The Criste Cast
Insights at the intersection of tech, life, business, and relationships. Hosted by Caleb Criste Eubanks. Tune in for a fresh reality check every episode!
The Criste Cast
The Criste Cast #5 | Timothy Ruppel: From Setbacks to Success
WATCH ON YOUTUBE ▶ https://youtu.be/juMbGyVJdHk
Today I sit down with Timothy Ruppel—an entrepreneur, humanitarian, and tech enthusiast who has redefined resilience and boldness. From rebuilding communities post-disaster to personal transformation and insights into AI, Timothy shares his unique perspective on life, growth, and leadership. 🙌
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Hello and welcome back to another episode. I'm excited to introduce my next guest, Timothy Ruppel. Since meeting Tim, I've had the opportunity to work with him in a few different places in a few different states. And one of the first times we hung out was at the biohacking conference over in Miami. And then after that, a few months later, we actually got to go run around Wyoming and Colorado while we were looking at a bunch of mining reclamation machinery and doing a bunch of drone shots and just kind of just checking out different places, getting some work done for some clients while bonding at the same time. It was really nice to get to know Tim on a deeper level during that trip. And unfortunately, he had some chaos going on in his life during that time, which we're going to talk about in the podcast. So go ahead and take a look at this one. It's definitely worth watching all the way until the end. Timothy is a very interesting person with all kinds of experience in different facets of different businesses and with different world leaders and business leaders of really all sorts. He's, again, an incredible person. of just incredible talent and invaluable things, which is why I wanted to have him here on the podcast. So we went ahead and actually had him here just a week after the hurricane, right? Power had come on literally within 24 hours, and I said, Tim, come on over. I've got power. Come film the podcast with me, and he said, I'll be there, right? He drove on over. We filmed the podcast, and let me tell you, this guy's a beast. Not only did he talk for over an hour, but when we finished the podcast, we ended up getting into a Q&A session where we kind of actually filmed a whole nother hour, so I'm going to go ahead and release the extra footage later on probably the Insider Plus, whether. it be on Patreon or Buzzsprout or YouTube, and that way you guys will have access to that as well. But get ready for this podcast. I will see you at the end. Thanks for watching. All right, this just in. Tim and I are hanging out in the Wyoming mountains. That's right. I've got to push the button. There he goes. Yeah, there he is. We're going to do some really cool video hours. It's going to be fun. It's staying, and it's snowing on us. It's snowing. All right. It means it's meant to be right this moment. Loud and clear. What's up? You're working. Okay, we're recording everywhere. I just wanted to start the podcast. Do you think we can do the intro here in just a moment? Absolutely. Let me know when you're ready to roll. We can kick off this podcast. Okay. Welcome back to the ChrisCast. Sounds like you're getting everything. God, Bill, you know you're going to do that every time. Whoops. Looks like we had a little stumble there. Yeah. Want to give it another go? Let's do this. Okay. Welcome back to the ChrisCast. We have a nice introduction from Vale. Let's go. Welcome back to the ChrisCast. I'm thrilled to be here with you today, and we've got an exciting episode lined up. Let's dive in. All right. So my next guest is Timothy Ruppel. Go ahead and give us a nice little introduction. about Timothy Ruppelveil? Absolutely. Timothy Ruppel is a dynamic entrepreneur with a focus on biotech and fintech industries. We met a few years ago at a mastermind. And since then, I've seen him make waves in the tech landscape, especially in blockchain, NFTs, Bitcoin, as well as mining and. reclamation. Tim's network includes high caliber individuals and celebrities, and he's known for his resilience, knowledge, and faith. I'm excited to share more about his journey and insights with you all today. That's pretty wild. All right. That was fantastic. Very interesting. She dove way back and found some buried things. That's exciting. Right. She actually just took a look at some photos and some brief information and came to this nice little introduction for us. So, Veil, I'm going to let you go right now so we get with our podcast, but I appreciate you with your time. Welcome. Enjoy the podcast and feel free to reach out if you need anything else. Have a great time chatting. Thank you. Bye bye. OK. All right. She's gone. All right, Tim. Tim. Hey, I appreciate you being here with me today. And of course, that's a fun introduction. That's why fitting for the fact that we're going to be talking a little bit about tech today. Yeah. So, yeah. First of all, people might be wondering, hey, you know, what brings you to Florida? You know, you're the guy who's traveling around all the time. And I just wanted to go ahead and start off with why are you here right now? I mean, what are you doing? Shot down to help clean up Milton and Helena. And that that chapter is closing today. So, yeah, I spent the last couple of weeks playing in the hurricane. When you say playing in the hurricane, it's not always so much fun as some people think. We have a lot of destruction, obviously, everywhere. What was the biggest impact, do you think, when you came down here as far as seeing it with your own eyes, as opposed to just what the media shows you? What's the big difference? The. The media will show you the happy and sad story like. oh, this happened or this got fixed. It doesn't work like that. There are people that will be experiencing a storm for a season or two. There are people whose entire houses have four feet of drywall removed, six feet, and sometimes even the ceiling, depending on how much water came in the property. So that could be six months to a year where they're in a place of recovery. And at times, this is that person's sole home. So they don't have a backup place or place to go. So they're literally coming in and sleeping in a new mattress in a house. where they can see all the way to their garage. And so it's wildly different than we see on the news because they make it look like it started and stopped. The storm happened. The residual will last for a long time. Like there's a video I posted yesterday where there's about one mile of road completely missing. And when I talked to the Department of Transportation guy or the local guy who said he was communicating with them, he's like, yeah, we're looking at at least a year. That's for a road. Yeah, right. And as you said, the devastation doesn't just impact for a temporary time period. I mean, even in the small ways. Here we had power or no power for about a week. And even now, we still have no internet, but we're able to at least communicate and do the podcast with the power, right? I was very lucky in the fact that even though I was in an evacuation A zone, our house was spared with flooding. Although we had some damage, minor roof damage with the wind and some sticks falling on the roof, a few little holes here and there. We can patch them up, right? But as you said, other people were not only devastated, it changes their lives completely. So what brings you as far as what's the connection to yourself and this world? I know I kind of talked about it. The hurricanes, right? Yeah, when I talk to an industry director, we talk a lot about tech and things like that. So what brings this humanitarian side out of you? So a number of years ago, or I guess I'll go way back. So when I was a kid, I always wanted to do things to help people. So my parents had some friends that lived in a downtown area, and I was walking around downtown playing with my friends, and I saw people that were homeless. And it always bothered me. And so as I grew up every year, I find a way to give back and serve, to do something uncomfortable in my line of work. And anytime there's a natural disaster, I do it. I do whatever I can to participate. And so a lot of people are like, I sent something. That's amazing. However, when you have millions of people sending stuff to an unorganized receiving area, they need skilled people to come in and support the next steps. And I've now cleaned up Irma, Harvey, Matthew, Michael, Sandy, Florence, Dorian, Helena, Milton, and I think 10 or 11 others, which puts me right around 20 storms. And every single one of them shows up and you experience it wildly different. You have people who, I guess I'll jump into a story that really anchored in why I show up here. I was in Hurricane Michael and I knocked on this door and the neighbor goes, she's home, she's home, I know she's home. I go back and I hit the door really hard. A disturbed lady comes to the door. She was shaking a little bit. And I said, hey, I'm here to help. I see you have trees all over the house. She's like, I can't afford it. I said, well, ma'am, with the damage you have sustained and the fact that they hit your structure, insurance should cover everything. proper steps and see if that's where it's at. Well, this other guy said $50,000 to $80,000. And I'm like, that's a lot of trees. Yeah. And she's like, I can't afford it. And she had a policy. She did a claim. The insurance approved it. We sent him pictures. We did the work. It was nowhere near that dollar amount. And afterwards, she goes, can I hug you? I was like, yeah, sure. So she gives me a hug and she just starts crying. She goes, I had pills in my hand to commit suicide. And when you pounded on the door, it scared them and they fell out of my hand. I came to the door and she goes, you being here, you being persistent, you following up, you serving this neighborhood, you doing all these things saved my life. And she owed me some money because I did work for her. And then I, there was some other things that weren't covered by insurance that were secondary structures. And she's like, I'll make payments. I was expecting like, it was like, I think it's three or $4,000. And she was going to send me 500 a month. About a month later, I received all $4,000 and about 15 different letters that were handwritten from the entire family saying that you kept our grandma alive. You kept my mom alive. Your presence changed the path of our family, impacted the path of our family. So when I reflect back to moments like that where simply showing up versus sending something is the difference, I do whatever I can to show up. Like when this storm came and I was called, I was in Michigan, and I drove 24 hours down to participate and support with cleanup and first responder and whatever else was needed, 10, 12, 15 hours a day. And, yeah, so I would say that those moments like that anchor me in to doing whatever I can to show up always. Yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing that story with us. And, yeah, when you talk about life or death, that's really the maximum of anything we can care as far as importance, right? The extreme of both. Yeah. And when it comes to. Yeah, the family is not only going to be in a better place, but we talk about this loss of life situation, right? This is something where I think everybody is impacted in it in some way or another, but when it directly impacts your family, it's almost like a poison that kind of sits in there and can kind of create harm in multiple ways and affect other people in ways others might know that might not have been affected by it. And I know my family has been affected by it, and because