The Middle Aged Werewolf: Paul Waggener

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hello, everyone, Welcome to another Jive Talk.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
This time I've got an interview with a guy who
I've known about for at least twelve years. I first
heard about Paul Wagana in twenty thirteen when he released
a PDF booklet called the Centurion Method about a new
approach to health and fitness that involved using the environment,

(00:36):
and then kept following him after that. In twenty fifteen,
I appeared on the first Millennial with his brother Jarnifer Matteias,
and he was seeing a very interesting guy, and I
learned through that about the Wolves of Vinland, which had
been going since two thousand and six, which is a
group of Heathens community in Virginia run by Paul and

(00:58):
his brothers. And twenty sixteen he was running Operation were Wolf,
which I was interested in, and but when I was
living in Sweden, I was in contact with a Nordic
chapter which was loosely affiliated with the main Operation were
Wolf in America. And more recently I've been very much
enjoying Paul's podcast call Sign Werewolf, which is excellent and

(01:22):
is full of very good advice for people who are
new to health and fitness and heathenry and life reform
and also people who have been involved in such things
for a long time and just need some reminders of
how to get their act together. We've got a lot
of things in common because we're both around we're just
about reaching middle age, we're both around forty years old,
and we both were both fathers of young children. We

(01:44):
both come from the kind of subcultural millennial gen X
youth culture backgrounds. But we both pivoted into lifestyle reform,
Evolian philosophy, Germanic heathenry as a way to restore spiritual health.
And we've both been very unfairly attacked by the media,

(02:05):
many lives said about each of us as a way
to defame us and to sort of move get us
out of the picture, and try to prevent us from
doing good for other people. So, since twenty thirteen, the health,
fitness and lifestyle influencer landscape is a lot busier than
it used to be. But Paul here has been consistent

(02:26):
throughout all that time and is a good deal more
valuable than most of the people in that scene. So,
without further ado, welcome to drive Toalk.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Paul.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Thanks for having me on Tom, I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
So I wanted to start off with that what I
mentioned there about the subculture thing, Can you talk a
little bit about your background before you, you know, reformed
your life or whatever, and how that influenced your ideas
of tribalism and the importance of tribe in the modern world.

Speaker 4 (02:59):
Sure, I think that one part of that was inseparable
just from growing up with three older brothers. When you
grow up in that kind of environment, there's always sort
of in us versus them kind of feel. My last
name was always very important to be my family, you know,
when anytime we went somewhere people would say, Oh, here
come the Wagoner brothers kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
And taking that into the subculture.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
When I was a teenager, I got into like we
were talking about earlier punk and oil and skinhead stuff,
and so I think by the time I was maybe
around fourteen or something like that, I had, you know,
the boots and braces and shape head and everything like that,
lifting weights and fighting a lot and drinking a lot
of beer and have I still have the tattoo on

(03:43):
my arm of the Skinhead crew. I was running by
the time I was around eighteen seventeen eighteen, and there
was a lot of good to come from that. I
think that even looking back, when you can see sort
of how chaotic it was and how immature a lot
of it was, there was a value in having obviously
peer group and pressure group. But I think one of

(04:06):
the reasons that these things stay valuable is you can
look back at them and see what you wouldn't do
again and the things that maybe didn't serve you as well,
or the issues that arose from that kind of stuff.
So it definitely informed, but sometimes in the negative and
sometimes in the positive, you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
So, do you think that subculture is kind of a
misdirected form of tribalism that had to manifest in the
modern world because of the absence of proper rituals of
initiation into manhood and things like that. You know, it's
absent in Western culture now or was it just is
it more of like a thing that's just more negative

(04:44):
or No.

Speaker 4 (04:45):
I don't even think that a lot of it is misdirected.
I think that where we see it misdirected is in
things like sports fandom or you know what people call
communities now right, this online community or this community or
that community of something that's completely been and stripped of
all sacred things or anything, Whereas I don't think it's

(05:06):
it's misdirected tribalism to be part of a gang, whether
that's skin head culture, if you're if you're a Caucasian guy.
Although I guess there's trad skins and stuff like that,
but those things do keep a lot of the sacred
nature alive because there's almost no clearer expression these days
of the youth manner bund than stuff like skin head culture,

(05:29):
hardcore culture, where you know you have to train, you
have to fight, you have to do all the rest
of this kind of stuff, and there is ritual in that.
There is ritual in seeing guys. I've been all over
Europe with Operation Werewolf Cruise that that did jump ins,
and although we don't do that in my club, there's
a ritual to that, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
And so I don't know that it's always misdirected.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
I think subculture will always exist because tribalism on one
level will always exist.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
People want to belong to things they want meaning m yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
I suppose what I thought is that maybe the subculture
wouldn't be as necessary in a culture where where the
like the youth group was a natural and integrated part
of society. But I know that when I was a
young man and I got into punk and hardcore and
things like that, and I remember some older persons saying, Oh,
it's just because he wants he wants to be an individual,
he wants to be an individency.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
It's not that it's the opposite.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
It's because I want to be a part of a group,
and I don't feel like I should have felt if.
I think if Britain, British identity were sufficient to be
British should have been enough, but it wasn't sufficient because
there wasn't a room for me and my friends to
be that. So that's why I think Britain had things
like the mods and rockers early on in the sixties
after the war, and we didn't have it before the war.

(06:41):
I think it was a direct problem, a problem to
the issue of the youth in the post war West
or in Britain first. But I don't know if you
agree with that or not.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah, no, I do.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
And I think that this is one of the differences
and interesting aspects between my European friends and my friends
in America is that the idea that if I was
from Iceland or Sweden, or if I was from Bavaria
or something like that, that I would have this local
identity and that maybe there would be some kind of
culture that you could adhere to that came specifically from that.

(07:11):
But that in America, you know, I was born in DC,
I grew up in Wyoming, I live in Virginia. I mean,
this is a huge span of area that I've lived
just in my forty years, and that Americanism has never
appealed to me. It always seemed like this sort of
Norman Rockwell kitch. And although there are aspects of America
that I think are phenomenal and that are great, and

(07:32):
when you go over to Europe you never feel more American.
You maybe that's the only time you've ever felt American,
but that there is no I think true American expression
really that appealed to me when I was younger.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
And so you have to find.

Speaker 4 (07:48):
These other niches and these other things that appeal to you,
whether that's through music.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Or training or an ethnic element or whatever it is.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
Because within a country like ours, where you have all
these disparate peoples, disparate languages and beliefs, you kind of
have to pare it down a little bit more than
just say I'm American, and that idea has always been
a bit absurd to me.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
What I mean.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Also, another thing that's big in your philosophy is the
idea of living with purpose, bringing that meaning to life.
And I think that's what attracts people to your content
as well as to mind, because they're looking for something
more to life than what's on offer in the general
like mainstream culture. But what exactly does it mean to
you to live with purpose?

Speaker 3 (08:33):
I like it.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
I mean, you're you're sort of the man on this,
but I like studying the words themselves, you know what
I mean. I think a lot of times we have
these conversations and someone says, well, what does it mean
to have purpose?

Speaker 3 (08:44):
And you're like, well, what is At the risk of
Jordan Peter saying everything, well, what does it mean? But
purpose is?

Speaker 4 (08:52):
I think if you look it up, it has to
do with intention and aim, doing things with a goal
in mind, doing things with something in mind, rather than
just doing what we feel like in the moment. And
so I think that anytime we have the idea of
how do I live with purpose?

Speaker 3 (09:08):
How do I do things? It really could be a
bad one or a good one.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
But to live with purpose is just ensuring that the
day to day things that we do, that all of
the actions that we perform are in line with this
further thing, that there's intention there and that there's a
goal behind it, rather than what most people do, which
is sort of live in all directions at once, and
that this is why they're distracted by each new thing,
and they're very easy to manipulate and to make go

(09:33):
this way or that way. And so I think that
if you are trying to live with purpose, people can
get very distracted by a great number of things, but
honing that down to something that is valuable and that
is worthwhile. For example, concepts like honor, or a specific ideal,
or a specific faith if you're religious or whatever, these

(09:55):
are the things that you need to set your sights
on because without having that north star, we can't live
a life of purpose, because you don't have an end
goal in mind.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Many who start on this process you've described where they
look for this purpose and meaning, they start off really
well and they make good gains, you know, physically, spiritually,
their life starts to look better, but they can't keep
it going indefinitely and they start to experience burnout. And
so for those kind of people who are listening, what

(10:26):
advice would you give to them so that they can
stick to their guns and not just have it as
a fad that makes, you know, temporary changes in their life.

