How to Properly Bl*w up Stuffs w/Matt Barnett (Bonneti Explosives!)

And right between my eyes is a piece of copper about the size of a penny, and it is stuck in the skull right between my eyes. My kids don't have phones and they don't have video games. Movie night is a thing, and I thought, man, what if I blew myself up? And then I was like, I blew myself up, but it's so fast, your brain doesn't register. I don't like radiation because you could be cooking and you don't even know it. And if we just put lithium in the water and everybody's drinking water, the crime would fall through the floor. I don't know why we don't drink you don't know about lithium? No, no, give us a lithium master class. The way you live, you know, shooting guns and blowing stuff up, your life philosophy and listening to poetry in the morning and reading and working out first thing in the morning and seeing how your kids are showing us the cool shit they built and whatnot, and it's like that was a goal. But the really pleasant surprise that I did not anticipate today was how philosophical the day. Matt Burnett, welcome to the podcast. How I even begin to introduce you after 8 hours of us being on your property, you know, getting driven around in a tank by your 15-year-old son using your patented explosives called Mattanite from, you know, how you built this warehouse that we're in right now that has a car you bought yourself after you worked with Mr. Beast down there and then designing the room where, you know, the light comes in and you read books about World War II. How would you explain who you are and what you do?

I'm a little boy that grew up. I had a dad that spent a lot of time with me, uh, telling me stories about history and science fiction, and he, my dad just took a lot of time with me to show me a lot of different things about life. He showed me how to use cameras to a degree. Uh, he would take me on picnics and we, he'd tell stories about historical events. And one day he said, uh, hey, I'm gonna show you something I used to do as a kid. He said, I'm gonna show you how to make gunpowder. I was 7 years old. And he, we were sitting at the kitchen table and he measured out saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, and he pulverized them, then he mixed them together and he said, uh. This is now gunpowder and we went outside and and we made like a little rocket thing with it and that that locked of all the things he showed me that I locked on to that. And when I did, he just supported it so I'm just a product of, of a man who spent quality time with his son and just nurtured him in the way that he would go that I'm just trying to do the same I have, I've built a successful life and, and it's continuing and I'm by no means at the end of it. I have, I have a lot more I wanna do, but now the most important thing is I have children and it's really fascinating to, to now it's come full circle and it's time to pass that torch and it, it feels really good and.

You know, as we've been hanging out with you today on, you know, your property, you have multiple ways you're Teaching people or making money from explosives or whatever it is and you told us a story about uh a a mentor or a man you met when you were around 26 you did a. Propane or was it oh you're talking about when I was 1515 he sold porta potties porta potties. Well, at first he just sucked septic tanks. Yeah, yeah, so that guy, before that, my mom, my mom is, is old school, tough, hardcore, John Wayne, but female, right? It's got legs and an asshole, she'll kill it. And, and I grew up watching all that. She's, she's hard as nails. And she'd call me out we gotta go build a fence we gotta go do this and she'd tell me she's like you're pitiful you can't work you know you you you need to learn how to work and when it's your mother.

Yeah, it's just, I don't know, it's not a lack of respect, it's just a familiarity, so you get away with some stuff, right? Well, we had a family friend. His name is John Butler and uh John Butler. Is is a whole nother story all in itself, but long story short. He'd fallen on some hard times and he had a septic company. He had an old dilapidated pump truck with a vacuum tank on the back and he would drive around, dig up people's septic tanks and pump them out when it got too full and, and he always needed a hand and she asked him, she said, hey, Matt needs to learn how to work and my dad, my dad had a job where he was out of town, uh, most of the, most of the week, you know, he was gone from, from Sunday until Thursday and then the other time he was there, he, he had a job like most people, you know, from. You know, 8 to 5, and so he's gone. And mom was like, you need to go work with John. So John said, hey, he can come with me and you can start digging these septic tanks. I'll teach you how to use this stuff. And John, John showed me a, an air truck hookup deal and I, I didn't know how to hook it up at all. And he, he started with that. Then he showed me how to drive a stick shift truck, and that was embarrassing because I goofed that up all over the place, but John.

Taught me manual labor as he went through his trials and tribulations and at one point that guy was living in a tent. And I mean a little pup tent on the back of a flatbed trailer on someone else's land, and I would go out there and shake that tent at 7 o'clock in the morning and we'd jump in that old dumpy truck of his and we would drive and do these septic tanks and I'd get 5 bucks an hour, far below minimum wage even at that time. And we'd work 14 hour days and he would hold my legs and lower me down in these septic tanks and because he dropped a tool in there or something and I said, John, this looks awful because you got one leg on each side of him, you know, and he starts laughing. Well, he lost his strength and so he, I'm going even further in the septic pit. Crap everywhere, right? But, and then I get the tool. I'm like, I got it, get me out of here. And then he starts laughing because he's laughing about how it looks, and he, he just backed up and just drugged me up the side of the septic tank, ripped my arm open. That's the last place you want your arm ripped open, but I put peroxide on it, got OK, but.

It was that kind of duo, you know, out there in the nitty gritty 105, 110 degree summers digging up septic tanks, but that man had an attitude that when you went to work, it was an adventure. I remember one time he said, we're going to work, bring your goggles and spear gun. I'm like, oh dear God, what, what am I gonna do with a spear gun and goggles and a septic business? He said, no. We're gonna go to this chicken plant that has sep uh sep uh porticans and we're gonna prop we're gonna service them. We're gonna drop the trailer and we're going to the San Marcos River. And you're gonna get us some fish and uh. I mean, I don't know the rules anymore. I'm pretty sure statute of limitations run out on this about 30 years ago, but uh. We went down there and went spear fishing, you know, and. Uh It was an adventure and we were down there sleeping on a park bench and then we got the word that a storm had hit Columbus and the, the city septic thing was overflowing and they needed somebody to come pump it out immediately and so we came in to rescue the place and no sleep, tired as can be and loving life and then later as things would unfold, he just kept getting opportunities and taking them. He always said yes and you know he became a multi-millionaire. I mean he, he is a multi-millionaire today and he's, I don't know, 60 something years old.

And he's spending more time with his grandkids and he's, he's trying to do the things he really enjoys. He's had a hard life on his body, uses his body a lot, but, uh. That man taught me some things. 22 men. One was a tattoo artist in California, and we were, we were doing some bomb work and there were sea turtles going to the beach. So we shut everything down and I asked him, I said, What's advice you have for me? He said, Uh, whatever you do, you go all the way. He said, there's, there's no alternative. You go all the way. And when I asked John about that, John said, Don't be afraid. He said. Just go don't, don't be because what about this and what about that? and because everybody growing up when I told them I wanna to do explosives, they said, oh, you need dynamite like I need a hole in my head. You don't need to be messing with that stuff. A lot of people were against it. My dad was for it. My mom and dad cautiously were for it. Uh, but nobody else was. But, but John said go for it. And, and so I took that advice. I was like that's the way it'll be. I'm gonna be an explosive man and, and I'm not gonna be afraid. And so I'm in a small community. The federal government is something that they're like, Oh, no, they're gonna kick your door in. A black helicopter is gonna come pick you up.

Well you go online and there's a a form for a license and if you're getting the license to do legitimate work, get the license and do it properly and build a legitimate business. I mean I, I didn't have, I didn't have a notion like man I wanna rob banks it wasn't like that I just wanted to make a living working with explosives, uh, and John gave me the foundation I needed for that. I, I'm curious, I wanna ask this before we go into the story a little deeper. What's your piece of advice? I mean, you got advice from both those guys through your life and where you're at now. If you had one thing that you were gonna say to kind of pass it on, what would you say? Well I don't know that my advice is for everybody. I think if you were in an audience of 1000 people. There might be. 2 or 3 in there. That this would land right. Even though it's true for everyone, not everyone's gonna do it. My advice would be is if you're one of those people and you're called to something, so many people out there just don't know, you know, I'm running that all the time and it.

It's nobody's fault. It's just they don't know. But there's some people out there, they know. They know and I knew. And I would say that if you're one of those people, and you know, you're gonna be an actor, you're gonna be a primo landscaper, whatever it is. Understand that time is a joke. You're already The doctor, OK? And I thought of this when I was a kid. I was like, a brain surgeon today once was a little child. But if we knew if if we know what he is today looking back, that's when he was a a child brain doctor, right? So I said in my mind I'm already the explosive man I'm just going through the steps you know and and when I I hated school and so when I was in school studying chemistry at Texas A&M. I did I wasn't the greatest student it was difficult for me and there were days where you wanna give up, you know, but I said nope, you already have passed these exams you already have achieved these things you already have been laid to rest one day.

But this is your story and you're just in a piece of it. And somehow worked for me might not work for everybody, but I believe it's possible for everybody it will solidify in you your reality. Because you know you already are that thing, you are an oak tree, but at this stage you're just an acorn. But an acorn ain't gonna turn into a coconut, OK, so you're gonna be an oak tree one day so if you have a calling, whoever you are out there, if you have a calling and you know it in your heart, and believe me, you're gonna meet opposition and if you ain't meeting opposition, you ain't doing it right. I mean you're gonna meet it from your family, you're gonna meet it from your friends, you're gonna meet it from timing, you're gonna meet it from everything, but if you know what you're called to do, just, just understand you already are. You're just in that growth pattern and there are gonna be wildfires and there's gonna be floods and storms and there's gonna be days where it looks impossible, thank God, because if it didn't look impossible your story would suck. Nobody wants to watch the hero movie where he wakes up and he wins 47 times through until he wins the big one at the end. I'm not watching that show, so.

Uh, you will be encountered by those dark nights and it just doesn't make sense, but rest assured when you're having those, it's because you're on the right path. So that'd be my advice just understand that you already are what you're becoming. And then somehow that shifts your reality and you go that way. I, I love that advice, and there's so many people trying to teach that, but I feel like they also can't articulate it in the way that you just did. And one thing I'm curious about is your philosophy on how you're imparting that knowledge to your kids, like your philosophy on raising children, because you had John and, and this other guy who instilled this knowledge into you that you took and you ran with it, and you, you created all this from it. How are you? Transmitting that down to your children and your philosophy for having them live the, the type of values that you want them to have. Well, first off, the other guy's name was Steve Hendricks. In case he watches this, I wanna know that I'm giving him credit because I really appreciate. Yeah, he, he has a tattoo shop over him.

