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Mass Surveillance, AI & The Death Of Mainstream Media - Andy Stumpf

Andy Stumpf is a former U.S. Navy SEAL, extreme sports enthusiast, public speaker, podcaster, and author, At some point, you’ve inevitably traded your personal information for the sake of safety and security. But just how intrusive has government surveillance actually become? And why is there so much support for increasing this scrutiny among young people? Expect to learn how Tucker Carlson destroyed main stream media overnight on Twitter, why 3 in 10 Americans under 30 support the installation of cameras in the home, if we are on the brink of an Alien invasion by UFO’s, Andy’s biggest lessons from his time in the Navy SEALs, whether army selection has become too tough or too easy and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: https://www.andystumpf.com/ https://www.instagram.com/andystumpf212 Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #military #SEALs #surveillance - 00:00 Intro 00:42 Why Tucker Carlson is Crushing the Legacy Media 04:27 AI & Automation’s Role in New Media 12:48 The Future of Mainstream Media 22:17 Increasing Surveillance Inside Homes 34:20 Are We Raising the Softest Generation in History? 38:20 Is it Too Difficult to Enter the Military? 47:30 Discerning the Truthfulness of Alien Sightings 1:04:00 The Rise of Prepper Culture 1:08:58 Gun Culture in America 1:20:21 Andy’s Experiences in CrossFit 1:34:27 Lessons on Business from the Nuclear Football Operation 1:38:46 How Andy Achieved Extraordinary Things 1:51:43 Where to Find Andy - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Andy StumpfguestChris Williamsonhost
Jun 15, 20231h 52mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:42

    Intro

    1. AS

      I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States government. I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that. I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where if a government knows more about you, you are actually safer as a people. I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows about you, probably the less secure that you are. (wind blows) I don't have any wisdom, but I certainly will tell people what I think regardless of what they may think about it and how it lands with them. And if you don't like the answer, don't ask me the fucking question.

    2. CW

      Good stuff.

    3. AS

      (laughs)

    4. CW

      Andy Stumpf, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the show.

    5. AS

      (laughs) Thank you for having me.

    6. CW

      Primetime

  2. 0:42 – 4:27

    Why Tucker Carlson is Crushing the Legacy Media

    1. CW

      ratings last night, CNN 569,000, Fox News 1.73 million.

    2. AS

      Okay.

    3. CW

      MSNBC 1.86 million. The first episode of Tucker Carlson on Twitter, 82 million in 20 hours so far.

    4. AS

      So basically an ADX increase over what would be considered traditional mainstream media.

    5. CW

      Yeah. Or 40, 30X over all three combined.

    6. AS

      Put together?

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      Wow. Um, where do you get your news from?

    9. CW

      Mostly the internet.

    10. AS

      How do you select your source and how do you bounce, you know, we're in an interesting time, a time where I think people have more access to information than in the history of humankind and it seems like every day we're through that envelope or threshold even more. I have seen it in myself, I've seen it in other people, I'm sure you have too. The pros of the internet is you can find anything you want to. The cons of the internet is you can find anything that you want to. If you go there pre-cocked or with some type of confirmation bias, let me just tell anybody what they're going to find on the internet, exactly what they're looking for. And you can get lost in fake news, literally like satire sites that sometimes are so ridiculously good they're hard to tell that they're satire. Fucking totally here for it. Um, you'll come onto traditional media outlets like, you know, Fox News, the CNN, and if, and I'm sorry at this day and age if people don't realize that everybody and that message is bought and paid for. I don't know how to help you because it's right there in your face. You'd have to be blind to not see it. And I don't have a problem with people getting news from either one of those sources, let's just recognize there's a slant on it and a bias, and also they're in the business of selling ads, just like TV. So it leads you at this place, where do you get information? Do you go onto Substack? Do you go onto Twitter? Do you go onto traditional media outlets? How much do you have to balance it against the other side to determine that the information that you're getting is actually legitimate or real?

    11. CW

      Did you see the debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Douglas Murray a couple of months ago?

    12. AS

      No.

    13. CW

      You know Malcolm, the bro-

    14. AS

      Yeah.

    15. CW

      And, and Douglas as well.

    16. AS

      Yeah.

    17. CW

      And, uh, it was a discussion around mainstream media basically needs to, it, it's, uh, not something that you should be able to trust. And there was some really interesting arguments from both sides that there are constrictions, uh, and guidelines around what you can and can't do with traditional media that are, um, r- unrestricted when it comes to the more new media, uh, but that also brings with it degrees of freedom that people can take advantage of.

    18. AS

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      It was a really, really interesting discussion and I think the sort of terminally online world sees new media as this bastion of free speech which gets itself closer to the truth because it's no longer encumbered by any of the rules and procedures and the bought and paid for and so on. But I think if everybody took a really close look at it, the, the incentives are different but they're still not exactly pure.

    20. AS

      Free speech and truth are not always synonymous, and I think people have to be really cautious with that. I don't have a great answer for myself as to where you even balance ideas or resources, especially in a world where... Like I've just recently started playing around with ChatGPT, holy shit. Or image creators, holy shit. And these are in the, in like what will be viewed in the very near future as their infancy.

    21. CW

      Yeah.

    22. AS

      If they're that good right now and it can really fool intelligent people, I feel like Skynet is just around the corner.

