Whistleblower Professor Fired For Exposing DEI Corruption Scandal | Rick Addante | Ep. 52 - The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So one of the most difficult things that people go
through in their life is when their integrity is questioned,
when an opportunity or an unfortunate circumstance presents itself on
whether or not people are going to crumble or they're
going to stand tall for what they believe in. My
guest today is one of those people. And when you

(00:25):
get to learn more about Rick and his story, you're
going to understand why he thinks the way he does.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
And the reason why he stood up for what.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
He did in terms of the corruption that was taking
place at Florida Tech. But what I really want you
to listen to is I want you to listen to
the breadth of knowledge that he has in terms of
understanding how human beings function, what drives them from a

(00:56):
neuroscience perspective, as well as what drives people to do
certain things psychologically. So, without further ado, Rick, welcome to
the show.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.
You know, obviously the.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Easiest place to start would be to just, you know,
give us a quick synopsis of what took place at
Florida Tech and how you got to the position you're
in right now.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Sure, so for the past five years, I've been a
faculty member at excuse me, at Florida Institute of Technology,
I've been a tenured professor of psychology. I'm a neuroscientist
and also affiliate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. And
so for the past five years I've been there teaching,
conducting research, winning NIH awards and grants, publishing discoveries of

(01:54):
the human brain, behavior, all that kind of good stuff.
And through the core of events, I was basically made
aware of the intention of our president and a cabal
of related faculty members to conspire to defraud the citizens
and the governor of the state of Florida, as well

(02:15):
as the federal government by virtue of non compliance with
federal and state directives for receiving state and federal funds
to the tune of first seven million dollars, specifically for
a grant that had been essentially stipulated by Governor Roncentus
and then from the federal Department of Education by virtue
of federal student loans. And I say that because that's

(02:35):
what I was told by the president of the university,
and he came to a meeting after a first initial meeting,
told us he was going to come to a meeting
and tell us these things of how he was going
to fight back against the government in order to continue
to do the prohibitive, prohibited activities of DEI and critical

(02:57):
race theory teaching and implementation, in order to who continued
to receive the state and federal funds. And then he
came and he did it, and I reported that we
blew the whistle on that. And at that point there
was a handful of things that happened, but ultimately I
was terminated unannounced, without any due process, any notification from

(03:22):
a tenured position that was probably about six weeks ago.
Left my family high and dry, without medical insurance for
my kids, salary income, whatever. And yeah, there's a whole
lot to unpack there, but the gist of it was,
I caught the president of the Florida Institute of Technology
coming to our meeting telling us that he had a

(03:44):
meeting at the Governor's office of the State of Florida.
Rondasantis was shaken down well by the governor and said,
why are you so woke? He said, I didn't say anything,
and his sin of a mission went home and said,
why don't we fight back? Well, when he came to

(04:06):
our meeting to tell us how he was going to
fight back. Well, and we're here in Florida, so this
is fighting back against your tax money to get a
seven million dollar grant. But then he went on to say,
so the seven million dollar grant was the first story
that came out from James O'Keefe O'Keefe Media Group. They
broke that in early April. But what we followed up

(04:26):
with in subsequent stories from o'keef media group was that
I basically found that it was way more than that,
because the president went on to say, this is more
than seven million dollars. He says, I don't mind losing it.
If I lose it, we lose it. What I'm worried
about losing is this federal student funding, which his vice
president published in the student paper the next day was

(04:49):
sixty nine million dollars. Wow, federal, that's a that's a
and that's why, right, if we can handle seven million
dollars somehow, right, but I don't want to lose sixty
nine million dollars because the vice president published in the
student newspapers and that'll shut our doors.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Wow. And so.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
That's what we were told and you know, what do
you do when you're, you know, the unintending recipient of
information of that magnitude.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And navigate conscience? I don't think you can.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
And I mean obviously it hits you to a point
where you recognize this, this isn't right. And I think
the thing that pops into my mind is is you know,
why did you think it wasn't right? What about the
programs that they were trying to protect? Do you did
you have a problem with Like I understand if it's

(05:48):
a directive and you seem like an individual we had
to chat prior to coming on that. You know, you
go by the letter of the law like this, if
these are the rules, I'm going to follow the rules.
And you identify that those rules had changed, and now
you were saying this is not correct, and on top
of them trying to pay you off, which is another
we'll get into that in a second, but but you recognize, hey,

(06:11):
this is not okay. But what about those rules? What
specifically about those ideologies? Because I think that's fundamentally what's
the argument. And this is happening obviously at institutions all
across the country and around the world. Right there's this

(06:31):
DEI initiative, which is diversity, equity and inclusion and which
is rooted in critical theory, critical race theory. So what
about that is problematic for you.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
That's a really good question. I'll try to answer in
three different layers. First, I would say you're right and
that DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. But it's
can I one time just hop in? I'm sorry?

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, and just could you describe what your PhDs are? So,
because I want people to understand it's you're not just
winging this from your back hit man like this. You
are an expert in psychology in neuroscience.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
Well, as it happens, I'm also an expert in diversity
as well. I was actually a Diversity Fellow of the
American Psychological Association's Diversity Program in neuroscience during my doctoral
dissertation at UC Davis in the neuroscience PhD program. In
my neuroscience degree was earned as a PhD at UC Davis.
I was a Young Alum Award winner at UC Davis.

(07:33):
An undergraduate degree in psychology from the College of New Jersey.
I did a first PhD program down here in Boca
at Florida Institute or excuse me, Florida Atlantic University Center
for Complex Systems and Brain Science. Before transferring over to
UC Davis, I did a three year post doctoral fellowship
in neuroimaging at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas,
and then was a faculty member at UT Dallas AND's

(07:56):
School of Brain Behavioral in Brain Sciences.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
And then I've been uh.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
So there are so there are many people out there
that understand how the human mind works from a neurological level,
biological level, psychological level. You think you've got that pretty
pretty well covered, huh recently.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
So I'd say that there are absolutely people.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Like one of the things I always enjoyed about that
journey in the world of neuroscience was I will promise
you that I was and always loved being the absolutely
dumbest guy in the room. Like they're like, don't don't
get me wrong, Like, yeah, like there are brilliant, much
smarter people than I out there.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
I think I was.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Well as he he told me before it becomes because
he's also a phenomenal collegiate wrestler as well too. He said,
I'm really just a knuckle dragon wrestler who got a
couple of degrees.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
That's how he described it.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, although I would say I definitely did not say phenomenal,
So I threw that in there. So this will be
a slight tangent to answering your question about DEI and
my caroscience credentials. But just for a point of full clarity,
I was a walk on Division three wrestler, which means
if Division three is the bottom of Division one two three,
and i'm JV is the bottom of that, and the

(09:18):
walk on is beneath.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
That, I was that guy.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
So I was the walk on, and I took great
pride though as a as a walk on college wrestler
at one of the top programs in the country that
after four years, I was the only one in my
entire freshman class of blue chip recruits left standing who
actually completed four years and never quit.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
So you can, you can call it the bottom of
the bottom of the bottom, but that's not the way
I see it.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
I was up by car in the middle of that.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
It was never a fifty miles an hour, and I
still finished four years straight. And some of those guys,
you know, injuries happened, you know these years. I'm not
you know, you know, it's not because they were just
some guys quit just quitters, but other guys, I mean,
they just things come up. You take a red shirt.
Year I happened, I was the only guy left standing.
And so you know, for I know, you come from

(10:09):
a strong background of never quitting and persevering through things
like buds. You know, that kind of an ethos is
what I what I brought to the neuroscience.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Well, and I think that's why you're able to keep
going in the way you are, because you learn that
on the mats and you don't learn that anywhere else.
I really believe that any combatives, in particular wrestling or
jiu jitsu, are you just learn so much about yourself.
And maybe after we get through all this other stuff,
I want to spend some time and your thoughts on

(10:38):
performance and what that never quip mindset is like if
you're okay.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
With oh, absolutely great, I mean, and I think that
there's an indispensable element of you learn about suffering and
how to suffer.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
That's right, you know, in both of our walks of life,
that's right.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
And when you learn that sort of cheat code to
the game, anything's possible, all.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Right, So we've established you know what you're talking about
when it comes to the human mind.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
So let's talk.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
About then DEI critical race theory back at all the way,
even critical theory.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
So the answer to your question I was getting at
was that you said that DEI is rooted in diversity,
equity and conclude and inclusion, and I would push back
and contend that it's rooted in discrimination, it's rooted in exclusion,
and it's rooted in a fundamental pattern that we see

(11:35):
in effectively communists. To control, they want to exclude people,
they want to define them by how they're different, and
they want to prioritize one group of people over another.
They use that policy, whether it's DEI or Title nine
or any kind of element that it brushes up against,

(11:56):
as a cudgel to control us, to control you. They
want to control you. They want to control what you do.
But they can't do that without controlling what you say
and what you think. And that's ultimately how it's manifested.
That's how I've seen it manifested on campuses across the country,
and it's part of.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
The California, New Jersey, California, Texas, and Florida. So you've
been how many in Florida too? In Florida, so you've
been at five major universities.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yeah, and across the span of like what you might
think of as like demographics. I've gone from public liberal
arts colleges in New Jersey to the biggest, you know,
broadest education system there is, which is cal State, which
is I think four hundred and five hundred thousand students
system wide. I was a ten yurre tract professor there
around a director of a neuroscience lab, and to the

(12:49):
University of Texas, which is right there as like one
of the biggest systems in the country. But that's that's
a little bit different profile than the cal State system.
And now I've been at a private technical school in
Florida as well. So this is a universal kind of
like pattern that we see, which is this this systemic
use of things like Title nine and DEI as a weaponization.

(13:14):
And so one of the things that have been popular
in the news has been weaponization and government, and I'm
glad to see that that's being addressed at the tip
of the spear of the highest political levels, because the
government was weaponized against presidents and his cabinet and other
people like that. But one of the things that you know,
I always like to send as a message to the

(13:34):
administration pursuing the correction of those weaponizations is the reminder
that all the regular citizens are subjected to this weaponization,
to this cudgel of discrimination and exclusion, that that hurts
every day, Joe's that hurts everybody at every no name

(13:58):
like regional state school. That the weaponization of government has
to be investigated or neat or should be against the
regular people who who comprise the government. Other people I
firmly agree.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
I mean, there's endless stories about you know, very high
performing kids, and it's I'm not just talking about white kids,
it's Asian kids, It's it's all different types of kids that,
through the the coveted idea of meritocracy, they believe that
if they work as hard as humanly possible, they're going

(14:36):
to get the opportunity to challenge right to get in
uh in the arena.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
So to speak.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
And I how soon did you start seeing this, Like
how far back does this go.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
In your mind?

Speaker 3 (14:52):
Anecdotally I felt it as a student applying to applying
to colleges, applying to graduate schools, applying for fellowships and
schol scholarships.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
As I.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Went to public school in New Jersey. I paid my
way with you school one hundred percent financed on my
own between cash working as a landscaper and a bar
back and a bouncer basically literally landscaping by day and
bar fighting at night. Wow paid cash, took loans for
the rest of It. Took me twenty five years to
pay off those loans by virtue of support from the

(15:25):
National Institute of Health grants I received. But you know,
I felt like, and I'm sure that this is something
that has resonated with a lot of people that no
matter how hard you work, like it still seemed boxed out.
Along that journey, I would sit in classes at Princeton
for five years, learning all sorts of things from their

(15:47):
visiting speakers and college dressler. I was a finalist for
the RHDES Scholarship in New Jersey in two thousand and four,
and I actually got interviewed by Corey Booker for it.
But oh yeah, he was the mayor in Newark at
the time. And you know, so so no matter how,
no matter what we were doing even at that point,
so people need to unpack and the idea that's very fresh.

(16:10):
The last fifteen months or so, affirmative action was deemed illegal,
but for generations beforehand, that was the law of land.
People thought it wasn't just good, but it was merited
and you know, like proper and so you're always essentially.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Racing against quotas.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Is there a component to the the initial construct of
the idea that underprivileged under under what are they called
underprivileged underserve service minorities and areas in particular academic right
that they're they're really is an unfair system in place?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Is Is there truth to that at all?

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Yes, if you consider the promotion of any one race
over another to be unfair. And I think you know,
I wasn't alive in previous eras, but I have I'm
very easily convinced. I have no doubt that they absolutely
were subjected to discrimination. And I think discrimination is wrong,
but I think discrimination of anyone is wrong. And that's
part of the answer your question of what's wrong with

(17:23):
DEI it discriminates it. And this isn't for me, by
the way, this is coming from executive orders from the
White House, the Department of Justice, Office of Civil Rights,
and the United States Supreme Court, which is said it
is wrong to do this and to discriminate upon anyone.
Racism is not a cure for racism. It's not the fix,
it's the problem. And so that's one of the problems
that's wrong with it. And I grew up on a

(17:46):
public housing in Chicago. We had one dollar a month rent.
My mom was a single mom, and then I swisch
I had lived at a single dad. Like we we
came from poorness, right, We were on food stamps, we
were on government services, and and you know, like there's
there is a really a valuable place I think for
supporting people from under service or underserved backgrounds. But you know,

(18:14):
that doesn't mean that the manifestation of how these policies
have emerged is correct, because it's not. And that's not
me saying that. That's the officite civil rights from them.
And anybody who's you know, had a sniff of culture
over the last stretch of years has seen how this
has gone awry. It's been used incorrectly. I've personally seen
it on campus weaponized in many different ways. I mean,

(18:37):
I've had students complain that I address a room full
of women as ladies. Hey, ladies, you're ready for class,
say majority of women in class. They say, that's that's
gender stereotypes. You can't control someone's speech to that extent.
While earlier telling me I shouldn't say you guys, which
is the standard per a way of addressing you said

(18:58):
that too.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
On your interview as too is that you talked about
the guy's comment as well. It's when you were first
entering academia did you hear did you hear the language
first before the policy kind of laid down? When when,

(19:19):
in your mind was the real shift where they had
been testing the waters? Right? You date back when I
was in college in the early nineties, right, and it
was political correctness, right, and that was the emergence of it.
That's where it felt like academia in particular, probably sociologists
right in that whole department and the humanities were started

(19:42):
to you know, pull at the edges of what was
feasible or possible with this critical theory stuff.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
I mean, I think like anything like slowly and then
all at once.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
So you know, I started college in the year two
thousand one. Thing I would say, and we talked about
this briefly off air, but I think it's a it's
an applicable answer of an analogy. When did I start
to see that? So after nine to eleven, I was
in Jersey. We had students at my university leaves their
parents Oh wow, you know, like we were. They grew
up across the river. They worked at the World Trade

(20:17):
Center And why I was there that Saturday the fifteenth
thereafter helping as a relief worker and so, and you.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Talked a little bit about to just explain that a
little bit so you can bring people to what that
was like in that moment.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
That was a it was a very challenging. So if
you remember that time, nobody knew really what was happening.
So the World Trade Center was attacked on a Tuesday,
and I was there that Saturday, I think it was
the fifteenth, and there it was locked down by the
Marines for the most part, like nobody really knew who
hit us yet, and so we didn't really know what

(20:54):
was happening. It was essentially a militarized environ right right,
And obviously their bodies still live as well. People were
still survived under the rubble, and we uh some guys
that I lived with and worked with set up a
bus to go up there and try to help you. No,
it was boxed off. But somebody's mom worked for the
Red Cross and she thought we could get in. So

(21:14):
we basically made fake ideas of the Red Cross. Uh,
snuck in past the Marine line, walked down Canal Street
and and did whatever we could in a small way
to help and and really just try to support the
firefighters and the people there who hadn't slept in three days.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Wow. And you could.

Speaker 4 (21:31):
See and you could see like people's fingers written like
the writing on the the windows of ash Oh my gosh,
of like our ip of their friend, Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
You know the firefighters.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah, and my brother is a firefighter now and outside
of Austin, and I told him that when he was
in training and stuff. Wow, like it was it was
hard to see that. And we didn't feel like we didn't.
We give them water and food and try to help them.
And you get there at the rubble, you saw the site.
But you smell smell is what you had talked about. Yeah,

(22:10):
it's a very unique burn smell.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
It's not a good one. You don't want to smell
it again. And it's a smell you never forget.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, no, and so it was a very profound experience
as a college kid at that age. We walked and
I I was telling Jesse Barnett this. The other day
they did that seal swim. Yeah, not too long ago,
was it last week? And they had a parade that
they walked. And what happened then is is nobody really

(22:39):
talked about this at that time that I don't know
why the news never really covered it. But there was
a street that you take to go to the World
Trade Center. It's called Canal Street, and it was blocked
off for miles because it was an obvious ground zero site.
But we walked once we snuck past essentially the marine
guards fake, I tease, I'm sixteenths and stuff. Yeah, we

(23:02):
walked down that street and it's covered with tanks or
not tanks, big army trucks might as well be tanks us.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Right, right, right?

