[00:00:01] Luke: Jesse Elder.

[00:00:02] Jesse: Luke Storey.

[00:00:03] Luke: This one's been a long time coming.

[00:00:05] Jesse: It really has.

[00:00:06] Luke: And I was so happy when you knocked on the door because we're good friends and therefore this is much less work for me. Not that it's ever really work in the truest sense. Any construction worker listening will be like, "Yeah, you don't do real work anyway."

[00:00:23] But there is a certain amount of energy that goes into meeting someone for the first time and building rapport and feeling into them and getting their vibe and ensuring that I can create the most impactful conversation. With you, I already know you, so it's just like, oh, we're just hanging out like we would any other day.

[00:00:40] Jesse: It's just like recording one of our normal  conversations.

[00:00:43] Luke: Exactly. Which brings me to the first thing I want to cover with you. And that is-- which could take five or six hours in and of itself and isn't even the topic really, but is the idea of time. And I know this is something you play with a lot. You're the time piercer. You have this mystic sort of time ninja perspective that I find really interesting.

[00:01:09] So first I'm going to give you my cartoonish, Flintstonian understanding of the fact that there's no time. The way I look at it is like this, and it's best done on a blackboard. So those watching the video, you'll see my hand movements. The rest of you just imagine this.

[00:01:28] So there's a line that is perpendicular to the ground. So there's a line, horizontal line, and on one end is infinity and on the other end is infinity. What I perceive to be the now is one spot where I stop on that line. And it seems like there's the time of now because the perception of my senses is only able to perceive that particular moment. And so I would call that the now, being in the now.

[00:02:06] And then without knowing better, I would look at 10 years ago as somewhere that has to come from memory that doesn't exist anymore or the future on the other side of the line as a fantasy of what I believe might happen. But in reality, that infinite line that has no beginning and no end is all one eternal moment.

[00:02:31] Jesse: Yes.

[00:02:32] Luke: And when I look at life that way, it becomes much more fun and less serious and gives me access to go into the past and reconcile things that I felt before were locked away in some realm of memory and also makes my future seem more malleable and at the whim of my creativity.

[00:03:00] Jesse: I think that last part especially is really useful. Because I think most of us look at the future as this completely unknown thing and the best you can do is extrapolate past experiences into the future and then avoid the past painful experiences if they come up again and do the best to replicate the positive ones in some way that ties in with our dreams.

[00:03:28] But it's too whimsical for a lot of people, or they go hyper logical and they're just trying to plan for every single possible way and then they just get over scripted and end up missing all these cues on what might actually be good for them. And I love the way that you said it about this continuum of infinity.

[00:03:48] When I first started playing around with this and I just kept asking questions, the big things that came up for me were memory and imagination. If time is made of three things, past, present, and future, and only one of them is verifiable, which is, as you said, the now, then you can only have a memory now and you can only imagine the future now.

[00:04:14] So really, past and future also only exist now. So then there's like, shit, okay, then neither of those is real except now. So I started to think about it this way. This localized experience of consciousness that we're having, this sensory, physically located experience of life, we're here in your home and we're on these cool chairs and we've got these clothes and we've got these bodies.

[00:04:45] So this is a concentrated experience of consciousness. But is that the only part of reality that our consciousness can experience? And I would say that it's not. Because, again, this is completely anecdotal and this is probably poetic license more than anything that can be scientifically verified right now, but we're the user having the user experience and this body is like an app. It's like an interface within the OS of this time and space, this dimension.

[00:05:20] But we've all had the experience of being on our laptop or on our computer or on our phone and it's like you're typing to somebody but you're listening to a song while you're watching your crypto or whatever, and you're getting incoming messages. You, the user, are having all of these experiences simultaneously. And it can be overwhelming, but it's also very enriching because you're having all these experiences tied together that are part of your life experience. And yet you're only experiencing them on just this one screen.

[00:05:53] But each of those applications, Spotify or SoundCloud or Telegram or whatever, they are siloed experiences that don't have anything to do with each other. If Telegram had a consciousness, it wouldn't be like, oh, I'm operating with SoundCloud right now.

[00:06:10] It's just siloed experience that only at the level of the user are then joined in this sensory thing. All that to say it just started to make sense to me that if we do have a soul that's the ultimate operator of this consciousness, would that soul be limited to this time and this place? Probably not. So if the soul isn't bound by time the way that we are in this dimension, then that means it could access all of the localized experiences at once and be just having all these tabs open like, whoa.

[00:06:47] Luke: Through multitudes of avatars.

[00:06:48] Jesse: Infinite avatars. Even avatars that are this consciousness like Luke Storey has a lot of past Luke's, the one that you lived, all the perceptions of all the actual memories that you've got, the experiences you've had, but also parallel memories.

[00:07:07] There's a lot of other ways that it could have gone that you're here. And then the future, just fractals out even more. So I think all of those exist and that higher self, or that oversoul, or whatever people want to call it, is observing and experiencing all of them simultaneously, and it's just enriching the user experience of the soul.

[00:07:30] Luke: This brings me to another realization/conundrum that has really broken my mind. And that is-- I don't know why exactly because I wasn't raised in any dogmatic belief system that was inclusive of reincarnation, but it's just something I don't remember when I first became aware of the concept, but I was just always on board with it. Like, well, yeah, duh.

[00:08:00] And some of it has to do with some of the spiritual teachings from which I've benefited and it seems to fit in the model, the Vedic worldview and so on. But I'm not one of those people that has had many past life experiences or memories with the exception of one occasion, but I feel like I've been here before.

[00:08:20] I feel like I've known people that I'm here with, especially Alyson. This is not our first rodeo. There's just no way. But what trips me out about that is when I try to reconcile what I also feel is true, that there really is no time. There is no past, now, and future. There's just one big eternity. Then the idea of a past life would be negated and it would just be another life that's also happening in the eternal now.

[00:08:53] Jesse: This is good.

[00:08:54] Luke: So it's not like my soul incarnated in 1432 and lived in Greece. And then fast forward time that doesn't exist and now there's a Luke Storey that exists from 1970 until now is that the eternal soul, to your point, is experiencing all of these avatar lifetimes in one simultaneous eternal now. I don't even know what to do with that.

[00:09:19] It just makes my head explode because the logical part of me wants to create a linear sequence, not only of this lifetime, because that's a lot to manage in and of itself, but it wants to create a linear experience of multitudes of lifetimes through the model of reincarnation.

[00:09:37] Jesse: Do you know the term ethnocentricity? It's the bias--

[00:09:43] Luke: I've heard the word.

[00:09:44] Jesse: Towards the best. So like somebody grows up in, I don't know, they grew up in Mississippi and they're Southern Baptist and they were just like, "That is the best religion." Well, why? Because I'm in it. It's like, why would I be in something that's not the best? Or like Americans are like, "America, have you traveled?" Well, yeah, I went to Cancun one weekend. It's like, mm.

[00:10:08] So how do you know America is the best? Well, because look at it. But it's that bias of ethnocentricity, the tendency to believe that where we are is the best possible thing. Otherwise, why would we be here? And I think what you just said made me think of that because we're here right now and we want to believe that this is it. We're here. I've reached the ultimate. Or I'm learning my lessons, and that other thing isn't there anymore.

[00:10:36] But there's no proof that it's not there. Just because I can't see my truck parked outside, I'm pretty sure it's there, but I don't know for sure that it's there. But if I were to be looking at a satellite view or drone view of the house, I could clearly see, oh, these guys are inside and the truck is there. So it just comes down to perspective, I think. And we don't have that perspective from inside of this brain and inside of these senses other than to conceptualize.

[00:11:06] But we tend to carry that conceptualization of time and try and make it fit into a place or non-place where time doesn't exist in the same way. And that's when our brains break a little bit. And that's why I stopped-- probably when I was 20 years old, I stopped asking what's true and I just started asking what's useful.

[00:11:27] Is this a useful belief for me to have? Cool. Game on. I don't need to be able to convince anybody, even in all of my teaching and all my courses and clients and everything. This is a description of what I found useful. This is not a prescription of what you should believe. And that in itself seems to be useful.

[00:11:48] Luke: What do you find in terms of the value of being willing to let go of these tightly held concepts around time?

[00:12:00] Jesse: Yeah, they do--

[00:12:01] Luke: This is something that I fight with a lot because I really struggle with calendars, clocks, dates. I'm just having a hard time my whole life just wrestling my persona as who I am into that system. And then you throw in daylight savings and time zones and I'm just like, "I'm on the wrong planet."

[00:12:27] Jesse: It's all purely arbitrary.

[00:12:29] Luke: And some people have a very easy time just adapting to that system. So I really struggle with it. And I feel like the looser I get with the attachment to the ideas we're discussing, just throw the whole thing out and create one endless eternity, it makes it even worse because then I have to fight even harder. Okay, I got to really come down and get granular here to operate and start a podcast when Jesse walks through the door and not be out in the backyard meditating or something.

[00:13:01] Jesse: The way that's made the most sense to me and why I continue to explore this is especially related to the future, because if the future is completely unwritten and if we're using the old or the common model of, let me take all my known past experiences and try and do the best I can in the future, man, there's so many variables, the stuff that hasn't been invented yet for us, beliefs that aren't widely known.

[00:13:32] The 80% of the stuff that runs my life today, I had no clue about five years ago or 10 years ago. So based on my current beliefs, current skills, current confidence levels, current relationships, for me to assume that I know what the ideal future is based on all of these knowns, that just doesn't make sense to me.

[00:13:55] But what started to make sense to me is when I got really curious about like, what is imagination? And I had some bonker experiences that were real enough for me to trust and detest, and one of the things that I started to understand is that if all of these selves are operating simultaneously, if you go up, I don't know, a dimension, if you go up a little bit and you see that all of these Lukes and all of these Jesses are having their experience in one ultimate time field, but from this place, it's just one time field at a time, but you can access the other ones through memory or imagination, that means that us today-- you could remember the last time we hung out.

[00:14:44] Or maybe more usefully, you could remember a time when you were a kid and it was a Saturday afternoon and you were just laying on the grass and looking at the clouds and seeing if you could change the cloud shape with your mind and all this. You could go back to a specific memory.

[00:15:01] And I believe that that kid could imagine his future and could imagine, well, I wonder what I'll be like when I'm like in my 50s. That imagination of that kid and the lived experience of the man today is the same thought. It's the same idea. The man today is living that.

[00:15:25] So it's a denser idea because it's in sight and sound and touch. That kid back then could only envision it and maybe feel it. But what if it's the same idea? And then I started to think about just the thought energy, which nobody knows what it is, but it's obviously something. And it can't just be a chemical file that's stored in your brain.

