00:00:00
Speaker 1: So being that we are talking and knowing that there are people listening, I would encourage if you take anything away from it today, do that, Like, take five minutes, write a note to somebody in your life, friend, family member, and just tell them thank you, drop it the mail. Like it’s hard not to get emotional right now because it just feels so much gratitude in that, like just thinking of all the people in my life. And I encourage everyone, just like, if you take anything from that this conversation today, just do that one thing and just see how it like causes a slight shift and again ounces equal pounds. If you’re able to take and implement a lot of these things on a regular basis, you’re gonna find yourself way happier and the people around you way happier. So be the change. Yeah, be the change that you want to see for sure.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: Out here the stakes are real. Effective preparations starts with fitness, but it requires so much more. This show explores the tools, knowledge, resilience, and skills needed to be ready when it matters the most. Join me Rich Browning as we apply the decades of wisdom I’ve gained through training and competition to hunting in the back country.
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Speaker 3: This is in Pursuit, brought to you by Mount Knoms in collaboration with Mayhem Hunt.
00:01:29
Speaker 2: All right, in Pursuit podcast, I’m here rich Froning and Josh bird bergeron have we have we established your true name on the podcast yet? I guess I thought it was bird were going. I know if that’s what we’re going, all right, guest, Richard Ryan. You got a long, long list of things that you do. Slash have done one of the founders of Black Rifle or co founder of Black Rifle, which is pretty awesome.
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Speaker 3: Now doing some media software stuff.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: You wrote a book, Warriors Garden. I haven’t read it yet. Rory was talking a ton about it and the kind of I guess subject is not per se ditching social media, but disconnecting.
00:02:09
Speaker 3: A little bit.
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Speaker 2: Huh yeah, which we are super passionate about. My daughter is still angry with me. She’s eleven and a lot of her friends, of course, have cell phones, and our age right now is fourteen, and it could be later, but I’ve told her fourteen and she’s so mad at me, Like she’s.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: Like my friends, and I’m like, cool, I’ll do eleven.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: So she’s got some time and uh, you know, we even limit iPad time to just travel, you know. So yeah, so bird, do you want to give the true intro a lot of it?
00:02:42
Speaker 3: I didn’t. Yeah, I mean.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you covered most of it. I mean I could say I could say the same thing he just said in like a bio form, but that would be totally Yeah, it’s I would feel.
00:02:57
Speaker 3: Weird doing it.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny.
00:03:00
Speaker 2: Well, cool man, glad to have you stayed stayed in town kind of cruising in the country.
00:03:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it’s been great. Like I stayed at a bison ranch last night. Yeah, Lazy G down the road and everything. Fellow farmer in the area.
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Speaker 3: Yeah that’s right. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Actually, so our two herd bulls came from there. Really Yeah, two of our herd bulls and then four of our starter hafers came from Lazy G. Good really good friends of ours, the kind of the like poor choice of words, but pioneers in the bison industry in our area.
00:03:30
Speaker 3: So real, big operation.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: I mean, if you don’t mind me asking, I know, this is deviating route.
00:03:35
Speaker 3: We’re really good at doing that.
00:03:37
Speaker 1: Why why why did you go down that route?
00:03:39
Speaker 2: This is gonna sound really bad because we are on a met eater podcast, Shameless Pluck. Shameless Pluck. You know, I grew up up here. My buddy Matt is my best friend. We both grew up up here, and we were both firefighters at the top.
00:03:53
Speaker 3: Are backup.
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Speaker 2: We moved, We lived up here, grew up up here. We were both worked at the fire department. We were a little bit younger. He on his off days raised cattle. I just did odds and end jobs for other guys at the fire department. Well, when we both moved back up here in our own homes, outside of our parents’ house, we were like, we should get some cattle, and you know, do something so the kids will have something that we can all do together. You know, along the lines of which I think you’re preaching this book is like get the kids outside, give them something to take care of and something we can all kind of do as a family. And you know, in this day and age, life is easy per se, you know, compared to what it used to be.
00:04:31
Speaker 3: And so we’re like, let’s get some cows.
00:04:33
Speaker 2: And while I was reading American Buffalo Ronella’s book about the history of.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: Such a wordsmith, yep, I love listening and.
00:04:40
Speaker 3: So that book.
00:04:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was like, let’s let’s do bison, and my buddy Matt was like, I don’t know anything about bison. I was like, I don’t either, but let’s do it. You know, it’s pretty American and.
00:04:50
Speaker 3: So the rest is history.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we went with bison instead of cattle, which we do now have cattle. Those are my wife’s hats on the other side of the street. I don’t know if you notice that, but yeah, I love it.
00:05:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean so, I mean that’s actually a perfect segue into the reason for calling the book the Warrior’s Garden. For me, you know, I’m big in the world of regenerative agriculture. Have been trying to go down that path probably the last five seven years or so on my farm, you know, from augmenting the soil with biochar because we’re in a Central Texas carrying capacities I think one animal unit per twenty acres.
