The Brute Saga

00:00:00HOST

I'm fine. What? I'm fine. Just roll me some cigs if you can.

Roll me some cigs if you can. Appreciate it. All right, let me get up for this. All right, so here's what happens.

I'm. I'm doing drone sales in my twenties. Very untapped niche market, right? I got it cornered.

I built a ragtag team of like killers, reprobates, misfits, the dispossessed, disenfranchised, disenchanted, that were came from broken homes. Because look, a lot of these guys that don't have an identity that, you know, abuse substances like that, they are the best salesman because they don't know who they are. So they can be anybody. And if you're a good leader and you're like a Julius Caesar type, you can really lead these on some not.

Here's the deal. Not only can you lead them into glory, but you can also completely overshadow their desire for self destruction. These guys are malleable as, and also they're extremely intelligent. Any of these dispossessed who are like severely addicted and self destructive, like it's misplaced passion, right?

So I build a team with this in mind and we are absolutely tearing the world apart with this business, okay? I created it from scratch. No one was doing drone sales at the time. So my right hand man, this was a beast, by the way, but he was a meth head, severe meth addiction.

He had been in and out of jail, he'd been dealing drugs, he OD'd a couple times. This was an embalmed mummy though. Could not kill this for some reason. He had a fighting spirit.

So anyway, I give him a position in the drone company and he was my right hand man. And this guy was a monster. Monster on the phones. Little bit of, little bit, little bit of an encouraging push and a little bit of gusto.

And if I stayed around him as his superintendent and kind of like whipped him into shape, this could accomplish anything. The minute I would take my eye off of him, he would flounder. So these guys need constant, almost like babysitting in a way, but if you stay on top of it, it's the most incredible, well oiled machine you've ever seen in your life. So anyway, I'm rolling deep with this guy and we had just had one of the best weeks of our lives.

We made a fortune and we were going back to his house. He was renting this little shack in this, in this sort of back country on these back channel roads. There was literally Like a crack den. But he had, you know, I.

I brought him back into my life to clean everything up. Like, one of my. One of my stipulations was if you use drugs, you're gone. I had a no tolerance policy for drugs, alcohol, like that, because I wanted this guy to turn his life around.

And he was a little bit younger than me, so he had a very checkered past. He had numerous brush ins and misdeeds and misgivings with the wrong sorts of people. And I didn't really understand the full scope of it, but I knew a little bit and I somewhat knew that being around him was going to be a liability to a degree just because he had not shorn up a lot of his past. So one night around Halloween, we're trundling along on this back country road going up to his crib.

And it was around Halloween time. And all the houses was a very festive community. Very festive community, you know what I'm saying? Like, the skeletons were out the nooses and were hanging from the trees.

They had all the, you know, paraphernalia, the jack O lanterns and were all lit up. It was one of those deals. And he. So he lived in.

This was a dilapidated house. And I'm not kidding, if the termite stopped holding hands, the entire house would have fallen apart. So we're rolling up there and adjacent to his house was like this very hard scrabble land that was undeveloped, just raw, raw clumps of dirt. And all of a sudden the windshield to my right where he was in the passenger seat, I was driving.

The truck explodes. It just explodes. And his head explodes into my lap. Explodes into my lap.

Chunks of human flesh are embroidered in my T shirt. I am covered in blood, covered in blood. Flipping the out, flipping the out. I'm telling you, like steak tartar that just got penetrated by hot lead was roasting in my T shirt.

Like I could feel the heat of the human flesh caking itself into my T shirt. Drive by shooting head explodes. I didn't know if I got hit. I didn't know if there was shrapnel.

I didn't know anything. All I remember is I put the truck into park and I bolt out the door. And there was this embankment that went down to the left and there was a massive slope and below the slope was a highway with a massive speed limit. So I could hear tons of cars below whizzing by.

So as I'm running down the embankment, obviously to get the out of there, I had no clue by the way I didn't know the orientation of the vehicle. I didn't know if it was a drive by shooting. I had no identification. I didn't know what the happened.

I didn't know if it was an ambush. But as I'm running down the embankment, I hear a car making a U turn coming down and bullets are still flying. Now I'm already down the embankment, so they're obviously trying to get me too, right? So I twist my ankle horrifically.

When I get to the bottom of this slope and I'm up, I have. I am soaked in blood. I am so disheveled. I am absolutely tremoring and paralyzed in terror at this point.

And I'm on and I'm. I'm waving maniacally at the bottom of the highway and cars are just barreling on, barreling on. It's a symptom of the times, right? Cars are just.

They don't give a. You know what I mean? There's no, there's no neighborly, there's no filial piety. Like no one gives a fuck.

What seems like 30 minutes passes by and a trucker finally stops and he gets out and he calls the police. And I am petrified to go back up the embankment for obvious reasons. So when they get there, they had already set up a scene. And by the time I got up there, I discovered that whoever shot my friend ripped his corpse out of the vehicle and just disposed of it in the middle of the road.

Vultures just threw. Threw his body in the middle of the road and dipped. Now was the most horrifying night of my life. Cannot put into words.