[00:15:49] How do you account for intuition? You're a musician and you know what it feels like when you get in the pocket and all of a sudden something just starts happening that you don't know where it's coming from, but it's coming and you're just on along for the ride. Where's that coming from? Yes, it might be a composite creation of influences, but any musician, any artist knows that there's just this thing that happens and you're just there. It just happens.

[00:16:17] Luke: I'm experiencing a lot of that writing this book I'm working on.

[00:16:20] Jesse: Mm. Yeah. So this is where--

[00:16:23] Luke: It's so fun.

[00:16:24] Jesse: It's super fun.

[00:16:25] Luke: It's fun to watch whatever the muse is use my fingers to write a book.

[00:16:33] Jesse: And to me, this is what's so fascinating.

[00:16:35] Luke: It also removes a lot of the fear and self-judgment because I'm like, "I'm not doing it. It's not me."

[00:16:40] Jesse: Right. It wouldn't be there without you.

[00:16:42] Luke: I'm the vessel through which it's going and it has my imprint, but I'm not forcing an idea of a sentence or a concept or paragraph to come to fruition. I'm turning the rudder a little bit, and I know what direction I'm going, but the wind is going to have the velocity that the wind has. And then I end up in some destination. Well, how did I get here? All I did was just turn the rudder.

[00:17:07] Jesse: So that was a perfect setup because if thought energy, for lack of a better term, is omnipresent, it's this field, just like these phones. If my phone's on airplane mode, all I can play are the songs that are already loaded on the phone, which is maybe 100 different tracks and musical pieces and voice memos, but I can't access all the tracks on SoundCloud or all the songs on Spotify or all the videos on Youtube because that's in the cloud.

[00:17:39] But where's the cloud? It's here. So if I take the phone off airplane mode, all of a sudden I can access every single song on the Internet because the phone is not the container. It's a conduit. All those songs already exist. Take that idea or take that example and then just think about if thought energy, that is all thought that has ever been thought can be thought, is possible to be thought, if that operates as a cloud where all of these thoughts exist, then our brains, our minds, our bodies, if we're not on airplane mode and we can start accessing those thoughts, then what if the version of you that has already written that song or already written that book is looking at the finished product going, "Fuck. Yeah, this is good."

[00:18:36] And in that moment of just intense presence of completion, that thought is so potent. It's like a beacon. It emits something. And then here you are else when, like you're over in your now, and he's in his now in what for you would be the future and to him, you are the past. And what if he's thinking about you going, "Bro, you got to see this thing. This thing is epic."

[00:19:07] And you're tapping into that same energy that he's in and you're getting the ideas and the words just start flowing and now you're in that thing. Well, what if you're being remembered by your future self? And what if that's what imagination is? What if imagination is when you're being remembered by your future self? Dude, it changes everything.

[00:19:31] Luke: Right. Yeah. That's a very interesting take on the idea of manifestation, where it's like this idea that you're drawing the experience that you want to yourself. When I intuit it-- the experience is pulling you to it because it already exists.

[00:19:54] Jesse: It already exists. And here's where--

[00:19:57] Luke: It's like you have to create something. The thing is created. It's just not in material manifest form.

[00:20:02] Jesse: Right. It's like 0.001% of the manifestation is the physical reality. Everything else is the frequency. And then it just forms into the physical form of the established frequency, the established thought form. And I think we'll get into it today, but one of the biggest crimes that's happened in the last couple hundred years is a complete removal of discretionary time for children.

[00:20:29] They're so controlled. Their time is controlled. They're under surveillance and observation constantly. There's so many absolutely sinister things that happen, and I'm not talking about adrenochrome and all of that. Literally observable things that are happening to destroy intuition, to destroy individuality, to destroy free thinking.

[00:20:51] And so if a child somehow manages to either survive that or avoid it altogether, then I think you stay in that childlike place where-- like when we were kids, there's no healthy child anywhere that plans out their play and optimizes for efficiency. It's like you have to--

[00:21:12] Luke: I'm going on the monkey bars for 15 minutes then transition into soccer ball.

[00:21:16] Jesse: And then I'm going to test that compared to last Friday and see which performed better. You don't do that because you're present and you're just following your heart and your flow and doing what feels fun to you. So the process of creation or creativity, I began to experience that when I would consciously give love and attention and appreciation to past versions of myself, especially, and you got to be a little bit tranced out to do this, like alpha, theta, or a softer meditative state.

[00:21:47] But if you can go back to just before a really intense experience happened-- I used to fight in the early '90s when UFC first came out. So hardly anybody knew what  jujitsu was. I was fortunate enough to have been training and learning from the Gracies and from my instructor who trained with them. So I knew more  jujitsu than anybody else in these fights. And it was such an unfair advantage because nobody else knew anything.

[00:22:19] So I started fighting in these no holds barred fights at this club in San Antonio, this nightclub, and it was no rules, no time limit, no weight limit, and no safety equipment. So literally like bare knuckle. You couldn't bite, you couldn't eye gouge, and you couldn't fish hook. But if you want to elbow the dude in the back of the head, go for it.

[00:22:40] If you want to punch him in the nuts, you can do that too. Nothing was off limits. And I realized I have to do this because I've been teaching martial arts since I was 15, taekwondo, but I'd never actually been tested in the real world. And this is as close as you could get. So I fought, and I had 11 fights that year.

[00:23:02] I won nine and I lost two. And one of the fights that I lost the dude was about 30 pounds heavier, just bad ass kickboxer, but he had coated his body in baby oil to prevent me from grappling. It worked, and I could not get a hold of that dude. I ate so many punches in this 15-minute match, and I ended up going to the hospital. I had a collapsed lung, and I had a concussion. It was pretty messed up.

[00:23:33] And the reason I share all that because that night in the hospital was so intense and it was so devastating at the time. I'm 20 years old. This is the fight of my life. I thought I was going to win some prize money to open my karate school, and now who knows how many thousands of dollars in medical debt. I don't have insurance. I just got my ass kicked. All my students are probably going to quit. Who wants to train with a loser?

[00:24:01] All that was going on. Plus, I already had very low self esteem, and I was questioning my purpose in life, and so this was the thing that was supposed to propel me. I remember laying in the hospital bed that night, looking up at these glaring hospital lights and just asking myself, like, "How am I doing?"

[00:24:20] And the answer that came back was, "I'm fine." I was like, "Who's the me that just got his ass kicked and who's the me that's fine?" And dude, it was like cosmic Google just opened up, and here's all this information. It's like you have a body, but you're not your body. And I'm like, "What am I then?" And I'm looking at the hospital lights and all of a sudden it hits me.

[00:24:44] That light is illuminated because there's electricity flowing through it. But if you hit the switch and the electricity withdraws from the bulb, the bulb goes dark, but it's the exact same molecular composition. It's the same weight. It's everything. It's just not illuminated. But nothing happens to the energy.

[00:25:03] And I got it. I was like, "Oh, these bodies, they're light bulbs." They're just lit up with this energy, and we call that alive. And then at some point, the energy withdraws and the bulb goes dark and we call that dead. But nothing happened to the electricity, man. Nothing happened to the energy. It still retains itself.

[00:25:25] It still knows what it is. It's just not in that body anymore. And I never was really afraid of death, but I could not take death seriously after that. I just completely stopped believing in it. I'm like, "It's a scam." Don't fall for it.

[00:25:37] Luke: How old were you?

[00:25:38] Jesse: 20.

[00:25:39] Luke: 20.

[00:25:40] Jesse: So in going back and revisiting that night in the weeks afterwards, because even back then I had a sense that I don't want to absorb some trauma of like, oh, I want to avoid martial arts, or that's dangerous. I'm like, "That's how your world gets small, man." I want my world to get bigger from this experience.

[00:25:57] So I had multiple journaling, meditation session, many things over the next couple of months until I reached the point where I was not only okay that the experience happened. I was glad it happened. To reach the point that I'll get emotional talking about. Man, I have so much love for that dude for doing what he felt he needed to do in order to win the match to help me have such a leading-edge experience that became the raw fuel for self-definition and understanding what this dimension is.

[00:26:34] I would not have gotten it if not for that guy. So in all that work of going back and seeing what else could this have happened for, I began to develop a relationship with me in that moment and then the me that was in the hospital bed. And it wasn't until years later when I started to understand or explore this whole time piercing thing.

[00:26:57] When I was in that hospital bed asking these questions, what if I'm the one that was answering? So I began to develop this circular relationship with my past self, and then I started to experience that, if that's the case, and I can't prove that it is and you can't prove that it's not, if the insights that I was getting were from some version of me in the future that had already figured it out, well, then isn't there another future version of me who's not only willing but highly motivated to do the same thing for me to ensure that they end up existing?

[00:27:42] So I started to do this little ritual where I would give a lot of love and appreciation to some past version of me and be like, "All right, future self. Your turn." And I know there's a lot of you, so highest and best. What's it going to be? Ideas would just start to hit that seem out of nowhere. Totally nonlinear, completely abstract, but feeling so right. Random stuff.

[00:28:08] Back in 2014, I was starting to make some money. I had freedom and free time, and I'd sold my karate schools. And I'm like, "All right, future self. What's up? What am I going to do?" So I drop in this prime light or this meditation and I just get this immediate answer. It was like, go to Bucharest. And I was like, "I can't even find it on the map. I don't even know where it is." But it was such a clear signal. Go to Bucharest. So I'm like, "Cool."

[00:28:37] So I ended up organizing an event in Bucharest. Three weeks later, I fly there, and there's this auditorium. There's 298 Romanians that show up and just delivered this full day, improv, action, philosophy, comedy, spirituality. And it was epic. And I don't know why I went. I just know that, hey, I'm supposed to do this.

[00:28:59] It turns out that I met some of my best friends, had a time of my life. It became such a reference point for trusting that very tactical intuition. And then when I was on stage and in the days after reflecting on what an awesome experience it was, I could feel myself three weeks earlier asking, what should I do?

[00:29:24] And I felt a strong connection in Romania. I'm like, "Bro, you got to go. You got to come here. It's incredible." So I just developed a trust in that. There's certain ideas that just hit different. And I think that in those moments, we are being remembered by the optimal version of our future self who's remembering us.

[00:29:49] And in that, we get to experience this phenomenon called imagination, but I don't think we're making it up. I think we're just seeing what's already happening, that version has already come true, and there's no better coach in the world than your wiser, more you future self.

[00:30:12] Luke: Wow, beautiful. Something you said really struck me. This is another thing I've contemplated, and I probably had many, but there were two that stood out because the answers were so meaningful to me, where I was in deep prayer. I felt really connected to God and I asked questions, and the answers didn't come from Charlton Heston's voice, "Luke, here's your answer."

