Andy Stumpf, a former Navy SEAL, contrasts Montana’s rugged self-sufficiency—where he now lives with 22,000 people after fleeing San Diego’s smog—with urban fragility, citing extreme survival stories like Timothy Treadwell’s grizzly fate and his own 750-horsepower Ford F-150. Hunting ethics clash with animal rights activism, yet Stumpf prioritizes ecosystem balance over trophy hunting unless it funds local conservation, referencing Louis Theroux’s African reserves. His military trauma—shot in Iraq (2005), redeployed to Afghanistan (2010)—deepened distrust of human nature, especially after witnessing child suicide bombers, while Rogan critiques political correctness and Trump’s monument shrinkages (Bears Ears cut by 80%). Both agree global threats like alien invasion might unite humanity, but lasting peace remains doubtful amid cultural divides and distracted discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
I landed on Saturday, and I lived in San Diego for, I think, almost 10 years.
Love San Diego.
No complaints about California.
It's beautiful.
The beaches, there's mountains, all that stuff.
I love it.
Landed in San Diego, got in the rental car, was going out to skydive, and couldn't even see the mountains out by where I'm going to go jump because it was all hazy and smoggy.
And it took me longer to get out of the parking lot than it does to get back to my house, go shoot the bow in the backyard, go do a workout.
I was still in the San Diego International parking lot.
I know some people who work in the industry to make the cold weather gear, just from my old job, and they send me some stuff, so it's really not that bad.
And there's some things in life that I will spend good money on.
Cold weather gear, rain gear, just pony up and pay the extra money because it's going to pay off for you in the end.
The picture that I put of you with your flying squirrel suit flying over the fucking earth, I purposely chose it because you can see the curvature of the earth in the background.
It's a very interesting environment that has no consequences and allows people to interact in a way they never would if they were sitting across like we are right now.
If you put a quarter inch piece of glass in between me and another driver on the road, I've been known to say some interesting things that I wouldn't say to somebody in like a line at Starbucks if they bumped into me.
Scientists have kind of studied the human response to critical situations where you have to make split-second maneuvers, like high-stress situations.
You don't think of a car as being a high-stress situation, but when you're going 70 miles an hour, and every little thing is like, you're way more tuned in than you think you are.
So anything that happens is like...
Yes, motherfucker!
Like, you're way more ramped up.
That's where road rage comes from.
It comes from the fact that your brain is very aware that you're going to have to make split-second decisions.
So, even though you don't realize it, you're at seven all the time.
They get really close and I'm doing 40 on the freeway and I don't know I mean, I don't know my problem is probably just an asshole But is the more upset they get the more warmth I feel in my soul as I'm going down the road watching them Lose their shit in their car.
Well, don't you think that a guy like you who's been through so much actual real combat Probably relishes a little elevation of the the normal day-to-day life Just a little turn that bitch up a little bit.
Let's feel a little heat Come on, just crank it up a little bit.
I'd heard about another guy who died in Oregon who was a he was a tech guy.
He used to be on this tech show that I used to watch and he would review like gadgets.
This was like early 2000s and he went up with his family And they didn't have a car that could handle like serious snow and they got stuck and they were there for nine days with no food and he went walking off to get help and froze to death and his family was eventually rescued.
And he was just desperate and he was trying to save his family.
It's just so sad because I'd seen that guy on TV. It was so weird because you see a guy on TV reviewing gadgets.
Like, here's the latest laptop.
Like, look at the...
Here's the Ethernet port.
And what we've got here is, you know, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this different stuff.
He'd review, like...
The most technical of technical things in terms of like the highest level of electronic achievement so far right like the newest gadgets that people love like Like the when you think about society and civilization you think about those things and meanwhile the guy froze to death in the forest like the real life All the tech in the world isn't going to save you if you get out into the wild.
Yeah, they say that when people go into the forest, people are afraid of grizzly bears and all sorts of different things, but hypothermia kills more people than anything.
I don't know the physical process of what happens when you go into shock, but I've seen some people that are in a lot of pain and they would have liked to have their brain pumping some morphine.
Near-death experiences and like why when people have near-death experiences they have all these freaky visions and some of it they think could be connected to Psychedelic chemicals that your brain produces which are that they definitely know that's true But I think there was also some talk about some morphine like substance that your brain makes It wouldn't surprise me if your body recognized it was on the downhill slide.
Yeah, just like this dude doesn't need to keep screaming.
Well, when you're out there, man, I think one of the cool things about being in the wilderness...
Is that most people just never experience that for long stretches, and when you do get to experience it, it gives you sort of a, like, oh, I always thought the world was this.
I always thought the world was Phoenix, Arizona, where you drive down the street, and you go to see your friend, and you get in the car, and you go to the movies, and there's a restaurant.
And then you go to Montana...
You'll wander through the forest and you see deer and bears and you see the mountains and the quiet and your cell phone doesn't work and you're like, oh, this is the actual world.
I have found that it's that and that people and including myself think that I am this and then you go out into that environment where you're detached and then you have to rely upon yourself and your knowledge and your grit or your Fortitude and you kind of figure out more of who you are as well, too.
I don't think people really...
You don't figure out who you are if you live in the greater Los Angeles area.
I think you've got to go out and outside of that and either rely on yourself or maybe even more importantly rely on somebody else and have that dynamic outside of...
You mean...
I guess you could starve to death, obviously, or not have enough water, but the places to get those things in L.A., you could solve in a block in either direction.
Go far enough out in the woods and you're on your own.