Speaker 4 (10:35):
Yeah, I mean, and that's sort of the crux of
all this stuff, right, if you're boxing, if you if
you're weight training, if you're doing any of this kind
of stuff a couple of weeks or a few months
or even a year on it, if you quit for
a year, it.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
Doesn't do you a whole lot of good.

Speaker 4 (10:51):
One of the things that I hate to hear people
talk about, and you'll see this quite often, is people
always would tell you to be realistic, be realistic about this,
And I think the Western writer Louis Lamore said that
when people tell you to be realistic, it's always when
they're trying to get you to give up on something
that you believe in. And so I would say that
be unrealistic with your goals. Set very extreme, sort of

(11:13):
monolithic goals for yourself, but set many realistic landmarks along
the way to something unrealistic. I think a lot of
times people have their site set so far in advance
in the future that it becomes, it begins to seem
impossible and like they're not making any market progress to that.
And what I like to do is if I'm trying
to bench four hundred and five pounds, I don't just say, well,

(11:36):
I'm at one hundred and thirty five now and I've
made no progress until I get to where I want to.
I break this down into all these different landmarks. Another
good thing that may seem a bit childish is that
humans love a reward system. I will often do this
with either work or with different things, where I'll say
to myself, if I do this, or if I get

(11:57):
X done, or if I have a month where I
do well financially or whatever, then I'll do why. And
having something like that in front of you where you
can make these little rewards to yourself can be very
nice rather than just feeling like you're sort of this
Instagram influencer mindset of just staying on the grind no
days off, which I fucking hate the idea of and

(12:19):
I've always done. I think that the other stuff that
can be more difficult for people who simply don't have
it in their lives is that accountability to appear group
or even to a single individual that you have a
lot of respect for, can make or break a lot
of people.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
They talk about.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
You know, there's a lot of data out there of
people who train alone versus people who train with a
training partner. Those who train with a partner tend to
be more consistent over a long period of time because
you're accountable to them. If you have any sense of
shame at all, or any sense of honor, you won't
be the guy who's late. You'll show up on time
and know that the guy's going to be there waiting
for you if you miss it. So you always have

(12:59):
to have a reason for this kind of stuff right
and keep it in front of you, Which goes back
to what we talked about with purpose, is that to
be a man, you have to do these things. To
be a man, you have to improve yourself, you have
to train, you have to do this stuff. It's just
not even an option or a question to not do so.
And you've got to keep this stuff in front of
you at all times and try to remember that whatever

(13:20):
you felt like when you wanted to start doing it,
even if that feeling is gone, the fact is that
this is your duty and it doesn't matter how you
feel on the day today, you know what I mean,
You simply have to continue doing it. But it is
that idea of sort of the road stretched out forever
that breaks most people, I think, and turns them into cowards.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
And I mean, as you're getting older, the body starts
to take longer to recover, and responsibilities in life heap
up and meeting the challenges that you set yourself in youth,
it gets harder and harder. So how do you think
young men and older men need to embody different ideals?
Respect Like, what is it that the kind of middle

(14:02):
aged guys face that like they hadn't encountered earlier in life.

Speaker 4 (14:08):
Yeah, I think there's a really good one, and it's
it's one that both of us have probably been thinking
about a lot more as we get older. You know,
there was a certain point and forty is not old, right,
forty is sort of what they consider to be the middle,
And I think that's a hopeful middle. But that forty
and kind of as soon as I hit my mid thirties,

(14:29):
I think about thirty five, you know, the hangovers hurt, worse,
injuries weren't so much getting hurt in training. They became
chronic problems that continued to come back or that I
couldn't get rid of. And I started to realize around forty,
after enough motorcycle crashes, enough injuries in jiu jitsu and
lifting and all the rest of this kind of stuff,
that it was possible that I was never going to

(14:50):
be able to match previous athletic landmarks. They were going
to have to change, like, I don't know that I'll
ever bench four h five again. It was a great
thing to have done, but I don't think I'm probably
ever going to do it again. And that can fuck
with the brain in a way where you say, well,
so I'll never be as good. Well, maybe not in

(15:11):
that aspect. And I think one of the hardest things
and what I'm really trying to learn, my old lady
keeps telling me I have to learn how to age gracefully,
because she says I've pretty much had an abusive relationship
with my body for years and years and years, and
that I just keep demanding things from it, and at
a certain point it's going to stop giving me that.
But that when we're young, it's good to be cocky,

(15:32):
it's good to be a bit arrogant. It's good to
set these titanic goals, and as we get older, we
need to pivot not on setting these big goals or
still holding on to these big dreams that we've had,
but of understanding that they will they will manifest for
us in different ways. And I think that with age
and if the body's breaking down, I think that older

(15:53):
guys have to realize they have to they have to
sort of go through a metamorphosis into a different aspect
of community, or of friendship, or even just of a
relationship with themselves, which is that there's an admitting that
has to come along with this. You know, gray is
going to get into your hair. The mileage may have
been good, but it's going to turn your hair gray.
You may never be able to do some of the

(16:14):
things that you did when you were younger on a
physical level anymore. But ideally you have made a great
amount of progress in who you are and the leverage
that you have in the world, and that the things
that you have to offer to the people around you
have deepened in a great way, and that you are
still very valuable even if you can't punch your weight
like you used to.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Anymore.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
And I think that getting ourselves to that level of
realization or realizing that there's still a value is very
challenging for guys who have lived their whole life in
an extremely physical fashion. I know it's been very hard
for me. But community is another aspect of that that
maybe we'll get into. I think that older guys who
are just aging and breaking down physically who don't have
a community to be useful to have a bigger problem

(16:58):
on their plate than guys who do have that, if
that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, that's an interesting point. I mean, you're someone who
does have a community, but I understand from your podcast
that even so you've got and maybe reaching this stage
in life has perhaps changed your ideas of what it
means to build a tribe, because previously the walls of
Vinland was centered around things that pretty much only young
men can do.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 4 (17:24):
And one of the things that's funny is my friend
and I were talking about this the other day and
he had given me a copy of a black metal
record that we both like, which has a song on it.
And in the song, it's a band called Watsain and
they have a track called wild Hunt and it says
in there, there's this great line. It says better that
we didn't know than what we know now. And it

(17:45):
resonated with me with our group a lot, because if
we had known the complexities, and if we had known
all the challenges, we might never have done it. What
we did was we created a world and a counter
society and all the rest that was perfect for us.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
Then.

Speaker 4 (17:58):
Well, I was twenty two, twenty three years old or
something like that. I'm forty now, so twenty one maybe,
And the world that's perfect for you as a single
twenty one year old with very few responsibilities and not
a lot of fucks to give is a lot different
from being forty with a family and all the rest
of this kind of stuff. And so the group has

(18:21):
had to evolve a lot. It's gone through a lot
of forest evolution as this kind of stuff happens. You know,
guys who are young then are getting older. Now, guys
who are coming in who are really young, they have
a different hierarchy to go through. They have older guys
telling them, hey, this is how we do things, which
we didn't have. We were shooting in the dark, you know,
And so realizing that creating a gang is a lot

(18:43):
different from creating a community, and we had that then
and what we have now is a lot more family
community and in the true sense of the word, rather
than sort of a lot of really young thugs with
good hearts, which is pretty much what we were back then.
Although it was a great time, and it forces you
to reassess not whether what you did was right or wrong.

(19:05):
It was correct. It was correct for the time. But
if you keep on with that, and if you keep
on with a lifestyle that was good for you at
twenty one, when you're forty, it's a little bit like
that wiley coyote thing from the cartoons where you've run
out past the cliff and that cliff that you built
is no longer underneath you.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
You needed to build a.