[00:30:44] It's like me talking to myself, but not the me right now that's asking the question. It's an interesting way. And I've tried to tell those stories sometimes and I'm like, "And then God told me. And I'm like, well, not really. I mean, yes and no, but it was just me answering the question for myself.

[00:31:00] But if I already knew the answer in that moment, I wouldn't have asked the question. There was one aspect of me, higher self, future self, whatever you want to call it, that had the answer. One of them was, I was praying to God and I said, "Will you please just protect me?" And like that, it goes, "You don't need protection because you're already safe." And it's hard to even--

[00:31:26] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:31:27] Luke: It sounds trite, but to feel that and know that in the moment, it was like, oh, oh yeah. Okay. That changes things quite a lot. In other words, no harm can come to you. Stop tripping. The other one, actually, it was when I had the only real past life experience I had. And I was observing how through just-- it was like turning pages of a book, just flipping through lifetime after lifetime as someone in India who was seeking God.

[00:32:00] And it was just like reincarnation after reincarnation, getting burned on the Ganges over and over and over again. And I was reflecting on that and I said, "Why do I keep going? Why do I keep coming back trying to find God and get closer to God?" And then I might've even said this out loud. It was in my first Bufo experience. And I said, "Because I want it all." And then just that fast, God goes, "You already have it all. What are you doing? You made it. You're there. Stop seeking."

[00:32:37] And it wasn't an egoic, you're enlightened type thing at all. It was just like, dude, you don't have to work this hard. What you're looking for is already here. And those two experiences have always stood out to me in that regard, that it's just like, yeah, I guess me and God are one in the same in the realm of consciousness. There's no separation. I'm just one unique expression of God.

[00:33:05] But it was very clear that the answers were coming from myself, not outside of myself. And they were two questions that were really important and two answers that really changed so many things in my day-to-day life when I remember them. But I used to just read all these spiritual books and go to the seminars. I'm just like, I got to find this thing. It was such a relief to know like, dude, okay, you can keep doing that, but you don't really have to. Maybe you could just live your life.

[00:33:39] Jesse: Test it. Just try it out. Live your life.

[00:33:41] Luke: You could just live your life. So that's beautiful. It's funny, I thought if we talked about this concept of time a bit, I thought, well, this is kind of an offshoot, but it really has to do with the main topic that I wanted to discuss with you, which is really preparing for the future in the time that we live. So many things are uncertain and especially now, what is it? October 30th today, I think?

[00:34:09] Jesse: 31st.

[00:34:10] Luke: Is it? Today's the 31st?

[00:34:11] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:34:11] Luke: So it's Halloween today?

[00:34:13] Jesse: I think so.

[00:34:13] Luke: That's funny. See, I told you, calendars--

[00:34:14] Jesse: Pretty sure. Yeah. 31st.

[00:34:16] Luke: It's a holiday. I had no idea. Well, happy Halloween. 

[00:34:19] Jesse: Happy Halloween. I'm dressing as last week's future self.

[00:34:23] Luke: Right, right. Exactly. But in a few days-- it's a meaningful day to many people-- we have our selection that happens every few years, and I don't know. It could go either way and either way could be great or horrible, which I guess is just up to your interpretation. But it is a time that I think the human part of me is a bit nervous, just watching the progression of tyranny as it's unfolded over the past few years and things seem relatively stable.

[00:34:58] My life hasn't really objectively changed much, even through the plandemic. I remember having the realization one day that if I didn't have a cell phone or access to the internet, my life literally did not change one iota the entire time. With the exception of a few times I went out into public and someone would yell at me to put a piece of plastic on my face.

[00:35:20] That was the only thing that was objectively different. But I did have and still have some subconscious, sometimes fully conscious anxiety around my safety and the future. And so that has to do with earthbound time and how much energy me or anyone wants to put in to being prepared for what we might think of as worst-case scenarios in the realm of prepping.

[00:35:52] And so when we moved to Texas, I got some storable food and a generator and make sure that I'm as armed as I feel I need to be and all the things. And kind of got things locked down a little bit, but I know in reality, in a full zombie apocalypse situation, I'm toast.

[00:36:11] I am totally ill equipped if shit got real hairball. And we, of course, hope that it wouldn't, but if you look at any country or any civilization that's gone through civil war or complete Mao revolution type things, that's a whole other level of preparedness when you have storm troopers coming to take you and your family to a camp or roving gangs of looters and so on.

[00:36:37] So I do my best to live in this moment and remember that lesson I got that you don't need protection because you are safe. And that might mean that even if I leave this body, as you described, if the light bulb gets turned off, I'm totally safe. You can't kill my soul. It's just around my attachments to my wife and my home and my friends.

[00:36:56] And I want to hang onto this earthly millisecond of this lifetime and this experience I'm having as Luke Storey. And I see that attachment and it's probably good to have some attachment to that. Otherwise, you would become apathetic, perhaps, and not do anything with your life.

[00:37:12] Jesse: Slip and trip out of your body. Be like, ah.

[00:37:15] Luke: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I'm always wrestling with my level of attachment to form and seeing the purpose and attachment to form and wanting to be prepared when the shit hits the fan, but not be overly paranoid about it. And so I think you as the balanced guy that you are and the-- you're not even an out-of-the-box thinker. You're a thinker that doesn't even know there are boxes.

[00:37:43] Jesse: Mm.

[00:37:44] Luke: And that's why I love hanging out with you, and I'm so glad we're having this conversation. So I feel like you have a very moderate, balanced, sane view on preparedness, but it doesn't seem to be affecting you in a way where you're building a bunker and you're totally paranoid.

[00:38:02] Like you're still out there living your best life, but knowing some of the things we've talked about privately, if anyone is prepared for the shit, it's you. If I was going to call anyone tomorrow if the things happened, you would be the first guy I would think of because you got your shit on lock. So I guess I'll just use that as an opportunity to open the floor and just let you take it where you want to take it based on that premise.

[00:38:30] Jesse: Yeah. There's a lot of kind words there, and I appreciate it.

[00:38:35] Luke: Yeah, all true.

[00:38:38] Jesse: I continue to play with lots of different scenarios. Sometimes for an hour or two or three, I'll just let my mind just wander into what if this and what if that and what if-- and I've done that for years for my profession, as an action philosopher hired to help companies or individuals with strategy. It's a huge part of what I do, is take in all the information, take in the problems they're trying to solve, ideal outcomes, and then just play in this ether space of what if, what if, what if, and just see what comes.

[00:39:25] It's like fishing. It's like, here's the bait. What idea is going to come and latch onto that? And then I'll come out of this space and there will usually be two or three ideas worth exploring. So when I started in 2020, started when I was watching everything unfold in comically authoritarian fashion. I was like, this is amazing.

[00:39:53] All of my rebel tendencies are getting to come out and play because this is fantastic. I missed this part of myself. The Ferris Bueller, Joker, Jester, completely respectfully irreverent. It's like, I'm just going to live my life. So 2020 came and it was fertile ground for that kind of stuff.

[00:40:15] And then I watched it get a little bit intense. When Jimmy Kimmel goes on and does his monologue and saying how there's this debate of who should they help if the hospitals are overrun. And Jimmy Kimmel gets on this fucking show and he was like, "I don't think that's a hard choice." Vaccinated guy having a heart attack, please come in. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo, rest in peace, wheezy.

[00:40:45] This is on national television, and everybody's just clapping. I'm watching this. I'm like, "This is how genocides start." So I'm watching all this happen, and I could feel that siren call of panic and fear and like, I get why people want to build bunkers. And I get why it feels attractive to take a retail approach to your survival.

[00:41:13] But that's only one possibility. And so I decided to play these sort of games in my mind of, let me see how dark I can handle it and have it still make sense within my belief system, like my spiritual beliefs, my beliefs about life and why I'm here.

[00:41:33] And so I went to some pretty dark places. I absorbed a lot of information that was very uncomfortable. Looking throughout history where things have gotten pretty gnarly and even today, there are unspeakable things that humans do to each other and that are happening right now. And could I make sense of that from a spiritual level?

[00:42:02] Luke: Right. That's the funny thing. Sorry to interrupt, but it's like, because we, in this period of time in America, have had a pretty cushy, easy go, we haven't had a war on our ground since the civil war, I guess. So we've had it very easy. We're super domesticated. And so we're thinking of these doomsday scenarios and playing war game in them, as you describe.

[00:42:24] And meanwhile, there's multiple places on earth right now where people's homes and apartments are just being blown to bits and people are vaporized every day, thousands and thousands of people in many different places on earth. So what we're preparing for or talking about preparing for, other people are experiencing right now and right now and right now and right now.

[00:42:45] Jesse: Somewhere on earth it's always been happening and it always will be happening.

[00:42:50] Luke: Goddamn duality.

[00:42:52] Jesse: Yeah. And we're not equipped for it. Our brains aren't equipped to-- and really we're not equipped to understand the realities of violence unless somebody's experienced extreme kinetic activity. Being shot at or shot, being punched, being threatened, unless somebody has experienced that, there's no way that our minds and our bodies and our brains are equipped to understand what that's like.

[00:43:20] And so through 2020 and '21, I could feel the draw, like when you're driving down the road and there's a car accident on the other side and you're like, hurry up, everybody. Hurry up. Come on, let's go. And then you get pulled up and you go and you stop and then somebody's honking at you.

[00:43:40] I could feel the urge to look at the horrors, especially the potential horrors. What if you're not allowed to buy groceries unless you're quadruple vaccinated? What if there's a QR code or a chip implanted in your arm and your social credit score has dropped a little too low and what then?

[00:44:01] Luke: You can't get gas.

[00:44:02] Jesse: You can't get gas.

[00:44:02] Luke: Pull up to the show. It's like, whomp whomp. Denied.

[00:44:05] Jesse: Yeah. You've already had a steak this month, so here's your cricket burger.

[00:44:09] Luke: We saw that Instagram post.

[00:44:10] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:44:12] Luke: We listened to that podcast.

[00:44:14] Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So I began to look at all of that and just start to play what if. What if that happened? And honestly, man, I got excited. I was like, I did not come here to this dimension, to this time in this space, I did not get born into this body to play the boring level. I came for the fucking awesome level. And to be real, my soul must have picked the lame setting, is like, we're going to make it as easy as possible this time. You're going to be a straight white North American blue-eyed male, easy level.

[00:44:54] Luke: With cool parents.

[00:44:55] Jesse: With cool, amazing parents. And these parents are going to love you unconditionally and stay out of your way. So you're not going to go to school. You're never going to sit behind a desk. You're never going to take a test. You're never going to raise your hand to ask if you can go to the bathroom. You're going to live a Tom Sawyer life in the '70s and '80s.