Speaker 1 (23:12):
We know anything you know od green is something that
can kill you, right, And when news trucks it's this
boxed off line of lane for about a mile, but
it's and you walk there in surreal silence.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
But it wasn't exactly silent because the sides of the
roads was packed with people cheering, wow, every single first
responder that walked in or walked out, and that we
were stunned. It was a very somber moment, you know,
and we didn't expect that. All the news never talked

(23:47):
about that. I've never seen it really featured and all
that time. But there were New York citizens who twenty
four hours a day through the middle of the night,
they would cheer for every single person that walked in
and out, and especially the walking out part, because when
you're walking out and leaving their destroyed, like like the
firefighters or the rescue workers or the police people who

(24:09):
were searching for their friends, they were walking out either
successful which is not good, right because they found things
they didn't really want to see and find they hadn't
slept for days, or they weren't walking out unsuccessful, which
is also.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Not massive what.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
They wanted to have happened. You know, they didn't find
what they were looking for. And so just know that
people were cheering for them that entire mile walk out
like like we it wasn't right for us because we
weren't those people like we we didn't deserve that applause
and support. But you also couldn't tell the people, no, yeah,
you had you had to.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Well, they're there for their own reason as well, too,
right that it's the Catharsis for them to support in
any way they can. And I mean, what what more
rudimentary way to support another human being by demonstrating an
overt approval right applause A good job, great job.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
It gives.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
It's giving the chill just thinking about it, because it
was it was so inappropriate for us because we didn't
do anything deserving of that, But you couldn't tell them
not to, so you had to just take it, which
is a weird thing to say. You had to take
this credit for something that we didn't really deserve. Well,
and but it's very profound. It was very inspiring of

(25:27):
the human spirit, I bet because I took that away
from it, like out of all that death and destruction,
there was goodness and there is goodness in people, and
I think that that is very important to remember in
dark times.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Well, I think it locks into us, right and when
you you know, to go back to you know what
you've pursued so vigorously over your adult life in terms
of understanding the impacts of that where it comes from
why it's important, How it alters our burying chemistry, how
it alters our cognition, how it enhances or you know

(26:03):
ingrains neuropathways. I mean, that's the root of everything that
you ended up becoming an expert in. And I think,
you know, it's really interesting to me as you shared
that with me, Like you know, in my mind, it's like, wow,
how does a person become so I mean, maybe infatuated

(26:23):
is probably too strong of a word for it, but
I mean it's certainly a It's heavier than a focus,
maybe not quite an obsession. It's that drive, right that
we keep talking about, that motivational drive that trigger in us.
You know, I would imagine that that experience was a
profound push for you to really understand how we function

(26:46):
and what enables us to to to either you know,
endeavor to persevere within the nine to eleven or what
drives the creation of DEI you know, I mean I
would imagine that that that.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
I mean, I went home and I wanted to I
want to do enlist. I was in my wrestling season.
I was also jacked up. I had torn rotator cuffs
and bad kneed. Like but like every young man at
that age you want to do Enlist. But I also thought,
strangely enough at the time, like I was a little
worried about like not knowing who was that did this.
And I'm like, I'm like, oh, and I should say too.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
There was something like in.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
One of the parks, like people just went missing. Yeah,
there was like three thousand people missing at Union Square.
I have pictures from a yellow polaroid like disposable camera
that day in Times Square, just missing posters everywhere. So
it was like it seemed like the rapture, like people
were just gone. They were there one moment and gone
wow the next. And I thought, and I mentioned this

(27:44):
a few moments ago when we were chatting, I'm like,
you know, I grew up in public housing. I had
a really really bad, abusive child that I ran away
when I was sixteen, ended up in New Jersey, had
rebuilt to you know, get to Princeton. No, I'm in college.
I'm paying my way through. I'm like, I kind of

(28:04):
wanted to finish like something in my life.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
I started.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
Wow, you know, I've never been at the same school
that I started at and I always transfer, So I'm like,
I really wanted to finish college, and I thought, as
much as I want to enlist, like September sixteenth or twelfth. Yeah,
after each of those two days, I'm like, if we're
starting a land war in Asia, I'm pretty sure it'll
be there in three years when I'm done. Certainly was,

(28:28):
and so that's it kept me out in that respect.
But I mentioned it as when did I start to
see these things happening on campuses? Well, like months after
that in New Jersey at our school where students had
had parents pass away, they were not allowing students to
fly the American flag out in their dorm room windows

(28:51):
and the first and it was a big story at
the time, and they they played it off like, oh,
it's a fire code thing.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
So we brought out the fire.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
Chief from Trenton. He's like, Nah, that is not a
fire code. You played the flag wow. And the school
did everything they could wiggle their way out of it.
I wrote an op ed in the paper for the school.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Oh my god. I sent it to til Meyer, who
was the Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Afterwards when we were talking, I wrote an OpEd It's
I tweeted it a couple of days ago because they're
having the same flag issue right now in England with
the Saint George flag. That's so I started seeing this
happen back then. We were deeply enmeshed. And of course,
like on the college campuses at the time, there was
a big, you know, anti war movement that emerged through
that process too, So you saw a lot of that

(29:33):
kind of cultural build up.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
But that was evident. Very anti war protests were not
unique though.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
I mean, we've been having it for long long period
and you know, there is a component of that that
is fair, it's right, it's your freedom of speech, and
when you are in the in a college environment, that's
when that activism is kind of planted, right, But there's
also a counter activism that can take place, Like people
should be able to be as patriotic as they want,

(30:00):
they should be able to counteract the elders, right, and
that would be that's that's that's the that's the equality
of that type of ideological stance.

Speaker 3 (30:12):
Well, and if you were I don't know if you
were in the service or civilian side at that time,
but like that's what I was in so at that time,
certainly on campuses and in the civilian world, this is when
things started to emerge where part of that issue with
the flag then on campus for the American flag was
that you need hold it out of administrators. They finally
started saying, well, it could be offensive to some people

(30:35):
at that point, that the boogeyman was Islam or Muslims, right,
which you know, you want to be fairer and whatnot.
So people people were starting to sow those seeds of
saying that America is bad, our symbol of freedom is bad,
which is, by the way, like flying over every bridge

(30:55):
and roadside, and certainly in New Jersey at the time, across.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
The New York kid the whole country, I mean, I
mean in California, which was already moving towards a much
I think, more rapid progressivism than anywhere else. Every single house,
every single building, every single inspiring.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
It brought people together. That's in such a unique way
because we are one. We're a country of countrymen together.
And it was already starting to have people claw that
apart by saying that that's not a good symbol because
it could offend somebody. And so that's when I started
seeing things. And at the same time, it's interesting that yes,

(31:37):
that because I haven't thought about it for probably twenty years.
But during that time and two thousand and two thousand
and five, when I was in school, there there were
a rash of these things that ended up being these
false cases of what they called hate crimes, which was
anathema to say back then. But now it's twenty twenty five,

(31:59):
we have an extraordinary documented record now of of of
josey small ads.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
It was that was happening back then, and we were
like the NASCAR, it happen on my campus. We had
these things that we had teachings. Classes were canceled in
two thousand and two, two thousand and three for like
people who claimed that they had swastika has written on
their doors.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
People who claimed.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
That, uh, they had whatever, some attacks for their sexuality
or something. And it turns out and all of them
they're fake, all of them like they were like and
his memory hold. People forget about that. But back then
we saw it early enough. And that's when I started
to see these things and and and then you know,
if you think about you know again, like culture, the

(32:45):
cultural history of say, affirmative action was built into the
cultural psychological makeup beneath us as being valid, appropriate, proper
and legal.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Up until just a year about a year ago.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
So people are wrestling with that, I think psychologically because
they're like, this thing that we thought was right, how
do you psychologically handle now thinking that that's wrong? And
so I think we're seeing some cultural classes on that too.
But what we're seeing now in DEI manifestations on campus
is like the ten X steroid version of that, where
if like affirmative action was bud light, this is but heavy.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
And what was gentle so to speak, in afirmative action
called some quotas trying to make sure people are balanced
out this and that that. People were kind of okay
for a while managing They're like, all right, what is
manifesting on college campuses now for everyone's children, grands kids

(33:44):
and campuses whatever? Is not the protection of discrimination but
the providence providence of it, right, And it's that's what
that came about in about twenty ten, after the mid
term elections in twenty ten, they knew administratively that they

(34:04):
had the goods and the political inertia to impose these
draconian measures that no longer just protected people from discrimination,
which is great, right, awesome, Right, I don't want you discriminated.
I don't want my other friends discriminated. That's who you know, like,
and I'm part Native American. Like the nobody's talking about
that because those are not things that we want to happen.

(34:28):
But what this DEI stuff is doing now is actually
giving a preference and saying, hold these people back and
push these other people forward. Right, that's a whole new
level of steroids, so to speak, for sure, at a
policy level. And that's what's so problematic about them, because
it's not about diversity, it's not about equity, it's not
about inclusion. It's about hurting people by holding them back

(34:51):
and preferring and pushing other people forward. That's essentially just communism.
That's in mafia. That's however you want to conceptualize that,
that's not it's not American, I mean, it's it's absolutely communism.
And that's and that's I think the real key is,
like you go back and you start researching critical theory, right,
and how that emerged, where it emerged, where.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
It came out of, you know, and you've you know,
you've got you take that back another step and you're
you know, you're four steps away from communism and right,
you know, through the academy of people escaping you know,
communist places in you know, East Germany and all these
you know, really areas where psychological development, the development of psychology, psychiatry,

(35:35):
that type of thing that emerged right late eighteen eighties
in Europe, Vienna in particular, and as it fantastasized through
you know, those two kind of you know, socialistic ideas,
you know, they ended up coming over here and repopulating
the universities. Now, I think it was able to keep

(35:56):
in check for a long long period of time because
I think for mole the tudor reasons. One, you know,
the the boards you know, weren't as corrupt as they
ultimately became. The money wasn't as big as it used
to be, you know. And then I think probably in
the nineties you had this you know, massive ship towards

(36:17):
these how do you get funding in And.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Did you notice it?

Speaker 1 (36:22):
And this is the we're kind of dancing around it
in your career progression, When did you start to see
that it was rooted in the administrative area and correlated
to federal dollars and so there was a direct correlation
to promote it as instead of just ideologically.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Well, goodness that I mean, so I was I think
I applied for a National Science Foundation fellowship as a
college student for the graduate research fellowship. I was an
honorable mention for the grad program as an undergraduate. And
even back then, certainly in the time since they required
these diversity statements to be real, and they have now
taken hold in the subsequent decade that followed or so,

(37:05):
and now they're un retreat again because people are realizing
that that's what they were starting to do. It was
kind of like compelling your speech to tell you to
to say some sort of a statement about like why
you're going to make sure that you have a commitment

(37:25):
to social justice and diversity in order to get these
funds right, and you.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Know, and that's grant money, that's oh yeah, that's everything.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
It's for faculty jobs, that's for job graduate schoolssions. I
was on the admissions committee for the pH d program
at you see, Davis Well, I've been on admissions committees
all over the place, like yeah, like that was that
was a part of it too. And so it's kind
of like you're you're forcing people to do these and
I imagine in the military world, It's similar for officer
promotions or other things. Right, there are things that when

(37:57):
you set the benchmarks, this is this is the h
the tune that we're going to play, people figure out
how to dance with the tune.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Because you have to if you want to advance.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
So, like those things were happening probably in parallel in
those in those cultures, and you know so, so I
started seeing that happen through those times. I saw Title
nine get weaponized in so many different ways when I
when I was a professor at ET Dallas, I had
a student make a false claim and threat against me

(38:31):
on Title nine in class. This is kind of a
funny story. The I was teaching a class and I
get this is a class you were teaching probably neurobiology
or systems neuroscience or something a science class.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Oh yeah, straight up science science class where theoretically there
is no you know, discrimination in science.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Right now, this is the name was behave Real NEUROSCIGNCE.
So this I get this, I get this email after
class and there's two hundred kids in the class. I
get get a lot of emails and and you love
working with students like I was. I'm a wrestling coach
by at heart and by trade, and like that's why
we do what we do. I like love to teach,
to coach, to mentor all the stuff that that you
champion and are our champion of yourself. So many good

(39:20):
ways that that I've benefited from uh listening and watching
your stuff for so many years. And so the student
come sends me this email. It's like a night class.
It's like eight o'clock. Now class is over. I get
this email and it was something to the tune. She's like,
I saw and heard what you said to me in class.

(39:40):
I didn't know you felt that way. I feel the
same way too. It's only harassment if I report you.
Here's my number. And I had I looked like that,
and I'm like, so I had just gotten engaged. My
fiance had just left the country to start veterinary school
in the island of Grenado, which we invaded a at

(40:00):
that school it's Angelge University. So what we had just
gotten engaged. She had just gone to start that. And
the first thing I did was I send it to her.
I'm like, you need to know that this just happened. Yeah,
you need to know it's not true. And like and
the best funny part about it is I tell this
story to students a lot. Now I send her a
picture of the student so that she knew this was

(40:24):
not a problem. It was an impossibility because she was
a dog like it was. It was like, yeah, like
it was so And if the.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Motivation is is is I mean the fact that a
student set has the capacity for that setup is remarkable
because she was taught that there was a weaponization of
Title nine.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
So that's only.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
I mean, Look, people come on to people all the time, Okay,
their adults on college campuses.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Sometimes it's not right.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
But like, but the lynch pin of the story is
that this is an answer. This is why I say
it doesn't answer you ques, when did I STI to
see this turn of the screw to a weaponization Like
I'm a junior, first year professor or whatever it was,
and she is she knows she has leverage over me
by telling me it's only a problem if she reports me,

(41:17):
and that she won't report me, she'll she'll essentially extort
me to do what she wants me to do to her.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
And like, I mean the manipulation level in that is
that's tier one.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
Yeah, and so but she was given the institutional knowledge
to know that that was capable to hold people hostage too,
And so I immediately sent it off to the Title
nine director. Uh, you know, the university did their investigation.
First thing I did is I sent it to my wife,
because you know, she's what you do. She was thinking,
you know, I've got this young fiance teaching classes with

(41:51):
a bunch of college girls, Like I have to be
very very respectful and fair to her.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
So I send it to her. I showed her the picture.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
I'm like, this is not a problem, and it could
become one for sure, different kind of problem. They investigate
that for a while, and I get a call from
Title nine and so, and I should say, the student.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Didn't know.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
That I had been video recording my lectures in twenty fifteen.
They were on YouTube everything. This is like way before zoom,
way before the pandemic. I was like innovating teaching methods, yep,
to put classes online.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Right, So the whole darn thing is on video. And
this is why I felt so calm. I was like, yeah, yeah,
I'm good. Let's walk it out. Yeah yeah, let's wow.
You know threatened me with a good time.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
Let's let's let's have let's let's do this then, And
so I send the video link to the Title nine.
They have it on tape. They have the whole class
on tape. Wow, it absolutely didn't happen. I never said
anything to her. She's completely delusional and weaponizing a system.
Title nine, what happened to the girl? Yeah? So Title
nine office calls me. They say, well, we looked into this.

(43:03):
We interviewed the girl, Melissa was her name, and they said,
and after forty five minutes, we're pretty convinced that you
didn't do what she said. You did pretty convinced. Yeah,
And I'm like, forty it took you forty five minutes?
They said, well, we asked her in every way we knew,
just to make sure. I'm like, hold on here, I

(43:24):
reported it as a victim. You turn this thing against
me anyways, that's right, and they did, of course, Thank
heavens for that video recording.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
I don't know why anybody that's in any position where
they they have an exchange of what do they call
it when it's a it's a there's a natural imbalance
of power or whatever they call it.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
There's a technical term from it. I can't think of
it right now.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
But anything where the power disbursement is profound, right, mostly
teacher to student, right, that's where it's the manage or
boss to junior employee.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
That type of malfeasance or what is it, it's we
call it in the military if an officer is manipulating
a junior soldier, sailor airman, marine. I forget what it
was called. I'm just brain dead right now. Sorry, But
but that reality, right, is that power distribution and then

(44:22):
all of a sudden they know that they people get that,
and so you're experiencing what year is that, twenty fifteen approximately?

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, So that's like you're seeing it.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
And my point of all this, and I know the
audience if you're if you're going, where the hell's rutt going?
And I do have a tendency to go down rabbitle
I'm laying a predicate so that you understand that Rick
just did not wake up one day and say, you
know what, to hell with all this, I'm sick of it.
I'm going to fight back against nothing. This wasn't a mission, no,

(44:55):
no at all. This was a build up and the
tolerance that you've had of it and trying to pursue
your dream of being the best professor, coach, teacher you
could be has has really been the predominant idea and
in the in the idea you think within this world

(45:18):
of academia, is that that type of initiative, that type
of integrity, that type of of what is it? It's calibration, right,
because at any minute we can deviate.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
I mean that what was happening at that time too,
there was a there was a fake rape cases emerging
at University of Virginia with Jackie Cokeley. Oh my gosh,
that was happening at the same time culture was starting
to do me lacrosse. That was when I was in
So that was happening in that earlier era. So you
see these steps and it's growing and growing. But every
single one of these things are generally found out to

(45:54):
be a fraud, but we don't change course. They keep
being allowed to happen. And then so to you answer
your question, what did they do to her? So they
they're telling me on the phone, they're like, well, Fin,
she admitted she made it up.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
I'm like, yeah, I know.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
And they're like, she's crying, she's really sorry about it.
I'm like boohoo. They're like, do you think you can
let her back in class? I think no, No, I
can't be subjected to that professional risk, like absolutely flipping.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Not.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
Well, there's another guy who teaches the class. Do you
think he could she could just attend his lectures.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Nope.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
We teach in different ways, different chapters, different Absolutely, they
did everything they could organizationally to who they now have
proven is a victim.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Me.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
I was victim by false allegations and the threat of
weaponization A title nine at grave professional harm they've established,
and I have a I literally I had. They they
were so reluctant, but they had to send me a
letter acknowledging that I was victimized. Wow, and I saved it.

(46:56):
Of course, they did everything they could someone who they
had to acknowledge was wronged to force her back into
my class and make me continue to be subjected to that,
and I just I wouldn't have it. Absolutely not right.
And so you start to see those things happening. So
when when we like you were getting at like, what

(47:17):
are the implications that why is the problem these these
d I things, It's because it gives absolute gasoline to
that fire and it empowers the administrative and the policy
based weaponization in that respect against people who are oftentimes innocent,

(47:39):
and you know that is that is a problem. So
when you your first question you asked me is like,
why did I think that was wrong? Well, Di, I
is wrong for some of the reasons that we've talked about,
and I don't think it's good to discriminate upon anybody.
Another reason I knew it was wrong was because when
the President came in and told us this, he acknowledged
it was wrong. He said, I don't want to get caught.
I don't want to see ourselves in court. I don't

(47:59):
want to have this stuff uses evidence. Let's just change
the words, don't. It really does put a target on
our back, but let's make sure that we don't do it.
We're going to try to compensate by building out uh
a new degree program with the US Space Force at
Patrick Space Force based up by US, so that we
can you know, and I'm thinking to myself of my
hold on, so we're going to hide this from the
Space Force. We're gonna indoctrinate their guardians on the GI

(48:20):
bill and Pentagon funding to indoctrinate warriors. Wow, no, it
so so he's telling us that he doesn't want to.
He said, I want to fight back. So when when
people are telling you this is what we're told, but
we can't we shouldn't do these things to get caught
doing what we shouldn't get caught doing, like right off

(48:42):
the bat, that that puts you in a really tough
position ethically, And so that's a second second layer to
your quick answer. It is like how do I know?
Why did I how or why did I know what
was wrong? It's like he basically told us it was wrong.
That's right, knew.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Admission is a is a concrete reality, and so that's
that's a tough boat to sail in.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
And then you know, third, like at a policy level,
it's like there's lots of policies we follow all the time.
I'm sure there are policies in the military. You've followen
in life. There's speeding limits that we think we should
be able fast run road.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
That's you know what we do. We generally follow them.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
Like there's there's ways to challenge policies, and and like
even if I was pro DEI and all that, like
there's a way to challenge it, which is to sue
the Trump administration, or to fight back in a proper fashion,
not to defraud people who paid tax money to have

(49:42):
money go towards grants to do A, and you're gonna
misappropriate it to do B.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
That's A. That's a whole other problem.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
And and that's actually what was pitched to us in
the meeting that happened beforehand. We were told this story
of which then he came and told us in person,
and we said, well, if you're gonna be our boss,
and you're gonna tell us our written policy blasted out
to the university, it says we can't do this, but
you're gonna tell us, Hey, make sure you do it right. Well,

(50:10):
you're setting me up as the fall guy first get
in trouble. So I said in the meeting, I said,
can he put that a writing or come. He needs
to come, and we need to hear that from the
horse's mouth. I'm not going to get that through telephone.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Game.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
He said it was okay for you to do this,
So he came to the meeting and he said, yeah,
we want you totally undermine this effectively. And he lied
and then he then he put out statements when James o'
keif caught him. He lied about the lies. He said
those things weren't true. They absolutely get out of context.
I absolutely so. At the time, I hadn't been coome
public as the whistleblower. They all knew it was me

(50:42):
because of the way that the camera was angled, and
they all knew, but I hadn't come public. There's no
They thought probably they could get away with the lie.
And but I'm a witness.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
I was there.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
It was absolutely the context right.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
There was no mistaking it. Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (51:02):
And so James only had a chance to publish a
few things I've published all over Twitter and my substecs
now a bunch of additional videos, Yeah, including the one
I even just refer to here where he's like, we're
going to compensate by essentially getting some money from the
Space Force and you know, getting DoD money for to
fill the the There's a whole lot more to unpack
on that story. And so you know three levels of

(51:26):
which is wrong wrong at a principal level of what
the thing is. Two is wrong because they told you
it's wrong. Three it's wrong because it's we still have
to follow some policies, and there's a way to challenge that,
and it's not by actively undermining it. And if you
are going to actively undermine it, don't hold a meeting
and tell everybody to do it.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Right, Like, So that's there's something you said too.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
Like all of us, obviously, we are governed by laws
and rules. We don't live in the anarchy, state of
nature chaos. You've you've had to see what that looks
like in real battle in third world countries where there
is the state of nature and anarchy, and that's order matters,
rules and laws matter. But like you know, like I'm

(52:06):
perfectly comfortable in the gray. The gray is life, right,
you know. I black and white matters on some things
for sure. But at the same time, like you know,
like when we teach our children, like they're going to
be disappointed when they go to the world and they
think everything is black and white, because we That's where
I'm at right now. We have to live in the
gray because life is great. There's textures nuanced, there are complications,

(52:27):
there are you know, like I'm perfectly comfortable operating in
the gray. I mean I basically did an undercover video,
so the but again, there.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Are well, your whole existence has been to understand the
gray and how we process the gray, I mean, the
gray matter in between our ears. Thank you for acknowledging
that little punt there. I appreciate that. I think for
me the hardest aspect of teaching that gray area to

(53:01):
people in particular, people that you care about, people you're
trying to influence, people you're coaching. You know, I deal
with it a lot with athletes, right, you know, you're
not as good as you think you are, and you've
got a lot more to go. Uh, and these are
the places you need to go, and you're not gonna
get there unless you do these places, these things. But

(53:23):
there's something that takes place within particular people that they
either generate an illusion that they don't require those particulars
and they can somehow jump ahead, or they continuously, you know,
mislead themselves, or they create this as you know, this
delusional construct of their own reality that that it's and

(53:47):
the more they reinforce it, the further away it gets.
And that's what this seems like what's happened, right, This
has gotten so far away from what the reality of
what it is. Hey, we know these programs are actually
they're divisive, they're they're racist in nature, they're picking one

(54:08):
class of people over another. They're using the context of
social justice or oppression or colonialism or whatever you construct
of oppression that they're they're they're manipulating. And then and
then what happens is the managerial class that supports it
ends up reinforcing it because dollars get connected to it.

(54:32):
And you said it yourself, sixty nine million dollars were
affiliated with grants that had been already put in place
from the US federal government. Now multiply that times every university.
I mean, the most famous one right now is Harvard.
Right you look at Harvard's, you know, the Harvard Fund,
which is essentially a private equity fund that's masquerading as

(54:55):
a college right now, and you know, the Trump comes
in and says, you know what, You're not getting nine
billion dollars or seven billion dollars in any more grants,
which essentially, you know, stops the capital intake to go
out invest in people like you, to do the research,

(55:16):
to flip it, and to build the fund, because you're
selling it to the companies that are all sitting there
salivating over the research. So you're manipulating from the endpoint
of who's going to get to do the research and
why right, based on you know, classifications that aren't meritocracy
are based in meritocracy. Then you're manipulating the outcomes in

(55:39):
many cases of the research that's emerging. Then you're you're
pilfering the intellectual property to fit it to the people
that are going to play this corrupt game, and so
the whole system becomes corrupt from that first initial like
movement into the gray area.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Man, you're barking the right tree for me on this.
I think a lot about this, I bet you. I
think you think a lot about everything. Yeah, sometimes that's
the problem.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, I mean from the first moment we started chatting,
it's like, whoa, this is one of the most complicated
human beings I've ever met. Not in a bad way either, Like, like, man,
you're you. I don't think you. I mean when you
say you live in the gray it's like you know
every shade that's possibly conceivable, right, Yeah, and you spend

(56:32):
time analyzing each angle. I spend time losing a lot
of wrestling matches.

Speaker 3 (56:38):
I mean, in all seriousness, Like, I know, you do
a lot of coaching and mentoring of people and kids, Like,
don't don't be like me at that. Like sometimes when
you the athletes when I coach, like yeah, it's like
you got to turn off and go right.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Sometimes like it.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
But anyways, let's wrap let's wrap this up because I
want to go to that because that's the thing that
the institution has lost stout on. Well, yeah, and so
if in you and so you know what you were
talking about there when you talk about the losses or
you know, it made me think of a couple of

(57:12):
different things. The impact of those discriminatory practices, what not.
The five hundred million dollars that Trump has fined Harvard
for and these kind of things. I think that's great.
I celebrate them, and I thank them for taking such
an important symbolic step. But Harvard's not going to lose

(57:33):
sleep over five hundred million dollars based on at least
based on my knowledge of their endowment.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Right.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
However, what has to be done and what has not
been done, is doing what we said earlier, taking this
to the smaller time places, for all the small time
people who are actually the voters who put them in
to do these things and the people who are actually suffering.
I'm pretty sure most of their voters aren't coming from
Harvard and Columbia, so it's an absolutely indispensable, necessary, symbolic

(57:58):
thing that has to be done at a policy level. However,
I would say that how this has, how this kind
of like sloth a of a discrimination beast has allowed
to emerge in this story we've woven now from two
thousand and twenty twenty five, has been a lack of
accountability because of weakness to impose accountability from leadership, middle managers,

(58:22):
higher managers. And I think it it crosses into those
gray areas of whether you call it theology or spiritual elements,
like there is a week like we have to be
strong as leaders, as just as followers, as people to
do the right thing and to hold accountable. So for instance,

(58:43):
it's like we talked about that sixty nine million dollars.
I didn't pull that number out of my hat. That's
what I read up. My university published in their newspaper
that they know that they are at risk of losing
but you know what, they're not losing sleep because you know,
nobody is having the backbone culturally and administratively in the government.
Nobody's taking that money away from them. No, nobody ever

(59:04):
does that Like it's like they say it, but it
never happens. Yes, so you know there's a level of
weakness of holding accountable.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Well that's you know, don't have don't send me down that.
I mean, it's it's astonishing, it's astonishing, and.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
It goes back.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
Maybe maybe you can enlighten us on that, Like where
does that moral relativism initiate? Right, because that's what it is, right, Yeah,
you get exposed at so you growing up, you know
the way you did, it would make sense that you
have a moral flexibility, But as you've matured, you've only

(59:48):
refined that moral integrity more and more and more after
each one of the situations that you've experienced at all
these different levels.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
I mean, I would say it's like there's a dichotomy
in that, Like there's a moral flexibility, but there's also
like a moral inflexibility. As you learn right and wrong right,
right and wrong gets solidified is right and wrong, you
learn how to be flexible in the spots that are ambiguous. Right,
So like ambiguity is fine, Like adults have to deal

(01:00:20):
with ambiguity. Like I think that's what discernment is. We
maybe we can come back to discernment later because that
at the spiritual level. You you know, young young men,
young young women, they need to be able to discern
what is my path? What is what is God's word
showing me and telling me. That's a difficult thing to
wrestle with until you're too old. And now now we

(01:00:40):
can look back, so we have that texture and season.
But that is what discernment is. The gray black and
white becomes easier to see. But you know, I faced
a lot of adversity growing up, like I've I've seen
I've seen my mom arrested for wrongfully. I've I've wrestled
with some really bad corruption and bad things that I

(01:01:00):
saw and abuses happening to us as kids and to
other kids, where you become crystallized in understanding what right
and wrong is. And at that point, and I imagine
combat does the same to you guys in certain respects. Right,
you learn how to be morally flexible because there's a
necessity to that.

Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
But when you see things, and when you see certain things,
you're like okay, like like you don't care what the losses.
It's like demote me, like I don't care about my
rank type of thing. Yeah, like there are times where
what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong, and
when you've already paid that price, and watch what other
people do. I suppose other people look at it differently,

(01:01:40):
but I don't. And you know, I had a quip
from a friend of mine laughing with me not too
long ago. He's like, they really kind of pulled you
out of hiding and made you go public with this
by the especially the barb of Striss. In effect, they
tried to buy you off for one hundred thousand dollars
to silence me with a nda a non disparagement and

(01:02:01):
promise never to sue them. I wasn't suing them, and
I wasn't talking about it, and I wasn't just I
was doing nothing, and instead they woke a sleeping giant.
He's like, anyways, what he quipped, He's like, this is
like like they should have told the National Guard not
to go after rambounded person because you know the person,
let him go, you'll pick him up, you'll let him go,

(01:02:22):
you'll pick him up, and the next.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Town and everything is just fine.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
That's right, and but but when you make these crystallized
moments of right and wrong with people who've had to
suffer the back.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Ends of what is right and what's wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
Well, that's the question, then, I mean, that's the question,
and not to to pivot on the the most intense
philosophical question that there is is other than like figuring
out who am I and why am I here? But
like what is the difference between right and wrong? And
how does that manifit? Or crystallize? I love of how

(01:03:00):
you use the word crystallized to where it's it's it's
discernible every day. Right. For me, there was a long
stretch where I didn't know what that was, and I
gave myself the wide range of interpretation right, and then

(01:03:22):
and then after you know, an experience I had in
Afghanistan me and that I was really in question of it.
And then I'm like, well, I don't know even where
to begin to generate the foundation.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
Luckily for me, I chose religion. I chose Christianity. I
chose christ right. And so that began this ten year
long exploration of what that looks like. Can I live
up to that? Can I hold the standard of it?
And then can it be iterable in my behavior day

(01:03:57):
in and day out? And you know, through God's that
relationship and that confidence that came out of that, you know,
in setting that corner stone right, I was able to
get there, but it took a long time.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
It sounds that I was thinking about this analogy driving
down here, because I know you have a military background,
and to me, it's not It tracks with learning how
to shoot in the respect of like if you've never
shot before, you go down on on arrange to a target,
you know, like you know, like like you're you don't
know how to control your breath, you don't know how
to control like, there are so many things you don't

(01:04:32):
know right, So you're you're aiming for the mark of
what's right and wrong, like you're trying to find that,
but like you don't really have that guidance and so
you can figure it out by practice. I'm sure there's
some self made sharpshooters out there, and you know, you
don't want to be on the back end of them
in a mountain like Great.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Lucas, the guy that was the YouTube gun guy who
just lost his his deal with the one Armament got
t Rex Arms or whatever. That guy, like he takes
a lot of a lot of crap from operators out there.
But that kid can shoot, and he's self taught, and
he got better and better and better and better.

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
And so I love the analogy. And it's a caliber
you calibrate through trial and error.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
But what I'm getting at is that that's probably it's
not an effective way that you guys trained people in
the military and from regular infantry to special forces in
special operations and what you guys do. The better way
to sort of speak to help guide someone to know
what is right and wrong. We hit the bullseye right right.
Sticking with the analogy is to have guidance, to have

(01:05:34):
a teacher, have a mentor, have have peer mentors, go
through have guidance, maybe a book how to shoot? How
do you right now? You codified these principles that you've
learned through your trial and error and you and so
it turns out and when it comes to right and wrong,
there's a book.

Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
A very very a book that's been around a long
time and for a reason. Yeah, I mean I think
the thing one of the there were two they were
like there was I read the the Least Strobull book
when I was really in struggling with whether or not
I could do it or not. It was like two
thousand and six and I read the case for christ
and I love you know, he's a classically trained lawyer.

(01:06:12):
He's an investigative journalist. Yeah, my dad was a lawyer.
So you know, I love the idea of journalism. I
love the idea of seeking out the truth of something.
And and so that all made sense, and so like
it put it in the framework that I could rationalize
the magnitude of the miracle. I could say, all right,
this guy believes it's true. But then like, all right, now,

(01:06:35):
what do you do? And since then it's become the
shroud of turn right, that one, you know, that one
just blew me away. I mean that one, the guy
that was just recently Untucker Carlson.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
I mean I was.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
I was a devout, like I'm a devout believer, but
that solidified it in a way I could never even imagine. Right,
and that's science, right, And then and then there was
for me, it really was a out the stories of
the apostles. If regular men could allow the message to

(01:07:10):
penetrate their perception of the world they live in, which
was a harsh, harsh, brutal world. I mean, under Roman rule,
you know, the whole thing, and then to fight against
you know this everybody who wanted this idea, this miracle
to die right, you know, to to endeavor that and

(01:07:34):
to you know, to walk the corners of the earth
and be crucified and upside down and rip the part
and all.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
You know, it's like if those regular dudes like me
can do it and become apostolic in their nature, right,
And I think that's what it is. It's the battle
of nature and our are our? What is it o our?
The miracle faith?

Speaker 4 (01:07:58):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
When you mix those to create that foundation, now all
of a sudden you have a framework to work with.

Speaker 3 (01:08:05):
Yeah, it's it's interesting that you mentioned that. It gives
me so many different things to think about that I
wanted to say, But like that all the testimony of
the martyrs, I mean, that's that's I'm Catholic. That's kind
of the language that we use about the the the belief. Right,

(01:08:25):
how do we know it's true? So like a couple
of possibilities. One, they're all liars, they just made it
up for whatever reason. Two mass illusional effect scenario. Three
it's true. And and so you know there's been lots
of people who've kind of walked through those options and
ruling out the first two things.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
Can you expound on the second one that you said
mass mass delusional sort of experience, like doctor Robert Malone
talked about mass formation psychosis as a result of COVID.
So can you just break that out a little bit
and how you understand it? So, because I think what
a lot of and I don't mean to cut you off,
I have a neuroscientist in front of me. So it's
like a dream come true, by the way, So for

(01:09:07):
people that don't get that, because I think there's a
lot of that taking place, can you explain that?

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (01:09:16):
In the respect of the theological example, So the idea
is that you can have a bunch of people kind
of engaged in uh, sort of a group level hallucination
of something.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
The upcoming alien invasion. Well, I'm sorry, I gotta talking.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
There's there's actually you know, people have written about social contagion. Yes,
of things that we now see may manifest and well
trnifestos and and and mass you know, I.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
Just reported on it yesterday. I went on Playing book
show and talked about it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
There's obviously the tragedy that was absolutely awful, And you know,
how are people becoming deluded with the notion that they're
trans and and part of that is social contagion. This
just kind of gets to that like mass level hysteria
or hallucination that social media has facilitated in a whole

(01:10:19):
new way because they don't all need to be people
in the same place any longer, which historically that's kind
of what it was alluding to with the original followers
of Christ, which is like this is some sort of
like group level hallucination, which you know, we can use
hallucination in lots of ways. You could say an illusion
likes lots of people can be looking at the same
thing and still mistake it, and that that there's a

(01:10:40):
normalcy to that. That's not a clinical level of a
hallucination like in schizophrenia or anything. But the idea is
that you can still have a big group of people
misunderstand something in an innocent way that's not the lying way.
So you have your three options, Like these apostles and
the followers and disciples, they they're just lying. They made
it right. Two, there was a group level innocent, not

(01:11:06):
malintented misrepresentation of an illusory experience. The sermon on amount
feeding five thousand, Well, those aren't mortals. Those things probably
I don't. I think we probably even atheists historically say
those things happened. A guy went on a mount and gave.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
It a lecture. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:26):
The issue is did he resurrect, did he bring Lazarus
back from the day, did he create the fish and
loaves miracles like the miraculous elements, or they're telling the truth.
And so what you were saying this the testimony of
the martyrs of you know, one of the things that
made me think about when you were saying that. A

(01:11:47):
good analogy, and like I think a military context is actually,
you guys do sear right's search escape right like torture.
Most of at least what I've heard as a civilian
right is. One of the mantras and lessons that come
out of those things are that nobody's a superman. Everybody
has a breaking point.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
I can tell you from you know, I spent two
years training case officers, well I should say they spent
two years training me. And some of the guys I
had access were part of enhanced interrogation rendition programs and
these these were the most elite interrogators who've ever lived,
in my opinion, and they always would laugh because you know,

(01:12:30):
I'd be like, you'd never break me, bro, and they
just like they give me the you know that maniacal
laugh and there and they would say, rut, everybody breaks
and one of the things.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
And I actually like that we can weave in different
things and stories. I think we both kind of jam
on the same vibe for that. But so I did
a mission for NASA where I lived in isolation and
confinement for forty five days in the space capsule as
Johnson Space Center, Oh my gosh, and to understand what
happens to humans in isola and confinement during high stress,
high stress, high pressure situations like long duration spacelight to

(01:13:05):
Mars and back. While you in the distinction rich with
being from like maybe the things that you guys have done,
you can't just look back and to say that the
military records of how do people survive and isolate? So,
like I talked with Colonel Charlie Plummer, you did four
or five one of my.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
Favorite human beings.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
We interviewed him on TNQ, probably one of my favorite
human beings. In his story, his story was a story
that changed me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:32):
Yeah, I guess I brought I got his book over there. Yeah,
that's awesome and so, but it's like you can't necessarily
draw those for.

Speaker 1 (01:13:37):
Those for those who don't know, Charlie Bum was an aviator,
got shut down, was in the Hanoi Hilton for almost
six years. Uh Cap Stockdale or Ben became Admiral Stockdale
tapped him to essentially be like the the the minister
or the the morale officer of this group in the
Hanoi Hilton. And it's I highly recommend look up Charlie Plum,

(01:14:00):
look up his speeches, his biased book.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
He is the real deal.

Speaker 3 (01:14:03):
Well and for the younger generation, like the Hanoy Hilton
was a torture facility. That's absolutely awful torture. They were
tortured for years and years and years, unspeakable things. And
when he came home his wife was remarried. Like talk
about a secondary level of breaking and harp torture. Like
and the man has nothing but a impossible to break

(01:14:26):
positive attitude that I can barely even comprehend.

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
He's so inspiring.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
So like when you know, so on the on the
NASA side, we can't look to those examples because you
have to survive in those situations. You don't have to
still land a spaceship. He's just interesting because you still
have to be an operator.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
Be an operator.

Speaker 3 (01:14:49):
So my buddy's a corrections officer in the Trent and
penn you with a bunch of mass murderers and like
he holds order there, I'm like, you can't. I'm not
sitting in a cell reading and doing push ups and
for the entire duration, like you were operating, you have
to land successfully. You have to fly spaceships, maintain the craft.
It's like it's like being on a sub or a ship.
Everything has to maintain ship shape, the water filtration, everything.

(01:15:12):
You have to do that while you're in isolation. Confind me,
imagine doing that level while and seer at the same time.
It's a really difficult thing that we as humans we've
almost never had to wrestle with. And and we found
that breaking point. It was only forty five day mission.
Every single person I went in there with with like
we all and we're lying about it too, like when
we like, we're we have to fill out our service,
how do you guys do it?

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Now?

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Feeling great?

Speaker 3 (01:15:33):
One hundred percent Yeah, I am falling asleep on the
lunar lander and crashing saying I feel great, and like, wow.

Speaker 1 (01:15:40):
What about the isolation, because I think this is another
main component of that we're seeing in young people performance.
There's a there's an isolation kind of emerging, right, what
about isolation causes disruption the way we are, we can
be optional in our focus.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
Man, I mean that's it's a deep question with deep
answers of layers, right, right, So sometimes, I mean sometimes
I like, I'm sure everybody likes to be isolated at times.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
But especially my wife when I go on the road.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
But like there's a but after a certain period of time,
like the and by the way, she only because I
never stopped talking to her, that's the job.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
My wife is similarly afflicted.

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
Yeah, if we could only learn to be quiet more right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
Yeah, my best man gave a great wedding speech about
how great of a listener my wife is and how
it's going to work out. Just really well, that's you
and me both, So thank god. You know, when you're
isolated in that respect. Some of the challenges psychologically is
we do we are social creatures, even even the most

(01:16:51):
isolated if people we were require, you know, interactions people
sometimes for our just sanity checks for like it's it's
nice to have. But then the problem too is you
can be isolated with people. So if you're lack of
a bit or analogy, at a forward operating base with

(01:17:11):
only five or six of you guys for a six
month stretch or at a one month stretch, yeah, those
your best friends.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Get on your nerves. And when I got when I
give talks in.

Speaker 3 (01:17:19):
Like like like public speaking to things about these missions,
I always say, like, look, it's hard to get a
family of five to agree on what to order for
dinner at the drive through at McDonald's or wherever you're going.
The people you love, it's hard to get along with
in isolation for even a short period of time. How
about not people you love, just co workers for a

(01:17:40):
three year cycle to Mars and back and and it's
not on Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the South Hole, where
you could be at each other's throats if necessary, which
is fine, right, Like good teams allow that to happen
because it's honest.

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
Police, please get out.

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):
And so I'm a wrestler, like I like combat, and
I had we we fought our best friends every single day,
punches neck chokes like and and and and when you're done,
like shake hands. You and you love each other and
we go out for beers and and your literal roommates.

(01:18:23):
But so I understand that iron sharpening of iron is
that being a good loving facet to teamwork, if you're
holding each other accountable and helping each other to grow
and testing each other in the right ways. Right, there's
a way that you you badge are too hard, right,
and there's toxicity that you need to have a barrier
that things can go south on but on shackled and

(01:18:48):
you can come up for air and get that cold
air and see the beautiful land. You can't do in
the spaceship.

Speaker 2 (01:18:54):
There's nothing. It's black, right, it's.

Speaker 3 (01:18:56):
Not like like so there's really weird things people don't
think about of that kind of a trip that humans
have never had to wrestle with. You still have to
be an operator and perform. You can't go out and
get fresh air. You can't.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
There's no escape.

Speaker 3 (01:19:09):
And I have a friend of mine who's a marriage
and family therapist, and I said, what would how would
you run your therapy if you couldn't advocate divorce. Sounds
weird because she's you think that marriage and family therapists
would advocate staying together. But her first response, she's like, no,
there's such abusive situations like I have to advocate they separate. Right,

(01:19:30):
that's not a solution. How do you solve it?

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
Yeah? How do you? Wow, it's not you can't. Well,
you can't because you can't you turn around, you can't.

Speaker 3 (01:19:36):
You can't go back, you can't quit, you can't resign,
you can't fire the person. Wow, fundamentally different human experience.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):
And you can kick somebody out of Buds. You can,
sure you can. They can quit, and.

Speaker 1 (01:19:48):
That actually that actually freeze, freeze up the consciousness of
the collective to move forward, to continue pushing, because you
know the dead weight is being jettison, right, you use
a different strategy, that's right. How how would you how
would you survive a mission to Mars? If if you
if you, if you had to go with some of

(01:20:10):
the people from the Buds that were dropped, I mean initially,
I mean I guess there's there's a sequence first. You
have to establish these are the these are the ground rules.
If you break the ground rules, here are the consequences, right.

Speaker 3 (01:20:25):
But the consequences are limited because you can't things were
used to on Earth, you can you can't kick them out, you're.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Not getting well no, But I think the consequence I'm
talking about is the level of violence that can be applied.

Speaker 3 (01:20:37):
Which is also very limited in the space because you
don't really well, you're not going to be like bashing
people's brains in might.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
Well, that's the I guess that's the greatest fear of that.
That's the because that's the farthest it could degrade. And
that's what's a vid of me of violence. That's why
we do the missions now. And we're doing these they're fake,
they're simulations.

Speaker 3 (01:20:56):
I always I have a NASA flight suit, but I
always tell people, like especially at I get confused as
an astronum, like I'm fake, Like this is a pretend
because simulations are really important. It's really like every world
a flight simulator. Your rehearsals all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:21:10):
That's what the whole gist of being successful at any
level and performance is rehearsal.

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
Right, So like that's why we're doing this to make
sure that we have a successful mission to go and
so all of wish is say, bring it back to
the Apostles if they were in Seer and getting tortured
or these missions. Because every person has a breaking point
except them. They gave the breaking The point was death.
They were filayed alive. See Stephen, I think was there's

(01:21:38):
Saint John's boiled and oil. They're crucified. Every single thing
that would test them, that would in your world of
interrogations and POW's. They they didn't break, and that is
evidence of truth because they would have broken. They would
have said, not how guys, fine, we made it up, Fine,

(01:22:00):
we stole the body. They would have capitulated. That was
the that was the right, that's right, like when the
Apostles were tortured and martyred and they were having that
happen because they testified to watching a person come back
from the dead and continue to work miracles and then
ascend into heaven and promise to come back.

Speaker 2 (01:22:21):
And people said, bullshit, we will.

Speaker 3 (01:22:24):
We will send you to our Gimo and we will
break you and we will get you to recant. And
you told me that you you just said it. So
she said you had you had the best guys in
the absolute world who can get anyone to recant.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
That's right, but not them.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
So is that does that become the basis of h
like of the research?

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
Like, how do you get the astronaut to be a h.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
A so their faith in the mission is so eclipses
all sense of self preservation?

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
How do you get them to do it? Is it?
Is it?

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
Conditioning? Is it imprinting? Is it? Is it?

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
Is it? Because I think this is this?

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
This is what we're talking about in the whole thing, right,
this is what we're talking about. We're talking about the
assault on truth and the ability to not back down
when it's the hardest. I mean, that's the whole gist
of why you initially came on. That's why I wanted
to explore it at this level. So is is that?

(01:23:36):
Is that for for anybody in their quest for truth
or purpose or meaning or whatever? Because I think the
quest becomes to live in a state of truth. Right,
that's the ultimate sense of that you have meaning in
life if you can look at yourself in the mirror
and say I am living a life in pursuit of truth,

(01:23:57):
and then you know I and then the the what
is it? The ideation of truth is emblementic of a
moral structure right and you can live and that way
we don't degrade into chaos and masks.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
You know. Yeah, the twentieth centis we're talking.

Speaker 3 (01:24:12):
About this as like middle aged men using the concepts
that we have developed as old guys. Essentially, like I think, say,
for instance, lack of a better number twenty year olds,
I think they have that, but it's unconscious and they
don't think about it in the same like they're not
not necessarily going to have that same conversation with the

(01:24:32):
words we're using, but they're doing the same thing that
everyone is on their path seeking that And what I
would say to them is that you will get to
that point of this realization that that you're saying and
that we're talking about, which is how do you how
do you know what's true? Because when you're young, you're

(01:24:53):
going through life because you're being pushed through grown up
and the system and what have you. But you're you're
not always thinking about what's true at the deeper philosophical
level unless some people do, right, but like most people
probably aren't. You know, you're going out having a good
time or what have you. But what has happening that
I've seen, I've experienced and sounds like it's tracking with

(01:25:14):
what you're saying too, is that you start to develop
excuse me, this this notion that you're looking at the
world you're living in you're you're like, this doesn't seem
real or what is real about it? I mean philosophically,
that's what Descartes asked, and he said, what's real?

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
I think?