To me, that's where you find out who you are.
I like being out there because I get to think about me a lot.
He's chasing this moose, and it's a big fucking bear, and he's chasing him around a circle, and it looks like they're filming it from a helicopter, and the bear is just, this moose is hauling ass.
See if you can find that, Jamie.
The fucked up thing is, when bears catch you, they just eat you.
Yeah, I mean, it's just he shows you this guy's ex-girlfriend who's crazy and they're talking about his life and they interview one of his past roommates or some guy who knew him in LA and he's talking about how crazy he is and how he kind of made up a past for himself and he was just like this really...
He had, like, fake accents that he would use sometimes.
Just a really bizarre character who found his identity in taking care, air quotes, taking care of these bears that didn't need taken care of.
And he was going to protect these bears.
And, you know, these bears just, they didn't give a fuck about him.
Well, my theory has been there's two types of people that care about gay marriage and that is people who are really dumb or people that are secretly worried that dicks are delicious.
And I think that when, you know, there's a lot of it that people are afraid that other people are going to think they're gay.
A lot of it is people that grew up where they hear terrible things about gay people or prejudice people around them, tell them crazy things about gay people.
They don't realize that gay people are just people that like guys.
That's it and there's other guys that like guys too and if everything was open they wouldn't feel so creepy They feel creepy because they have to hide it and be secretive and always be yeah, like it's forbidden or they yeah So that's where the weirdness comes from But if you go to Santa Monica Boulevard...
There's this area of three blocks in West Hollywood, in Santa Monica Boulevard, that I don't get out of my car.
I think that a lot of males, right, in a male in a position of power, like the chief of the village, like that guy would probably have his choice.
He's the warlord.
He'd have this choice of women.
And the women would respond to him in a favorable way, which would let him know, it would indicate to him that it's time to fuck, right?
This girl wants it.
I'm going to give it to her.
So when a guy is like some Harvey Weinstein guy or someone who's at the front of some giant company and everyone in the office kisses his ass when he's there and everyone's so happy to talk to him and people are angling for raises and they're angling for promotions and they're always nice to him and they treat him like royalty, I think the guys start thinking that these girls are attracted to him.
That he's gonna fuck them.
It's a power thing, but it's also like a trick on the reward system that the brain has.
I think that as humans, we're only capable of dealing with so much fill-in-the-blank when it comes to that, whether it's the money or the fame or people throwing themselves at you.
I think at some point, depending on the moral compass that you have and how it's calibrated, Swinging in the wrong direction because you can look at Physicians you could look at religion you could look at people in the military Generals and the number of sexual assault cases and the generals like one to four star generals in the US in 2017 was insanely high to Comedy Bill Cosby to you know just fill in the blank you can find an example everywhere once you start getting to the apex I think there's just a disconnect on how much
Depending on who you are going into that position, I think there's a disconnect on how much you can handle.
But Cosby was a really weird one because I've had this theory for a while that I think that during Cosby's era, the 1960s, I think it was not just common to drug women, but it was almost like a joke.
Like the people thought it was funny because drugs were fairly new and the consequences of sexual assault weren't talked about and it wasn't thought about the same way.
And I think that during that day, like he used to joke around about it in his act.
You know I had these girls on the podcast the other day um um Corinne and Christina from uh the podcast Guys We Fucked and one of them was saying that she was hanging out with this guy and uh she had a drink and then all of a sudden she just She couldn't fucking control herself.
If Scarlett Johansson, if somebody, like, filmed her talking about how she had had an anal orgasm with a vibrator and how she likes having her boyfriend get his dick sucked in front of her, that would, and she didn't know that people were gonna talk, like, it would be horrific.
She'd be like, oh my god, she'd, like, have to stay home for days, she'd have to pop Advils and sleep on the couch with a fucking blanket over her head, like, you know what I mean?
Well, it turns out that when he was diagnosed with HIV was right when he started going wild and talking about, you know, snorting, you know, smoking eight grams of crack and that's how I roll and all that shit.
I have gone to the bookstore and read books written by an individual who said they were on a combat operation that I was on and don't remember seeing them there.
It's the symbol that is associated with being a seal.
When you get that symbol, they change your designator inside of the Navy system and it registers as a 5326. Right, but why do you think them using that trident...
I know some people are doing it purely to make money.
Some people got out a little bit early and have used the recognizability of that mark to further their own motives down the road and are purely 100% profit-seeking.
Other people are...
They're trying to tell, I guess, would be their story or their version of a story, and that would be the people in the middle.
And then, I guess, on the other end, the best example I point people at is generally Jocko's book.
It's not a book about, hey, no shit, there I was, which is the number one indicator of a story that's completely false.
People want to romanticize and embellish the reality of What actually happened?
And I don't know if it's the desire to make it seem like it's more than it was.
I don't know if it's because most of the time when you're coming from a military background, you're not used to any level of people really, I would call it fanship, I guess.
You know what I mean?
Right.
The military and being in the military is not about money.
You can pull up online and see exactly how much every individual in the military is making based off what rank they are and how many years they've been in.
So people will be approached and like, look, this is how much money you can make if you wrote a book.
And they're like, holy shit!
And so they will, and they'll make millions of dollars.
The problem is if you start embellishing those stories, in my mind at least, it starts tarnishing people.
The reality of what the occupation actually is and the good and sometimes amazing things that happen lose a lot of their value in my mind.
And I just think it's an enticement that guys are not used to inside of the military.
It's very...
When I was in the military...
