What Went Wrong With America? - Tim Kennedy - #753

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tim Kennedy. He's a Special Forces Master Sergeant, former professional UFC fighter and an author. There is a lot of doomerism in the world, assumptions that things are terrible and they're never going to get better. I don't agree, and neither does Tim. Expect to learn how we can fix the American military's recruitment problem, Tim's firsthand experience of what's really going on at the southern border, the wild stories of unknown military heroes that we should know more about, how Tim plans to fix the current education system, the state of veteran mental health, the best preparation routine every tourist needs to know before traveling, and much more. Tim is a very particular type of tool. He is a very blunt object and a very sharp object. And even though you don't necessarily need to agree with his methods, I do think that it is important to have people like that who can tell us about what war zones are actually like. I think it's very important for us to have people like that on our side, because there are definitely individuals like that on the opposition side. So, yes, lots of interesting insights today. Great stories. And I appreciate Tim. I do appreciate his sacrifices and his efforts and his honesty. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Kennedy.
77% of US 17 to 24 year olds could not join the military. The American Department of Defense recently did an analysis of 17 to 24 year olds and found that 77% were unqualified to serve in the military, due mostly to obesity, drug abuse, physical health or mental health. Almost half were disqualified for more than one of those reasons.

**Tim Kennedy** (2:00)
Yeah, this is, when we talk about strategic level issues, like national security problems, anybody looking at that number, from the SEAL teams to the Green Berets to Ranger, those select their populations from a larger general population from combat arms. Combat arms gets their people from this larger population of people. So like, as the arrowhead gets a little bit more narrow, the availability of people to fund these small groups to these middle size groups to these potentially larger groups are just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. This is, we're going to lose to everybody if this trend continues. We just can't, we can't win wars with the bodies that we have.

**Chris Williamson** (2:49)
Because the catchment area of the normal people feeds into the catchment area of the normal soldiers, feeds into the catchment area of the semi-elite, into the absolutely elite. And if the bottom rung of the ladder, which is population is bad, that trickles all the way up to the very top.

**Tim Kennedy** (3:03)
Yeah, the Department of Defense is always a parallel. It's just a reflection of what society is at large, right? When you look at society at large right now, they are just that. They are very large. They're obese, they're gelatinous blobs of broken minds. They don't know if they're a boy or a girl. They definitely have never jumped out of a tree before. So when they go to airborne school and they land on a static line jump and they break both their legs, it's because they've never done it before.
You and I grew up chasing kids and smacking each other with sticks, and this generation hasn't done that. So they're just weaker in every form of the word. I know every generation says this, but right now statistically, we've never had a data point to point to, to show that it has ever been this bad. So now I know the World War II guys were like, those Vietnam guys are a bunch of pussies, and the Vietnam guys are like, oh man, those G Watt guys are a bunch of pussies. And the G Watt guys are like, man, all these millennials and Gen Z's are a bunch of like, but they really are. But this is a real big problem, and we don't know how to fix it.

**Chris Williamson** (4:09)
How much do you lay at the feet of the population with this? Because lots of people probably would like to be fitter if they knew what that would feel like. They would like to have better mental health if they knew what that would feel like. But they weren't aware, they weren't given the tools, there are distractions and environmental issues, technology, screens, social media, porn, video games, all of these things are relatively new inventions that didn't have to be contended with by World War II or Vietnam or even early millennials. So how do you think about it, sort of individual agency versus environmental stimulus and restrictions and stuff?