We sat down with Jarrett Sleeper and this one went way longer than planned because we could not stop talking. Jarrett is an actor, a jiu jitsu black belt with about 20 years on the mats, a shooter, and a guy who thinks about violence and identity more deeply than pretty much anyone we've had on this show. He also has ADHD so between the two of us this conversation went everywhere.

We got into why honest conversations about guns are so hard to have, the LARP that lives inside all of us and why nobody's actually John Browning their way out of this, what it feels like to hold a gun for the first time when you didn't grow up around them, why assault weapon bans don't actually do what people think they do and who they really end up hurting, treating shooting like a martial art instead of a static range hobby, the spiritual weight of living in a country built on violence it never answered for, why community trumps ideology most of the time, the DMV for guns idea and why it would work in a perfect world but not this one, and his motto "the real deal or nothing" and what that actually means when your morality gets tested for real.

This is one of those episodes where we didn't agree on everything but we were thinking out loud together the whole time. If you've ever felt stuck between wanting the world to be less violent and also wanting to be capable of violence when it matters, this one's for you.

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Edited by Matthew Boerger