In this episode, we speak with a former Navy SEAL Team Six SEAL who served with the elite elite commando unit from 2001 to 2019. He talks about his experiences in the military and how he transitioned back into civilian life after being deployed. He also talks about the challenges of returning to civilian life and what he learned from his time in the service. We also discuss the importance of family and how important it is to maintain a good relationship with your spouse, kids, and partner. We also talk about the value of being a family man and what it means to be a good father and husband to your kids. Finally, we talk about how to deal with the stress of returning home after a tour of duty and how to adjust to the normalcy of civilian life when you re no longer in uniform. We hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for the next one coming soon! -Joe & Andy Thank you to our sponsor, GTombucha! for sponsoring this episode! Don t forget to rate, review, subscribe, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about what you think of our podcast! If you like it, share it on your social media! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite part of the podcast? 6:30 - How do you feel about it? 7:00 8:15 - What does it mean to you? 9:20 - What do you think it's a good thing? 10: Is it a good idea? 11:40 - What s your favorite thing to do you're in trouble? 12:00 What would you would you re going to do next? 15:00 Is it better? 16: What's the most important thing you're going to be in trouble for me? 17:10 - What are you going to get in trouble in a good place? 18:00 Are you getting in trouble right now? 19:00 Do you have a good day? 21:30 22: What s the worst piece of advice you re gonna do in the next episode? 27:40 26:30 What do I'm in trouble, or are you in trouble?? 25:30 Is it in trouble ? 29:30 Do you think you re in trouble yet? 30:00 Or do you need a good problem? 32:10
00:01:28.000I mean, during the time that you were serving, from 2001 to 2019, where we're at today, I mean, there has been a significant change in outrage culture in this country, in entitlement, things that people think that they can get offended by and not offended by,
00:01:46.000things that are important and not important.
00:01:51.000The beauty of that is most of the time I was serving, so it paid zero attention to any of it.
00:01:56.000The disaster part of that is when you come off the off-ramp, you know, out of service, and you go, what happened?
00:02:04.000What happened to the environment that I left?
00:02:06.000But, I mean, I went from Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up, where it could well be the origin of outrage, culture, and social justice warriors, to the military.
00:02:19.000So I had very different optics when it comes to perspective, where I started and then what I was seeing when I came out.
00:02:26.000Well, that's the take that I always see from people that are in the military or have been in the military, is their understanding of what's important and not important is so much different, because it's truly life and death.
00:02:39.000Not all the time, but I think if you are exposed to that environment enough, it'll recalibrate your perspective of what's important and what's not.
00:02:59.000I probably would have used different terms in different places throughout, but the concept that he was talking about absolutely made sense.
00:03:06.000I mean, so the SEAL team is one of the, whether or not people live up to this, an argument could be made, but one of the key tenets is, you know, the brotherhood, which is just another way of talking about a tribe.
00:03:17.000I just felt like it was really interesting to me, like that book, the most moving part of it was how connected these people are when they're together and when they're at war and what that brotherhood is.
00:03:30.000That camaraderie means to them and how they feel disconnected when they're back in regular civilization and they get depressed.
00:03:39.000It's like their life had been led at such a high vibration, intensity, so much on the line.
00:03:50.000There's so much dedication, so much commitment.
00:03:52.000And then to go back to the regular life is very, very difficult for a lot of people.
00:03:56.000Yeah, I don't think it would be unfair to say that some of the people that I served with, I probably have closer relationships than I do with my biological family.
00:04:06.000Even probably, I've shared, I don't know, it's not that the things that we shared were important, but the value and our connection was so tight.
00:04:18.000Honestly, tighter than my definitely biological family and potentially even my wife as well, too, and my own kids.
00:06:12.000So I got medically retired, which is not based off of any one instant, hopefully.
00:06:17.000I mean, people who get an IED strike and they'll become a quad amputee or a triple amputee.
00:06:23.000That's one incident that they're going to get retired for.
00:06:27.000For me, it was more the culmination of a lot of things.
00:06:29.000So the gunshot wound obviously didn't help.
00:06:33.000And then the operational history of exposure to Explosive blasts, the concussive forces, all of those things just kind of added up.
00:06:42.000I went through a 30-day protocol where they baselined me and took a bunch of tests and basically came to the, you know, they write out a massive document of all the things that they were able to at least document.
00:06:54.000Like for me, I can't get an MRI because I still have metal in my body from ferrous metal from the round that clipped a piece of rebar on its way to me.
00:07:03.000And it clipped my sciatic nerve on the way in, and they're concerned that if they image me, or what I've been told by the doctors, if they image me, it might react again with my sciatic nerve.
00:07:10.000Just pull a piece of metal by it, and I'll be right back where I was.
00:07:26.000Guys get low calf kicked, and there's something about chopping at the nerves behind the leg that guys' legs are just, their foot's going limp.
00:07:51.000So for me, I got shot in the hip, high up on my left-hand side, but by the time I made it to the hospital, my single complaint was my ankle.
00:08:00.000I didn't remember falling on my ankle, I didn't remember hitting my ankle, but it felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and just beat it into powder.
00:08:28.000I'm hoping that, obviously, for the fighters, it eventually comes back because I had dropped foot for six months to a year.
00:08:35.000I eventually was able to start dorsiflexing my foot again, but I still can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down on the side, the far left-hand side, and as it wraps over the top of my foot, it's completely numb.
00:08:47.000And is this because of the actual damage to the nerve or something touching the nerve?
00:08:52.000That was an interesting part of being hurt as well is talking to people who have decades of medical experience and having them look at you and go, I don't know.
00:09:05.000Because they're worried about it being pulled out.
00:09:07.000Same thing why the concussion history that I have, it's an estimate based off of operational history because they can't throw me in that same machine and image my brain.
00:09:19.000And there's metal all over the left-hand side of my pelvis, and I don't know how much it would have to move, but if it just clipped that nerve again...
00:09:27.000I mean, it was probably one of the more difficult times in my life.
00:09:31.000My leg felt like it was on fire 24 hours a day, which I could ignore during the daytime, but where it got me was at nighttime.
00:09:39.000And it just felt like I had dipped my leg in gas and put a lighter onto it.
00:09:44.000So I was on high dosages of gabapentin and neratin, which are central nervous system suppressors.
00:09:51.000So I started feeling the cognitive effect of that, so I backed myself off of that.
00:09:55.000Wasn't in a great phase of my life, so I was, of course, washing those down with massive amounts of alcohol, taking three to four Ambien, staying awake because my tolerance to all that stuff was so high, and the last thing I ever want to do is go through that again, so I'm going to stay away from the spinning magnets.
00:13:12.000But I don't think they're as powerful as an MRI. I mean, you can't even wear earrings in those rooms.
00:13:17.000Yeah, with an MRI. I had heard about some kid who accidentally died because he had an oxygen tank in the room and they turned the machine on and the tanks slammed into him and crushed him.
00:13:25.000Yeah, I've heard about the TBI magnets.
00:13:28.000That I think I would be fine with because I don't think it has the power that the huge machines do.
00:13:34.000Yeah, it's like a low-frequency magnetic pulse.
00:13:38.000Kat Zingano, who's a UFC fighter, she essentially had been hurt really bad in a fight with Amanda Nunes, and she got hypothyroid condition from that fight.
00:14:28.00022 veterans a day, the commissioner said.
00:14:31.000The number that is often touted, I'm hesitant to say that number is accurate because if you look at how it was derived, it wasn't...
00:14:39.000They could have done a better job of getting that number.
00:14:41.000And I don't want to say inside of the SEAL teams that there's a suicide issue, even though I do know a few people that have committed suicide, and they were the ones that I would least expect it from.
00:14:53.000But they were also the ones who had quite a bit of Yeah.
00:15:13.000And I know countless times where I either did something dumb or was just standing in the wrong place or had a hard parachute opening and I cracked my head against the metal risers and your head hurts for the rest of the day.
00:15:26.000And I've seen the change in behavior in some people and I know the stuff that's tied to it as well, the low hormones, all of that stuff.
00:15:37.000That is happening, I think, at the highest levels in the military, probably military-wide, but specifically those people who are kind of more on the front leading edge of combat operations.
00:15:46.000And I think as a country, we're in a total unknown area because we're in a sustained period of war longer than we've ever been as a nation, and nobody knows the outcome of that.
00:15:57.000And people who I would have never guessed would make the decision to take their own life, I'll get a text and, hey, you know, so-and-so just went out into the woods.
00:16:08.000And no other external injury, no other marker than obviously something happened in the geometry between their ears that caused them to make that decision.
00:16:17.000And I suspect it's from the repeated exposure to the brain injury.
00:16:22.000Yeah, it's something that people are just starting to understand over the last couple of decades.
00:16:26.000I mean, obviously, there was a focus of that concussion movie, and I don't know if you saw that Bob Costas was actually pulled from football, and they had told him that he'd crossed the line.
00:17:02.000But this problem was so poorly understood just two decades ago.
00:17:07.000So everyone's just sort of coming to this realization that...
00:17:11.000I mean, according to Dr. Mark Gordon, who I've had on, who works with the Warrior Angel Foundation, Andrew Marr's setup, where they're helping all these veterans that have traumatic brain injuries, and I've had Mr. Gordon on several times.
00:17:26.000He says that you can get traumatic brain injuries from things that don't even remotely knock you out.