I mean, I feel like I was talking to Jamie before we started.
I feel like I'm late to everything.
I'm late to social media.
I'm late to...
I had never listened to a podcast before I sat down and met you with Tate.
Really?
I had never listened to one.
I had no idea.
I had no idea the diversity of information that is out there, and you can go and...
I mean, you can almost get, like, an advanced degree in whatever it is you want to get by just going.
I had no idea.
I'd never listened to one because I was so focused on something else.
And then you lift your head up from that world, and you're like, what the fuck is going on around here?
And, you know, if you post the right pictures on social media of you and your outfit with your thousand-yard stare up to the distance, then you get more followers, and then people are like, oh, come and speak.
And it's an enticing thing to individuals, in my opinion— That are just not used to that.
And it can really, I think it can take you down a path that I would recommend most people don't take.
Which is why I like the way Jocko went, is he has experiences, but he's trying to take those experiences and portray them in a way that people can make use of them.
It's not about the story.
It's about what he learned during the story and how you can implement that in your life.
Well, also, between working out, writing comedy, doing stand-up, being with my family, archery, anything else I'm doing at the time, I don't have the fucking time.
My wife was so pissed at me because I went in with my other F-150 to get an oil change and I technically did get an oil change because I came home with this truck and she walked outside and she was just like, God damn it!
I literally went in, I got very fortunate, and I got a great deal on a Ford, on, like, a pseudo-endorsement sponsorship thing earlier, so I had a bunch of equity in my truck.
I literally went in to get an oil change, and right next to me in this spot was this Ford F-150 Black Ops model, like, by Tuscany.
Locking differentials means you have an ARB locking differential, and what you can do is you set it so that all wheels will always spin together, no matter what, so it locks together.
So if you're in a place where one wheel is spinning, it doesn't work that way.
All wheels spin together, and it's not good for driving down the road, but it's good for getting you out of places and for traversing very difficult terrain.
That's not hunting buffalo or bison and eating bison.
That's not hunting and eating things.
We're talking about two totally different things.
And then when you get to like the lions and the elephants and There's a real problem, and the real problem is that there's not enough money in conservation to ensure the safety of these animals unless these animals are valuable.
And the most valuable way that you can present these animals, and this is fucked up, is as hunting targets.
And I'm not saying this is the only way to do it, and I think it's not.
But Africa is a crazy place, and the best documentary about it is Louis Theroux, who's a British documentarian, did this trip where he went to one of those high-fence hunting camps in Africa.
But Louis Theroux's documentary, Louis Theroux, his documentary is amazing.
Because you kind of get the sense of what it's all about.
Like these animals, a lot of them were going extinct just a couple of decades ago.
Because there's massive poverty all throughout Africa, and there's no money, and they figured out that if you take these animals, protect them, put them inside a fenced area, and talking about these enormous like 10,000 acre reserves, preserves, and then people fly in to hunt them on a daily basis, they get a tremendous amount of money.
So then these animals, their populations are booming.
They're higher than they've ever been, and the animals are protected.
They're no longer in any danger of being extinct.
But a lot of people are super uncomfortable with the circumstances.
I'm not going to make a character judgment against somebody who is or the elephant or whatever animal you may go to call it trophy hunting.
Like, I... I don't know enough about it.
I would assume and hope that the situation is exactly like you described, where the people who live in the area are managing and monitoring the species and making sure it's good to go.
And if they're doing that, I have no issue with it.
And in the same breath, I totally understand why it's very off-putting to individuals who see a picture of that and just loses their shit.
I think you posted a picture, or it was either you or Cam posted a picture of, I think it was an elephant, and it was a line of people outside of the border of the picture.
I'm assuming they were waiting to come and get their share of the meat or whatever it was from that animal.
Yeah, I mean, these are people that have a really hard time getting meat, and elephant meat, as gross as it sounds to people listening to this, is supposed to be unbelievably delicious.
And I was driving down to where I lived in New Rochelle, and I hit this one patch that had so many deer, I had to drive like 20 miles an hour on the highway.
When I was up there, this lady who lived up there was talking to us, and she said she lives in this canyon, and they had wolves come through a couple nights before, and I said, what is that like?
She goes, well, it's two things.
She's like, it's beautiful, and you also have to be cautious.
So it's this thing where you're like, I really love that they're there, and I love looking at them, but I want them to go away.
Songbirds have been spotted in really high numbers in Yellowstone now.
There's a bunch of stuff they documented, but a lot of it is because the wolves chased down the elk and decimated the elk population and knocked it down to half, but in the process made those elk just a little bit more wary, a little smarter.
Still a healthy population.
But that's kind of how it's supposed to be.
It's not supposed to be...
Like these hunters that live there, they got super spoiled.
Because they were used to seeing hundreds of elves.
But when you see an animal and you're hunting with a bow, so the thing is the difficulty and the challenge and the connection to the animal is way more intense because you're trying to get inside of 40 yards.
The whole thing to me is it's not a matter of how much I feel like I can do right.
It's a matter of how few things I can mess up.
And I love...
Fighting against the odds like that.
I love the challenge of having to worry about not only cover and concealment and, you know, high ground versus low ground, but shadows and light and moving and noise inside of that moving and monitoring the wind.
And then the fact that the animal might just want to go take a piss and you're screwed.
You get the best stock in the woods.
I gotta take a whiz.
I love the challenge of it and I suck at it.
So it is a draw to me that And my wife is already shaking her head at me.
She's like, God damn it, you're going hunting again?