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
Therefore, I am that's right, what ten years in a
cabin in isolation? Well, yeah, right, and so you know,
like your question was, well, it's it's it's the acceptance
of metic cognition. If I can think about thinking and
do it in a systematic way that I can ground

(01:25:55):
myself in truth, whatever the truth you choose is, then
I have a shot at a at a healthy framework
of reality. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:26:05):
I have a little bit of data for you all.
Come back to on that in a second, because I
published a study on that. Actually I knew you did.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
I but but.

Speaker 3 (01:26:16):
You asked, like, how do we get the astronauts to
that point? And I would say my answer is that
it's the the end that the question is actually the opposite.
The astronauts already at that point when you launch, like
it's like it's like when you like, I don't I
haven't served in the way that you guys have served.
But like I imagine when you when you first deploy,

(01:26:37):
like you're feeling pretty good, You're.

Speaker 2 (01:26:38):
Excited to get some I was scared.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
Like initially I was good, but then the reality of
combat hit me because on the way over a friend
of mine, Matt Bourgeois, was blown up, and then it
then it was like, oh, yeah, that's what I'm talking to.

Speaker 3 (01:26:54):
Like when you like the beginning, everything is exactly the
astronauts have been trained, they like there already at that
point of like max resilience, like you are fortified. The
question that we don't have the best that we are
asking scientifically that we were running these missions and these
simulations to study and to find the answer to, is

(01:27:15):
how do we prevent the breakdowns at that Because you're
starting off at a ceiling. What happens is like you
just said, at some point, it could be immediately upon
deployment there's a degradation, and you're like, whether it's a
long term, slow roll degradation or an immediate like oh crap,
you're Matt. His name was, like that's a fast degradator, right,

(01:27:37):
Oh shit, this is a wake up call. Now I
get it, and it's different. We need to understand, as
as a science and a culture, how do we make
sure that we don't have that degradation or really accept
that it's going to happen. But what NASA's words, they
use or developed countermeasures for. So there's lots of countermeasures

(01:28:00):
for these what they call deficits and behavioral health. So
and I actually think that's that's an important framework because
we can't go in there like to sear thinking that
we're going to be the superman who won't break right.
We have to accept this will happen, the degradation will occur,
we will break down. What we need to do is
be prepared for a mitigating it, to knowing what to

(01:28:20):
do when it happens, and three overcoming it to be
able to continue to ensure mission success. Right, and the
mission success happens because we've been successful with the people,
so we don't have great answers.

Speaker 2 (01:28:34):
That's why we're running these studies.

Speaker 3 (01:28:35):
And part of that goes back to, you know, when
astronauts will come back from space, they'd ask them, you know,
how things went, particularly during the short mission era of
the shuttles, and the sort of the running quip was
that like there was no bigger group of liars in
the world because everyone's like, oh, went great. Yeah, because
nobody wants to admit that there was a problem interpersonally
or inter dynamically with the team, because then it's like, well,

(01:28:58):
maybe I won't get picked up for the next mission.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
That's right, Second Trip Space. It's the same thing with us.
I mean, you get the guy who's at his tenth deployment.
You know, he's been operating for seventeen straight years in
the GWATT. He's fried, you know, from an endocrine probability,
from an incan system. He's got massive traumatic brain injury
from blast wave exposure. His orthopedic you know, pain is

(01:29:23):
off the charts, right, He's not sleeping, he's got migraines,
he's got vestibular issues, He's got everything that falls within
the component of operator syndrome. Right. And then he's got
the mental health stuff as well too, the survivor's guilt,
the lack of intimacy with his home life, you know,

(01:29:44):
the sense of never being able to maximize the experience,
the existential experience he felt in combat anywhere else so
it's like this whole thing, but what do you ask?
And you see it on people, right, you see it.
That's the one you thing about where you really I
think the higher degree of maybe not empathy or compassion,

(01:30:09):
but the high awareness of those that you care about.
You know them, you know their baselines, you know their
highs or lows, and you see it happening and you go,
are you okay, I'm fine, I'm fine.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:30:23):
And for lots of reasons. One of it, you don't
want to admit that there's something wrong too. You don't
want to miss the chance for the next thing too offline,
you know. And so they built these missions out because
you know, they still know that they're interpersonal problems or
team dynamics or like things happen, right, we're humans, and
so they're like, we can't have this happen on the

(01:30:45):
long trip, Like this has to be fleshed out, and
we have to first build a culture to where it's
acceptable to tell the truth that things didn't go well,
and you know, organizationally within like the the hot wash
app like you have to be able to come back
and be like I can speak the truth and I
know it's not gonna affect getting access to the next mission.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
That's a tough thing to build for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:31:07):
But you know, and I can't even imagine what some
of those guys would come back with it everything you
just described. I know when I came back from the mission,
I did there were challenges that I generally tend not
to get into, just out of respect for some facets
of the mission and the team boat. Right, there were

(01:31:29):
times I was I was an anvil to a hammer,
and I felt that way at.

Speaker 1 (01:31:36):
What's funny you say that, man, I actually talk about
the choice of being the anvilla or the hammer in
your life, man, because that's and I had this young
man who I've known a long time, men toward him
a long time. He's being medically retired from from a
Tier one unit, and as he was going through that

(01:31:57):
the process of the training to get into this unit,
like he was midway through, and he gave me that analogy.
He's like because I'm like, because he was telling me
the the insane physical pressures that were they were putting
them on on top of the emotional and cognitive requirements
for the operational requirement. Right, you can't miss you can't

(01:32:21):
make the wrong step. There was no latitude in this
level of life and death. And and he says, I
remember him saying, he's like what He's like, it's making
the choice are you going to be the anvil?

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:32:37):
Are you going to place yourself on the anvil or
or are you going to have life place you on
the anvil? And that either way you're getting the hammer
no matter what. So what how are you going.

Speaker 2 (01:32:48):
To perceive it? What?

Speaker 3 (01:32:50):
And I and and I took great pride in that
respect of being so I'm the oldest of seven in
my family. Well I was my dead dad when Wall like,
I have printal child. I I've been an anvil in
a lot of ways, for a lot of things, for
a lot of people. And you look at it exactly
as you said, there's a choice of a way in

(01:33:11):
which you look at it. Anvils are immensely strong. Anvils
absorb a lot of pain and pressure because they're strong.
They that they're and so that's a positive thing. And
you know that analogy from that mission, You know, I

(01:33:34):
did that to help the mission move forward so that
others didn't have to be the anvil. And and I
was proud to do. That's that's right. That but but
it you know, it still came aut a you bottle
a lot up. That came at a big cost. So

(01:33:56):
like when I came home from the mission, like it
wasn't anything like you guys done or the duration or extent,
but like it was weird, Like I generally like I
couldn't really talk to people about it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:07):
Yeah, and that's the toughest part.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
And if I did, they would still wouldn't get it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:13):
And in order, you'd get like trite answers of like
cliches and and you're appreciative of the effort, but like
you know it, it's not the genuine curiosity. No, And
I would just sit in the dark sometimes in my
apartment by myself and just enjoy it of like wow,
because you're just processing stuff and you're working through things.
And so I have enormous respect for what those guys

(01:34:38):
must handle because you know, like in wrestling, we teach
young boys and men that they need to be absolute
savages on the mat and you know, killers on the mat, right,
you know, within boundaries, within rules, but such as life.
But it's we also teach them as coaches and teachers
in the framework of the education system that when you

(01:34:59):
step off that, Matt, you were a gentleman and so economy.
That's that's when you guys come back and you're like,
I just you know, I was I was reading Eddie
Penny's book and he's like, so I come back and I'm
driving like crazy round bag and I come back and
and I'm and people look at me like I'm a
savage because I'm like and he's like, yeah, I guess
I guess I need to recalibrate that. That's right, because

(01:35:22):
there's these dual messages.

Speaker 1 (01:35:25):
Well, that's that's like you, I mean, the perfect description
is you you build a tool, and the human is
the tool for a particular mission, right, and and the
most extreme missions require the most extreme like you said, pressure, heat, pain, right,

(01:35:50):
and so you're what are you doing? I think there's
a natural uh inn a. Maybe levity's not not the
right word. There's a there's a natural component of the
human condition that is affiliated with the ease of interaction,

(01:36:11):
the facilitation of of reciprocal emotion, right, those back and
force that make life enjoyable, right, the pursuit of happiness
if you want to call it that. Right, Those guys
are pretty smart, but it's it's man, there's a lot
of other missions that that's not conducive. So we have
to do these other things to get the result right,

(01:36:34):
to test what's underneath that.

Speaker 3 (01:36:37):
It's an extraordinary burden that are put on our war
fighters to come home and then said, just now be normal,
flip that switch off and be normal to people. And
you know, like your family just wants their dad, like
they don't want like you know, it's just it's such

(01:36:58):
a weird contrast, and I think that's difficult to wrestle.

Speaker 1 (01:37:01):
I think we're doing we're dealing with that in a
pretty profound societal way.

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
Right now.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
We've been we've been put on the anvil and all
these different ideas, ideological these forced ideological influences, and now
what's happening is we're like, now we're the degradation of
not not that it wouldn't be the degradation, it'd be

(01:37:28):
the emergence of that morality, that core stuff that you
worked so hard from Chicago in wrestling, through academia, through
the Nationalist mission, and then into that moment where you
are now where it's like, no, I had to do
what I did because of all of this.

Speaker 3 (01:37:49):
Yeah, and if I can riff on that for at
the moment, there's there's a lot I could unpack on
it that you know, one level, when I would go
through I had a couple different instances in which things
came up of real ethical challenges or quandaries, just difficult
things like mountains I didn't want to climb, and I

(01:38:14):
thought to myself, you know, like this is so hard
to do. But then I thought like, but I've been
through so much I should If if what I have
been through isn't enough to prepare someone for this, then
nothing would be. So then I should do this because

(01:38:35):
no one will if not. And so that was the past.
Was God preparing me for the future with the strength
Because to answer your question, how do you make those
decisions in the gray the discernment? How do you how
do you do what's right and wrong? And there are
some really big times in life of right and wrong,

(01:38:56):
like when life and death changes on it. And that
might be living or dying, but it could also just
be someone's life and death of where does their career
trajectory go? Because you're the person in charge of deciding that,
whether you're an HR representative or a judge or a
cop or all sorts of things. Right, you can control
lots of people's life trajectories. You can do the right
thing and the wrong thing in your own life too,

(01:39:18):
some really big calls. And to me, that would be
like taking a kid from MEPs, the entry point of
the military, and putting them on a Tier one team.
You don't have the skill. You're not going to lift
five hundred pounds on a deadlift right off the bat.
You need to build up. So in the same way,
I think your ethical discernment in mental fortitude of discerning

(01:39:42):
great in black and white, that that is, you think
of it as a muscle in the brain or your soul,
It's really more of a soul muscle in a brain thing, right,
that has to be developed and built through smaller decisions
of things, which is kind of what I was referring to.
When you see when you grew up, or you see

(01:40:02):
things that are right and wrong, you learn things. You
also learn, and we mentioned this earlier suffering, like when
you learn that. So for me, like I got the
living shit kicked out of me day in and day out,
and wrestling times I thought I would die. I literally
thought I was gonna die and get choked out or
killed or broke it. Like there were absolute beasts and

(01:40:23):
killers like in my room that were very very good
and uh, and I wasn't. As basically the contrast, they
didn't even have to be that good.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
I sucked.

Speaker 3 (01:40:32):
But you learn that you can suffer. And every time
you think you're gonna quit, you come back the next day,
and one day more and one day, and before you
know it, you're the last guy standing after four years,
when everybody else has walked away for whatever reason, and
and you realize that you can do it because you've
done it. But it's those little decisions. So like you

(01:40:55):
know the stuff that that we were talking about, and
and you know that James talked about in the turning
down one hundred thousand dollars, to not stay silent and
to tell the truth instead of give into a lie
or speak up against the president when he's telling us
to undermine some pretty serious stuff. Those things don't I mean,
I suppose they could happen in a vacuum, but generally speaking,

(01:41:15):
those are really really tough calls. Yes, and I and
I'd be lying if I said it was so easy,
because it wasn't. And I remember because we mentioned the apostles,
I'll go back to that. I went to my priest
and this is and I mentioned this because it's a
good example of things to keep in mind for leadership
when people are mentoring others, because people will come to

(01:41:36):
you for advice, and the way that we answer advice
changes their course trajectories to as leaders. And so I
went to one priest that and I said, hey, I'm
going through this thing. You could just kind of keep
me in prayer of you know, I've had I've had
to blow the whistle on some rough stuff at work,
and I just I want to be able to do

(01:41:57):
the right thing, but but I don't. And I had
one say you could tell he got uneasy, and he
kind of and he kind of gave a very what
you'd think of as like a trite or a cliche
kind of answer.

Speaker 2 (01:42:10):
He's like, Okay, well, sure, I'll pray for you, but
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:42:14):
Try to try to be like a disciple of be
like the disciples of Christ. And this was in the
week of Lent, right before Easter Lassion, and so that
was his advice to me. But to me when he
told me that first of all, the vibe I got
was like an uneasy one and like as if I
was doing might be doing something wrong. Yes, but he

(01:42:35):
would pray for me, which is like you know, the
we're in the south there, you know. But then the
other thing it made me think of, right, and we
don't always think about this as leaders of how people
listen to what we say because they but what I
heard during the week Holy Week and the passion, He's like,
you know, I'll pray for you to be like the
disciples of Christ. I'm like, you mean the guys who

(01:42:57):
abandoned him, what kind of courage? Because I was looking
for courage. Yeah, I was looking was to be end
courage and have that courage.

Speaker 2 (01:43:04):
Go put yourself on your cross. It's worth it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:07):
Yeah, because you're again you're calibrating this discernment. And I'm like,
during this particular week, it was the women who went
to his cross.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:43:17):
His disciples did not want I mean one is one
of them designed him three times they and I guess
John was on the cross.

Speaker 2 (01:43:22):
Okay, sorry John.

Speaker 3 (01:43:24):
But like you know, for the most part, they weren't
really bastions of courage at that point. That was what
the Resurrection re embolded them, and the Holy Spirit came down.
They gave them the courage that they needed that they
thought they had. Remember, They're like, no do anything anything,
and he's like, really, how about like three before the
night's over, you're gonna dieven.

Speaker 2 (01:43:44):
Not a ship a chance. Yeah, He's like all right,
brom the rock. But like so that I thought about that,
and I'm like, you know, like like is that a
great example.

Speaker 3 (01:43:55):
But then and I was mad about it because then
I went to another priest literally twenty feet away at
the other side of the church, shaking people's hands on
and very different style person. Yeah, and I told him
he's like Saint Joseph's feast days coming up. He's just
the he is the defender against demons and the fighter
against the worker for your work. And he's like, you

(01:44:15):
will be strong, And I was like, yeah, yeah, there
you go. That's wrong, like like so like so I
was mad about that at first, but then in the
last couple of weeks, I've been thinking about that from
about five months ago, and I realized, you.

Speaker 2 (01:44:26):
Know, like we used it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:27):
I'm like, well he didn't say when they were all
actually pretty courageous. They all got I mean they were martyred, like, okay,
so but as leaders, we don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:44:36):
We need to give be.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):
Mindful of how people hear what we say, yes, because
we may give the wrong context and they can interpret
things a little bit exerctly. And and you know, it's
kind of like old man talking from my point of view,
as like, you know, how do we mentor and coach
younger people up and keeping that in check.

Speaker 1 (01:44:53):
It's giving him the space, giving them just enough planning
and dropping enough seeds so that when they're ready, you
know that the manifestation of that courage can present itself
in the right time, the right place. But to have
the understanding and the expectation that sin is always tempting

(01:45:14):
us to take the easier route.

Speaker 2 (01:45:17):
It is.

Speaker 3 (01:45:18):
And that's where again I come back to that idea
that like, how do we make these important big decisions
it's everyone will face in life like it's through practice.
It's whether it's mental practice or physical practice, lifting weights
or doing arithmetic, if you know, if we have About

(01:45:43):
ten or twelve years ago, I wrote a blog series
for UFC fighter Matt Linland and becoming a very close
friend of mine. He spoke at my wedding, he fought
federal Menako's if you remember the old days, Like he's
og one of my very best friends now. But I
wrote a series for him during the George Zimmerman trial

(01:46:05):
here in Florida that was in the national news and
I was just watching it, and I wrote the series.
It's called a Dearth of Heroism, saying that, like, we
just don't have people in society who often are comfortable
taking heroic action of ethical or physical courage necessary. Because
I was watching some witnesses and testify in that case,

(01:46:25):
who like basically heard whoever it was kicking the shit
out of the other person in that right battle. And
he said, So I hid in the bushes and called
the cops, And I'm like, come on, man, like, maybe,
like I'm the person, I'm a kind of person who
goes to the fire to help. Sometimes that's not always

(01:46:45):
the best advisable. I understand, there's times where.