[00:45:15] In the '70s, there was 15,000 families in the United States that did homeschooling, and we were one of them. And now there's over 3 million, which is epic. So my soul was like, easy level. Here you go. But when all this stuff started happening in 2020 and '21, I was like, "Oh, now everything starts to make more sense."

[00:45:36] Why have I been so interested in self-reliance and, as you said, largely unaware of so many other structures? Structures of control and of assimilation and conformity. I just was never really part of that. Even my business, martial arts, it's an unregulated industry. So there's no barrier to entry.

[00:46:01] Anybody can open a martial arts school. There's no oversight, there's no regulation. It is infinitely more regulation to cut hair or be a massage therapist than to open a martial arts school, which is mind blowing. Even if you open a gym, you have to have a certification or something. Martial arts, nothing.

[00:46:19] Luke: Is it still that way?

[00:46:20] Jesse: As far as I know. It's incredible. So I started to see why all these environments either appealed to me or I just found myself in them and I thought, man, this is just the same thing. Because if things do get weird and I began to just make spreadsheets and journaling mind maps of all the ways it could get weird, and every time I'd feel a little bit of resistance, like, ooh, that's scary, I've just learned to interpret that sensation of fear as a green light, not a red light.

[00:46:55] And it's like, oh, why am I afraid of that? Because if I zoom way out, I'm not a deather. I don't believe in death. So is it death I'm afraid of? No. So what am I afraid of? Ah, I'm afraid that I won't be able to help or protect the people that are close to me. I'm afraid that I'll die a boring death instead of a glorious one. I'm afraid, and I just could isolate all the fears. And I realized, man, my imagination is kicking in to create fear where none exists.

[00:47:25] And once I purged that out of my system or my thinking, then I started gamifying it. And then I just started having fun and I was like, man, what a time to be alive. And I feel strongly that I'll live to be 150. So I'm a third of the way there. I got another 100 years and then maybe I'll see if I renew my lease.

[00:47:49] But I can see way past all this weirdness, and it has to happen. I don't know how. And maybe it won't, but we're due. We're due. And all of these false structures from education to finance to food, religion, and the pros and cons of that, this place has been just so fake for so long, but you can't stop the evolution of consciousness.

[00:48:22] Consciousness is going to keep expanding. And now you got transhumanism and trans everything else and there's all these other things. And it's like, awesome. That's just variety. But what do I want to experience? What's the subjective reality that feels most aligned with natural principles?

[00:48:38] And it's a return to self-reliance, deeply connected interdependence with people that you're really close to, people that you know would have your back, people that you trust implicitly. And I just thought, man, if shit really hit the fan and tactically speaking, let's say that there was an EMP or let's say that 1,000 Venezuelan, Mexican drug cartel cells got activated with pagers all at the same time and there was September 11th times 10,000 on the same day that there's an EMP. What if that happened?

[00:49:18] Whether I made it through that with a body alive or not is irrelevant to me. I don't care. What I would hope for and what I do pray for is to be as agile and as mobile as possible so that I could thread the needle, jet ski around those waves, be in the right place at the right time, which I think we have a lot of control over, be guided to serving and connecting and contributing to the people that I can be of most value to and who can support me.

[00:49:56] And if that's the case and that gets heightened as a result of whatever external factors happen, then we're going to get through the other side of that more human than we've ever been. There's a tendency to glorify the past, I think. It's like simpler times. We've all seen the memes, like, not a phone in sight, and people were stabbing each other. But I think there's a  tendency--

[00:50:24] Luke: No air conditioning either. Come guys.

[00:50:26] Jesse: Yeah, yeah. I don't know, man. I grew up without air conditioning in South Texas. So I'm just nostalgic.

[00:50:31] Luke: But I think we idealize, say 15,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer and we think, oh yeah, you just wake up in the morning, pick a few berries and then the men go out hunting and the women hang out with the kids and keep the camp going and the social cohesion. And we all sing Kumbaya around the fire every night and we forget there were motherfuckers from the tribe down the road coming to scalp us all. You know what I mean?

[00:50:56] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:50:57] Luke: There's been no time in human history where we were all just completely safe and secure. And I'm sure there's been suffering of--

[00:51:04] Jesse: At every turn.

[00:51:05] Luke: Of different varieties at every turn.

[00:51:08] Jesse: Yeah. And to your point, I think the menu is just going to keep expanding of human experience from absolute misery and the most intense suffering that we can't even imagine. That's just going to keep expanding. But so is the beautiful, so is the sublime and the miraculous. That's going to keep expanding too.

[00:51:34] So the menu, before it was chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and now it's 32 flavors. But I think 50 years from now, it will be like, you're literally limited by your imagination. And so I do think that a correction is inevitable, inevitable. Whether it's economic, conflict, I think that that is inevitable.

[00:52:01] And it's brought me, not just peace of mind because I don't think that that has as much to do with the resources as it does your internal resources, but it's brought me a sense of excitement, man. As I look at having a food library that's got months and months of food, as I look at water and redundant water supplies, and as I look at community and people and connections, that's wealth, man.

[00:52:31] And then your ideas and your imagination and your initiative and your ambition, that's real wealth. So if something happened and the lights went out or martial laws declared or FEMA camps are set up, yes, I'm sure that there's a timeline where that happens.

[00:52:53] Would that involve me? It might, it might not. And I don't find it useful to burn mental energy trying to figure out, what would I say to a UN blue-helmeted guard when he was like, "Get in the van?" And I'll be like, "Section 241, 242, bitch." I just don't find that useful.

[00:53:15] It's fun to think about. Would I go full wolverines and just Red Dawn his ass? Or would I be like, "Oh, let me go experience what it's like inside a FEMA camp? Or would I run a zig zag line? There's just too many things to think about and at some point it's like you just bungee jump.

[00:53:33] It's like you go in as far as you can and then you just come right back to your baseline. So I've enjoyed thinking about things like that up until the point that it's not useful and then I'll just come back to doing my work and living my life. But in those explorations, in making peace with what seemed like worst-case scenarios, there seems to be a lot of power in that.

[00:54:00] Because then you don't get that unconscious twinge of like, oh, shit. What happens? It's like, oh, I'm exposed. I've already gone to the of the end. And I've visualized some intense stuff. I've seen dying of torture. I've seen myself starving to death, and I've seen myself watching people that I love starve to death and all of that.

[00:54:23] But I've only done that for inoculation, sort of like, okay, that's possible. But it seems much more useful and much more practical to weave in basic preparation with living a connected, fulfilled, fun, creative life. And I just don't see any more-- I did in 2020, but I don't see a difference between those anymore.

[00:54:50] To load up, to add to your food library, or to get some range time in and then to play some piano and work on a novel and then go on a date and then go write some content, that all feels like a day in the life. There's no contradictions in there.

[00:55:10] Luke: One thing that I think about in this realm sometimes is when I picture worst-case scenario, the most security I can imagine is in community.

[00:55:25] Jesse: Big time.

[00:55:26] Luke: And not necessarily having a concrete plan, but having your little black book of like, all right, who are the like minded people with whom I could collaborate and find a way to support one another? And sometimes though, I think about what value other than a decent personality and a little charisma can I add to that? I'm not a great marksman. I suck using my hands. I'm not good with tools, on and on and on. I'm not a specialist. I don't have a special skill.

[00:56:00] And I even think about this. If I was me back in the day in a hunter-gatherer tribe, what role would I have? The guy who talks all day or ask people compelling questions? It's funny. It's an assessment I make of myself. I really don't know the answer other than my compassion and empathy and that I really care about people. And I'm an honest person.

[00:56:24] I have a lot of value, I think, in terms of my integrity and my character, but in terms of real-life boots on the ground skills, I'm quite lacking to be honest. And one of the ways I explore this, by the way, is Alyson and I watch the survival shows like Naked and Afraid. We've seen every episode of every season. I'm obsessed with these shows because you get to see the human experience and the dynamics of people working together, working against one another, and so on.

[00:56:52] But it is also very humbling because I watched one a couple nights ago, this version of Alone, I think it's called Beast, where they drop three expert survivalists in the Arctic. And they have a fresh killed moose and they have no tools. All they have is the clothes on their back. And they have to survive between the three of them, 30 days, with just this one animal. They're making cutting tools with rocks. They're doing the coolest shit.

[00:57:18] And I'm sitting there going, "Dude, I don't know how to do one of those things. They're making fishing line out of this-- what's it called? [Inaudible], the tendons, and weaving that together. Just crazy shit. That's so fun to watch, but it's also very emasculating and deflating, because I'm like, if they flew me onto that team of three right now, they would kick me off. Because I'm like, you suck. You're a burden.

[00:57:41] Jesse: Or eat you.

[00:57:42] Luke: You're a burden. You don't know how to do anything. All I could do is be like, "Hey, let's stay positive. You guys want to meditate? Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with that, but I guess something us to contemplate is like, what value do we have to contribute if we know that, hey, the glue of a micro community or micro nation, someone like you that has some land and you have a team of people out there that all have various skills and stuff? If you want the safety in numbers, what's your contribution to that safety? It's an interesting self-inquiry.

[00:58:17] Jesse: It's a great inquiry. And one thing I appreciate about your sharing of that is your emotional sobriety of the gap between who you are today, who you've developed yourself into, and who you might need to become in a more extreme situation and not doing the typical thing of like, oh, I'll just go hunting.

[00:58:40] I'm like, "Bro, you've literally never hunted, number one. Number two, you and 7,000 other people are all going to have that idea." So after a week, there's no more game in the woods, or is there? Because when you get out there with 7,000 other people and you're aiming at the one squirrel and all of a sudden you catch some motion out of your eye and you're in the sights of somebody else because you've got more meat on you than a squirrel, people are not equipped to play these games.

[00:59:08] And if they do play these what if games, they tend to severely overestimate what they think they could do right now. Or they just check out. It's like some circuit breaker and they'll just be like, "Oh, well, if it's my time, it's my time. Cool." Or occasionally they'll be like, "Well, I can fast." I'm like, "Sure, buddy."

[00:59:32] And you can. I've got a client right now who is training for 42-day fast, like full-on Jesus level. He's going to go 42 days. Done multiple 21 days. So I get it. There's all these things. But I really respect what you said because what I heard was you're owning your awareness of the gap between who you are, your current skills, your current level of resilience or abilities, and what you know would be required based on exposure to these shows, which I think is very useful.

[01:00:07] And my take on that or my response is just being aware that there's a gap and not immediately assuming that you would know what to do and not immediately just saying, I would just check out, that's a superpower by itself. Because the ability to know what you don't know or to say, I don't know what I don't know, but I'm game. Like, let me see what's available.