00:17:31.000He's like, people get them from doing moguls when they ski.
00:17:34.000They get them from jet skis, bouncing around on jet skis.
00:17:39.000I mean, you can get it from a minor car accident.
00:17:41.000You can have a traumatic brain injury.
00:17:43.000And for guys like me that got hit in the head for years, who knows what the fuck is going on in there?
00:17:49.000And for professional fighters, it's almost inevitable.
00:17:53.000For football players, it's even worse.
00:17:56.000For football players, they did some crazy study, and I know we quoted it, and I don't remember what the numbers was, but it's some insane number, like in the high 80% of people from high school on through college and into the professionals have TBI. Or CTE,
00:18:12.000or some signs of traumatic brain injury.
00:18:19.000It is interesting to, like I was saying, so when I got medically retired, they sent me to a medical facility called NICO, which is attached to Walter Reed, and it's the best care that I ever received, because it's a civilian facility.
00:18:31.000It's called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.
00:18:34.000We did a lot of work with them back in the day for the UFC. The UFC raised a bunch of money for that.
00:18:40.000Well, the money was well spent because I went there and I probably would not have been medically retired had I not because I left with literally a 150-page dossier.
00:18:50.000But it's interesting tying it back to TBI because I spent a lot of time as a requirement talking to psychologists and psychiatrists.
00:18:58.000And the TBI-PTS... In the military, it gets interesting because it seems like they're treated as different issues, and I'm probably misquoting the number a little bit.
00:19:08.000I think there's 13 recognized symptoms of both, but there's an overlay of like 11. So I can't remember any of the symptoms off the top of my head, but you could describe one and it could apply both to TBI and to post-traumatic stress.
00:19:23.000So it gets even more muddled on how are you treating somebody for a brain injury?
00:19:29.000Are you treating somebody for a post-traumatic stress?
00:19:34.000Because I see a lot of people, specifically a lot of veterans, getting stuck in that world where...
00:19:39.000It's a lot of focus on PTS, but the reality is it could just be from the trauma received over a career or nearly two decades for most people to make it to retirement.
00:20:58.000They might be doing it wirelessly now.
00:20:59.000When I was in, it was called Nonel, or a shock tube.
00:21:04.000So you put a charge wherever, a gate, a door, a wall, and you basically have to attach an initiator to it because the charge isn't going to go off by itself.
00:21:15.000So you need a highly reactive charge to set off an explosive that is less reactive.
00:21:19.000You keep them separate, obviously, for safety, except for the main breacher.
00:21:23.000He probably has at least one hooked up so he can be really fast.
00:21:26.000But then you just extend that flash tube and they come in long reels.
00:21:33.000And each charge, mathematically, we do math on it to determine the minimum safe distance of every charge and it's written on the charge so you know how far you can get away.
00:21:42.000But sometimes you're in a situation where, like I said, you think you got an awesome hiding spot and the guy lays out the flash tube and he's getting ready to fire it off and you realize that you're staring directly at the charge and you have nowhere to hide.
00:22:42.000Yeah, because you get hit in the chest and you're like, I didn't even get hit in the head.
00:22:45.000But just getting hit in the chest makes your head snap and it makes your brain swoosh around inside your head and that's what gives you an injury.
00:22:53.000I just remember earlier on, I mean like in the mid-2000s, it wasn't...
00:22:58.000The only question was, does your head hurt?
00:22:59.000Like, that was the beginning of whether or not you might have sustained a concussion.
00:23:02.000And then, obviously, learning much more now and where we're at, it's like, yeah, you may not have even had any sensation in your head, but...
00:23:11.000It's kind of crazy when you think about how long people have been studying the human body and this is just something they've really got a real understanding of in the last couple of decades.
00:23:19.000I don't even know if I would characterize it as a real understanding.
00:23:22.000I think they're farther along than they were two decades ago, but I think the amount we know versus the amount that we don't know is much more weighted on the amount we don't know.
00:24:39.000And it really was the first time that I seriously considered giving it up.
00:24:46.000I haven't touched a wingsuit since my buddy Alex died.
00:24:49.000And he was my main base jumping partner overseas on most of the trips that I'd done.
00:24:55.000And I'm not going to say I shepherded him into the sport, but I was there with him on his first jump off of a cliff in Italy, the first time he put a wingsuit on.
00:26:10.000So the canopy size, the main canopy that you're flying, the wing over your head, the smaller it is, the faster it goes, the faster it descends, but also, quite frankly, the more fun it is.
00:26:23.000So there are canopies that you can initiate a turn with.
00:26:28.000And if you initiate the turn too low, you cannot pull the canopy out of the turn.
00:26:33.000You will impact the ground at a high rate of speed regardless of what you do.
00:26:36.000And if you get under that canopy with not enough experience, obviously your odds of making a bad decision are going to go through the roof.
00:26:43.000So most injuries and fatalities, at least from the stuff I have seen, is from people making poor decisions under good equipment or choosing to execute an emergency procedure, which would be cutting away your main parachute and deploying reserve.
00:26:56.000Either out of sequence or doing it too low where the reserve parachute doesn't have time to open.
00:27:00.000To me, that's not a failure of the parachute system.
00:27:02.000That's the failure of the individual who is driving that parachute system.
00:27:06.000So if you have a main parachute and you jump out and you hit the main parachute and there's a malfunction, how do you cut it off to get the other one?
00:27:13.000So there's two pillows, one on each side.
00:27:15.000The right-hand side, you literally need to do this in the correct order, even though people have killed themselves by going backwards.
00:27:24.000It's literally just a pillow with Velcro that has two cables, and the cables are what's actually holding the parachute on your shoulders.
00:27:30.000If you pull that out, a three-ring release system, which is basically just a load reduction system, unwinds itself and your parachute's gone, and you're going back into free fall, and you just pull the other pillow.
00:27:43.000It sounds worse than it is, and before I had my first cutaway, it was terrifying.
00:27:47.000And then after you have four or five, you're like, okay, I got this.
00:27:49.000You had four or five main parachutes fail?
00:28:20.000Deploying a parachute and just sitting there looking at it as it's – because they want to open and you can – I can tell now within an instant of trying to deploy my parachute whether or not it's going to open or not just by looking at the shape, by sometimes listening to it and just seeing how it opens.
00:28:36.000Sometimes – I mean so packing a parachute people think is really difficult.
00:28:39.000If you can fold a t-shirt, you can pack a parachute.
00:28:43.000Sometimes, though, you just get off of a jump and you only have 10 minutes to make the next jump.
00:28:48.000So you skip a few steps, or you rush through a few steps.
00:29:42.000I felt like by the time I had pulled the reserve handle, because I had a handle at that point, by the time I had moved my arm to three quarters of extension, it had fired off.
00:30:50.000The addition of the wingsuit is really the only difference, which allows you to...
00:30:55.000Like for myself personally, I'm not a huge fan of jumping off buildings and cliffs.
00:31:00.000Without a wingsuit, because I don't like being from me to that flag when a parachute opens.
00:31:05.000Because if it doesn't open exactly in the direction you want it to, you better be Johnny on the spot or you're going to have a fucking problem.
00:31:11.000So to me, if you have enough altitude, you put a wingsuit on, in two or three seconds, the suit is mocking forward.
00:31:19.000So then you're hundreds if not thousands of feet away from the object.
00:31:22.000Then your parachute can open up however you want it to.
00:31:25.000Have they made any improvements in the technology of this stuff since you first started jumping?
00:31:32.000I mean, the first wingsuits were literally just fabric that had like the little thumb loops you'll find on like cold weather long sleeve shirts sometimes.
00:31:50.000And they would just sit there and just, they would just jam their appendages and lock them out and use their entire musculature to sail this fabric as far out as they could get.
00:34:50.000I was not there the day that Dean died.
00:34:53.000I've talked to people who have looked at it.
00:34:55.000As to the conditions that led up to it, and one thing people generally don't want to do is place the responsibility on the individual making the choice, but from everything that I have seen, he made a choice to jump at a time when he should not have been jumping due to visual conditions.
00:35:11.000So even though the suits are amazing, really the only thing that doesn't seem to be evolving is the person that's jumping it.
00:35:17.000Most of the time, just like skydiving, it's just a human being making a very poor choice, to include Alex.
00:35:23.000What is it about people, particularly people like yourself, that love these thrills?
00:35:37.000What motivates you to keep doing that?
00:35:42.000So if I look back at it objectively...
00:35:45.000I think when I initially started pushing hard down that path, I was trying to replicate a headspace or a feeling or a sensation that I had in my old job.
00:35:57.000So if you want to talk about clarity of thought, and I think we might have talked about this the very first time that we sat down, stripping away all ancillary bullshit that has absolutely no meaning, but for me at least, I spend 99% of my time worrying about things that have no impact whatsoever.
00:36:15.000So you sit on a helicopter, pick the battle space that you're in, and you get a five minute warning.
00:36:20.000And you really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage.
00:36:25.000And then you get a three-minute warning.
00:36:27.000And then you kind of stop worrying about whether or not you just had an argument with your wife or you just sent off some snarky email.
00:36:33.000Then you get a one-minute warning and a 30-second warning.
00:36:35.000And the closer and closer and closer you get, everything is gone.
00:36:39.000And it is still to this day the sensation and state that I have been in that is by far – I had no question about my purpose and I had the utmost clarity that I've ever experienced in my life.