of it, those things become an entry point almost. Absolutely. And it's like, wait a second, you know, for others, it's a big, you know, obviously maybe an area where they don't go, and I'm glad that they don't. Again, for the people that do, there's obviously places where they can reach help for that, and at the end of the day, if they're lucky to get a little guardian angel knock on the door, you know, and kind of stop them from those situations, really there's nothing bigger than that. So, yeah, I think that that's a good reason to go here and help out in these efforts. One thing I do have to say is, yeah, commend you on coming here. When everybody's driving north and staying north, you came here in your big camper truck. And we're going against the odds. And, of course, I came to see you a couple days ago down in Bradenton, and that area was just packed full of people trying to get work done, a lot of utility trucks in that area. Is there anything that you saw that maybe you weren't expecting at all? When I went down to the beach, there's areas that have 10 feet of standing sand, and the road was cleared kind of like with excavators. And all you see is a 12-, 15-foot palm tree, and you have two feet and then the top. And, yeah, that was different for me. I'd seen one or two feet of sand in the past with all the different hurricanes. This one with the 10-plus feet standing, and there's a handicap ramp that's about three or four feet off the ground that goes up to, like, a second story, and it just pops out around the second story. So knowing that there's still 10 feet underground under beach stand was a wildfire. It was a wild thing to visualize. Right, and how fast that came in, obviously, we're hoping most people are going to be able to see it. People are safe, but we don't even know some of the things that are going to be underneath that sand until we get to it. So that's part of the rescue effort right there. And, you know, kind of switching gears, we have a lot of things in this kind of humanitarian space, but I want to talk a little bit about some of the industries that you've been involved in for quite some time and some of the things that you care the most about. I know you're on kind of a health journey right now, and I definitely want to dive a little bit into that. Let's go. Right? So when you say fasting, what do you mean when you're fasting lately? So October 15th was my birthday, and I haven't had any food now for four days. I did a nine-day fast last month, and during that, the first three days were physical. The next three days were mental, and the final three days were more spiritual, where I was just in sync and things were coming and manifestation was coming about. And so I'm on that journey again, stepping into the 40th year of my life. I have some really big commitments and some really big missions. And some things I'm still wrapping up. I'm chopping my head around and creating, therefore take food out and bring everything else together. As far as a mechanism of focus, it's helping with that? Yeah. Between sex and digestion, those are the two biggest draws of energy from our body. So abstaining from anything like that, my laser focus is the clarity in my head. When it comes to clarity, that's what I'm looking for in this podcast. It's the whole reason I'm trying to talk to people like yourself is I want to get some insights, some valuable knowledge. And, of course, there's some things we can't know. There's opinions at the end of the day. There's a lot of philosophy, which is a place I like to go into just as much as science, fact-based things. But one thing I know is that vibrations are real, right? Frequencies are real. Tunage is real. So there's a reason that we're having this conversation right now. And one thing I'd like to think is that we can shape these words into tools that others can use and hopefully gain some benefit and value from. So. One thing. I do want to ask you a little bit about, though, this is completely off-topic now. Dude, let's just make the entire episode called off-topic. Off-topic. That way we're covered. We've seen both a lot of the same things with misinformation when it comes to just knowledge being given out there to people. The last few years. Right, the last few years. It's hard to keep track of what's right. Even when you are somebody who wants to have faith-based knowledge in the world, there's just so much stuff coming at you. Gotcha. So why do you think there is so much chaos when it comes to UFOs, UAPs, and extraterrestrials, and heaven and hell, right? Those things seem to be mixing about quite a bit. Have you seen this, and what do you think about that? Yes, I've seen it. I have a friend who was in Colorado camping and hiking about two weeks ago, and when they were up on a pass looking down, they saw things moving that were about 20 feet tall. He's like, there is nothing here. that's 20 foot tall. And it wasn't like a bear that went up a tree and shook a tree. It was like a movement through the forest. And so that's something that was reported to me directly from someone hiking. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. Right. Those big feet. Yeah, I have a good friend who, he owns the Love Pyramid in Bosnia. Okay. So the Love Pyramid, literally a place, literally a pyramid. And a few years ago, I was sitting, I was attending a Tony Robbins event. I walk across the street, get a couple burgers with no bun, and I'm sitting there, and this guy comes up to me and just looks at me. There's six of us at the table. He goes, does pyramids mean anything to you? It's literally how I met Jay. And I'm like, yeah. And everybody at the table is like, whatever. Like, this dude's crazy. And he goes, let me talk to you. So we talked for like three minutes. He's like, well, I just got a pyramid. I'm like, that's weird. That's strange. But he's saying that. And so now we became good friends over the last, I think it's five plus, yeah, it's five plus years. It's five plus years. And he obtained this pyramid in Bosnia, and he owns the Love Pyramid. And the energy level and the things that are taking place, and him and I will have a conversation over 90 days. There will be things that come out of it. I will have conversations with other spiritual workers from around the world. People have met at a Dr. Joe Dispenza event, a faith-based event, and it's just like these things are coming together. I have a friend who was in the Himalayas recently, and there's an area that people come to and just pay homage for the fact that there are footprints in the stone. And they're just grateful for the fact that somebody walked in there and created that. And I would say right now, energetically, the veil is thinner than it's ever been in our lifetime because people are manifesting. People are having spiritual breakthroughs and healings. I mean, cancer leaves people's bodies. Belief systems go to the wildest. This woman that I know had a psoriasis when I was at a Dr. Joe Dispenza. That was so bad that she hadn't kissed anybody in like 10 years or been intimate in 11 years. And at the event, she just believed that she was stepping out of it a new version. And during a 15 minute healing session, it went to zero. Right. And so like what we think we know today is what is the dogma surrounding it. The agenda we've been we've been force fed. And yeah, no, it's complex. It's an entirety. But as you said, the placebo effect almost is the thing that's the strongest that we're finding out. Right. Those who have the internal belief, not only thinking it's going to happen, but really externally pushing that belief onto the external world. We're finding scientifically there's some reality to that. Right. There's a piece where placebo and things like conspiracy are an invented and focal word. I believe that faith expressed and placebo get blended together. And it's kind of bullshit because you're taking the power away. So for me, I find ways. To take placebo out and say, you know, the faith and the ritual and the. The indoctrination that we have that says this means this is based on what? A person, a book, a story that mom and grandma said that you're now saying because they said it? So for me, I'm at ground zero, and I'm like, I'm open. Like, teach me something. Let me learn. And when I see it, I'm like, all right, that just happened. My own eyes are witnessing it. I'm going to go check on my brain. Yep, just happened. Just happened, and then I'm like, all right, I'm curious. I'd like to learn about it. Right. Yeah, you've got to keep an open mind at the end of the day, but your eyes don't lie. Well, do they, right? Some people say no. As you said, I think you have to take the knowledge and affirm that over time with the things that you see, not just with the values of others but with your own experiences. And, yeah, we're finding that, as you said, the veil is thinner than ever. That's a really nice expression you said right there because it feels that way. It feels like we're able to see things like we haven't before. What we used to call BS is now becoming reality evermore. Right? Still have our good one? Yeah, we're still good. And when it comes to – Kind of accessing that veil. One thing I thought was really interesting after watching podcasts here and podcasts there and podcasts there, different people are kind of unlocking this knowledge that whether it be parapsychology or this ability to be psychic, right, is not only something that should be frowned upon but is actually real and that we should be trying to tap into, right? Have you tried to do some meditation or tried to do anything in this area whatsoever or read about this? I've experienced certain things. There's a story where there's a gentleman over in Africa and there's two brothers and they're an hour apart. And the guy's in the woods and they're walking and all of a sudden the guy goes, my brother's calling, this guy's wearing a loincloth. And he turns and he goes, we must meet him. And he just starts running across the field. And 20 minutes later after chasing this guy with American clothing and a belt and a shirt and whatever and he's running, all of a sudden a man comes off into the distance and they meet and they hug and they speak about something. And he said, this is going on. We must return to the village. And he's like, where's this dude? cell phone. What just happened? And so that's very real because it happens around the world and it doesn't happen here today. We have so much technology that we're connected, but we're disconnected. So for the breath work, breath work is something that I'm diving into big time. Meditation is something that I practice. I practice it kind of reactionary. And I realized that last week as I was reflecting, approaching my 40th birthday, several areas that I have have incredible disciplines. I exercise them upon need, not upon like development. And so as I move forward in my life, I'm starting to incorporate different things to become better and have that be a more predominant practice in my life. Right. Yeah. Well said. We've got the. tools, but you don't always have the system in place to use the tools and probably maybe dustless toolboxes are not that valuable. Yeah, exactly. I'm real smart with this tool shed that I have locked up far away in the back of the apartment. So yeah, let me go ahead and go. Jump down. We actually have some things here that, We started off 1,300 questions. This is my podcast stuff right here. So we're well prepared. We're well prepared. And we still haven't had an issue with the camera, so we are still gathering our feet here with the Christ cast. Let's go. And we're using some old Canon T2i's for those wondering what cameras we're