It's not like the movies at all. Cannot put into words what it's like to have a human, the human flesh dispose of itself in your presence. It is beyond the most grizzly thing you could possibly comprehend. And when I tell you that I was numb for hours afterwards because look like when that happens, your body is squeegeeing as many hormones just to stabilize the system.

The shock is so tremendous and so severe, it's almost like a circuit break. Like you can't. You really cannot string coherent sentences together. I mean, I was bewildered.

I was absolutely besides myself. I couldn't speak, I couldn't do anything. I was completely, completely dispossessed of my body at this point. It was surreal.

It was surreal. And I became very tight with his family, with his mom and dad. His, his mom and dad were very compassionate people. They, they had given him multiple stints in rehabs.

They had really Tried to rehab him. And it seemed like I was really the only guy in his life that could kind of reign him in and kind of tame the wild beast. And so we had a very special bond when this happened. And I would meet up with them every now and then and just I stayed connected.

About two and a half years later I got pulled into the station because they thought they had found the guys who did it. And it's one of the most harrowing nights of my life because for that two and a half years, I lived every day of my life knowing that I had zero. I had nothing to offer the detectives. I didn't see anything, nothing.

And obviously I stated that many times. But as a formality I had to go down to the station and they wanted me to try to do an id. And I get down there and obviously I went through the formality and I had to look them in the eyes and tell them that I had absolutely no clue. Absolutely no clue.

It was pitch black. I didn't even really have an idea of the vehicle. I thought I did, but the memories are fragmented. Like I said, it's a, it's a full circuit break experience.

Everything just shatters. Your, your memory becomes very fragmented. Horrifying thing to live through, horrifying. So I think Carl Jung said misfortune comes in threes.

And I lose my, I lose my, my right hand man. Money starts to get real tight. The business starts to crash because your personal problems, your business problems are always, always an extension of your personal problems. Your personal problems creep in there and it becomes sort of this necrosis.

So I had necrosis seeping into my business because my, my personal life was in shambles. I mean this completely turned my world upside down. I was very withdrawn, became very antisocial, was just sort of trying to sort everything out for myself. And people were offering me tremendous amounts of support and groups and, and like that.

And I rejected it all. Something that I just wanted to kind of deal with on my own. But things got really rough. The business completely tanked, largely probably due to some self destruction on my end.

I think I was sort of lashing out and acting out and just kind of wanted everything to burn. But the bottom line was everything kind of came to a breaking point where I was just kind of trapped in this community. I really had nowhere to go. My back was against the wall.

I hadn't been dealing with anything emotionally. And so his dad, who I was super tight with, made a suggestion, he made like a one off suggestion to me one day that kind of pattered around my head for a little bit. And he was like, look, he's like, you have a couple options here. And I was like, what's that?

And he was like, you can. He's like, this is going to sound crazy, but he's like, if you're down on your luck. And he's like, you really need a refuge, and you need a respite, just sort of a haven, just to kind of get your head collected and sort of figure out what your next move is. He was like, you can get a scholarship to halfway house to a where.

Where basically you're gonna live with, like, other drug addicts and other alcoholics. Even though I had never, at this point in time, I had never experimented whatsoever with drugs, I had no experience with drugs or alcohol at this time. And I was like, so basically, you're telling me to basically infiltrate this place and. And almost pull, like a One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest where I'm just gonna pretend I'm a alcoholic to get housing for 90 days?

And he's like, that's exactly what I'm telling you. He was like, the worst thing that can happen is it'll probably help you out. And I just remember him saying that. He said, the worst thing that can happen is it'll probably help you out.

And so I mulled this over for days, and it kind of tortured me because I was like, you know what? I know I'm not going back to college. I know that's a cul de sac. That's a dead end.

But. But the halfway house is a little more interesting to me because I'm sort of infiltrating as an investigative journalist, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm sort of sharpening my blades. I know I'm gonna be having to live with the scum of the earth.

And I know on the other side of that coin, I'm probably gonna have to be living with CEOs and professionals who. Who were playing life large and lost their way and got engrossed in substance abuse. So I was like, I'm probably going to get both ends of the spectrum, and why don't I go in here and learn to rise rank and earn my stripes and just see if I can dominate? And so he gives me a whole.

He dresses me down. He gives me a whole rundown. He's like, here's the deal. You're gonna go into the program 90 days.

Boom. You're gonna say you're an alcoholic. Boom. You're gonna do Intensive therapy groups.

Every day they're going to be doing psychoanalysis. You're going to be, you know, doing massive, massive intensive reflections, meditation, all this. Where do you think I get all my critiques of all these policies? You know what I'm saying?

Like, the pieces are starting to. Starting to come together. So I finally decide that I'm gonna build my own curriculum college. Why don't I go here for 90 days, muscle up against some of these characters, and let's just see how far I can take this.

Let's see what I can learn. Let's see if I can do a psychoanalysis on the very people who are doing it on me. Let me, Let me go into the belly of the beast where the behavior analysis are and the psychoanalyst. Let me do my own little psychoanalysis on these people.