[01:00:37] And all of a sudden, intuition, resourcefulness, good old-fashioned fucking grit, all that comes to the surface. And people are capable of so much more than this modern life requires. So when you get into an environment where it's required of you, dude, the number of modern stresses that are going to completely go away if this ends up happening, incredible. And the part of me does like, oh, man, this is going to be good for people. This is going to be really good. You have trouble off your phone for a while? Cool.

[01:01:12] Luke: It'll be like a mass vision quest.

[01:01:14] Jesse: Dude, it literally will. And it will be like everybody having an intense psychedelic journey all at the same time. And some people are like, I can fly. And other people are like, the guitar is trying to eat me. And they're in the same trip. And I think you have control over that. And it's no matter what, it's all good. And that's the fun of it. Even the seeming forces that seem to oppose, like that dude that collapsed my lung when I was 20 years old, he was not my foe.

[01:01:50] He was my divinely appointed ally. I have love for that guy for doing what he thought he needed to do to win the fight, which ended up resulting in him winning the fight, me getting this complete debilitating evolutionary experience, which was the raw material to shape myself into who I am today, which I couldn't have done without him.

[01:02:17] So take him out and put in antagonist du jour. Who is the antagonist? That's my divinely appointed partner, and I'm theirs. So ultimately, man, I think we are all on the same team. We're all on team human. Even the ones who seem to oppose by playing the role of politician or policy enforcer or FEMA guard, or whatever, they're all part of the same team.

[01:02:49] I can only speak subjectively. I only create and only draw into my experience that which vibrates at the level of consciousness that I'm at. So a couple of years ago-- I think I told you the story. I walked into my very nice home in a very nice part of Austin and found a dude standing in my hallway pointing a pistol at me saying, "Don't make me shoot you."

[01:03:14] And I was like, "Fair enough. I won't." And I ended up creating some distance and didn't get shot. Went back to the house. He was gone. Cops are there. And the guy was just knocking over houses. He'd hit a couple of other houses and stole some of my stuff and stole my gun. And that night I just realized, man, this is such a beautiful opportunity to practice this empowered meaning creation, because it's a meaningless event that's not a new concept.

[01:03:54] It doesn't mean anything. There is a man. There was another man. There was a gun. There was a house. There was these very objective things that happened. So that night, once everything is all said and done, I just stood and I just fucking shook my body for three minutes and just like, ah, verbalize and just get it out. Shiver it out, like a zebra.

[01:04:21] To my knowledge, there are no trauma survivors support groups for lion attacks. It's like all the gazelles and zebras get together every week and they talk about their lion attack. "How was it, Billy?" "It was awful. I was at the watering hole and the lion-- he almost got me." "It's okay, Billy. We've all been there." I don't think that exists in nature. They just shake it out and they're done because they don't have this same attachment as we do to story. It's like being very present. So I shook like crazy. Ah, let it out.

[01:04:59] I felt really good, sat down, started writing, and the first thing I wrote was, why am I glad this happened? Why am I glad this dude showed up in my hallway pointing a pistol in my face? And it's like the prompt generates the response. And then I just kept asking, why am I glad this happened? And then how did I create this, and why did I create this?

[01:05:28] And man, by the time I get to the end of a couple of pages of journaling, I felt love for that guy, man. Like, thank you for being such a perfect vibrational counterpart in the field that I've obviously been resonating in. Otherwise you couldn't have shown up.

[01:05:48] What a beautiful testament to the consistent behavior of this living universe in response to each individual's frequency. That dude showed up perfectly on time in order to give me the raw materials of an experience that I get to decide what am I going to make out of it. It's just raw clay.

[01:06:07] If you get a lump of clay and you're like, oh, God, I hate lumpy clay. Well, bro, make it into what you want to make it. And I can only hope-- my prayer to this day is that guy got what he needed out of that experience. He's not a bad guy. I can only ever assume a positive intent. And maybe people don't know why they do things or they make the best choice they can at the moment with what they think they have.

[01:06:32] But the only way that he and I rendezvoused is because our frequencies completely matched up. So all of that to say, let's assume that the lights go out, or let's say it's Wednesday, November 6th at the time of this recording. The release, we'll all be looking back going, "Oh, I remember what happened that day." Let's say that on that day, there's chaos because half the people's person didn't get selected and they decide this means that they need to take matters into their own hands.

[01:07:10] And let's pretend that they all get angsty. If it's one side and they're very, very well armed, that will be one thing. If it's the other side and they're just angry and they've got-- Rudyard Lynch, I think, on Whatifalthist, interesting YouTube channel, he said, "If there's an American civil war, one side will be carrying AR-15s and the other side will bring katanas from their mom's basement."

[01:07:37] Luke: It's quite true.

[01:07:39] Jesse: So depending on what happens, let's say things go kinetic. It gets very intense. Things start to feed one on the other. We've had all this pent-up anxiety and pent-up anger and all this stuff has been there. Let's say it all bubbles to the surface. Throw in a few false flag events, carefully engineered to just amplify all this rage.

[01:08:00] Let's say that happens. Do I want to get involved? Zero. Zero. Dude, I'm so sideless, it's not even funny. There's no side that I feel like, oh, I'm on that side. I want to be there. And I've never felt that way my entire life. And I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. I just know it's right for me.

[01:08:22] But let's say that that happens and all of a sudden the power's out and now you've got militia roving the streets on one side and the national guard is on the other and then they start taking each other out. They're all divinely contracted to do that with each other. That's not part of my contract. Show me the contract. I didn't sign.

[01:08:44] I believe the only thing that I can experience is what I've already been connecting to in that particular timeline. And in my case, it means everything's totally cool. I know who my people are, I know where I want to be, and if I can't be there, my assumption is it's going to be someplace even better.

[01:09:04] Because if I'm writing the menu, why would the menu be good or awful? Why not good or better than I can imagine? If that's a possibility and that's what I keep giving energy to, and if it's a fail safe philosophically, the worst possible scenario that I can think of is dying, oh, man, I wish for a glorious death.

[01:09:28] So if I go out in the spring of 2026, I just want to see it coming. That's all. And maybe Instagram live. Yeah, I'm here in the foxhole and down to my last can of beans and there's a cartel member. Ah, okay. Whatever. I'm so unattached to how that plays out that the peacefulness of that is its own game.

[01:09:59] And so then I just start to think about like, well, how can I be useful? That's why I appreciate this dialogue and you, is like, there are ways to think through worst-case scenarios that turn them into dreams come true. But it's not by controlling the scenario or controlling your resources.

[01:10:22] It's orienting yourself to what that would mean to you. Is it good? Is it bad? It just is. Recently, it doesn't feel like an intentional vision. It just keeps coming in. But man, I keep seeing family. I keep seeing this just radical woman or women, and there's just this thermonuclear family with nine kids. I haven't had that vision ever in that particular way.

[01:10:55] Luke: Listen up, ladies.

[01:10:58] Jesse: And it's fascinating because I didn't have that as a goal. If you would ask me six months ago, do you think you'll ever have kids? I'd be like, "Yeah, I can see it." There's definitely timelines where that is happening, but it's morphed into desire. It's morphed into like, oh, that would be amazing. And the more I think about it, the more real it feels, the righter it feels. And then this part of me is like, "Now? Is this the time?" And I'm like, well, I don't think that inspiration's coming in for nothing.

[01:11:37] I don't think that's an accidental vision. And so I'm just going with it. I don't know what it means, and I don't need to know what it means, but if it means that I connect with some radical chick who's my polar equal, and we end up spawning some epic new humans who are here for their own agenda, and I'm just here to love them, to protect them, and stay out of their way, and learn from them, sign me up for that.

[01:12:06] And if that means they grow up learning how to duck and cover and learning how to shoot and learning how to prepare, great. What an epic childhood. And easy for me to say now, not being partnered or not having kids, if it means that they are such advanced souls that they're here during a time where they beat the game in a year or two years, and that's their physical experience, so be it.

[01:12:36] Luke: Beautiful. I love the emphasis on perspective and the self-awareness of the judgments that create meaning of our experiences. And it brings me back to that idea I was expressing about where would I fit in in a worst-case scenario? What value could I add? And as I watched those survival shows, there's two parts I really love. One, just the human ingenuity of just how they do things physically.

[01:13:12] The idea is they get the inspiration, but probably even more so is watching who's going to crack mentally. And someone will come on and they'll have an incredible skill set and you're like, "Oh, this lady's going to crush it. This guy's going to crush it." And then they tap out two days and you're like, "What?"

[01:13:29] And it's always the mind that gets them. They go dark. They go negative. And once you see that happen, you know they're about to tap out. And those are the situations I can actually transpose myself into a little bit more. And who knows how tough and resilient I could really be. I don't know. I'd have to be tested.

[01:13:47] But based on my experience thus far, I've been through some pretty harrowing stuff and have managed to come out the other side, and I'm pretty skilled at objectivity and neutrality and the awareness as the observer self when the mind goes right, wrong, good, bad, light, dark. It's like I'm playing in the duality thing.

[01:14:13] Okay, it has a purpose. We're here. I'm in agreement with that. Consciousness created this thing for us so that we have a school. And I volunteered to be in the school and the school has bullies and the school also has best friends and awesome people.

[01:14:26] Jesse: And sometimes they're the same person.

[01:14:29] Luke: In your case it has.

[01:14:29] Jesse: This idea, a different--

[01:14:30] Luke: Sometimes pointing a gun at you when you walked in your crib. But I think that is some value that I would actually have in that kind of situation.

[01:14:39] Jesse: It's a huge value.

[01:14:40] Luke: Is to not go dark, to not go negative, to be able to hold the line, and to realize that everything that happens is truly neutral until one attributes meaning to it and names it good or bad.

[01:14:51] Jesse: Exactly.

[01:14:52] Luke: And it's so verifiable too, because if I go back in my life 30 years, one of my teachers-- you might have this when you walk by in the drug store and you see a bottle of baby oil or you see a P Diddy post about a bunch of baby oil and you're like, "Fuck, yeah, I love baby oil."

[01:15:12] For me, it's Rottweilers. Many years ago I was drunk at a party and big ass Rottweiler bit me on the face. I have a big scar on my nose from it. He just was like, "No, thanks." Chomp. And just bit me on the face. There's a whole other story that unfolded from that, but you could look at that and go, oh, that was horrible. What a horrible thing.

[01:15:32] Well, next thing you know, the owner of the dog who was my dealer at the time calls me and says, "Hey, man, I found out we have renter's insurance. Why don't you get a lawyer and sue us and get some coin?" I was like, "Great." Got a lawyer, sued him, got 7,500, which was like 75,000 to at that time.

[01:15:50] Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:15:52] Luke: Which you'd be like, okay, let's label that good. You got a bunch of money. He also bought me a base, bought me a Fender Precision Bass, which is pretty nice. He's a nice guy. And so you think, man, I got a base. I got 7,500. You could say, well, the dog bite was awesome. I lived. Right now I have all this money. Spent all the money on heroin, of course, because I never had that kind of money and a habit at the same time.