Speaker 4 (19:23):
Bridge into a new lifestyle, and if you don't do that,
you're sort of failing to learn the lessons of history,
and at a certain point you're going to look down
and you're going to fall.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, I've never had they never succeeded in building a
tribe on a scale that you have. But I have
a hearth here in Devon, and it started off with
just a group of young friends and we tried to
orient all the rituals and events accordingly, and you know,
some of the locations are impossible to get to for
the infirm and things like that. But gradually, as more

(19:54):
of us are getting married and having children, we tried
to integrate women and children into it and it's changed
the whole dynamic.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
But it's part. It's a necessary change to be made.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of guys out
there who I think they never want to get past
this sort of Peter Pan you know, lost boys part
of stuff. And I think for a lot of those guys,
especially ones that you see maybe start a group later
in life, their community or their little click of guys
is like their their man cave. It's like their getaway
from their their old lady who maybe runs their life

(20:28):
when they're home. And you can see this sort of
this boyish play acting with this kind of stuff which
my group gets accused of, like LARPing, and I you know,
you guys get accused of this kind of stuff. But
my question for these people is always, you know, when
does it cease to be that? Because I've been doing
this since I was in my teens and and I'm
still doing it now and the big difference between creating

(20:51):
something as an escape from your normal life and as
creating something that is your normal life. When you talk
about the idea that some of these locations that you
do are you can't get to him if you're not healthy,
or if you're old or whatever. Maintaining some of those
things is good because what we've realized now is there
was this split. Yes, we started to get older, but

(21:12):
new guys coming in, we're still young and they still
want to do that stuff. So you have to create
this space for both of those things. So, for example,
one of our solstice winter solstice, the it's up.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
A mountain, you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (21:27):
And one of our guys would do it with his
kid on his back and everything like that. He's this
super strong guy, very fit. But we go all the
way up there and the fires happen up on top
of a mountain, and it's not for the older the infirm.
But now what we do is when we get done
with it up there, we come back to the hall
and then the ritual happens there with the community. So

(21:48):
finding these ways to involve both the young and the
older is quite a challenge, but you have to provide
the young guys with the stuff that you were able
to do when you were young. Otherwise you've doomed yourself
of being the old guys who sit in there while
the young guys listen to you tell your fucking stories
over and over and you don't give them the opportunity
to tell their own, which is very unfair to them.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, I mean that would be I mean, that's exactly
the sort of reason that you created. You and your
friends created this tribe separate from the main stream society
in the first place, right because and I wouldn't want
to be I wouldn't want to be the sort of
person who would drive young people away from heathen Rey,
for example, because I failed to make space for like

(22:29):
the specific needs that young men have.

Speaker 4 (22:31):
Yeah, and a lot of it too, is that even
the dumb shit that I did when I was young,
which or not so young, you know, which there was
a lot of. I have never been accused of being
a genius in my life, and that even that stuff
that now that you're an older guy, you want to
look at the young guys and say, hey, man, you

(22:52):
probably shouldn't do that. A lot of the time I
try to leave it and let them do it, because
if they go to jail, if this happens or that happens,
or they do this wild shit. Well, doing a lot
of that stuff when I was young is what got
me to being who I am now, and I wouldn't
change that for anything. And so sometimes you even have
to check yourself on giving good advice because they got
to find out on their own. I mean, did you

(23:13):
listen to anybody when you were young. Probably not. You
did what you were going to do, and to hell
with them, and that that's how you learn. Because I
think that women may learn in a different way than
men learn, but I think men only learn through pain.
It's the only way they learn is through self induced
to hardship, you know. And so even with that, it's
a challenge man, because you want to, as an older guy,
say let me help you through this, or let me

(23:35):
give you this advice, and sometimes it's better to say
you got to do it on your own.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Figure it out.

Speaker 4 (23:40):
You'll be a stronger thirty year old or forty year
old if you do this stuff on your own when
you're in your twenties.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
You know, it's especially difficult as a father of a
young boy, because I recognize myself saying all the kind
of things my father said that I didn't listen to,
and I know you won't listen to. And the only
way is going to happen is the same way it
happened for me. He's got to go through the same
mistakes himself.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
For sure. You know.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
With my little boy Victor, he one of the things
that everybody laughs about is that there is no time
when you will be sitting in the long hall that
he will not remind you that the stove is very,
very hot, because he had to learn the hard way.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
You know.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
You tell him, hey, this is hot, and until he
touched it himself and he burned his hand and got
a bad blister, he didn't give a fuck about you
tell me, don't touch that. But once he did, Holy cow,
every time someone walks around, it's my little guy, my
little blond haired, blue eyed boy, looking at you very
seriously and saying very hot, very hot, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
And now what's he doing.

Speaker 4 (24:33):
He's trying to admonish other people and tell them, hey,
don't touch it, But you know, you got to do
it on your own.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
What do you think of the most common mistakes that
people I guess mostly young people, but any people make
when they're trying to build a community of the sort
that you've built.

Speaker 4 (24:51):
Well, I can probably speak with authority on this because
I probably made them all, you know, and had.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
To correct them all.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
So any mistake that I'll out here is definitely one
that I'm sure I'm guilty of at various times, but
I think one of the worst. And this is what
I see when a lot of guys ask me how
to do this, is that they're very young. And not
that it's wrong to start your own crew when you're young,
it's the best time to start it, but they're very young,

(25:18):
and they haven't asked themselves the question, why would anyone
want to join my group in the fucking first place?

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Who am I?

Speaker 4 (25:25):
There's a very motivating element in that question. It shouldn't
be asked as a self deprecation. It should be asked
as a motivation and a call to action. What am
I doing with my life? Is my life exciting? Are
the things that I'm doing something that other young guys
would look at and say, Man, this guy's fucking awesome.
I may even be better at this thing than he

(25:45):
likes than he is, But he's providing this environment where
I could thrive in that environment, and I could be
a guy who's respected. So I think that putting the
cart in front of the horse in that regard of
not asking the question what is your group actually offer?
You might think you're the coolest fucking guy in the world,
but I promise you probably not, and that you have
to provide. One of my mentors told me once that

(26:10):
he said, if you're creating something, your idea has to
be like a forest, and it must be big enough
that many other people can come in and thrive and
live off of it. And so I think that having
a really big idea and a really good idea of
how different types of people can come into this and
why they would in the first place. The other thing
is that I love what you're talking about. You say

(26:32):
you're in devn right. That community used to have a
very very strong implication of place and locality, and I
think in the Internet age that's been totally lost, and
that people think that they're part of a community if
they if they are in a group chat.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
That's not it.

Speaker 4 (26:53):
Community and cult and culture and all the rest of
these things have to be something that is in a
locality where people see each other daily or at least
extremely regularly, and are close enough with each other to
be able to actually engage and involve themselves in each
other's lives. Because in order to actually be a tribe,
there has to be a shared language, there has to

(27:14):
be a shared culture, which is something that is an
output of that group. And so I think that starting
locally is always a great idea. I think you use
the raw materials of what you have right around you,
which is what we did. You know, we started with myself,
my brother and two other brothers that we've been friends
with forever and ever, and then we looked at who

(27:36):
was right in our immediate vicinity, and we started finding
guys in various ways, at various places, whether it was
at local concerts, whether it was at the gym, whether
it was through martial arts, whether it was through drinking
and partying because we had a shared love of black metal,
whatever it was. I think that place is critical and
that for us off hame where we've developed over the

(27:58):
last years and years and years, where I live now
and all the rest of this and I'm raising my
child there, the place where you do what you're doing
becomes as much of a member of your crew and
community as any individual that's in it. For me, the
idea of the Wolves is totally inseparable from old fame.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
Where we are, the land.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Itself, how it looks, how it feels, the layered experiences
that we've had there, and all the rest of this stuff.
So where you choose to do something is very important.
Probably the other two I don't want to go on
forever because there's a lot of this stuff, But maybe
the other two is the two things that I've seen
destroy groups more than anything other than money. You know,
wealth causes strife amongst kinsmen, but it's a loose approach

(28:40):
to male female interpersonal relationships in a group.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
We have really really strict and specific.

Speaker 4 (28:46):
Rules for how men and women act and operate at
our events and individually and all the rest of this
kind of stuff. You're not going to see a single
guy at one of our events over there talking to
people's wives across the thing while they're and it's not
gonna happen, or somebody's gonna walk over and kick him
in the back of the leg and be like, what
the fuck are you.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Doing over here?