Let's see what they're up to. Let's see what their flaws are. Let's see how fallible they are. So I finally convinced myself that, you know, what, what the.

Is 90 days? I mean, three months is an eternity when you're, when you're insulated, right? Because these, these halfway houses, they're. They're heavily incubated.

You go into them and you. They don't let you have a phone. They strip you down. You're.

It's very regimented, it's very militant. You're. You have a curfew, you're following rules. There's a ton of authority.

All that, all the. That I hate, by the way. Like, I, I naturally don't like authority. All.

Everything that I naturally don't like. And I was like, you know what? Why don't I just go against the grain? Because like, like old boy said, the worst thing that can happen is it can help me out.

I'm gonna get housing, I'm gonna be fed for 90 days. And it's just gonna be a journey. It's gonna be an experience. So let me throw myself into the wolves and the jackals and see if I can come out of this, and let's see what happens.

So he books my plane ticket. And I'm not gonna say where it was, but it was in some po Dunk town, some in Timbuktu, which at the time was completely anathema to the way I was living, right? I was making money hand over fist. I was doing drone sales.

I lived in a very nice neighborhood. I had a very, very upscale upbringing, etc. And I was about to go into the complete polar opposite domain. I'm talking like a.

But I was Kind of excited about it because I just kind of wanted that rough hewn style of living for a second just to get my perspective back, just to get my bearings. So he books me this flight and I get to the airport and it's a little 30 seater, little rinky dink, little aluminum canister as a plane. And we, we pop into the air and the turbulence the entire time was literally out of the Twilight Zone. Like I remember literally thinking that plane was going down like 10 or 12 times during the flight.

Thing was tiny and I was. There was like three people on the flight. And the whole time I'm just like, what the am I getting myself into? When I was like, you know what, it's just gonna be a journey.

You're just gonna come out of this with another battle scar and another story to tell. Remember I'm going to Oxford in my head, right? Because like I'm. I'm about to get a street education.

Because I know living with these types of people ain't easy. I know these are some of the most difficult personalities on earth, you know what I mean? These people are unruly, they're uncivilized. And so I just kind of wanted a piece of that, especially because I was sort of a different.

Of a different constitution of a different ilk. So of course I had a very late night flight and we touched down and it's pitch black. I can't see anything. I can't even see the terrain.

I can't see the landscape. I have no idea if it's a hole or not. I can't even really make out the houses. So the driver of the halfway house picks me up in this druggie van, you know, those white drug events.

And he swoops me from the airport and we're driving along and I'm just trying to like make out the faint shapes of the houses while we're driving. I'm like, where the am I? It was like a 15 minute drive. And finally we pull up to this little shanty, literal little shanty little house.

This thing, this, this, this place was a literally. It literally looked like a meth den. It looked like a meth den. And we pull up and I have no idea what to expect.

I didn't ask any questions on the way home. I was just silent, just looking out the window, gearing up for the ride. So I walk into the front door and they had this huge like mahogany dining room table in the house. And all the people that lived in the house happened to be at the table.

When I walk in and they're all filling out paperwork, I guess you had to chart your like weekly schedule and submit it to the house once a week, no joke. To something that I learned that was fascinating. All these, I think 13 of 14 dudes that I saw at the table were left handed. There's some very strange correlation between left handed people and addiction.

Very, very prevalent. Now I, I also happen to be left handed, which I, which I gave myself a chuckle. I thought that was funny because I was like, all right, I'm already blending right in. So I'm a lefty.

These are lefties and they're all at the table and everyone's writing with their left hand. It was bizarre. And so they take me into this little room first thing, everybody kind of greets me. Everyone was kind of standoffish.

They were like, who the is this guy? I mean, at the time I, I looked the, I didn't fit the demographic, which was a lot of these guys were very small, they were emaciated, they looked like emaciated coyotes. They had missing teeth. A lot of these guys, you know, they're coming off of fentanyl, they're coming off of heroin, they're meth addicts, they're doing some, they're doing some hardcore.

So their physiques, their heads are all up and I'm coming in there, I'm pretty brusque. I'm like, I'm robust. I had a, I was in really, really good shape at the time. I had perfect pearly white teeth.

So like, who's this? So I walk in to the assessment room and immediately they confiscate my cell phone, they confiscate my wallet. You couldn't have a debit card, you couldn't have money, you couldn't have cash. They had their own economy.

They had their own economy within the confines of the system that you basically had to, you were confined by it. So they didn't want you using real world money. You couldn't have a cell phone and you basically were being stripped down to zero. That's basically what the protocol was.

And basically the whole tenant was, look, we're going to break you down to zero through these intensive groups and you guys in the house are all going to hold each other accountable. And then we're going to build you back up. And once you've proven that you're built back up, then we're going to slowly start giving you your back. Tough pill to swallow.

Losing, getting stripped of all my. To go into this house. So basically My freedom has been severely hindered, and already I'm squirming. I'm ready to be like, you know what?

This. I'm going back home. I can do this a better way. So the next morning, I get put.