using right now. These are actual photograph cameras that we're repurposing for this podcast. And I think there's nothing wrong with it. A little magic lantern makes it work. When it comes to making content, you're somebody who has been in the media, been out of the media. You're more or less kind of hidden on social media right now. So what is your path moving forward when it comes to people seeing you and hearing more from you? And what can they expect? I'm just going to be as real and raw as I know how to be and bold. I came up with a saying last year that was I've never felt proud of a moment I was called to be bold that I wasn't. And as I started to evolve and live on that, I have said more forward things. I've had more in-depth conversation. I'm recently single. I've been single for a while. And in that, I started to start dating. And I'd ask really blunt forward questions and I would be uncomfortable, almost little body sweats like, what about this? What do you think about that? And the response I got has been so phenomenal to dive deep and get real information versus being like, hi, I'm great. And look how good I am and blah, blah, blah. And let me give you my one hit wonder. You know, I tell people like Cisco and the thong song popped up, went on the chart, disappeared. And I've never heard of the man again. I want to build a Rolling Stones experience where over time, everybody gets little touches of it throughout their lifetime and everybody knows who I am. So I, uh, yeah. Talking about building a legacy. As far as a catalog of things as opposed to just a one hit wonder. I agree. Uh, that's what I think all people strive for. But when it comes to what's easy versus what's difficult, right? People tend to think what's. Easy is going to be the better thing, right? What's difficult is going to be the hard thing or the worst thing. And I want to try to change that for people, too, because what's easy can sometimes be great. But at the same time, what's difficult is usually going to be more fulfilling at the end of the day. And as you said, building a legacy is difficult to do. When it comes to this name, Rupal Effect, right, what does that mean to you? I like leaving it alone because people start to ask that question. It's who I am. It's how I show up. A couple days ago, I was sitting in Michigan. I got a call. Can you help? Let's click him. We're getting used to it now on these live casts. Caleb's standing up and hitting his cameras. All right, so in Michigan. All right, sir. I was up in Michigan, and I got a phone call. I was heading to Maine. I ended up in Florida the next day. So that is how it is. I get calls and opportunities of fantastic individuals, and I show up. I would say that is it. The Rupal Effect will be continuously involved. That's a good way to put that, for sure. When it comes to this turning of age 40, as you mentioned earlier, right, I know that you had some reflection moments, right, during this time. I definitely want to go into that because I think people of all ages, they've either been there, they're going to be there, or they're there right now, right, especially in our age demographic. What are some of the things that you contemplated when it comes to this whole process? And even, we're young, got a lot of time left, but life after death, are these the kinds of things that are in your mind? What kinds of stuff is rolling playing? So I have a Rolodex of phenomenal relationships, and I started to see where I show up to serve them and where there's reciprocation. And I just started taking people out of my life, and I'm so grateful because even in the brevity of the last three months, I've had so much more value exchange with people that it's an exchange. I committed to being bold. I committed to being authentic at a level that... Sorry. You're good. I just want to make sure this one, we got a little break in our third person view. Committing to being bold. All right. So I just, I, in reflection for the last 90 days or so, I committed to the rest of my. life to be bold and to be authentic. There's a lot of things that we have the opportunity to be throughout life. And right now, those are the focus that I find the most value in. For sure. And when it comes to actually changing your own persona in life, what has been the biggest effect on you externally? Like what kinds of things are actually changing you as a person when it comes to maybe media that you're intaking or just life experiences? So I'll take that in two parts. The first is forgiveness and grace. I have fucked up a lot. I have worked really hard. I've had things fail. Things have been in my control. Things have been out of my control. And as a human being, we tend to bring stuff from yesterday and today. And the more that I have the ability. To be in the. moment with real, raw, authentic experiences, the more powerful my outcomes are. So that would be the answer to that. The media and the content that I consume, I break down several ways. I do 30 minutes of scrolling a day. What is something that I can hear that day that will and can impact my life? This morning, I got up, third scroll, something popped up, boom, I left it on repeat, jumped through a shower, no more scrolling today. That was fantastic. It anchored something in my head that allowed me to think a little bit different, and I find immense value in that. Every now and then, I'll take a month and I won't scroll at all, zero, zero. The other thing is, is every 90 days, so this is the final quarter, every 90 days, I'll pick somebody to mentor me. May it be a Tony Robbins, a Jim Rohn, a John C. Maxwell, Patrick Bet-David, whoever the. titan is, Gary Brecken, his content around health, I go after it and I just, I download everything I physically possibly can. That way. Um, in consuming the entire individual's content and library, I'm able to emulate it. I'm able to share it. I'm able to live it. I'm able to embody it. If, and when I have in the past gone through, Oh, I read 130 books in a year. And like, there's a blend. There is not there. Like if I read all of an author, I'd understand more about the way that they think they show up. They present. themselves in the world by reading 130 books, a book every three days ish. Uh, math wise, I, I had a lot of information and it was very blurred. So I think that more precise in this stage of my life is valuable. When I was younger, I want to change a thing. Going through every single book gave me the ability to understand that leaders had habits, habits, had patterns, patterns, had rituals, rituals, created principles, principles created who we are. Like it's a stacking effect. So all the information that I've collected created who I am. There's areas that I am. Phenomenal. There's areas that I, I lack, and I'm so grateful to be recognizing them. and stepping into them for 15 years. I studied. to help them on this and didn't apply a damn thing. I was almost 300 pounds a few years ago when you met me. I cracked 300 pounds. That is unnecessary. That is absolutely ridiculous. Whenever I sit down with people, I'm solving all these people's problems. I'm like, have you tried this? Look at this. It supports your body. What about this? Try this. You don't do that. Why didn't you do that? That was four-year-old information. Do you think it's time to hit the next software and update what you're taking in as information to live a great life? So that would be your answer to those two. I appreciate that. As far as what better application than doing the steps yourself to then reaffirm not only your knowledge but then to have more input from that actual first-person perspective, the benefits of health can't be understated. One thing is, as we both talked about, focus is something that I have a lack of quite often. Even to get this podcast going took way too long just because, trying to always have not just excuses but real-life things that come at you if you don't apply yourself to try to make things happen. What has been the biggest, biggest pullback on you when it comes to becoming this person, becoming where you are right now? What do you feel was something that you kind of had to overcome that you now don't fear or don't fall victim to anymore? Damn. I have fucked up a lot. I have had incredible successes in my life. Putting each one of those in a box and letting it be. If I lived in my success and told the story from a long time ago, who am I today? How are you avoiding falling into the pitfalls of the past, right? How are you staying positive? How are you staying motivated? And how are you being basically the person you are and not falling victim into the things before and being overweight and doing those kinds of things that cause those reactions? I took all the sugar out of my house. So I don't have access or proximity to things that I should or shouldn't be eating. So it made my life a lot simpler. I took all the noise out of my life. It became very quiet. I'm out on the road a lot. So when I step out of the existence of my life and into the roadshow where I'm at a, seminar, a conference, I'm on stage, I'm listening. to somebody, I'm learning, I'm meeting somebody. That is that setting. The second I come back, everything is very simple. So I made my life quieter in order to make it louder. I will be on more stages, presenting to more people, adding more value. In that process, I have released and reduced, the access and the information and the access to me. So it becomes, that's the formula. So less people have access to me. If it impacts and adds value, I go and do it. If it doesn't, I'm not. And I'm looking for things that are 100x, 300x, not ones and twos. Save your time. What was the last podcast you listened to? Joe Rogan. Can't go wrong right there. When it comes to Joe Rogan versus other people out there, what makes him attractive? He has no filter. So if there's a question that's like, man, I don't know if he should ask that, he's like, here we go, boom! The question is asked. I very similarly, Patrick Bet-David delivers bomb questions, dropping bombs with Bradley. He does it. He just says it. He's like, huh, this is something that people won't talk about. Let's talk about it in its entirety. Yeah, there's a lot of value to be said when it comes to opening those cases. I agree with free speech, as I've mentioned multiple times, and I want people to talk about things because I think when communication is happening, we're growing. Even if somebody says something crazy, now people get to hear the crazy thing and they get to go say, hey, here's why that's crazy. And if they want to present that case, then they start coming up with proof and reasoning. And over time, we create this database of knowledge that I think makes us stronger and more robust. So right now in your life, what's your main focus? I know we've talked a little about health and biotech. As growing as a person, is there any specific industry that you're focused on, or is it just personal growth? So I'll answer that twice. The industry is. longevity. The way that I look at longevity is the highest quality of life for the longest part of your life. A lot of people, there's sayings like die at 30 and are buried at 75. 