[01:16:15] They both converged. And I got a really, really bad habit. And when the money ran out, I had no way to support that habit because of the tolerance. So you see like, oh, that's horrible. You got that money because you got so strung out. Now, fast forward, I realized I painted myself into a corner with that habit and there's no way I could have stayed well.

[01:16:37] So eventually I checked into rehab. So you could say that dog saved my goddamn life. And when I see Rottweilers, I have two reactions. One is [Inaudible]. My body still remembers what it's like to see the tonsils of a big Rottweiler, but my conscious thought right after that, I was like, "Oh, thank you, Rottweiler. Man, you saved my life." And the only thing that changes that experience is purely perspective.

[01:17:07] Jesse: It's just all interpretation.

[01:17:08] Luke: Flexibility of perception.

[01:17:10] Jesse: Yeah.

[01:17:11] Luke: There's no good or bad, only thinking makes it so. I think in this realm that we're talking about, the unknown and the what ifs, what's going to shape the next few years for all of us as in this tumultuous, crazy ass unpredictable time is that very thing, is to be able to go, let me wrestle this into an experience that is for my highest good.

[01:17:38] Jesse: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:17:39] Luke: No matter what it looks like on the surface, because there will be some point in the future, we'll be able to look back in hindsight, as you did in the hospital bed and go, "Oh man, that was the catalyst for the greatest change in my life," or one of them. And that's something I always just try to keep in my awareness when I'm tempted to judge any experience, person, etc., as bad.

[01:18:01] It's like having the humility to say, actually don't know. On its surface, this sucks really bad, but can I really know that to be true? It's too soon to tell. We don't know. It could be the best thing ever. The house burns down. Oh God. Well, then I ended up living in Hawaii on a banana farm or something and going, Oh "my God, Texas. Are you kidding me? That house sucked." We're in a tiki hut now with spring water. This is amazing.

[01:18:30] Jesse: And I love the way you put that, man. There's so much gold there because your choice, it's like the choice you make before the event to just say everything you just said. If it happens, we'll see. And within that space, you have such a blank canvas to just start assuming a positive outcome.

[01:18:54] And if that's the assumption and our intent has such an impact on what we're able to physically see, and I believe it has an effect on what actually starts showing up, if that's the case, then it truly is all good. And then in a shit-hits-the-fan scenario, if you're the guy that's like keeping everything chill and maybe it's a leadership position, maybe you're just learning super fast what to do, show me how to shine the flashlight.

[01:19:25] Show me how to do this. And you learn quick, there's a lot of, of value in that. But there's something you said that brought me back to a couple of months ago, I did a escape room, which I'd never really experienced before. I judged him because I'm like, you guys are going into this place with all these problems to solve and then you come out and then you go back to your life where you've got all these problems to solve that you're avoiding solving.

[01:19:55] But you can go to here and you can act-- so I was pretty judgy. But then I did it, and we were in two teams and we're competing and all this stuff. And there was a moment where we're have 12 minutes left in the thing and we're competing against this other team and we're in some room and we have to figure out how to open this gate to go down this slide that's supposed to be a sewer escape.

[01:20:19] Luke: Is this here in Austin?

[01:20:20] Jesse: Here in Austin, yeah. It's downtown. And so there's four or five of us in on our team, and it was a pretty elaborate puzzle because there was a lock and it had five letters. You had to get a five-letter combination. You had to guess the word. So there's clues all over this place of how to find the letters. And we're under a time crunch and we still got a lot of puzzles to solve, and I don't know what came over me.

[01:20:54] I do, but I just thought, well, it's only one word. And there's a future version of me that already won the game because somebody else figured it out or whatever. So at some point we know what the word is. I wonder if I can just know the word. So I just looked at the thing and I just looked at it and I just closed my eyes and I just imagined it being figured out and I opened and I fucking knew the word.

[01:21:23] Luke: No way.

[01:21:24] Jesse: And I entered the word into the lock, dials, and it pops open.

[01:21:28] Luke: No way, dude.

[01:21:30] Jesse: And the word was freed.

[01:21:33] Luke: Oh, well, there you go.

[01:21:34] Jesse: So it's not non-obvious, and everybody's like, "How did you know?" I was like, "I'll tell you later. We've got to beat the game." And I just think about that because what if the solution is always at hand and it's only because of being over logically trained or overly reliant on memory and knowns that we think we can't just know. What if you can just know, and what if knowing is a skill?

[01:22:06] And the more that you practice knowing and then going with what you know and observing the result, what if that becomes a superpower? I began to test that in creating content and materials and speeches. Every time I try and plan out a video or plan out my talk, it just felt like [Inaudible].

[01:22:28] And I'm no stranger to scripting and rehearsal and preparation. I know the value of that. But when I would just chill out, really quiet, and just listen and be like, what? What do people need? What are they asking for that I'm not thinking about that I can be suited to support? And I just began shrinking the timeline of my own need to know to now.

[01:23:03] I only need to know what I'm going to say right now. And I'll know what to say when the next now shows up. Then I began to test that and, dude, it became remarkable. The relevance of the content, the connection to people, actually feeling other people, not just feeling the response that I thought needed to happen, all of that stuff. And a few years ago I'm like, "I need to test this." What would it be like to be in this pure presence for an extended period of time while delivering?

[01:23:43] And so I announced on Facebook that I was going to do a 24-hour Facebook live, totally improv. So I announced it and everybody's like, "Oh, we'll see." And Saturday morning, 9 o'clock, I went on and I was like, all right, guys, we're starting a 24-hour Facebook live. This is completely unscripted. No idea where this is going to go.

[01:24:05] And dude, I riffed nonstop for 24 hours, nonstop. I was telling stories and it was Q&A and it was live guided meditations, and I'd play the keyboard and then I would like mess with people in the comments and I would tell another story. And then I'd be eating, people sending me food from all around the world.

[01:24:28] One woman in Canada, she found a sushi place and had it sent over. And then I had female friend that came over and very quickly covertly gave me a foot massage while I'm like on my laptop and then she snuck off. She's like, "Bye." And it was so much going on. At one point I had to go to the bathroom and so I was on my balcony and I've got the laptop.

[01:24:48] Luke:  Number one or number two?

[01:24:49] Jesse: Number one.

[01:24:50] Luke: That's good.

[01:24:51] Jesse: Number two, I wouldn't have cared either, but you program your mind. It's like, didn't happen. But I'm on the balcony and I'm peeing off the side of the balcony and one guy was on there and he was like, "Oh, this is a live stream." And there's people that stayed on for 18 hours. They were just in it because they were feeling that something--

[01:25:15] Luke: Filming show type thing.

[01:25:18] Jesse: Yeah. And they were like, what's going to happen next? And so there's just that beautiful immediacy of the energy. It's like, you don't know what's going to happen, but it can't be bad. It's going to be good. And dude, when it got to the last hour of that, there was so much emotion, and everybody was feeling it. And people were like, "What is this?" Something's happening. Hundreds of people are on and they're [Inaudible].

[01:25:47] They're like, "What is going on?" And I'm fucking bawling. I'm like, "I don't know, but God damn. This is the most beautiful thing ever." It was like a near-death experience. It was just something. And when it finished, I just felt it was just a slow clap from God. It was just like, good job.

[01:26:15] You don't need to work as hard as you think you need to. Just chill out, go with it, and you'll always be provided for. And I'll never forget that experience because it was so co-creative. Every single person that was a part of that experience was creating that experience.

[01:26:36] And it was one of the most pure, examples or demonstrations that I've ever seen of when we really surrender to purpose and expand our awareness to appreciate and include other people without needing anything from them, without needing them to change and without censoring ourselves, and we just open up and just say what needs to be said, nothing to hide and nothing to prove, the juice that's available, the power that's available that comes to us, I don't know that there's a limit to it.

[01:27:22] And if that's the case in a non-emergency situation, then I can only imagine that it would be massively multiplied in an emergency situation. And that's why there's a significant part of me that's like, that would be epic. What would it be like to improv on the fly, iterate fast, instant bonding with the right people, instant separation from the wrong-- it's like you're at home playing chopsticks on the piano and all of a sudden, boom, you find yourself in a jazz band and you're at Madison Square Garden and you're just trying to keep up. Same idea, different stakes. Sign me up for that.

[01:28:13] Luke: Yeah, with the flexibility of reality amplified, there's a lot more potential for magic. I used to have this friend, and he was pretty tapped in. We would do this thing where we would go invisible. And it would usually be if we were trying to get in a club or a restaurant, there's a long line, we don't have a ticket, we're not on the guest list kind of thing.

[01:28:45] And he would go, "We're just going." He was much older than I, and he goes, "Don't worry about it." I was like, "Oh, we can't get in. We're not in the line." He goes, "No, we just go invisible." And I was just like, follow, walk in his shadow. And we would just walk through the door. No one would see us, doorman.

[01:29:04] We were literally invisible. We did that quite a few times. I get inside and go, "Dude, how did you do that? He goes, "I told you, man. You don't get it. You don't get it. You make it your own reality." And I still don't really get it, but a lot of the things you're speaking to are within that, within the ability to create your own reality in the moment.

[01:29:27] And so if your moment is filled with intensity as these situations likely would be that we're exploring here, that does seem like a rich opportunity to do that. If you need to go invisible to sneak past the UN guard that doesn't want you to go down this particular road that's going to take you to where your bug out location is, then it's like, whoa, that's actually very useful.

[01:29:53] And you might not have the impetus to go invisible to learn how to do that unless you're put in that situation. Trying to get in some club is a very low stake way to do that, but still, it's still a demonstration of what's possible. When you believe something strongly enough, all of a sudden reality starts to mold to your reality.

[01:30:11] Jesse: It's malleable. And it really is. There was an example. I think it was an Abraham Hicks audio or something, but there was a guy who was talking about there was a shaman who was going to get on an airplane, but he had this big staff with him, which you're not supposed to take an airplane. But his belief was so strong and he was in such integrity with his belief that not only was there nothing wrong, but this was the most natural thing in the world.

[01:30:43] And so he just gets on the plane and sits down and he's got his staff. The question, I think, to Abraham was like, what's that all about? And I thought it was an interesting answer that in this example, the dude, the shaman was in a state of total non-resistance. There was just no push against what was happening. And I was actually talking to Brandon Williams about this when he was in town for our group and on your podcast.

[01:31:15] I've actually spent a lot of time with him that week, and I haven't done probably 90% of the remedies and the steps and the things. I just never have a problem. And I just don't participate energetically, physically, contractually. I just don't participate. And I never have any problems. And Brandon made the comment. He said, "You just embody this. This is not a belief for you." I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, this is just who you are.