First of all, that night, I get put in a room with, like, three other dudes who happen to be, like, the most hardcore drug addicts in the house. So I'm like the fourth bed, and we had four individual beds in a room, and there were like four bedrooms, and everyone had four beds in the rooms. So I'm stuck with these dudes. These are snoring, they're having crack withdrawals in the middle of the night, they're screaming, they're having bad dreams.

I'm just laying in my bed staring at the ceiling, and like, what the have I gotten myself into? It was a madhouse. It was an asylum for all intensive purposes. I really was in an asylum.

So the next morning, they take me into the official center, which they. You had to drive down this very, very twisty, windy road. You had to go downtown through a city, and you had to go to an actual center where they construct. They have, like, almost like seminars.

So you go see different counselors, and you're with a. The entire day. It's like eight hours of intensive therapy. They're discussing your.

Your inner child, your. Your child history, your past. They're going through the whole panoply of your past to try to sort out why you do. Why you do what you do, why you have the tendencies that you have.

And they take me to the health counselor to do a small physical, and they're like, by the way, we give you your own little debit card that's pre loaded, and we give you a food budget. And I was like, what's the food budget? A hundred bucks a week. A hundred bucks a week for food?

And they made us shop at Walmart. At Walmart. So at the time, I'm already very deep into the carnivore diet. And my diet was extremely strict, and it was extremely important to me because health was everything.

Health was the cornerstone of my philosophy at this time. And I was like, how the am I gonna make this work on 100 bucks a week? Made zero sense to me. I was like, I'm gonna starve.

So we go through the first day. That was the first rub. I was like, you know what? There's no way I'm gonna last.

I. I truly thought I was gonna last maybe 48 hours. And then just bounce. And then just bounce.

First day of therapy was insane. You got guys crying, you know, you got guys reading letters that their parents have read to them that were horrifying. All the damage that these, that their, you know, their drug addictions had caused their families. Really, really fucking sordid tales to be a part of.

And I'm over here and shit and I got a fucking claim I'm an alcoholic. And I'm just sort of treating it as a way to just kind of examine my own past. And I was like, you know what, I'm just going to start coming forth with some of my own stuff just to see if can stick or if this could be beneficial. I was like, I might as well engross myself in the curriculum, right?

Like I'm here so I might as well participate and see if I can get any benefit out of it. So I met this dude in the house who was the most mischievous in the house. This dude was getting busted, he was getting in trouble every day. He was smuggling in contraband at a different rehab, got banned.

He would fucking smuggle in phones when you're not supposed to. It was a co ed facility. So the, the females had their own house. And then you would participate with the girls during the day in the intensive group therapy.

And then you would go to the men's house and they would go to the female's house. Now obviously one of the first rules they tried to tell you, you cannot converse with the females. And if you know anything about real life, that's the first rule that everybody fudgeing breaks in these situations. The females and the males and shit were doing all sorts of crazy shit to meet up in the middle of.

You had all sorts of fucking sexual dynamics and forces at play. Even during the groups. Shit was crazy. Like you, you cannot, there's no way you can siphon off those energies.

And they tried really hard. So the men and the, the women were doing all sorts of crazy, myself included. So this one dude, I really took a liking to him because he was just a hard headed, pugnacious, like this dude, didn't he, he was very, he was just mischievous. He didn't, he didn't want to follow any of the rules.

He would clash with the counselors during the sessions. He would challenge them and they would try to pry into his personal life and he would always clap back. He was super witty and he happened to also be a meth head. And this dude's brain was cooked, by the way, absolutely fried.

And yet he was the wittiest, funniest, I'd Ever met. Funniest. Funniest. Ever met.

You know, some of these addicts, like some of these guys who deal with severe substance abuse, they are almost. They almost have an aura of immortality to them. It's very hard to explain, but if you've ever seen someone who drinks like a fish or like a functioning alcoholic or guys that have OD'd several times, first, there's just some guys that you just can't kill. You just can't kill.

And these guys always, always, always have an incredible sense of humor. They always do. They always just have this sort of light sense of life. They don't take it too seriously and they're always funny as.

And this was one of those guys. I mean, this guy should have been dead like hundreds of times in his life. And he was just an unkillable force for whatever reason. He just had a really fighting spirit.

He had a brutal spirit that was just really, really indomitable. And he loved. His frame was incredible, by the way. Like, he would get attacked.

He would get attacked and swarmed by these counselors that are trying to like tame this. They're trying to break this dude down. And this dude was just unfazed. I mean, I would just watch him just so passe.

He was just so blase. He would parry and repost every attack like a professional fencer. This was just impervious. He was just completely impervious.

And you could never make him crack a smile. You could never make him crack a grin. And keep in mind, this didn't study game. This knew nothing about red pill, but he had more game than any I had ever met up to this point.

The sickest frame I've ever seen. I mean, I saw this dude getting bullied, getting massacred by people with doctorate's degrees, credentials that would make your head spin. They're professionals at twisting and turning the knife in the brain to get people to behave a certain way. And this dude was not breaking unbreakable.