45 years of. hell between your health, your finances, your relationship that isn't on fire is a choice now today because we understand what makes those things that way. I have a friend who told me, yeah, my marriage is over. I was like, well, what are you doing? He's like calling divorce lawyers. I said, are you calling any counselors? He goes, no. They didn't cheat on each other. They were in some debt. They had some pressures. They weren't having intimacy. I go, here's a question. When was the last time you watched one of your wife's favorite movies that had an intimacy and that had her? He goes, it's been a long time. You know how it is. I'm like, I don't. know how it is because if I found myself married to somebody I love and it going wrong, I would find those movies. I would find those things. We're sitting at lunch. I simply said, I challenge you right now to do something for her. Well, we're here. Great. There's a divorce lawyer. There's apps. There's delivery service. There's Uber. There's a friend next door. You have a $100 bill in your pocket. You do fairly well. Find a way to do something in the moment. He did. That was two years ago. Their relationship's on fire and a baby popped out. So like that's it. Right, right. I completely agree that at the end of the day, you can't control others' actions, but your actions are what you can control. Absolutely. And if you can do some positivity as opposed to the continuation of the negativity, then, yeah, you might see some actual changes, some differences. And I see that on a daily basis. And that's kind of that whole perspective flip, right? It's not that he's wrong. It's that there's another option, right? There's another way of doing something. There's another way of seeing something. And I really appreciate that you can see it from that perspective and help others. The fact that you just said what you said. So you said the perspective flip. I'm four days into a fast. I started some protocols. I've worked out every single day. And it is becoming difficult between the mental power and the energy in the body. And this morning, I spent an hour. Between meditation, prayer, and gratitude, just being thankful for my life, my health, the health of everybody around me. And during that, I was stating things, where I needed to be, what I needed in that, what I needed from somebody, what I was for somebody. And I stopped myself. I was like, that is not the most powerful set of words to put around that. And my perspective on everything switched. And I know already, because of the people that have texted me in the last two hours, and the fact that you just said that, and the fact that I was on the phone with somebody, and I was like, yeah, I'm going to drive across Florida and shake hands and kiss babies. And I walk in, and you're like, here's my baby. And I'm like, that was like three minutes later. I was like, no way. So the way that we show up and the perspective, super powerful, super valuable. Mm-hmm. Yeah, very well said. And I think that showing up is the thing that people want to do, but that's the hardest part for people is showing up, right? Mm-hmm. When they don't feel like it. When they don't feel confident yet. And that's kind of one thing I want to hopefully do with this cast is help people kind of maybe. You break out from that feeling of where they want to be and where they are and getting that confidence to take that step by listening to other people talk about not just their experiences but some of the faults that they've gone through and hearing that it's okay to make mistakes, as you've said before. Not only is it okay to make mistakes, but it's actually the requirement in order to be a robust and fulfilled, wise person. Everything. One thing I try to tell my son always when it came to video games, he broke his tablet when he was four years old, smashed it on the ground. I said, hey, you do that again. Never get in a tablet. No, you don't get upset when you lose a game. You get excited. You say, hey, I lost, which means now I can do better. Now I can actually figure out what I did wrong, which is going to show me what not to do. And now you take that perspective with life. It becomes a little more fun. And from somebody who is really afraid to ever make a mistake in front of other people and ever show any faults, this is something that's completely changed my life, this perspective of, hey, not only is it okay to fail, but if somebody is laughing at me, ha-ha. Ha-ha. To you. Because you don't know how the game's actually played. All day. Right? This is the way we're supposed to do it. And if I make some mistakes or say something wrong or look goofy on a podcast, bring it on. Criticism doesn't come from the front row. Right. You know, nobody above you is saying, ah, you did a shitty job. So those people aren't my audience. Exactly. I don't need or want that. I say stuff now in a very small audience and have people DMing me. You got to be careful. I was like, why? They're like, you know what they say. Who the fuck say? What are they saying? Whatever. Fear. You should watch the news. For what? I drove in five, six, seven years ago, drove straight through Ferguson happening. Driving back from Dallas, Texas to Toledo, Ohio. I pulled in. City's going crazy. I thought there's a concert. There's people everywhere. They're having fun. There's energy. They're loud. They just exited a sports event in my mind. I don't watch TV. I don't watch sports. I had no idea. I posted on my Facebook, like, just made it to St. Louis. Headed home. See everybody soon. That next day I had so many comments and everybody's afraid. I'm like, well, first of all, it's 17 miles away from where I am. Had no idea. Drove in, drove out. Had no idea. Completely, perfectly safe. People say blanket statements like, well, you heard what happened in California. That's hundreds of miles down a coast. You're in California. Are you okay? If I walked, it'd take me four weeks to get there. That's how close I was to that situation. People that aren't in your area are more worried for you than you are in the area that you're at, right? How many times do we have that effect happening to us? Which is a good thing that people are worried about you. But at the end of the day, if they try to tell you what to think, how to feel, what to fear, maybe ask questions instead of making statements. Questions are beautiful. Questions are very valuable. That'll save you a lot of time. And when it came to the hurricane, I've got a lot of people messaging me telling me what they think I should and shouldn't do. And one thing that people don't really take into consideration, I have to say, when it comes to events like this is, is the kind of costs that come into play, right? Yeah. If you want to uproot your family and pets and travel somewhere, right? Where, right? If the hurricane goes north, I can't go to Destin. If the hurricane goes south, I can't go to Miami. If the hurricane goes up, you know, towards Jackson, I can't. So where do I go? And then go to the Midwest? Okay, great. You know, for how long? And in a vehicle, right? So you've got to have these things. And I don't even have air conditioning in my car, right? So it makes these little things difficult, right? And that's one thing I try to tell people and say, well, we'll just give you money. Again, money doesn't just solve it, right? Because finding hotels isn't easy in an issue like this. Even leaving itself, unless you've left two to three days before the hurricane comes, you might just get stuck in a traffic jam, right? And not have any fuel because the fuel becomes impossible to find. So this is one thing I wanted to express all that out there. for anybody listening and maybe going through similar situations, but what do you think people should maybe just maybe think about when it comes to giving advice, or is there something that people can do that actually is helpful other than just being armchair experts? Get out there and experience what you're talking about. I think that when somebody hits caps locks, they feel like they're in a place of authority. The most deleted comments on the internet, I actually saw a statistic the other day. I read an article about how people delete comments, and it's this exponential factor. when people start using caps. So if somebody's like, da-da, that comment gets deleted. And I was like, man, how many people feel like they showed up and did something that day while they're smashing their unhealthy processed food and raising their blood pressure out of frustration, keyboarding away for it to just be deleted? Right, right. You bring up a good point. That actually was in my mind earlier when we talked about... kind of haters or people that kind of come up on and give you feedback or criticism when it comes to whether it be deleted comments or criticism on YouTube or Facebook or any. social media platform. What I find is that they're temporary. And as you said, whether somebody is calling you a name or saying they don't like you or this or that, you're resonating with them in some way, right? And if they say something negative, this person is usually at an immature level over here. And whether it be a few days, months or years later, this person becomes an ally or a friend or starts trying to imitate you because they saw what you did, right? In some way, shape or form. So what I try to keep in my mind and what I want to also say to other people is that, sometimes the negativity, although it does exist in the world, we have to keep in mind. prospectively it needs to exist, sadly, because it's part of life. It's part of growing up. And that negative positive balance is something that's structured into the reality of life so that people grow and so that they can become better. As we said, we make mistakes in order to become smarter, right? We caps lock, yell at people and feel stupid and then delete it. And they go, oh, my gosh, I shouldn't do that again. Right. Hopefully moments. Yeah, hopefully. Some people, I think, never learn, and they continue to follow down that path, and I'm not really going to focus on those people because they're not going to be watching this or care to change, right? But those of us who do want to do better, I think, is something that we can always think about. So I do want to talk a little bit about some of your health stuff, but you're not somebody who's avoided all issues when it comes to traveling around the world or traveling around the U.S. lately. Last year when we were hanging out, we went to Wyoming, and we got to see a bunch of spots, but right before that, you had a house fire that took over your house. Man, that was devastating, something that many people have unfortunately experienced and gone through, and you've added to that statistic. So I want to hear a little bit about that process now that it's been a year and how you're feeling kind of with that whole thing and how that affected you. And I know at the time, we were just kind of getting through it day by day. Literally. You hadn't even seen the house yet when I had first seen him. We'll show some footage. We'll show some pictures and things like that. But basically, yeah, during that time period, you were kind of in your head quite a bit. Not only, hey, let's get some footage, but let me try to talk to Tim and get him out of his head as much as possible. I remember every bit of that. I woke up early that day. It's crazy. I'm a dude. We don't clean our houses, right? So I cleaned my house, had my Roombas running. That's me cleaning the house. Made sure the dishes were there, ran the dishwasher, threw away some stuff, you know, the fruits and stuff that wouldn't be good, and left town for a few days. Anyways, we took off and went to Denver, Colorado. I flew in. You flew in. And get my bag wandering through Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, phone call, Messenger phone call. My phone's blowing up. And I look down. It's like ding, and different, you know, makes different noises. So I was like, that's interesting. And my neighbor texted me or called. He called me. So I was like, all right, I'm dragging my bag. I have a bag over my shoulder. And I text him. Um, mind getting my like, uh, Amazon packages or whatever. And