[01:31:52] I was like, "Yeah, actually, it's who I've always been." And great credit to my parents for loving me and staying out of my way. The concept of someone else telling me what to do is insane to me. It's insane to me. But if I respect someone or if they're getting results that I desire to get, I will be aggressively curious, respectful and curious, but I don't experience humility.

[01:32:25] I don't experience the, ooh, the lowering. It's like, yeah. If it's jujitsu, of course, you can tap me out. And of course, I'm going to learn. And I want you to tap me out as fast as possible and as many times as possible. But there's no humility in that. It's just an extremely, aggressively, respectful curiosity. And I don't know, that just seems to be the most useful way that I've found yet to approach uncertainty, is this aggressive curiosity.

[01:32:59] But there's no, let me be small or let me shy away. It's like, no, man. Lean in. And I think that when we're in that frequency, like that 24-hour Facebook live, or your ability to just turn the Rottweiler incident into this beautiful benefit, even with all the choices you made, it's clear in your body language and the way you talk about it that you have an appreciation for that.

[01:33:30] That's a skill. And if we have that ability, I think it really switches the dynamic of one's life from-- so many people are going through life with struggle and discipline and willpower and you got to make it happen. And it's like they're rock climbing just an inch at a time and they're hanging on for dear life and everything they want is at the top of the rock and they're climbing El Capitan in their life. And they're just like, "Ah." And they're terrified of falling, but they got-- and it's like, that's their life.

[01:34:07] I'm like, "No wonder you're exhausted, man." But that's only one way of living life. It's not the only way. What if, switch the metaphor, you're not on the face of El Capitan being blown around by the wind and trying not to die and climbing up? That's not where you're at. You are at the top of the most epic snowboard run and you're strapped into a badass board and the weather's perfect and you got some good jams and there's trees, but they're really spaced far apart and the powder is fresh. It's like that perfect powder. And everything that you want is at the bottom of that hill.

[01:35:00] And there's a hot tub, and all your friends are there, and all you got to do is just kick off the lip and just enjoy the ride, and you just go. And the wind's in your face, and the trees are there, but they're very easy to navigate around, and you don't wish that they weren't there. You're glad they're there. They give you contrast. As you go by when you're like, "Whoa, I'm going fast." That's cool. And you don't protest that there's trees on the hill.

[01:35:29] You're just like, "Oh, there's trees. I will not ski into the tree." Cool. And you're listening to jams and the sun's overhead, but you got to stay present. And how are you getting there? You're partnering with gravity. You're partnering with natural forces. You're not fighting it. You're not forcing it.

[01:35:49] You're not pushing it. You're guiding it. Like you said earlier, you're just with the rudder. The wind is blowing and the waves are there and you're guiding, you're partnering with that natural force and you're not in a hurry to get down there because the ride is so enjoyable and you know that you're going to enjoy your friends and being in the hot tub and everything you want is down there, but you're not in a hurry to get there because this moment is so rewarding.

[01:36:14] And because of the speed and the perfect powder and the jams and the sun, it's like this extended awareness that this is a perfect moment. And you can't dwell on the past because the present is so compelling and you're focused on what's right in front of you but not too far in front of you because you already know what's going to come.

[01:36:34] And next thing you know, you finish this epic run and you go right in where all your friends and they're cheering and you take off your snowsuit and jump in the hot tub and there's a hot toddy or wheatgrass or whatever the fuck you want to drink and all your friends are there and you're like, "Wow that was an epic run." That didn't require any of your own motive force. It was just happening because you partnered with gravity.

[01:36:58] And man, there's no right or wrong, but the metaphor of struggling and climbing and scrabbling through life, that's only one option. Partnering with these natural forces, which does require a more feminine energy, more softening and being more receptive and listening more, and then trusting yourself to listen. And then taking action on whatever the impulse is.

[01:37:28] But that's a very ingrained trait in human beings. We all had it when we were kids. Most people lost it through schooling, not education. They lost it through schooling and a complete, almost total destruction of their individuality. But if you got a heart that beats and you can put air in your lungs and you can think, then you can always tune back into that frequency and it's always there.

[01:37:58] And I think combining your interests-- if somebody's listening to this or they're interested in resiliency and preparedness, then this might spark some thoughts on what to do next. And people might be listening to this because they're just huge Luke Storey fans. They're like, "Oh, let me see the next episode."

[01:38:18] And they're just like, "What is this guy babbling on about?" And it doesn't interest them. Honor that, whatever that interest is. If it interests you, then you get to follow it. If it doesn't interest you, then you don't have to follow it. And there's no right or wrong. There's only what's right for the individual right now.

[01:38:36] Luke: It's the dao. That's what comes to mind. It's always available.

[01:38:43] Jesse: Yeah.

[01:38:44] Luke: Felt like, ooh, it was there. Or the force in Star Wars. It's like the force is always there. Which one of the characters is skilled at tapping into it and believes in it enough to actually put forth the effort to learn how to tap into it? And I guess when you do, you can walk past the guards and say, these aren't the droids you're for.

[01:39:04] Jesse: These are not the droids you're looking for. Or you can get into the club, or you can be pushing your shopping cart past a smoked-out bunker and get an idea to turn right. And you turn right. And as you turn right, the fucking UN tank rolls by where you were a moment ago. Is there a limit? I don't think so.

[01:39:22] Luke: Cool, cool, man. It's funny because I didn't really plan because I just knew we would have a great spontaneous flow. Sometimes I'm more planned than others, but I had the idea that we would break down the categories. So you got to have ammo and walkie talkies, and I feel like that is so irrelevant at this point. I feel like that's another--

[01:39:45] Jesse: There's a lot of places to go to get that information.

[01:39:46] Luke: That's another show. Right. So yeah, maybe without us creating another two-hour podcast on the back of this one, what are some practical non-insane resources for people that they might be able to check out? I know you shared with me your Telegram group that has checklists of things like that for people that are like, "Okay, cool. I'll work on the mindset thing, and I'll get in the dao, but I also should-- and candles, batteries, generator. There are some real world things that are maybe of value. What's a synopsis of where people might go to, as they say, trust God, but tie up your camel?

[01:40:25] Jesse: Right, right. The first question that I always ask people is, where are they on spectrum of what they think might be likely? Because that's always a good starting point. If somebody is brand-new to this stuff and all they've done is watch a tale of us or Mad Max or whatever, and they were just like, I haven't really thought about it as it applies to their life, then they're in a different starting point than someone who's studied history, realizes that we're due for some sort of major conflict, add in geoengineering and all this stuff, and they're like, "Oh shit, we could actually be looking at a total grid down situation."

[01:41:10] I'm not saying one of those is right or wrong, but it totally depends on the individual. So somebody watching this who this is the first time they've ever thought about this, I would have very different advice for them than I would for somebody who has thought about it more or talked about it like we have or is actively preparing.

[01:41:28] So I just want to give that as a caveat before giving any practical resources because for the person who's more, I won't say advanced, but for the person who's thought about it more and has actually taken more steps, what I would advise someone just starting out would be to that person completely inefficient, that's not enough, but if I started to advise someone who's just curious and about to learn more and I gave them what I'm doing or what someone else would be doing, it will blow them out.

[01:42:03] Luke: Overwhelmed.

[01:42:04] Jesse: They'd be overwhelmed, they'd we freaked out to be like, what do you mean? You've got 17 different places in a color-coded map with chalk on telephone poles. What? It's too much. So I would just say that for anybody who's curious about preparing to just check in with yourself and what do you think is a likely scenario.

[01:42:26] But for anybody, and I'll start from the beginning and assume that people aren't prepared, which is most people. Here in Austin, we've had two experiences in the last few years of the power going out because of the snowpocalypse thing. So imagine you're going to be a week with no power. Everything's closed.

[01:42:47] You have no water because faucets run on electricity. What do you need to make it through a week? And it's really just a math problem. It's about 3,000 calories per day per person if you're pretty stationary. You need a gallon and a half of water per day and you need some basic energy, but not nothing exorbitant.

[01:43:18] So if you've got some batteries and you got some flashlights, probably some books, some playing cards, because if you're not going to be going anywhere for whatever reason, you actually don't need that much. And if somebody just does that, if they're starting from scratch and they just do that and they just imagine that we're going to go on a camping trip in our living room for a week, what do we want?

[01:43:43] And just come at it from that softer gamified sort of thing. Once you do that, and I wouldn't suggest doing anything until you do that, then you can start playing different scenarios and running different simulations. The tendency, and I observed this in myself in 2020, if you get a little uncertainty going on, to deal with it like a good consumer and just try and buy your way out of your fear.

[01:44:10] So I've seen a lot of people get a little unsettled and then they go straight to Cabela's and they buy a rifle and they buy 500 rounds, they get the dopamine flush, and they walk out feeling like John Wick. And they're just like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Cool." If that makes you feel better, good.

[01:44:32] Luke: That was me the week I moved to Texas.

[01:44:35] Jesse: Yeah. There is usefulness in it. It's like, let me try this. But if you look at Maslow's hierarchy and you think about physical safety, so shelter, and then water, food, energy, and you just work your way up, it's like a little part of your brain gets activated because you start playing through different scenarios of what if I couldn't go out to get groceries for whatever reason? How much do I have in my place right now, and what else do I need?

[01:45:11] And if people play that game with himself, if starting today I had to be in my place for three weeks, what would I need? Do you need feminine hygiene products? Do you have toothpaste and toothbrush and floss? Do you have enough water for 21 days for everybody that's there, including your pets, if you have pets?

[01:45:33] And when you start asking that question, you start seeing different areas of improvement that you can start adding in. By the end of 2020, I had a two-bedroom apartment downtown. It was a nice place. I was at the W Hotel, but that place was stacked. I had just five-gallon water jugs just stacked, and it actually looked very cool.

[01:45:57] I made it look very artistic. And so there's the water wall. And then all the food was stacked in the shelves above and then I did have some guns and ammo. It was weird man, but it was like a luxury bunker. I was like, "I got my stuff." If I had to stay here for three months, I could do it. With everything that's in my place, I could do it.

[01:46:21] And if I had another person with me, well, now I've got 45 days. And if I got three people, now I got 30 days. It's cool how fast your brain starts playing the calculations. And then as it turned out, when the snowpocalypse hit and I had all these supplies and all these stores, we didn't have power outages a lot and we still had cell phones.

[01:46:49] But I got a text from a friend that there was a mutual buddy who lived in Cedar Park who's paralyzed, and his body doesn't generate body heat. And he didn't have any power in his house, so without an electric blanket, the dude could freeze to death. He could be under 10 blankets and still get hypothermia.