00:05:28
Speaker 3: So you’re one and a half.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: So it’s like it’s not the not the most facilitating, So how do you improve the quality of the soil and everything, Because you know, there’s a saying in regenerative agriculture it’s not how much rain you get it’s how much you keep. So you really want that healthy soil and you want to improve it. However you can specifically around those arid climates. You know, most people don’t realize the bulk form of erosion comes from wind erosion, and you know, you do get it from from water as well. But when you have you know, conventional tillage and everything, tilling up the top sole and everything, you get a good dust storm or something like that coming through, all your nutrients and everything are being blown away. You may get a little bit of rain, you’ll develop specifically where we’re at, you’ll develop some crust. And so whenever you do get the rain that you need, it sheds into the waterways and maybe the fertilizer and everything goes into the ocean. You’re getting algae blooms and everything. So the best way to kind of build a resilient ecosystem increase your carrying capacity and everything. You know, roots in the ground, like I plant like sorghum sudan hybrids, so that’s you know, it’s like the corn style stock and you’re getting the deep roots in there and everything. I’ll have lagoons like Harry Veatch and whatnot. But again, it’s about you know, taking and proving the soil however you can, because inputs equal outputs, and so for me, I’ve realized, having built so many companies over the last twenty years, if not optimizing for exploiting various algorithms. You know, we built a media company for Verizon and Hurst. Within I think it was six months, we had a million organic followers. We were kind of the bastard child of this, we’ll say a blue network. We were doing daily editorial news for the heartland, millennial mail, you know, black Rifle coffee. We did five hundred million organic impressions in our first year. I talked to any startup that’s really great, really great for your bottom line in a lot of ways. Now it’s not to negate the fact that, you know, you have people like Evan and everyone in the company that are just absolute rock stars at what they do, and that story to somebody correct and you know, I’m you know, even going further back, I built a YouTube app and had it in the app store four years before YouTube did, kind of predating the mobile version of the partner program for content creators and everything. So I’ve had kind of like that inside look at how you know, the various mechanisms work, and fortunately and unfortunately in hindsight, you’re able to see the downstream effects of things like the attention economy, and you’ll have a lot of creators out there. They’ll tell you, you know, social media is bad and everything is, but the fact of the matter is there’s a lot of good that comes from it too. So I definitely want to preface that. In no way, shape or form am I telling anybody to abstain from social media. It’s just for me. I found that I had been in the system, creating content and having a good time. But you know, doing these different thought exercises, you know, the person I’m always trying to please is probably me fifteen thirty sixty years from now if I make it that far, and I’m constantly reassessing, you know, that person that I that it is that I want to become. And I’ve found, after burning through all these different studies and books on addiction, is really the definition would be sacrificing your life long term goals for short term gratification. And I found that being caught up in this system and everything, there were a lot of misaligned incentives in the world of social media specifically around that attention economy, and I needed to build up some type of resilience for me because again, inputs equal outputs. I was talking with a number of people the other day and it just, you know, kind of came to me. I was like, well, you know, you take and you look at all these different studies, what’s arguably the most researched or observed data point out there? And I’ll spare you. Spare you because people will be like, oh, this is the placebo effect, right, because it has to be factored in for most studies, and you could say it’s like two to three percent depending on whatever. But what it shows you is that the brain’s ability to impact the physiological state is real, it’s meaningful. And so if you have these things that are impacting you psychologically in a negative way, what is that two to three percent in your life? And how is that compounding over time? How is it? You know, like, if if you’re shooting, you know, you might zero your rifle at one hundred yards, but if it’s off a little bit, yeah, five hundred yards, it’s gonna be you’re gonna miss the target. Right, So for me, I was like, Okay, I really need to assess these things. And you know, in the book and everything, I try to make it as stupid simple as possible, putting statistics around different things, but also didn’t want people to like to come away with it thinking like, well, now I need to buy this court, I need to buy this thing or whatever it is. It’s like, no, it’s very very easy, but it’s also really really hard considering a lot of us the world. Yeah, it’s our world, and you don’t realize how addicted you are, you know, the compulsive behaviors and everything that are developed over time. And this, Yeah, Rory and I were talking about this was like, you know, one of the one of the observations that I give is like, you know, just taking a looking going down the road, how many people are on their phone? And again I’m not trying to pass judgment here, but the fact of the matter is is like, you know, observed like out of ten people, like six or seven of them, we’re looking at their phone. It’s like, if you can’t, if you can’t go to the grocery store, just as an exercise, leave your phone at home. You’ve been to the grocery store. How many times you know how to get there. Oh, somebody’s gonna call you. You might miss that call, call them back thirty minutes later. But like just notice your wife, notice the urge, like the pull, the draw and everything. So you know, insight is a big component in the book and just trying to get people to at least turn on the varying systems like screen time and stuff like that, so you can just have an observation of what your consumption looks like and what platforms you’re using. If you’re you’re looking at Instagram all the time, if you’re looking at whatever, first open, that’s.
00:11:53
Speaker 3: That screen right now? Oh yeah, that’s it?
00:11:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so well Apple does if you really interesting statistics too, is your first open and things like that. So what is the thing that you’re looking at like you’re going to what’s creating that compulsive.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: Well what’s crazy too is you know, I’ll have my phone in my pocket a bunch and you know, they’ll be sweat I’ll be sweaty, and it’ll move around my apps and I’ll notice if I go, like there’s a natural habit to go to one app and it’s usually Instagram or whatever it is, but you when it’s not there, you have to retrain your brain and then you don’t realize that until that happens, and you’re.
00:12:30
Speaker 3: Like, it is. It’s very eye opening.
00:12:34
Speaker 1: Well, and I think something that you appreciate too. You know, again, this study gets cited and using so many different things, but the Stanford Marshmallow study and delay gratification specifically as it pertains to friction and your reward systems and everything, and you know, technology and mobile and social again, I guess let’s let’s let’s break it down here. When you hear the phrase the attention economy, what does that really mean? Well, early days of social media, it was really expensive to host a viral video, right because you get your you know, one hundred thousand, maybe million views on a video, you could go bankrupt paying for the bandwidth to your internet service provider. And then YouTube came out two thousand and six. You have your vimeos and stuff like that. But you people found that it was like, oh, okay, I can host this for free. I don’t at the risk of video going viral and going bankrupt paying one hundred grand and you know, bandwidth fees and stuff like that. So YouTube really positioned itself really well. Short of like you know, lawsuits with the DMCA and everything else, and that what arguably led to the pressure and the acquisition by Alphabet. But it’s neither here nor there. And the partner program comes around and around twenty twelve, I think was open for everybody, and then something something happens. You’ll hear guys like Cal Newport talk about you know, mobile phone usage around twenty ten to twenty twelve and all these other different things. And while that’s true societally, like you know, maybe people were buying iPhones more. You know, it’s been about four five years since the you know, iPhone came out at that point. But I would argue that it’s the partner program and that incentivizes people to create and to consume. And then you start seeing the partner program, so you just you make money off of YouTube being a creator, right, so like so they give you a revenue share for the ads that are displayed on your channel. And then what happened was I I was just so, you know, creators essentially become algorithmic optimizers in that sense. So you’re gonna you’re gonna find that there’s certain things that you do that are gonna get people to click, it’s going to get people to stay. And you know, it’s it’s fascinating to watch how the algorithms evolve over time. And you know, I know a lot of people use that term very loosely, but essentially, just an algorithm is various machine learning weights that optimize for a desired outcome and whatever that is. And so being that you are the product as the consumer, and again what does that mean. The platform is the business that is selling your attention to the customer, the advertiser, and the more of your attention that they have, the more there is to sell to those people. And so then send it for them is to keep you on platform as long as possible. And I don’t think that you know, Mark Zuckerberg or soon Dar any of these other guys are sitting on a throne somewhere going like, how do we suck people in? You know, like, I think it’s just the byproduct of optimizing for that desired outcome. And you know, and again, if we don’t really have these conversations about it, I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice. And so you found over the last thirteen years or so that content in itself has evolved and so were those algorithms. So as an example, around twenty twelve, I would say the click through rate optimization was the primary weight at that point in time. So it’s like, how catchy can you be with your titles and your thumbnails and everything. And what they found was when people would click through, they would just be baited in or clickbait them. There’d be a high bounce rate. So if you’re an algorithm, how do you want to curb that behavior? Because you want people on platform so you can serve on more ads well retention, so you put a higher weight on retention. So video game let’s players like they became really big and started dominated search and related on YouTube and now you see podcasts and long form content and everything because it keeps people on platform longer. And it’s not to say that that’s a bad thing, but again it’s an observation that you need to be aware of because one of the examples that I give in the book is like, if your you know, value is very subjective at the end of the day, but if you wanted a cooking tutorial or just how do I make this recipe? You’re going to go to a platform and maybe expect a TikTok style video of give me all the value that I need. But if you go maybe do a YouTube, it’s twenty minutes somebody telling you about their day and their life, and maybe you want that, you know, parasocial relationship with that person. But I would argue most people want that value. But the byproduct of watch time on platform as the incentive mechanism, means that you’re being sucked in this thing. And I know it’s a very long winded way to get around to, but explaining these minutes add up over time. And so if you’re not looking, if you’re not doing the work and looking at the things that you value in your life, what is the thing that you want to spend more time with your children? Do you want to you know, spend more time hunting, because I would argue, like, if you’ve ever been injured or sick, like it’s very humbling to be in a hostel, little bed or whatever it is, you find out really really quick what the important things in life are, right, And I would argue like, and the encourage people to do these kind of like deathbed you know, exercises or giving advice to a younger version of yourself where you you really assess those things. And I would argue that once you start accumulating, you know, weeks, months, years of time on Instagram when it’s all said and done, because you know, being eighty ninety years old isn’t given to us, you know, it’s not.