00:36:56.000And you get used to operating in that headspace of just being in the moment.
00:37:00.000The first one to three seconds in front of you, nothing else matters.
00:37:04.000I'm going to solve this problem and move on to the next one.
00:37:06.000This problem and move on to the next one.
00:37:08.000Well, then I lost that ability to do that.
00:37:10.000And it sucked because I liked operating in that headspace because it helped me deal with all the other bullshit in my life because it reset for me my what matters and what doesn't matter ratio.
00:37:21.000I was able to get rid of like, I would describe it as just the white noise in my head.
00:37:24.000Or another way I'll describe it is, Like Jamie's got a bunch of levers that he can push up.
00:37:29.000I think, and I'm included in this, I think most people are pegged out at a 10 almost all the time.
00:37:35.000They're fucking white-knuckling through life.
00:37:37.000But if you can get into that state where you have that clarity of purpose, clarity of focus, I felt like it pulled everything back to a 3. And so that state helped me in things that had nothing to do with that activity and it lasted for a long time.
00:37:52.000So when you're base jumping and you're standing on a cliff and you're scared out of your mind and you can't talk because your mouth is so dry and you have a P ring on your suit, which is why you always get dark suits so people can't see your P ring.
00:38:06.000Every alarm bell in your body is telling you, don't jump.
00:38:39.000I certainly enjoy that, but I actually like what I get from the activity more than the activity itself.
00:38:45.000What do you think is going on where people are pegged at 10 all the time with nonsense and that something that's life-threatening can bring it back to a 3 and offer clarity?
00:38:55.000I mean, there has to be something that you've discussed or thought about in depth.
00:39:02.000Control-Alt-Delete your hard drive a little bit.
00:39:06.000It helps by not having, like when I'm standing on a cliff right before I get ready to jump, there is absolutely nothing that I am thinking about other than where I want to be in the next three seconds.
00:39:19.000By being able to focus on something so singular, and maybe I don't meditate, but I've heard people talking about it.
00:39:26.000By being able to clear your mind, it helps them deal with everything else.
00:39:29.000I think there might be some connection there.
00:39:32.000But I just think that The removal of the noise that bombards everybody all day long, even for a little bit, helps you.
00:39:44.000You have iPhone and headphones for sure, right?
00:39:51.000Have you ever noticed when you're listening to it, you listen at the same volume level, but then it doesn't seem to be as loud?
00:40:04.000Your body gets used to it, so it adapts to it.
00:40:06.000But if you pull that stimulus out and leave it at that high volume, but listen to it like two weeks later, it's going to blow your ears out.
00:40:15.000It's not gonna blow your ears out, but it's gonna seem much louder than it would if you slowly just incrementally started adding that volume.
00:40:21.000So there's something in there that is allowing me, and I'm not recommending that anybody pursue therapy via the directions that I do, but there's something in there that's allowing me to...
00:40:33.000Instead of add and add and add and add, that activity allows me to detach, and then when I come back to it, I realize it just feels different for me.
00:40:43.000I don't know if that's a good description of the mechanism, but that's the best that I can probably describe it.
00:40:49.000Well, I know a lot of veterans come back and really get involved in martial arts.
00:40:55.000Martial arts apparently is good for along the same lines, the same sort of noise reduction.
00:41:02.000Especially jujitsu when someone's trying to strangle you and you're fighting for your life and they're mounting you and trying to lapel choke you.
00:41:32.000I don't have enough experience with jiu-jitsu to truly speak about the long-term benefit, but what I can say is this.
00:41:40.000If I stop base jumping, what I will replace that activity with is more jiu-jitsu.
00:41:46.000Because what you just described, when you're simulating murder in your pajamas, and somebody is trying to choke you to death, you are not thinking about anything else.
00:41:58.000One thing that I do do that's weird is I have songs playing in my head.
00:42:02.000Well, you also probably have a few more reps than most people, so you can have that capacity for songs in your head.
00:42:08.000But they're weird songs, like Christina Aguilera, I Am Beautiful.
00:42:11.000Like, sometimes that'll be playing if I'm rolling.
00:42:15.000But the song, it's almost like, it sounds strange, and I never talked about this before, but it's almost like a mantra.
00:42:23.000Like, I'll play certain parts of the song over and over again in my head so that I can think about that instead of the actual training and the actual strangling.
00:43:07.000So I don't have the hard drive space to sing Christina Aguilera.
00:43:11.000And you probably don't even remember half of the things that you do when you roll or how you think about it because you have experienced it so many times.
00:43:20.000The weirdest thing about jiu-jitsu and training, and you could say this about striking as well, is sometimes things happen and you didn't even think about doing them, you just did it.
00:44:06.000There's moments where, particularly if you do a lot of drilling, which I don't know how much drilling you're doing, but it's one of the things that I... It made me way better.
00:44:14.000When I first started training with Eddie Bravo, one of the things that we did a lot from white belt to blue belt time was a lot of drills.
00:46:40.000And I try to relax and use zero strength.
00:46:43.000Because I'm bigger than most people that are there.
00:46:46.000And I've heard enough times that if you rely on your attributes early on, what's going to end up happening is you'll have success early and then you're going to nosedive.
00:46:54.000And so I'm just trying to go the other route.
00:48:22.000So my body tells me I know who I'm going to have a really, really tough role with, and they're probably going to beat me, and I can feel it bouncing against my ego.
00:48:29.000But if I just go roll with that guy over there, I bet you I'll be successful.
00:48:32.000And I feel that inherently, and I'll just go roll with the person I know who's probably going to beat me.
00:49:21.000But then, you know, you have to roll with people that are legitimately far better than you just for a perspective enhancer, to understand how quickly someone can close the distance, how quickly someone can take advantage of an opportunity, and then also the feeling of being set up two,
00:50:53.000You're thinking about all these moves.
00:50:55.000It's just that you can get your chess pieces to move better than other people's chess pieces can.
00:51:00.000It's like chess, but you can make your chess, if you do a lot of box jumps and plyos and you do heavy-duty strength and conditioning routines, you can get your chess pieces to move better.
00:51:12.000You can give your chess pieces more endurance.
00:51:15.000You can prolong your ability to train and roll.
00:51:23.000And like I said, in those moments where you're getting choked or I can't breathe, it's the same type of focus.
00:51:31.000It is the singular goal in your life to not get murdered.
00:51:35.000And I feel, for me, it's been crazy healthy.
00:51:38.000I can't speak to the larger veteran community, but I can absolutely say for me, it's beneficial.
00:51:43.000I think it's beneficial for a lot of veterans.
00:51:45.000I talk to a lot of them that train, and a lot of them get super addicted.
00:51:51.000They're there five, six days a week, and wrapping up their elbows and their wrists and taping up their fingers, and they don't give a fuck.
00:52:06.000Which is not always good because eventually...
00:52:08.000I know a lot of guys who've reached a point where they maybe could have rehabbed something and now they have to have surgery because they've kind of blown it out to the point where it's fucking dangling.
00:53:42.000I mean, maybe not 100%, but no pain at all.
00:53:45.000And I ran a good, steep course where it's, you know, like heavy-duty running in the hills, and I was getting cysts, like recurring cysts, because where the meniscus tear was, there was some, you know, it was loose, and so, like, as I'm pounding,
00:54:00.000the blood would pool up, and then it would, you know, swell up, and I had to get it drained, and they'd stick this fucking fat needle in there and suck all this puss out.
00:54:10.000So I got exosomes and platelet-rich plasma six weeks ago.
00:54:14.000So from then, I waited the six weeks, but during that time period, I mostly did that echobike, that rogue echobike, because it's not impactful, so it doesn't put the pounding on the knee that was causing the cysts.
00:54:29.000But fuck, man, does that thing build your cardio up.
00:54:54.000Because I've been doing the echo bike.
00:54:56.000So it's maintained my cardiovascular level, which was always my weakest point.
00:55:02.000And so your knowledge and experience base in jujitsu.
00:55:05.000And I ask because, like I said, I've been at this for six months.
00:55:08.000I'll take a week off for travel and I'll go back to a class and I feel like I have a massive disconnect between knowledge and getting my body to work.
00:55:15.000And I suspect it's because I'm thinking too much.
00:55:18.000Whereas, like I was saying, you have the ability to listen to Miley Cyrus in your head or whatever her name, Christina Aguilera.
00:55:32.000So for me, if I take time off, I really, really struggle with it because I can't connect the dots.
00:55:38.000Well, it's definitely, there's a difference though.
00:55:40.000The pathways get sharper when I train more.
00:55:43.000Like the last time I was doing like serious training was over a year ago.
00:55:46.000And when I was doing it, like after a few sessions, the pathways sharpened.
00:55:52.000And like, you know, you clinch up, there's less hesitation, there's more of an understanding of what's got to take place, there's more of like a familiarity with training.
00:56:01.000But you know, as you get older, you know, I'm 51 now, the thing that happens is your fucking joints and your body does not want to hold up to this continued stress.
00:56:11.000So you have to really be careful about when to train and how hard you train.
00:56:15.000Like my friend Eddie Bravo is going through that right now.
00:56:18.000He has a fake disc now in his lower back.
00:56:22.000He had to have his disc replaced with a titanium articulating disc.
00:56:35.000And he's a couple of years younger than me.
00:56:37.000So his body is hitting that point where this...
00:56:40.000Years and years and years of strain and pull and choke and resist and base and push.