[01:47:13] So I had my 4Runner, put it in 4 low, loaded up a generator, got a fuel can, drove to his house, and the highways are just desolated. Cars spun out on the side. I went with a buddy of mine and we're just driving a little bit of snow and we get to his place and we take the generator and his mom was there and we showed her how to use it.

[01:47:36] Watching her, this 60-sh-year-old woman, pull this generator, fire it up, and then plug in the electric blanket, plug in his computer-- and he's a bad ass entrepreneur. He's a multimillionaire, bad ass entrepreneur. Watch him be able to go to work and connect to his audience knowing that his body was warm because we were able to get him a generator, dude, it's the best feeling in the world, especially for a man.

[01:48:06] A man's number one job is to create safety. That's the number one function of a man. In order to create safety, you have to be equal parts, loving, but you also have to be lethal. If you're just nice and loving and kind, but you're not capable of protection, then you can't ever actually be peaceful. You're just harmless.

[01:48:28] And then the provision part, to be able to provide for someone else, something that they don't have. And as somebody who's in your circle or they're under your protection, dude, it is the most incredible activation of your purpose. And within that, society is a blanket term, but I think humans need that, man.

[01:48:53] Humans need to feel important, and they need to feel like they matter. And if that's what it takes, is for some global or massive experience where it's like, we're going to put you in technological timeout for a minute and you're not going to have your phones for a while and you're going to have to learn to get along and you're going to have to learn to figure shit out, that will be nothing but a net positive.

[01:49:20] I don't even remember where we were. Maslow's hierarchy. Water, food, energy, know who your neighbors are. Once you check all those boxes and you've got at least a week's worth of food and water and energy, like you said, candles, a generator is not a bad idea.

[01:49:41] Just do that, and you can get all that for a couple hundred bucks. Get all of that and have it set aside and just step back and check in and see how you feel. Do you feel more empowered? Do you feel like that's a responsible thing to do? Then do more of it. If it freaks you out and if the presence of all this food makes you worry about a zombie apocalypse, reconcile that in your own belief system before you start adding stuff on because you're not going to be able to out supply that philosophical weakness.

[01:50:15] Luke: Yes, that is so true.

[01:50:16] Jesse: You just got to balance it.

[01:50:19] Luke: Beautiful. I'm glad we got to fit that in.

[01:50:21] Jesse: That's good, dude.

[01:50:22] Luke: Yeah. And I'm glad we didn't start with that either because whoever made it to the end here deserve to that information as a reward. Thank you so much, dude. I knew this would be fun and I'm so glad I just trusted my intuition as to when to ask you to come join me.

[01:50:40] It's funny, sometimes I think I just forget that some of my friends would be great guests on the show. Just like, oh yeah, I know him. There's no novelty there because I see you fairly often and I'm thinking, oh yeah, someday I'll do that. But I also really love it when somebody isn't, how do I say this in a kind way, opportunistic and pushy because they want to sell some shit from coming on my podcast. I'll just say it plainly like that.

[01:51:08] And you've never hinted at, bugged me. Maybe you didn't, you never wanted to. I don't know. But I like it when it just happens organically when it's supposed to happen versus me feeling ingratiated because I know it could help someone out and like, I don't know, it doesn't feel like the right time, but they're bugging me about it. It's much more fun when it just--

[01:51:27] Jesse: It's in the dao, man. It's in the dao. And this will be just last thing maybe. I work with a lot of, or less now, but I have worked with a lot of people who are content creators and teachers and authors and entrepreneurs, and there's this constant conundrum of like, how do you create great content?

[01:51:49] What is it that makes great content? And I'm just like, "Man, if we really are messengers, if we really are here to serve through authentic self-expression, then where does the inspiration to express come from? Is it purely internal? Do we get an idea from the ether that's too big to ignore and then we have to share it?

[01:52:16] I think that's been more my experience. But then where is that coming from? And I think it's coming as a request from someone else or from others who are seeking a very particular answer in their own aggressive curiosity to try and figure something out. And I think that their request, that magnetic sort of vibrational request is causing this delivery of the idea to those of us, and you are definitely one of these, who is a messenger.

[01:52:51] Then the idea that we get as messengers, it's not coming from us. It's coming to us, but it's coming from them. It's like being drawn through us like a conduit to refine and amplify and turn into this message for other people. And in that way, we don't own it. We have a responsibility to steward that, but it's coming from them. And so I think the timing of this, at the time of the recording, we're days away from the most interesting thing.

[01:53:26] Luke: I know. It's funny that-- I don't know when this comes out because I don't handle that part. Someone else does the publishing calendar. But it'll be interesting for people to watch this and listen to this after next week. Whatever happens, it's going to be entertaining.

[01:53:46] Jesse: It's going to be entertaining and it's going to be empowering if that's what you've already decided in advance. And if somebody votes, great. And if your person gets picked, you'll be happy. And if your person doesn't get picked, you'll be unhappy because that's what you've already decided you're going to be.

[01:54:04] And if you're not picking at all, like I'm not picking-- I don't know if you're picking. But if you're not picking somebody, then we're going to do our life anyway. Life goes on. And at the end of the day, you do always have that relationship with your future selves and they're all trying to remember you.

[01:54:22] And if you can let yourself be remembered by the most badass, optimized, holistically tuned, harmoniously prosperous version of you who's remembering you so that you can see their life and then adopt that behavior and beliefs and then collapse time and next thing you know you're there, that shit doesn't wear off, apocalypse or no.

[01:54:47] Luke: How do people work with you? One thing that I know very little about you is the inner workings of how you support yourself. I know you coach people and things like that and you do things, but I've never actually asked you like, what exactly do you do? I just know you have gifts and a lot of talent and knowledge, obviously, as people can tell now from listening to this. But if someone's listening, they're like, this dude's cool. I want to do stuff with him. What did they do? Where do they go? How does that work?

[01:55:14] Jesse: It's always moving around a little bit. I've been very appreciative to have remained strategically ambiguous for the last 11 years, and so I do coach, but I'm not a coach.

[01:55:29] Luke: Are you a coach that coaches coaches on how to coach coaches that coach coaches?

[01:55:36] Jesse: To the point that they're coaching me, I'm like, "Wait a minute." It's just the reciprocal.

[01:55:41] Luke: I love the content creators that make fun of people like me and like you. Especially in Austin, there's some such funny memes out there about us.

[01:55:51] Jesse: Oh, deservedly so. So I do coach, but I'm not a coach. I've created over 80 different courses.

[01:56:03] Luke: Really?

[01:56:04] Jesse: Yeah.

[01:56:04] Luke: Oh my God.

[01:56:06] Jesse: And it's things that I've found useful and have tested enough to see a benefit in that I feel confident in sharing it with somebody else as a description, not a prescription. So I've got a dozen different meditation courses, journaling programs. We have a full-time piercing course that takes people through these guided time piercing journeys where you're actually being remembered by your future self. It's insane. Tons of stuff around healing.

[01:56:38] And then I started getting asked to create marketing and sales stuff because I always knew how to market and sell from the karate school days. And then I created a program called Sell With Soul that people really seem to like a lot, and it just helps them to connect more to their message and be able to develop the confidence and the clarity and how to message more consistently in a way that's attractive to their audience.

[01:57:05] People really seem to like that program. And I'm not doing too many courses right now. I do steward a community for men, for entrepreneurs, that's called Sigma University, and that started back in January of 2024. It is an incredible group of dudes. It's men's work done very different.

[01:57:30] One of our members said, "This is like Abraham Hicks meets Fight Club." It's like a think tank meets locker room. And it is wildly vulnerable. Like leave your shield at the door. Come on in. All of you is welcome here as long as you just leave the victimization outside and just own what's going on. And it's incredibly healing, very powerful group of dudes, entrepreneurs who are really doing cool things. And the whole thing is just bound together with weapons grade sarcasm. It's like how guys used to be. And so it's a big--

[01:58:15] Luke: Movement. Make guys great again.

[01:58:17] Jesse: Make guys great. I'll go over huge. So that's been great. I occasionally do some one-on-one advisory or consulting, and then starting in 2025, I'll be creating an event series that'll happen partly on my farm and partly in downtown Austin that'll be for experienced entrepreneurs.

[01:58:39] The sweet spot is people who are running between a million and 5 million a year in revenue, but there's just certain things you've developed to get to that point. And there's certain problems you don't have yet. When you get around 10 million, your problems change.

[01:58:57] But we're planning a series of four-day events that is really designed to help open the channels to your innate wisdom so that your business remains as much art as it is science. So it's going to be exciting.

[01:59:11] Luke: Wow. You're an impressive, dude. I'm glad to know you.

[01:59:14] Jesse: Thank you, man. Likewise.

[01:59:15] Luke: Yeah, I need to come take some of your courses.

[01:59:18] Jesse: More to come.

[01:59:18] Luke: I need that shit. I'm sold. We're going to put all of the show notes at lukestorey.com/jesse, and we'll put your website, Instagram, Facebook, all the things there, and it'll be clickable in the show description on the podcast apps.

[01:59:35] In closing, I've got a three-part question for you. Who have been three teachers or teachings, could be a person, a book, a philosophy, etc., that have informed who you are?

[01:59:57] Jesse: They're all important. And this may be cliche, but the older I get, the more accurate it is. My mom and my dad, the more that I see how different they were in their choices on how to raise me and my siblings, the more in awe I am at their choice to do things differently and follow their heart, follow their intuition.

[02:00:23] I've spoken at length in various different places, but my mom and dad for sure. They're dynamic. They're relationship, even though they're divorced, the way they still relate to each other is just so inspiring for me. And at the time of this recording, they're both actively preparing to stick the landing on a life well lived. So they're in the home stretch.

[02:00:52] Luke: Oh, wow. Wow.

[02:00:54] Jesse: Yeah. I've had so many great mentors. I've just always been able to find myself in rooms where I'm the dumbest, the weakest, the brokest, the slowest, the thickest, the most scared person. But I always saw a way to learn how not to be that.

[02:01:23] And so it would be tough to put it down to one person. My martial arts mentors and my martial arts instructors, specifically because it's a reality-based environment that doesn't have anything to do with theory. It has to do with results. And I think that's why what I hear from clients and students is that they're like, this is so different.

[02:01:47] It's like, yeah, because it's based on reality. It's not based on what sounds good or a state change because I didn't grow up in those environments. I grew up in an environment where if you were going to talk about someone's technique, you better be able to back it up on the spot because there's going to be a physical confrontation if you're saying things that you can't back up.

[02:02:11] So I learned to only say things that I knew I could back up. And then I had business mentors who wouldn't accept stories about how business is. You don't answer a math problem with English. You answer a math question with numbers. And so I think that same ethos is alive in the coaching and the teaching and the training today.