    23. CW

      (laughs)

    24. AS

      (laughs) We are mere inches away from just getting butt-fucked by robots. That's what it's going to look like. (laughs)

    25. CW

      Dude, I, I have a fr- I have a friend who

  3. 4:27 – 12:48

    AI & Automation’s Role in New Media

    1. CW

      sells silk pillowcases and bamboo sheets on Amazon, and he has been Amazon funneling and building his business-

    2. AS

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      ... and so on and so forth. It's very effortful to do. And he got ChatGPT to write his sales page for him and then he used Midjourney to create the photos that he needed to do for the image listing, and the increase in his sales that he's had is absolutely absurd. And he showed me, "Look, these are the other top five competitors for bamboo sheets-

    4. AS

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... and silk pillowcases in the United States, and look at how much better my images are." He said, "Well, because I wasn't constrained by reality or physics, I was able to just perfectly dial in exactly what I wanted through Midjourney, and I got ChatGPT to write the prompts for Midjourney."

    6. AS

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      So you've got AIs telling AIs what to do, so-

    8. AS

      So I literally, the day before yesterday, this is the 7th of June, I think. On the 5th of June, I tried Midjourney for the first time, because I kept seeing articles about it and I was thinking, "How could I make..." I'm like, "Could I improve YouTube thumbnails for the podcast messing around with this?" Because oftentimes, as I'm sure you and your staff knows, like I kind of want to have a certain feel so I'll just Google image search. (laughs) Not Google im- image search. Shit. I'm going to create it in a day and a half and I'm going to be super upfront honest, I'm an idiot. I am not an intelligent person. I can like, I can wrecking ball my way through life. In a day and a half, I have already created some images that were beyond what I was even thinking was possible.And that's 1.5 days. I mean-

    9. CW

      With the least experienced user on the planet?

    10. AS

      Yeah. Yeah.

    11. CW

      Yeah, it's terrifying, man. So-

    12. AS

      (laughs)

    13. CW

      ... I, I think your point when it comes to talking about media, heterodox, new wave, whatever, uh, is that you're going to be able to propagate a lot more news stories that are going to be automatically generated. Maybe this is the, the, the bulk of reporting, the boring stuff that just needs to be done potentially will come from ChatGPT or some other sort of automated system which has been trained on the biases that humans have.

    14. AS

      Yeah.

    15. CW

      So, it perpetuates and propagates those existing biases. So yeah, man, this, this Tucker thing is, is absolutely fascinating. You know, for, I think, uh, Matt Walsh's What Is a Woman?, that the Daily Wire released-

    16. AS

      Yep.

    17. CW

      ... over the weekend to celebrate the start of Pride Month.

    18. AS

      That's right, they released it, uh, Twitter allowed him to put it up.

    19. CW

      Correct.

    20. AS

      An article about that.

    21. CW

      Then Elon Musk retweeted it and pinned it. That is potentially the most viewed documentary in human history now because it got hundreds of million, I think 100 million plays over the weekend-

    22. AS

      That's insane.

    23. CW

      ... on Twitter. The most viewed documentary in human history.

    24. AS

      I think that's a metric for how much people don't have faith anymore in traditional media sources. I, I truly think that it is. My concern is with the AI, whether it's a good thing or bad thing, at some point my thoughts will always shift back to weaponization and the volume of information that that AI can create and could get the snowball rolling downhill before people could actually backtrack and figure it out.

    25. CW

      Mm.

    26. AS

      For most people, it seems like their, their deeply held beliefs are about one click deep and it's usually the first search result. So if you've got a volume of information heading in the wrong direction that was legitimately untrue, and I think it's a very, uh, fair thing to say that the, the western world, however you would wanna define that has, you know, there's an access to every belief system and there's an access to those belief systems, and those belief systems are also looking at AI and leveraging AI and weaponing, weaponizing AI. I don't know if we're intelligent enough as a species to survive.

    27. CW

      Well, think about it this way, right? You make content on the internet, as do I. What you're trying to do is find a balance somewhere between exactly what you want to talk about and what your interests are, and some degree of what's going to be at least partially interesting to the audience. You don't wanna compromise yourself so much that you get audience captured, but you don't wanna be so niche-y and completely, uh, solipsistic that all you do is indulge yourself over and over. It's a blend between the two, right?

    28. AS

      Yeah.

    29. CW

      There is a third participant in every conversation, that is the audience member that's listening. What you're trying to do is in some regard on varying degrees, reverse engineer what the audience wants, right?

    30. AS

      Yeah.

  4. 12:48 – 22:17

    The Future of Mainstream Media

    1. CW

      You, as somebody that's been in this great nation longer than I have, how likely do you think it is that more and more of the news guys ... I th- Trevor Noah recently left his show. I think he was released or, or maybe left. Uh, Tucker Carlson obviously released by Fox-

    2. AS

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      ... and now doing his own thing. What do you think the future of these sorts of news organizations would be? If people can go and make 40 times the entire primetime ratings by going and, and YOLOing it themselves with a couple of students and a nice g- garage set-up in their house, maybe we don't need mainstream media anymore.

    4. AS

      I think we're through the looking glass on that one. I, I think that Tucker and just those numbers alone speak to how much people are looking to a traditional source. And the traditional models, I mean, I think they're mired in bureaucracy. I have, uh, been to the Fox, um, News studio a few times. I've done a, a couple of written pieces for them and a couple of, uh, in-person stuff, and it is a large building with a massive amount of people that is constrained. You know, they have ... They do have different, uh, journalistic, uh, thresholds and barriers that they're gonna need to at least be able to clear to present, uh, information and ideas, but they're way slower, and there are 100% soft and probably hard boundaries on what their hosts can say, what they can do. And I'm sure that the money is good. I have no idea what they, what they make, but if somebody wants to go out and have complete flexibility and autonomy and probably actually make orders of magnitude, more money by being on their own-

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. AS

      ... why would you mire yourself in bureaucracy when you can put together a small team and be, you know, the first person through the door and then reap the benefit of that?

    7. CW

      Are you on a network?

    8. AS

      (sighs)

    9. CW

      Your show?

    10. AS

      Uh, no. Just the internet.

    11. CW

      No, but you ... You know what-

    12. AS

      (laughs)

    13. CW

      You know what I mean? Like, an iHeart Radio?

    14. AS

      Uh, no.

    15. CW

      Right.

    16. AS

      Just ... I put it up on the, just the normal platforms.

    17. CW

      Uh, any sponsors that you do, you handle yourself-

    18. AS

      Correct.

    19. CW

      ... either through an agency that's working, like, as a consultant for you?

    20. AS

      Uh, I used to go through the agency route, and then, just due to my relationship with Evan at Black Rifle, I just streamlined it-

    21. CW

      Yep.

    22. AS

      ... and was like, "You know what?"

    23. CW

      Perfect.

    24. AS

      "How about we just do this?"

    25. CW

      So my point-

    26. AS

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      ... being that even within our world, the new media thing, um, there are varying degrees of people being bought now.

    28. AS

      Oh, yeah.

    29. CW

      If it comes to, uh, networks and stuff like that, it ... The people that are listening that are concerned, "My favorite creator's on iHeart Radio. Maybe they're part of a globalist conspiracy." Th- those guys, they help with production. Uh, they help you get guests, and they sell ads, right? Like, they're not, they're not really stepping into-

    30. AS

      It increases ... Yeah. It increases your reach at largely ... In the experience I do have with those things, there are other platforms, and maybe those platforms ... Whatever. They fall into whatever, um, the globalists or whatever it might be. That doesn't mean you, as somebody who has content on that platform, is a part of that.

  5. 22:17 – 34:20

    Increasing Surveillance Inside Homes

    1. AS

    2. CW

      According to a new survey from the American Cato Institute, three in 10 Americans under 30 support the installation of cameras in the home to monitor wrongdoing. Strikingly, the figures were markedly different among the 18 to 30 cohort, three in 10 support the installation of surveillance cameras. We can probably also map this to emerging support for intrusive digital surveillance on the growing body of studies, indicating that faith in and support for democratic norms is falling with every generation, even as the same group turns against open debate and academic freedom. In other words, there has been a pronounced turn away from the foundational liberal norms and towards a baseline of authoritarian control and surveillance in the name of safety, care and the avoidance of harm. Cato report speculates that this shift is generational, noting that the over 45s have a markedly different attitude to surveillance and suggesting that this is likely connected to the growing prioritization of safety. If you're used to interacting on social media and you're used to unaccountable authority, and you've grown up partially online, you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy, for example, allowing social media to track your behavior, in exchange for access to the digital services that enable your virtual social life. Three in 10 want home surveillance inside.

    3. AS

      Who decides what's right and wrong? Who decides what's the appropriate... I- I have three kids, um, we're just getting into birthday season. My daughter just turned 15, my middle son will turn 18 next month and then my oldest son will turn 20. Wildly different. And it's just different between having boys and girls. There's a way that- and I learned this lesson the hard way. You know, I- I can talk to my sons in a tone of voice, and not that I am aiming to do so, but they may get frustrated as a parent, right? There's times where you're just like- you're at your wits end and I've- there have been times where I've been very sharp and direct with my sons. I made that mistake one time with my daughter and I watched her kind of wilt away and she- she was quite young. But I learned my lesson in that moment. But- so for me, I ha- I kind of have a- and it's a floating scale as they evolve as human beings too and they're processing. But right and wrong? Who- who decides in that surveillance what you're-

    4. CW

      What is wrongdoing?

    5. AS

      What is wrongdoing? What, eh- what's the difference between wrongdoing and...... difficult parenting decisions that you have to make. Discipline, um, it, like, and by discipline, I'm not talking like, "Jocko get up at 4:30." I'm talking like, "Take a nap, Jocko." You know, I'm talking like (laughs) discipline, disciplining-

    6. CW

      Put your dishes away.

    7. AS

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      Again.

    9. AS

      Or, you know, "Hey, you snuck out of the house at 13 years old and you were gone for two hours and I caught you coming back in. Oh, and it looks like you're shit-faced." These are hard parenting things that you have to deal with. The idea of surveillance, I f- uh, I think it was a quote from Thomas Jefferson, it came up on my own podcast not too long ago, but it's, uh, e- essentially in a nutshell, and I'm sure you've heard of this, those who are will- willing to sacrifice a small amount of freedom for an increase in safety are deserving of neither, or security. And I, it's a, such a slippery slope. First off, I don't think most people have any idea how much the government is capable of collecting on them right now. Um, for most people, if you're listening to this, you need to assume that anything you do on an electronic device is at least being held somewhere. I don't think we have enough people or the computing bandwidth to look at it in real time, but we absolutely do retroactively. People are like, "Oh, well, no, the government can't do that. There's rules in the Constitution." It's like, okay listen, there, go onto the internet, which you're probably spending most of your life on and actually you're consuming this content on it anyway, and Google the partnerships between America and our allies and what we do when we wanna flirt the Constitution. We have our allies look inward 'cause they have, (laughs) your country might be a little bit guilty of this, Chris.