00:56:48.000Your body just doesn't want to do that all the time.
00:56:51.000So you have to be smart in terms of how much stress and how much recovery you put on.
00:56:56.000I think you also have to be really smart about working on your flexibility and working on your recovery, whether it's through cryotherapy or sauna use or massage.
00:57:19.000It's the same thing with flow sparring.
00:57:21.000Like, I remember some of the best gains that I made as a kickboxer with training with guys who I knew I could trust to not fucking brain me.
00:58:46.000And I find that I rotate through a lot of the different positions and I find myself working out of other problems more than I would in like a normal five minute just open roll.
00:58:57.000And I realize how limited my offense is because I like holding on to the pajamas and basically holding on to a freaking doorknob on somebody's collar.
00:59:05.000It makes sense to me now when I've heard you talk before like, yeah, go ahead and wear that sweatshirt.
00:59:09.000Now I'm like, ooh, I don't really want to wear a sweatshirt.
01:02:41.000We should vote for anybody but Hillary.
01:02:44.000And what they were basically trying to do was weaken the support that the Democrats traditionally have from the black community.
01:02:50.000And they were doing this through these pages.
01:02:53.000And there was not that many pages when you find out there's like 80 pages or 100 pages they were running.
01:02:57.000But then you find out the amount of interactions that they had with them.
01:03:00.000Millions and millions and millions of interactions.
01:03:03.000So comments, likes, shares, and then people are – this message that they think is coming from people from their community is actually coming from Russia, and it's actually a calculated attempt to sow dissent and to sow this conflict in America.
01:03:19.000And the idea is – And it sounded so crazy to me, because I wasn't really paying attention to it that much, but the idea is that they're trying to make us fight against each other about everything, so that it fucks up democracy.
01:03:36.000I would say that they've achieved that goal, whether or not they're responsible for it or not, but it certainly seems like we're trending in that direction.
01:03:41.000I can't remember a time where there's more conflict and more outrage and more people willing to jump into the fray, regardless of whether or not they're informed.
01:03:52.000What do you think about the people who keep calling for violence?
01:03:54.000It drives me crazy, because it's people who don't understand violence.
01:04:10.000There was a lot of that where they were telling people that the only way to get people to understand is through violence and that you must be willing to do whatever you can by any means necessary and violence is good if it achieves the desired result of peace and prosperity and making sure that progressive ideas get pushed forth.
01:04:27.000It's fucking crazy because people who don't know what violence is, it's like, here's one that people say, they'll say to a martial arts person, like they'll see someone like John Jones, like, if I was John Jones, I'd just fucking kick everybody's ass.
01:04:42.000You know, and all the problems that John Jones has been in, one thing you should notice is, never been in a fight, there's no street fights out there with John Jones, you know what I mean?
01:04:50.000I would bet he is the least likely person to engage in that activity.
01:05:16.000Either they hire someone to get you back or they get you back on their own or they wait for you to not remember it and then they come around the corner and fucking brain you with a baseball bat.
01:07:08.000The best way to do it is to try to figure out the points that you can agree on, find out what you disagree on, and find out why you disagree on it.
01:07:17.000And you're always going to get bad actors, right?
01:07:18.000You're always going to get people that are in there That they don't care, they're not reasonable, they just want to win.
01:07:24.000But there's a giant problem with that kind of communicating because it's so absolute.
01:07:34.000That's where real physical conflicts, that's where they come from when there's no way to negotiate and there's no way to communicate outside of that.
01:07:45.000I think it's sad that the vast majority, from, again, my opinion, what I see is people who are identifying with shit you can see on a street sign.
01:08:49.000So when you're seeing people from universities, from these coddled environments, and these people with a really completely ignorant perspective as to what the actual consequences of violence are, calling for it, it's just bananas.
01:09:06.000On one hand, I'm glad that they haven't experienced it because I can tell that they haven't just by the way that they're acting.
01:09:12.000And I'm glad that they didn't have to do that.
01:09:14.000But on the other one, it's a tough pill to swallow because I just don't understand.
01:09:26.000It's about as high consequence as you can get, for sure.
01:09:28.000Like I said, it resets your perspective, and the last thing that I would ever want to see is that here on the streets of the U.S. Like, I just, I can't even imagine how destructive, well, it would destroy our country, for sure, but I also don't, I can't figure out the route out of where we are.
01:09:46.000So people are calling for violence, right?
01:09:47.000You've got other countries trying to incite Get groups together.
01:09:52.000What's the navigable route out of that?
01:10:01.000I'm hoping that things don't have to come to a head.
01:10:04.000I'm hoping that we don't have a Kent State or some horrible event in this country where protesters and And the people that oppose them get into some horrible, deadly, violent encounter.
01:10:17.000Because so far, other than Charlottesville, that time that guy ran over that woman with a car, we're seeing most of this violence being at least somewhat contained to fisticuffs, right?
01:10:28.000And the professor that hit that guy with a bike lock, and there's a few other instances of people getting knocked out and punched and hit with sticks.
01:10:37.000Shootings and murder, but goddammit, that shit's close.
01:10:41.000Especially when they're doing rallies and people are like, you know, let's do an open carry rally and everybody show up in their operator-chic apparel with...
01:10:50.000I look at the pictures of that, I'm like, okay, you have a lot of stuff.
01:10:54.000First off, that's on fucking backwards.
01:10:56.000I'm like, okay, you have all the tools, but you obviously don't practice with them.
01:11:47.000I'd give my military career a C across the board average.
01:11:50.000There's absolutely nothing spectacular about my career.
01:11:54.000I've done more than some way less than others, but I've sacrificed enough that I'm not going to allow those people to tear us apart.
01:12:02.000But it's the last thing on earth that I want to do.
01:12:04.000But if they put me in that position, I know that myself and many other people are in that same boat are going to get involved.
01:12:08.000And I don't know if that's going to help the problem, but it's going to get ugly pretty fast.
01:12:13.000I just don't remember a time where the country's been so divided.
01:12:19.000I don't know whether it's because of social media and because of the Russian influence on social media compounded with having Trump as a president, people that feel like they're disenfranchised and they don't feel like they're...
01:12:33.000You know, you hear about this all the time in regards to income inequality.
01:12:58.000There's a lot of people that are not those fat, rich cats you're positioning yourself against.
01:13:03.000They're just normal, regular Americans who happen to be conservative.
01:13:06.000And conservative does not always have to equal racist.
01:13:11.000It doesn't always have to equal white supremacy.
01:13:13.000It doesn't always have to equal all the negative connotations, you know, religious fanaticism and all these different things that people always attach towards conservatism.
01:15:06.000If I had a problem with you, I'd be like, Joe, I would talk shit to your face, or I'd have to find out what your phone number is, or mail you a letter.
01:17:59.000And then I'm going to get to the other side, and they're all in these weird communities of people, like, you know, my grandfather would always talk about how racist people were against Italians, and then there was a lot of that against Irish, and all these, like, immigrant communities on the East Coast, and then what happens is they would get in their car,
01:18:16.000and they would go, fuck this place, let's go west, and they would keep going until they got to California.
01:18:21.000And I think that's why California is, like, one of the most progressive places, because it's the furthest away from where people landed, and So the people that wanted to get the fuck away from them, they got as far away as they could.
01:18:33.000And the even smarter ones came to Montana.
01:18:35.000And then there's some people in the middle that went, why are we traveling?
01:21:37.000They probably have one place where they have a video camera up where they can capture a certain amount, multiply it by a magnitude, and then extrapolate that over, like, I don't know.
01:21:53.000I think our take on it, though, is really essentially based on how many people are registered in this area, how many people we absolutely know, and then how many people have pushed into this area from other places.
01:22:25.000Maybe it's number one for book reading.
01:22:27.000I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not the case.
01:22:32.000Well, it's, you know, I don't know, man.
01:22:35.000It's an interesting thing, like population, because when you fly over the country, you look down and you go, wow, look at all that spot that people could live in.
01:24:18.000Like, what path do you get from being a baby coming out of your mama's vagina to one day being holed up, sniffing bath salts, you know, smelling your own farts.
01:26:36.000And the cold weather immersion test is there where you have to get into the water with just a pair of shorts on for five minutes and just then rewarm yourself.
01:26:43.000So they get you to a point of hypothermia right to the edge?
01:26:47.000I think, as many things are in my old job, there is an aspect of learning and there is an aspect of tough it out.
01:28:00.000Look at him, standing up there on that rock.
01:28:02.000Well, Barklow has a great rewarming drill that we actually played on the podcast before for Sitka, where he takes their gear and jumps into a lake.
01:28:11.000So that is the test that they're doing.
01:28:13.000Yeah, and then rewarms himself with basically all Sitka's gear and figures out how to get your body back.
01:28:20.000What I thought was interesting that I never really considered was that eating food actually ramps up your body heat because you have to burn off the calories.
01:28:28.000Your body starts processing the food actually is good for elevating body temperature, eating food, especially if you can get hot food, of course, but just eating.
01:28:35.000So the drill he was doing actually had much more, I would say, educational benefit because they would take them there with all of their gear.
01:28:44.000Their gear list would say, Whatever they were wearing.
01:28:46.000Plus, bring your tent, your sleeping bag, and all your stuff.
01:28:49.000Because we're going to put you into the water, and then you need to survive your way out of it.
01:29:44.000That makes sense, but those arctic conditions, I don't know, at least in the modern theaters of war we're engaged in, I don't know where the applicability would be.