So I think for some people, the issue that they have is that they think that killing an animal should not be this pleasurable challenge.
That it should be, if you are going to eat animals, you should be shooting them in the head with a high-powered rifle where you can't miss and they die instantaneously and there's no suffering.
Right, but if an animal doesn't know you're there and you're setting up and it's a 100-yard shot and you have a 30, a 300-win mag or something like that.
No, I agree with you, but I just wanted to hear you spell it out because that's the issue that a lot of people that are sort of in the animal rights activist side of things, one of the things that they would have an issue with is the enjoyment part of it.
I'm dead serious when I say I don't think you figure out who you are until you get into those environments.
I have...
Taken a sounding on the depth of who I am as a human being in the worst most physically arduous moments of my life And I and I wish that more people would willingly go to that point I think that it would it changes my perspective for sure it changes my appreciation for things Nothing will make you appreciate the little things in your life more than nearly dying And having, you know, like, oh, wow, like, I have all of these things that I wasn't paying attention to.
The martial art thing, I think, is a lot like the bow hunting thing in that it's very, very difficult.
And once you start doing it, you get better at it, and then you get addicted to it.
And it's not crazy, people.
I'm not even talking about actual competing and fighting, but just training.
Because when you're training, you're competing.
When you go onto the mats, you train, you're trying to improve yourself, but you're also trying to tap someone who's trying to tap you, and you're both going at it.
And when you do it, and you get better at it, and you get better at it, you develop this kind of understanding of what it is, and it becomes this very addictive thing.
Well, you'd be a master in comparison to someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing, but you will definitely...
Physically, the only problem is your body starts to break down.
As you get into your older ages, like most guys that I know that are in their 40s, and for sure in their 50s, I was in Hawaii recently with Ed O'Neill, who's a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
A lot of people don't know.
Big Ed O'Neill from Married with Children and Modern Family.
I was training like twice a week and, you know, trying to have a career.
But, you know, for the people that really get into it, that really get obsessed with it, it becomes just as addictive as archery, bow hunting, anything else.
And I think what we were talking about earlier, when we were talking about people being...
Angry and like on social media because they're not getting those natural rewards and the natural struggle of life and their life is very muted in that regard.
You were talking about this recently about just the headaches laying in bed.
I have and I know a lot of guys from previous career who are suffering from or discovering or the military is doing research into the causes of the brain injury issue.
It's not awesome to read your future when you get diagnosed with that.
You're like, okay, so what does it look like when I'm 60?
My good friend, Dr. Mark Gordon, who is an expert in traumatic brain injury and does a lot of work with soldiers.
And Andrew Marr's foundation, he has a warrior angel foundation.
Dr. Gordon does a lot of work with him and they they have Developed some really good protocols for helping guys and these help the shit ton of guys and he does a lot of the work for like nothing Yep, just trying to help as many people as he can because you know he's he's He's doing well financially.
He's not desperate for money.
He does a lot of charity work is my point.
He's dedicated a significant amount of his professional time to trying to find solutions for soldiers.
And also he's done a lot of work with football players and boxers and fighters.
There's a couple of buddies that I have who came to San Diego, La Jolla area.
They would go in once a day or twice a day for a quick session.
I'm pretty sure it was magnets placed either across from each other, whatever it was.
A protocol, I think it was for a month.
And to a person, they all actually said that they had significant benefit, whether that be most of them were saying they were sleeping better.
And I don't know the causality or correlation there, but they had improvement.
It could have been their mood function, whatever it may be.
So how do the fighters, what do they think about if you get knocked out in the UFC, like you're just flatlined, do you have a minimum amount of time before you can go back?
So that is the issue that I've heard with some of the active duty guys now.
They'll go in and From a perspective, if they kind of want to preempt and get an idea of where their head is at currently, they'll go in and they'll get a scan or however they...
They couldn't give me the scans because I have retained metal in my body, but I think a lot of it is based off of MRIs and the magnets and stuff.
And they'll recognize that they have the precursors or they'll have damage to their head and the guy's...
They don't want to take any time off.
They just want to get back into it.
It's a struggle.
They're like, hey, listen, this could be what it could look like for you in the coming years.
And the guy's like, yeah, I get it, but put me back in, coach.
It's a struggle to get them to take time off, which doesn't surprise me that the UFC guys are the same way.
Yeah, you have to almost protect people from themselves, or maybe there could be an argument that there should be sort of a comprehensive education, for fighters at least, because this is an elective thing, right?
In which you're definitely going to get hit.
For soldiers, might be a good argument as well, but that there should be some sort of elective...
Well, so skydiving, jumping out of an airplane, is, to me, if you follow some very basic principles, you know, being current and maintaining your gear and taking your time to pack your parachute, the most difficult, or not the most difficult, the most dangerous portion of a day skydiving will be your drive to the drop zone and your drive home.
And that is probably the worst situation you could get into because you could see he was spinning in the suit.
And that is how you can kill yourself in a wingsuit.
If you try some crazy maneuver that you're not capable of doing, you essentially stall the suit and then you end up on your back spinning out of control.
You'll black out and, you know, whatever happens, happens.
And they're not aware of their ability or their skill.
They're just not looking in the mirror and being honest with themselves.
They attempt something crazy.
The most common in skydiving thing is somebody to die under perfectly functioning equipment.
They'll have a really small main canopy.
Like most main canopies, the canopy you're suspended under in your harness when you're learning is about 300 to 360 square feet.
It's like driving a school bus.
It's really slow turns.
It doesn't dive.