he goes, he replies back. It won't matter or something. And I was like, that's rude. And then he calls me and I'm like, my hands are full, et cetera. And I'm like, hello. And he's like, where are you? Like I'm in Denver, Colorado. Where are you? And he's like, your house on fire. And I just replied back so casually, like, no, it's not. I just left it. It was clean. The Roomba. So I'm like, well, what the hell happened? Are you okay? Are the neighbors okay? And he's like, I have no idea. They're here now. I talked to the, uh, the fire person, the inspector person. Like what happened? Nobody has any idea. I started in the pantry. Um, the, the fire guy was like asking me questions. What's in there. Do you have batteries? Do you eat e-cigarette? Do you vape? I'm like, I didn't know there was a difference. I guess there was a difference between the two. He was explaining to me. One is a big carpenters. The other is a little tiny thing. Like, no, I don't do any of that. I don't have any of that. The only thing that we came down to a resolution a while later was a girlfriend of mine, Sydney, and her boyfriend were interested in moving out of her parents' house to have some privacy in their own place. And I traveled a lot. So I was like, I think that this might be a good thing for you guys to basically rent the first floor of my house. I'll have my master bedroom. You guys have access, et cetera. And so I had taken a video around the house. So I went back and reflected on that and found a pack of batteries, a little bin of batteries. So I think that the only thing we came up with was that during cleaning or the batteries on their own, you know, in proximity to each other, touched and created heat and created a spark and an arc, and that was it. In reflection, it's a lot less emotional in the moment. You were there. It was just fucked up. Like I woke up, had a beautiful four-bedroom, three-bathroom house. I went to bed. And at the time, I told you, it was like they said everything's okay. It was just a little kitchen fire. I got home. And everything is gone. It started out as a kitchen fire, and then day by day went, and all of a sudden it turned out to be more and more. Yeah, they kept showing me more photos. Like, I literally had one room of the house with a photo saying there's black smoke and soot. I'm like, okay. And then by the time I got home, and they told me, like, it doesn't matter. The smoke had reached everything. And I drag-cleaned items three, four, five times, and it still smelled like a kerosene-y, gasoline-y. Yeah, that was tough. I left there with two pairs of shoes and four outfits. Wow. I had some items in my garage that are in a good friend of mine, Jeff's garage. Not where I thought life would have taken me. And the thing was is I paid for insurance on the home for two years on my credit card. But when my ex-girlfriend and I obtained the house, she went to the insurance place. They called me, asked me how much do we want, how do we want to set up, blah. Took my credit card, paid off. And she signed the paperwork and put it in her name. My name wasn't added to the policy. My credit card, my mailing address, her name on the policy. Since her and I had broken up, they said we're not covering anything. And it was a total loss. I had, being in the health industry, I had Avacyns in there. I had red lights. I had a vibration acoustic bed. I had just bought a subwoofer that I'd saved for for about nine months. That was like my, in the time, pride and joy because I really enjoy bass. And when I went to bed that night in Colorado, I just sat there and I just had this hole in where I was experiencing life. I sat there for about, I think we were there five or six days. It was about 48 hours where I was really in it, wondering what it is, how it is, what's damaged. They told me the living room was messed up and that was where those items sat. And I was like in gratitude. thinking I still have an Avacyn outside of there. I have several red light panels in a different part of the house. When I got home, it was all gone. Do you think being away from the house for that time period was helpful or more of maybe a mind fuck and you just had to think about it all the time? Being told it was a small kitchen fire and everything was okay was fine. I told the fireman I was on the next flight. I told you, I called you and said, I don't know if I'm doing anything, I'm heading home. Then he goes, you can't go in it for a couple of days. We've got to do our inspection. That allowed it to become less of an impact in that time. Once I got home and saw the exponential devastation over what I was told, that shifted for me because I had T-shirts from 20 years that were band T-shirts or event T-shirts or concerts or church events. They're all gone. I did laundry. I did laundry at one of the neighbor's houses. a few times and they bought something off the internet that reduced the smell and commercial people used with no. saving anything. It all came out of the dryer and was horrible. I remember seeing some of the videos and as you moved any item from even places in the house that didn't have the direct fire, as you said, the smoke had covered everything. They had a silhouette of everything and I can imagine the smell that everything protruded after that. It's devastating to go through that experience and not to bring it up to put those feelings back. here, but the reason I want to bring this up is just because since that's happened, whether it be social media or whether it be seeing you or talking to you, I've seen almost like a phoenix, a rebirth of Timothy Ruppel. I've seen you go from kind of being the long-haired guy taking care of business to now you've got a shaven head and you're kind of kicking butt and going to all of the coolest events everywhere where people are saying, this is where you need to be. This is what you need to do. You're managing to find your place in these circles. So what is it that's pushing you to, I wouldn't say, to be this place? We know people want to be there, but how are you manifesting this right now? And what is your, I guess, how has this fire situation kind of helped with that maybe? And what's been that path since then to rebuild yourself to get to this place? That's beautiful. So the Super Bowl came about because I had an invite to go to a party with a family office that supports some of the companies I work with. And that was just a beautiful experience. Went over to Lee Steinberg's party. Pretty easy access there. Walked up, named some people that we know, asked how tickets work. Tickets were thrown around our neck. We came in, shook hands, kissed babies with a lot of people. They were there, the right people. He draws an incredible audience. About a month ago, I was in San Francisco. I took an amazing woman out to dinner on a date, and during that conversation at dinner, I said, what is something I don't know about you? She's like, I wanted to train and pull a card in the UFC, and I'm like, wow, that's interesting. And I was like, have you ever been to a fight? She goes, no. So that night I got home, and I was like, I'd like to be on Gary Brekka, Joe Rogan, Dana White's podcast and communicate with them. And I'd like to go to a UFC fight, and I sign all my entries in my diary with the date and the time. It's 12.12 a.m. Go to bed, wake up. A friend of mine, Tabor, had texted me, hey, bro, once in a lifetime opportunity, Sunday. It was Friday or Saturday, the day before. And I read the text, and it says I have two extra tickets to the UFC fight at the Sphere. Do you want to go? And so I just replied back, yes. And it was the most expensive. It was the most expensive date of my life, and I wouldn't change anything. I'm grateful for the time, the proximity, et cetera. I went back, and we were at an event. The woman was working with me, and I said, hey, you want to do something fun? She's like, what is it? I was like, go to UFC fight? She's like, yeah. When? I'm like, we have to fly from San Francisco to Vegas today. It's tomorrow. And she's like, okay. And it was a great weekend. A lot of things learned. And I actually sat in the fight at one point and became really quiet. My buddy was like, were you okay? I was like, I was okay in such a manner that I couldn't express with words or my anything the fact that I'm waking up living my dream right now. And I would say it's the reward for the boldness because I'm writing down things at such a level and such a caliber that it's bringing them to be, period. You know the list of people that I work with and serve. And I'm a homeschooled kid from Toledo, Ohio. who dropped out of high school and dropped out of college, and I have presidents, presidential candidates, CEOs, CFOs, world leaders, and people who call and say, I have a situation. How would you approach it? How would you handle it? How would I look at it differently? And I'd say that everything in my life, like people ask me a lot, like, you've been through some rough stuff. Would you go back and change anything? Zero chance. I am so grateful for every moment of pain, every bit of suffering, every fuck up, every error, every miscalculation, every single thing that's made me who I am has allowed me to become resilient and bulletproof in areas that people get taken out. So every bit of pain, every bit of loss, thinking I arrived, I got somewhere, and that goes away has still built me to who I am and what I get to experience in this life so far. Are you afraid? Are you afraid of AI taking over the world anytime soon? No, I think it's. A complimentary service for the way that we're showing up in the world as humans. I think that the open source aspect gives the ability for people that have both sides of it. There will be weaponized AI as there's been weaponized computers, as there's been weaponized money, as there's been weaponized good and bad things throughout history. I'm not afraid of that. I don't wake up in fear. I wake up in gratitude. So that is not something that takes hold or hosts my mind time or bandwidth today. Absolutely. When it comes to AI technologies, is there any AI-specific tools that you use? Yeah. I spent five hours writing out a framework for the next decade of my life on the last day of my 39th year last week. And so in five hours, I put together all these different things. And I went to AI and I said, here's a sentence. Find me like a Latin term or something in the framework of stoicism. To consolidate. Solidarity. this. And I, it was wild because when I got done with it, I spoke these things into it for, probably about 90 minutes. So three and a half hours of physically handwriting 30 pages back and forth. So in three and a half hours, I wrote 60 pages of hand content. Then I use Siri and spoke into the phone and I put it there and then I refined it. It was 40 fucking items on the news. I got chills on my whole body. Cause I was, I was just dumping them in. It was three and a half hours, 30 pages back and forth, 60 pages in total content. And I did it. I just sat there and I was. like, wow. And then I read through it and it had broken it down. I think I edited it or amended it two or three times. And so I simply use the large language models to consolidate and create, deliverable copying content when it's necessary. Other than that, I'll ask for support to make a word bigger. And then I'll go manually, go to Google and pull the definition because I want to build something. In my head versus become lazy. and soft in the fact that I can be like, give me this, create me that, make a banana bread. I really want to go pull out a cookbook and go to page 67. So I love and appreciate how it empowers me. I don't want it to be something that is a crutch ever. Right, right. I