01:29:52.000So it might be a little bit of a benefit versus time expended to teach the guys that stuff.
01:29:58.000You know, because unless it's, we're talking like Korea, probably farther in the northern, you know, latitudes.
01:30:05.000I mean, it's, like, the training was amazing.
01:30:08.000Like I said, I didn't use a single bit of it.
01:30:10.000Right, but it's something, well, it's also building mental toughness and determination.
01:30:15.000And that's why I said there's an aspect of learning and there's an aspect of just this is going to suck.
01:30:26.000There's no target you're going to do anything on.
01:30:30.000You're just going to go out there and you're going to do it and you're going to survive out there and it's going to suck for three days and then you're going to come back.
01:30:57.000I mean, it is really, you're learning a technique to manage your mind under sucky conditions.
01:31:04.000I mean, that is a technique as well, right?
01:31:06.000So, I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this recently.
01:31:10.000I'm of the opinion that really the only thing that I learned how to do when I was a SEAL was to enhance my ability to learn other things.
01:31:21.000You're selecting for people, and to get to that point, you've got to maintain control of your emotions, whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're cold.
01:31:28.000So there's that essence of self-control, but then they require so many different skill sets and so many different things that the selection process is looking for, and then at the end of it, teaching people how to become better learners.
01:31:41.000And then you just refine that over and over and over again over a career.
01:31:46.000It's the ability to learn is probably the biggest takeaway that I have from my time in the service.
01:31:51.000I think that's the best thing you could ever really learn, is learning how to learn.
01:31:56.000Learning how to learn correctly, learning how to actually pay attention to what someone's teaching you and absorb it and follow the steps rather than fuck it up with your own ego and your own insecurities or whatever it is that's going to...
01:33:01.000As long as I wasn't more than three feet off the ground, yes, I'm totally comfortable free soloing and moving laterally but not vertically away from the ground.
01:33:49.000As a lead climber, you are probably setting the ropes, at least in my old job, you're setting the ropes for the people who are going to follow.
01:33:55.000Most of the time, when you see people, well, not most of the time, but one of the disciplines would be there's bolted routes that go up a rock.
01:34:02.000So you can just bring carabiners and put the carabiner through that, and you loop the rope through it, and you're good to go.
01:35:20.000Well, you've got to think it's double the distance.
01:35:22.000If you're 10 feet above the last piece of protection you put in, you fall the 10 feet to the protection, then the 10 feet past the protection, and then it pulls on the pro.
01:35:32.000So it's actually double the height that you are above it.
01:36:04.000I'm like taking plastic off of climbing gear to go climb this rock.
01:36:07.000This guy pulls up in a van with a Marlboro hanging out and, you know, tennis shoes that have laces probably on one of the shoes and an old pair of pants.
01:36:18.000And he's climbed like every mountain ever.
01:36:26.000The other person comes up and they pick all the protection out.
01:36:28.000So you can just switch and then the other person leads the way on the next one.
01:36:32.000So I'm like halfway up this pitch and...
01:36:37.000I can't move because I'm losing my shit.
01:36:40.000I'm like 15 feet above the last piece of protection that I just put in.
01:36:44.000I'm convinced that I feel my feet slipping off of the rock.
01:36:48.000I have my hand jammed into the rock and then you make a fist to prevent it from falling out.
01:36:52.000You can actually see Alex doing that in Free Solo as he's climbing up.
01:36:56.000They'll slide their hand in and then they'll manipulate the shape so it pulls.
01:36:59.000And as my world is collapsing on me and I'm just sitting there, I've got full sewing machine leg just sitting there just shaking, I hear a voice just over my shoulders like, hey man, just put the piece of pro right there.
01:37:11.000And I look over and this professional climber is right next to me with no rope, in his fucking tennis shoes, smoking a cigarette, which is what he was using to point to where I should have placed the next piece of protection.
01:38:15.000That's a different kind of, but I guess it's one of those things where it's like you just get better at it.
01:38:20.000After a week of climbing, you will not feel bad about walking up to the edge and just standing there.
01:38:25.000Alex Honnold was telling us a story about one time he was free soloing and he was halfway up and he, well, he was in the middle of this journey up this fucking mountain.
01:38:34.000He realized he didn't bring any powder, so he didn't have any chalk with him.
01:38:38.000So his hands are sweating and he's just climbing with no powder.
01:38:42.000So he met a guy halfway up, these guys that were using ropes and they were doing it the right way and he's doing it with no ropes and he goes, hey man, can I borrow your chalk?
01:38:52.000And the guy gives him a chalk bag and he goes, I'll leave it for you at the top of the mountain.
01:38:55.000So he takes the chalk bag, passes these guys, see ya, and just keeps going, and then leaves the bag for the guy at the top of the hill.
01:40:53.000Well, and he talks about it a little bit, more so in the promos for the film, but how sketched out he was to actually be involved and sit there and film, and how much of a burden he felt to stay out of the periphery and not get engaged in the headspace and make Alex do something different because the cameras were there that would,
01:42:58.000But I could go to the edge of that cliff and zip up my suit, absolutely no problem, and send that off there, and I bet you he would want no piece of that.
01:43:58.000I mean, I say that and I would totally agree with that, but I also understand why he's doing it.
01:44:03.000I mean, the end state for all of us is predetermined, and I would suspect, having never talked to the guy, that he would rather meet his end like that than at 80 years old as a geriatric.
01:45:00.000Sometimes you look at your path in life and look at where you are right now and you go, what the fuck led me to be in this spot where I'm...
01:45:09.0002,000 feet above the ground with my foot jammed into this wedge looking up and there's another 4,000 feet to go.
01:45:30.000I knew the result and it still freaked me out.
01:45:32.000I think that it's one of the more interesting things about all paths in life.
01:45:37.000It's like, what is it that leads someone to decide to be a surgeon?
01:45:42.000What leads someone to decide to be, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the fuck you want to do.
01:45:47.000What leads someone to decide to want to climb mountains?
01:45:51.000The way human beings vary and the way human beings find comfort in whatever path they choose, whether it's you doing wingsuit jumping or...
01:46:00.000Like some people, public speaking is so terrifying for them that the idea of doing stand-up is just horrific.
01:46:08.000Like I've had friends that come to see me at the comedy store and I'll be talking to them right before I go on stage.
01:46:14.000And they're like, do you have to prepare?
01:47:52.000Had to come back to LA from Colorado and I didn't want to, but it was just one of those things.
01:47:58.000And when I was starting it, it was really just a goof.
01:48:03.000I'd always wanted to do something like that because my friend Anthony Cumia, he was from Opie and Anthony, he had a setup in his basement and he would do this thing, he would call it live from the compound from his house.
01:48:15.000He had a green screen and he built a set in the basement.
01:48:50.000And I've gotten, I mean, just in the last few years, I've gotten so much better at listening to people and understanding and trying to see things from their perspective and trying to ask questions that get them to expand on their ideas better.
01:49:10.000In a bunch of ways, not just in terms of gathering information, but also in terms of how people react to that information.
01:49:17.000And, you know, human psychology and how human beings react to controversial subjects or, you know, how they forgive people for mistakes, too.
01:49:59.000And one of the things that I was talking about with Jack Dorsey from Twitter...
01:50:02.000I was going to bring that up, actually.
01:50:04.000One of the things I was talking with him about was how everything, like literally from here forth, will exist forever.
01:50:11.000And, you know, we're going to have to figure out a way to recognize that someone from, you know, 10 years ago when you were a 15-year-old kid and you made some crazy fucking tweet, you're not that same person now.
01:51:34.000Look at them with the most compassionate or forgiving view possible and look at the things that you have in common rather than the things that are inexorably separating you.
01:51:45.000I would like to think that most people actually do that.
01:51:48.000I think that, unfortunately, extremism is winning in the country, and the vocal minority just has a much larger megaphone or microphone than the non-vocal majority.
01:51:59.000I think most people do that, but I don't think the people that do that waste their time posting about it or just filling the narrative so it looks like there's only two positions.
01:52:11.000I would love to see some return to moderation.
01:52:15.000Extremism in any shape, I feel very uncomfortable with people who go to any length like that.
01:52:20.000I think people are getting more and more upset at it.
01:52:23.000And I think as people recognize it's more and more preposterous, there's more and more pushback and resistance.
01:52:32.000What's really interesting with progressivism is that People are getting in trouble now for things that seem like there's something, like Martina Navratilova just got a bunch of shit from people calling her transphobic because she was saying that she didn't think that biological males should be competing with biological females and that there are people who identify as transgender who keep their penis And compete as a man.
01:53:26.000And now they're attacking her and calling her transphobic.
01:53:29.000Like, listen, this is not transphobia.
01:53:30.000This is a real thing that you're going to have to address when you're talking about physical activities, when someone identifies.
01:53:37.000Look, if you want to identify as a woman or identify as a male, I think we should all support people doing whatever they want to do as long as it's not hurting anybody.
01:54:04.000If you decide that you're a woman and you want to enter into a fucking weightlifting competition and you weigh 220 pounds and you're beating all the other women by like fucking insane numbers like there was a few world champion weightlifting winners that are women that are actually biologically male so they're winning weightlifting competitions Just like,
01:54:31.000This is not a matter of whether or not someone should identify with something, but you're talking about making it fair for actual biological women.