Speaker 4 (29:04):
This looks weird? We don't speak certain ways around the women.
And it's not because we think that they're these pure
little angels who you're gonna bruise with whatever.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
It's that there's decorum there.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
And so if a woman comes by while you know,
you got a couple of the young guys talking something
that's inappropriate sexually or something like that, boy, that conversation
shuts down before she gets within earshot, because no one's
trying to put those ideas in their brother's old lady's mind,
you know.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
So there's a really strict decorum.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
And we haven't had a lot of that kind of drama,
and when we have, the grass gets cut low, so
that snakes are very immediately exposed in that regard, and
they're treated with very hard treated very harshly. And the
last one I would say on that regard is a
lack of confrontation. Most guys these days, I think I'm
comfortable saying most they are very, very uncomfortable with physical,

(29:56):
eye to eye confrontation of other people. A lot of
this probably because we do almost everything these days through text.
It's very easy to say things when you're not in
the same room as somebody. But the need for eye
to eye, face to face conversation while you're looking directly
into someone's eye and saying, hey man, this is unacceptable,
or hey, so and so told me that this had happened.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Is that true.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
I want to have a conversation with you about that.
Dead onto the eyes.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
Man. People fear this shit like the fucking plague. These days.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
You'll have guys try to confront you, but they won't
even look at you. They won't be able to make
eye contact like there, Tom Cruise's autistic brother from rain Man.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
You know.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
And if you don't have that, if you don't have
the willingness and the ability to confront other men, and
if you don't have the willingness to be confronted, because
as much as we have to be confrontational, we have
to be willing to be confronted in an organization otherwise
things will break down very, very rapidly. If you can't

(30:55):
do that, you're gonna have people talking about other people
instead of talking to those people. And that's a cancer
that spreads rapidly and kills almost any crew.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, there's some interesting points there, and about I think
some of the problems you've raised about avoiding confrontation and
not and not having like regionally localized communities. Both the
problems caused by technology and so many of the problems
like we actually faced, whether it's to do with social
problems or spiritual problems, are I think caused by a

(31:25):
wedge driven between man and like natural life and natural
spirituality by technologies, even though there are many positives of course,
like this ability for us to talk to each other now.
But I mean I might be a bit old school
in this regard, but I generally advise young people, like
when they're looking for girlfriends, like try and find some
a girl that you're you can you can get to
a house within an hour or something, because I mean,

(31:47):
I know some guys meet their love with their life.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Online or whatever.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
But I've always believed that you need I mean, it
says in hom all about friendship as well, like go
regularly to a friend if you want to keep that friend,
as otherwise thornes grow over the path and you need
to go to people. And the same as with the
relationships with girls. So I do keep I make that advice.
And do you think technology Do you have any problems

(32:12):
with technology specifically within the community.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
Do you have rules about that or.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Uh, you know, I mean you have the bullying.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
If guys are sitting in the hall and someone's sitting
there on their phone, somebody will knock it out of
his hand and say, hey, hang up, hang out. It's
very common, you know, guys will start slapping at people's
phones because you forget, you know, you you're so accustomed.
It's almost like smoking a cigarette, right If if you're
a smoker and you see somebody pull out a cigarette
and smoke it, you might pull out one and smoke.
And it's the same way with phones because they're they're

(32:41):
I would say, probably more addictive than cigarettes or a
lot of other drugs that I've personally done.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
It's it's.

Speaker 4 (32:51):
It's such a weird disrespect these days, where you'll be
in the middle of a conversation with someone making eye
contact with them, and while you're talking, they'll out their
phone and start looking at it. It's like you've you know,
you've lost the face off to whoever's on the other
end of that thing or or whatever. And it's so
common nowadays for someone just to casually disrespect you where

(33:13):
it's bizarre. But it's I don't even think people really
take this into account, and like you said, there's so
many wonderful things that these things have done for us.
But I always wonder if I had never been exposed
to them, I certainly wouldn't miss them, and that if
I wasn't able to you know, and this is someone
who's benefited wildly from this on a financial level and

(33:34):
on the people that I've met and the connections and
the traveling I've been able to do and all the rest.
But if I hadn't been able to do it, I
know what I would have done. I would have done
before what I did before I had a smartphone. I
didn't have a smartphone until I was, like, I don't know,
in my late twenties or something like that. And before
I had one, I didn't know what was going on
out there on the internet. I never had a Facebook

(33:55):
until I had gotten into music and they told me
you have to have one of these.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
Prior to that, like I said, I was on ludd eyed.

Speaker 4 (34:01):
I had a motorcycle, but I lived out in the
woods and I didn't have water, I didn't have power.
I didn't give a fuck, and you know, a lot
of ways I was happier then, you know, It's kind
of like the caveman. You bring him into the modern
world and you show them all this stuff, and then
he says, oh, but there's all these bad things. I
wish you had never shown me the good ones, you
know what I mean. I have a personal sort of

(34:23):
my friend Sam, my best but and I are always
talking about, you know, but lerry and jihad. When you
know that at a certain point the technology goes so
far past convenience and ease of life that it starts
to atrophy, you know, and I'm sort of waiting for
this inevitable future of human beings just becoming these atrophied
things like floating around with the neuralink on or whatever.

(34:46):
That one of the things he said is he said,
you know, the more these people use all this stuff,
and the more you'll see people, because I'm sure the
VR stuff is going to get more and more developed,
and the more people who are on that, God bless,
the streets will be more open, and then there will.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Be less traffic for my motorcycle. You know.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, it's interesting you talk about the butlery and ghead
because in June that that's like that that doesn't exclude
all technologies like many of them are kept, but it's
specifically like the thinking technologies that have to be done
away with, and that my attitude to technology is I'm
not anti tech. I just think that we have to
take each type of technology on its strength and merits

(35:23):
and like and its drawbacks, and to cut certain types
of technology out when we can see clearly that are
having negative impacts for sure.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
And I think that there is definitely a danger in
becoming so resistant to anything new. You know, Boots are
a fucking technology. Ships are at technology. So it's kind
of like one of my one of my brothers in
the in the Wolves, is a straight edge and he
always talks about the idea of everyone's edge is different, right,
So some guys won't take aspirin, some guys won't have

(35:53):
sex at all. Other guys it's well, I just won't
have promiscuous sex, you know. And because everyone's edge is different,
you know, you always have to ask guys this. They say, oh,
well I won't do this, but I'll take aspirin, And
you say, well, that's a performance enhancing drug.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Right.

Speaker 4 (36:08):
The argument in sports if somebody, if somebody takes caffeine,
is that cheating because it's been shown to enhance this
or that? Is it is it cheating to have better
nutrition than a guy who's who's maybe poorer than you?
Should we should we bring everything down to this level
so that we can compete at the lowest common denominator.
And so there's always these questions of where where is

(36:28):
your line with technology? You know, are you gonna are
you gonna go back to just using sticks and rocks?
Or if you tie two sticks together? Is that too much?

Speaker 3 (36:36):
So I think there's definitely too much of this sort
of thing.

Speaker 4 (36:38):
But I will say, I'm i'm uh, I'm bearish on
AI as being a positive thing for humanity, except in
that it'll put a bunch of smug leftists out of
their jobs.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
You know, that's that's fine with me.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
But yeah, good, good, good of those people lose their jobs.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
But it's not so great the kind of slot that
you see all over YouTube now with like completely AI voice,
AI editing, AI video, like there's nothing really the all thing.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
And the only thing I will say about that, though, too, Tom,
is that maybe this will change.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
But it's quite obvious if you're an artist, It's quite
obvious which art is AI, Even if you're not an
artist right now, but especially if you are one, you'll
look for specific little things and you'll see them and
you'll know it's AI. It's the same when you read writing,
like I can nine times out of fucking ten, if
you show me a chat GPT piece, I can tell
you which one is and which one isn't, and I'll

(37:30):
put that up against the old Pepsi test. But I
think that a lot of people over time, I hope
maybe this is too hopeful for humanity, but I think
there will be some people who will be able to
into it what is made by a machine and what's
made by humans, or the idea that you have to
show your work right. If I see a Frank Frizetta

(37:51):
painting and I see a photo of him painting it,
and I can feel the painting and I can feel
the texture of it, I know that that's real and
that it has some kind of fucking astral light on
it that a machine made and printed thing simply does
not have. And so I think that showing your work
and being able to show the process, which has always
been really powerful in things like marketing right, is going

(38:14):
to become even more important, and it may drive these
creatives into more niche areas where their things may become
more luxury. But I think there will always be a market,
and I don't necessarily just mean a consumer's market, but
I think there will always be a demand and a
desire for incredible things, beautiful things, wonderful things that were
made by people with their own mind, because I think

(38:35):
that humans value not just the thing itself, but they
value the process of what it took to make that thing.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Yeah, I agree. I think that's an inbuilt desire for that.
And also, like when I'm talking about the changing attitude
of technologies that sometimes I've been criticized for allowing for
myself actually having a write a prayer and I don't
have a printer, so I read it off my phone
because it's a new prayer and I haven't memorized it.

(39:03):
And some people say that's you've brought a profane technology
into a sacred space. And I can understand what they're
saying there, But like we can also think of like
ruining the writing was a technology. Chariots were technology, and
sources enlogy and all these things, Like there was Indo
European religion before there were chariots. But the gods all
got chariots updated, so the latest tech was introduced directly

(39:25):
into the most divine thing of all the myths. So
I think that there's this there's going to be this
way of like preserving the original you know, values of
the tradition, but also integrating it into you know the
reality of that you look that you live.