agree. In my mind, kind of the joke that I'm using now is that AI can be a donut or it can be a weight, and you can either use it to lift yourself up and grow muscle in your brain, or you can completely just take over and become flaccid and everything. Right. So, as you said, when you give it, when you prompt it full of information, it can do a lot of kind of nice, insightful things with it. And that's kind of my favorite thing to show people is that, hey, you know, when I get a prompt, you know, to or when I give a prompt to AI, it's often, you know, yay big twice as long as the actual output of what I'm trying to get. Right. I'm trying to refine information. And in that way, it's really well done. Having said that, being able to combine these LLMs with these visual models, create little holograms like Veil. and be able to see things in the future. This is something that I've talked about a lot in the past when virtual reality was first coming about in 2014. I had a podcast with a bunch of guys called VR Spies, and we used to speak about these future things. And now we're seeing them here in 2024, 10 years later, actually come into fruition. And one thing I spoke about in previous podcasts and that I want to kind of just bring up right now is this very soon future of having an AI assistant or an AI buddy that travels with you everywhere, something that sees what you see, hears what you hear, and then gives you feedback on a regular basis, right? And so I see this thing constantly in my mind as I look around the world, and I see all these applications for it that'll be beneficial. And I can already see the technology with the meta-ray bands that I've got a few pairs of those where they can see and hear what you see and experience your life. And with your cell phone combined, we could create that already. Today's technology, we can already create that, right? A living, breathing AI. So in this future, the world, So are you thinking that this is going to be maybe a benefit for yourself? And are there kind of negatives that you see for people maybe using this? As we said, there's the lazy way of using AI and the beneficial way. Having an AI buddy, is that something that kind of gets you excited or, I guess, fearful overall? Fearful is not something that you'll find me identifying with in any way. Everything has its place. A forest is for rest, two words plugged together. So when you want to unplug, you plug them together and you go there. As long as somebody plugs in and gets a benefit, unplugs and goes and gets some connection, I don't find a problem with very much that's available today. What I do find a problem with are people that become less functional in their lives, their daily, their movement, their bodies, et cetera, as a human being. And during that experience, they're leaning into AI too much. Yeah. And when you say... Leaning into AI too much, there's a lot of people right now that are doing that, clearly. When we read the responses to the emails that we get or even some social things, you can tell whether you're talking to a human being or AI right now. I know that's going to change in the future as people get more adept, again, with AIs listening to you and developing its own personality with you. It's going to kind of become you. And that's where I kind of fear for the, not today's version generation, I would say, but in the future generation when people become over-reliant on this AI buddy, this little holographic guy that talks to you or a woman or it that speaks to you and gives you advice, I think people are going to kind of become not just reliant on it, but it's going to help develop their emotions somewhat. And kind of their emotions are going to be set in stone, meaning, hey, Caleb, how are you doing today? I'm excited. Let's have a great day today. It's going to have to pep you up and motivate you. And let's say the Internet connection is off because of a storm. All of a sudden, now my AI is not connected to anything. I'm talking to it, and it can't give me any feedback, right? So there's going to have to be this reserve of information somewhere. That it can apply its personality from, number one. And number two. Having that connection with this AI world versus people, that's where we see potential manipulation coming because where's the source of information coming at the end of the day, right? And one beautiful thing I love when I talk to people like yourself is that you have so many thoughts that are individual to you. And in the future, I kind of feel like we're going to have less of this individual thought and more of this hive mindset thought with everybody speaking, whether it be using Neuralink or having AI. That's one thing that worries me. I wouldn't say I'm scared or fearful of this tool because I love the idea. I'm aware of it. I'm aware of this. And just because, again, we talked about what's easy versus what's hard. Well, it's easy to rely on something that tells you what to do, right, especially if it knows the best way to get what you want, right, or can even tell you what the best thing is or what you should want at the end of the day. And that's where it becomes scary if it's telling people what they want, right? And so this is where, again, I wouldn't say fearful is maybe the best word, but I think we need to be aware. And is there something that you think is going to happen when it comes to technology that kind of goes in your mind? Yeah. Like this thing is. always been in my head here. Is there some change that you see coming? So as an advisor to people that have tech companies and some of the people around the world that I've spent time with, our heart math is our ability for a tourist field to share electromagnetism with another human being. When we detach from that, society will split. We will have people that are connected to each other. We'll have people that are connected to technology. We've. already experienced that. In 2012, depression started to go up exponentially. In 2007 and 2008, we saw a rise of around 100%. Then it was 300% over those next four or five years. The difference was the flip phone to a screen. The immeasurable, catastrophic, cataclysmic experience of human beings interacting with technology. over each other will be seismic in our future. I'm not afraid of it because I know who I am. I know how I raise my children. I know the people I choose to be around. If I choose to be around somebody, they're very special. They're a person that I find or see traits that I admire, and they're somebody I want to learn something from or teach. In my program, it's learn, teach, mentor, period. Fuck off. That's the outside scale. So society will be split, and it'll be different. It'll be a technology class and a connection class, and that may not be elitist or wealthy or poor. It'll just be more of a frequency and a choice because there are people who, by choice, by the chemicals, then the processed foods they eat don't like people as much, and there's people who love people who are in a more vibrant place, and that will be a split in society that's already happening today. Some people, oh, my God. God, I've got to go to yoga. I love yoga. I've got to go. move my body. Phenomenal. Other people, I'm not leaving my house. I'm going to move my body. There's nothing wrong. I'm agnostic. I'm just saying that I'm recognizing patterns. of the way that people are showing up and the way that technology is interacting in a big way. Absolutely. As you said, it's maybe not good or bad, but it's just definitely changing the landscape. There are benefits in both directions that I can see. I'm trying to always ask questions about that and balance is that kind of word that you didn't quite say, but you've mentioned multiple times and how you have to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. If you don't, you become heavy on one side. That's something we want to avoid. One last little camera update here. This one keeps going because it's getting, overheated. Talking about balancing the tech of the future with the past. That's one thing I find myself constantly going through in my mind right now, which is just this idea that people are saying, hey, enjoy the things that you have. Enjoy tradition. Enjoy the past. Which I do. I grew up hunting in Nebraska, right? I grew up on farms and my first job was to tasseling in cornfields. And I love this attachment with nature that I got to have while I was doing those activities. And conservation is something that's really close to my heart as well. I also love technology and gadgets and AI and all these tools because I fear that if I don't pay attention to them, that I will not be able to perform or really live and survive in the modern world. But there's only so much time in the day. So there's this conundrum here. I was in such a peaceful place with every. interaction there. And I guarantee you 90 days prior, it would have been a different emotional, chain of events that was less healthy. Well said. Well said. I agree with that thought process there. I have a lot of tech even in this room. People come over and say, oh, you got all these things. And as I mentioned, even before the hurricane came, I told people, yeah, the roof might fly off and all this stuff might disappear. And at the end of the day, as long as I'm still here and get to play the game of life, I'm going to be okay. The gadgets really aren't that important. Although I do find benefit in them, they are replaceable, right? And something that. we don't need to sit there and worry about so much. So yeah, I'm always reflecting in this space myself. And when it comes to balancing life right now, as you just kind of said, trying to figure out what the best place is right there, how are you kind of refining yourself on a day-to-day basis to find your balance? Is there a method? Is there a kind of a mantra? Or just maybe, as you said, Is it kind of just, the set of behavioral activities that you do each morning? Every day I'm committed to working out, moving my body. My day is unstructured. That's why it's structured. So the last few days in the hurricane, where does somebody need help? I go there. If I had a plan or structure, a series of phone calls, I try not to have more than three phone calls on my docket per day. And I was very potent over the last couple weeks in the hurricane to help people get on their path of recovery. So working out, moving my body, taking my supplements, and currently drinking water, or if it's a day that I'm dry fasting, simply have the discipline to carry through with that action. That would be where I'm at. It kind of covers the future questions of what are you going to be doing next. It kind of depends on what needs to be done at the end of the day. You as a person, I find you to be not only an interesting person, a fun person, an inviting person, but you have a great positive energy about you. At the same time, I find you to be a little bit complex and mysterious. Where do you think that part of you that kind of is intrigued comes from? And what I mean by that is the part of you that questions things and looks into life and kind of sees things a little bit deeper. Is that something that you've always had since you were young? Is that something that maybe a parent instilled within you? Where did you get that maybe hunger, motivation to look into things in life and just be who you are right now? Questioning things is something I've always done. At a young age, I was told all things are possible through Christ, but a Ferrari wasn't something I'd have in my future. And so if everything's possible but a car isn't, what else am I being held back from and why is their belief system the foundation of the operation of my