What, what's that in on uh in California it's, it's a coast, coastal town real cold, uh. Dang it, Monterey Monterey of Monterey, so Gold Coast tattoo in Monterey, uh, so anyway, how I do that with my kids is pretty simple. I leave them alone. Um, with the littlest one, Jon Nathaniel, he's 4 years old. We were out in West Texas and he's butt naked all the time. That kid ain't got a tan line. He, he, he looks like, uh, like one of these little Ewoks on Star Wars, you know. So one thing, he runs around West Texas butt naked, and I mean butt naked. There's no even moccasins on his feet. And he gets thorns and splinters. He learns, we dig him out, and then he'll be rolling this big rock and he'll roll that sucker right on his foot and cry. Well, He learned. Now, I'm not gonna let him get next to the 100-foot cliff, and I'm not gonna let him run up to the giant cactus, you know, and I'm gonna keep him from the rattlesnake a little ways, but. I'm going to let him.

Get pinched. I'm gonna let him bleed a little bit. I'm gonna let him have these things happen. My, my daughter Sarah wiggle worm, you know, I tell her sit still in your chair and she keeps squiggling around and then the chair falls over and she busts herself and crying. I don't run over there, oh baby, are you OK? I can tell she's fine. Did you learn your lesson? Sit still in the damn chair because that's what's gonna happen now. You can go too far with it. We were in Telluride, Colorado once, and we were doing a hike up there by the big waterfall at the end of the town, and I heard her light up screaming and whining and I said, Oh, quit, you bitch, and you know, get back on the trail. Well, she had fallen like 20 ft down this thing and it was tough. And so I did. I went down there. I was like, Oh, this is real, because she cries wolf all the time, you know. But she's tough as nails, and Max, uh, he had really interested in his engineering stuff, and I don't understand that. I'm not a technologically, uh, you know, savvy guy and so I give him the tools to work with and I show him how to learn and then I cut him loose and I observe a lot like my father did. My father knew how to make gunpowder, but once I started making detonators and high explosives, it was out of his realm already. So my parents bought me dynamite when I was 14 years old.

And they didn't know how to buy dynamite. I had to do the research, figure out who to call, what to say, and so for Christmas, 14 years old, I got a 50 pound case of dynamite, but they didn't just say, Here's some dynamite, have fun. My dad was like, Look, this is your dynamite, but we do this together, and he kind of learned with me because he didn't know. Actually I knew more and so I'm doing that with my. Sons and with Kelly, you know, uh, I just bought my wife an airplane at this last Christmas because she, she got her pilot's license and so we bought this little Cessna 150, just great little fun training plane. Well, she's been taking all the kids up and going with it, and Kelly has a real aptitude for that. So how I do that is I find out, you know, Kelly's at the point where he's really honing in on it. Max is a little behind, and the other two, they're still figuring it out, but that direction that they go. It gets scary when it's an airplane because that's not rolling a rock on your toe, you know, so he's doing that with a paid instructor it's not just with my wife he's going up we pay the instructor and he has given him good training on how to learn this airplane, but it's to do dangerous things slowly, a little at a time, cautiously and put thought to it because one day they're gonna be in the world, one day they're they're gonna be out there running on their own and.

They gotta be able to perform, you know, in all these different ways, and they have to be able to stand on their own 2 ft. So, so that's my, you know, that's how I'm doing it with them. Does your wife share the same philosophy of letting them get banged up a little bit from time to time to learn the lesson? Because a lot of times, you know, the women are the softer, more nurturing type, which absolutely they should be. And I feel like it's a good balance when the father has a little bit more of that tougher hand and like, yeah, let him get banged up, let him get scratched up. Obviously with safety, safety, safety in parameters, but. That balance I think is so important and one quote that I've always loved is that a good mother will raise, especially for, uh, if, if they're raising a boy, a good mother will raise a good boy and a good father will raise a good man and I guess the same could be for, for raising a girl as well, um, but does she share that same philosophy or do do you guys find that you kind of like add in sometimes? No, if anything, um, my wife is very strong. And She expects a lot from the kids, you know, so now she's nurturing and tender and, and does love them, but I'm more of the one to give them the hugs and, you know, sit and have a, a tender moment though she does too, but we both agree that we're raising men and women, and that's just how we feel, you know, so we, we really are lined up well on our beliefs of raising the children, which is a lot of hands off actually, you know, they, they're, they're, in fact, all my friends, they laugh and they said we enjoy watching your feral children.

Do you, do you, do you have? People you, I don't know, friends or people that have been customers or I don't know you just run into that, you know, say shit like that feral children and then you look at their children and you're like those are actually feral children stuck inside, not. You know, interacting with nature, not self-sufficient. Yeah, uh, or just even out in society, well, it's very common. What, what I've noticed about children is very few children know how to do something steadily and long term and uninterrupted. And when I was a kid making gunpowder as a child, you, you didn't just do that for 5 minutes. It's a process. You prepare this, this and this, you put it together, you know, there, there's a whole step of processes to making good black powder, right? But I knew what was at the end of the line. I knew, I knew the result. And so my children are learning that you know Kelly, he's, you saw him down there he says he's working on something in the woods weeks long. I don't know if he's building a cabin in the woods. I don't know what the hell he's doing. I don't wanna go look until he's ready to show me, but.

What I have noticed about children in general is uh. They are so far away from being able to build a fire. Like go in the woods and build a fire, they, they just throw some logs together and think that's how it works. It's like, no, there's a thing called kindling and you need to break these sticks and you need to take time to stack it just right and then you need a little bit bigger wood and then you need processes, maybe that's the word they lack the understanding of processes because so many of them are in that thing right there and everything is at the push of a button it's just pure straight sugar for the brain there's no protein for the brain. My kids don't have phones and they don't have video games and movie night is a thing like we pop popcorn and we love it we get we sit down as a family and we watch a movie. But after that, the next day they're tending to the chickens, they're tending to something with the cows and my mom feeding them hay, you know, and then they're, then they're doing their schoolwork because we home school and then they have their chores, you know, they're cleaning stuff, and then they have their projects, things that they work on, but they're, they're tangible things. They're not, you know, just on a computer like Max. He goes on the computer to write a program for his 3D printer.

And Kelly, he's building things are going to fly an airplane and Sarah is studying dance and so she and she takes it serious like she practices that dance it's really neat to see somebody that little spit on their toes and Gina's got John Nathaniel in ballet too. Which is kind of funny. I, I joke. I'm like, Oh, you got him in this Twinkle Toe deal, but, but I support it 100% because he's 4 years old. He's running around with the girls, but he's learning discipline. He's learning form. He's learning control and. It's great. Yeah, dance is just like martial arts, exactly. So I, I love it, and I, I, that's what I, I would say to parents. It's like, you know, take stock in what you're creating because there's not gonna come a day where all of a sudden a switch turns and they're able to do methodic processes and critically think and produce things if they haven't been brought up that way. They're gonna become a lost person that's 40 years old going. What the hell? and honestly. It's it's not their fault. I mean, if you, if you wanna worry the blame game, it's not because nobody took them like my dad took me and just spent time talking, spending time. what are you interested in? Let me show you this. Let me tell you a story. Let me, let me water and fertilize that that brilliant mind that a child has and cultivate it and then something's gonna bloom and they're gonna go, I wanna go that way and then when they do.

You help them do it the right way, you know, you wanna blow stuff up, there's a legal and right way to do that. It's a wrong way to do it too, so that's why you need guidance, exactly, and that's one of the main things you teach here on this property is. You know, how to blow things up safely and properly and not fuck yourself up. Yeah, cause you can. Yeah, you can. I had a, I had an incident, you know, people always talk, they're like, hey, that guy's got all his fingers. But I've got my story. When I was 14 years old. I started dabbling in a little more complicated chemistry. And when you make explosives they're dangerous enough, but when you make blasting caps, initiators, you got high explosives, low explosives with high explosives you got primary, secondary. The primary, that's the sensitive stuff that's 100 times more dangerous than working with just explosives. Well, I'd made some primary explosives and I was gonna make some detonators for my, my, uh, explosives. I had, I had dynamite.

Blasting caps were expensive. Remember, I'm only making $5 an hour sucking shit, so you might wanna make some detonators when they're $7 apiece. So, funny story, kinda, I, uh, was at school and I go up and I asked this girl out to a dance. And she's like, no. Bam! Shot me down, burn, crash right there, right? When I go home that day, I'm kind of bummed out and I was like, oh I need to load those detonators. I had made that compound. So I'm, I'm loading up the cap and it was a, a copper tube and it was crimped over. And, and, and, and I ain't telling anybody to do this stuff. This is what you don't do, OK? But I had that cap in my left hand and I had put in just a little bit of that material and I had a paintbrush, wooden handle paintbrush, and when it's wet. Pretty much a pussycat, but when it's dry, you don't wanna push it. And I was sitting there loading that thing and I had the radio going in my room. And I remember All of a sudden I couldn't hear the radio. Couldn't hear anything. Well, that's odd.

And then there was this weird smell. And I really couldn't see much, it was just like cloudy. And I thought man what if I blew myself up, you know, and then. I was like. I blew myself up, but it's so fast it's so fast your brain doesn't register right? And so I looked at my hand and it is just filet open and I looked down at my, my left foot and blood is pouring on it and there is, there is just shrapnel wounds in the, the table, the wooden table, and then about that time I hear. This whistle coming in and you ever seen that scene in Saving Private Ryan where he goes over the side and everything's quiet and then the whistle comes back that's real. And so that whistle comes back and then I can hear the radio again and I go in the bathroom. And right between my eyes is a piece of copper about the size of a penny, and it is stuck in the skull right between my eyes. Well, I freak out. I grab it and I pull and it ain't coming out, and then I freak out and I yank it out. Well, head, head wounds, they bleed like a stuck pig, so blood is just going everywhere. My dad comes around the corner and he just looks, he goes, yeah, he blew himself up. And he, he, I, I'll get the car fired up and I'm in there trying to like wash this away.

The fascinating thing was I was able to see my bones and my ligaments in my fingers and I'm like and the first thought that hit me was man that stuff's real because when you're a kid you see this stuff in a classroom. But it's on paper it's, it's, that's you that you go shoot a deer and gut that thing you get to understand like there are real parts of this and that's you too, you know, and so it's all sinking in the reality and the gravity of the situation and. I get to the, the emergency room and I'm like, crap, I can't tell I'm making detonators. I'm like, oh, I had a reloading accident and the press blew up, you know, and all this stuff. Well, when I had the, the plastic surgery a couple, a couple of days later, the doctor goes, this looks just like a blasting cap wound, you know, and I was like, yeah, that's right. That's what it was, you know. And, uh, so he knew. And, uh, I remember the next day I had my hand all bandaged up and I had some of that compound left and I went to blow it up.