Speaker 4 (39:42):
Yeah, I think that the danger there with this kind
of stuff, especially as it as it applies to modern technology,
is that, for example, you say, and this isn't a
dig at you, you know what I mean, We've all
been in this position. But say you come in and
you you don't have it memorized, and you have to
read it off the phone. What happens there is that

(40:02):
chances are good that you'll read it off the phone
the next time as well. And what it does is
it atrophies some of the things that we would have
used otherwise. You know, I've seen one of the guys
in our crew, he's a writer as well. His name's
Troy Wisehart. But one of the guys in the Wolves.
He will come to our events and our rituals and
he will recite these incredible amounts of the etique poetry

(40:24):
and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And
it's not that he just is good at it, it's
that he's practiced it a lot, and he's spent a
lot of time memorizing these things, and he tells these
stories at different rituals at different times, and that if
he had just read it off his phone, there would
have been a different feeling to that. And I think
no one would deny that memorization and recitation are things

(40:47):
that are sacred to our people because we have all
of these oral traditions. And so I think that if
I'm able to just read it off my phone, it's
not necessarily that the phone is the bad thing. It's
what it needs to which is it needs to me
using phone instead of reciting, instead.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Of learning the story, I can rely on this thing.

Speaker 4 (41:04):
So while I don't think that, oh well, just because
this guy used his phone, the gods have turned their
back and the world is going to fucking explode, I
do think that on a personal level and on a
community level, it's better to show I came here and
I memorized this thing because it's what it implies.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
It implies it was very important to you.

Speaker 4 (41:22):
There's much more gravitas when you say something from wrote
and from memory than if you read it off the
screen or even off a.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Piece of paper.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
And so it's not necessarily the technology, it's all the
things that it implies had you memorized it.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, I agree, there is something valuable for that. And
the main reason I say in my defense that I
don't is because we have not in the process of like,
we're a dynamic group and we're constantly trying to make
the prayers better and better. So we like talk about
what went wrong with the prayers, we talk about what
could be more accurate, more pious, or whatever, more fitting,

(41:56):
and we update them and update them year by year.
So there's the same prayer constantly been changed. So there's
no way I can memorize it until we've finally arrived
at a final version, and then I could then I
can start memorizing it. Or but I used to have
to memorize old English poetry for in Anglo Saxon for
my degree in a non non religious context, and I
was able to do it. But I just haven't gotten

(42:18):
to that stage yet. But I do think that you
have a good point there.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
But well, and as you said, these things in stone,
I'm sure you will memorize them and so you know
and what you're doing, I think is wonderful, which is
the idea of saying instead of just putting it down
and saying, nope, this is it.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
This is the way that it'll be.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
Especially when you're a new group, that ability to be
to be a bit more fluid and to be more
flexible with this kind of stuff I think, I think
is a very very good thing.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
The problem with some Heathen groups is that they all
with all the best intentions, they codify something as that
you know, this is going to be the exact correct ritual,
which is what traditional rituals should be. But then when
they find that something they did might might be could
be made in a better away, they can't back down
from that because they put themselves in a position where it's.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
Like, yeah, well this is that.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
This goes back to something you were talking about earlier,
where you were talking about pitfalls and things people do wrong.
One of the funniest things that I see in anything,
and this happens with guys who are starting a motorcycle
club or a heathen group or whatever it is, is
that they start out with rules. Now, it's good to
start out with a general code of conduct, but they

(43:31):
go so hard on bylaws and like you said, codifying
these things or those things that they don't even know
what the fuck they're going to be doing in two
or three years, but they're codifying these things. Rituals should
be organic, and rituals should serve the community. It should
be something that when you go to it, you feel
that you've been things have been re established, things have

(43:53):
been recharged, and those channels that you've cut have had
new blood sent through them, but those channels were created
over timed.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
You know.

Speaker 4 (44:02):
One of the things that always really sticks in my
mind is the pathway down our hill is this long
pathway down from our communal space where the hall is,
down to where the ritual space is, where the vey
and the horg is, and it's in the shape of
a savillo room. So you walk it every time, and
it's a good little ways down and when we first

(44:23):
started walking it, you know, you would start to see
the ferns or the moss there would get walked into.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
A little track.

Speaker 4 (44:30):
But over years and years and years now then it
gets a little bit deeper and the rain starts to
run that track. It starts to expose roots and stone.
And now the path is like this deep, it bowls
in and there's moss all up one side of it,
and you can see all these roots that you couldn't
see before. And when it rains, you can watch the
rain run down this whole track. And to me, that's

(44:51):
how ritual should go. That's how the tribe should feel. Right,
it's by nature of walking this path so many times.
Now it's there for good, you know what I mean.
But at the beginning to do this is is no good.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
That's very well put.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Indeed, on the on the subjects of like updating or
like I'm preserving the ancient things within heathenry, I wanted
to ask you about your your opinion on the ideal
of honor, which is so important to all Heathens. All
heavens talk about honor. But I think that when you
look at like how honor is actually understood in the
sagas and in old times, it's not quite the same

(45:27):
as what a lot of people mean by honor. So
is it right as a given example of some difference,
like for a kinship network to share in the honor
of an individual within their kinship, like you know, with
who's one of their own. For example, if my brother
committed a shameful act in a traditional Heathen community, that
shame would attach as much to me as to him.

(45:49):
And also if if someone in another group wronged me,
I don't have to take revenge on him. I can
take revenge on any of his kinship group, even though
they hadn't done anything to me. In their version of
that would be honorable. Do you think that that's the
same honor, kind of honor that you believe in or
is it? Has it changed?

Speaker 3 (46:08):
Or yeah? I mean what you said kind of down
the line.

Speaker 4 (46:13):
Not only do I believe it, I've I've been involved
in that exact sort of thing and believed what I
was doing at the time and still do was an
honor of black I think one of the most difficult
things when you talk about honor. I've known a lot
of guys. I've known guys who had a tattooed on
their body who didn't know what the fuck it meant.
And if you put it to them what is it?
You would get a well And if you ask five

(46:37):
different guys in one crew, you may get five different answers.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
To me, it's very simple.

Speaker 4 (46:41):
What you're talking about is hamoingya right is a shared
power that can be lessened and increased. And I believe
that is what honor is. I think honor and hamiya
are are inexplicably tied together because my belief in its
simplest fashion, If someone says what is honor, I would say,

(47:02):
honor is a thing that has grown through acts of
loyalty to an ideal. And if that ideal is your faith,
your religion, whatever, or your crew, your family, when you
commit acts of loyalty to that small and large, you
increase your honor, your haminga. And if we view this
as a resource for the tribe, just like our money,

(47:27):
I believe that haminga can be used and dipped into
like a ladle in a well. I think it's probably
one of the reasons some of our guys haven't died
in certain situations, why you win various things. We have
a really, really strong and very literal belief in this
in my crew, and that it's also one of the
reasons why it's so important to put back he who

(47:47):
drinks much from the haminga. If you're riding motorcycles and
split in lanes at one hundred and twenty miles an hour,
you better make sure you're putting something back in there
so that when I go to pull my own out,
I'm not scraping the dry bottom. And that when acts
like these happen, and when acts happen that require the
use of haminga, it should also be like using the money.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
If I use money.

Speaker 4 (48:09):
From the group's coffer, it should be to make more money,
to bring more money back in.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
And the same with honor and haminggate.

Speaker 4 (48:16):
If it if I have to use this force to
go do something, it better not be something that that's
just getting expended for something frivolous. And so when you
talk about these ideas, like if someone in my crew
does something shameful, does that affect me?

Speaker 3 (48:30):
The answer is one hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (48:32):
I have to be accountable for every single thing that
one of my brothers does, because if I'm not, then
we do not have a crew, we don't have a
community because there's nothing that binds us together. But we
are bound together both by our oath, which which is
bound us together by by what we would call our
weird and that everything that they do lessons or increases.
My grandfather used to say that we succeed together or

(48:55):
we fail together as a family period end of conversation.
When you do something, it either increases us or it
lessens us. And so the idea of if another group
does something to our group, and like I said, this
has happened, that's card blanche on that group. Whether they
believe what we believe or not. It's not up to
me to ensure that they believe the same thing that

(49:15):
I do. It's up to me to ensure that what
we believe is manifested in a very real way in
this world, and that people understand that if you fuck
with one of us, then you fuck with all of us, and.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
That is what our honor is about.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
I think it's commendable that you retain that in ancient
version of our honor, which most people don't really understand
the word to mean that anymore. I just wanted to
clarify for some of the audience who might not be
as familiar with the terms that you just used. The
Germanic pagan idea of the soul, specifically in the Norse sources,
refers to having certain components, including humming her, which is

(49:48):
an inheritable form of luck that people can also It's
like it's connected to you, but you can also give
it to someone else. You can lend them your humming.
And another part is fuligia, which is connected to humming,
and that can also be there can be fullio, which
is not just your individual sort of part of your soul,
but one that's shared with a group, including a club
or an organization or a family. So these and these

(50:11):
things all pertain very strongly to your luck. And your
honor is affected by your luck, which is what or
your luck is affected by your honor. So if you're dishonorable,
then you're going to lose luck, You're going to become
less lucky, and all the people within that kinship group
will suffer from that unluck by association. So it's something
that was extremely It's not like an abstract thing, was

(50:33):
real consequences for being associated with a dishonorable person that
people were very concerned with.