    10. CW

      (laughs)

    11. AS

      We might have a partnership with a couple of people across the ocean that have access to the same data that can look in because they don't have to worry about the Constitutional rights of American citizens. I would imagine that we have a reciprocal agreement with them as well. There are ways around all of this stuff. I have tried to teach my kids since they had access to electronic devices that anything you do on an electronic device lasts forever and you should be aware of that, um, and I actually think it's a vast overreach by the United States Government. I think the government has the ability to know far too much about its citizens and people should be really upset about that. I really don't think that there is a breadcrumb trail that you can follow where with a government knows more about you, you are actually safer as a people.

    12. CW

      Mm.

    13. AS

      I think there is a breadcrumb trail where you can follow that the more the government knows about you, probably the less secure that you are. I mean, I'm sorry, if you look at what's going on in the FBI, um, and I just had an FBI agent who retired after 20 years on my podcast and he was talking about-

    14. CW

      Hm.

    15. AS

      ... the shift in the higher levels of the FBI. Government organizations can be weaponized in directions because of what the government knows about people and their beliefs, and they shouldn't know those things. The patriot-

    16. CW

      How so? Have you got an example?

    17. AS

      Uh, the websites that you visit. Are you a member of the NRA? Are you a member of this or that organization? Did you visit this website? Um, what have you posted? What do you post about? What type of things d'you... They can get a really good profile about who you are as a person and these large organizations, people forget often, I think, that they're just a conglomerate of, of individuals. If you get a large amount of individuals that all think the same way pointed in one direction, the result that you're gonna get from that is going to be biased, and I think it, it, people are so willing to allow the government to look into their life. In my opinion, the government should know almost nothing about you and I, but we should know everything about the government and what they're doing, and it's completely backwards right now.

    18. CW

      Dude, it's scary. It's scary stepping over here into America. You guys have a much closer read, even if you think that most Americans aren't sufficiently concerned about what the government knows about them and aren't sufficiently aware, it's a conversation that is much more surface level and much more front and center. Uh, in the UK, it's just, it's not a, a real discussion. We don't have, we don't uphold the virtues of, of f- freedom from tyranny and all the rest of it in the same way that you guys do. Um, now, I have no idea about, uh, whether our government is or is not surveilling us as in a-

    19. AS

      I can answer that for you. Yes.

    20. CW

      (laughs)

    21. AS

      (laughs) 100%.

    22. CW

      (laughs)

    23. AS

      100%.

    24. CW

      Well, there we are.

    25. AS

      (laughs)

    26. CW

      Fuck it, we should, we need to have a conversation, Britain. We need to have a conversation about freedom. But, I mean, the, the, especially the thing about looking at your surveillance inside the house and you make a really great point that who determines what is or is not acceptable behavior? You know, we've said for quite a while when it comes to having conversations on the internet, are there topics that should be beyond the pale that you're not allowed to talk about? And even if there are topics that you can talk about, defacto you can't talk about them because of the sort of response. So if you start-

    27. AS

      Yeah.

    28. CW

      ... bringing up race and IQ, that's not going to be allowed. If you start bringing up stuff to do with antisemitism or conspiracy theories to do with certain ethnic groups, that's also not going to be particularly well-liked. And, you know, maybe very g- very good reasons that it's hard to work out who is a good actor that's genuinely having a, a good faith interested conversation to try and find out truth and who is a bad actor that's trying to be the front end of the funnel toward a, a KKK march, right? It's difficult to, to parse apart those two.

    29. AS

      I think the better question is, would you rather have conversations that may not be agreeable to people happening in public or have those same conversations that are still going to happen occurring in private? I think as a society we are better off having them occur in public. Eh, my theory is pull things into the light. If you push things into the shadows, you can't really see what's going on in there and I think it creates an environment and room for things to turn quite sour.

    30. CW

      Correct. Well, the, the problem with censorship and the reason that it doesn't work is that it doesn't stop people thinking things.

  6. 34:20 – 38:20

    Are We Raising the Softest Generation in History?

    1. AS

    2. CW

      So I think the interesting, uh, part there was, if you're used to interacting on social media, you're used to unaccountable authority, and if you've grown up online, you will see it as normal to surrender a measure of privacy in exchange for digital services that enable your social life. It definitely seems to me that this sort of generalized risk aversion, uh, this optimization for convenience, comfort, um, uh, safety-

    3. AS

      Mm.

    4. CW

      ... over freedom/genuine privacy, um-

    5. AS

      Well, they gr- they don't know a world without it.

    6. CW

      Correct.

    7. AS

      You know, my, all three of my kids, again, they, they didn't grow up... My daughter probably the most, um-

    8. CW

      Digitally native.

    9. AS

      Digitally native. My sons pr- at, not, not 100% but not as much as my daughter. They don't really know or understand a world without that device and what that device can create for them. It's hilarious when I explain to them, going to the library and looking for books about, you know, the career I wanted to go into when I was younger. They're like, "Why would you, why would you do that?"

    10. CW

      Or ringing a friend to tell them-

    11. AS

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      ... where you'll meet them.

    13. AS

      Yeah.

    14. CW

      Because once you're out of the house, you have no other way of getting in contact with them.