00:18:31
Speaker 3: It’s spending four hours, five hours a day on the phone.
00:18:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, every day bounces equal pounds, right and so so. And again I’m not saying I’m not saying abstain. I’m saying, just do the work, understand what you really really care about, don’t be passive in that. And you know there’s other other areas and aspects when in there. I think that you definitely would appreciate it as an athlete, because again, these systems are meant to remove friction and create and stuff like that, so you’re constantly going back for and checking it. And it would argue that friction or effort specifically around that Stanford Marshmallow study and stuff and the leg gratification. You know, as an athlete, friction is a good thing, right, you know, you want friction over a period of time so you build up resilience and for gratification and stuff like that. Friction and effort leads to greater reward, and you know, by removing all of that, your dopaminergic system, as doctor Analymki would would put it, you know, the pains he saw is completely imbalanced. You’ve reduced all the friction. Everything’s so easy that it’s not gratifying anymore, and so so your pain goes up. So you find maybe societally, and again it’s really hard to draw causal you know, implications around saying that the phone or social media, but there’s definitely correlating statistics around you know, eating disorders both among male and female, depression, suicide rates, and stuff like that. So you know, for me, this was very much my anecdotal journey and trying to define a system that didn’t really cost any money and trying to deviate from my short term gratification to align my long term goals and everything. So that’s my spiel, and a.
00:20:29
Speaker 2: Lot of that’s awesome, No, I mean, I think it ties into a lot of why. I think what originally kind of drew me. Well, there’s a couple things that drew me into hunting, but that was the disconnect, Right, you didn’t even have an option because there was no service, right, and so you’re like, oh, I can survive.
00:20:49
Speaker 3: You know, I would have I’d have a.
00:20:50
Speaker 2: Garment in reach that I could reach out to my wife and just say, hey, I’m alive. But you know, the first couple of places we went there was zero cell phone service, like zero anywhere we went, and you come home and you just feel better, like more clear, and then you get right back in the present present.
00:21:05
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so I think that was one of the huge draws for me in hunting. Obviously the competition side of it I’ve stated multiple times, but just that connection and that clear and just like, oh, you know there is life outside I.
00:21:20
Speaker 3: Think, right, yeah, I love it.
00:21:22
Speaker 1: And you know, the thing is is again for me, I was I was really trying to figure out like these these needle movers and the insight, the inset, the assessment of you know, really understanding what I wanted out of life and the things that I value and establishing those boundaries. Like there are some positive needle movers. Again, these things they don’t really cost anything, or they can depending on what works for you. But I really appreciate that. I think you would too. It’s like I give the case study is CrossFit as an example, community. If you look at the blue zones, are you familiar with that with like you know, centenarians and stuff like that. So it’s like, if you look at that, community is such a huge component to it. And if you take the statistics around CrossFit versus Globo Gym and the retention rate of a member, it totally makes sense. It’s like, yes, CrossFit as a discipline, there may be pros and cons for depending on the athlete and everything, but you would you could easily argue that the community is the thing. That’s the thing, that’s what we’ve talked about for a while, and I think that’s lacking. I think the value proposition with social media was that we would be social and we would engage and interact in this you know, and again we could community. Yeah, and what’s happened is, you know, again maybe no fault of one person, but misaligned incentives have led to what’s the thing that’s going to keep people in longer? You’re going to tap into a fight or flight response. Maybe something that’s like you know, the twig snapping in the savannah, that really ingrained, genetic like fight or flight thing that’s going to just really make you angry really make you, I don’t know, excited or whatever it is. And so people are constantly in these these states, and you know, you could argue that that’s one of the things that’s maybe led to the polarization and politics and all these other different things.
00:23:12
Speaker 3: Well, just a move from center.
00:23:14
Speaker 2: Yes, regardless of what you believe, everybody’s no longer there.
00:23:18
Speaker 3: You can’t be center anymore. You have to be one way or the other in the opposites.
00:23:23
Speaker 1: That’s the thing is like, So I would argue that there’s still a lot of people there, if not the majority.
00:23:28
Speaker 3: Of people, but a loud minority.
00:23:30
Speaker 1: But it’s it’s kind of like the the the political system in the US where you have the primaries, the five percent of the polarized side of each party which that aren’t that are participating and and they’re the ones nominating the extreme candidates or whatever they are, and and those are the things that get algorithmic preference because it’s what excites people. It gets and it goes up in the headlines.
00:23:55
Speaker 3: And it gets it clicks and it gets views.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: And so you know, again, how how do you how do you evolve from this? I don’t know until we fundamentally reshape social media and those those systems, I think people are going to have to do the work themselves, still use it as a tool and everything. And again, you know, the community component I think is so important for people to get out there, find something, try something hard, add that friction layer and you know, you hear everyone, it’s if it’s not these days it’s jiu jitsu and archery.
00:24:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, archery and ultra marathon. So that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you can do.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: But you know, adding that friction level with your consumption, adding the community component to it. And I will say this is very very important to me at this point in time. And the thing that I felt was I really didn’t want to acknowledge it’s hard not to get emotional here because gratitude was, without a doubt, the biggest needle mover for meat. And I found that again, inputs equal puts. I found that I’ve needed to sever certain relationships in my life because you know, they and again everyone has their own things that they’re dealing with and everything. But there are some people that are constant pessimists. And I am very much gasoline on a fire. So whatever whatever I’m around, I’m an amplifier for like I tell people, I’m a subject matter enthusiast. I love being around people who are passionate about what they’re doing and building and just you know, just generally optimistic people and I thrive around those people and that whole state, you know, In the last two three years, I was like, I need to figure this thing out because there’s clearly a lot of research around gratitude and so you know about a ton of gratitude journals. There’s actually one in the back of the book. I do a thirty day assessment for people that you can take and you can you can monitor your consumption or as the and you can download all this stuff for free too if you want. Like I’m not I’m not trying to hog books here, but it’s a thirty day exercise and gratitude journaling and everything. Because that was such a huge needle mover for me. And I’ll tell you a little anecdotal experience in that and like trying to read all this research around it. You know, you have you know, varying religion or religious gratitude exercises, either giving things before a meal, you know, things before you go to sleep or when you wake up. There’s different events that happened, and for me, I was like, how do I introduce gratitude in a way that doesn’t become I don’t know, systematically, I don’t know, just watered down. Yeah, check a box, yeah exactly. So I tried to find ways to introduce inconvenient gratitude. And so one of the things I would do is before I get my truck, I would take two three minutes and I would say, you know, I’m grateful that I have reliable transportation, I have fuel to get where I’m going, I have an opportunity to see my friends, go to this business meeting, whatever it is. I am extremely fortunate. And I found that this weird thing happened, this weird psychological shift, this main character syndrome, complex, whatever you want to call it. Me being in traffic, I like we were talking about having add earlier. I have to do certain things whenever I’m driving. So if I get in traffic, I have to listen to a podcast or something talking. I can’t listen to music because music has a rhythm, and if I get out of that rhythm, I start getting anxious stopping and going in the traffic, and I’m like, ah, crap, like the construction is going to make me late, and it’s like why me, you know, And this shift started happening and it just completely blew me away. I started noticing the people working construction and I’m like, oh my goodness, Like this.