So he became a really good friend of mine in the house very early on. And, you know, the first spread of my influence over the house is everyone noticed. When we would go to Walmart, all I would buy were those disgusting five pound cylinders of ground beef. This shit's like 70 protein, 30 fat.

It's basically dog food. But this was dirt cheap. Like, you could literally get a five pound cylinder of beef from Walmart. I'm not kidding, for like four bucks.

And so I would just. I would take my hundred bucks a week. I would. We had a tobacco budget too.

So I was chain smoking, but I was just stocking up on these cylinders of beef. And everyone, nobody could believe it because I was in a po dunk like country bumpkin town. So nobody could understand why I didn't eat vegetables. They were like, you don't eat fruit.

These people's carts were pathetic by the way. Soy milk, almond milk, Coca cola, like the most pathetic diet. The way these people allocated their hundred dollars was mind blowingly fascinating to me. When we would go to the store and I would just see what these addicts were putting into their body.

I mean these dudes were literally running on like am, PM root beer and like literally running on root beer. And they were, they were spry and they were lively as. And that's where I started to really, that's where I started to really kind of dissect the whole diet optimization thing. I was like, wait a minute, these kids, not only are they withdrawing from hardcore drugs but they're up at 5am ready to do their routines.

We were forced to go to the gym and, and these were running circles around people energetically. I mean just like infinite pistols of energy running around. And they had no nutrition. They were completely nutritionally defunct.

Anyway, I'm over here eating my meat and cooking it up. It was a shared kitchen. You had to do chores. There was like a real, real collaborative environment in the house and there's obviously hostility.

Everyone's got different opinions, everyone's got different morals, everyone's got different values. There's clashing, there's fights, people are eating other people's food and very kind of prison esque in the economic system within the house. So very quickly I become sort of like a mythological figure because of the condition that my body was in. No one could understand how the alcoholic looks so good because I just had no traces or remnants of decay like these did.

So pretty soon, after a couple weeks, the entire house converts to carnivore. Every single in the house is copying my diet, eating like me. And they had to call a special meeting at the center because it became a huge problem because they, the counselors thought that I was essentially manipulating and taking over and dominating the house. And they found it very concerning because you got to understand these people are on, these people are withdrawing from drugs.

They're on a very flimsy, they're very impressionable is what I want to say. They're very impressionable, they're very susceptible to dogma because they're, they're identityless. And so all these are eating carnivore and it was a huge talk of the, of the group. They were like, what do we do about this?

This is, this is bizarre. They had a gym in the backyard, rusty gym. Like the kind of gym where when you use these weights, you want to get a tetanus shot afterwards. This was rusty.

The weights were all bent. And I had everyone out there doing cleans, deadlifts. I, I literally started like my own little military battalion. Like, everyone was on my routine.

They were eating like me. I was educating them about health, nutrition. We would have these little fireside chats every night in the house, and all these dudes would just be picking my brain about nutrition and, and I would just blow their mind about the, you know, evolutionary biology, how the, how we, the brain evolved. Blah, blah, blah, fat, saturated fat, it's good for you.

Just sort of breaking the mold of all these, these lies that, you know, you get fed in some of these, some of these poorer, socioeconomically repressed societies. And so I'm just bringing the thunder. And I got called in one day and they had to separate me. They thought about putting me in a completely different house by myself, treating me like Hannibal Lecter, because they felt like I was having way too much influence over the people.

And the, the, the clients in the house were starting to kind of rebel and be a little bit, kind of churlish towards the counselors because there was this sort of, you know, there was this culture of fitness and this sort of enthusiasm in the house that hadn't been there before. So the counselors really didn't know what to do with it. And then we keep doing the intensive therapy and these, these sessions were, they were fucking the most. It was the greatest education sitting through these classes and just listening to the modern mainstream approach that they have towards treating, like, mental illnesses.

Like, all of these guys in the house, for all their flaws, truly had sparks of genius that I could clearly see. And they were being smelted down. They were being smelted down and being homogenized and essentially going to get a spiritual lobotomy is what it felt like. Because they were being told that they're powerless over their lives, they're powerless over their addictions, they're powerless.

That was the mantra. The mantra is, you are powerless and you must surrender. And that's what these guys were being fed in these classes, is that they have zero control over their impulses. And that if they do not follow this 12 step program, there's 12 steps to, to emancipation, to clemency, that they would essentially crash their lives and never be able to recover.

And they were told that if you engage in any kind of risky behavior, you're on a slippery slope and you'll probably use again. And you could see it. You could see these dudes drinking the Kool Aid and you could slowly see their edges just being melted away into dust, into dust. The spiritual lobotomy.

I started to see the life force just being ripped out of them because they were just absolutely being fear mongered and essentially bullied into not understanding, which is what I always tell you guys, is that your, your, your flaws, the things that you do that destroy yourself are obviously your gifts. They're just misplaced. They're just completely misplaced. And if you take that energy and you redirect it and you harness it, it's obvious you can be an extraordinary figure.

It's obvious because it's just a flick of the dial turned in a different direction. Now these guys were just getting pulverized. I could see them in the sessions pretending, they were definitely pretending to go through the motions and to say that they're never going to drink again, they're never going to do drugs again. And they were speaking in these absolute terms.