Speaker 4 (50:38):
And I think that's what you know with one of
the things I think to confuse some of our guys
when when we were younger, when we talk about this concept,
and this is a core, absolutely core concept that every
single guy young or old in our group understands because
it's maybe it may be one of the most important
things to us that our group is based around the
idea of deed.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
And action and what you say say and all the rest.

Speaker 4 (51:00):
This kind of stuff literally and and even physically affecting
people in the group is that sometimes people hear in
luck and they think, oh, wow, I don't really believe
in luck. If you just change that word and you
say personal power, then then you don't have to worry
about it. It's it's that things that are productive lead
to productivity and they need to behavior. Things that are

(51:22):
unproductive lead to a lessening.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Right.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
So this is one of the things and one of
the reasons why gifting remains very important to us as well,
is that when we get together for symbol, uh which
symbol is? I know you know this, but for for
people watching, symbol is a ritualized drinking rounds that you'll
see a lot of different variations on. But for us
during Somembol, it's very common to see gifts given and

(51:47):
sometimes incredible ones. I've I've seen Harley Davidsons given away
at symbol. I've seen really really incredible.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
That's a good.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
Doubt and no doubt.

Speaker 4 (51:57):
I had a bike ridden up and given to me
at symbol, and I also have given one to another guy.
And it's not to flex on someone by giving them
something that is showy and to show them that they
owe you.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
It's a transference of Hamingha.

Speaker 4 (52:12):
In other words, if I have at one of our
last ones, a fellow who is out from our Western
crew out in Colorado, he was here, and maybe he's
a guy who goes under the radar sometimes because he's
not very showy, he's not very loud, but his life
is one I believe that has shown loyalty as a

(52:33):
he's just like a living ruin of that idea, you know,
and he embodies that concept of true loyalty. And so
I had this wolf hide that I've had forever and ever,
and I mean I've done a million rituals in it.
I was married in it, and it's been very important
to me, and a lot's been done wearing it ritually
and otherwise. And I gave it to him and you

(52:54):
could see that he could feel exactly what I was
giving to him. I wasn't giving him an old wolf hide,
giving him everything that went.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
Along with that. And it was a transference of personal power.

Speaker 4 (53:04):
It was, hey, now you have this thing that has
all this on it, and you could see in his
eyes he knew and he could feel, and you could
feel the personal might increase. And so I think this
is one of the reasons why gift giving is very important.
Is I'm not going to go somewhere and buy something
unimportant and give it to him as a last minute thought.
I want to give them something that increases their harmonia,
that makes their personal might go up, that they might

(53:27):
do wonderful things with it will bring tribe honor up
because then in a direct fashion, I am benefited. Then
again by the giving and by the show of large Jess,
it all comes back into the well.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
Right, yeah, this is a prehistoric actually like Indo European
thing that the Germanic people preserve. The idea of the
gift cycle and the whole economy was based on this
idea of like everyone gives to the lord, and the
Lord just gives it all back again, so he distributes
it and it's like this all the idea of economy
was so different to what we now think of. It

(53:58):
was all about cycling it like you go out and
raid and take from other people and then it goes.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
All goes to the lord.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Who redistributed it again and then and according to his
view of who has done the greatest service to the group.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
So it's a it's a.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Commendable form of economy, I think, and it can be man,
it can be replicated on a smaller scale with in
the form of like groups and tribes. We had some
we had some gift giving in my at symbol in
my blood in my group as well, but it was
only me giving group gifts. So after a while it's
the group grew, like I'm not telling it anymore.

Speaker 4 (54:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, then you have to get a little
bit more selective with who you give stuff too, right, Yeah.
We we call it a gift war because oftentimes it
will turn into one where you know, you give somebody
something that's meaningful or really cool that you knew they
would really like, and they go all right, motherfucker, and
then they come back and they bring you something. And
it's never intended as a as a show of like

(55:01):
personal wealth or as I want to give this person
something that's more financially valuable. It's what can I give
this person as a one up that will be extremely
meaningful to them. And so sometimes you'll see these little
cycles go back and forth where guys will be involved
in this kind of like friendly gift giving war for
four or five or six months before they finally go, okay,
we'll move on now to somebody else.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
You know. But it's wonderful to see. I always love
to see that stuff.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
And it's ammenst The bonds within the group keeps the
group strong very much.

Speaker 4 (55:30):
And you know, you see a chain or something around
your neck, or you know, a hammer, or even the
braid that it's on.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
You know, all things that were given to me.

Speaker 4 (55:38):
When you see them, you remember the person who gave
it to you, and so on a very basic level. Obviously,
of gift giving, it's important.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Another ideal, an ancient ideal which is less not so
much associated with Heathens, but were rather the Middle the
Christians of the Middle Ages, which I think is misunderstood
as well.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
It's chivalry.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Chivalry originally meaning like horse riding and stuff, but within
like Romantic literature the Middle Ages, it had it took
on an ideal of manly virtues within like the High
Middle Ages of Christian culture, which was not wide common
to all people or men. It was just an elite

(56:14):
or a military elite or men who were trained to
be nights. So and you talk about a version of
this called brutal chivalry, can you explain what that is
and how and how that differs from that chivalry in general.

Speaker 4 (56:28):
Yeah, you know, I like to come up with terms
for stuff that sound cool, you know what I mean.
But the point of it is that I think that
one of the great failures of i'll just say Caucasian
people in general is that they have an idea of
the way the world is, and they expect everyone to
have the same idea, and they get fucked by that

(56:49):
over and over and over. And also they have a
sense of fairness that a lot of other people of
other beliefs, other faiths do not share with them, but
that they think there's something noble and adhering to these ideas,
even as it applies to people who don't believe in it,
because they think there's this nobility in holding to this
kind of stuff, which I think is ridiculous, and I

(57:11):
think it's it's one of the great downfalls of the West.
And so when we talk about chivalry as an idea,
obviously it's not just a code of conduct that involves,
you know, protecting the weak and you know, so on
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
Although all these.

Speaker 4 (57:25):
Things are good, to have a high compass and a
strong moral ground is good, and to know what that
is is critical for us to live our lives. We
have to know what it is that we that we
adhere to. But we also have to be realistic. There's
that word. But we have to be realists about the
way the world is, and that we can't be afraid

(57:47):
to completely revoke our own personal honor systems from those
people who are not deserving to be within that. The
honor system exists for the community. So for me, my
honor system goes to the wolves mandatorily, and it goes
outside of that to people who know how to act
as a courtesy. But that courtesy is not mandatory for me.

(58:09):
I choose to be courteous and I choose to treat
people well, and so they give me a reason not to.
But it's a choice. So within the crew, it's frith
your oath to it. You have to adhere to this,
But outside I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
I will.

Speaker 4 (58:24):
I can lie to people, I can cheat them, I
can steal from them, I can brutalize them, I can
jump them, I can do whatever I want to, and
it does not lessen my honor, it does not lessen
my homiia.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
And I think that in this day and age, a certain.

Speaker 4 (58:37):
Brutality is called for, because even if we look at
at medieval Europe, where you had guys, the way that
you made your money on the fucking battlefield was to
kidnap other guys who had money and take them hostage,
and they'd sit in your hall. And we get a
lot of stories about this, where it doesn't seem that
bad to have been captured by somebody. You were on

(58:58):
your own honor to not escape from their castle. They
were under their honor to feed you well and clothe
you and all the rest. And then a lot of
these guys would get given the freedom to go and
get their own ransom because they knew that they would
send them their ransom because they were they were under
the idea of chivalry.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
This world is no.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
World noble's treating other nobles as noble is basically it
was about.