And a lot of people try to get to these little postage stamp parachutes that are 71 square feet, 69 square feet.
And in those canopies, if you initiate a turn, regardless of what you do after that turn, you cannot pull the canopy out of the dive until it goes through its natural recovery arc.
So if you initiate that turn 300 feet low, you're done.
You'd be lucky to walk away with a set of powdered femurs, which is exciting to watch from the ground.
It's a very interesting noise to hear happen.
That's best case scenario.
Middle of the ground would be wheelchair with a colostomy bag for the rest of your life.
Worst case scenario, you're getting carted off in an ambulance and you're dead.
And it's just a rush to get to that super small canopy or you just started jumping.
I think either way, though, on the North Shore, you're going to die.
But you try to tell that to that person.
They don't want to hear it.
They're ready.
And not only are they ready, I need to go to Best Buy and get about four GoPros, and then we're going to send this thing.
And you're dead.
And it presents this and creates this.
I don't like to talk about the risk necessarily because there is, in my opinion, a community of people that really romanticize that risk and they define themselves by that risk, where that's not for me, that's not what I'm looking for at all.
But when it comes to skydiving, it's just fun, man.
I cannot not smile when I'm flying that wingsuit.
You're doing 120 miles an hour forward, face first.
I've almost hit a bird base jumping in Switzerland.
But again, there's a difference between skydiving and base jumping.
Skydiving is, if you have enough experience and you learn that you can handle with most likely what's going to come up, you can just focus on having fun.
I have seen more people die under the super small canopies turning too low and just impacting the ground.
I mean, it's a sight to be seen where the canopy, it's in such a steep dive, like as the canopy is up top, as you pitch over, your body is actually above the canopy, so it hits and they pendle them into the ground.
It's like wet meat on concrete.
You know exactly.
And you can hear it coming because the canopies whistle.
The lines that suspend you underneath the canopies are cutting through the air.
And you just hear it.
You look up and then wham!
As far as actually physically watching people go in...
May 2, I think.
But my last trip to Switzerland in 2016, last year, I was in the valley with my buddy Alex, and we were there for two weeks, and 15 people went in.
And that's why, again, I think you have to be careful talking about the stats and the risk, because I don't really know how many people partake in that activity.
But I can tell you this, of those 15, zero were gear-related.
Not a single one was because their gear failed.
It was, in my opinion, somebody attempting or just living.
They're walking on a razor blade.
And sometimes when I go over there, I will do that as well.
I'll fly close to the ground or I'll fly in between trees or I'll fly through a crack and mess around with that.
But I try to do it on a very limited time period.
I try to have outs and I try to work my way into that position.
And what I have seen personally, which doesn't mean that this is the norm, what I have personally seen with my own eyes is people that don't take that route and they want to go straight to just, hey, hold my beer.
Waltz, Misfits, SoCal, yeah, with a skull, with a Disneyland hat on.
And these people go and they have things that they would have to have, like, little things that they would have to accomplish to get entry into these gangs.
And one of the things was they would have to have one of the rides go down.
So they'd have to make a ride go down in order to get entry into this stupid fucking gang.
I'm more convinced now than ever, plus having a bunch of really good podcast guests that explain the benefits of probiotics and about how probiotics literally affect your gut ecosystem that affects your personality and your immune system and just all sorts of different aspects of your life.
But I've been eating kimchi almost, when I'm at home, daily.
This place had a heavy bag, and I knew they had a heavy bag, so I brought boxing gloves and hand wraps and everything, and I have a timer on my phone, so I set the timer up and I just wailed away.
It's fucking great because you know those Apple EarPods?
And here's the thing, when you have this timer, it would play me music, but then the timer, like the noise of the timer would also go through the AirPods.
When I was super young, I remember that I went on a cruise with my grandparents to Alaska.
I don't know where we started, but we went up to Alaska.
When we were flying back from Alaska, puddle jumper to probably Juneau to get on the big plane, and they looked at my grandfather a little up and down like, sir, you're on the next flight.
But I think that all this stuff, when you see all these people that are morbidly obese, I think this is all...
There's a lot of things, right?
There's shitty food, there's bad gut flora, addiction to refined carbohydrates and sugars, alcohol, a lot of things that make people that fat.
But on top of that, I think a lot of it is that they don't have real physical challenges in their life on a daily basis.
Especially physical challenges that they enjoy, that forces them to be disciplined about their health and to understand that their body is a...
It's not just your body, okay?
It's like you have this variable vehicle and the more time you put into it and the more you pay attention to it and the more discipline you use to keep this thing running, the better it's going to work for you.
And if you use it all the time, you're going to appreciate it.
But if you just use it to walk over to the couch and crack a beer and start fucking filling your face with chips and cookies...
Well, everybody did need to hear it because most people didn't know that there was a group that's that fucking stupid that's willing to go into the streets like that and do it in this day and age when you're on the internet and people are going to realize, oh, you're a Nazi?
A friend of mine has been on the podcast before, used to be on this podcast called Citizens Radio, and he was a real heavy-duty, lefty, social justice warrior type character.
And somewhere along the line, He ran afoul of them because he dates girls, and girls are calling him a predator or something like that.
He really didn't do anything wrong.
If you look at it on paper, like, okay, what did he do wrong?
There was nothing.
There was no rape.
There was no assault.
There was no harassing.
It was him trying to get laid, which I thought is normal.
It's problematic to be an aggressive sexual predator.
What she did is actually predatory and really not cool at all.