And my mom caught me and she goes, what the hell are you doing? I said, well, I'm, I'm getting rid of it. She goes, you're still doing it. I said, Mom, I said, it's what I do. And I, I thought about of all people because I, I don't drink, I don't play sports, there's a lot of things I'm just not, right? I'm not a sports man at all, but I thought of Michael Jordan, and I thought to myself, you know. If Michael Jordan had jumped up to make a hoop and landed and twisted his ankle really bad and said I'm done with that, you'd never know his name and I said I don't know where I'm headed. But chalk this down as one hell of a lesson and keep moving otherwise it was lost but if not it's a wonderful investment because you, you got to get out of jail free ticket, you know what I mean? And I got it and so I ran with it. And uh I made a business of it, you know, as I could, my parents could have said no more of this, you know, and blah blah blah, but, but we didn't do that. What, what, what exactly happened that made it go off? Like what did you do the right pressure that it was the pressure, yeah, and I wasn't thinking. I'd just been down by that girl, you know, and so my mind is somewhere else, and, and I was pushing on it, and it was about that much. That's all it takes, yeah, look, maybe a little friction in there. It just.

Boom, it's all it took you blew stuff up today so you see how quick that is well, imagine you're just living your life and that goes off next to you you're not even aware of it and so when somebody gets blown up and the explosion kills them. It sounds awful, but the truth is they never knew it. They never. They were walking and then they're probably the fastest, most painless way to go. Oh yeah, if you're nearing, if you're like actually in the explosion, not the shrapnel, but actually getting exploded. It, yeah, you, you don't feel a thing. It was an hour later and that, that I, I said this woman came in with these shots and I'm laying there and she's like, Give these shots in your butt, and I was like, What's that for? She goes, for the pain. I said, I don't really feel any pain. About that time I started feeling this throbbing. Getting louder and louder. I mean, give me the shot and I put my butt out there, you know, we, it's funny you say that about the shrapnel. We were changing the track on a skid steer. We're using a sledgehammer on this piece of steel and my employee, he, he hit that thing. And a piece of that steel shot off red hot right into my arm, and I went, oh, and I felt that immediately and burned. Went and got it X-rayed. I still got it in there. It's about the size of a 22 bullet right into my bicep, and when you put a big old strong magnet on it, my arm was comes up that I felt the explosion, no.

What was one of the first jobs you got for the entertainment industry? I mean, you've been working with explosives with, you know, the government and whatnot, but like when was the first time someone approached you? You're like, oh this is interesting, like a movie or entertainment, and can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean there, you know, there are some I can certainly talk about the, the first ones were, were YouTube. I would, I would say the first ones were YouTube. There were people that had found it and then we're talking. I mean we're talking 1517 years ago just YouTube's just getting going. YouTube's just getting going and there were kids a lot younger than me that did not have access to this stuff and one of them was called Gizmo Slip and Gizmo Slip would had a really great idea. He would buy the latest gizmo. iPhone, iPad, whatever, and he would show what it would take to destroy it. He'd be like, look, if you drop it from your table, will it be destroyed? And he'd dropped it off the table. Oh, it survived. What if it falls off the refrigerator? What if it falls off a 10 story building, that kind of thing. Then one of them he would do nothing to and then give it away to a viewer and then the, the one that he dropped a bunch of times, finally we would get rid of it some epic way, right? So.

We put dynamite on it, which the phone went away. I mean, it's it's still orbiting Earth, uh, so you know, things like that would happen, and I would never charge for that. It would, it's kind of a pay it, pay it forward or pay it back, however you wanna look at it. People were always good to me. There were all my friends are dead except, you know, John and Steve, a few people, but most of my friends are dead because when I was 15 to 20 years old, they were 65, 75 years old already. Pat Crawford was a guy that collected firearms, a great mentor. He's dead, you know, um, these people that, that taught me these things, you know, passed on. I kinda, kinda veered off right there. Sorry about that. You're good. Sometimes I, I take a, a track and I'm like, what the hell am I'm talking about Pet Crawford for? What are we talking about? Your media, like your first jobs in media. Well, you, you, you're, you're fine doing stuff for free because you're, you wanna pay it forward in the beginning, right? Yeah, yeah, and, and it's, it's, it's nothing. Some kid comes up they're like, I'm gonna blow a TV up. I'm gonna blow this up. It's nothing for me to do that. It's colossal for them. They don't have access to that. So if you have something that to someone else is just this ivory tower, but for you it's in your backyard every day.

Why would you not help them? Why would you not help them? So, so I started doing that and then, uh, I got little by little I, I, I, I moved on up. I, I remember one time in college I was late night studying and, and they had the the student access channel and I'm looking at that I'm like this sucks and so I contacted I'm like y'all wanna do something cool come blow stuff up with me now guys this was before I knew laws. And I had the damn Access Channel come out and record me doing all kinds of shit and and sure enough it made TV and I'm like wow this is so cool and I'm glad I didn't know now then what I know now I was like good lord you you can't do that but but I did it uh and then somewhere out there that footage still exists. What did you do that you should not have done? Well, I mean, you know, um. I was a little younger, you know, blowing stuff up. Probably shouldn't have been doing that, you know. A lot of people got pipe bomb stories and shouldn't be doing that, right? But, you don't know what you don't know, and I didn't have anybody ring me in at the time. We're doing it safely and respectful, but still there's laws that go around all this stuff, and that's what I try to tell the the young guys right away, like, look, you can do it all, but here's how you get started, you know, and then it, it just got a little bit bigger, and then.

It's funny how things happen all at once. Have you ever been thinking about something? And then and it's just a the things that you're like really want really bad that that shit ain't gonna happen that ain't how you pull it in it's it's like you flirt with it you wink and then you walk away, you have a little fleeting thought and then you get back to your life and lo and behold. Uh, best thing that ever happened to me are in a portaan. The, the phone calls and the portaans have always been the best. I'm in a sweaty ass portican and I get a phone call and this guy goes, Hey, we saw you helping people on YouTube, Zombie go boom, Gizmo slip, this kind of stuff. Uh, we'd like to do a TV show about you. And that we, we do dirty jobs and big tuna. I'm like, this is legit. This is Discovery Channel, you know. I'm like, yeah, OK. And then another production company comes in and they happen to be doing something about a neighbor down the road and he's like, Yeah, my neighbor could blow a car up for us. So I blew the car up, and I run my mouth a little bit. Next thing I know they're all in my laboratory filming me and then they proposed the show.

And then a third guy out of nowhere says, Hey, I heard about you from somebody else. I wanna do a documentary on you. And I'm like, Good lord, all three at once. Well, I had to pick one, so I picked the Discovery deal, and the other one was like, All right, but that one, the other one, them people were crying on the phone, and I felt bad to tell them no. But, uh, the, the woman was like, We're not as big as them, but we're gonna treat you better. And I was like. I get it. It's freaking Discovery Channel, and I'm gonna go with that now. There's a huge chance that your show will never make it on Discovery. 00 yeah, because they're gonna come in with this crew. They're gonna do all this preliminary stuff. I call it softening the beach. You got the battleship out there. You shell the shit out before you ever put troops on the beach. Well, they do the same thing in business. They're gonna do background. Checks they're gonna check with their attorneys they're gonna check with your neighbors, they're gonna check everything that you ain't a child molester that comes out later and then ruins their show, right? So they do all this stuff and then one day it just dawned on me I was like, you know, I really don't care if it makes it or not it's something a little voice, a little hand that's always been on my shoulder my whole life. That's why it'll happen. And I was just like quietly I knew.

It's gonna happen. I don't know where it's gonna go, but you're gonna be on TV, and sure enough they, they green lit it. They came in like 20-30 people, you know, Mike's and what do you wanna eat today? You know, it was, it was unbelievable experience for 3 months I had these people living on my farm, and we traveled to Puerto Rico. We went to West Virginia, we went to Georgia and blew stuff up and. Then they were flying me to LA to do, you know, talk over, but it was a reality TV show called Fire in the Hole came out in 2015. We filmed eight episodes. They only aired three of them, and then they had that presidential switch at Discovery, and he's like, I don't want the old shows and big swords or something was at the same time and they killed all that crap, but whatever, doesn't matter. The best experience of of the whole thing. And I know I'm off a little bit, but it's worth telling, is they used to send a limo to pick me up here at the farm and fly me to LA, and a limo would pick me up and take me to a movie set and prop me up, and they would do interviews, right? And if I said I want an In N-Out Burger, and I feel sorry for that poor bastards over there because they eat it all the time, but I don't get it. I said, I want some In N-Out Burger. They made everybody on set eating, and you could hear them all groan. Oh, and I was like, you don't have to make everybody eat that. They're like, No, whatever you want, that's what we're all eating. Good Lord, sorry guys. So we all ate In N-Out Burger.

And, and I, they flew me to LA, I don't know, 345 times something like that, and it was cool because I started getting noticed in airports. I walked through the airport and a guy coming, you on Discovery Channel and get my autograph, and I'd get a gas station on Interstate 10 in middle of nowhere and some guy would spot me and, uh, in the, in the show, look, look, reality. TV show ain't real, OK? It's just not. They, they gotta do stuff. They gotta soup it up now. The, the truth is far better than a lie, but a lot of my truths I, I can't tell, at least not yet. Maybe one day when I'm a real old fart, I'll tell some good damn stories and buckle in. When you're that old, you'll be willing to break the NDA's. Oh man, we're gonna bust it out. But, uh, no, I'm just kidding. I ain't gonna let it out. But, but you know there's personal stories too that are worth telling, but, but not yet. So anyway, uh. I, I come back in a limo. The limo was driving back to the farm, and I saw my family on the way in an old pickup truck to gather hay off a field. My mom and dad are driving, my wife and kids are in the back of the truck, and they're going to grab hay off the pasture, and I told the limo driver, I was like, stop right here. So we stopped and I got out of the limo. I crawled on the back of a truck and I went out to a field and I hauled hay.

And that was the neatest thing to go from being a guy that they picked up in a limo, flew you first class or something and they put you up and then you everybody gotta eat whatever you wanna eat, and then the next thing is you're right back in the back of a truck out in a farm field picking up hay. That was a wonderful experience to see both sides of that. Yeah, that's, uh, that's amazing. So they lived on your farm. Well, they, they said they would stay in town at the local hotels and then by 7:30 in the morning they're already, they had a camper out there on the farm, and they'd move in and start setting it up every day. And what kind of stuff were they filming? So they, they at first they wanted to follow what I do. And to give the industry it's credit, what I do takes a lot more time than they have and so they wanted to go back and recreate some stories that actually happened to me. One of the stories did happen we did find a bomb on a beach and we did blow it up right there and there was some interaction with the public. But we didn't drive it through town, San Juan, Puerto Rico like we did in the show. We didn't do that. You ain't gonna throw a bomb in the back of a truck and drive through San Juan, Puerto Rico. It just ain't gonna happen, OK? So there was some embellishments there, but, uh.