Speaker 4 (59:21):
And in order to treat someone that way, they have
to be noble, and noble means to have to have honor,
and if they don't have that, then you can't treat
them this way, and so the idea is just to say,
have a conduct code and and have a very very
idealized one, I think within your own peer group and
your own honor group. But outside of it, these people

(59:43):
don't mean anything. If they don't mean anything, you know,
And I'm not I'm not a brother to the world,
and I would say that I'm not even a brother
to other people of European descent.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
Necessarily they're not within my honor group.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
And so a lot of them that I've met have
been complete scumbags, and I have no desire or willingness
to extend them my own courtesies, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
I mean even you can see something similar in like
the Arthury in literature, where they like treat an enemy
night very well, but they'll just go past a bunch
of peasons and kill them without thinking about it. But
what going back to Heathen reing, I wanted to ask, like,
how your how your religion as a Heathen because a

(01:00:25):
lot of the audience here are specifically Heathen people, like
how you're like how that features in your personal life
not just in the walls of Vinland. Because I've got
now two kids, and I say, you do my main
main blocks, like four or five times a year with
like the half, but I do a lot more things
just at home, like maybe once every couple of weeks,

(01:00:46):
have little prayers.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
And my son actually asks.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Me like can we pray to the ancestors and stuff
like that, because he specifically loves the ancestors a lot
more than the gods.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
But and I have a.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Little half shrine or two house shrines and another third
shrine for the ancestors at at the house. And I
just thought, how does how do the gods and or
your ancestors feature in your life and your home life
and your family life.

Speaker 4 (01:01:09):
You know, one of the one of the things that
I love most about I wish, I wish I could
say paganism or heathenry as a whole, but that would
not be true because I think, unfortunately, uh, largely, I
think it's a goof troop. I've seen, I've seen a
lot of absurdities done in the name of it, but
that I think at its core, especially as we talk

(01:01:31):
about with with ancestor worship as its as its core,
and and the idea of blood and soil and locality
as its core, what I love about it is that
it's very practical. It's very down to earth, and that
I would say that first, there is no difference, and
I know what you meant, but there is no real
difference between my personal life and the wolves.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
So you know I I live.

Speaker 4 (01:01:53):
It's kind of hard if you can't see where I live,
but I live right here in the woods, and and
just here across my is the Long Haul, and then
just down the hill from that is the Horgan. Just
down the hill from that is the gym. So I
don't even have to leave that locality. Very often in
these days, I don't, And so I wake up surrounded

(01:02:14):
by all of this stuff. It's not like I go
to church on Sunday and then I'm not there anymore.
It's there. And I think that the practical nature of
this kind of stuff. You talked about how your son
is more interested in the ancestors stuff than he is
and anything else, and that it's wonderful to hear that
because my little boy. I have a book, a picture

(01:02:36):
book that I wrote for kids that's about that, and
I read it to him and he loves it, and
he'll come up on the steps and he'll recite little
lines from it and all this and that, and when
he looks at my tattoos and stuff, he says, oh,
those are runs, Papa, those are runs.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
And he knows the name of a lot of them,
because we'll go over.

Speaker 4 (01:02:52):
He sees the big one on my arm and he says,
manas he says them very well. And so where it
enters into saying like my family life, my little day
to day life, is.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
That I do pray.

Speaker 4 (01:03:05):
I have one prayer that I say every night, which
is your mothers and fathers, who are still alive in
my blood, give strength to me, your loyal son. I
think that that says a lot within a very short period.
It encapsulate a great deal about what I believe and
for me, the idea of the gods and things like this,
they're almost too large, too awful, too awesome for the

(01:03:29):
day today, I think, especially with the little ones too.
What is the word you hemmeorhization where yeah, you almost
have to to to adhere to this idea which I
actually believe in. As part of what I believe is
that they were ancestors, but maybe there were many of

(01:03:49):
them who were put into one sort of I don't
want to use the word they're just archetypes, but I
mean many powerful people who have gone before who were
put into one idea of saying, these were all people
who tip this, and maybe there was one progenitor for this,
whether that was Othen or vivol Viillmathan's fart healthy, whoever
it might have been. But I think that when you

(01:04:09):
make it simple for the little ones, you make it
simple for yourself. And I realize that it's not really
important for me to express this in a very wide way.
I have little places that I have set up as shrines.
I have one simple prayer that I do. The monthly
ritual for us is the big one. So every month
we come down and we do one that follows the

(01:04:30):
course of the year. But being there for the community
and doing the ritual for the community, then I would say,
does affect my normal day to day life because I
think about what's been done. I think about what's been
said and these principles and these ideas. And I'm also,
as one of the guys who puts on the rituals
with my crew, I'm always thinking about the next one

(01:04:51):
as well, And so I think it gives us unintentional
look at the natural world around us as We're always
looking for these examples in things that we can see
and know and touch and feel, and that the rest
of it for me is one hundred percent on a
day to day about ancestor worship in the idea of
giving worth to my family line, to make sure that

(01:05:11):
I'm increasing my genetic materials, that the othalah, this priceless
inheritance that I've been left, I'm not squandering it as
a shitty sun, and that I'm doing something with it
so that i can leave a greater estate to my
boy that he can leave to his And I think
for me that is the religion. It's the adherence to

(01:05:34):
the narrative of being part of this great line. You
touched on it earlier when you talked about the idea
that you didn't want to be an individual, you wanted
to be a part of something. And what I would
tell them, a lot of the guys out there who
maybe don't have their own community, it's very important still
to remember that you are part of something. You are
part of that family line which is very real, and
that is in a very literal sense, wrapped around your

(01:05:55):
bones and running through your veins right now. You are
always a part of something and in order to be
able after you die, to stand there among those great
men who came before you is the point of living,
and it's the point of living with honor and attaining
haminga and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
So that's the day to day practice is every moment
to day.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
You know, I think that's natural as well, that the
ancestors feature more largely in day to day practice. I
think that was that's historically natural. And I've also said
to like a lot of people who message me starting
out and they're not sure how to approach the gods,
to start with the ancestors, because they're more approachable, more
easy to understand, and that you know they're there for
you specifically. But my view of the gods is that

(01:06:40):
they have a greater power to help, to provide help.
But I guess also the gods love those who help themselves.
But maybe do you actually ever ask for help from
the gods? Have you ever done that?

Speaker 4 (01:06:51):
Yeah, that's a funny one right in, And I know
you're familiar with the story where they say in the
in one of the old sagas, they say, what did
you do there? Right? The guy's he's reblessing the Heathen sacrifice,
and his buddy says, ah, he's he's making the sign
of the hammer over it. And he says, after he says,
as all men do who trust in their own might

(01:07:12):
in Maine, it implies that that at least there was
some precedent for this, you know, he says, as everyone
does who And they said, well, that wasn't what that was.

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
That was the sign of the cross. We fucking know
what that was.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
But I wear a Thor's hammer, and I you know,
I have one tattooed on me, and all the rest
this kind of thing, but it's I'm gonna try to
not drag this on and be as succinct as they can.
But when I was young, I wasn't interested in the pantheon.
I wasn't interested in any of these other gods. I
was only interested in Odin, and I was only interested
in living in line with these ideas that I saw

(01:07:48):
as typified by him. And I had a very literal
and and fanatical approach to that. I would say, I
I wrote poetry, I I practiced mu ua sick, you know,
I fully immersed myself lifelong in the ruins. And I
would say even in the darker parts of that identic
aspect of manipulation and getting what you want no matter what,

(01:08:12):
and all the rest.

Speaker 3 (01:08:13):
That was who I wanted to be and how I
wanted to be.

Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
And it wasn't until I had a son that I started, actually,
you know, wearing a door's hammer in the rest and
realizing that that part of my life wasn't gone, but
that I had to ascribe to more solidity. Odin they
called fee Paul right, the ever changing one. And I
couldn't be ever changing anymore. I had to be solid

(01:08:38):
and I couldn't wake up one morning after eating six
hits acid and decide I was going to put my
backpack on my motorcycle and fuck off for a month.
I used to do that kind of stuff, but I
can't do that anymore. I don't want to do it anymore.
I am where I want to be and I want
to protect that. And I remember one day, you know,
I had like thrown the hammer on and stuff, and

(01:08:58):
when you said the God's helped them who help themselves,
I ascribe to that as well. I think that to
worship Thor, to honor Thor is to be strong, is
to engage in the acts that make you powerful. Thor
was a wrestler, he was a fighter, he was he
was a lifter of big things and all the rest
of this kind of stuff, and I like that as well.
So I think that asking them for help, if you

(01:09:22):
ask me, do I do I pray like you know
Conan and the crom scene.

Speaker 3 (01:09:26):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:09:27):
But when I put the hammer on and I'm looking
at certain things, I would say that there is an
internal prayer that is asking for aid, that is asking
for that feeling of red Thor, that that hammer to
become that to be able to become like him, to
see that if a man can give another man haminga,
then certainly the gods can give us part of their haminga.