Speaker 2 (01:46:48):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
I think it's always the best thing to do, Yeah,
even regardless of the pain you're gonna suffer, because then
you'll never have the regret that you did.

Speaker 2 (01:46:58):
Yeah, because somebody died, that's right in that case.

Speaker 3 (01:47:00):
And and so I wrote this, it was called a
dearth of heroism, and I think this is what we're
still talking about here, which is that in culture and
society we have what some people would call it dearth
of heroism.

Speaker 2 (01:47:12):
That doesn't mean none.

Speaker 3 (01:47:13):
I think that there's incredibly brave and courageous people doing
amazing things. And the series I wrote back then actually
featured that too. But the point was to say, how
do we build this? And the build and in that
frameworker it was through wrestling mixed martials. You have to
teach kids that it's okay to get beat up, you
will rebuild. It's okay to have the courage to go
out on a mat or in practice against a kid

(01:47:33):
who's bigger and better than you, because that is scary
when you can do that and you learn how to suffer,
and then somebody comes up to you at work in
a white collar situation and they're like you should be scared.
You're like, of what?

Speaker 2 (01:47:50):
Of what? It's like?

Speaker 3 (01:47:52):
What was the old year old enough to remember Rocky fighters?
Like assume me for what? Because he knows how to suffer?
And you know that's something that you know, you guys
are obviously world class trained and how to suffer. Suffering
is a skill. It's a theological one too, one hundred percent.
And and when you suffer the theologically to me, I've

(01:48:14):
learned this over the last three or four years as
as a parent. We went through some really bad suffering
of a really sick kid. My wife almost died in
my arms on labor and like, like, we suffered in
extraordinary ways that brought us to our knees and made
us prayerful, and that helped us grow. We actually the

(01:48:36):
suffering was the gift. And knowing how to do the
suffering and have it be a gift and have it
humble you towards prayerfulness and growth is like, I mean,
that's that's how we've got not you know, don't People
shouldn't mistake me. I'm not saying to beat people up

(01:48:56):
because it's going to make them stronger and they're going
to learn how to like that's this is not a
justification for abuse and taunting or both like, but like
we do need to allow people and kids to scrape
their els, knees and elbows and learn how to fail,
learn how to suffer. And this comes back to this
DEI thing. That's right, So this is you asked me,
what have I seen it manifest ed? Why is this

(01:49:18):
the hill to die on that I chose to to
to hold firm on and speak the truth about. It's
because this has been happening, as our conversation has alluded
for over twenty five years, and what we've seen over
twenty five years is everything goes south. Now, there's lots
of reasons for that, but one of these are this
is this tracks in correspondence to that. Like you talked

(01:49:39):
about the patents and the science discoveries that people want
to make. Guess what we're not making a lot of
science discoveries. Like in the academic world, there's a whole
rabbit hole if you like going around rabbit holes of
how broken science is. They went in business, you say
you go woke and go broke. Well, in science they

(01:49:59):
went it woke, but they are broke. Like science has
a replication crisis. You can't replicate most findings. There's a
huge fraud issue in science. So much major findings have
been found to be fraudulent. The biggest model for Alzheimer's
disease turned out to be fake papers that they spent
then million, five hundred million dollars of investment into drug

(01:50:22):
treatments based upon it was all fraudulent. And you know,
when you're promising treatments to people whose parents can no
longer remember them, Yeah, Like, that's a different kind of
evil too, like and so we fund science in America

(01:50:44):
to make explorations and discoveries. But when we're funding it
with decisions based upon features that are not ability and
merit and excellence and skill, then it's not going to
be able to execute what we needed to do in

(01:51:06):
making the discoveries that save lives and improve society. You
may end up with something that looks like how you
want it to look like, but it's not going to
work like how you want it to work like. And
you know, like it's something I think Americans have always
held the deepest respect in regard for your communities in

(01:51:28):
special operations because we've always assumed and believe that you
guys are the last bastion holding the line of standard.
I think I think we are, and and and what
we haven't done that it would be the equivalent of like,
you guys wouldn't be able to operate if you started
selecting people not based on we.

Speaker 2 (01:51:47):
Change the standard, and and and and and.

Speaker 3 (01:51:50):
I know there's military conversations about that for a long time,
about what happens in the risk thereof But I'm here
reporting back from the front lines of education and science
and the intellectual side of the academy that we gave
up that fight twenty five years ago. Wow, And where
would your community be if that fight was given up
twenty five years ago? And that's where we're at right

(01:52:13):
now in science and education, And so that's why it's important.
That's why I took a stand, because if we are
to save a nation, if we are to save our
culture and our society so that we can educate people
instead of indoctrinate them, then somebody has to hold the line.
Somebody has to say the emperor doesn't have any clothes.

(01:52:33):
Somebody has to say these are wrong things, and you're
doing the wrong things about the wrong things. And that's
why it's important. And I've seen it weaponized. I've experienced
it weaponized, and we've had a weakness in leadership of
holding those things accountable. Even now, you say, you know,

(01:52:54):
you allow companies or universities to fix their websites, to
fix their words, but you keep the same people in place.
That's right, the deeds don't change. And you know, those
are the same institutions that keep getting the funding. And
in your world there there they accept the GI Bill
to train leaders to take that indoctrinated philosophy and take

(01:53:17):
it back to the military, and and and and and
so that they can interrupt the standard bearing you know,
selection based on a faulty indoctrination of education.

Speaker 2 (01:53:30):
And it matters.

Speaker 1 (01:53:37):
I tell you, Rick, I'm I'm blown away by not
only your courage to have the stance that you took,
but the way you think about it. I mean, a
lot of people will will make stances based on a
gut feeling they know it's wrong, and so they'll they'll
they'll they'll.

Speaker 2 (01:53:56):
Wave their hand and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:53:57):
But you know, I think what what makes you so
unique is that you can articulate the reason behind it
and the importance of why it we need to do this,
why we need to stand up for what we believe in,
and why we you know, we have to hold the
line of that pursuit of truth, that that integrity and

(01:54:22):
that foundation of the things that I think societies need
as a whole to be able to rely upon.

Speaker 3 (01:54:29):
Well, you know, thank you that that means a lot,
and coming from you, I don't know that I deserve
such kind words from from men like yourself, but it
does mean a lot. I've always looked up and aspired
to be everything all of you guys have always been.
But you know, there's a real tangible connection to this.
We talked about the Communist applications of this, of control

(01:54:52):
of humans, control society. But like one of the people
in that meeting was a foreigner from Europe on an
H one P. He's actively working to indoctrinate his students
with European communism principles like like these are not esoteric,
the theoretical things that it happened.

Speaker 2 (01:55:12):
I caught it, I proved it.

Speaker 3 (01:55:15):
Like I have the video and those things are happening
all over and it's it's it's I think it's a
there's an infection and about it. I have another film
that they're laughing. They're laughing about teaching it. They've been
unchecked for so long and and like any any idea,
any any infection that goes on, you know, un what

(01:55:37):
is it undiagnosed and then treated, it just keeps growing
and growing and growing.

Speaker 1 (01:55:42):
And that's the whole gist. Of communism. That's the whole
gist of this, these radical ideologies. But you know, I
think now we're in a place where we were, We're done.
There's a there's enough people beginning to stand up and
fight back and push back. And I and and you've
in that person.

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):
Well, if I may, you know one thing that I
think has happened, Like you said, they've been getting away
with it so long because nobody said or did anything
we had for I guess what you would say, two
generations since the Global war and terror, our warriors were
sent to war. Our fighters, you guys were sent to war,
and we talked a little bit, like I felt drawn

(01:56:22):
to it, and for whatever reason, I kept getting taken
at so like I'm kind of a weirdo in the
academic culture because like I'm actually a trained fighter in
wrestling and hand to hand, Like I'm used to being comfortable,
being uncomfortable, being suffering, suffering being in a contentious, combative
scenario and being comfortable there if necessary.

Speaker 2 (01:56:44):
But that's not usual.

Speaker 3 (01:56:46):
Our generations, they said, all of the people taught all
you guys how to fight, and we gave away the
ship domestically. And in twenty sixteen, Most people don't know this,
but I remember watching it because at the presidential nominating
R and C convention, I think it was It wasn't
It was Marcus who gave a speech. And people don't

(01:57:08):
remember probably Marcus's speech, but I remember it because I
remember and he said he came back from war, but
he realized that the actual battlefront here is domestically on
the front of our culture and society. And he was
not wrong. He was absolutely right. We are now seeing
that manifest and you know, I think that people are
starting to answer the call, but they're they're doing that

(01:57:30):
because of the inspiration and the guidance people like you.
So like you know, I came across your your videos
in like twenty fourteen, and they were so good and
about motivating young young men and people to have integrity,
to live a life of virtue and to hold the

(01:57:53):
line of your standards of integrity. And and I came
from I was trained by programmers that built Olympians and
really high level elite coaches. And when I saw what
you were saying, I didn't didn't know much about your background,
but it instantly resonated, like this is an elite level
person training people for free on YouTube through your frog

(01:58:17):
Logic program, and it was right, and what you're doing matters,
and it leaves a very big impact where like whatever,
it's been eleven years now, you know, I can meet
you today and be like, hey, you actually impacted that.

Speaker 2 (01:58:35):
I appreciate that, Rick. It means the world, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:58:37):
I think the whole gist is, you know, I learned
pretty early on that the suffering is the pathway to salvation.
And so how do you teach people that, you know,
how do you say, hey, guess what you're gonna If
you want to become the person you want to become,
you have to go seek out the suffering, the pain,

(01:59:00):
and it's part. It's imbaute, it's impart imbued in life regardless.
I mean, you're a product of you know, that imbued suffering.
It takes courage to seek out the suffering.

Speaker 2 (01:59:08):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:59:09):
It's scary, that's right, especially if you've been indoctrinated in
it as early as childhood, where you like, man, I
don't want any of that anymore from my whole life.
And then you you figure out the mechanisms to deflect
or defend, or to ignore, or to reroute or whatever
away from it because it was so intense whatever these periods,

(01:59:31):
whether you were a kid or whether you went through
trauma as an adult or went to combat or whatever
it is, or had to be a whistleblower. You like,
it's so it's so impactful, it's so uh what is?
It fractures us?

Speaker 4 (01:59:47):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:59:47):
It fractures I think it fractures us to our core
to where we really have to believe is our foundation
going to hold up under this this this on this
anvil rights as we're getting waylaid and and that's what
I always have been trying to do. And let me

(02:00:08):
ask you this, and this is something like, I I
know that you have left the university and you're you know,
I think what was just blew me away is at
your mowing lawns for uh? In you know, in the meantime,
what would be the thing that you would want to
do most right now? Like, what what would be the

(02:00:28):
perfect scenario to go back into academia, to go back
to work, maybe to work for you know, a starship,
to work at a at a for an athletic department
during neuroscience research on the modern athlete. I mean, what
would be the perfect thing for you that would give
you that sense of meaning, that sense of purpose and

(02:00:50):
meaning that all of this is worth it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:53):
Man, that is such a good question. I don't know
that I even have a great answer, because it's been
such a whirlwind. It's like, it's like I just ended
a twenty five year trajectory on a dime, and I'm
trying to turn a cruise ship or an aircraft carrier
around in a moment like there's it's been such a
whirlwind in such choppy waters, and I haven't had time

(02:01:15):
to really like decompress and unpack what's next or what
I mean. I'm the kind of person that is interesting.
I'm capable for lots of pretty much all those things
I've you know, I've I have a small couple of
small LLC companies. I actually started one called Space Psychology,
where I actually want to do the kind of psychological
work that we were doing that we were talking about

(02:01:35):
in our conversations and take to towards these commercial and
NASA space based applications. Because of my experience being both
a crew member and a principal investigator of these missions,
studying astronaut cognition, one of the things I got to
see is that like there is we are an embryonic
level of understanding those things at NASA for psychological Exploration,

(02:01:59):
long duration space. And I think we can do it
better than what can sometimes be shackled by in the
in the government like NASA system, right, And I I
want to say I was talking with one of the
astronauts at the Astronaut Memorial for Columbia and Challenger Explosions
this past January and explained in this idea and said, hey,

(02:02:22):
I kind of I like to build this out. You know,
do you think it resonates with you know, your time
on the ISS and isolation confinement and the challenges there is.
He's a military guy too, and and he said, you
know we don't d O D had a much better
system in place than NASA does coming back from deployment.
They have a better build out for bringing people back

(02:02:43):
and transitioning. She said, it's still also still pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (02:02:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:02:47):
He's like NASA's like you come home and they're like
see you, thanks, Yeah, great job. Now you got to answer,
but you got to go do all the kids elementary schools.
You don't get a rest, You don't everybody wants it
because you're a celebrity, everybody you know, you get to
do it again. I talked with a French astronaut at
one of these missions and he said that, he said,

(02:03:07):
you spend four years training with someone with a team,
you go and you do this mission for eight months.
It's immensely bonding. I mean, you're forged, like any of
your teams would you have forged, I'm.

Speaker 2 (02:03:18):
Sure you know.

Speaker 3 (02:03:19):
And you come home and as soon as you land
in Kazakhstan at that point, every country of your team
has a team of people, a truck, in a helicopter basically,
and as soon as you're landing, you go to the
four opposite corners of the Earth and you stop talking,
like you text for here and there. But he's like,

(02:03:41):
but at that moment you the breakup. He's like, and
he's like, I was there. I was in space for
eight months or whatever it was. And he's like, then
I come home and like two days later, I'm stuck
in traffic in the circle in Paris trying to go
get to the President to receive a medal and I
can't get out of traffic, and he's like this, He's like,

(02:04:03):
it was just so surreal, and everybody wants a piece
of you and all you needed, all you want to
do is rest. That's so decompress and so like that's
kind of my answer right now, like like like I
I would do all those things. I'm interested in a
lot of them. But I think you know, like, yeah,
I do have a question for you.

Speaker 2 (02:04:20):
Yeah, well let me real quick.

Speaker 1 (02:04:22):
If you're listening to this and you have listened to
what Rick is about and something pops in your head
for your program, your school, your science, your evaluation, whatever
it might be, make sure you get we're going to
put out all of his contact information and reach out

(02:04:43):
to him because you should have an overwhelming response. I'm
praying and that opportunities come to your door because not
only have you shown your intelligence here and in every
aspect of your career, but your integrity most And I
think that's the key because putting all that together, that

(02:05:04):
doesn't always happen. And I and I think that's the
wrestler in you for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:05:08):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (02:05:09):
Yeah, I mean you know, maybe that's a way to bookend.
That answer for you too is like you know, I've
talked with some other friends about similar things, and you
know what they've said, is that what what businesses look
for or need most is moral leadership. So in terms
of leadership, that's something that I would want to bring
is more leadership to you know, as a culture, our

(02:05:31):
ships are not doing well. Are where we have a
lot of rats.

Speaker 2 (02:05:34):
On the ship.

Speaker 3 (02:05:35):
We need to we need to make things ship shape again.
And and that stems with moral leadership. And that's something
that I want to bring forward to wherever we go
because I'm committed to putting our future, our kids on
the right pathway forward and building this not out for us,
but for them to inherit what we have become stewards
of and and and so you know, I hope to

(02:05:57):
make a good contribution to any place I know and
do the right thing because it does it is important
and you know so and we've seen that, like I've
seen the education system fail at producing it great inflation,
pushing people through. I've seen students who struggle with reading, writing,

(02:06:20):
math in college.

Speaker 2 (02:06:22):
And we're going to write that ship.

Speaker 3 (02:06:24):
I've been committed to it and still committed to it,
and we're going to make sure that we do everything
we can to do things in.

Speaker 2 (02:06:31):
The right way. Wow.

Speaker 3 (02:06:32):
So when when I would watch a lot of your shows,
you talk a lot about the negative insurgency, So I'm curious,
like where that came from for you, and you know,
how did you conceptualize that? Because one of the things
that when I first came across your frog Lodger program
years ago, I was already a professional neuroscientist. I was
doing a post doc, and like, when you're talking about

(02:06:54):
positive and negative insurgencies as you framed them, the brain
has positive and negatively charged ions that will make cells
fire or not fire, and it's not a good or
a bad thing in that respect. So sometimes you want
to inhibit cells or brain areas from firing because they're
going to make you do something you shouldn't do. So

(02:07:14):
so like think of like Tourette's is a problem where
that inhibition is gone, and so you need the negative
balance with the positive.