But for the most part we just we tried to track things that I did and they embellish it a little bit yeah. But you know it takes a long time to invent some things and, and they need a show coming out every I was paid every two weeks, you know, and you gotta have something else so. They can't just sit there and wait for you to get a phone call like, hey, we found a bomb somewhere. We need you to come do what you do best. So gotta fabricate a little bit. That's TV though. Is it still online? Can you go? I think you can go on Amazon and get it. Uh, I have the DVD set somewhere, but You know, maybe I'll watch it one day. I just kind of like my very, very built my whole business around it. Name a kid after it, Kelly's Heroes, that movie. Clint Eastwood said that's the one he watches. He goes, but the other movies I was in, I don't watch them, and I, I just don't. I like it. I'm glad we did it and kudos to them for what they did, but. I haven't watched it in a long time. So speaking of you getting called out to things because you're the expert, when we first started talking and kind of planning this, this day out on your property in this podcast.

There was a, a tragedy that had happened in, was it Tennessee and you were kind of the go to guy that they called to, to inspect that or to see what was going on. Was that, was that what happened? I'm really curious the story or if you know anything else about what had happened there that you're willing to share. Not at all, and I definitely wanna set the record straight on that because I don't, I'm not an, I'm, look man, I, I know what I know and I know my limitations, OK, uh, I know explosives, OK, and, and there's some things to know about them. But CNN contacted me to to talk about explosive plants, how they're set up, and just some general stuff because CNN called me right after it happened. Well, I just found out, so how do I know what happened, you know, like what happened there? You're like, I don't know it or what, but I could tell you some basic things how a plan is laid out for safety, what they produce, blah blah, because I knew these people. I knew of them, you know, I never, I never, well, I did deal direct with a couple of them. But it was really a somber day because 16 people ultimately lost their lives that day and uh and it hit hard and it, it, you know, it's, it's an emotional thing because when you work with this stuff you're always working with the dragon, you know, and, and when it gobbles you up it's not so much you, it's your family that gets a phone call it's them that feels the table shake and then look up and know that.

That probably was you and we know you were alive five minutes ago, but are you now? You know what I mean? And so my heart just melted and went out to the families and, and, and you know what? it really goes out to the people that run that company too because they're in a level of stress. I told you I like working out in the mornings listening to stoic poetry. I hope You know, I don't know what caused it. I don't know, and, and I'm not pointing fingers or anything because I don't know. I'd be a jackass if I did if, if I was pointing fingers because I don't know. But the burden they bear, no matter the reason. Is one you just never get over and it it it doesn't matter if it, it was, you know, somebody else's fault or whatever. That is such a somber thing. I mean I've recently gone through some, you know, legal stuff when you do business, man, you're gonna have it you're asking for, you're asking for difficulty you're not here because it's easy, right? And I've had things that keep me up some hard nights, man, hard nights where you learn the meaning of those those poems when they talk about trusting yourself and staying the course, but.

It really goes out to those people. So when CNN called me, I just said, hey, explosive plants are generally set up this way and this way and, and, and so that if something blows up here, it doesn't spread across the property, and it didn't. It they had one event blow up and the initial report was it was a lot, um. But that's all they did. They didn't call me to inspect anything. I'm not like some Superman in the explosive world, and I certainly don't wanna piss off the guys out there who are the true explosive real guru experts, you know, I'm not, I'm not ever gonna claim to be that, uh, but if you wanna talk about some basic explosive stuff, I'm, I'll, I'll talk with you. Nice. So I guess that does bear the question then, like how are plants set up for safety so that things like this, like these terrible atrocities, I guess don't, don't come to be. Yeah, it's, uh, so when you work with, with radiation, I, I worked a little while in the oil and gas industry as a wireline engineer, and when you have a, a radioactive source, you protect yourself with time, distance, and shielding. So time on target very little you don't wanna be there long distance, get away from it and shielding put something between you and it, OK? I don't like radiation because it could be cooking and you don't even know it thank God at least the explosives if, if you're still here it didn't go right? So but with explosives when you set up a plant you would do the same thing.

You would limit the amount of time that any one person is near the material that that's gotta be functional specific like they're there because they're performing a function and they're gone they're not on their cell phone twiddling while something's mixing right now if they have to be there to manage it you gotta be there to manage it that that's that's all there is but you wouldn't have somebody there any more than you have to be. Distance you spread everything out. The storage depot is very far away from a processing plant that's very far away from where it's put into a device and it's very far away from where it's packaged. OK, these things are spread out. Yeah, I noticed all your storage containers for your explosives are all pretty like those big white boxes are all pretty far apart. Yes, that's, that's actually to a, to a code put out by the federal government, uh, for citing a magazine. And so then they're shielding and oftentimes that's an earthen burn. It's concrete barricades with dirt in between it. It's something to stop debris and high speed particles from penetrating and going into the next building. So you really use the same time distance shielding time on time on a process as little as possible, spread things out and then barricade things so they're protected.

And and that's how every explosive plant from the first powder mill and the brandy wine with Thomas Jefferson to make our own powder was set up. I mean with DuPont it was, uh, DuPont was our gunpowder manufacturer for the Revolutionary War and Jefferson and all those guys were like hey man, you make some pretty good powder so they, they set up this mill on the brandy one and every, you know, I'm sure it was a little less safe back then but same principle spread it out. Yeah, don't blow shit up, I'm curious. Tell everybody what room we're sitting in right now, because they maybe we haven't even told them what what we're doing in this room and what this room is. Well, I like to shoot, um, and I've acquired a lot of firearms over the years. I'd, I'd say that's an understatement. Well, it actually is because for all the folks in Colorado County this is a pitiful little collection. Believe it or not, people just don't get it. I, I grew up going to people's houses and guns falling out the damn hot refrigerator and behind the couch and everywhere else. We just got guns down here. I mean, everywhere that, you know, you look at the average, it says there's, uh, so many guns per person in the United States. Well, that's condensed in the Southern states. They hold the sharehold of it, OK.

I mean, I, I, I do have a few. I wanna say my, I got one friend that's got 200 actually I've got multiple friends that have 200+ firearms. Uh, I don't know how many guns I've got. Do you have, do you have any favorite guns from like, like, like your top three that you just love? Yeah, I do. I, you know, I've just acquired these things over the years and that German Luger over there was passed down from my grandfather to my dad and it's got the weight, the date of his, uh, wedding on the inside of the grip. And then it has the date of my wedding on the inside of it and then when my first son gets married, he'll get his, uh, he'll get his date inscribed in there and then he can keep the tradition going. So this, uh, 9 millimeter parabellum, uh, Luger 1921, it's actually pre-Nazi Germany, but the magazine we took and had a, had a guy take a look at it. This is some SS magazine. I think it's got a little swastika or something on it.

In there. So it's got a little bit of history with it. I'm not really sure if it was a police gun. Uh, my grandfather got it because he ran a sawmill. And the guy couldn't pay his debt and so he offered this as payment and my grandfather was always a wheeler dealer and my dad told him he said don't get rid of that one and so he kept it for dad and then I would say, uh, it was my grandfather's 30 caliber carbine and simply because of the history it's got it's traveled with him all over the country when he would make his runs getting silver coins and buying treasures and stuff that was his, his little rifle that would ride along with him. And uh after that, I don't know. I, I figured that M79 grenade launcher kind of takes the cake because who doesn't want a thumper. And then you're Tommy, we got a chance to shoot your Tommy gun, yeah, and that that's owned by my company, so that's not a transferable, um, but the Tommy gun holds a special place in my heart because of Kelly's Heroes, the movie that I built my business around. I mean if you watch that movie, it's OK. There's two ways to watch that movie entertainment and then a business model.

If you watch it as a business model, it tells you everything you need to know. What do you, what do you mean exactly? Well, have you seen the movie? I can't, and I can't remember all the time. It's like 1970. Telly Savalla, Donald Sutherland, Don Rickles, and Kelly and, uh, Clint Eastwood. The, the story goes they're, uh. They're, they're just soldiers fighting a war, right? And there's one evening they're getting shelled, they're at this farm in France somewhere and Kelly had snuck into, uh, the German community near him and taken one of the German officers prisoner. And what these guys want to do is they said, look, we're about to get 3 days off the front line. We're gonna have a break, OK? We want a town, and in their words, we want a town with hot baths and broads and fine restaurants, OK? So get some fat sausage chewing wino German over there and bring him in here and interrogate him and find out where the best town is we can go to when we got our 3 days off. So they get this guy over there and he's, he's opening his briefcase and there's papers and he's getting the guy drunk. He's giving him brandy. He's like, get drunk so he'll talk, you know, because he don't want to give up the other Germans. And so in the bottom of this thing is what looks like a lead bar and he goes, what is this? And he goes, lead bars and he's like, for what? He goes, you know, to throw in the water in case I was captured, but it was handcuffed to me, so you got it.

Kelly scratches it and it's gold, and he gets the guy a little bit drunker and he's like, Colonel, why don't you tell me about these gold bars? and he goes, they're in a bank and he's like, yeah, where? And about this time the shelling is getting heavier and the other troops are coming in they're like, hey, Kelly, we gotta go. And why are you giving this guy a good brandy, you know, he's like, y'all go on. I'll be there. They're like, German 88s are coming out. We gotta get the hell out. He's like, Go, I'll catch up. And he keeps talking to this guy and he says, Where are they at? He goes, It's in a bank 30 miles behind lines, German territory. He says, uh, well, how many are there? He goes, 14. He goes, 14. What? He says, 14,000, 14,000 gold bars. So Kelly's like. Shit, we're going to get that gold. So he goes to the guys and he starts telling, he tells his, his, his sergeant Big Joe Telly Sabala, he, he tells him about it and he's like, Cut that shit out. You get these guys thinking about gold and they're gonna go get their, their head shot off for nothing. And, well, he tells the team about it and they're all like, Hey, we're in. But then they start leaking it. They need a mortar barrage. Well, there's this dude that runs the mortars, but he ain't on time or on target any time. His name's Mulligan.

And so they go to him and they're like, look, we need you to lay down a barrage at this crossroad at this time. And he goes, Sure, I need the orders. And I go, Well, that's the thing. There ain't no orders. He goes, Well, I can't do that. And he goes, Well, here's the proposition. He gives him one of those gold bars. OK, got that set. Well then he's talking to another guy and he goes, Hey, I'm the investor in this. Uh, that's crap game, uh, Don Rickles. He goes, I'm going with you. About that time, Donald Sutherland sets up and in World War II they portrayed him as a hippie, so he's this hippie tank commander got 3 Sherman tanks, and he goes, You could use some armor for this mission. So he joins in and so now you have this motley crew with one goal at the end of the line and it's robbing a bank behind enemy lines in a state of confusion and this is where I introduce another great movie called Duck You Sucker. Quentin Tarantino drew a lot from this Duck You Sucker. And also it has a double name called Fistful of Dynamite and there's a beautiful scene in there where they're about to blow a bank and the guy is sitting there and he's he's taping the dynamite up and there's a damn revolution going on the street they're in a coffee shop there's like bullets going on and everything and and he goes, you're gonna blow the bank right now? He goes yeah he goes in the middle of this there's people shooting in the street, he says in a state of confusion, a man who knows what he wants stands a good chance of getting it, and that is so damn true and so if you look at a lot of industries.

Buddy, they're so damn regulated and convoluted and everybody fighting for a piece of the pie. Nobody knows what the hell's going on and there was a, a, a TV show called All in the Family. And, uh, Carroll O'Connor was the character and he played the general in Kelly's Heroes and they hear these guys on the radio and he goes, what, what, what's going on? And so he's listening to this and they're under fire and he's like, where are they at? And then they said, Nancy, he goes, Give me a map around here. He said, that's 30 miles beyond the line. We, I didn't know we had a unit over there. And so he's getting wind that they broke through the lines and finally he's listening and one of them comes on the radio and goes, uh, Kelly, this here is the gravedigger. Uh, we're coming up the rear over there and he goes. Did you ever hear enthusiasm like that in all your life? He said, they even got the damn grave diggers out there. He said, You're the one supposed to be fighting this war. You don't even know where the hell it is. He said, it's 30 miles beyond where you thought it was. Get my medals. And so he's running in there to give them medals, but they're trying to rob a bank. Well, at the end of the deal, they get to the, they have a big shootout in town. There's one tiger tank guarding this bank, and there's this iconic scene.

Where the three of them are walking down this road and that tiger tank lowers that barrel right on them and they walk right up to it and it's German and they picked the perfect guy to play this German guy, blonde hair sliced across his face, he gets out and they go, cigarette, no smoking, the fuel is all over the place, you know, and uh. Telly Savalas goes, Hey, listen, Mac, he said, uh, about a half an hour the whole American army is gonna be coming down this road. So how about you do yourself a big fat favor, huh, get the hell out of here. And he goes, You the American army, and Donald Sutherland, the hippie, he goes, No, baby, we ain't. And Kelly says, Think of us as a private enterprise operation and uh. Don Rickles said, hey, he goes, hey, before you go talk to him, he said, make him a deal. He said, What do you mean make him a deal? he said maybe he's a Republican, make him a deal deal. And so they walk up and they say, uh, Kelly says. Do you know what's in that bank? He says there's 14,000 bars of gold in that bank, baby, and you see his eyes get real big and he says, and all you have to do to have an equal share of this is turn that turd around and blow a hole in that door and then it shows that door and it blows all the hell and they run in there and they get the gold and they split it all up and, and oddball, he buys the damn Sherman. I mean, he buys the Tiger tank.

From the German and the uniforms and his, his guy is looking at him. He goes, his mechanic was Moriarty, he never has any positive waves. He goes, oddball to trade for the uniforms. I can understand, he said, but to buy this tank you gotta be crazy. He goes, it's a Mother Beautiful tank. He says it's a piece of chunk, you know, but he spent his money on a tiger tank which. I would have bought the tiger tank too, but in truth, we all know they just would have shot the German and blown the doors open, but the movie was fun because of the unlikely people they pulled to accomplish a goal that was a pretty gray area. You're robbing a bank, but it's a Nazi bank. We can all get behind blowing up the Nazis is all right. You're still robbing a bank and they probably stole that gold and it belongs to somebody else, but if we don't think about it that way. If you look at it as I'm gonna put together a team and I have a goal and I have a mission. Nothing's gonna be easy and Mulligan ain't never gonna be on time or our target and there's gonna be people watching you that are rooting for you but for the wrong reason but you're gonna have that one tight little unit and you know what you're doing and when you strike out to do a company, a business, anything you're gonna have some dark days, dark, dark days where you, your shit just is falling in on you and that's when you remember it's an adventure.

And, and, and, and, and when I hit my low moments, man? I remember I'm like this is the adventure, this is, you know, there was a scene in Kelly's Heroes where someone got blown up by land mines and they're all sad about their buddies, so you hit those moments, but we're moving on. I remember in one scene of it, the guy's whining to Kelly, I didn't know we were going to carry all this stuff, and he says, Why don't you remember what's at, why don't you quit your bitching and remember what's at the end of the line? And I tell myself that all the time. Why don't you quit your bitching and remember what's at the end of the line. What, what is the the, the adventure you're on right now? Like you've achieved all these different things, you know, you have your explosive company, but is it? You know your property in West Texas and bringing people out there or what's the next main adventure and the people you're bringing along to achieve that? Yeah, well, I, I'd say there's there's, so life is a grand adventure for sure and at the end of it you go on the best adventure because we're gonna cross over one day and that's a hell of an adventure, uh, so, so how this turns out to, to reach a point where I feel like I am full of life and I really lived.

That's my adventure, but there's so many side adventures. West Texas is a property that I wanna develop, and I'm doing the whole Kelly's Heroes thing. I've got people out there. I've got a ranch manager that runs the physical part of it. He's an ex-Marine. Very capable man, and I wanna, I wanna see what his interests are and kind of bring him on with that. And then Kat Silva, she runs Port of Soul. And she is like the ranch manager when it comes to events and so I'm watching her grow and cultivate and massage that thing. And it truly is an adventure because we don't know. Where it's gonna go, I would love to open that place up for 10 to 12 guests to come out for like a 3 day event where we, we bring out some entrepreneurial guest speakers. We have some fun challenges using, using the tank, machine guns and explosives, land navigation, desert survival, the whole bit, and then at night have the, the chili and the steaks and the campfire and the camaraderie, uh, where people go away from it saying.

Uh, you know, I got the clear direction because here's the thing, you don't know what you don't know. And I take for granted the way I've been brought up. I've had a lot of support. I've had a lot of good people in my life and I have a hard time understanding that other people don't, but they don't and to come to a place where people are where they wanna be, which is one of the best ways to be successful, is to find a mentor that's where you wanna be and reach out to them and talk to them. To find some human being that's in the flesh that has done it, not showing off, not but solid, done it, OK. And hang out with them and have them spend quality time with you. To just listen to you and then offer encouragement, advice to get where you wanna go, uh, I think that would have true value and that would make me feel like I'm adding value to it ultimately the ultimate value is where are you going with your life and where do you go after. But there's so many things that that we tend to skip over.

And there's actually a verse in the Bible that says while, while exercise is good for the body, uh, the spirit Christ is good for the soul, right? But don't neglect the body. And, and so many people do, they just jump right over it and, and they're out of shape and they're pathetic and they, they can't do a push up and they can't run a mile and all these things and I'm like there's a lot of things here that while we're on these lofty subjects we forgot the basics and so I would love to get some people out to West Texas and you know whoever you are, whatever life you come from, whatever your beliefs are, you come out there and we just, we talk about the basic truths that are that will lead you to success. And encourage people to be the best version of themselves. That, that would be a great adventure. And what's it gonna be? You know, Kat does women's retreats out there. Our ladies' retreats and these ladies, they have a great time and I have a great time. Kelly Hines, a good buddy of mine, and he also is, is upcoming. He started K-36 consulting and he teaches people, uh, handgun classes. He is a wonderful instructor. I'm not a great teacher. I'm not, uh, I, I, I maybe a great.

Promoter and maybe I encourage, but when it comes down to taking the time to show you the mechanics of something he has the patience, he has the voice he's calm, he's he's confident. Let him do it, you know, and Cat, she knows how to provide. She knows the good food, how to, how to give it that edge that just makes it flow, and you feel like, well, I'm being taken care of here. This is a home cooked meal. This is heart and soul being put in this. Let her do it. Let her make the money. You, the way I look at that out there is I don't wanna make a whole bunch of money off them the first two events. I wanna be making mailbox money from them 15 years from now, and I wanna see them be millionaires with whatever they do. That, so that's an adventure and I remember being in Boy Scouts. They'd say going on high adventure and as a kid I figured it out. A lot of that stuff ain't adventure. Look, going on a ride in AstroWorld, that, that dates me for the tour that down AstroWorld, that ain't an adventure. An adventure has to have 3 things, and I figured this out as a kid. You have to have a clear goal. Number 1, you have to have a very clear obstacle. There's got to be something in the way.

And number 3, there has to be a true and clear danger. I don't mean perceived danger. I mean your ass falls off that rock, you're gone. That's an adventure you have a goal you have an obstacle and you have a very clear danger blowing up getting shot, falling, getting eaten by a damn shark in the ocean, something being at sea with a storm. And you might die. You might not, and you're gonna live a life worth living. That's similar to the Japanese misogi. You know about that in, uh, in ancient Japan they had something called the misogi where the warriors would do this once a year, usually at the end of the year, and the misogi kind of fits into your definition of adventure, and it was some kind of task or feat that you would have to accomplish as a way to like. Bring in this new year as like a celebration of the last and preparing yourself for the new year and you have it one of the rules is it has to have about a fifty-fifty chance of survival and so you'd have to do this misogi every year to remember that life is hard essentially and to and to prepare yourself for the.

For the difficulty of the year ahead and for battle and for everything else. So it could be something as like standing under a raging waterfall for for 12 hours, and having it beat on you. Like that was one that they would do where, um, you know, getting into shark infested waters and achieving some kind of goal, like you have to get something from the, from the floor of the sea floor, like something that's extremely difficult with about a 50/50 chance of survival. So yeah, an adventure is exactly how I would, how I would call it. Yeah, that that'd be an adventure. I like my goal to be. I like to throw a treasure in there, you know, like I, I don't do rock climbing. That's one of the things I don't like. I've done it a little bit in Alaska. I strapped on the ropes and went up some, some, you know, as far as the rock climbers out there, some baby shit, OK, but, but I don't like it. When I, when I was little, my dad tore down and then rebuilt this oil derrick, a 100 ft oil tower, and he wanted to put an observation house and play music up there and watch sunsets. He's, he's eccentric, right? And he'd make me climb up that thing as a kid, a little kid, and he would, he would just let, I mean, I'm not tethered to shit. I'm just climbing this ladder 100 ft in the air and he's just like this going along with me and I'm, I'm in there.

I don't know if I would do that. I don't know if I'd buy my son dynamite at 14, you know, but. Thank God they did, but, uh. That I think instills a lot of, a lot of important skill set, but, but I do do some rock climbing and things if I think there's an Indian cave that nobody's looked in a long time or if I think there's a treasure up there, I'm like. Saddle up buckaroo because we're gonna ride because I wanna see what's in there. I love the idea of seeing something that that nobody's seen in a long time. I find arrowheads at the creek and before I touch them. I think The last time, more than likely the last time that a human touched this was 12,000 years ago, maybe 2000, maybe 400, I don't know, but when I touched that it's a direct connection to them and man that's cool. That's treasure, you know, fun and stuff like that. You probably find a lot of that in West Texas. I, I find a lot right here. Oh yeah, we're sitting on an Indian, probably about 8000 people lived right here at one time when we, when we built this shop and the bulldozer scraped the ground. There was burn spots from the fire. In fact, there's a micro desert back here in the woods where they burned so many fires and so hot for so many years that to this day.