    15. AS

      Yeah. Uh, one of the most hilarious conversations with my middle son is explaining to him a pager. He goes, "That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life." (laughs)

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. AS

      "Oh wait a minute, a number that I have to call, that goes to a device, that beeps you and you'll call me on another device? Why wouldn't you just combine those two?" I'm like, "Yeah, well, y- the apes were still figuring it out, dude."

    18. CW

      It took a while.

    19. AS

      Yeah. (laughs)

    20. CW

      Right? And Steve Jobs wasn't born yet.

    21. AS

      Yeah. No he re- truly thought that I was from the dumbest species in the history of man when I was explaining a pager to him.

    22. CW

      Yeah.

    23. AS

      (laughs)

    24. CW

      Yeah, and, and you know, if you've spent all of this time with, at your fingertips-

    25. AS

      Yeah.

    26. CW

      ... the most controlled, I can, I choose what I get exposed to.

    27. AS

      Yeah.

    28. CW

      Anything that I am exposed to which is remotely objectionable, I can report. So why can't I report things in the real world? If most of my social experiences occur online, most of the interactions, most of the stuff that I consume happens on the internet. On average, Americans spend three hours and 43 minutes per day on their phones. For Gen Z it's gonna be way, way-

    29. AS

      Yeah.

    30. CW

      ... way higher than that. That's spread across the entire nation. 20 years ago, that time didn't exist, so where's it come from? It's been squeezed out of real life experiences.

  7. 38:20 – 47:30

    Is it Too Difficult to Enter the Military?

    1. CW

      can join ... 76 of, percent of American adults aged 17 to 24 are either too obese to qualify or have other medical issues or criminal histories that would make them ineligible to serve in the US Armed Forces without a waiver.

    2. AS

      I wish that number was higher. (laughs)

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. AS

      I'm being dead serious. I hear people ... I'm all about inclusivity. Like, I don't have a problem with inclusivity. It bothers me when it's inclusivity for inclusivity's purpose and just for ... just so we can say we're inclusive. I think that the military should be very exclusive. I think it should be extremely difficult to be able to join and proceed down a pipeline that you want to go down, because at the end of the day, you ... I look at, what is it that you want to do and what are the standards for that job? What are they based off of? And, and I can only speak through the lens of my own previous military experience. The standards that our, that our job was based on and that we were held to came from the battlefield, and I don't give a shit about your woke ideology, because none of that matters when you're covered with your friend's brains. Not a single stretch of that shit matters whatsoever. All of those ideologies and all of these platforms and, and ideas that people want to put onto the military just so they can say that they did, I think that they should be removed. I think it should be super hard to get into the military. We should exclude most people from it because they don't meet the physical standard, the, uh, whatever standards are listed, what, the, uh, intelligence standard, the educational standards, all of those things. I ... That's a good thing. Um, I think we are headed down the wrong path when we just start opening the doors up and letting all of those people in, because that is not a military that is based to operate in the environment that the standards are based upon.

    5. CW

      I had a conversation with Heather Mac Donald, who has written a book called When Race Trumps Merit, and she's talking about how affirmative action for different ethnic groups is cau- causing meritocracy to kind of be thrown out of the window, and it's ... It kind of is really uncomfortable actually to, to kind of go through, because there's a lot of pretty sort of harsh and, and disquieting stats that you start to learn. But the main thing that I realized was, most people, most sane people, wouldn't have a problem with the military having an incredibly rigorous standard for entry, because they understand that if you get this wrong, mortal danger is on the other side of it.

    6. AS

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      Right? If you have somebody that is unable to keep up with the rest of their platoon because of their physical fitness or because they've got diabetes or because they've got a gluten intolerance or whatever, that person puts themselves and everybody else at risk. But really, almost all industries are just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, away from that. So she used this example of, uh, underrepresentation, uh, within Alzheimer research or Parkinson's research, but the problem that you have if you start to do, uh, an excessive amount of affirmative action in that, uh, especially if you completely disregard or mostly disregard meritocracy, is that you slow down Parkinson's and Alzheimer's research-

    8. AS

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CW

      ... which is directly impacting people's quality of life.

    10. AS

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      So okay, uh, uh, it's not mortal danger, but it's, like, health span and life span and it's-

    12. AS

      It's mortal danger for some.

    13. CW

      Precisely. So you go, okay, and then ... So where ... At w- which point all the way down to the checkout operator, you know, like at what point do we say that this doesn't have a, uh, uh, operating based on merit doesn't have a place to be within the system? Uh, it's really hard to find a line at which you go, "Yeah, it's, it's about there. It's about the person that professionally does cro- crochet or fucking bakes cakes or something like that," you know?

    14. AS

      Yeah. I mean, I, I think that the, the conversation should be had, and it's probably going to be a shifting scale depending on what you're talking about. Um, you know, should it be as difficult to join the military as it is to work at a Dunkin' Donuts? No. Right? Like, we need to be able to have a s- a sliding scale. We're an advanced species. We have the ability to think. Let's use that skill a little bit more.

    15. CW

      Did you see that, um, criticism around Navy SEAL selection being too harsh, uh, as SEALs were sprayed with tear gas and forced-

    16. AS

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CW

      ... to sing Happy Birthday?

    18. AS

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      You see this video? It's a year ago.

    20. AS

      Yeah, it's fucking awesome.

    21. CW

      (laughs) What's your thoughts on that?