Now I know from experience anytime you see a speaking in grand proclamations, it's a, it's a huge fall waiting to happen. And what I started to see was these guys would, essentially what they were doing was they were building up a lot of tension by becoming sober because this, the sobriety became the identity is what I was really seeing. These guys would literally get dopamine hits, getting 30 day clean chips at the AA meetings that we were forced to go to. And at these meetings they would get these massive rounds of applause and ovations for their sobriety.

And it dawned on me that a lot of these people, because the recidivism rate you have to understand in these programs is like 99. It's not like these programs, the, the retention is, is basically next to zero. Like anybody who goes through a 12 step program, the chance that they go back and use again is almost guaranteed. And so what happens is a lot of these guys go in there and they're building up a fireball of tension so they can go back out and go on the most glorious, extravagant bender they've ever in their entire life.

But they need, they need the sort of spiritual reset in order to kind of build up the health reserves to sustain it. So that's what they're doing. They're kind of getting their health back. They're getting their perspective back, they're getting their mind back because they know eventually down the road they want to do it again because they're leaning into the wrong thing.

Their eye is on the wrong thing. If you. Self denial, self resistance does not work. If you.

There are, there are many, many, many in this society who are functioning very, very high functioning alcoholics and functioning drug, drug users. That's just a fact. Nature is cruel. Some have leaned into their nature so hard they have binged the thing that has brought them to their knees so hard that they are, they've essentially consumed its spirit.

Like there are dudes who've, who've drunken. They are so pickled. They're pickled by alcohol consumption and they've basically consumed its spirit. It no longer has the same effect that it would on somebody else because they've done it so much.

Now there is a book called Alcoholics Anonymous. And I am not kidding you, if you, I don't give a, if you've ever had a drink in your life. This book is a classic text. It is better than the Odyssey.

It's better than the Odyssey. It should be required reading for every child, literally every teenager growing up should be forced to read this book. Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a, it is the deepest dive into human psychology that you could possibly undertake.

You have to go get a copy of this book and read the stories in there. You have to read about the misplaced passion of some of these, some of these addicts and the indomitable spirit. I mean, these guys should have been dead. They should have been turned over in the grave hundreds of times and somehow they came out unscathed to the other side.

It is the most remarkable fight. The internal struggle, the fight. These guys are unrelenting. Unrelenting.

They have a mission. It's a misguided mission. It's a misguided mission, but they do have a mission. And a lot of these guys had emblazoned careers, careers that would blow your mind while they were getting plastered and they were somehow keeping the jigsaw pieces together.

And they're, they're wearing many hats and they're wearing many masks and they're juggling this, this double life. They're, you know, getting plastered and torched on the weekend and then they're running these massive companies during the week. All those stories are in that book. And it's absolutely incredible what dedication to a solitary thing.

Even though a lot of the stories are very tragic, I'm a very non judgmental person. I, I like interesting People, I like interesting things. I like to read about interesting things. I'll read about Hitler, I don't give a.

I just want to read about interesting events. So when I read this book, even as someone who's never abused alcohol, I could completely relate to some of the obsession, some of the desire to, to just to wrestle with the human spirit and kind of understand these things. These guys, I'm telling you, because they were addicted to whatever drug or whatever substance it was. They had this superhuman ability to.

All their insecurities evap washed away by the way. They had zero ins. There was no self consciousness, there was no insecurity, there was no nitpicking. They were immune.

They were walking through life completely immune to the opinions of others. And these guys were getting laid left and right. And, and I was, I was reading this and I was like, God, these guys are so dysfunctional. Their lives are a mess.

But they, they, they have no shortage of women in their life. They have no shortage of careers in their life. They have no shortage of opportunity. I'm talking about the high functioning ones.

And what was interesting to me is it was just glaringly obvious that when I would read these stories, even though they were addicted to what society would call a terrible thing, and of course some of these lives were absolutely damaged and permanently ruined. The interesting thing was because they were obsessed with a mission. It didn't matter that the mission wasn't glorious. It was a mission.

The fact that they would do anything. They would run through your chest to score a magnum of alcohol. They had the admiration and adulation from their peers. Like they, every character in that, in the stories in that book had women that would ride or die till the bitter end with them.

And they had friends that would take bullets for them. Because the people on the peripheral could not comprehend that somebody could be so zealous for a cause that made zero sense in practicality. Zero fucking sense in practicality. But it just shows you the power of a mission.

And that's why these addicts became addicted. Because when they drink and they do these substances, what happens is the sense of self dissolves. They have, I'm telling you, they have zero self consciousness. They don't have any insecurities.

It all goes away. They become superhuman and they become addicted to the feeling. They become addicted to the feeling of not clashing with the ordinary fears of the common man. They no longer have to worry about the things that ordinary people worry about.

It all washes away. And that's why they wake up every morning and they can't stop hitting the bottle because they never have to feel the pain of self analysis. Get them completely out of their head into the spiritual realm. And they can't get enough of it because it is a superpower to a degree for a lot of these people.