00:28:04
Speaker 3: Is out there in a hundred degree heat.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: No, this guy has a job, he’s providing for his family, he’s improving my community, he’s making my community better. And all of a sudden, I start feeling more a part of this thing, this that we live in society and everything. And again, I know it sounds cheesy, it’s a lot, but once you start brute forcing this behavior, you start seeing inputs equal outputs.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: Yea.
00:28:32
Speaker 1: And like it was such a catalyst for me that I was like, Okay, I have to add this section into the book, because again it all makes sense when you you dovetail in the placebo effect and just psychologically how your brain’s ability to unpack your physiological state is. And so for me, just you know, kind of tried defining and outlining these just different systems and processes were for me.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: I mean that parallels a lot of Yeah, obviously the real world stuff is huge, but if anybody’s been on a Western hunt or a multi day Western hunt.
00:29:11
Speaker 3: I’m not super familiar with your like hunting background. Have you been on any.
00:29:16
Speaker 1: So I filmed hunting shows, Okay that counts Scott, but I’ve never really like out short of bird hunting. Yeah, Like I just really went deer hunting for the first time, like a year or two ago.
00:29:28
Speaker 3: And so, uh, you filmed some hunts a lot, yeah, like Western hunts. Yeah.
00:29:32
Speaker 2: So you know it’s an emotional roller coach, sure, and so I a lot of this could be used in that because there are a lot of guys and we’ve fallen down that trap. If you just get you know, there’s such highs and lows while you’re hunting, like, yo, we’re going to see something, you know, like you got the excitement of the trip. Then you get there and then first day is good, second day is good, you don’t start to see anything. Maybe third day you start to crash a little bit, and then you met have an encounter and then you crash.
00:29:59
Speaker 3: You mess it up. It’s such an emotional roller coaster.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: There’s so many things that you could use a lot of these techniques, well, like introduce some gratitude in there.
00:30:08
Speaker 1: You’re you’re definitely, I mean, you’re you’re you’re outlining the delayed gratification, right, and and and arguably the journey makes the destination that much better. And don’t get me wrong, if you’re trying to fill the freezer, yeah, go out day one and be great, it would be great, right, But in a lot of ways it’s it is not as much fun, for sure, And it is the experience, like especially if you’re you’re in a camp with friends, and it’s just it’s that’s what life’s about. Yeah, and that’s what we you know, I talk a ton about hunting with other people. It’s just way more fun.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: But I think, you know, I think people build up these expectations.
00:30:42
Speaker 3: Oh you know, it’s only a week.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: I have all from work, I did all this e scouting them away from my family. There’s these things that can creep in, right, and self doubt or whatever is going to creep in. And so I think having some of these tools to just be like, hey, I get to be out here. You know how many other people that I know are sitting back there, or you know, I get to these you know, years ago, hundreds of years ago, these acres were set aside that I could go hunt these and these types of things. You could, you know, introduce some of that stuff and maybe we’ll try some of these techniques.
00:31:10
Speaker 4: Well, what you just said, it’s a different perspective, right, So when you’re when you’re thankful and when you display gratitude, it brings you to a place where your perspective is completely different.
00:31:22
Speaker 3: For sure.
00:31:25
Speaker 4: A few years ago, I went to Haiti. Haiti’s not a great place. I don’t even think you can still go to Haiti really, but you get in and man, it’s terrible, Like the people hate you. Everything about it is bad. Right, There’s nothing good to eat, no air conditioned, nothing like it is.
00:31:40
Speaker 3: It’s a bad place. Smells you’re really selling it.
00:31:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker 4: Well, but but so when I’m when I was in it, I had one perspective of it. But then we took a trip to the other side of the mountain and you get on top of the mountain and you see down on Haiti and the island actually looks completely different than when you’re in it, right, Like the island’s tropical, it’s beautiful New York. Yeah, but that’s that’s what gratitude does to anybody’s life, Like it gives you a different perspective, right, because we all we all get in our own thoughts, right, and you always you can’t. It’s and I think honestly that’s what probably social media does a lot of times. It lets you people only post their highlights, right, So it gives you a perspective of maybe my life isn’t as good as their life.
00:32:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get that constant comparison.
00:32:30
Speaker 4: So whereas if you do have this life of gratitude, it just gives you a different perspective of just like you just said, right, like even the fact that you can just go out for a week, you’re not working, you’re in nature.
00:32:42
Speaker 3: It’s awesome. Ye.
00:32:44
Speaker 4: If you don’t kill, that’s part of it, right, But if you’re thankful that you can even get that, because like I’ve said, like Louisiana, people don’t go out wet out west to hunt at all just to say, man, I’m thankful I have this opportunity, it changes kind of everything for you.
00:32:59
Speaker 1: Well, i’d be curious. I mean, you’re the lead of the leite, right, but still it doesn’t negate the fact that you had some systems, whether or not they were conscious or subconscious.
00:33:11
Speaker 3: Right.
00:33:11
Speaker 1: So the gratitude component is just a psychological hack that I was trying to introduce to move the needle in the way that I needed it to go. Like for you, you don’t become the one percent of the one percent without some type of psychological edge. Is there anything that you used or you were mindful of?
00:33:32
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, in the last couple of years coming to you know, really think about what I was doing at different times.
00:33:40
Speaker 3: I think, you know, obviously genetics plays into it. Right.
00:33:44
Speaker 2: The upbringing that I was brought up in my family was hyper uber competitive. Everything we did was a competition. I’m I’m just one side of my family. There’s thirty two of us first cousins and twenty five or boys. Everything I did was a competition, right. There’s definitely some substance abuse, you know. Iologically we’ve come to find that substance abuse does run in families. And I think that’s my substance abuse is working out. Like these guys could probably attest to it like it is what it is. I turned it into something positive for sure, and then man, my faith. You know, I competed and failed. I call failure. I got second.