    22. AS

      Um, I mean, I, I say that a little bit tongue in cheek. First off, anybody who's been through that pipeline has experienced that, and there's a few ways that you can look at it. Uh, from my understanding, what I will say is this.... from my understanding, from what I have heard from other instructors that were there, those particular instructures- instructores were a little bit off the reservation. And this can happen because instructors, again, you wear this blue and gold T-shirt and your hat and your shorts and you roll your socks, it's super dumb way and it's just people. They might all look the same to the outside perspective, but just because you're an instructor or even a SEAL doesn't mean that you're a good person by any stretch. You get the wrong person in the wrong role, bad shit is going to happen. So the amount of CS gas that they were exposed to, from my understanding, exceeded what the, um, what do they call it? It's a... God, of course, I can't remember right now. It's every e- it's an evolution cheat. So everything that happens in SEAL training, the- the room for imagination is almost nonexistent. It's basically like pull the three-ring binder, here is what we are trying to accomplish. It's like, you know, the mission statement, here's what we're trying to accomplish, here's our boundaries. This is the evolution, this is what it is, this is how long we're going to do it for. The students don't know this. So as a student, it's very chaotic. I didn't know this until I went back as an instructor. I'm like, "Holy shit." Like, basically every day.

    23. CW

      There's limits to this.

    24. AS

      The limits are unbelievable and the safety net should be incredibly robust, but also invisible to the students. There's a portion of that training, I'm like, "Yeah, may- maybe you should feel like you're gonna die." You're not going to die. We're not gonna... we're gonna do our ab- absolute utmost to prevent you from dying, even though it does happen, um, but there's a psychological test there as well. It's a physical and mental crucible. So I have no issue with people being exposed to CS gas because I was exposed to CS gas. Uh, the third phase of training occurs out on San Clemente Island, which is where that video came from. The problem I have with it is the training and those evolution sheets and again, those standards, you can draw a very precise breadcrumb trail to the why. Why do we expose people to CS gas in training? Well, because one, it's very common and the first time that you're exposed to it probably shouldn't be for real. So what do we need to do? We should expose it to people in a training environment where we can have a robust medical staff. Problem is, from my understanding, they involved people in that that actually weren't necessarily directly involved in the training pipeline. They exposed them to far too much gas and one of the biggest issues I have with it is that there was some fucking idiot there filming it with a cell phone. Do your job because I tell you right now, filming it for your Instagram page is not your job. And I don't know what you think is going to come from that and the reason they make you sing Happy Birthday is that that requires you inhale and exhale. It's the same, like they do that, it's-

    25. CW

      Is that what you did?

    26. AS

      Uh, we didn't, they didn't have us sing Happy Birthday. They m- they, because there's all these like frogman songs that you sing when you're in training and they'll just have you do something that increases your respiration because there's some people out there that can hold their breath really long time (laughs) . Now that holding your breath in an environment where like, it's still, it's on your clothes, it's- it sucks.

    27. CW

      What's it like? What's it- what's-

    28. AS

      It burns. Um, have you ever, uh, well, I was (laughs) , my sister one time had like a little, uh, mace spray thing and I had, I don't know how I had it in my pocket and I sprayed it on myself and then wiped my eyes. I was gonna say, have you ever done that? But most people haven't because they're not idiots.

    29. CW

      No.

    30. AS

      So (laughs) it would be, it's, uh, it burns. You, it- it really burns. Your eyes water an unbelievable amount. Um, within a few seconds, you'll be questioning how it's possible that your body creates as much mucus as is coming out of your body. Um, you cough. It can make it seem like people, it's hard to breathe. For some people, they describe it as- as they're inhaling like flames from this, like very hot. Is it- is it going to kill you? Unless you have an underlying medical condition, I think it's so highly unlikely. Does it feel like it's going to kill you? Probably to some people. And that's the point. We have to expose students to those things that they may be exposed to overseas. I would rather have a student have that experience and know the cognitive decline, the physical decline, the emotional decline, and the impact that it's going to have on their ability to do their job in training before it happens in real life. Now if the instructor staff went 1% beyond what is on that evolution sheet, then they are wrong for doing that because that evolution is based on that real world requirement. If they use 5X the gas or 10X the gas, then they should be punished for that particular activity but the- the evolution in and of itself is essential. Now, somebody looking at that on Instagram could be like, "Oh, well, that looks like torches." Like you don't know anything about this job. You're- I'm not saying your opinion isn't valid, I'm just not going to pay any attention to it because you don't know what you're talking about.

  8. 47:30 – 1:04:00

    Discerning the Truthfulness of Alien Sightings

    1. CW

      phenomena.

    2. AS

      Are we talking about aliens?

    3. CW

      Yeah. Fuck yeah.

    4. AS

      God, I hope they're real.

    5. CW

      Yeah.

    6. AS

      Why are people scared of aliens? I would have one on the podcast.

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      I don't know what the fuck we'd talk about. But I mean, if there's aliens out there, which I think there are, mathematically, I think it's improbable that we are alone out here. It's, uh, our ability as a species to think that we are so incredibly unique shocks me sometimes (laughs) . If they're here visiting, I have to believe that they are more advanced than we are. I would assume, a- and obviously technologically, because they're covering a distance that we are not capable of covering, um, it seems like they are able to evade detection to a degree, and I would honestly guess that if we are seeing them, it's because they would want us to see them. But both of those things combined lead me to believe like if they wanted to fuck us up, they probably already could have and would have. So I don't know, I think maybe like we're the comedy planet to them. Like you win a prize on some other planet and they're like, "Dude, you just won the best prize ever. We're going to send you to this other planet and you're not going to believe the shit that you're going to see." And so they come and they watch and they laugh (laughs) and they go back and they tell tales of how dumb we are. But it doesn't work. Like- like let's get on like this is awesome. Sit down and like have a chat with me or like Bluetooth to my mind or however that works. I'm not interested in the probing part, you know? But like... and I don't know why that was such a narrative early on (laughs) . (laughs)

    9. CW

      Yeah, I, uh, kind of like a Freudian thing that, wasn't it? And I got taken up into the sky, they levitated me up, and the first thing that they did-

    10. AS

      Always right up the ass.