But what he said was that when he was in that world, he wasn't even aware of dissenting viewpoints because he was so insulated because everybody in that world thought a certain way.
And so you just get accustomed to these very rigid sort of channels of thinking and everybody sort of follows these channels and he literally wasn't even aware of The possibility of there being a dissenting point of view that was rational.
But at the same point, I try to recognize in myself, if I'm whatever, consuming anything, information, if I'm like, okay, I need to go and figure something else out or hear another viewpoint, or at least try to balance it.
To me, the spotty senses start going up.
If too many people are saying the same thing, if everybody's all chanting the same, it's like, what's going on?
We might be down the rabbit hole here, and we need to take a few steps back.
There's some things that people have that are, like, unfortunate.
And one of the things that people have is this, like, deep desire to have other people like them and to fit in and to cause zero friction and to be amenable to the groupthink.
You know?
It's like it's a real it's a common issue with folks like you see them like just slotting into group think ideology and Whether it's group think on the right side or group thing.
I mean there's a lot of fucking really dumb people that I follow on Twitter that are Make America Great Again people like I'll go to hashtag MAGA every now and then and just like Just start reading tweets and just just like fucking Macaulay Culkin from home alone my hand on my head going Oh my god, these people are serious You know, drain the swamp.
Hashtag drain the swamp.
And I'll go and I'll read these people's tweets.
I'm like, these people are just apes that are in a tribe.
They are really, really...
Not all of them, folks.
Don't get me wrong.
There's a lot of people that are Make America Great Again people that really do feel like...
It's a good thing to have this guy in office.
Stock market's up.
I'm not talking about you.
But I'm talking about people that have this tiny little brain.
And this tiny little brain just needs to slot into a place.
And this is where they found.
This is their spot.
And then you go on to their Twitter page and these motherfuckers are on all day arguing with people about Trump.
You know what scares me about that is, again, I feel like I'm late to the game to everything.
And social media, late to the game.
Podcasting, late to the game.
Like I was telling you, I'm trying to play catch-up.
And I used to look at the news and...
Largely accept you know what I could corroborate on each side and now I can't look at any of that and so I just have to use my own eyes But I see with my own eyes people arguing with their head down so much about what they believe that they're actually not seeing what's happening around them And because nobody trusts anything and they only repeat what they say It provides the seams for people to do shit that as a country I don't think we want to go in that direction in that distraction Moves are being made that people aren't paying attention to Yeah,
And we're sending stealth bombers over to South Korea.
We are literally a few steps away from the brink of a nuclear war.
We're not there yet, but we're where everybody should be going, hey, hey, hey, hey, what?
What the fuck is going on over here?
What is this?
Why are we even battling them?
What the fuck is the issue?
Other than the fact that...
I mean, if you want to talk about going somewhere where you have a real communist dictatorship that is a ruthless military dictatorship that has an entire...
Country of people enslaved, North Korea is the spot.
How weird must that tension be between the North and the South just staring at each other in the opposite side of the line and they both look exactly the same.
Yeah, I would love an example, and that's what I always ask people.
Just give me the example of what you want to use as the foundation for those principles, where it's been executed properly, where it's thrived, where it's survived, and I'll just sit here and wait.
And another part of the problem is that the people that are really, like, the people that are in the left that are, like, really progressive and support Marxism, the idea of Marxism and socialism, those people are in general very supportive of gay rights, very supportive of women's rights.
Those are the first things that get trampled in these communist dictatorships.
That is the first thing that goes.
Like every single one of these communist Marxist rules, homosexuality is treated as the devil, like these people, they live in hell that you don't understand.
It is very difficult for me, after a long period of time, the majority of my adult life, to pick my head up and look around.
And most of the interaction, like I said, is social media.
I sit back and I watch and I see the things that people say and I see the complaints that they have.
Oppressed this, this, that or the other and I'll be the first person to say that there's inequality in the US just like there is in every nation on the face of the planet.
But to hear how people think how bad we have it and then to have seen with my own eyes places where people would To claw their way across the border to have the opportunities that people in this country have just waking up.
The sun rises over the United States and they wake up and they have so much opportunity that they don't appreciate.
It's very difficult for me to make sense of what's going on.
It's a bizarre place to be in.
Who are you people and where do you get these ideas?
I think they're idealistic and they think that we can do better, and I think that we can do better too.
But I think where people go afoul is where they start saying that they want equality of outcome.
And equality of outcome is contrary to equality.
Because when you have equality, equality, real equality, meaning you can do whatever you want to do, that breeds inequality.
Yes.
Because some people are going to work harder.
And competition is what pushes things.
And some people think that competition is bad.
And the reason why they think it's bad is because it makes them feel bad.
Like, I put something on Twitter today where they were saying that Fitbits That people using Fitbits is fat-shaming, and ableist, and it's problematic, and it causes all sorts of issues, and these educators were looking at Fitbits as being, it's a real problem with the emotions of people, you know, they find out, and they start comparing, and it can cause all sorts of issues with people.
So they were literally saying that Fitbits, they're just devices that give you data that these things can be a problem.
Like, I'm looking at my oldest son is 14. And, I mean, I realize that at some point in time, in the very near future, he's going to go off and, you know, he's going to want to pursue a higher education.
And I almost would rather send him to a trade school where he learned something with his hands or I would hope that he would.
I would never tell him to do that.
I would hope that he would want to go down that route instead of going into an environment that is completely artificial, where people portray this world of You know, rounded corners and nerfed everything, and your feelings and words hurt.