01:54:40.000Like, there's a reason why women don't compete with men.
01:54:43.000It's because physically they're not as strong.
01:54:46.000So, and obviously there's some exceptions, there's some weak men, there's some strong women, and there's some sort of a spectrum, and you find yourself somewhere on it.
01:54:53.000But if you're allowing biological males to compete with biological females and just say, oh, he identifies as a woman, let him in.
01:55:02.000Yay, we're all being very progressive.
01:55:04.000And then you look at the results and you go, wait, he just broke all the world records first time in.
01:55:22.000People getting upset in time, time of these instances, enough of these things happen, enough discussion, where enough of the actual reality of the facts and the data are shoved in everyone's face enough that The new generation comes to some sort of a rational understanding about what is and is not fair,
01:55:44.000as opposed to where people are now, where they just, no matter what, they're scared to not push this progressive agenda, and they're scared of the blowback of Martina Navatilova, who is an LBGT hero, right?
01:55:58.000She was a lesbian woman who was a world champion tennis player, and now the left are attacking her.
01:56:05.000So they're eating their own in a spectacular fashion, where you have these trans people who don't want to look at reality, and then people that support the trans people because they don't want to be considered in any way, shape, or form anything other than the most progressive of progressive.
01:56:30.000I don't have a solution for it, but I know it's not going to be overnight.
01:56:33.000It'll be generational in nature, just like it crept in generational in nature.
01:56:37.000I think a lot of these problems, people look for a light switch solution where the solution in and of itself is the exact opposite of that.
01:57:46.000How do we look at that as like, if this is our global community, if this is our national community, how do we stop this from happening in our national community?
01:57:55.000I don't know what the answer to that is.
01:57:56.000I think there's an answer to stopping school shootings and not to oversimplify anything.
01:58:03.000I would say there's a couple key issues.
01:58:05.000One of them is location, the other one is motivation.
01:58:09.000Like if we as a country were legitimately interested in stopping school shootings, how many have ever occurred at a school where the president's children go?
01:58:25.000They actually take a proactive approach to it.
01:58:27.000They're going to have layers of security, defense and depth.
01:58:31.000They're probably going to have somebody looking out the front door or a system looking out the front door, controlled entry points, entry and exit points.
01:58:38.000You're going to have a metal detector.
01:58:38.000You're going to have security staff on site.
01:58:40.000So you can control the location aspect.
01:58:46.000Every time I'm at my kids' school, or unfortunately, or fortunately, every building I've ever been in, I'm viewing it from a pseudo-tactical perspective at least.
01:58:53.000So I'll go walk around my kids' school.
01:58:57.000There's issues that I see from a perspective of somebody who would want to exploit that from an aggressor's perspective.
01:59:40.000The rise in psych medications has got to be correlated with the rise of school shootings.
01:59:45.000I mean, the amount of people that are on psych medication, and I understand that correlation does not equal causation.
01:59:51.000It's not necessarily that the medication is forcing them to do this.
01:59:54.000I don't know what study has been done on what is the effect and is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication?
02:00:05.000Is there some sort of a connection between taking certain types of psych medication with certain biological makeup that allows you to have this Diffusion of reality.
02:00:16.000Some weird thing happens to them where they're capable of horrific things, horrific actions.
02:00:22.000How much of that is monkeying with human neurochemistry?
02:01:50.000And I go to the schools in the neighborhood where my kids go to school.
02:01:57.000I don't see a single change that they have made.
02:02:02.000I think you're 100% correct in that there doesn't seem to be any real, there's no real plans to stop this stuff, and I don't think anybody has a real answer.
02:02:15.000And that's one of the reasons why it's so confusing to people, because you could dwell on it and roll it over in your head all day long, and there's nothing that stands out as obvious.
02:02:24.000Like, hey, there's a fire, go pour water on it.
02:02:29.000And the low-hanging fruit, the metaphor for the school shootings would be, there's a gun, go pour water on that.
02:02:35.000But the more nuanced and complex problem is actually the human being behind it.
02:02:39.000And I see people, they just, well, that's too difficult, so I'm going to throw my hands up and give up.
02:02:43.000But also, too, I think it's important to point out that actually, thankfully, it's incredibly rare that it actually happens.
02:02:52.000And it's funny because you look at the stats and you start digging into where the stats come from and Two groups of people, and I'm sure you see this across a variety of topics, will take the same study and derive two different sets of numbers.
02:03:04.000There's school shootings, and then there's shootings that happen at schools.
02:03:08.000And you can make one number look bigger and one number look smaller.
02:03:12.000Like if you wanted to include the number of people who commit suicide in a school parking lot, which at a national level is considered a school shooting, Right.
02:03:42.000Yeah, I saw that when Ted Nugent debated Piers Morgan on television.
02:03:46.000He was talking to him about gun violence and the actual numbers, and he was saying, well, these are the real statistics, and this is why the numbers are so high.
02:03:54.000How many of these, when you're including gun violence, how many of these people are, like criminals, are being shot in the act by police officers?
02:04:01.000How many of them are people defending their home from a break-in?
02:04:50.000What fundamental changes have to happen in the way human beings exist that we stop...
02:05:03.000It would be a terrible world if we said, hey, we're just going to have to accept that people are never going to evolve socially, emotionally, whatever it is that's causing people to lash out the way they do.
02:05:16.000What a horrible world it would be if we say, no, people are just going to be like this forever.
02:05:22.000We're not just flawed, but flawed and ruthless and cruel and violent and awful, and that's just the way people are forever.
02:05:29.000I mean, I think there's improvements you can make on both sides, right?
02:05:32.000So there's a gun and there's a shooter.
02:05:35.000I couldn't be a more vehement supporter of the Second Amendment.
02:05:39.000I completely and utterly support it, but I'm anti-irresponsibility.
02:05:44.000And there's a lot of things that we could do as a nation.
02:05:47.000That would improve safety via responsibility.
02:05:51.000I mean, look at the stats on the percentage of American gun owners that don't own a safe.
02:06:32.000His felony did not show up when they had the background check for his job, but it did show up for the background check, I believe, for his concealed weapons permit.
02:06:42.000Oftentimes I see it where there's this disconnect between agencies not sharing information.
02:06:46.000Very much like the military, civilian military infrastructure prior to 9-11.
02:06:51.000Agency didn't want to talk to the FBI and the NSA because budget and relevancy and this is mine and that's yours and this is my rights.
02:07:00.000I think we could do better on the regulations that are in place.
02:07:03.000I'm not saying add any more, but maybe let's figure out a way where we could share information or at least make sure we're living up to the letter of the intent and the letter of the law.
02:07:13.000And then on the other side of the house, you had a pinned tweet for a long time, and I'm going to totally murder this when it comes to exactly what it was, but something along is, we don't have a gun crisis, we have a mental health crisis.
02:07:26.000I'd say we have a mental health crisis disguised as a gun crisis, or a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.
02:07:32.000And just like we can do better on the firearm side of the house, we can do better on the mental health side of the house.
02:07:37.000And I just see people throwing their hands up and attacking the low-hanging fruit because I think the mental health side of the house is a more difficult issue than the firearm issue.
02:07:47.000I think it's the most difficult issue.
02:07:49.000And I think everyone that I know, including myself, has had bad moments in their life and has struggled.
02:07:56.000And the struggle, especially mental health struggle, struggle with depression or being unhappy or anger or any of the things that keep you off of a healthy baseline, those moments in life vary wildly in how people experience them,
02:08:16.000to what level people experience them, what impact they have on them, and whether or not they can recover from these things.
02:08:39.000What the fuck is going on where we let people get to that point without stepping in and trying to help?
02:08:46.000And do they have anybody that even notices?
02:08:48.000Do they have anyone around them that knows that they're this fucked up and this far gone?
02:08:52.000We all like to think that that could never happen to us, that we could never get to a point where we're so despondent and filled with anger and hate and fear and self-loathing that we want to do something horrific.
02:09:05.000But every person who does something horrific is a human being.
02:09:09.000And the difference between you and them might be genetic, it might be environmental, it might be life experience, but they are a human being, just like you and I, and something horrifically went wrong in their life to the point where they are in this position where they show up at that school shooting in Illinois just a couple days ago.
02:09:51.000Overseas, when I lose close friends, the first absolute feeling you have is an anger that I don't have the vocabulary to describe and all you want to do is burn the world to the ground.
02:10:03.000But it was fleeting and I didn't do it.
02:10:06.000And I just don't know how we provide the barrier for people if they can.
02:10:09.000And when it comes to mental health, I mean, somebody with more horsepower between the ears than me is going to need to solve that problem because I don't understand it.
02:10:27.000Character and discipline and a lot of things that many people lack in your ability to mitigate these horrific feelings and this severe depression and anger.
02:10:39.000Some people don't have those mental health tools.
02:10:45.000You're already a guy who's endured more than most human beings will ever in terms of physically and emotionally and how to get through that hump to become one of the elite operators in this country.
02:11:01.000You have the tool set to endure more than most.
02:11:07.000Some people are just not capable of handling any real adversity.
02:11:11.000Anything bad that comes down the pipe for them, they just fall apart.
02:11:16.000And I think for many people, there's a real extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life.
02:11:23.000There's an extreme feeling of a lack of meaning, that nothing they do matters, that they don't matter, that no one cares about them whether they're there or they're gone.