    11. CW

      Yeah, gapers.

    12. AS

      It's like, I ... They were, they were forced to be agape. (laughs)

    13. CW

      Agape, that's it. Yeah. I love the fact that it's like, it's using a verb as a noun.

    14. AS

      You have so few times in life to use that word that I think you should seize-

    15. CW

      As much as possible.

    16. AS

      Seize the day, my friend.

    17. CW

      Let's get it in a few more times before we finish up.

    18. AS

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      So, David Grusch, this guy-

    20. AS

      Yeah.

    21. CW

      ... that's the dude.

    22. AS

      Yep.

    23. CW

      I've watched a good bit of stuff on him and his story. In your professional opinion-

    24. AS

      Yep.

    25. CW

      ... how reliable do you think that this particular person's story, security access, clearance, all the rest of it, is?

    26. AS

      So I have very limited knowledge of him, I actually was exposed to his videos for the first time yesterday, um, in a very, in a very brief article. Um, so he was in the Air Force, I think he was an intelligence officer. He held a TS/SCI clearance, um, and apparently he worked for a program that was peripheral or directly involved in identifying UAPs, is what I think they call, call it, aliens. You know, military officer, cool. Intelligence officer, great. TS/SCI clearance-

    27. CW

      What's that?

    28. AS

      ... it's Top Secret Special Compartmentalized Information. And it sounds like a big deal, but honestly, it's not. I mean, if you look at the, uh, not too long ago, there was a National Guardsman that, uh, the intelligence leak. He was on, he had a TS/SCI clearance and access to these databases, because oftentimes, you know, to hold certain jobs, you have to have certain clearances. It's the same clearance that I had when I was, uh, at the Seal T- uh, Seal Team on the East Coast, and it takes about two years to actually get the clearance, so oftentimes, you'll get the job and they'll just give you an interim clearance, meaning you have the clearance and access to the stuff as if you had had, the background investigation had been complete, but then it takes, like, two years to catch up to it. It's not an uncommon clearance. It's cool to say and write out, like, "Oh, Top TS/SCI clearance, he must know everything." I was read into, with that clearance, in the course of 17 years, I was read into a few programs that offline, I can give you a few Google search words and you would literally be able to find the information on the internet. People's th- thoughts that Jason Bourne is, like, out there, maybe there is, in my experience, that's not the case, it's a com- combination and, like, this vice of, like, 60 people's careers jammed into one unique little coin, and that's just not the way that it works. So, I- I don't doubt that he might have worked on a program that was basically around, um, identifying unidentified shit in the air, like, that's probably a good idea, like, "Hey, we're kind of seeing these things that we don't know what they are, let's put together some people to do that." From my understanding, that was nested inside of the Air Force. What he was referencing in the video and what he seems to be referencing when he kind of made, like, the- the tour of, uh, the media tour is, "Well, there's this other program and it's their job to actually collect things," and what I'm hearing is from these people, these senior officers, they are telling me about things that they saw. And for me personally, now we're talking, like second and third-hand information, it's like, listen, he's like, "Well, we weren't read into this program and we weren't, we weren't allowed access to that one," and that's totally common. Compart-

    29. CW

      It's the C.

    30. AS

      ... yeah, the compartmentalization is totally common.

  9. 1:04:00 – 1:08:58

    The Rise of Prepper Culture

    1. CW

      Yeah, man. It's interesting. The, the, it's everything seems to be picking up speed, whether it be conversations about AI and recursive self-improvement, whether it's nanotechnology or bio-weapons, or natural pandemics or engineered pandemics, or aliens or whatever. Um, I think the next five to 10 years is going to be a real fever pitch for stuff, because if it keeps increasing, if it keeps getting-

    2. AS

      I mean, aren't we at vertical? (laughs)

    3. CW

      Yeah. Pretty, pretty ... It's the inflection is feeling pretty, like the hockey stick, it's very hockey sticky at the moment.

    4. AS

      Yeah. I don't know how much more vertical that we can get.

    5. CW

      Yeah.

    6. AS

      It's gonna ... I would describe it as wild. It's gonna be a wild time.

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. AS

      I'm glad that I live in a remote section of Montana, maybe give me a little bit of buffer.

    9. CW

      Is that where you are?

    10. AS

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      Fuck yeah.

    12. AS

      Yeah, up in the northwestern section. It's ... How do you, you know, just a little physical buffer.

    13. CW

      Yeah.

    14. AS

      Not saying it's ... They, they can come visit me there too.

    15. CW

      Yeah.

    16. AS

      I actually prefer that they did. Um, welcome arms. You know, come on in.

    17. CW

      But it's gonna be a little bit ... You're, you're gonna be later in the day. Yeah.

    18. AS

      It'll buy me a little time. Ge- uh, geographically. Topographically it'll buy me a little bit of time.