00:34:22
Speaker 3: Other people would be like that’s great, for me, it was a.
00:34:24
Speaker 2: Failure, right, and what I had kind of determined through stepping back and really looking at it from a faith perspective of I let whatever I was doing, you know, as a kid, and I don’t blame my cousins or my aunts and uncles, parents or anything like, I put myself worth and if I was the most dominant of the cousins or whatever, I was doing baseball, high school baseball. From there, it was firefighting and you know, we did this tough challenge, but being a firefighter doing some travel like flag football type stuff. And then CrossFit came along, right, And then when you have these failures, you’re like, oh, man, you know, I let my identity become whatever I was doing versus who I am and my faith. And you know, I’m not unashamed to say that my faith is in Christ.
00:35:06
Speaker 3: And that’s that’s what when I had the shift.
00:35:09
Speaker 2: Of competing for gratification for myself or whatever I was doing, or to make people proud to all, right, I’ve been giving these talents, these gifts, this upbringing whatever to glorify Christ.
00:35:21
Speaker 3: For me, there was just a huge shift and it was.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: I am still the most competitive person you’ve ever met, Like, I hate losing, that’s not going away. But I knew that my identity wasn’t tied up and or my self worth wasn’t tied up and who I was as.
00:35:36
Speaker 3: A competitor, and that for me was a huge shift.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: And then I could compete from a different spot of saying, all right, I’m gonna go out here and I’m gonna train and I’m gonna you know, I still want to win every day I wake up.
00:35:47
Speaker 3: I want to be the fittest man on earth.
00:35:49
Speaker 2: Like I have to put in the time, put in the work, obsess about it, right, and I know that, you know, if I lose, I’m gonna be pissed off for you know, some time. But I can get over it because that first time, when I got second, I like I was in a funk for months and you know, just found you know, I grew up in a faith family, but it was more of a somebody else’s faith. It was never my my own personal you know, what it had done for me or how I could express that.
00:36:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s interesting. I feel like there’s a lot of parallels with a lot of people in society. You know, you have the you know, with our coffee company and everything. We have a lot of veterans transitioning from their time and service into civilian life. You know, there’s a lot of people I think, even as much as I hate to say it, you know, content creators like I know a lot of people because I’ve been in it for so long to include me, you know. And again this is not me like trying to grandstand here or anything, but like one of my channels has like two point seven three million subscribers, right, And there’s something that happens to you when you’re on a pedestal where you’re putting some some of your worth, if not all of your worth, and the thing that is getting attention from those people. And so you know, I’m getting ten million, thirty million, forty million views. And I never really wanted to be put in a box. That’s why I personally suck at social media so much, because I don’t want to be known as the gun guy on YouTube. I don’t want to be known as the software developer or the anarchist or this thing or that or whatever, because I’m a pretty complicated dude. Like I’m again the regenerative agricultural world. I’m building stuff for small farmers and stuff. Yeah it’s pretty complicated. Yeah yeah, I mean doing stuff in robotics and stuff now and everything. But it’s like I’ve seen the I’ve seen the rise in the fall of a lot of content creators too, and it is tragic to see somebody put their self worth in really other people’s affirmation and and and I think that you really really like owe it to yourself, especially in this digital age, to do the work, figure out again those long term goals and that will help you establish And that’s you know, I never knew my father, and so I felt like, here we are unpacking a bunch of stuff on a podcast. But you know, I found that psychologically speaking, one of the reasons that made me an overperformer and everything that I did. So that’s exactly it. I was trying to approve a male figure in my life or get the affirmation from from them. So whether it was work in construction, whether it was media executives, even you know, my business partners and stuff like that, there was a subconscious thing that I was always trying to prove myself. And then you know, you take and you put that catalyst with social media and again, I know, to the average person is just going to sound weird. But like when you’re getting millions and millions of views, I just like, I just walked away from it. You know, I talk about I talk about a little bit in the book and that, you know, I didn’t want to make a big to go away video or anything like that. And you know, I understand why people do that and everything, but for me, it felt like if I did that, for me personally, it was like a heroin junkie going I’m going to do an I’m going to do an epic dose and then I’m going to rehab. I was like, no, I’m just like, if I really do want to step away from it and like only create content whenever I want to create content just for the sake of doing a cool video for whatever it is, then That’s what I’m going to do. And I did, like and it sucks, man, Like you you see, you see how different people treat you when you’re not getting views or the things that you’re not invited to. And again but again, if my if my my self worth was put into that, and again that’s kind of how I found that, you know, that psychological hack and that I’m trying to please myself fifteen thirty years from now, because that’s the person I need to be true to. You know, is that person going to look back, you know, having kids and everything. Am I doing them a disservice in the future and stuff like that? And that’s the person I’m trying to be true to. I just feel like, you know, this whole process with something that I feel like a lot of people could benefit from. And if we’re ultimately going to shift the you know, the things that we need to shift, I think it starts at an individual level, and then once we you know, build up at a community level and everything, you’ll start seeing out’s equal pounds in society, and dude, I am. I am long community. I think that so many people are hungry right now for it.
00:40:44
Speaker 3: They’re a part of something, be.
00:40:47
Speaker 1: It board game clubs, to CrossFit whatever. I feel like, if there’s not a resurgence already coming, there is a tsunami coming with that, for sure.
00:40:58
Speaker 2: I didn’t tell you this that they Violet, my youngest, she’s seven, super inquisitive always.
00:41:04
Speaker 3: Dad, did you grow up wanting to be a YouTuber? That hurt me.
00:41:08
Speaker 2: I was like, one, I’m not a YouTuber too, you know, yeah, what we’re gonna say, Sorry I cut you off.
00:41:17
Speaker 4: Well, I think even what you just said, there’s plenty of people in the world, I would say, most people who don’t think thirty years from now, who’s the person that I want to be?
00:41:27
Speaker 3: Right?
00:41:28
Speaker 4: And if you have that and it drives your life, then it’s completely different. Right, or even sitting with your family and having like a mission statement or whatever, say hey, our family is this you know what I mean?
00:41:39
Speaker 3: The like my.
00:41:41
Speaker 4: Past, we’ve we’ve always taught people to do that. But of course, like if you have the end goal in mind, I know you talk about not having a dad, which probably also shapes how you want to be a dad, right, and then even that once you have kids, then along that journey is like, Okay, I know this is the kind of dad I want to be, and that helps you along the way. Whereas people who don’t have a dad, that’s how you get sucked, Like we talked about the Dale Earnhard documentary, like, and you get sucked into just how your dad was because you don’t have that full outlook on your life, which is really cool to have.
00:42:17
Speaker 1: Uh.
00:42:17
Speaker 4: But with that, I know you talked about some things, but what about just total detox.
00:42:21
Speaker 1: Right, Like we talked.