You talk about it all the time, actually.
I don't want my son to go into that environment.
He's already experiencing that a little bit in the school system that he's in.
He uses the word triggered, and his teachers will use that word triggered.
I'm like, listen, it's okay to have somebody say something to you that invokes a reaction or emotion in you That causes conflict.
That's okay.
Don't run away from that conflict.
Why don't you go directly at that conflict and figure out what your problem is with it or figure out why you have an issue with that and then work through that and you'll be a better person on the other side of the house.
I feel like we're in a place now where people are creating...
It's an artificial environment that as soon as you leave that environment, you're going to get your teeth just kicked in.
And I don't I see it trending more and more and more in the US and I almost think we're getting ready to fall flat on our face and I almost think we need to to figure out who the fuck we are and to pick ourself back up and to realize that those artificial environments that people are trying to force onto the world it just doesn't work.
In campus cities and small towns that have campuses.
Yeah, it's just really heavy-duty left-wing people that are just committed to this ideology and they don't have I mean, it's good to have both sides.
I think it's good to have people that lean left and people that lean right, and you try to figure out which way works.
And by the way, it's going to work better for some people to be left, and it's going to work better for some people to be right, but this lack of tolerance for other people's ideas is one of the most shocking things about the left these days, is this need and desire to shut down speech.
Freedom of speech, to me, in my mind, is not about what I can say to you.
It's not about me saying, I'm going to say something messed up and try to offend you.
To me, freedom of speech is, how much can I tolerate from somebody else?
How much am I willing to listen to an opinion that I absolutely hate, but I'm going to allow it to exist because I'm grateful that we have an environment that that can exist in, and you're not going to get pulled into a public square and get your head cut off.
Well, there's certainly that, but there's also the only way you find out which idea is correct.
Is you have to have debate.
You have to have open debate.
You have to have the ability to communicate your ideas freely.
And if you don't have the ability to communicate your ideas freely and the other person just bulldozes you with their ideas because they think they're right.
And I'm going to shut down everyone else's opinion because I'm right.
And again, I don't try to make a character judgment on them, but to me, in my mind, again, with one of my own eyes, I think the biggest threat to this country is political correctness and safe spaces.
I truly think that teaching people in that manner or getting them – not getting them – allowing them to think that that is how the world outside of that environment operates is setting you up for a very long-term failure because you're going to just get crushed because there are – Plenty of other entities throughout the world that will look at what you're doing and say, oh, that's awesome.
You're just teeing it up for me.
That's a complete vulnerability.
They're going to leverage that against us and manipulate, not manipulate, just attack the fact that those people feel that way.
They'll take it as a weakness and they'll leverage that for their success.
Yeah, I don't necessarily think we're fucked because I think there's enough people that are paying attention that think it's terrible.
And there's a lot of us.
But I think that when something like 9-11 happens, one of the things that I thought that was really interesting right after 9-11 was this rallying cry of patriotism.
Like, everybody had an American flag on their car.
It's like a friendly village that had been attacked, and everybody was super thankful that they were alive and supportive of each other, and also the solidarity.
His book, Tribe, changed the way I understand that.
I'm like, oh, this is a natural part of being a human.
And like we were talking about these reward systems that are built into animals that allow, you know, tigers and like they don't get the natural release.
These natural reward systems, for good or for bad, human beings are designed to deal with conflict, with real conflict.
And when we don't have real conflict, we make up our own bullshit conflict.
When real conflict shows itself, then everything sort of normalizes.
For good or for bad, we haven't evolved past that.
Whatever our DNA is, whatever our programming is, almost at a cellular level, we're designed to have a certain amount of risk.
And when we don't have that risk, we don't have that danger, we don't feel good.
I just think it's amazing the ability for people to have the public face and then who they are.
I have not personally had any interactions with Hillary Clinton, but I have some firsthand friends that have had direct interactions with her from either a security detail perspective or being on the ground and securing an area that she was traveling through. but I have some firsthand friends that have had direct
And the public face that she puts on and how she treated those individuals up to and including people that were tasked with her personal security up close detail, the stories that those people have would melt your hair.
But none of those stories come out.
There's the person that she, you know, portrays herself to be during the election cycle.
And this is who I am.
And then you talk to all these people who live at a day to day level with these people.
And the difference between the two is like sitting there trying to broad jump the Grand Canyon.
It absolutely blows my mind.
The stories about her in particular and her hatred or What they had told me her hatred for basically and essentially people in military or people who were there to support her doing her job, just the anger and vitriol that she would attack those people with on a daily level is unbelievable.
One of the best stories that I have was, I won't say the agency that the person worked for, was basically she was exiting the White House and he said, good morning, Mrs. Clinton.
And he was in a uniform at the time and she stopped and turned around and she said, hey, why don't you go fuck yourself?
Don't talk to me when I'm, you know, going in between place A to place B, wherever she was going, got back in her car.
It's exactly the same behavior when the cameras are not rolling.
100%.
And it's fucking terrifying because, yes, she is campaigning or was campaigning to be the commander-in-chief of, from what I can tell, again, having no direct relations with this person, a person that despises almost, I would describe it as that, is what the organization stands for.
She licks her fingers, she finds out where the wind is blowing, and she goes that way.
And when you see the difference between what Comey said about the investigation and what the investigation had found on her emails and what the illegal activity that she had participated in versus what she said, you know, with the deleted emails, the 30,000 deleted emails and all that stuff, and...
There's a video that shows what he said versus what she said, and you play them back-to-back with each other.
