken.

1:28:02 I’d rather, as always, err to truth, err to real, err to hard, hard choices and discipline and regiments to see a whole version of my soul and my heart and my head. of the other which is the lies of denial and the brokenness that would then I think ultimately lead to addiction and suicide. Yeah, I appreciate you Tim in a big way. You’re a Renaissance man disguised as an MMA grunt and I really appreciate everything you do man. You continue to create doing some amazing things.

1:28:38 Best way to people, follow you on Instagram, on Twitter. What is it? Yeah, Instagram and Twitter are good. I post a lot of both a little bit more political on Twitter and definitely, uh, you know, obviously more content based on, on Instagram. And uh, and I think we have a date.

1:28:55 You need to come here to Texas and have some barbecue and shoot the coffee with me. And I’m going to come and see your Taylor. I can’t wait. I’m coming to Roca too. We’re going to roll.

1:29:03 Yeah. I mean, I do any, I mean, we see all this, all we do. Yeah. So you have an open invitation. I’m dreading just getting beat up by you, but uh, I know I just got to come and do it.

1:29:14 It’s going to be, it’s going to be fun. Cause I was watching your sheepdog stuff in the past. So I know also you do some serious training there too. But look, now I’ve seen it. I know John, I know you.

1:29:25 I’m just coming in. So yeah, deal. And we’ll get you a proper English suit as well. Sounds amazing. God bless you and everything that you do, Brian.

1:29:34 Thank you, Tim. I appreciate you. Let’s do this in person next time. And yeah, man, keep fighting. We need you out there and I appreciate everything you do.

1:29:42 All right. Thank you, sir. Take care, brother. Thank you, everybody, for watching. Follow this man, pick up, help him fight, and we’ll see you next time on London Real.

1:29:51 Bye.