02:11:34.000People either mock them or disregard them altogether, and they want people to know who they are, and that's one of the reasons why they do these things.
02:11:42.000I can see that for sure, but Again, if I'm being objectively honest about myself, I did have those tools.
02:11:50.000And probably the only thing that prevented me from acting out in that moment is that I didn't have access to the individuals that I wanted to act out against.
02:12:01.000And I mean, like I said, I understand it.
02:12:05.000I don't have a solution for it at all, but I understand it.
02:12:09.000Yeah, well you would be able to understand it more than most in coming from that place of having lost friends and being in that intense and also being in this environment where people are shooting and killing people on a regular basis and you're directly a part of that and directly connected to it.
02:12:25.000It makes violence so much more tangible.
02:12:28.000Well, I mean, at the same time, I don't want to paint a horrible picture.
02:12:32.000There's a ton of misconceptions about what I used to do, right?
02:12:35.000And it comes from books and movies and TV shows because in 60 minutes, all that happens is bullets whizzing by your head and shit blowing up.
02:12:43.000The reality is you're not exposed to violence that often overseas.
02:12:46.000You are over a long term, I guess, in the aggregate.
02:12:52.000It's not as bad as people, I think, often would maybe want to romanticize it as being bad, because then they can maybe excuse away behaviors that come from that.
02:12:59.000Does that bother you about movies, when you see movies about...
02:13:02.000If my wife was here, all you'd have to say is, do you enjoy watching a war movie with your husband?
02:13:10.000Get out of the room because I can't do it.
02:13:12.000It drives me nuts, but it also sets bad expectations.
02:13:16.000I mean, I had some of the best times of my life overseas as well, and it wasn't all about loss, and it certainly wasn't all about loss of life.
02:13:22.000There'd be whirlwind periods of time where that happened, and there'd be other periods of time where we're just training people.
02:13:28.000You know, or we're going out and actually meeting leaders in the city and having meals with them.
02:13:34.000And then, yeah, that night you might get your stuff on and go banging for a night.
02:13:38.000But at the same time, it's a mix of all of those things.
02:13:43.000I'm grateful for the experiences that I have from my military service.
02:13:48.000Probably the best day of my life was the day I got shot.
02:13:50.000It changed my perspective of who I thought I was.
02:13:54.000It forced me to lift my head up and think about the future more than just the job that I had because my ability to do my job was thrown into my face.
02:14:02.000I thought I was, well, one, once I realized I wasn't going to die, I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do the job I've always wanted to do for the rest of my life.
02:14:10.000So I started thinking about the future.
02:14:11.000Again, I would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn't been shot.
02:14:16.000And when it happened in that moment, it was the worst day of my life.
02:14:19.000And I look back on it, and it probably wasn't the best day of my life, but perhaps one of the most meaningful changes in direction for me as a human being.
02:14:28.000So there is positive that comes out of that negative.
02:14:51.000I had never thought about anything in my life except an insatiable desire to be a SEAL. And then I became a SEAL. I'm like, this is awesome because it was pre-911.
02:15:01.000So we just worked out, drank, and then worked out and drank.
02:15:35.000People, I think, often paint war or the experiences associated with war as solely negative.
02:15:43.000I also, just like when it comes to the conversations and being on the extremes, I would love to pull that more back into the middle and actually have a conversation about it.
02:15:50.000I think amazing changes can come from people in those environments.
02:15:54.000What is it about war movies that drive you the most crazy?
02:15:58.000The fact that almost everything in them is inaccurate.
02:18:13.000I'm obviously hearing that 18th hand, but I want to believe it's true.
02:18:16.000Well, you know who I hear trains diligently and really hard, and takes it super seriously, and is like, one of the most humble guys you'll ever meet is Keanu Reeves.
02:21:13.000Yeah, because when you smoke, there's just, like, a casual, relaxed way that you're holding the cigarette, and the way you're drawing it, but when someone's, like, never smoked before, and they're like...
02:21:29.000It's like another thing that bugs me is you watch any tactical scene where they're like moving down a hallway and it's like, why is your gun pointed at your buddy's face?
02:22:58.000I mean, it's, it just, we would need another four hours to literally go down the list of things, but it's just, things are compressed, things that would never happen happen for the sake of creating an entertainment.
02:23:11.000An intoxicating or emotional scene on camera.
02:24:17.000Given how I can, again, having not been there, and I can only imagine how horrific that incident must be for him to deal with on a daily level, I would bet he wasn't very involved.
02:24:28.000I would almost rather them, if that was me, I think I would almost rather say, you know what?
02:24:33.000Just make the movie that you want to make.
02:24:35.000Because I don't want to sit here and explain exactly what happened and recreate these scenes and talk about how this person died over here.
02:26:24.000I mean, our normal planning cycle was 24 to 72 hours.
02:26:28.000Sitting in front of PowerPoint, considering whether or not I should hang myself or blow my brains out because we're arguing over the font that we're using to submit for mission approval.
02:27:18.000The last thing you would want is one person creating the entire plan.
02:27:22.000Somebody's doing the communication plan, the medevac plan, the insertion plan, the route planning.
02:27:26.000We don't ever really brief what we're going to do inside of the objective because that's kind of the soup and nuts that you train for at all times.
02:27:33.000Everything is to get there and then, okay, that's actually our job.
02:27:37.000But we focus on all those other things.
02:27:38.000Then, primary, secondary, tertiary plan for each one of those things.
02:27:42.000Phase lines for each one of those things.
02:27:44.000None of that has ever shown up in any movie.
02:27:47.000What doesn't show up in any movies is...
02:27:49.000The vast majority of time, the intelligence is bad, and you hit what's called a dry hole.
02:27:53.000You go to a building, you approach the structure, you breach the door, and the intelligence is wrong.
02:27:58.000It's either empty or it's the wrong person.
02:28:03.000So we pay the people money, they fix their door, and we go back and we try to find the person again.
02:28:08.000None of that shows up in any of the mediums, because they're too compressed.
02:28:14.000With all your experience in the military and your knowledge of what the real world in these combat environments is like, how do you feel when you hear people talk about We're good to go.
02:28:57.000I'm glad that they live in a place where they have enough space to develop those thoughts because they're not under pressure because the military is doing the job that they should be doing.
02:29:08.000There are, like I said, so many misconceptions about what the military does What we do overseas, how many countries we are in overseas, how deep we are into some of these countries, how forecasted and how forward looking the military is,
02:29:26.000looking for emerging threats as opposed to just responding.
02:29:50.000They're not being told, you have to say this or it's going to be your fucking head in the square.
02:29:55.000It is frustrating for me at times, but I balance that with...
02:30:01.000That's what this country is supposed to be about.
02:30:03.000You're supposed to be able to voice your dissent, right?
02:30:06.000And I believe that the system will correct, and it does correct for itself.
02:30:11.000There are people that believe that, but I think the majority of people, again, silent majority versus extreme minority.
02:30:19.000I think those people are in the extreme minority, but they're very vocal.
02:30:21.000I think most people are incredibly appreciative of what the military does.
02:30:25.000But having said that, if you've never served in the military and you've never been in a combat occupation and then you've never applied that occupation for real, there's going to be a gap.
02:30:38.000And there's going to be a gap in understanding.
02:30:43.000So it's frustrating, yes, but I'm glad that it exists, and I'm glad that they are not, and this country is not in a position where they are getting drafted and forced into that position.
02:30:51.000I'm glad that it was me that did that and had to bear any weight or burden that came with that to allow them to have whatever opinion they want.
02:31:12.000Because initially, I have to fight back the initial anger.
02:31:17.000But eventually, give me a little bit of time and the hopefully relatively sane head is going to prevail.
02:31:22.000And I had, you know, again, that night I got hurt.
02:31:26.000It changed the way that I thought about things.
02:31:29.000If I had never gotten hurt and I had never thought about my own mortality and I had never thought about – I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not what I did in the military hasn't had any impact,.0001.
02:31:40.000I don't know if I would have thought about that.
02:31:43.000If all I had ever done was just doing the occupation that I did, I needed that lifting of my head to have that perspective.
02:32:17.000But they need to change the term also.
02:32:18.000Retirement pay in the military should be, in my opinion at least, replaced with money that you are going to get paid until you find your second career.
02:32:26.000You're not going to retire on $3,000 a month.
02:32:29.000But if you want to make it to retirement, you have to do 20 years.
02:32:34.000The only reason I get a retirement is because I was medically retired.
02:32:37.000So they basically, I don't know how it happens in the system, but they put me in that category as essentially I've been made at 20 years.
02:33:22.000It's a lot of money if you're used to having your head down and you're used to making 90 a year and you're in your late 30s and you realize, oh my God, I could buy a house with that money.
02:33:33.000And every year that you do over 20, they will add, I believe, one half of a percentage point to your military retirement.
02:33:40.000So if you do 20 years in the military, you will get 50% of your base pay.
02:33:46.000Which doesn't include the dive pay, demo pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, all the difference in money that I made.
02:33:51.000I get the exact same retirement, which is totally fine, and I signed up for this as a person who was in front of a radar scope for 20 years.
02:33:57.000We get the exact same paycheck at the end.
02:34:00.000If you do 21 years, you get 50 and a half.
02:34:30.000But most people, as the operational temple has slowed, anecdotally, what I've seen is they are looking more towards the future, going to get out around 20. If not, they'll get out around 25 after they take that re-enlistment bonus.
02:34:41.000And if you're staying in to your 30s, you're in for the long haul.
02:34:44.000When you look at the news, do you pay attention to potential conflicts internationally and the things that are going on?
02:34:58.000I'm not looking at them to inform my opinion.
02:35:02.000I'm just kind of curious as to what the news agencies are reporting, because having lived on the other side of that and doing things that will eventually make the news days, weeks, or months later, the news is generally behind on that cycle.
02:35:14.000And the military does do a good job and has continued to do a better job of kind of forecasting those things and spreading out as much as necessary.
02:35:29.000And when you see, you know, the debate about that or actions, possible actions against North Korea and all this kind of stuff, like, how do you, do you view this?
02:35:39.000I mean, obviously you view this as a guy who has served and has been overseas.
02:36:52.000You can argue whether or not we were effective, but then all of a sudden we started seeing foreign fighters coming in from all of these different countries.
02:36:59.000And the tactics that we started seeing used in Iraq – like my first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003 – no, 2002 – Welcome to my show!
02:37:30.000Where they had the ability to allow, again, for lack of a better term, that evil to grow, to learn, to come across the border, to engage American forces, then to flee into a sovereign nation we couldn't do anything about.
02:37:43.000Then we started seeing that in Afghanistan.
02:37:45.000But we got effective any time that these people would get together and have a large group.
02:37:48.000We'd get effective at either capturing them or killing them.
02:37:51.000So they realized they need to be disaggregate.
02:37:55.000I think the last stat that I saw was ISIS is in 64 countries.
02:38:00.000And the problem that I see with the US military is that we're very, very good at going in and cutting the head off of the snake, but we're not good at creating and holding infrastructure.
02:38:11.000And the timeline required to hold that infrastructure is well beyond the palette, I think, of most Americans.
02:38:16.000And the best example I can point to is South Korea.
02:38:19.000We still have bases with an American presence in South Korea.
02:38:29.000Now, we're not necessarily using them for the same purposes, but if we really want to control that area, we have to be prepared to stay there for that long.
02:38:37.000And I don't think the U.S. military, one, has enough personnel to do that, and I don't think the American populace has the palate to allow that to happen.
02:38:46.000Do you think that that's necessary, that in order to protect people from, whether it's ISIS or whatever, comes after ISIS? I mean, obviously ISIS is fairly recent, right?
02:38:59.000They went to Al-Qaeda, to ISIS, to ISIL, and all that.
02:39:03.000So you feel like we have to maintain presence in that part of the world, period.
02:39:09.000I think we should use the military as a measure of last resort.
02:39:12.000I think that war should be a measure of absolutely last resort and I would love to see us evolve to a point where we use it less and less and less.
02:39:22.000I describe it as you're standing at a dam and you can see a little spout coming out.
02:39:31.000Do you put your finger in the spout Knowing that it's not going to fix the problem, but it's going to buy you time to hopefully have somebody come and fix the dam, right?
02:39:40.000That's the option I would go for, versus just leaving it as it is and allowing it to continue to weaken the dam, or another sprout would come out.
02:39:46.000My theory, that the military is really well served to provide that space, to put that finger in that sprout.
02:39:53.000So yes, I think if we find an area where these ideologies are thriving, We have to do what is necessary to remove that ideology and hopefully destroy it.
02:40:04.000Not resettle it somewhere else, but actually destroy it.
02:40:07.000So yes, the short answer is, absolutely, if we find areas where we can squash this down, we have to go.
02:40:16.000But I just hope that there's people smarter than me that have a much longer-term strategy.
02:40:21.000Because all we're doing, in my opinion, is the finger in the dam.
02:40:27.000Like when you see all the global conflicts, I mean, is there a time that we could, I mean, it sounds insane to say that there's never going to be a time where there's no war.
02:40:35.000It sounds like an insane thing to say.
02:40:37.000I don't know if there's ever been a time, at least globally, not that the U.S. was involved, but I don't know if there's ever been a time where there hasn't been war.
02:40:53.000It doesn't matter what your belief is, you have an axis somewhere that has another belief.
02:40:56.000And if you go to the extreme end of that belief, that individual may be willing to take action against you, violent action against you, for your belief.
02:41:04.000And I don't think there's a way around that, because humans are just too diverse.
02:41:07.000But is it possible that one day we'll move past this?
02:41:10.000I mean, is there any plans at all to try to facilitate some sort of a peaceful world civilization where, you know, all nations kind of get along in some sort of a mutually agreeable way?
02:41:22.000I mean, does anybody have some sort of 100-year plan?
02:41:24.000Isn't that hilarious that that's a funny thing to say?
02:41:26.000I mean, they didn't brief me on it, if it exists, but...
02:41:35.000Since the inception of human beings, it seems like, at least at some level, and thankfully it's microscopic in comparison to the overall total, but it's happening.
02:41:45.000I think it's happened since man has been walking on Earth.
02:41:51.000That we feel today that we can protect ourselves is to have the more dominant, more powerful military and to make sure that we're the ones who get to dictate whether or not evil flourishes.
02:42:03.000Yeah, I mean that's – I would want maybe a – I want the dominant ability of our military to continue to grow, but I'd like to see – and I think it's already moving in this direction – smaller, more surgical uses of it.
02:42:16.000I just – the military, in my opinion, is not good at building infrastructure and holding terrain for a long period of time.
02:42:21.000It's just not what we're designed to do.
02:42:24.000It's not the design of the military, for that matter.
02:42:27.000What is the overall view about getting out of Syria?
02:42:32.000It probably depends on the people that you ask.
02:43:02.000Choke yourself with my hand and you get told what to do and how to do it and how much time you have to do it.
02:43:06.000People think that critical thinking has no place in the military.
02:43:09.000But where I came from, that's what we're looking for is people who are able to critically think.
02:43:13.000So there would be – we would have political arguments, religious arguments, philosophical arguments in the team room and then – We're good to go.
02:43:38.000From this is awesome to this is stupid.
02:43:41.000I've heard different opinions on Assad, whether Assad is evil, whether he's gassed his citizens, or whether or not he's a victim of propaganda or some mass smear campaign.
02:43:50.000I'm like, whoa, this is way past my pay grade.
02:43:53.000I've heard the same thing, and it's beyond mine as well, too.
02:43:55.000It's frustrating, because when you don't know whether or not this is some propaganda, or this is a real threat, or whether it's something like The Saddam Hussein situation where, yes, he was an evil dictator, but also removing him might create a power vacuum like Libya.
02:44:20.000I don't know the long-term solution to those problems.
02:44:24.000Like I said, I spend enough of my waking hours truly questioning whether or not anything that I was involved in made my family or your family or Jamie's family safer.
02:44:37.000Did my actions erode what the rest of the world thinks about the United States of America?
02:44:47.000I think it had an impact in the moment.
02:44:50.000I think it had an impact stopping the water coming out of the dam.
02:44:54.000I think it was essential that it needed to be done.
02:44:57.000But I don't know if any of that has an impact beyond that time period that it occurred.
02:45:03.000How much does it help you in talking about this stuff to give you a perspective?
02:45:08.000I know Cleared Hot, your podcast, you're very active with that.
02:45:12.000Does that help you flesh these ideas out and have conversations about them?
02:45:16.000One of the most cathartic things that I do is talk on the podcast about these topics.
02:45:22.000And I'll do a mix between guests and Q&A. Guess what people ask me about?
02:45:27.000They want to know about war and they want to know about that stuff.
02:45:30.000And it forces me to sit there and truly Gauge the depth of my beliefs and then answer the questions for myself as to why do I believe this?
02:45:40.000It is by far one of the most cathartic things that I have done is the ability to sit down and reflect.
02:45:45.000And I mean, I'm pretty honest about, I mean, if people ask me about killing, I'll talk about killing.
02:45:49.000If people ask me about mistakes, I'll tell you the worst mistakes that I ever made.
02:45:53.000Parenting, relationship with my wife, military, fill in the blank.
02:46:41.000But it's also, like, in terms of motivation, he's a mindset alterer.
02:46:46.000Like, you hear the way he discusses things and thinks about things, and if you can adopt those ideas and put them into your own head, you really can shift who you are and how you move through this world.
02:46:56.000If you can adopt a fraction of his ideas, or it'll change your philosophy.
02:47:02.000There are some people that I see go very, like, they seem to be searching and they just want to dive in.
02:47:08.000It's like, you know, maintain some of yourself.
02:47:28.000Well, you know, Goggins is another one.
02:47:30.000You know, Goggins, just being a guest on this podcast, I know he hasn't started his own podcast, but one thing he did do is, if you listen to Goggins' audio book, in his audio book he has the book itself, which is read by another guy, and then him and that guy discuss various chapters in the book and discuss the real events that led to this,
02:47:52.000these different things and how he felt about them.
02:47:54.000So it's a podcast wrapped up in a book and it's excellent.
02:47:58.000So much better than just reading chapter and verse.
02:48:01.000All that additional information and all the breadth and depth that you can gather from that.
02:48:33.000Fraction in comparison to other podcasts out there, but even the volume of response that I get to mine, it's unbelievable.
02:48:38.000The number of people who are consuming this type of medium is mind-blowing.
02:48:43.000Well, it's free, which is great, and it's also easy.
02:48:46.000You get it on your phone instantly, so you could be in your car, your phone is Bluetoothed up to your car, and you say, oh, this is nuclear hot.