Normal stuff doesn't even grow there and I asked the guy, I'm like, why is it cactus and rock back here in the middle of this forest? he said, look at the rock chippings and it's all these chippings of their tools and stuff because they, they burned they had fire there forever and I guess it burned all the seeds up or something. It changed it. It's different, uh, in West Texas I do find that I found some drawings on the rock. I have found campsites where they broke their rocks are still sitting there where they broke them away and they're making stuff and there's old charcoal there it is still there. In fact, when I find those rocks. I don't touch it so that I can show everybody just like I found a mosasaur laying on the ground the bones are on top of the ground with jaw and teeth and everything, and, and I let this museum come and dig some of those dinosaurs up, but that one you ain't touching because I wanna be able to bring people to it and show it to them laying right on the ground for many years. Yeah, I wanna describe a little bit about this West Texas property because you know it's not based on what a little bit you told us it's not a typical like retreat center. It's set up in such a cool way. I mean, I, I wanna, I I wanna go out there and check it out. I've been to West Texas a couple times, but.

You know, the stars out there and how you had everything set up is, uh, sounds amazing and just before you go in is, you know, one thing I truly resonate with what you said is, you know, you just go sit up in the mountains in the desert for an hour and that's one way you kind of get clarity and reconnected and I think. You know that's super important and that's a place you could definitely do it. Oh yeah. Oh, you can do it and I'm fortunate enough that there's a creek that runs through there called Terlinga Creek and so sometimes I have this area I call it the bathtubs. It's a limestone creek bottom with, with pools that always has water and that water's cold because it's, it's touching that rock that goes thousands of feet in the ground, so it's sucking the heat out of it, OK. And uh I do go back there and and there's there's 3 types of terrain there there's rolling hill with scrubby stuff and there's canyons and you could be in Colorado or New Mexico in there you can't tell where you're at and then there's what I call the Gobi Desert which is just flat it's like there's more vegetation on this tabletop than back there, OK, but down in that canyon.

You know, and this, this sounds a little funny, and there may be some people out there that they'd be like, well, I don't know about all that, but, you know, I'll go back there and man, I'll strip butt naked and I'll get in that water. Now there ain't nobody around. If I saw somebody, I'll tell them to go and get because my land, they ain't supposed to be there, but I have a 100 ft sheer cliff wall that goes around this thing. I don't want this to come off the wrong way, it's not a brag. But to to be butt naked out there the way you were made and to sit in that cold water and just let everything slow down. And then get out and go lay on that smooth warm rock. The sun is shining and you look at that that massive wall of rock. I, I'm, it's, it's big, you know, and there's mountains around and to know that everything you can see you own. Temporarily by the laws of man on the paperwork you own it the truth is you don't know nothing you're passing through, but you for a time are a steward.

Of that land. And I don't have the words for what that does to you and I think that's why I'm drawn to buy more and more land. Yes, I blow things up and yes, I shoot, but do not make the misconception that I'm some redneck just blowing refrigerators all over the place and shooting every animal that runs and. That ain't me. I have designated areas we do shoot and we blow stuff up, but the larger the buffer I can get to to keep people away from being hurt, but also to preserve that land, the better and my goal is a 255 to 30,000 acre ranch that's, I'm saying it publicly right now I proclaim it that's where I'm headed. I'm gonna own that kind of land one day and uh you know I'm closing up on 2000 acres now and, and, and this ranch goes that's actually pretty small, but uh. That land out there did something to me the first time I saw it when when I was looking at buying land in the West.

I went online and I found this place and I wanted the cheapest land possible. I was gonna blow airplanes and buses up for the FBI. That was my goal. I was gonna build a business model where you could do a, a post blast investigation area, you know, you blow it up, they come out, we clean it all up, and we do it again, right? But when I saw this land I I grew up in Texas my whole life, but when I went west I skipped it. I flew over that crap and went to New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado. And when I went out there, I saw a dinosaur laying on the ground. And I said no one has touched this and I'll be damned if I'm gonna desecrate it. So what I did is I made a road and you can see where I drive on Google Earth, you can see where you drive because those tracks from General Patton training out in, in Blythe, California in the 40s, they're still there today. So be careful where you drive in the desert. So I made one area to drive. I made one area to shoot and blow stuff up and the rest of that, you gotta walk it. I got a buddy of mine. He goes, I'd have a trail over here and a trail over there and I'm like, nope. We're gonna walk it, you know, and uh.

It does something to you and when you sit still it takes, you know, 20-30 minutes you calm down, you're clearing your head and you're just present with the wind blowing and the dove cooing and the dove, if, if you were in prison but you could hear a dove cooing outside, oh you're good, you can go anywhere you want. That is so peaceful. And uh that's where I get things straight. I got a lot of things in my life falling through and stuff doesn't work and and things that I'm just real shortcoming on and some I've succeeded and. And I just, you kind of look at it for what it is, you don't, don't worry about the ego here and there and you just put it together. And you think about OK what's my next step to keep going the direction I wanna go and it's it's funny how it just whispers to you. And then you almost feel like it's time to get up and go it's the most gentle thing. And sounds hippie as hell, but, and that's one reason I like hot springs. I like to go to hot springs and relax and talk, I think. We come from nature and when we reattuned to nature it doesn't sound hippie at all. I mean it it just it makes it just you isn't it funny that we are banned? I was talking to my wife about this the other day. I said, you realize if you got butt ass naked the way you were born and came into this earth and.

Walk down the street you'd be arrested, but that's what you are literally you have to cover this up to to be legal. I think that's so funny, man, because in a lot of people they can't they can't break the sexuality away from it and it's such a shame because. Uh, sex is a function like anything else, and it's a, it's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. It's not just humans, it's all of nature, everything, but it's not everything. Walking naked in the sunshine is not sexual to me at all, but damn, it just feel good, it's just natural. It's just leftover Puritan crap from when religion and state were so interconnected, which they still kind of are, but when it was ran by religion and nudity was seen as lewd. Then now you gotta cover you up. It's indecent and to be fair, a lot of the people that you see nude, it is, it's it's sexually branded, you know. So when you see it nude, that's what it is, it's sexually branded, but it would be nice to see like you're, you're not illegal without your clothes. I'm not saying I'm gonna go walk to Walmart, my wiener hanging out, but, but you would.

Is what you're saying you would with this Tommy gun in just open carrying with your wiener out, you know, I don't know, in another world that it would be nice, yeah, but it, but it would never be perceived that way. So no, I mean when you're out there, I imagine once you spent 34 days out on that land and then you get naked. Like with people that are with you, it's probably not weird at all because it would just make sense at that point. Like if you're hanging out, you know, in the city and you do it and you're like, hey guys, come in my backyard and we're gonna cold plunge in my bathtub naked. You're like, what is this guy doing? Now it's good. Yeah, now it's good. I've spent a week in nature naked and It was amazing, yeah, and you're, you're like, you're free, right? And when you come back to society and put clothes on, that is the most foreign feeling in the world. And to your point, it is like, why am I, what is unnatural about this? Why am I having to put on this denim? What the fuck is denim for? Yeah, clothes are protection. What am I protecting myself from? It's 70 degrees today. There's no reason to put on clothes. Protecting myself from people seeing my dick.

Who cares? Yeah, yeah, it's not hard. Relax. No, yeah, and, well, in the desert, you know, there are thorns. That's true. I wanna keep it from that, but I don't know. It, it's, and, and it, it, it, for the record, uh, if you come out to a retreat at our camp, I ain't gonna step out but naked. I, I'm not getting naked on you. It's not the ladies' retreat. It's. Welcome to the, welcome to the ladies' retreat. My name's gonna be naked. OK, damn. Well, Kat's gonna call me up, you son of bitch, and they all backed out. You scared them all off. You scared them off, but you'll have a couple of stragglers at stake. Yeah, maybe so. No, there's people that get it, you know. I had a, I, I collect really cool people in my life like Kelly's heroes, you know, these oddballs. One day I had somebody reach out. We run a, uh, we run a campground down in our Kelly's corner, we call it down at the creek. And it's, it's definitely a hippie scene. It's got the wood burning hot tub. It's got the pizza oven built Western style with the earth, and it's got a tree house. And when you go past that, that, that bamboo fence, I ain't coming down there. So do what you want, you know. Many times I've gone to get somebody to sign the release and they, they show up butt ass naked and, well, I eyes only, right? But anyway, one day I get this inquiry.

Guy goes, Hey, is it private down there? Yeah, it's private. That dude must have asked me 4 or 5 times if it was private. I said, exactly. And I said, Look, man, what do you wanna do? He said, Look, I'm gonna level with you. I'm a, I'm a photographer, and I'm bringing out a fairly well known nude model, and I just, we just don't want people sneaking in on it. I said, Brother, I'm the closest one, and I'm half a mile away. I said, so. Don't worry about it, I said. However, I'm a huge fan of the arts, so let me open the whole entire property to you and you do what you want. So he shows up, the model gets there. She's from Canada. She comes in my lab and she sees my rocks and my, so I was working with some plants at the time and she, uh, she was all into it. She goes, we gotta talk more. I'm here to work. I'll be back in touch, right? You just know sometimes that that ain't the last time you're gonna see somebody, so she goes, they do their thing, they leave and you know it's funny because we all took the kids to a soccer game and we're driving back in the van and I could see her butt ass naked in a pecan tree down there and, and, uh, the kids are just like, well, it's dad, you know, it's just dad's got funny farm out here and uh so anyway.

About a year later she reached out to me she says, hey, I'm dating a guy in Houston and I've booked some photo shoots and I wanna I wanna use your farm and these photographers will come out and they'll pay you and they'll do the photography shoot, but my boyfriend and I wanna stay in your tree house. I was like, yeah, sure, of course. She comes out. I, I get the, uh, the flowers and everything ready because it's got romantic things. So I'm gonna put on the dog for him. I got everything ready, firewood, the whole bit. I take them down there. I'm showing them around and I noticed that this guy just walks off and. I'm I'm telling you where the bathroom is, you know, where to go, and he just leaves and it's just me and her talking, OK, whatever. So anyway, I explain everything to him. I leave. Well, Going to eat my dinner and about 20 minutes I look and I got a message on my phone. It says, uh, what, what are you doing? You know, I wanna bring him up and show him the shop and everything and then then I'd missed that that message and the next one says, hey, it's getting late we're just gonna go back and catch you tomorrow. Cool, good night. Next morning I get up about 6 a.m., go to my lab. I'm gonna do my exercises.