00:42:23
Speaker 4: About hunting, spending time away h even you touched on archery, which I think a lot of times that’s why people like archery, because even if it’s just for that twenty seconds before you release or before you punch your trigger, like all your focus is literally just on one thing, or even when we had Joel here, you know, like all your focus is just on the release and all that.
00:42:47
Speaker 3: So just.
00:42:49
Speaker 4: Because the reality is maybe most hunters like it’s great to have that detox, but probably the amount of times you spend in the woods is not enough for the year. Right, You have these to the end of August, so what do you do in that time?
00:43:03
Speaker 1: That’s also just practical. So going through most of the research, specifically doctor and Olimke and some of these other studies would would say thirty to forty days is a typical kind of detox duration before you reset your dopaminergic system to baseline, So you’ll have to go through the withdrawal phase of just like any other addiction. Correct, correct, and you don’t realize the impulse of that. That’s exactly a text, yeah, and it’s constantly happening. So that’s contact switching right for me. That’s why I was so stoked that we were doing this this morning, because I am cognitively like a game. First thing in the morning, about two three o’clock, I am, I have so much cognitive atrophy from just contact switching, all the different things, little conversations that come up and everything. But it again, this is one of those things it’s very, very hard to do a complete detox with because it’s so ingrained in our society and so many different ways. If you can, that’s awesome.
00:44:10
Speaker 4: Well, and even say, if you run a business like it’s part it’s a it’s part of it, right, like you have to have it.
00:44:17
Speaker 1: So I think you would have to establish some very clear boundaries and what that’s going to look like in your quote unquote detox phase. Again, this is where it gets kind of gray depending on the person it may mean. And again I know this is a luxury, but if you can get a second phone, I film that there are a number of ways to introduce friction. So I removed social media from my mobile app, or I’d only do it from the desktop. Now, again, this is one of those frustrating things where I’m going to deviate here a little bit, but you know the again looking at the various ways that they distribute content and the preferential treatment based off of the metadata the post. So if it came from desktop versus mobile, what type of device it is. Even to this point, I have I think a couple hundred AI influencers that I’ve been building over the last two years, and I randomize the metadata so it’s like an iPhone or a Galaxy, different focal links, and I see how it impacts the distribution on it. So I know that you know it’s going to be hard for people not to upload on a mobile device, So if you can get an extra one, that’d be great. Separate it from your personal line, right, and I put mine in gray scale mode. I put a Matt filter on it so it looks like an e inc. There’s all these different ways to introduce friction. If you can do a detox, that is really the way to reset the dopaminergic threshold or your baseline in that sense. Thirty to forty days is historically what it takes. It could be longer depending on your level of addiction or compulsion. And again, these are the things that I like, I definitely want to emphasize, is you know, if you have a real, real problem, you should seek professional high.
00:46:10
Speaker 4: I don’t know if you have a real problem.
00:46:11
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, man, this is such a loaded, a loaded because the research and everything we were going through. I was fortunate enough to be able to hire some uh, you know, people to help out as far as researchers and everything we’re concerned. But from pornography to you know, just social media and like you know, people just their motivation and life and all these different things, it’s like it’s very hard. You might need somebody to help you objectively assess your issues. So I would I would say you might want to seek professional help if that’s if you find that you can’t go through a detox phase once you’ve established some clear boundaries, maybe it is you need some some actual guidance from somebody or even at some point maybe even a medical and intervision in some way, shape or form.
00:47:07
Speaker 4: I know, for me, I can’t have Twitter on my phone. Yeah, so I don’t do Twitter at all, and then.
00:47:14
Speaker 3: I got really bad during the election on Twitter. Now I don’t ever go to Twitter x X. Yeah.
00:47:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, nor I don’t have TikTok because I’m too old too. And then really my morning routine is I do pick up my phone just because the first thing I do is go to the bathroom. But after that I do try to sit.
00:47:38
Speaker 1: Where’s your phone where you’re sleeping?
00:47:40
Speaker 4: Well that’s tricky, so it is next to me because I use the noise, so I don’t, so my phone goes do not disturb at eight o’clock. So I really from eight.
00:47:54
Speaker 1: On you’re still I’m not okay, okay, no, it’s.
00:47:58
Speaker 3: Usually up mine.
00:47:59
Speaker 4: I don’t keep it, but I do just.
00:48:01
Speaker 1: For the noise. Right, Well, I can help you solve that problem.
00:48:04
Speaker 4: Then can you help my wife be able to turn the TV off? Because that’s why I need the noise.
00:48:08
Speaker 1: So growing up here in Tennessee, I developed a very bad habit. We didn’t have central heat and air, and so I had a box fan in my bedroom. Old are you all right? We had electricity. It’s just like we we didn’t want for anything, but we weren’t.
00:48:33
Speaker 4: You know, uh, saving money on the electric Yeah.
00:48:38
Speaker 1: Uh. So I had a box fan growing up, and that’d be something that carried through adulthood. So like whenever, even whenever I was doing media and everything, my producers anytime we’d travel, I would have them get a box fan at Walmart and have it my hotel room. Or then when Amazon came around, I would just Amazon one. And there’s a company this isn’t no affiliation with, but Snooze. They’re like about this big and there are a mechanical white noise machine that’s a fan. I can’t do iPhones because the digital frequency that is exactly the same.
00:49:18
Speaker 3: That’s as soon as I hear the loop, I can’t I wake up.
00:49:25
Speaker 1: So the short term, if for some reason I forget my Snooze because it’ll fit in a backpack, super great.
00:49:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, get it. Get it.
00:49:37
Speaker 1: The hack for that is you can if you have YouTube Premium. There’s creators who have recorded like a fan for like eight ten hours and I just download that video. There’s no loop, that’s exactly it. Right, Yeah, so I got I guess I’m digressing so much here. I’m in dis Yeah. I don’t even know where I was going. I was bringing up the fan situation. Oh you your bedside table. So for me, I think a really meaningful friction point for people specifically around the home is taking and having a charge station by the front door for your phone and you plug it in when you get home, and so you can hear if you get a phone call or a text message if you’re worried about emergencies or something like that. Because everybody uses that excuse, but I think you will find more often than not, when you’re sitting on the couch watching TV or eating dinner, you’re you’re checking your phone and again, ounces equal pounds. If you can start to remove that, you’re going to notice a withdrawal face because that compulsion’s kind of going away and everything, and again, everybody’s circumstances different. I’m not trying to tell people they have to abstain, but like, if you can get it out of the bedroom, I think a lot of sleep scientists will even tell you that is a way better way to get deep sleep. You know, say what you want about eight sleep. I’m not you know, I’m not the biggest fan of subscription eight sleep, oh, subscription furniture. But but you know, if you have a chili pad or something like that, there yeah cooling, cooling, cooling your your bed. Yeah, so I have a in my camper right now, I have a chili pad because it’s like a twin mattress and eight slick doesn’t have, you know, optimize your sleep. For me, I prioritize certain things, right, So sleep’s number one, Uh, fitness and diets underneath that of course, relationships and everything else. But it introduced friction to your consumed experience. That’s the only thing I would say, is like, if you’re doing the work and you establish those boundaries, or you know you’re you’re the things that you value or you you want out of life, you should be able to objectively say that’s a problem if it is or it isn’t, you know.