life? And so I started questioning that, who's speaking into my life. And I've questioned everything. I've been questioning everything ever since. I question it in a playful manner. I question it. it in a prosecution manner of, at the end of the day, something's living or dying within me. I question it in a, is this the season? Is this not the season manner? So those would be some of the pieces that I approach life in, and those are some of the benefits, because when you're able to be the judge and jury for something in your life or your health, I've done this for three months. I have not gotten this result. I tweak it. It, this result's way better than I ever thought it'd be. When you're able to do that, you're able to carry through, you move mountains. Yeah, and this brings us to a good place, because I have kind of two points I want to. ask about right now, and talking about moving mountains, somebody who maybe is thinking that they're doing everything right right now, they're high on life, they're feeling good, they're watching this podcast thinking, man, I'm about to have a great year, right? What kind of advice could you give this person that might help them from potentially having a pitfall or downfall or the unfortunate low? Rollercoaster fall or fall. I'm going to call it fall. Make your decisions quickly and take action as fast as possible. I watch people think about stuff for three months and then come back around like, I think I'm ready. I'm like, for what? We already had that company. We already flipped that product. We already worked with that individual. I told you I'm on a journey. You're wanting to hop on on the high side? What about being the person who supports this? So now, when is now a good time? If you're getting your ass kicked, double down. If you're kicking ass, double down. Enjoy the journey. One of the greatest connection moments in my life with CEOs and high-level individuals is finding a way to give them something they don't give themselves. So, yeah. You know, very well said. And even double down is what you would say to somebody who's not kicking ass right now. But that's kind of the alter question I was going to have right there, which is somebody's not feeling great on life right now. They're feeling like they're pathetic and they couldn't be an entrepreneur. They couldn't do things. You know, what kind of advice do you regularly give people to try to maybe boost them up? And when I say give people, I'm talking about people who you see potential, people who, you know, have something that they can do inside, people who have that feeling to be in a better, bigger place, but they just don't know what to do. Get clear, hone your skill set, go after it. I tell people in sales that a restraining order is a soft no. I'm going to call you and call you exponentially for the foreseeable future. Until you give me. I'm not. That's not it. And if somewhere upon that path, I get quiet, I understand that I'm talking to the wrong person or I found somebody who filled that role. Period. And so if somebody's getting their ass kicked right now, double down. Read the book. Get up early. Fast. Oh, my God, Tim, fasting sounds so difficult. My blood sugar and the way that I eat and the way that I think and blah, blah. I don't give a fuck. Do you think that sitting here on the fourth day during a fucking hurricane is a piece of pie? It is kicking my ass. I was up on a ladder. I was up on a roof. I was flying my drone. I went and took the drone one direction. I was looking for it the other direction because I haven't eaten in four freaking days. It is not. Oh, man, you're so good. You're so disciplined. Fuck you. Do a five-day fast and talk to me about fasting. Don't tell me how great I am on the other side of your screen. Like, it pisses me off because I have been there. I spent 15 years looking at health and wellness. Didn't do shit for myself. One day woke up with such a level of conviction and such an interest in a path forward. And then also I had an interest in a woman that kind of said, not it. I'm like, wait a minute. I've never experienced that. I've never been like, that's where I want to go. And them saying no, I was like, hmm. So then I called a friend, and this is a couple weeks ago, and he says, what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to fast. He's like, cool, a couple days, yeah. He goes, I heard you say five days. I was like, no, I said three. He goes, I'm sorry, I thought you said five. I said, all right, five. I'll do five. He's like, so your six-day fast, how's it going to go? I'm like, fuck you, I'll do a week. And at the end of seven days, he texts me. He's like, I think it was 168 hours or whatever the math was in seven days. And he goes, 168, dot. And I was like, and then I put in 24 more hours and text him as a reply. And he goes, congratulations, call me tomorrow after you've eaten. And I didn't call him. And at like midnight, ding. And he goes, bro, you got three minutes, you know, stand in integrity. And I replied, didn't eat. And he goes, fucking monster. And I was like, let's go. So wherever you're at, do something difficult right freaking now. I don't give a shit what it is. I don't have the time. I don't have the money. Go feed some homeless people today. Go. Go find somebody that has a fucking problem. Most people have a problem like, I'm only making $120,000 a year, sitting in my house, the gym's $100 a month, watching $220 cable. The only fucking problem you have is the person in the mirror. It's the only distance between you and what you want. The person in the mirror is the consistent factor that you're going to go to war with. Get to know that motherfucker and scale it to win. That would be my reply. Perfect reply. I think when it comes to trying to solve problems, you can only do what you can do. That's one thing that I've not only learned myself, but I'm trying to apply on a regular basis. If you spin that guy. I got it. Okay, yeah, it's good. I actually love that reply. The reason I like that so much is just because I do hear on a regular basis, hey, Caleb, you're such a positive person. I'd like to be positive like you, but I've got a lot of things going on in life right now. There's a lot. stuff happening, right? And then I try to remind people that the reason, by the way, the reason I'm positive is because there's so much stuff going on all the time and life is constantly punching in the face and you realize what do you do? You either show up and smile and kick some butt or you let it take you over and you get bruised constantly and it hurts and you cry and that becomes boring over time. So again, when I get hit in the morning, I wake up and say, I want to have a great day. I'm going to have a great day and other people are going to come at me and choose to try to do what they want to do, positive, negative, and that's their choice. But living transactionally is something. I don't have to do, right? So I really appreciate when you said that and saying, hey, fuck you guys. It's not always easy to be positive, but at the same time, it is when I remind myself that that's a choice and I can either be a grumpy guy or I can be a happy guy and I like to be a happy guy. So I'm going to choose to be the happy guy each morning in spite of the punches to the face. Even if the hurricane comes and tries to knock us down for seven days with no power, no, we're coming back. We're coming back. That's right. You're a busy guy and you've got to run around. Bro, I've got hours. Let's go. All right, let's go. AI and filmmaking. No, this is one actual big subject. When it comes to people are watching this often in the tech industry, when it comes to AI copyright, what's your thought process on AI stealing people's work or stealing, I guess, jobs in that sector? Any thoughts? Everything has an evolution. This is where we're at today. It's not going away. That's an agnostic reply. I'm not saying that somebody's right or somebody's wrong. I'm saying this is where we're at today. Copyright is something that's going to be run over very quickly because of the fact that AI can so quickly articulate another similar word with another similar meaning and even evolve beautiful copy that people put their life's work into in moments because of its access to the large language model where it has trillions of variables and in seconds we're getting replies that could take days to write manually. Mm-hmm. And, yeah, I mean, there's really no other follow-up to that one. My next question is, is AI art still art? I guess we go into the definition of art. Art is something created by a human being for another human being to feel the emotions and the experience of what they did when they created it, no matter if it's a sculpture or a painting. AI is art of a computer. So it's an electronic experience. I saw something that was prompted and 3D printed the other day that was fantastic. I also knew a human being didn't make it because of its presentation and its physical presence of what it was. I was like, I wonder what made that was what I said. And my buddy goes, look, a computer made it with an AI prompt. I was like. Right. And that's where we're kind of getting into this. I wouldn't say gray zone. But we're getting into this zone where people are saying, hey, my prompt is my creative tool. It's my thought that went into this tool that then created this output. So what's the difference from my creative prompt versus using Photoshop and having some digital tool have an output, right? I think there is definitely a lot of discussion and distinction that can be made. But for myself, just to put this out there, that's just where it runs. The best part about being a human being is that we get to make distinctions. We have categories. We have the ability to label things. And if I'm going to say, is AI art for myself? Yeah, it's AI art. AI art is AI art, right? Let's keep it as that, right? Simple as that. And if you prompted it, wonderful. It's prompted AI art. And it doesn't compete with these other things, just like Canvas doesn't compete with Photoshop, right? Absolutely. And I think this is kind of the thing that I want to just keep putting out there because I have to say it a lot of times because we're going to merge into this world, right, every single day. Well, some of us are. So some of us will have physical art. And other people, like I have a friend with a… Nice television that flips through art in his house, and I have another friend who would never do that. He's just like, there has to be an artist that put the paint on the canvas. And so some will, some won't. So what? What touches your heart? For me, I love having physical pop art and art throughout my space, and I also like the idea of having a very high-quality television that reflects on some of my drone footage that I've flown traveling the world from the coast of Italy to a few moments a few days ago and here in Florida to the coast in California to flying over my daughter driving through Moab this summer. Like all those moments, like having a day, you know, days, and I walk in and there's a memory. That touches me. That's my art. Yeah, having that visual memento in that space, and I agree. So when it comes to this technology, what I see happening is kind of the inundation of every app that we have, for example, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook. I agree. They have all got this, hey, imagine this picture thing. They can all create at a whim an image for you. And in the future, I've kind of talked a little bit about these devices, maybe like a magic mirror on the wall where it walks in. It takes a picture of you, and it can just put you in different scenes, whether it be movie scenes or