And I see this guy's car fly by. And I'm like, damn, he's in a hurry to get some donuts. I figured he's going to town and get some breakfast, you know. So I work out, I get my day started, checking my emails. My employees come in and, and my employee, he runs down to the range and he calls me. He goes, Hey, there's, there's something weird down here. He goes, the gate's open. There's like a bag on the ground with some stuff scattered, and, uh, he's like, You know what's going on? I said, man, that's pretty odd. I'm like they've had like 4 hours now to come back. So I drive down there and it was a weird, it looked like somebody left in a hurry, but I don't have any messages saying something was wrong. So I go down there and knock on that tree house down at the bottom. I didn't go up to the top. And she comes to the door closed and she says, Oh, did you see that? I'm like, Well, yeah, I saw him leave but what do you mean? She goes, he left. I'll never see him again. I said, keep in mind she's from Canada. She flew here. She got a week and then she got to get back to Canada, and that dude was her ride and I said, What do you mean you ain't gonna see him again? I said, he went to get breakfast, didn't he? She goes, No, we broke up.

I said, so you're just in my tree house. For how long? and she goes, well I got a week here. I said no, you're gonna move into the lab you're gonna you're gonna be part of the family you know and uh. She said that he told her the energy was very strong there and he, he accused her of like wanting to, you know, walk up and, and see me, uh, up at the house or something. She's like, no, I'm going to take a piss, you know, and his dog was always following her and he got upset about that and. There's nothing between me and this girl. She's really cool. It's a nude model, but I actually made it a point. I've never seen her other than far, far away. But if I knew she was doing something, I didn't go there, you know. She was in the outdoor shower one time and needed towels and stuff, and I just set it by the thing and walked away, you know, I just, you know, not doing it. Anyway, for a week we became good buddies, you know, she told me her whole story, everything she'd been through and how she was progressing and her goals, and she's a very spiritual person, and she said I do this thing where if you lay down it's not Reiki.

She goes, but your body will talk to me, and I said, you know, to tell you the truth, I have, I have that spina bifida issue and my, my bowels don't move like they should. It's kind of embarrassing. I can't feel my ass, and I'll be talking to a bunch of ladies one day and I'll fart right in front of them, and it's so damn embarrassing, but I can't feel it. It just, it just sucks. And I can't feel sometimes when I gotta go to the bathroom #2, and that's embarrassing and I told her I said I got issues with this and she said well lay down so I lay down and she's. And I played the game. I'm, I mean, I'm open. I'm not gonna be a skeptic. What the hell do I know? I've only been here 44 years and I learn something every day, so I don't know. So she starts putting her hand on my chest and my stomach and she goes, it, it wants attention. And then she starts talking to my organs and she's like, Now you need to talk to them. Now I don't know what she did. But for the next 2 months. I could go to the bathroom. Everything float like it should. That is the truth. Now it slowed down after that and probably ought to have that done again, but, uh, the people you meet running an Airbnb is is phenomenal and I don't know how we even got off on that, but that's a cool story.

I just love how open minded you are to letting people just run with what they're good at and just kind of backing them and then just being open to like an experience like that you're just open to everything. Well, I, I'm not so open that my brain falls out on the floor. I mean, I, I have logic. I have my gut and I listen to my gut. Somebody was asking, are you logic? are you feeling? I work off feeling a lot a lot of people would say that's not good. But that I'm not talking about the airy fairy feeling I'm talking about that gut that knows the truth that knows the patterns and the systems of the world it's ingrained in my DNA probably from generations it has DNA memory. I listen to that because it speaks through people and beyond their words and you can feel things and and I try to shift it that way. I got stung a few times, but. Yeah, I'm open. I, I mean, come at me with something. Just because you don't, because you believe something I don't believe is no reason for me to be rude to you, no reason for me to not listen to you.

Let's have a, a great conversation and you tell me your whole thing and I'm not even gonna have an argument and try to win you. Even I'm gonna dig into why you believe it. I'm gonna ask, well, have with it and, and I may hear something be like, Well, I don't believe that because of this, but. I don't need to bring that up right now. You know what I'm learning at 44 that's a superpower and you guys are doing it is the listening, the ability to listen, and it, and it's, it is a very dynamic thing, and, and I, I'll just say it again for the podcast even though I told you earlier I looked around at, at reality and you have two ears, two nostrils. You got 2 hands, you got 2 eyes and 2 ft, and you got 1 mouth. You got a pee hole and a poop hole, but that's for getting rid of the crap, right? But if you look at that system. You were designed. To listen and do twice as much as you speak. And I don't think that's by accident.

We have an amazing processor between these two ears, it's phenomenal, but if you don't load it with information, if you don't give it the time to receive what comes out really ain't worth much. And so I used to run my mouth a lot when I was younger. But now I try to listen and having my friend Beth you met Beth Beth loves to talk and and she's got stuff to say. But when we first became buddies, we were chatterboxes and most people are like croaking frogs and just waiting for you to shut up so I can say what I wanna say. But when you calm it down and you just let somebody talk they tell you more than what they're saying they're telling your hopes, dreams fears direction where they're going where they've been they're telling you a lot of stuff that you start to soak like a sponge and you don't need to respond and.

The final frontier is and has always been within. It's not space it ain't some Western horizon even though I love to go to both of them that'd be cool, but the true final frontier is within it's always been that way. I think the ancients knew that they, they, they went in they spent a lot of time going in right? so. When you're quiet and you don't need to respond. That's when you start to grow and, and that's to the point we were talking about haters and hateful comments you get on social media. Those people aren't even aware. To shut up and listen, they're reactive. They're reactive. They're reactive over garbage. Let's say I did say something stupid, you know, when a camera's on you, you make mistakes. There's there. I could be telling you about the clothes I'm wearing, but the camera's running. There's a little pressure, and I call them breeches or pants or shorts or whatever. I screw it up, some comment, Oh, you're so stupid, really like. And, and this message is to them.

It's a good thing you're out there because you are the grit that sharpens the blade, OK? So, so kudos to you. But the message to you would be. Be quiet. Let the idiots let me be the idiot let idiots be idiots and observe and then reflect on yourself and see the idiocy in yourself and allow other people to sharpen that blade and it's very coarse in the beginning and it does not feel good it's not comfortable, but in time you will say more with less. And when you say something it has the weight of experience with observation, now you have a gift to give back. But until that you just uh uh you're just a clanging gong. Exactly. Yeah, that's how I feel like when we make these episodes. I just know there's plenty of times I fuck it up. I just, I can like feel it. You feel it right then. Oh yeah, like, and I just keep moving forward, right? And we'd get funny ass comments sometimes, right? And we just rip on them a little bit, but I don't even like you said.

I know where I'm going and I'm just, I'm just gonna fucking go forward and there's gonna be all kinds of criticisms and people saying stuff and. You know, it's like, sure, yeah, the only way forward is messy. It's you try to perfect the path forward, you're not gonna go anywhere. You gotta, you gotta have a sloppy copy of first draft. You gotta just fall forward all, I mean, that's how babies learn to walk, right? It's not. It's not like they just can't walk and then one day they walk, they get up and they fall on their face, and then the next time they fall on their face again. And then the next time instead of falling on their face, they put 1 ft in front of it and they're like, oh, cool, I didn't fall on my face. But then they fall on their face. And then they finally do that enough times as they figure out, oh, I can put a foot in front of the other one. And that's. The same philosophy you just gotta fuck it up a lot. That's the perfect analogy, and I've used that one before because what do babies do when they fall down and they get back up. There is no ego that they're worried about.

And that's what we've gotten away from. They don't care what they look like. No, you have a goal and you're working on something and you were so locked in that all these comments, all this crap floating around, is just chatter. It's just dust in the wind because you're headed to something and, and, you know, uh, I listened to Jordan Peterson said something about, uh, being the fool today, the master tomorrow. And I take encouragement from that because everything comes with a price and just know that if you feel like you're you've been paying the dues, there's the other side of that it's like today this coin drops and you are the clown, you're the fool, but the laws of nature dictate that if you're doing that the other side of that is tomorrow's master and that's something to take encouragement in. Yeah you're never going to be a master unless you're willing to be a fool in the beginning. There's no way you're gonna come right out of the gate and do it well, yeah, and that, that needs to be told to our youth. Like kids need to know that. I, I, I have seen it many times where a young kid is wanting to do something and they'll, they don't have direction, so they just lock on to the success of this person, the success of that person. Oh, I, I wanna be a brain surgeon. Oh, I wanna be a pilot. Oh, I wanna be an explosives guy.

It's like calm down. All those trees took hundreds of years to grow from that seed. Why do you think you're any different? Calm down and enjoy today the growth that you have to put in it, and one day you will be, and you have to give up this fantasy land of being all these things and choose something that really aligns with you and, and water it and fertilize it and grow in that direction because I've seen what they become when they don't. And it's not pretty, it's grown men. Who've missed the ship and they're floundering at sea and are they still salvageable? I would say yes. But they have to completely humble themselves and acknowledge that they missed the ship. If they admit that up until now it's a pile of dog shit. But from here on out I can begin to grow and, and I think they would rapidly catch up because they're adults at this point, uh, but when they just, oh, you, you're this, I'm gonna be that oh you're, I'm gonna be that I'm gonna be that, and then they try to get on Instagram and show the flashy fancy things and show this persona of somebody that's made it.

You're not watering that tree, you're just trying to get that, that quick bush right there that that withers quickly. I'll tell you one thing I kinda hesitate on. I don't, I don't ever wanna come across, and if I've come across this way, I, I, I just know that I don't like that I come across this way, but I, I have a cool car. I got an army tank, bought my wife an airplane, got a ranch, OK? Those things do not make me who I am, and I do not count them as my identity. These firearms, they're cool, hands down, love them, think it's great. I don't worship them they're just things I don't think that I'm a better man because I got a big gun. I don't think that having a gun makes me some badass, uh, what makes you quality or the quality of your thoughts, the internal side to yourself so that's the encouragement that I would put out there to to young people growing up don't think that these things are ever gonna make you.

They're gonna be the fruit, they're gonna be the signs that you're moving somewhere, but if you make them your god, if you make them your goal, they're gonna leave you hollow, cold. Empty and lost And I don't ever want to come across as flinging like, first of all, let's be honest. Elon Musk is, is putting people in space and building badass rocket ships, OK, so the bar has been set for somebody that does some pretty bling bling stuff, OK? Put a car in space. So me driving around in my little kit car Cobra ain't really a flex compared to him. Well, if I'm not trumping him. Ain't drumming nobody so the car's cool and I wanna share it with my friends because I like it. I enjoy to drive it, but it's not a status symbol it's just a, it's a cool story and it's a fun car. That's all it is. You know, one thing that was a pleasant surprise about coming here today was, you know, you have your preconceived notions of what's going to happen, and you have an idea. It's like, ah, cool, we're gonna go see the explosions guy, we're gonna blow stuff up, we're gonna shoot guns, and they're like, hey, like, you know, even driving a tank, super fun.