00:51:42
Speaker 2: I one thing I don’t like about three or four years ago, no phone by the bed. I did it in the in the bathroom, but now it’s like underneath the bed, and I don’t even it’s not a problem whatsoever. And then one thing I did was I only if I was going to use my phone, I put it on the counter by the fridge right there, so you’re like awkwardly, you like, you know, you’re on your phone and you’re standing and it stays right there after like four o’clock. And and that was an eye opener. And I go through phases where I’m like, oh crap, I got to get back to doing that because it has started leaking. You know, We’ve had a lot of stuff going on in the background in the last couple of months, but that was like that’s something talking.
00:52:21
Speaker 3: I’m like, I need to get back to that.
00:52:22
Speaker 1: Where say it’s an athlete that’s a competitive edge too. Yeah, stay because because your focus, Like just think about that from an athlete’s perspective, if your focus has shifted any during some type of training protocol, like you’re not giving it everything that you need.
00:52:38
Speaker 2: Right, So yeah, that’s a good good way to look at it. But yeah, you have that one spot where your phone stays and it’s not a comfortable spot. It’s not like uncomfortable, but I have to be standing and it stays right there on the thing on the counter.
00:52:50
Speaker 3: And so yeah, so.
00:52:53
Speaker 1: You say you have you like the idea of mission statements if you don’t mind me asking, like, do you have like what are some mission statements? Yeah, I’ll give you an example. So my software company or my incubator or whatever, it’s build like humanity depends on it. So everything that we do when we’re we’re building products is focused on these are the things that we feel are dire importance. Like, so one of the things we’re building is trying to help small farmers compete with big a scale. We could get into that if you wanted to, but I’m curious if you have any mission statements or Yeah, I.
00:53:27
Speaker 4: Think just more so words like and rich can share even like mayhem stuff, but I mean for our family, like grateful is one of them, just because I think that it offsets plenty of things. You know, like even you read the Bible, there’s plenty of verses about thankfulness and how you should like enter his gates with praise and things like that. So I think if it’s that important, if that’s how you enter, then there’s probably something to it. So my kids definitely do not live by that often, but you.
00:53:57
Speaker 1: Know, and I’ll come back to it.
00:53:59
Speaker 4: Yeah, I try to practice it, like even like to be honest, Like there’s times when I’ve like on a rich and said hey, dude, like thanks for the opportunity, And it’s probably a bit awkward because most people don’t act that way. But like I I’ve also I worked at a church for twenty years, so it was more practice in that setting. But to me, if if you’re like, if you do that to your employer or anyone. For one, it lets them know that you are at least thankful for an opportunity, right, and then it in my mind, it keeps my perspective the right way, because anybody’s replaceable, even in a company. Right, So if if you’re thankful just for an opportunity of or taking a chance on me or anything like that, then that that lets them know that I have the right perspective. And honestly, I’m not full of myself, like it keeps it keep If I’m thankful, then it also keeps me humble. Yeah, you know, so that is one thing we try to practice.
00:54:57
Speaker 1: Be the change that you want to be. And I think you’re doing that right because everybody wants to work with people that enjoy what they do. And you know, I think that a lot of companies will tell you they take out or you know, the few employees they give them the opportunity, like they’ll even say, like the COVID uh kind of like, hey, well, you know, give you. Coinbase was a great example where it’s like, hey, if you want to resign, we’ll give you a comp package of like three months or something like that. For the people who didn’t like Brian Armstrong stance on Hey, look, we’re we’re focused on crypto and you know, global infrastructure like the new era of payment mechanisms and empowering the individual and everything else. Uh, And we’re not you know, we don’t have any other focus ideology, ideologically or you know, whatever things that you participate in outside of you know, we support you having and exercising your free speech and whatever it is that you’re passionate about, but we’re not going to do it. And people didn’t like that within the company. And so you could say that there’s there’s you know, a level of toxic behavior or people that just aren’t grateful for whatever it is. And if you trim that fat I think you’ll find, more often than not, historically a lot of these companies have been better for that. Give them the comp package to to exit and uh, and then you’ll find you have a lot more happy employees. But then I put it back on myself. It’s like am I being? Am I being the employee that I want to work with? And I agree with you there that gratitude like thanks, rich, I appreciate you having me on today, and like like.
00:56:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, that one thing we also put in place was even writing it. So even like thank you notes was.
00:56:45
Speaker 3: A big deal. It’s huge.
00:56:46
Speaker 4: It’s because if you take the time to write it, it’s even like says more you know what I mean, which haven’t really put in place at Mayhem yet, but like I got a thank you note for one of a guy who volunteered with me at the church. He like mailed it to me, you know, and like I am not a words of affirmation person whatsoever, you know, so even to be that way as a stretch, but I know what it does for me. But even to hear those things, even though I’m not words of affirmation, like, it still does, like like you want to know you made a difference in people’s lives at the of the day, right, So I think just things like that does go a long way, no matter whatever person you are, No however awkward it is to say here anything like, it’s just a good practice.
00:57:30
Speaker 1: Well I mean to say and also to receive. So being that we are talking and knowing that there are people listening, I would I would encourage if you take anything away from it today, do that, like take five minutes write a note to somebody in your life, friend, family member, and just tell them thank you. Drop it the mail. Like it’s hard not to get emotional right now because it just feels so much gratitude in that, like just thinking of all the people in my life. Uh, And I encourage everyone just like, if you take anything from that and this conversation today, just do that one thing and just see how it like causes a slight shift and again ounces equal pounds. If you’re able to take and uh, implement a lot of these things on a regular basis, you’re gonna find yourself way happier and the people around you way happier. So be the change. Yeah, be the change that you want to see for sure.
00:58:27
Speaker 2: I don’t know to ask ask him for his one takeaway. That’s usually like the end. I’m like, hey, what’s your one takeaway?
00:58:32
Speaker 3: There? It is gratitude.
00:58:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, Man, I think a lot of this is you know, we didn’t we haven’t talked a ton about hunting and how it applies. But man, anybody who’s been out west or even going on a you know, a white tail or any type of hunt that you’re in the woods for a long day or multiple days and you.
00:58:48
Speaker 4: Start, in fact, sitting on a deer stand all day is harder, right, it’s way. Uh, it’s not physically.
00:58:57
Speaker 3: I’m just physically.
00:58:58
Speaker 4: We had we have this, but for the detox, A detox part of it is just sitting there doing nothing, whereas at least Western you are walking and things, so it’s a bit easier because you’re going somewhere.
00:59:12
Speaker 2: We have this discussion because we have a buddy that’s a hard tale or Hardtale, hard hardcore white tail guy, and and he says it’s harder than hunting out West.
00:59:24
Speaker 4: The detox part.
00:59:25
Speaker 3: I will say, yeah, you can’t just sit.