picture scenes. People that are walking by, it can just instantly kind of transform and create on-the-go art, right? Or even whether it be generative AI where you're talking in the room, and all of a sudden the walls are changing pictures based off of what you're speaking about, right? So I see this kind of technology kind of advancing in the world, coming more and more common or becoming more and more common. And I'm excited about it at the same time. I'm also trying to make sure, as we said before, we don't fall into the pitfalls of, I guess, not just losing our humanity but losing the reality. The reality, right? My name was Reality Check for a long time on YouTube, so that was for reasons because I always wanted to touch base with reality and combine that with that virtual world. So before we end the podcast, I want to talk a little bit about virtuality. What do you think about VR or AR? Uh, technologies, uh, have, is it something that you've used a lot yourself? If not, why? And it's something you're excited about. What do you think about that stuff? I live so much in the real world that I don't spend a lot of time there. That being said, during the NFT craze, I spent a good amount of time in the metaverse creating and clicking a button and dragging a ship in a building together always seemed and felt asinine to me because I could put the goggles down, go for a walk for 12 minutes and walk. in a building and see a boat or whatever it was. Um, for travel, I think that it's fantastic. If somebody is in their eighties or nineties and they're unable to put their body and their endurance isn't enough to travel somewhere and they were thinking that it'd be nice to see it. It is a beautiful thing that we never had access to, to be able to throw a visor on somebody and take them somewhere. There's a retirement community. I want to say it's in like Wisconsin or Illinois where they put 10 people in a room like this. It's about 20 feet long. By six feet wide and they all sit in there and they have a subwoofer that kind of. And they put on the goggles and they set them in a train and the train will go to the Caribbean. The train will go to the Swiss Alps. The train will go to wherever it is taken by the Eiffel Tower in Paris or whatever it is. And that is an application that I love and adore because that human being is going back to a time in their life that could have brought them the greatest joy. And in their final days, that's not something their body will endure. However, their brain and their spirit and their heart and their gut and their entire energy is able to go and participate at a level. And so they're at dinner just moments later. Moments later, they take the goggles off and they talk to their friends who just experienced it with them. And they go sit at dinner and they talk about their trip to Paris eight minutes ago. So that is one of the most beautiful things I've seen applied for the goggles. And the 3D, the AR, the VR, that entire space that touches my heart, that fills me up. That is one of the greatest things I've ever connected with from that space. Mm hmm. For sure. And as you said, social experiences are the thing that brings us all together. Cameras having fun. Social experiences are the thing that are going to continue to bring that space further along. And that's one thing that's kind of lacking with the Apple VR headset, if you remember that one coming out. So, yeah, we'll kind of jump away from VR. I'm going to fix the cameras one last time. OK, so in the future, I definitely want to get you in some virtual reality applications so that we can play some things together and do some work environments. There's a nice program called Immersed, which allows you to do a lot of VR productivity. You can throw windows everywhere. You can see people at the same time. And one thing that I've been doing for almost six, seven years now with an application, you know, is the ability to work on my computer, see my desktop and also look over and see my friends at the same time. That's right. And even when we wanted to do like LAN parties. Remember when you said you wanted to do like LAN parties? You sit there and you get all the computers around with your friends and have a good time. Sometimes you can't do that. And with these virtual reality applications multiple times now, I've been able to set up little situations where I've sat virtually with my. Where I can see their screens and I can look over and see what they're doing, basically. So if I let's say I'm playing a game and I die or I, you know, I'm waiting in a moment, I can look over and kind of have fun seeing their screen for a moment. And then when it's back, I go back. That's stuff you can't do right in a normal virtual situation. But, of course, in an actual metaverse, it's possible. So I really do like those applications. It means a lot to me. And here we are, 2024. And I feel like it's more difficult today to do some of those things I was doing in the past. And that's what's maybe made it more difficult for people to get into VR. Because they allow you to see virtual objects. in your normal world, right? And they're completely see-through, so you could see my eyes if I was wearing them right now, but I can then put screens around me. And just like we mentioned earlier, we could put a little virtual assistant in the bottom right that could look at us and talk to us and see and hear what we are doing and speak to us just like Vail does. So would that be something that you would purchase or spend your money on? No. And why? I haven't bought tech like that in a decade. In a decade, the most tech that I use is my cell phone and my drone. I do not own actively use a computer, and I do not use email. So for me to integrate in something else, I want my life to be very in-person. That's why I drove a couple hours to be here today and I'll drive a couple hours to see someone else face-to-face today and it's brevity that is value to me. I've had breakdown in communication as simple as text messages where my heart was in the right place and my words weren't. And therefore, moving forward, I'm spending a lot of time with... voice notes, uh, videos and not replying. Sometimes it's good to actually take a moment, think before you speak, right? Dear God. Yes. Some, some benefits of, of course, past knowledge comes to us all the time. And so in honor of your time as well, I want to get to one little nugget here through each podcast. And that is, you know, I want to ask each person, what are the basic ingredients to success to you? And when I say this big question, right? Cause success can mean so many things. And, and, and I understand that. So we're going to have multiple times to talk to each other. This is one of the first of many, uh, but right now, based on kind of what you're feeling, what kind of ingredients do you think are necessary for you to have success in your life right now? Congruency. I would say that there's a lot of people out there who talk a lot of shit, show up a certain way and they struggle behind the scenes. And I've spent, I've spent a lot of time with phenomenal humans who do that. I was one for many years. I've not arrived anywhere, so I haven't stepped fully out of that category. The last few days were difficult. I'm out four days fasted, working on a hurricane, hopping on and off a ladder. I struggled. Waking up was difficult. Going to bed was difficult. Quieting my mind, being focused, some of those things are very real for everybody, for me. So being authentic and being in congruency. If somebody is full of love, they aren't fearful. So if you're afraid to do something and you tell everybody about love, get in alignment with yourself. If you want to become stronger, go to the gym. Do the hard things. We said hard things earlier. I'm in that place in my life, so I can speak to it with absolute authenticity. Every single ounce of me is pursuing consistency and being congruent with what comes out of my mouth and what actions my feet take. I have some of the most beautiful human beings in the world in my space, and their words and their feet do not align. I asked a handful of men that have known me for more than 10 years, and they said that I used to go like this with my words and my feet. And 100% of them, 22 out of 25, gave me a text reply, or I even got four- and five-page emails from them, which meant the world to me. That regardless of what obstacles come up, things are coming back into alignment where I will do whatever it takes based on what I've said. And so finding out that the people that see me, that know me, are reflecting on the fact that I'm diving in and doing what I say and saying what I do meant the world to me. And so in this time and space, I would say that congruency between my words and my actions, which is where my heart is. My feet carry my body. are in alignment, and that is delivering the best results humanity will see out of me year to date. And I'm in pure gratitude for it. And as I develop this filter, it breaks my heart to see how many people talk one way and walk the other. And so it deepens the conviction within myself to continuously show up and be the best version of myself so that I can serve humanity at the highest level I physically, possibly, mentally, and spiritually can. I couldn't say that any better myself. I appreciate that insight right there. And, of course, coming from that honest place, I know that, as you said before, authenticity is something that really shines through, not just with what you say, but the experiences that you have and the ability to share. So I really do appreciate your time to get that information to us. And you mentioned congruency, and I think that that's a great point. That is a really important word overall, and I have to say you not only have congruency in your life because you're focusing, but you also have a lot of resilience, I have to say. On your birthday, I got to meet you with my son a few days ago in Bradenton, and we got an extra-large pepperoni pizza, and unfortunately – I was salivating so much. You were fasting during this time period, so I wasn't able to share it with you, but I did get to share the smells with you. So, yeah, you guys, he was there, and he didn't even touch the pizza. There's no normal person that can avoid that, right? So, yeah, I would say that you did a great job at sticking to your guns and being the person that you want to be. I'm actually super happy that you're here with us. It's an honor and a privilege to have you in the room on the podcast, and, of course, just to be able to have this insight with you and to let the viewers kind of just grow in this place with us, right, together. It's been a really nice situation. So one thing I do want to ask you before we go, though, is is there any way that people can connect? Is there anything that people can do to maybe follow you? Follow you or connect with you or, I guess, reach out to you if they want to learn more. Google Timothy J. Ruppel and click on whatever social is your preference, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera. The channels will become more live through the end of 24 and into 25. Absolutely. And as I've been watching you on Facebook and on socials, I've not only been impressed but excited just to see your journey. And I can't wait to see where you're going to go next. It's funny because I wake up some days and think the same thoughts. Where are we going? What are we doing? Who are we helping? As you said, when you have maybe less structure in life, sometimes it allows for more structure in your days and allowing that clarity. So, again, I appreciate your insight. And until next time, we'll see you. 100%. Thank you, guys. Thank you, sir.