And so obviously if these shifted just a tiny flick of the dial with that passion that they have to just literally score a bottle or score some crack, whatever the it is, if it was a turn of a dial the other way, they would be the top of the class in every domain. They would be annihilating the competition, annihilating it. But the self, the. The removal of self from the equation is what was so interesting with these guys.

I mean, the guy that I was telling you about that had the iron frame, this didn't have an insecure bone in his body. And here's another interesting wrinkle it turned out. I ended up finding out, okay, here's, here's something that'll blow your mind. The two most masculine that I have ever met in my life, I'm talking not a faggoty bone in their body that you could tell from the surface.

Nothing, no remnant of in their heart. I'm talking like brawlers, brawlers, Dudes with iron frame, dudes with virtues, dudes with honor. All the that you talk about on right wing Twitter, like these dudes embodied that two at. It turned out that super masculine homie of mine with that iron frame, I found out after the program he was gay.

He was completely gay. Had no interest in women. Camille Palia, Camille Paglia, the political commentator, the feminist. I mean, the anti feminist.

She's a genius. She says in one of her books, I forget what book it was, but I remember reading it somewhere. She said that. I think she said that gay men were the guardians of masculinity.

I never understood that quote. I never understood that quote at all. But I did find it interesting that the literally the two most masculine men that I have ever come across in my life were 100% homosexual. Don't know why that is, but this dude would, when me and him would be walking to the center sometimes, because as we went through the program, they'd give you more and more freedom.

And you were able to kind of walk and you were able to kind of like side skirt the vans. They. They would slowly give you your freedom back. There was a night where this wielding a rake or like some kind of hoe for raking brush was wielding it and he was drunk off his ass.

It was like an older guy, we were walking by a parking lot. This dude was wielding this thing like a weapon. And he came at us and this dude interdicted the attack and he threw himself right in front of the dude and me. And he's like, yo, yo, yo, you're not getting anywhere near him with that.

And he was ready to literally take that thing to the side of the dome for, for me, for whatever reason. So it's like I know tons of straight who wouldn't do like that. I know tons of dudes who would out a situation like that. This was about it.

And I've always just found that interesting. I've never been able to kind of unpack and figure out why that is. I'm sure some of you smart can DM me and give me a good analysis on that one. But that one was definitely interesting to me.

I mean, this dude was always ready to brawl. He was always ready to have your back. When we were doing the, the bartering system and the, the economy within the house, there would be times where I would run out of my budget because I would want this like really good coffee and I would run out of my money and I would. There would literally be days where I had no food.

This would give me his food in his fridge and he would starve for like two days. Like he was just a homie. The dude was just, he had my back the entire time we were there cracking jokes every day. And I had zero clue, literally zero indication that this dude was gay.

Zero. There is no FBI profiler on earth who could have figured it out. I mean he was just as masculine as they come. So then, so as we're going through the, the system and we're, and we're, we're kind of getting our freedom back and you know, everyone's smoking cigs and we still got the whole, the whole gym regimens going on and, and I'm just kind of learning about the addict mind.

I'm learning about why these guys do what they do. I'm learning about their self destructive tendencies. I'm hearing harrowing letters from their family. Their family is writing in letters to the group and they have to read them out loud.

Like the way they've damaged their families. Some of it the was heartbreaking to listen. Listen to. I mean absolutely heartbreaking.

Some of the things that these guys did to their family to get drugs was just sickening, completely sickening. But these people had the biggest hearts. They were ruthless. They were ruthless when it came to scoring drugs.

But when it came time for loyalty or friendship or to give you the shirt off their back, these would show up for you. Every single one of them had a massive heart. Massive heart. Some of these dudes were killers.

Some of these dudes in the Rehab had done 12 years in prison, 15 years in prison for DUIs, and they've manslaughter. There were tons of crazy that was going on in there. And these dudes had the biggest hearts and they were full of life. And they just.

It was. It was just mind blowing to be a part of this and to realize that these dudes were just a little bit misguided. And when I say a little bit, I really mean a minuscule amount. Right?

Life really is a game of inches. It's a game of inches. If your personality corkscrews just a little bit to the left, you ain't gonna make it. You ain't gonna make it.

It's a very. The system, the system of life, the human animal is very, very, very well calibrated. And if anything is off kilter, even by just a millimeter, the whole fucking system comes. Comes collapsing down.

That's what I've noticed the most, is you just turn the dial on some of these things in these people and you can completely turn them the other way. Now, the guy who got in trouble, smuggling the contraband. So when I was there, I was. Gambling was banned.

Gambling was banned in the house because they felt that any kind of risky activity was a slippery slope for the other addicts in the house. Now, when I was there, I had a phone also smuggled into me by one of these guys. And I started up the drone sales business again while I was in the confines of the home. So I was in this house where you're not even supposed to have a phone.

You're not working. There's no economy. I started up the business again, and I started having this dude and a couple other guys in the house working for me during the day at off hours, we were all sneaking in the phones and we were making money. We were actually making pretty decent money while we were in the house.