Speaker 2 (02:07:22):
I know that's not exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:07:23):
The way you you frame the insurgency with, but like,
where did that come from and how did you tap
into applying that with like the brain based integration of
you know, all your mentoring and leadership stuff that you're
doing well.

Speaker 1 (02:07:38):
I I the biggest thing for me was it was
the fear that was always present and I And I
remember when I when I left the agency, the number one,
one of the number one questions you'd get was were
you afraid?

Speaker 2 (02:07:57):
In training?

Speaker 1 (02:07:58):
And I was like, you know, it's such a personal question,
and I you know, I was kind of a snapperhead,
and I was just like, well, you know, I'd make
some stupid you know, well, we're you know, have you
ever had a three hundred pound boat on your head,
immersed in freezing cold water, you know, running two hundred
miles with you know, ninety six straight hours you're up
to out four hours of sleep in a full week,

(02:08:21):
you know, And they'd be like no, And I go,
you'd you'd be afraid too, you know, And and it's
like that's how I would push back similar questions about combat.
But then then someone asked me for real, like, you know,
how if you were so afraid, how'd you do it?

Speaker 2 (02:08:36):
And I didn't know the answer to that.

Speaker 1 (02:08:38):
And so that began this this going down this road
to understand where fear comes from and where it originates.

Speaker 2 (02:08:47):
And how we're taught it and how we cultivate it.

Speaker 1 (02:08:49):
And so I mean, you know, the first place you
start is fight or flight, and then you understand the
Olympics system and how the amigdala's work and how the
Hippo campus works, and and then so then I read
I found a book on positive neuroscience and that was
by Martin Seligman, and that one was a massive flip
for me because I was like, like, exactly what you said.

(02:09:11):
There is a positive and negative electrical you know thing
taking place. And when you understand, you know how our
hormones and our stress hormones work, and you know that war,
that war that's taking place between those in your limbics system, right.
And then the big one was, oh, your amiglos actually
can generate positive emotion as well too.

Speaker 2 (02:09:34):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:09:35):
The case study was like you go to a concert
and there's sixty five thousand people, Like I just took
my family. We're up to New York over the summer,
and we went and saw Zach Bryant and at the
end he sings this song called Revival and it's like
a twenty minute song and there were sixty thousand people

(02:09:55):
singing this and I'm looking at my children, you know,
from twelve the seventeen, and then I'm looking at people
in their sixties screaming the song females, males, you know,
different races, different genders, different cultural backgrounds, and the same

(02:10:16):
energy is being exuded.

Speaker 2 (02:10:19):
And so I'm like whoa.

Speaker 1 (02:10:20):
And then I thought back to the suffering and the
pain of combat and how that affects everybody. There's a
it kind of it is. It's the energy that infuses
into us and the sorrow or pain or whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:10:34):
And I'm like, whoa.

Speaker 1 (02:10:36):
Okay, so there's there's it's a it's really, I think,
an idea of perception. And that's why I like fast
forward Jordan Peterson. When I when I had gotten canceled
off the internet, canceled and you know, lost everything, lost
my business from COVID, everything, I'd lost it all. I

(02:10:56):
found this lectury Gifts called Restructuring Your Perceptions Part two,
and the way he deconstructs it and then builds it
back up right from from you know, the nature of
of writing a book, right, Well, I'm not you know,
I start at well, I'm going to punch a key,
and then I'm going to punch multiple keys, and I'm

(02:11:17):
going to connect those keys into a word. Then I'm
going to put these words into a phrase, and then
I'm going to put these phrase in a paragraph and
hopefully that paragraphs make sense. Well, what's the intention behind
a paragraph? What are you going to teach? And so
these these perceptions of each step, each phase, each concept,
and so you build on those, right and and the
more ambitious that you want to be becoming a navy seal,

(02:11:40):
the more you have to have, you know, a focused uh,
conviction towards the steps it takes to get there. Well,
each step is riddled in pain and fear. And so
if I allowed my if my perceptions off, then I'm

(02:12:03):
never going to get to reach the pinnacle of the ambition, right,
And so I'm I'm putting all this together, and then
all of a sudden, I start understanding how how we
teach fear, How it's built into almost every fabric of
every phase of your life, right from uh, the immediacy
of physical fear. Don't touch the hot stove, don't cross

(02:12:27):
the street without looking, don't go up next to that
that bad guy, all the way to the point, Well,
if you don't accomplish this, you're not going to be
accepted into society if you don't, you know, And so.

Speaker 3 (02:12:39):
Now here's a crazy thing. It's a fucking crazy thing.

Speaker 1 (02:12:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:12:43):
So I.

Speaker 1 (02:12:45):
Get after like two years of this and I'm like, yeah,
but none of what I was figuring out gave me
the answer of.

Speaker 2 (02:12:58):
The unknown realities.

Speaker 1 (02:12:59):
How it just hits you when you when you don't
like you don't even you'd be one minute you're good,
and then some little thing getting pinned on a mat
can destroy a whole season. One one submission or one
mistake can spiral the entirety of this pathway you're on.

(02:13:21):
Why is it so profound? And I immediately correlated it
because guys were starting to commit suicide.

Speaker 2 (02:13:29):
It started to pick up and meanwhile.

Speaker 1 (02:13:31):
These are the most impressive, hard human beings I've ever
known in my life, but they're spiraling out what's going on.

Speaker 2 (02:13:41):
And it became these invisible.

Speaker 1 (02:13:43):
Battles that nobody and if you talk about that isolation,
it's the invisible battles that emerge.

Speaker 2 (02:13:50):
And it starts right.

Speaker 1 (02:13:51):
It starts as the whisper or the scratch right, or
starts as the itch, or it starts as the doubt.
And those are the insurgencies, and those were the people
we were fighting. They weren't the army in front of you.
It wasn't toe to toe because you can rationalize toe
to toe, right, you can generate that's the lift off
that's going to mars Is is the toe to toe fight.

Speaker 2 (02:14:15):
But it's it's it's, hey, well, you.

Speaker 1 (02:14:17):
Got to get back in the fight every day for
three years, and that's what ends up breaking.

Speaker 2 (02:14:23):
It's the it's.

Speaker 3 (02:14:23):
Fighting another person is the easiest thing in the world.
And fighting yourself like wrestling and fighting yourself, that's the
ultimate opponent. And and that's the real battle. And you know,
so it resonated with me when I was I was
hearing you share a lot of that both online and
then again here. You know, fear is so powerful. I've

(02:14:44):
I've I've heard it in two different ways, Like I've
I had friends who were test pilots at Edwards and
they would say, for a while, it's part of the
sort of maximum is like guys wouldn't want to go
up and fly with people who weren't married with kids
because it changes your risk calibration, right, and and it

(02:15:06):
makes you take it makes you more governable by fear,
because fear is a helpful thing and a good thing too.
That's right, you know, you know, just like I'm sure
you there's probably exceptions to this too, right, but like,
it's probably nice to go out on patrol with people
who have a family that want.

Speaker 2 (02:15:26):
Them home one hundred percent more.

Speaker 1 (02:15:28):
They're more focused, they're more acutely aware, they're paying better,
are going to take They take different risk profiles.

Speaker 2 (02:15:34):
Some do right, but most don't.

Speaker 1 (02:15:37):
Most most if the guys that I've worked with, it
reinforces their determination to not make.

Speaker 3 (02:15:43):
Mistakes precisely, But that's the risk profile. That's what I'm saying.
You make sure that you take the risks that are
calculated and mistake proof because there's a different thing. But
at the same time, the cowboys go away quick once
there's other people involved. Well, yeah, and who wants to
go Who wants to strap your wagon to a cowboy

(02:16:03):
that doesn't want to come home? So people ask about
this with Mars all the time. They're like, would you
take it? Like, I'm like, no, it's it's a it's
a return trip home. You don't want to go with
somebody who doesn't want to come home, that's right, And
in astronauts would say this at times. I forget who
I've heard somebody, but they would say that. People ask him,
are you scared? He's like, well, yeah, he's like, I

(02:16:23):
don't want to go to space with someone who's not scared.
I mean, why would you? And in combat, when we
go to UFC or mixed martial arts stuff like, it's
like when you mentor and coach guys training up and
before the match, they got the butterflies, they got this
it's and they're they're scared.

Speaker 1 (02:16:41):
I've worked with one of the greatest UFC fighters in
human history, Andrea Vlovsky, and I remember when I was
working with him, he was in his eighteenth year and
I remember we were getting ready to go on a fight.
It was I think his Chicago fight that I did
with him, and you could tell I watched it come
over him. And I'd been with him two fights before

(02:17:02):
and it was a little bit different in those, but
this one was more meaningful. That's where he'd got his start.
That's he lived in this one word shitty apartment and
now he's back to the space and it's like he's
in the twilight of his career and you saw it,
and I'm like, are you all right? And he's like
he's like, yeah, I'm good. I was like, are you
feeling it more intensely? He's like, yeah, of course I am.

(02:17:23):
And he's like and I'm like why, and he's like,
I'm going to get into a fight, and there's no
other there's no other thing.

Speaker 3 (02:17:31):
But I tell kids, like, when you don't feel the
butterflies when you should be worried. Yeah, they're a good
sign that you know what's at stake, you know what's
that happened. And so you teach the kids to embrace that.
That's not a thing to be scared of. That's a
thing that's a fear to embrace because it means you're
on the right path and it's it's funny. So we
had a really similar conversation a couple of years ago.
I did a pod. I used to have a podcast.

(02:17:51):
It was a really crappy YouTube show with Lynland and
Eddie Penny was our guest, and so he's very gracious.
He came down and I was just happy to be
a flying the way. I'll listen to the two of
those guys. So Eddie and him were talking about the
same thing about He was asking Matt, what's it like
when you go into the ring, you know, to fight
in front of putin or something, And Matt was like,
you know, listening to Eddie talk about like, what's it

(02:18:14):
like when the back door of the helicopter comes down
and you're out and it's go time, right on a
mission or something. And it was so funny to see
the totally different worlds completely match between the two of them,
because Matt's answer to Eddie was like, when I heard
that pin drop in the the door of the octagon

(02:18:35):
and I knew that it was locked. They were talking
about this fear, right, Matt's like his answer, He's like,
I knew they couldn't escape, And Eddie's like, yeah, that's
how I felt leaving the helicopter. He's like, like, you
weren't scared at all at that point. He's like, once
that and it was all flipped. You're not scared of

(02:18:56):
what happens to you. You know that they can't get
away from you. Now, that's right, and that as a
warrior some mindset.

Speaker 1 (02:19:01):
That's right, and you and you can you, I mean,
through stress inoculation, you can teach that right. That's why
I say, don't don't seek out to be fearless, because
there's no such thing, but to embrace that fear and
use it as the motivation that drives you forward right.

Speaker 3 (02:19:16):
Well, and that's and that's why I asked about it,
because when you were describing those those moments of using
fear through through your blood's training and the boats, when
the people were asking weren't you scared, You're like, well yeah,
but like when you That's why I think it's important
with stress inoculation, you can have this little fear trend.

Speaker 2 (02:19:33):
People need to build this up in their.

Speaker 3 (02:19:35):
Lives, right, because it gives you the tools to say, like,
I know how to suffer and if if I'm going
to lose something from this, I'll be okay. Like if so,
so you're gonna punish me, Okay, I can handle a
punishment or I can handle the pain because I know
I'm strong.

Speaker 2 (02:19:52):
I know that we can survive.

Speaker 1 (02:19:54):
Well, you improve too, and they're what Just a couple
of months ago, some neuroscientists disc that the suffering improves cognition, right,
improves a sense of self, it improves all of that.
And I haven't read the science yet, but I'm like, well, duh,
you know, duh, like the resilience piece and the it

(02:20:17):
reinforces those neuropathways if you access the ones, that gets
you through it.

Speaker 3 (02:20:23):
Right, So yeah, so and I told you I come
back to this when you were talking about metacognition. Yeah,
when you're saying the suffering builds reinforces those pathways and
those resilience, I think this is a little bit anecdotally
for me speaking to and then I'll get to the science.
But like I think, when you're going through that suffering,
one of the mechanisms by which it accomplishes those reinforcing

(02:20:46):
and the connections and whatnot is when you're suffering, you're
actually engaged. You're engaging a lot of self talk and
self reflection because like a lot of times, you're usually
bring by yourself, so you're like talking all sorts of
stuff like what is it? How do I get out?
And there's negative insurgencies, right, and that's what you need

(02:21:07):
to You need to harness those negative self talks, unleash
the positive ones, and wrestle with it. Let those two
horses run together to pull your cart, right. And so
that takes practice because that's a skill. And so as
you're practiced in the skill of suffering, you're actually practicing

(02:21:28):
in the skills of self awareness meta cognition. And that's
uh what you were describing in those some of the
whether it was kids or recruits or colleagues, people who
are over confident and think, oh I got this, and
they don't take feedback and they're like no, no, we're good,
and you're like no, literally, like you're not. So I

(02:21:50):
don't for goold me if you haven't heard of this phenomenon.
But there's a phenomenon in psychology called the Dunning Kruger effect. Yeah,
so I discovered the first neural correlates of it. Are
you kidding me?

Speaker 2 (02:22:01):
No? I published it in twenty twenty one. Are you
kidding me? All Right?

Speaker 1 (02:22:04):
Explain it to because it's one of the most phenomenal
things that I've ever been exposed to.

Speaker 2 (02:22:10):
I call it psychological gravity. Awesome.

Speaker 3 (02:22:13):
Why gravity? Because gravity is a physical force of nature
in the world and it affects everyone. You don't get
to float around Earth. You are harnessed by gravity. You
can beat gravity, you can jump, but it takes energy
to beat that. Gravity bring you down, and it will
also bring you down to an airplane can use energy

(02:22:34):
to lift off. It takes energy to stay above gravity,
but it will eventually have to come down because it's unsustainable.
So when I say it's psychological gravity. It's a psychological
phenomena that affects everyone like a physical law of Newtonian
gravity does in the world of physics, which is to say,

(02:22:54):
I am talking to everyone, including me and you. There
is no one that is not effect by this phenomena. Okay,
so what's the phenomena. It is a twofold phenomena. The
one part of it is that people have a tendency
to overestimate their abilities or capabilities, and the other side

(02:23:16):
is that people also have a tendency to underestimate their
capabilities and performances. Now, the twist on it is that
it tends to be the phenomena is that the people
who are the most competent and the most capable are
the ones who underestimate themselves. And the people who are
the most or the least competent are the ones who

(02:23:39):
are the most overconfident. So in the science side of that,
statistically we call that a crossover interaction. So and I'll
impact that as we move along here. So it's really problematic,
So I gave it. I actually I reported these findings

(02:24:00):
to Army Futures Command at the Association for the US
Army because I pitched it in the context of we
can make better leaders my stopping over confidence. And I
had to picture George Armstrong Custer on the slide because
like perfect example, Well this is all fun and games
and lovey dovey psychology stuff into lives around the line
and over confidence kills, which it did. It killed everybody

(02:24:21):
in his command. But under confidence kills too. If you
don't go forward when you should, you miss an opportunity
a for victory, but be to save lives that could
have escaped a bombing or you know, whatever scenario you
want to you know create. So both of them are
essential to master for good leadership. And I needed a

(02:24:43):
good military example of how the military doesn't always have
that great calibration. Custer was a great one that was
so far away that nobody would feel like I was
talking to them in the room.

Speaker 1 (02:24:55):
So there's actually a wonderful book that a British psychologists
wrote about British officers making horrible calls and why the
psychology it's like psychology of bad Leaders or something like that.

Speaker 2 (02:25:09):
Yeah, yeah, unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (02:25:10):
And so this is actually one of the things if
I wouldn't have been fired, I was writing grants some
projects I wanted to apply this actually in a leadership context,
which our study was in a basic science way. It
wasn't an applied way of leaders But I'm like, this
is the next step. We have to do this, these
kind of research studies because it's it could be gamebuster.
So what we found in our studies and what the
psychological phenomenon, the dun Kruger effect is is that our

(02:25:35):
least competent think they're the best, sort of your Bregado shows,
and our most competent I think they're the worst. So
I call him you're humble heroes. So and and we
see this in all tracks of life. Right, if you
talk to Michael Jordan, he knows he's Michael Jordan. You know,
he might be some people might think he's arrogant, but

(02:25:56):
he's just confident. He's actually a reasonably humble guy because
he knows it.