    19. CW

      What is your opinion on this sort of ... I, I'm seeing this more and more, especially since I've moved to America. This sort of very, uh, it's not quite being a prepper, but it's kind of-

    20. AS

      It's being prepared?

    21. CW

      No. It's like military LARPing. It's like people-

    22. AS

      Oh, yeah.

    23. CW

      ... people that like to wear sort of tactical wear as casual wear, uh, people who are maybe non-military but could be relatively wealthy but spend a good bit of time sort of surrounding themselves with military or, or-

    24. AS

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      ... or with firearms and doing lots of tactical training and stuff like that.

    26. AS

      It's a, it's a tenuous balance, because it can absolutely be taken too far. I mean, the things that get reported are like individual buries a school bus and makes it into a bunker and lives out of that and is putting camel paint on every day and waiting in the bushes for an unseen government entity that's probably never gonna come, 'cause they know you're crazy and you're isolated and it's like, "Oh, the guy's in his trench again. We don't need to go out there."

    27. CW

      Like that, that Japanese, uh, guy-

    28. AS

      (laughs)

    29. CW

      ... uh, the, the Vietnamese soldier or whatever that wouldn't stop until-

    30. AS

      That stayed for years?

  10. 1:08:58 – 1:20:21

    Gun Culture in America

    1. CW

      spends a lot of time shooting and is very responsible and he sort of talked me through his progression that he had of becoming a gun owner and then becoming sort of competent and then proficient and then kind of where he's at now. Uh, and he was saying that he's fluxed in his, um, desire for an incident to occur an awful lot and it's kind of given him em- emotional and existential whiplash, uh, because of what's happened. And I mentioned to him, and I'm sure that you'll be familiar with this as well, but there are some people who spend a good bit of time around firearms and when I'm around them, I get a sense of hunger.

    2. AS

      They want something to happen.

    3. CW

      For something to kick off-

    4. AS

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... because they've done all of this training and they've spent all of this time thinking about the bad guy and you, you roll BJJ, you want to compete, right? You, you do boxing, you want to get into the ring. You don't just hit the pads all the time. You want to actually... And I mentioned it to him and he said, "Uh, I've actually become, as I've got super out into expert level, I've become more and more reticent around using my firearm because I know that that's the last time I'm probably ever going to pull the trigger."

    6. AS

      Yep.

    7. CW

      If I shoot a person, even if it's in the most unequivocable self-defense ever, I'm probably not going to be able to shoot another firearm again in my entire life.

    8. AS

      And you still may lose in civil court.

    9. CW

      Yep.

    10. AS

      I have, uh, I have been around more weapons based violence than almost every human being on the face of the planet and I say that because almost nobody is actually exposed to it, but in the job that I came from, that was literally, if ... At the end of the day, if you refine everything down and what is it that ... What was our job? It was to find, fix and finish individuals in locations where they thought that they were the most secure. To find somebody, locate them in space and time, go to their front, front door, and depending on how they behave once we cross that front door, either take them into custody or fucking kill them. And if you do that for a long enough, the last thing that you ever want to do is be around gun violence again. I don't want to, and Montana is a constitutional carry state, I carry, um, but I don't ever want to have to pull my gun out on a human being ever again. It is not ... And I do agree with you, there are people who have this idealistic, like, they're going to be like (makes shooting noises) like doing a gun shoot at the O.K. Corral. It's like, "Oh, dude." And I, uh, a good friend of mine, uh, Mike Glover, who is actually the owner of Fieldcraft Survival, this weekend we are doing some scenario based training where I live up in Kalispell, and we did one a few weeks ago, and before that I had helped him out at another one, and it's, it's ... The morning starts with an introduction to pistols and then my wife teaches an introduction to JuJitsu, and then they do scenario based training with somebody in a red suit that may have a gun, they may not have a gun. These people have a gun on them with simunition rounds, the wax bullets that sting like a motherfucker. Varsity move is to put them in the freezer the night before. That's an aside. (laughs) That's a tip for anybody out there who still trains with SIM rounds, put them in the freezer. You, you'll drop them like a sniper shot to the chest. The number of people who, that was their first time ever actually making a decision, "Should I pull this gun out and should I use it?" And the number of people that would have spent their remaining days in prison for murder is startling.

    11. CW

      What's a typical scenario?

    12. AS

      Uh, I don't want to give too much of it away, but I'll give you a broad one. You are in a parking lot, and usually he'll pair this up with a male and a female. The female will have a bag in her hand and somebody starts approaching you pretty aggressively asking for money. "Hey," and this here's like usually coming out of a grocery store and you have vehicles on each side so a little bit of a confined environment. Somebody is coming directly at you. And go, the person's loud, they're coming at you aggressively and the beauty of the last, uh, (laughs) the last time we ran this is that the role player was actually a sheriff, a local sheriff. So he could really speak to, "Here's what's going to happen when law enforcement shows up." (laughs) Uh, go ahead and, uh, show me your hands, turn around. (laughs) So he could give that, and so the person approaches, I've seen it go down now three times.... every one of those times the person gets shot, they do not have a weapon. Now, and there are plenty of times where that is completely and utterly justifiable, and I would also say in that situation, it depends on if you're a man and a woman. Um, for women, absent an incredible amount of training, and even then there is a size, strength, and weight difference that cannot be overcome, the only thing that you really can do to increase survivability is to introduce a tool into that environment that levels that playing field.

Episode duration: 1:52:22

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