And I'm not going to get into the whole mechanism, but the banking system that we had set up was very clever. You become very industrious and you become very resourceful when you're in these environments, by the way, like the things that you conjure in your head when you're sitting all day in a boring house, in a backyard smoking cigarettes. You have no phone. You have literally ample time to do anything.

Your mind just starts solving Problems. And me and these dudes literally figured out how to run a business from a fake cell phone from Walmart out of our pockets that we were hiding in the pottery outside. And so we were making money. And the entire time I was in the house, I was gambling.

I was placing crazy bets while I was there. Crazy bets. And if they had ever found out that I was betting while I was there, they would have kicked me out because they felt that I was a liability for the rest of the crew. So, again, my whole purpose of infiltrating the situation was to see how dominant I could be in a very restricted environment.

Like, how can I take over? Okay, that's one layer of it. The second layer of it, the house managers were very, very strict. They were all former addicts themselves, so they were well versed in the program.

And they knew sort of the tug of war between the personalities. They knew how to kind of. They knew how to intercede, and they knew how to. How to deal with sort of every personality.

Now, the whole name of the game when you were. When I was in that environment was winning over the house managers. There are certain house managers that would give you flexibility and leniency and let you do certain things that other ones wouldn't. I had these house managers wrapped around my finger.

It was insane. What you learn about these institutions and these environments is everything is corrupt. Everything is corrupt when it comes to power and it comes to exchange and it comes to making feel good. It's all about that exchange of value.

You guys know what I'm talking about. These guys would love. They would relish letting, I want to say, the leader of the group break the rules. They were letting me go out with girls in the middle of the night.

They would let me sneak out at midnight, and I'd come back into the house at like 5am pretend I was sleeping. All sorts of crazy rules were being broken. The guy would take me privately in the van sometimes and pick me up on the side of the road, and you'd take me to, like, a nice restaurant, and we'd get, like, good steaks, and you put it on the company card. All sorts of crazy was going on in these.

In these houses. And that's why I was there. I was there just to see if I could dominate, number one. Number two, I wanted the education.

I really wanted to understand the mind frame of these guys. And I wanted to see how. How fast I could advance and rise to power, earn my stripes. Could I go in there and was I gonna bully or was I Gonna get bowling.

It was that simple. To me, it was like. It was dog eat dog. So I'm having the time of my life.

I'm getting driven around, I'm getting steak dinners, I'm getting. The guy's getting. Smuggling all the nice cigarettes to me on the side, the organic. These were smoking marble reds.

I'm going out. I'm meeting up with the chicks at night. I have no money. I have no money that I can physically touch.

I'm making money in the drone business, but it's all stuck in a bank account. And I don't have my debit card. I don't have my driver's license because it's all locked up with the house. So I'm just stabbed in cash because I know in 90 days, when I complete the program, I'm gonna have a nice little bag to come home to.

But during the time I was there, I was having a blast. It was fun. We were partying, we were doing all sorts of you're not supposed to be doing. And it's funny because the rules just bent to us because there was like this collaboration, you know what I mean?

Like, I was kind of at the top. Then I had the guy beneath me, and everyone was kind of playing their part, and everyone was playing it perfectly. Every. No one was welching on each other.

There were no moles. It was just like house managers were loosening up. They were fucking confiding in us. I had the house manager, like, he was a confidant.

Motherfuckers were drinking and doing drugs and shit in other fucking rooms, which they weren't supposed to do. It was insane. But as you can imagine, when you're in these super strict, tight environments, these kind of underground. These kind of underground things pop up.

Of course they do. You know what I mean? It's like. It's like during COVID when the speakeasies and would come back were breaking rules.

Like, it became like that. I do remember there was one time where somebody got caught with a phone, and we had such a fitness culture because I had everyone doing the power cleans and the deadlifts, and they actually banned the weight room for, like, two weeks. That was our punishment. The house could not lift weights because they felt like the weights.

And I found this very interesting from a clinical perspective because these therapists. These therapists were very, very textbook in the way that they proceeded with mandating punishments. And the stuff that they did for the clients in the house was very detail oriented. It was very regimented.

Like, they had a they had a textbook way of dealing with everything. The fact that they attacked the gym was the most eye opening thing to me because obviously everything else is downstream from fitness and health. And they took that away from us as a fucking fuck you. As a fuck you for smuggling in the phones.

And they knew that everybody in the house knew about the phone and no one shared it with the superiors. And so they wanted to bring us all down and they fucking banned of all the things that they could ban. And by the way, this house had been around, I think, for like, 18 years. It was unprecedented.

Fitness had never been on the table as a form of punishment. They never even thought or dreamed of banning fitness. But this particular crew that we had, they felt that the fitness was the key to liberation. They felt that we were using our strength and our kind of military regimen in the gym to kind of get wild ideas.

They felt that. They felt that it was the funnel that was kind of the lightning rod that was kind of sparking a lot of this sort of rebellious behavior within the house. And it was hilarious because when they banned the gym, then we were all doing calisthenics. We were all doing, like, handstand push ups against the wall.

It was crazy. It never ended.