Speaker 2 (02:25:59):
And if you talk to.

Speaker 3 (02:25:59):
Your tier one guys like all, look there, you know,
you get them all around the bar. You guys arouse
each other in quiet, but like I'm there, the humbleness
probably climbs as you climb that ladder one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (02:26:12):
I mean, there's there's.

Speaker 1 (02:26:13):
A there's a there's a I think there's a existence
within the operational community that it's like, I'm not gonna
your humility is tempered because it's it's happening in real time.
But the guys, the really amazing operators that I know,
as soon as they separate from that world, unbelievably humble

(02:26:35):
in terms.

Speaker 3 (02:26:36):
And just to take it back to the guy you mentioned,
Colonel Charlie Plump, one of the things that was incredible
for me was his humility about his whole scenario. And
he made a comment in a show that we did
together during COVID about kind of isolation and confinement. And
I was very like deferential because he's like, well, you've
you've done some time to him like I did a

(02:26:57):
few weeks, Like I'm not going to sit here with
you and talk about doing talk.

Speaker 2 (02:27:01):
But he's amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:27:03):
But he he said no, no, he's like, you don't
understand Rick, Like Tom, if you did one day, time
is time. And he said that he understood that everybody
has their own Hanoi hilt and everybody has their own prison.
We're not operating all at the same level. So he
had such a large cup of water that could hold
so much fluid that it took four years to fill.

(02:27:24):
But somebody else, he's like, he might be in an
abusive relationship at home.

Speaker 2 (02:27:27):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (02:27:27):
That is the same prison and the same resilience that
you're building. And he could understand that with the humility
rather than be like, well, you know I did this,
he isn't as you know, he's not that guy. No,
And so with Dunnan Krueger you have this famous phenomena.
It's captured in biblical scripture. Confucius Shakespeare famously said the

(02:27:48):
fool thinks he's wise, but the wise man knows himself
to be a fool. And I was just back from
the NASA Astronaut interview process twenty sixteen, and I was,
I mean, it was reasonable that I could have been
picked up because I just interviewed in the finals. Fortunately
I had to go up against Johnny Camp and Frank

(02:28:09):
Ruvio and they beat me pretty.

Speaker 2 (02:28:11):
Good, very healthy competitors.

Speaker 3 (02:28:14):
Yet but yeah, I went home to my university job
and I said, I probably won't be able to run
any more scientific studies anymore, Like what would I run again?
And one year to run whatever study you can do.
And I had a student who came and actually demonstrated
this effect. She was complaining about some grades she got
in a test, but she's like, but I've always just
gotten a's and all my papers. I'm like, well, here's
why you got enough like you just here's the reasons

(02:28:36):
it didn't connect. She was over confident because she didn't
have the skills to know the areas that were failing short.
And so I said, I wonder where the brain activity
is associated with this? And I went and I looked
at and it turns out there weren't any studies of
these phenomenas. And so I designed one because I'm like,
this may be I could never do another science. I'll
just be a labrad for an ascid the rest of my life,

(02:28:56):
right possibly, And so let's do it. And I didn't
ask for any research funding. I didn't get blogged down
in the bureaucracy. We ended up getting funding later for it.
It took a long time of being told no, we
just did it. It was a beautiful, badass part of science.

Speaker 2 (02:29:14):
We just did it.

Speaker 3 (02:29:15):
And so we built a study as a memory study,
and we'd ask people every ten trials of their memory
decisions to say, how well do you think you're performing
compared to everyone, And so we replicated that crossover finding.
So the best performers said they were performing not so great,
and vice versa. The people performing the worst on the
memories test thought they were doing great. But what was

(02:29:37):
really interesting was two patterns of results. One was a
behavioral response times and the other was the brain activity. First,
the behavioral response times, how fast people respond to those
judgments you mimic the exact same crossover pattern of results.
So the people who are your humble heroes, they were

(02:29:59):
slowest and speed to press the button to say I'm
doing the best. They were also fastest to say I'm
doing the worst. And your braggadocio's the people who were
had the illusion of being better. They were fastest to
say I'm the greatest and slowest to say I'm the worst.

Speaker 2 (02:30:24):
They were the worst.

Speaker 3 (02:30:25):
Wow, And I mean that tracks anybody who has worked
like you have with high performance. You've also it's exactly
how you see things manifest That's what you focus on
that evaluation, and that's how you begin to break the
individual down or build them up.

Speaker 1 (02:30:43):
Is in that space, in that crossover, that's what I
look for.

Speaker 3 (02:30:47):
Yeah, so the problem that we've had psychologically is we've
known about this phenomena since for decades, and they've come
up with theories to explain why and it's and we
reasoned in the literature that the theoretical accounts for it
were garbage because all they came up with was the
account of it being they called reach around knowledge that

(02:31:09):
you have some knowledge and it's allowing you to reach
around to some guests that you're going to do, or
they said basically blissful ignorance like that you don't know,
so you're blissfully over confident.

Speaker 2 (02:31:19):
To me, that's not a well.

Speaker 3 (02:31:22):
Designed and empirically strong construct of a psychological construct. That
just doesn't to me, that's that was flimsy and week
So we recorded brain activity of these judgments and we
found two patterns of effects. We actually found different brain
activity for these different judgments of the people doing these things.
And what we found was a pattern of activity in

(02:31:43):
the overestimators, the people who are braggadocios, people you know,
who think they're great you know and and and aren't.
That pattern of activity was very frontal.

Speaker 2 (02:31:53):
In the brain.

Speaker 3 (02:31:54):
It was very kind of what we call early in time.
So when the stimulus and the judgment happens. It happened
very fast close to that judgment, about four hundred milliseconds.
And what was interesting about what was interesting about that
pattern brain activity is it's very it's the same pattern
of brain activity that we see when people are in

(02:32:15):
memory studies and are using a kind of memory we
call familiarity, which I mentioned because your earlier comment made
me kind of put a attack in returning to this,
because it's the using of our just intuition. They're just
kind of feeling that they're remembering something that they're not.

(02:32:39):
They're not performing as well, but I think they are,
and so there, how are they arriving at this judgment.
It's because their decision is governed by the sense that
this information just seems familiar. Okay, but how are the
best performers actually constraining themselves and holding themselves back actually

(02:33:00):
saying act and saying, well, actually they're not accurate, but
they're saying they're underperforming. They had showed they didn't show
that pattern of activity. They showed a pattern in the
back left pridal area of the brain later in time
about six hundred and nine hundred milliseconds.

Speaker 2 (02:33:13):
Why in the pridal region.

Speaker 3 (02:33:16):
Well, why is a deep question. I'm not sure I
know the exact answer, but what I can tell you
is that pattern of activity is the same pattern of
activity that we see typically in memory studies when they
use a different kind of memory process called recollection. Recollection
is a clear, distinctive retrieval of the context woven together

(02:33:36):
with the information from the past. That is, you know
the details, you know, you can remember everything about it.
It doesn't just seem fuzzy. Oh I think I know
you from somewhere. Don't you seem very familiar? Instead this place,
this time, This was a yeah, exactly okay, and so
very different kind of memory. Those people are humble heroes
were making their judgments and performance based upon that kind

(02:33:57):
of a brain process, which told us a couple of things.

Speaker 2 (02:34:01):
It told us that they were.

Speaker 3 (02:34:04):
Constraining their judgments and estimations of their own performance relative
to others with clear details and in specificity versus people
were jumping to these wild conclusions of being great because
it was actually fuzzy, and so they were using this
intuition without facts, without information, and it was leading them

(02:34:26):
down the primrose path of thinking they were better than
they were and we kind of took the next leap
of saying, we presume that they probably encoded the information differently.
That is to say, like in real world applications, probably
when you study better and you know the material better preparation,
you're going to remember the details. Those details are also
going to constrain you towards getting out too far in

(02:34:49):
front of your skis, because you're also going to know
the information well enough to where you also know what
you don't know, and so you're like, you're honest about it. Well,
in this case, they were falsely honest like that, right.
The people that thought they were better than they were. No, No,
those people were not honest about it.

Speaker 1 (02:35:05):
The people that were restrictive in their assessment of their
capability they actually lowered.

Speaker 2 (02:35:12):
They weren't honest about how good they were. Was it
a protective? Is it a protective?

Speaker 3 (02:35:17):
I think I think it was just I mean, like
anything when you when you know what humility.

Speaker 1 (02:35:22):
When you was it part of those those moral those
moral uh, those the the what the moral boundaries? Right?

Speaker 2 (02:35:31):
Kind of?

Speaker 3 (02:35:31):
I mean I think it's like the Socratic method Socrates, right, well,
he knows what when you know what you don't know
it's only because you studied and you put the work in.
You went to you know, you took the long journey
in life, like you put the work and you went
through s qt. You did that, you now know who
you are, or maybe maybe you don't until after combat.

Speaker 2 (02:35:51):
But like like you, you.

Speaker 3 (02:35:53):
Put the work in your journey to where now you
have the constraint to realize Socratically, there's a lot I
don't know. Yes, so, but that's only because you know
so much. So the people who are are braggado shows
they hadn't gone on that metaphorical journey. I would say
that that they probably didn't encode the information well enough,
and so it allows them to just use their intuition

(02:36:15):
to falsely jump to conclusions and erroneously think they're better
than they are. Now. You can see where I applied
this towards the military leadership side to help. When I
talk to the Army Futures Command, it was like, I
was like, I think you want your leaders to be
constrained and not to be the ones who maybe aren't
who are making decisions out of intuition because they think
it feels right because maybe they didn't study as well.

Speaker 1 (02:36:35):
How do you teach constraint or restrain. I mean not constrain,
it's restrained, right, A little bit of both. I mean
you're constraining your decisions based upon details, facts and information,
based on experience. But you God bless you, I would
say broadly, I mean it's probably the answer to this
whole conversation, which is like experience and discernment and wrestling

(02:36:57):
in the gray teaches that right, right, aiming that that
that target on the target field trial and error. But
you also have the guy you like.

Speaker 3 (02:37:07):
You can teach someone to shoot really a whole lot
better if you just take him out of training and say,
do what I tell you to do. I'm gonna teach
you and listen to what you teach.

Speaker 2 (02:37:16):
You.

Speaker 3 (02:37:16):
You have to actual mission. You have to be coachable
and and be responsive and accepting to feedback of what
you're right and wrong about, and just do what I'm
telling you to do. When you get kids like that,
like from grassroots levels to the Olympic training center, like
those are your those are the coaches dreams because you
save so much time you just do the thing. And

(02:37:37):
so when we found those patterns of brain activity, that's
that's kind of what we deduced is that this Dunning
Kruger phenomena is based upon people using these wrong mental
processes too, because both of them are illusions. And and
everybody talks about the Dunn Kruger effect for a while.
People bash Trump for it, but because he just seems

(02:37:58):
like this every it's great as you you know, the
whole Braggado Show stereotype of anybody over confident.

Speaker 2 (02:38:05):
Some people might say a lot of seals.

Speaker 3 (02:38:07):
No, it's fact, but like you know, like the that
just think of any stereotype of overconfident people. What I
always when that story broke about five years ago, on
that finding, I always told people and shows and smaller
you know, interviews about it. I said, I think the
biggest take home from that isn't that it's that, in

(02:38:30):
a leadership sense, society is held back by our best
people underestimating themselves.

Speaker 2 (02:38:40):
They're not running.

Speaker 3 (02:38:41):
They think somebody else is better, is going to run
for office. They think somebody else is probably knows more,
like you know, like so it's just I'm just a
knuckle dragging wrestler at the end of the day, right
like I was a bar back and a landscaper and
a bar fighter and a wrestler, like somebody else, probably
figure these guys are running for office or leadership for

(02:39:03):
this or that is better. He probably knows more about it.

Speaker 2 (02:39:06):
No, they don't. They don't. We now know this for
a factor. I thank Heaven's for the Internet. It's a
it's a double edged weapon.

Speaker 3 (02:39:12):
Man. Is they revealed people for what they are, what
they aren't. And now we know as leaders in society
that we need to step up and we need others
to step up. But when you're wrestling with those demons
of doubt, the negative insurgency that you refer to, those
should be learned through practice to be comfortable areas, because

(02:39:34):
it means you're on that socratic path. If you don't
have those demons of doubt, you're gonna make that overestimating air.
You're gonna think you're great, you're gonna think you're fine.
You don't have those butterflies before a match, you're about
to get knocked out. That's that's the next like, that's
learning how to harness that negative insurgency to make properly
calibrated estimations and to put your hat in the ring

(02:39:56):
and take command of control and lead your family, your township,
your commun into your country forward, because we need the
best people to stop thinking that they're not good and
somebody else is better out there.

Speaker 2 (02:40:09):
I promise you they're not.

Speaker 3 (02:40:11):
It's the actual science, it's the actual data. And I
was just fired from it, so we can't do more
work on it.

Speaker 1 (02:40:17):
Well, my goal now is to figure out how to
get you into a place that you can continue this work. Rick,
I'm you know. I thought we'd go for an hour.
We've gone for three. Oh yeah, it felt like it
felt like three minutes. So I can't thank you enough
for your time. Your courage is admirable beyond measure. But

(02:40:40):
it's your your wisdom and and your drive, and man,
I just I'm going to start praying that something's coming
your way. All of this is for a reason, and
just I can't thank you enough for coming on.

Speaker 2 (02:40:57):
That's my honor.

Speaker 3 (02:40:58):
I can't thank you enough for having me on. And
like I said, there's been parts in my journey where
I was wrestling with a negative insurgency and negative thoughts
and I saw what you were doing, you know, evangelizing
on the internet and and and giving good messages legitimately
good things that have have helped give me the strength
to get here, and many others too, So I mean.

Speaker 1 (02:41:17):
I appreciate you the man. How can people follow you,
get in contact? Where can they see your work? You know,
just share a little bit of that way?

Speaker 3 (02:41:26):
Yeah, so well, my work scientifically is on PubMed you
can everything is publicly, freely accessible or kind of nerdy
technical papers.

Speaker 2 (02:41:34):
Nobody tends to want to read them that much. But uh,
I'm on, I just had to start.

Speaker 3 (02:41:38):
So basically, I've always been in the shadows and quiet
and tried to be essentially a quiet professional. I've never
really done anything publicly outside of science and NASA interviews
and stuff. But I had to make us decision that
we need to lean into this and and and reveal
the truth for what it is. So now I started

(02:41:59):
a Twitter account recked Dante. I have a sub stack
which is our a Dante substack slash our a Dante
so they can subscribe freer subscriber models Twitter. Of course
I'm there, and I have a gifts or yeah gifts
send go account. The title of it is The Truth
is not for Sale. The website is some weird numbers.

(02:42:21):
I forget what it is. It's like just random website.
But the Truth is not for sale. Your name in
truth is not for sale, and that'll give send go,
that'll pop up. I would have had a better website
name for it, but when I created it, I had
never done it before.

Speaker 2 (02:42:34):
And I didn't worry about it like that. So you're good.

Speaker 3 (02:42:38):
But we're grateful, and you know, we're grateful for you.
We're grateful for people who have been supportive. James of
course has been a godsend, but so is everybody. I mean,
people have given twenty bucks five like that. It all
matters like and it truly warms our heart and touches
it because you know, when we turn down that money,
we we don't think any money is worth a lot,

(02:43:00):
and you know we figured that, you know, we wanted
to aim to raise the same amount of money but
one dollar more, just to show that the truth is
worth one dollar more than a lie. If not, they
win in that respect, they'll never win. But at a
message level, that was something that was important to us

(02:43:21):
because we do feel that there is no price on
the truth. If it's if they're offering you one dollar,
it's probably not a truth that matters, so you don't
need to take it. If they're offering you a trillion.
It's probably especially the kind of truth that needs to
come out.

Speaker 2 (02:43:34):
Amen, Rick, thank you.

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Whistleblower Professor Fired For Exposing DEI Corruption Scandal | Rick Addante | Ep. 52

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Whistleblower Professor Fired For Exposing DEI Corruption Scandal | Rick Addante | Ep. 52