(01:09:50):
And to ask for some of that from time to
time in an internal fashion, I would say very very
much so, and I do very much believe that there's
a power to that. With many things, I am a skeptic.
If people tell me a lot of stuff, I'm skeptical always.
But in my personal life I am a fanatic. I
believe what I believe and I don't need it to

(01:10:11):
be rational or explained. And I believe that faith and
fanaticism is the enemy of rationality. I'm not interested in
believing in my God's in a rational, realistic way.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
A true believer.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
Yeah, I think that's good. I mean people.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
I think a lot of the stuff that people experience
personally is meant to be experienced personally. And there's no
reason that other people should believe everything they're told about
other people's personal experiences. You should focus on what you experienced.
But I'm interested you saying that Odin featured so large?
Was he what initially attracted you to Germanic heathenry or

(01:10:45):
what was it that that first.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
Brought you in? And how old were you as well?

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
And I want to know how you do you think
since that initial time that you first became involved, do
you think heathenry has the potency of heathenry as a
spirit force in the world has increased.

Speaker 4 (01:11:04):
I was introduced to it at a very very small age.
My mother read aloud to us, or my father did,
and the whole time I was a little boy and
so very very small. My mother read a book called
The Song of Roland to us, and it grabbed me
very very strongly, these stories of heroism and berserkers and
all this stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:11:25):
As a little boy might be attracted to the basics
of it.

Speaker 4 (01:11:28):
But when I was, I think probably nine nine or
ten was the first time I had ever seen the
Ruins in any other context than when I had read
The Hobbit. I started reading at a really early age.
I was homeschooled, and my folks it was very important,
so I started reading by like four, and so The
Hobbit was one of the first few books that they

(01:11:49):
had given me to puzzle out to read. And so,
you know, you see the five feet high the door,
and two may walk abreast, and all the little ones
on the map, but I thought that they were just
part of that world, and so it wasn't until I
was a couple of years older than I realized they
were real. They were linguistic inheritance down from my ancestors.
And my last name is Wagoner, but the Wagoners that

(01:12:10):
come from Holland, after Wogeningen Is the name originally was Garroson.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
So I do have some Scandinavian ancestry.

Speaker 4 (01:12:17):
And when I realized that this was a thing that
was part of my genetic inheritance, it stuck with me immediately.
I remember the first time I saw a swastika, you know,
and you see these things and you know that they're
for you, you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that they're for you. And I would say, from ten
to now, I've never not had a week where I
wasn't meditating and studying and working with the Runes and

(01:12:39):
all the rest, and to have started to read the
lore on Odin as I mean, how can a young
guy who's into what I was into not read something
like Odin as Lord of the Ghouls and the Hanged
and all the rest.

Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
And there was this grimness to it that I liked.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
But there was also this idea of self transformative power,
of sacrificing who you are for what you could become.
Uh That that has appealed to me and will appeal
to me for my entire life.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
So it was what got me into it.

Speaker 4 (01:13:09):
And ritual and all those things, those odentic things were
the reason that I was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
I was interested in starting the Wolves, not.

Speaker 4 (01:13:16):
To be a part of the greater Germanic Heathen community
or anything, which we've never considered ourselves to be a
part of. And they've definitely never considered us to be
a part of what they do, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
And so.

Speaker 4 (01:13:30):
I think that as a as a whole, I think
that anytime you see something diluted, it starts to lose
a little bit of its force. I don't think that
paganism and pagan belief is done a great service by
guys corn rowing their hair and getting a room tattooed
down the side of their head, Nor do I think

(01:13:51):
it's it's I don't think it's gravitas is greatly increased
by seeing veg Viser's tattooed on everyone, on everyone, and
seeing stuff like transphobs don't get into Valhalla and all
the rest of this kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
I think it's a great delution.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):
And I think, like everything that becomes thrown to the masses,
it becomes more like McDonald's than it does anything else.
And so I think that what keeps current strong will
always be the same, and I think it was the
same back in our ancestors days. I think small groups
of incredibly serious people who believe in themselves and believe
in what they are doing is who keeps the current strong,

(01:14:28):
and the rest of it is pearls to pigs.

Speaker 1 (01:14:32):
And to finish off.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
I want to follow off on that elitist theme there,
and because You and I both students of Evela, which
is probably the most.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
You may be a student I've read some student.

Speaker 1 (01:14:47):
I mean i've read. I haven't read every single book
he's done that. I've read most of his books.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
But well, he's probably the one author of the right
who most who's who has most people pretending to have
read him, who haven't. I have never read him, and
so he's quite often misunderstood. One of the things that
very often misunderstood is the title of his post war book,
Ride the Tiger, where he advocated for a non outcome

(01:15:11):
dependent actions in the modern world, which people misinterpret to
mean non action or like just you know, wait, like
just not doing anything, which is not at all what
he did. He was politically active after the war, so
it's just not true at all, but not an excuse
for an action. But what I wanted to know is

(01:15:32):
how if you believe in that Ride the Tiger principles.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
I think you do.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
But how does one balance that kind of lofty detachment
which he advocated for, with the necessary participation in the
world that we live in being a man of action.

Speaker 4 (01:15:49):
I think that's always a question for the ages. One
of the things that my father talks about often as
an Orthodox guy who I have it's under respect for
is that it's important to be in the world, but
not of the world. And man, there's so many correlations
between my beliefs and what my father believes, even before

(01:16:10):
he was Orthodox. But if there's one Christianity that that's
the most like paganism, and I know what they would
say about that, but it's Orthodoxy and that being in
the world by necessity, because we have to live in
the time and the age that we were born into,
and not being of the world, that is, to not
be a product of it. I always refer to this

(01:16:32):
line from a movie where in the beginning of this
movie that Departed, Jack Nicholson says, I don't want to
be a product of my environment. I want my environment
to be a product of me. And I think that
remembering that we are not or should not be receivers,
we should be broadcasters and transmitters of tradition, which is
what Evan I would call it, and to transmit these

(01:16:55):
traditions into the time that we are in now, and
that even though we can live in the world, we
cannot be blown around by its wins all the time.
We can have this anchor in tradition with the capital T,
and that I think some of it, And maybe the
baron wouldn't necessarily agree with me. I don't know what

(01:17:15):
kind of sense of humor he had in life, but
having a sense of humor about what we do and
where we are, but also maintaining a seriousness of the
idea of saying that we weren't born into the wrong time.

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
You know, you always hear guys talk about this.

Speaker 4 (01:17:29):
No, we were born into the exact time that we
needed to be born into, and it needs us now
more than it ever did. If you wouldn't mind, I'd
like to read this little piece and I'm gonna do
it off my fucking phone.

Speaker 3 (01:17:40):
Ah.

Speaker 4 (01:17:40):
Yeah, this is an Evola quote that has meant a
lot to me. He says, he talked about our era here,
and he said, this is not a matter of compromise
or adaptations. The power of a new Middle Ages is needed.
A change interior as well as exterior of barbaric purity
is required. Philosophy, culture, everyday politics. Know more of all

(01:18:03):
that it's not a matter of shifting to the other
side of this bed of agony. It's a matter of
finally waking up and standing on one's own feet, and
I think that his idea here, and you'll read a
lot of You'll see a lot of people who pretend
to read him. And then they'll they'll ask if I'm
fucking voting for Trump or something, and you say, well,
I don't care about modern politics. There's plenty of people

(01:18:25):
who care about that stuff, who know more about it
and are better suited to discuss it than me. What
I care about is a barbaric purity and of embracing
this idea of sort of a new Middle Ages and saying, look,
the change has to be interior, and we have to
be able to wear armor and be a fortress against
this modern world, while at the same time realizing we

(01:18:45):
are a fortress within that modern world and should act
as a bastion for those other people like us who
are bearing that torture of tradition and say, hey, you
can come inside, but they sure as fuck can't, and
be able to hold that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
You know, I hope you'll continue to be that for
to us for a long time to come, and keep
on helping all the people who listen to your podcasts
and learn from you in other ways. As well, and
thank you very much for coming on drive Talk today.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
Hey, thanks so much Tom. Great to talk to you, bro.

Speaker 2 (01:19:14):
And you are you interested in worshiping the gods of
ancient England and Scandinavia, but you're not sure how to
do it? Starting Heathenry is a ritual focused online course
which will furnish you with the knowledge and confidence to
practice the Heathen religion alone or with others. The course
teaches you how to construct Heathen prayers for yourself, not
according to the established rights of any modern group, but

(01:19:35):
according to what historical sources show. Starting Heathenry assumes you're
interested in Germanic paganism, know about the gods and myths,
and want to begin practicing this religion, but require guidance
on how to do so. It is based on a
micro learning structure which has proven to improve knowledge retention
by up to eighty percent in students compared to other
learning methods. You get more than five hours of learning

(01:19:56):
material bit by bit as you please, a modern method
of learning about an ancient religion. Your path to knowing
the God's through ritual starts here.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Middle Aged Werewolf: Paul Waggener

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

The Middle Aged Werewolf: Paul Waggener

My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark