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#BermasBrigade #TruthOverTreason #BreakingNews #InfoWarrior Show less
Hey everybody, Jason Burmes here, and I've got a great show lined up for you.
I interviewed Tyler Gray, and this is a former Delta Force operator.
He's the author of Forged in Chaos, and it's just a really great insight into somebody who actually seeked out chaos and warfare.
And folks, I do want to remind you, I need your support now more than ever.
There are no paychecks.
You are supporting this broadcast $5, $10, $15.
Big donors.
You mean the world to me.
I want to thank those that have supported the broadcast in the past.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
And we are back.
We are now joined by Tyler Gray.
He is the author of Forged in Chaos, a warrior's origin story.
Tyler, you are a former Delta Force and SEAL team operator.
First off, thank you so much for being with us.
And secondly, let's talk about your origin story.
How did you get into this?
Well, first, I want to be clear.
I was not a Navy SEAL.
I was in the Army.
You mentioned the SEAL part is I played a SEAL on TV for eight years on the show SEAL team.
So that's the SEAL team part.
So I just want to.
I got you.
I saw actor in there and I just assumed that was the lingo.
I get wrong as well.
No, no, no worries.
No worries.
I just want to make sure it's clear before old Don Shipley starts calling me a stolen bauer.
No, so yeah, so you know, for me, I was very lucky to, you know, be able to join when I did and be able to do what I did in the military.
A lot of people, you know, kind of ask, you know, why did you join?
And for me, I don't really feel like I ever had a choice, quite frankly.
It just felt like it was something as far back as I can remember, it was just something that was innate in me that I needed to do.
And I'm very fortunate to have had the opportunity to do that job and live that life.
So when did you get started?
And, you know, first of all, how do you rise up into the ranks of Delta Force?
A lot of people obviously don't get there.
You obviously serve overseas.
And when you say you don't have a choice for the time period, when was that time period?
And I would assume, you know, since you're serving during the war on terror, that 9-11 was probably that trigger point.
Yeah, so for me, I mean, the reason I say lucky, I mean, it's all relative, obviously.
But for me, you know, I felt lucky in the sense that I joined prior to 9-11, several, you know, four-ish years before 9-11.
And so by the time 9-11 happened, you know, I had been in a little bit.
I had, you know, was trained.
I think I was a sergeant at that point.
I was a sniper team leader.
So, you know, I really was kind of positioned in a good point to, you know, my training was all out of the way and everything.
So when 9-11 happened and we got our deployment orders, I re-enlisted for six years.
So let's talk about not only that re-enlistment, but how it went overseas, because, you know, it seems like for a good portion of this, like you said, you were well-trained, you were very comfortable.
Obviously, this book delves into the mission that kind of changes all that as well.
So let's talk about it.
Yeah, so, you know, it's, I feel like putting out, and again, I'm what I'm about to say, I'm not saying to, you know, sound cool or, you know, fearless or anything.
I'm saying this because it's part of a deeper point, which is for me, I wanted to go to war.
Wanted to go to combat.
And I'm not saying war or combat's a good thing.
9-11 was obviously a horrific tragedy.
But, you know, I didn't just want to join the military.
I wanted to join the military and go to war.
I grew up, you know, post-Vietnam with, you know, Vietnam vets very much, you know, in movies and TV and things like that.
And so that was just, I just felt like I wanted to do that.
And so when I got the opportunity, when I was in Afghanistan, I mean, I was so happy to be there.
The reason I'm saying all this, again, I don't want to sound like, oh, he was, you know, I'm this tough guy or anything.
I'm just saying it was just the realization for me of kind of, I was lucky to be in when a war happened, if that makes sense.
And what the book is about, Forged in Chaos, the title is the common mentality, I guess, what people would perceive is that war was like this horrible, terrible environment.
And don't get me wrong, war is a horrible environment.
It is, there's no way to do war cleanly.
It's a dirty job.
It's a dirty business.
And there's just, you know, an infinite number of negative things about it.
However, what I learned, and this is the key point that the book brings up, is that for me, I grew up in a very chaotic childhood environment.
So for me, a chaotic environment was my homeostasis.
That was my normal.
And war for me, war is a chaotic environment.
And so war, as crazy as this sounds, it matched what I had grown up in and what I was used to.
And so being in a war zone actually, for me, felt more comfortable than being at home in a, you know, in a safe first world society.
And I think that's an experience a lot of other veterans, combat veterans have had.
And so I wanted to put a book out that explained the complexities of this reality that most people would assume would be different.
Now, number one, I want to ask you, do you feel like most of the people that rise up in the type of ranks that we're talking about, whether it be Delta Force or SEAL teams or special operations, et cetera, grow up in those type of environments?
Because I would also imagine a lot of you guys don't share the roughest of the rough of what may have gone on at home or as a kid.
And then, you know, the way you're talking, you know, kind of reminds me of the film The Hurt Locker.
Sure, they didn't get into the combat scenarios as much.
It was more the pressure of, I guess, diffusing those bombs, but certainly being in that environment.
And then I guess the contrast to being home with his wife and his baby and all that downtime, et cetera.
I mean, what do you think about that film?
And then, you know, again, let's talk about the other people that kind of gravitate towards these positions.
Yeah.
So the film, first of all, you know, if I ever hear of a scene quoted from Hurt Locker, it's that one, the serial scene when he's in the grocery store.
I've heard that scene quoted to me, you know, dozens and dozens of times.
And I think that The Hurt Locker Offhand was one of the few movies that it didn't, like you said, it didn't exactly know, you know, didn't go into depth of storytelling on what that was, but it showed it a little bit.
And that resonated with a lot of people.
And in my experience, as you said, when we were in, none of us talked about childhood.
It was just a non, it was just something no one brought up.
And so you don't really put it together then.
Now that I've been out, now that I've been on this journey for almost two decades now, I can tell you that in my experience, the vast, vast majority of not only special operations veterans, but all veterans and first responders, it turns out the vast majority of us grew up in a chaotic childhood environment.
And therefore, I believe most of us are forged in chaos.
And that is why we operate so well in chaotic environments and why we struggle so much when we are not in those environments.
Because when the environment is chaotic, we're calm.
And yet, therefore, when the environment is calm, we become chaotic.
And the way we calm ourselves is to create the chaos back into the environment to bring us back to a level of comfort and back to our homeostasis, because that is how we were reverse wired in our childhoods.
You know, I heard Sean Ryan, who's obviously big in the podcast world right now, kind of discussing that, you know, he wasn't feeling like he was getting enough action, et cetera, et cetera.
Is there ever enough?
You know, I guess that's the big question.
And is that a positive thing?
You know, because obviously you take a look at the darker side as well and some reflectionary moments.
Obviously, we need warriors, right?
But you want them to be as, I would say, of sound mind and level head as humanly possible.
I think a lot of that comes with the training.
But when you are dealing with, I guess, a different kind of adrenaline junkie, right?
Because, you know, we're not just talking about, you know, jumping out of a plane or even the squirrel suits.
We're talking about, you know, bullets, IEDs, missiles.
I mean, you name it.
It's there.
Close combat.
Is there ever enough?
Do you see people's breaking points at times?
Is this book also about that breaking point?
And what does that feel and look like?
So there's a couple different pieces to what you said.
So one, you know, I went on Sean Ryan's show and we talked about parts of this, but the one major thing is that there's a big problem in my mind in both the military, law enforcement, and society in general, which is the expectation that you can do a job well that is fundamentally self-destructive.
And yet the expectation is outside of that job, you won't be self-destructive.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
If you're the type of person that will do this very self-destructive job, you're going to be self-destructive as well when you're not doing the job.
And that is something that is absolutely being unrealistically put.
There's an unrealistic expectation that is being put on warriors and first responders that I don't agree with.
If you go back to, you know, Vietnam, guys would go in the bush, they would come out, they would send them to freaking, you know, wherever, Hanoi, you know, wherever in Vietnam, they would go to bars, drink, get crazy, get in fights, you know, do some crazy stuff.
Same thing in World War II.
And then they would bail them out of the jails.
And when the people, when the guys did crazy stuff at the time, they went, well, yeah, they just got out of the bush.
Of course.
Of course they're going to be a little out there.
And now the problem that I see, same thing in France, they were going and, you know, going to certain places in France, you know, after the invasion.
They were allowed to blow off steam because it was understood that the job creates that amount of steam and pressure.
Nowadays, you know, a guy gets back from a deployment, his sixth one, he freaking drinks and drives and gets pulled over for DUI.
And then all of a sudden the command goes, oh, that guy's a piece of crap.
Get rid of him.
Really?
Really?
Like that's like at what point are you looking at this and going, maybe that is a normal, and I'm not saying it's okay to drink and drive, but I think we need to look at it through the lens of, yeah, there are ways that we are going to blow off steam when we're not doing that job, especially if the job is taking away that are going to be viewed by normal people who don't have this chaotic baseline as maybe a little out there and a little crazy.
And the reality is yes, because that's the mentality it takes to do the job in the first place.
And the expectation that a non-self-destructive person could do a self-destructive job is just not true.
So let's talk about that issue of maybe PTSD.
You know, when I was younger, my stepfather was military.
I tried to join the National Guard pre-9-11 and he wasn't having it.
I mean, he cursed out any recruiter.
I mean, death threats, the whole nine.
I kind of thank him for that.
The guy that I was going to do it with ended up having to go over to Afghanistan and Iraq.
And although, you know, I took the ASFAB test and scored really high and, you know, supposedly would not have been combat.
At the same time, I don't want to see a dead body.
I have no, I have no inclination for those type of things.
I understand the aggression.
I got in fights as a kid, but one of the reasons I never got into law enforcement, a lot of people tried to recruit me to that.
I'm like, not only do I not want to deal with other people's day-to-day problems, which is most of it, and I'm a New York guy too.
So, you know, I just know that you can just see the worst thing ever.
And those things do not leave you.
I am sure there are a multitude of things that you have witnessed or done that do not leave you.
And that is a huge part, I would say, of that.
Is there a real recovery process?
Or do you see, you know, you talk about not only, you know, lifelong military personnel, but there's a lot of mercenary groups, especially during, you know, this time of the last 20 plus years being in the Middle East.
They've only grown and grown.
I mean, there's got to be a dozen of them at this point.
Most people are only familiar with the big ones.
You know, I think they went back to, what was it, Blackwater after being XC, an academy.
But what's there?
There's Oak Grove.
There's so many of them.
Do you think that's a positive outlet?
Do you think that's, because I've talked to some veterans, and again, this is probably 15, 20 years ago, just post, you know, the really heavy stuff in Iraq that we're starting to do this.
And they would come home and be depressed and they would be on a bunch of pills.
And I don't think that's the solution.
And so they were just like, well, I can go over.
I can make six times what I was making in the military.
It's a three-month, you know, tour.
And they go do it.
You know, is that the answer?
Or what do you think?
So, you know, what you're talking about.
So I have a friend who was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He's been in Ukraine now for the last two-ish years.
And he's American.
You look at mercenary work, whether it's Ukraine, Middle East, Africa, whatever.
And, you know, the lie that we tell ourselves is, oh, the pay is good.
Chaos And Addiction00:06:26
And I'm not saying it's not.
What I'm saying is you're not doing it for the pay.
You're doing it to feed the addiction to chaos, to feed the addiction to adrenaline.
And, you know, my book has a theory that I came up with to explain that chaos addiction.
And you mentioned PTSD.
So one thing about PTSD is that the first word of PTSD is post, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder assumes a pre-traumatic stress baseline.
It assumes that you had a baseline, an environment that was prior to, that was normal and safe prior to the introduction of traumatic stress.
And for myself, and I think the vast majority of veterans, first responders, and most high performers is that we didn't grow up in an environment that didn't have traumatic stress.
We grew up in a chaotic environment that had traumatic stress, and therefore we don't have PTSD because we never had that baseline.
We have what I call LTSD.
Because we grew up in traumatic stress, our brain neurologically rewired itself to make chaotic chaos or traumatic stress our default or homeostasis, our normal baseline, however you want to say it.
And again, go back to LTSD stands for lack of traumatic stress disorder.
I don't have post-traumatic stress disorder.
I have lack of traumatic stress disorder.
When the environment is calm, I need the traumatic stress, the chaos back in the environment to be calm again.
And if it's not, if the environment's calm, chaos is in my head.
And that is why you're seeing so many veterans chase combat, chase addiction.
That's not PTSD.
That's what I call LTSD.
So we talk about chasing combat, whether it be re-enlisting, the privatized military groups.
What's the other outlet?
I mean, is it law enforcement?
Is it, you know, becoming a part of the fire department?
Or is that, you know, because you do have a lot of military that ends up doing that.
You know, my buddy Kareem, he ended up working from everywhere, from ICE to LA's departments and all these different things and private contracting and airports, jumping around.
What do you think is the most positive route?
Not only, I guess, career-based, right?
But are there things outside of that as well?
Obviously, I would say support groups, trying to get together with other like-minded people and enjoy yourselves, getting away from that destructive behavior.
But what do you suggest to people?
What do you think works?
For me, what has worked is, you know, look, it's very difficult.
And don't get me wrong, you can fix the addiction to chaos, the LTSD, the neurological rewiring that is pushing you into that chaos addiction.
That has solutions I talk about in the book and I talk about more on my YouTube.
But what I have kind of found has worked for me is I still chase chaos because I'm aware of the decisions, why I'm making the decisions that I'm making now.
I have just steered myself towards what I call healthier chaos, right?
So you look at addiction.
Addiction is chaos.
Well, that's unhealthy chaos.
You know, for me, working on movie sets and doing the workload I do on these movies, a movie set is absolutely chaotic.
And it's a much healthier form of chaos, but it is chaos.
And so operating within that chaotic structure makes me calm.
It feels like my normal environment, and yet it's a much healthier form of chaos than certain other forms of it that are much more self-destructive.
Are there other careers?
Because not everybody's going to work on a Hollywood movie set.
No, no, no.
Yeah, there's many, but I also want to be clear.
I'm not saying somebody can't go into a career that is chaos, like a first responder, law enforcement, et cetera.
It's not about not doing those jobs, and it's more about understanding the fundamental reason why you're doing what you're doing.
When somebody does something, you know, buys a motorcycle and is riding at 120, you know, goes out and rides 120 miles an hour on the streets at night when everything was fine.
Under PTSD, you go, oh, yeah, that guy's crazy.
He's got PTSD.
That's why he did it.
That doesn't mean anything.
Then how do you treat that?
Ah, well, give him, you know, barbituits or some kind of drug to calm him, right?
That doesn't mean anything.
What means something is, hey, I'm about to go hop on my motorcycle.
Everything's fine at night.
Kids are asleep, whatever.
And I'm going to go just create chaos.
Once I realized what I was doing, then I went, oh, I know why I'm doing what I'm doing now.
I know why I want to do it.
I know the mechanism that I'm trying to achieve.
So then it allows me to go, you know what?
I'm going to make a healthier choice on that creating chaos.
So I'm either going to do it in a more healthy way, or I'm going to go the opposite and really try and settle in the calm and realize that I'll be okay in it.
So it's a combination of different techniques and strategies and tools, excuse me, that can help people overcome that fundamental neurological rewiring or wiring that happens when we're very young.
So the first part for me is education, because once we understand why we're doing what we're doing, then it gives us some ability to step in and change it before it happens the next time.
You know, you talked about moments of realization.
How do you get to those ultimate moments where somebody is about to self-evaluate and change things?
And especially when maybe they are on those drugs and have been on those drugs now perpetually for the last decade, two decades in some cases.
So, you know, how do they, I saw that flash too.
Education Leads to Change00:04:04
I don't know what it was.
Yeah, you got spooky stuff going on over there, Tyler.
How do you get to that moment?
I mean, is it somebody listening to you on the Sean Ryan podcast?
Is it someone handing the book to another veteran saying, hey, this helped me?
Is it a movie, a TV show, a talk with a loved one?
Is it a combination of all those things?
And then how do you really pierce the pharma end of it?
Because I would say that's probably the most difficult part, right?
100%.
I mean, the short answer, I think, to your question is you don't know what exactly is going to work or quote unquote breakthrough, you know, for one person versus the next.
For me, it was a bunch of little moments of realization that continued to steer me in the right direction.
But as far as changing the system, that's what I'm embarking on.
And it's going to be an absolute uphill battle.
I have absolutely no doubt.
But I am coming after the big pharma system.
I do not agree with it.
We are simply treating and suppressing symptoms rather than understanding and treating core root causes and the actual disease.
And so it's a system that needs to change, but it's a system that doesn't want to change.
And the only way it's going to change is if enough of us step up and basically take it upon ourselves to help change it because it's not going to do it on its own.
Well, I think we've certainly seen at least the general public speak up in the way that they voted, and especially with RFK Jr. and Maha.
You know, I want to continue to hold their feet to the fire because there's been some disagreements there.
But in general, I would say that, you know, the general populace is more educated on this subject, especially in the farm arena than ever.
Can that cross over to the military?
Or is the military just so in line?
Because, you know, you talk about the VA after this, and people are just happy that they're getting healthcare, especially with the system that we have in this country where, you know, I remember watching movies in the 80s and 90s talking about how the VA is.
It's so bad out there for everybody.
The VA is like, wow, you get benefit.
People are like looking at these people like they're getting something.
And I would say, well, what are they getting?
You know, so can we, can we pierce that as well?
Because you're not only talking about the pharma industrial complex, you're literally talking about the military industrial complex.
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the good thing about veterans in general is it's it's a group of people that will generally push when uh pushed.
They'll push back when pushed.
And so I think the more, you know, veterans and first responders we can make aware of what the system is actually doing.
And I'll tell you this, however bad people think it is, mark my words, it is a thousand times worse.
I believe it's criminal.
I believe that it's intentional.
And it's, I think if people, if our society, let alone our veterans, truly understood what those industries are doing to us intentionally for profit, there would be, you know, it would be an absolute revolt because it is really shocking what's happening.
And the more information that is coming out, the more that we're just seeing it's, it's a, it's beyond a systemic problem.
It is an intentional problem being done for an intentional reason.
And it's up to us to realize that, accept it, and push back.
You can get the book over on Amazon, Forged in Chaos, a warrigent war.
I want to say Warigen.
Like, I screwed up.
A warrior's origin story.
I can't read at a fifth grade level right now.
It is embarrassing.
Realizes Applies Widely00:00:47
Tyler, this has been an awesome conversation.
What would you like to leave the audience with?
What I want to leave them with is really this.
You know, the book was originally written, you know, from a veteran perspective.
And then as we were writing, then we realized, wow, this applies to first responders.
And then the more we wrote, the more we realized that it really applies to anyone that grew up in a chaotic childhood environment.
The template or the pattern is the same pattern over and over again.
And if you were raised in that environment, then you're going to get a lot from this book, not just people that, you know, wore some type of uniform.