And that's all the surface level excitement stuff that we got to do, and it makes for great videos and great content. But the really pleasant surprise that I did not anticipate today was How philosophical the day became and. The level of wisdom that you carry, you know, it's easy to think, oh, he's just a, yeah, he's a redneck shooting guns out in the, out in the, in the Texas sun, right? But there's so much depth to you as well in terms of the stories you have, the wisdom you carry, and most importantly, the way you're able to articulate it in such a clear and direct way. That that I just wanna give you kudos for that because that was an unexpected thing today that I'm actually taking away a lot more from that than getting to ride in a tank. I appreciate that and, in my head it's kind of a spaghetti mess, so I'm glad you understand what I'm saying because I was like damn it, I hope this is getting out, but thank you. Super inspiring like the way, yeah, exactly what you're saying, Tony, like the way you lived the pieces between actually doing.

You know, shooting guns and blowing stuff up. You know your life philosophy and listening to poetry in the morning, why that's important to you, you know, uh, reading and working out first thing in the morning and the deep reasons why you're doing that, seeing how your families are running around, kids are, you know, coming in and showing us the cool shit they built and whatnot, and it's like that that that was that was a gold and hopefully, you know, people are listening to this we've created a vlog of us filming throughout the day and you can hopefully. Feel some of that, right? And so. Yeah, I hope all people can feel that experience that Tony was to be able to experience and that we would be able to experience as well. I, I'm glad you, you felt that. I really am because I don't, you know, this is the unknown adventure. I don't have the words. A good friend of mine put it one way, he said, when Matt talks. I don't know what he said, but I know what he meant, and it's because we communicate far more with something that is unspoken you can feel it.

I don't know what it is. But I know it's real. And when I started going to hot springs the first time, the, the water, Lord, it was loaded with lithium. And if we just put lithium in the water and everybody's drinking water, the crime would fall through the floor. I don't know why we don't. We need to put lithium in the drinking. You don't know about lithium. No, no, I'll be dang. Give us a lithium master class. This is a fun guy podcast, right? So you guys should know about lithium. I didn't know either. Tonapaw Hot Springs, Tonapaw, Arizona, little backwater side thing on Interstate 10. You drive right by and never notice it, except there's a bunch of bamboo growing in the bald ass desert. And the reason that bamboo's growing there is there's a natural hot spring flowing up. And they got an area in there where not only is it clothing optional, but you can't wear clothes, it's banned, you go naked and it was my first one and I wasn't used to that. What's that. Camera. Oh, so I didn't know what to expect and this old hippie guy, you know, he's like, just nobody allows clothes in here and I'm like, good lord, eyes only, right? So I go in there, I sit in this water, it feels amazing. It, it makes your skin feel soft, but after about 30-40 minutes.

You notice something, the chatter in your head. It's quiet. You hear the birds, you notice the wind. You're not thinking anymore about work and problems and things, right? You're just calming down. Now, I didn't know what was happening. Well, I ended up spending about 12 hours in that water and I don't have enough time. We'll do another podcast on, on this because there, there's all kinds of naked people coming and going and talking to me and uh I mean every walk of life and I saw it all. And I was very calm by the end of that to the point that I got out and I drove into the desert and I found a little hill out there and it was a cave and I crawled up in there and I got on my phone and I, I called up people I hadn't talked to in a long time and I just said, hey, how you doing? Ain't heard from you in a while. You good? I just want you to know I love you. And, and they're like laughing, you know, they're like, well I'm good, sounds like you're doing good. And I thought it was funny because in that cave were pock marks from 20 millimeter rounds when the military trained out there in World War II, so even that serene setting was the evidence of training for the other side of humanity, right? So it's always present.

So then I, I went back to the hot spring. And uh I, I got back in the water and then and I didn't plan on spending the night but it was getting late and I'm gonna spend the night so I thought I was gonna sleep in my truck and this hippie dude, he says, hey man, he said, here's a blanket you can sleep on that bench over there. So he gives me this blanket. I roll up like a burrito in it. Well, about 4 or 5 in the morning. Some hippie dude comes up and grabs that blanket and rolls me out like a burrito and takes the damn blanket. I mean violently. What an asshole. So now I'm sitting there and it's in the desert in October, so I'm just shivering. Well, what are you gonna do? I go back in the water, sit in the hot water, then the cleaning crew comes in about 6 o'clock and they drain the tub, so I gotta play musical tubs while they're scrubbing them. I get back in and then the day starts and more people start coming and I spent until 2-3 o'clock that next day. And I got so damn high. My life changed completely changed, and I went and looked it up and it was the lithium you, your skin is one of your biggest organ I guess your biggest organ, and it will absorb a little bit of that lithium and I started doing some research and lithium is used in patients with.

Schizophrenia, um. Something I, I, I'm not really sure what it is. They're violent tendencies and stuff they use it to calm them down and you can take it internally. To a certain point, I think you can OD on it. But I was getting some of it in my system through this, and I'm already a, a, a nonviolent guy, but the way I described it was a traffic cop gets in your head. And brings this thought in you have that thought blows the whistle and the next thought comes in you have that thought and you get your next thought and they're all lined up and they function there's not all this crap at once it's lined up and so when I built my little hippie campground down there, I got some lithium carbonate and I had a little bit to the water for the campers so they can have the lithium experience, you know, uh, but then I started researching around the country places that have high lithium content they're drinking water, it's found in the ground. Uh, their crime is to the floor. It's almost nonexistent's Austin's lithium numbers? I don't know. I'm curious, uh, that would be a good question. It's typically more out west than east. It's gonna be where you have a lot of geologic activity, bringing those minerals up close and those thermal springs.

Um, I don't know. I think in out West Texas, uh, some water comes up in my neighbor's well, about 120 degrees. It's hot, and they had lithium, and it was so much that they were having trouble with the animals. It was too much. Animals were too chill, too, too chill, or maybe they're having birth defects or something like drinking it that quantity is not a good thing, but soaking in it. You're not gonna get enough to have an OD on it. It's just enough to chill you out. So we should replace the fluoride in the drinking water with lithium. We, we definitely need some lithium, yeah, yeah, and probably getting the fluoride out if LeBron's, you know, it's, that's one double-edged swords. It's done good things, but also, shit, it's rat poison, you know, uh, yeah, lithium is, is, I think, a good thing. It's interesting. I'll have to look into that more because I, I briefly saw an article I came across that they were talking about that for people who are developing like Alzheimer's. They're recently starting to study, so I think you're on to something and I'd be, I'd be curious, yeah, what is happening and to what amounts you can.

Bring into your body and. And soaking in it like what, what it's doing. I don't think you can soak so much that you get too much lithium. I just, I don't, I think I read somewhere where you're not gonna soak that much in. But after about 20 to 30 minutes of soaking in it, you start to feel that relaxed effect. And if you do what I did, I mean, hell, you know, freaking 2 days in water, I'm still high from it, you know, I'm just chill. I, I say it changed my life. I bought the hot springs book there. And I, I really love to go on a hot spring trip where I go out to Arizona, New Mexico, and, and you'll see a little dot and it's a treasure hunt. It literally says start at this trail, hike 8 miles, you'll see this red rock turn left there, go 100 ft down by the river and look for steam, and you go find them in nature, and it looks like Disney set it up. There's a hole in a rock that Moses poked and there's just a stream of water coming out and uh, and the hippies built a little rock pool right there and you just, you sit there and soak in it. And it's very therapeutic and this is a book that you can buy that'll guide you to these places.

Oh yeah, yeah it's very, I mean there's so many books. The one I bought was, uh, Hot Springs and Pools of the Southwest, and then they have one of the Northwest. I went to some in Alaska and they're in Hawaii. Um, they're all around the world, anywhere, and, and see my background's chemistry, explosives, chemistry is broad and when I started getting into this stuff I really started falling in love with geology. And at coming at geology from a chemistry standpoint you understand these processes and it's so much more fascinating it's it it's quite a little mind adventure. Man, yeah, speaking of adventure, today was a massive adventure and ending it with a podcast, I think was the right move, yeah, uh. I just want to say thank you so much for having us out here. I mean, this was an incredible day and. We'll take, I'll, I'll, I'll be processing a lot of this, uh, I think for days and weeks to come, and I hope people that are listening to this and watching, I mean, I wanna keep recording with you, but I wanna also be respectful. We'll definitely have to come back. I think we need to just go to West Texas and then do it out there. 100%. We'll spend some time out there and maybe on the like the last day.

When we're like fresh and whatnot, we can just let it rip again. I'll tell you what will be awesome. Bring your gear, we'll go to that flat desert area out there and you're gonna need a generator or a battery pack or something. Very often there are lights out there in the sky. You cannot explain. I've captured them with time lapse photography and all the stars behind them look just great, but that thing, that orb is a combination of like five different colored lights spinning. I'm not drunk. I'm not high. I'm not crazy, and many people see them and I retreat. It's almost just like there they are again. We go to that back desert area, it already looks like a lunar landscape. So you have this really cool thing in the golden hour, the sun's going down, we're set up with tables in our gear. And we conduct the podcast out there and then if those things show up, capture them. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. I love it. Yeah, yeah, I love it. Yeah. Well, Matt, thank you so much for having us out to your property today, taking us around, giving us the tour, sitting down and talking with us and sharing your story and your philosophy with us, and I can't wait for episode 2 and round 2.

OK, well, I love it. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. And before we go, what are all the ways people can come hang out with you, connect, come out to the ranch, your Airbnbs, you know, just. So the, the ranch would be Portoso Ranch.com. How do you spell that? Uh, it's uh Brazilian. It's P O R D O S O L Porto Soul Ranch dot com. Uh, you go to my Instagram, Matt explode stuff and you can look and there's links to all of this. And you know I'm not running like Christmas specials on dynamite or anything so I really don't have that for the general public, but we are having a, a career day class. It's December 19th through December 20th. And ballistic high speed is gonna be there. These guys are well known on YouTube. I think a million plus followers. They're coming out with these awesome cameras. They're gonna be there where we teach about the rules and regulations, the do's and don'ts of the explosive industry. We're gonna give demonstrations of products used in the various industries, and if you wanna sign up for that, go to Matt explodestuff.

And send me a message if you can't find it, but my manager Lauren should have it up there. There's a link of an Eventbrite. You can book a ticket. We're only accepting 15 people, and, uh, it's gonna be a great time. On Friday you come out, we're gonna find out what your interests are, and on Saturday we're gonna cater the class to you, and you're gonna get to meet the ballistic high speed guys, and then they're gonna stay a couple days after, and we're gonna get some really cool footage. That's awesome. Yeah, cool. All right, brother, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hell yeah. All right, that's a wrap. We did it. That's a wrap, my friend.