00:59:28
Speaker 2: I will say, you know, like me and Scott hunted a lot last year together and we were in the same tree.
00:59:32
Speaker 3: That was fine.
00:59:33
Speaker 2: Like if you got one other person and I lose my mind when I’m sitting by myself.
00:59:38
Speaker 1: Intand who’s got a squirrel over here barking at you?
00:59:43
Speaker 3: Ye?
00:59:44
Speaker 2: So man, I think, yeah, I think there’s so many parallels of one being disconnected, but also just the you know what you were saying, with the the gratitude of hey man, I get to be out here, I get to you know, experience this with buddies or whatever you’re doing, even if it is solo and it’s something you want to do. You’re checking something off a bucket list, whatever it is. But man, there’s just so many things to be grateful for in those situations where we get yeah, I mean you get so singular focused or somebody like me that is so goal or not. I don’t like goals per se, Like I don’t have a six month goal. I have targets, right, yeah, and you know when I’m hunting, obviously, the target is to get something. And so you know, when things aren’t going the way you want them to go, there’s things that you can be grateful for in those moments.
01:00:31
Speaker 3: For sure. What do you you travel around the US right now?
01:00:35
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, I was like, I was going from Texas to Georgia, South Carolina, headed to Indiana today and then I’ll head to Missouri, and uh maybe those are well, you know, this is that time of year where I’m trying to prioritize stopping and seeing people and everything. I’ve been doing some stuff with the Kansas City Cattle Company, and I love stopping at small farms. We were talking about his hosts earlier. Yeah, so one of the things I’ve been working on is how do I create transparency and supply chain to help smaller farmers compete with big agg scale because you’re probably familiar with the average person might not realize the nomenclature around food is well. So like you hear grass fed and you’re like, oh, I’m doing a good thing, but it could be an animal on a feed lot in a fifteen by fifteen stalled and they dump.
01:01:25
Speaker 2: Truck grass finished, grass fed, grass finished, grain finished.
01:01:28
Speaker 1: So one of the things I’ve been working on. And again, I’ll burn through this really fast because we’re probably limited on time. I don’t know what your schedule is. But military working dogs, they used to be euthanized when they were retired because they were classified as military equipment. Then Robbie’s Law was enacted which allowed them to be adopted out by nonprofits, civilians, and other government organizations. But there’s inherent challenges around military working dogs and that they have specific skills that aren’t necessarily conducive to home life with children and stuff like that. And so Mike Ritlin started the Warrior Dog Foundation, and he’s a buddy of mine, and I was like, Okay, I’m wanting to build this tech stack that builds a more meaningful relationship between an organization and an end user through transparency. And so I put RFIDs in the collars of all the dogs and cameras in the stalls and throughout the facility. So a person could sponsor one dog, two dogs, or three dogs, whatever, and it automates media feed so that they can see that dog’s retirement. And it helps, I think, build a more meaningful relationship between the ORG and the sponsors so that you know, there are organizations out there that do fantastic work, Saint Jude great example, but when you give them one hundred dollars a year, you know, it’s like I trust that they’re gonna you know, and there’s really not a lot of transparency. You can audit the ORG and everything. But you know, I’m a big opponent of like trying to figure out solutions to these these really really big problems. And I think that the small farmer is just getting decimated by h be it, you say, the processors and everything out there or whatever. And so I was trying to figure out a way where states like Tennessee or Texas that have these cottage food laws and stuff like that selling direct to consumer, or if they do go the route of having an FDA inspector on hand and everything ways that we can integrate RFIDs or tracking, Like my chickens I have, You’ll when you get a carton of my eggs, it’ll have the date and the nest box on it. And so when you hit the QR code, there’s cameras everywhere, so you’ll see the eggs that day in that nest box rolling back. So it’s just transparency, right, You’re seeing the life cycle of that animal grazing out Kansas City Cattle Company, You’re seeing like the you know, these wago cows out in pasture, roaming around and everything. That’s exactly it. And so if all farmer wants to sell their stuff at a premium, there is that transparency in that. And you know, food waste is a massive problem in the US. Over sixty percent of food goes to waste. So how do you how do you tackle that along with trying to help the small farmer. For me, I’m like, okay, let’s elicit an emotional response. You guys, being hunters, you’re very connected with your food. Well, the average person buying from you know, a producer. It’s it’s like you’re not seeing the slaughter process. You’re not seeing all this so if we can, if we can show a calving process all the way through the slaughter process, I think it’ll really listen. Yeah, it’ll listit emotional response. Not everybody’s gonna want to see it, but the fact that you can see it means that there’s that transparency and supply chain. So maybe a farmer could sell their steak for a dollar or two more a pound to a restaurant, and then it makes people feel better when they buy it on a menu or if they buy it directly.
01:04:51
Speaker 3: From that you know it’s alive. I mean, that’s what we’ve preached.
01:04:54
Speaker 2: I mean I don’t get as much hate now, but early on I got a.
01:04:57
Speaker 3: Ton of hate.
01:04:58
Speaker 2: And the ones that are against hunting because vegan and vegetarian, that’s a whole nother conversation. But the people that were against eating, killing or hunting because you know there’s plenty of meat.
01:05:11
Speaker 3: At the store or whatever, you’re just.
01:05:13
Speaker 2: Like what you know? It blew my mind. So yeah, no, I think that’s awesome. The full transparency. You don’t see the animal on the hoof, the animal had a life versus you know, it just being stuck in a feed.
01:05:24
Speaker 1: And I do everyone I know it’s not it’s not a moment that when you know, the lights go out on an animal, it’s not a it’s not a moment that people are generally happy to see.
01:05:39
Speaker 3: No, there is a little bit remorse to.
01:05:41
Speaker 1: That’s exactly it. And you know there’s a sadness around it and everything. There’s grateful you know, like there’s gratitude, uh, you know for the animal and its life, and you want to do right by them by ensuring that they live the best life possible.
01:05:54
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:05:55
Speaker 1: And so for me, these are the things that you know, as I’ve shifted, like build like humanity, he depends on it. Like I really want to build as many different systems that hopefully, like my kids have a better world, uh to grow up in. Whereas like I feel like I’ve extracted a lot of value over the last two decades. It’s my it’s my duty to try to figure out how to realign incentives in some way, shape or forms.
01:06:21
Speaker 3: Man, I appreciate you coming out.
01:06:22
Speaker 1: I cannot thank you enough.
01:06:24
Speaker 3: This is fantastic.
01:06:26
Speaker 4: We can just try to out thank each other.
01:06:28
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you, thank you.
01:06:30
Speaker 1: We’re like in a Canadian standoff. Sorry sorry sorry sorry, sorry.
01:06:35
Speaker 2: Sorry story I’d be uh Man, appreciate it.
01:06:40
Speaker 3: Welcome back anytime we gotta get you on a hunt.
01:06:43
Speaker 1: Sweet, I’m very much appreciator of the camera, Right, Scott, let’s do it.
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