It's like how anybody could support her.
The idea that you wanted someone other than Donald Trump, I get it.
The idea that you wanted a woman, a historical first for equality, I get that too.
You know, the only thing good about having a guy like Trump in is he's not from the system, is that he used all of his money and kind of jumped in, and the financial system is still being supported, obviously, because he's a big part of it, but the political system is in chaos.
I mean, he's not a part of that at all and never was so besides donating money to them Yeah, that was the only thing that people thought was a saving grace about him being in office like let's see But I think he's crazy.
But again, I look at that as people have their head down not paying attention to what they should be paying attention to because in those seams of people losing their mind over a tweet...
What the hell is getting passed through in regulations and bills?
If only the sandstones could sing, imagine the stories they tell of dinosaurs, mammoth hunters, and ancient ones known as the Anasazi.
All roam southern Utah over the eons, long before the Native Americans struggled to hold their land against the Mormon settlers.
Modern life and now Donald Trump.
Scroll.
As President Trump arrives in Utah Monday afternoon, this rocky corner of the Wild West is a battlefield once again, but this time the warriors will carry briefcases and lawsuits.
Trump, by signing two presidential proclamations on Monday, shrunk the size of Bears Ears National Monument by more than 80%, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by roughly 45%, fundamentally reshaping the two large national monuments.
He seems like he could have been one of those guys that was upset at Hillary Clinton up until about 2013. Yeah, I think I hear what you're putting down there.
And a lot of people just want to – I mean, you feel like you can't do anything other than vote, right?
Vote and protest.
And you have a job and a family.
How do you have time to protest?
And so a lot of people shut out because they just don't feel like – they don't feel like they can represent their opinions in a way that's going to be meaningful and impactful.
If you are the chief monkey, if they show that you're a liar, if they can show, if there's, like, proof that you're a liar, you should be removed from office.
If you get...
If you are in court...
And you swear on a Bible and you commit perjury.
You'd go to jail.
Like, why is swearing into office for the United States, why is that less of a Like, a situation where you could be charged with perjury.
Like, that seems to me to be far more significant.
You're literally in control of the country.
You can do things like this fucking thing that he signed that shrinks these monuments, these horrible reductions in the power that the EPA has.
The fucking Environmental Protection Agency is to protect our very environment.
You shouldn't be able to get away with lies as a president.
I think lies as a president, willingly lied is one thing to being misinformed, but willingly lying as a president, if they can show that you had information To the contrary of what you're saying, you should be removed from office.
I wish people would take that level of accountability on themselves as well, too.
I think the country would be a better place if people acted as if there was an organization ready to write down a list of their deficiencies at any given time.
I think you're totally right, but I think that What we're seeing is, for the first time, a president that is showing why we have a real flaw with this idea of one person being the chief dog.
There's a strategy for that, too, meaning that, like, I forget exactly what the strategy is, but it's in terms of how people are addressing him and how people are talking against him because they would be running for president.
They would also be if they're running for president because he is a presidential candidate.
There's like certain rules to behavior and this is very calculated.
It's less risk from a risk-to-force perspective because if you're looking at it as you're the person who has the drone, it's less risk because you're not putting a physical human being at risk or launching a force or an asset or a helicopter that could, fill in the blank, go wrong.
And then on the other side of that risk, though, is that how are you really sure the person that you're going after is there?
Are you really sure that they're alone?
Are you really sure that you can action this target in a way that's not going to have collateral damage?
So there's two different sides of the risk.
And I think that right now, the American populace would probably rather not see flag draped coffins and just assume that business is being taken care of.
In LA, China flies a drone over, or whatever, North Korea flies a drone over, and they just juice the U.S. Bank building in downtown LA. How would we respond to that?
I mean, I sit back and I kick my...
I just do mental judo in my head trying to figure out what the hell I did with almost 20 years of my life.
And did it actually do anything important?
And where is everything going?
And like, what in the fuck was I doing for so long?
Is that my children would have to finish something that I started.
But I also think that the success that we had as a military drove the creation of the enemy that we're fighting.
We took an organization that was largely geographically co-located and we were so effective at finding them when they met in groups of people that they splintered and they spread apart.
Which is why now it's more effective to fly a drone over, as an example, Yemen.
I have no idea if that's happening, but it's easier to have a drone over Yemen than an aircraft carrier sitting off the coast to do something about it.
So now we have an enemy that was in a couple of countries that's now in 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 countries, and you can't really cut the head off of that snake anymore.
And I look at...
Did I do anything...
That made my kids' lives safer.
Did I do anything that made your daughter's life safer?
And I would say in the moment, I feel like I had a difference in the moment.
But I think in the grand scale of things, looking back, that everything that I was involved with, I almost think that the tide has washed it away.
The role that we played, I think, is absolutely essential.
Looking back on my career, I think the role of what I did was to create space And a barrier and a boundary so people in this country could be complete cunts and complain about their rights and freedoms and oppression and inequality.
We have to create an environment where those things can thrive and flourish and be in a melting pot and figure out who we are.
So we have to have that role.
But what frustrates me is seeing what's going on in the country or seeing what's going on in the world and thinking that I was involved in something that was important, but just realizing all I was was a point in time of sticking my finger in a dam that had 15 different water spouts coming out of it.
But who knows if the time that I was there mitigated the problem or kicked the football down the road and made it worse, and it's a problem that your kids or mine are going to have to solve in the future.
And I don't know those answers.
I don't...
I really...
I was 100% and still am 100% committed and very proud of the actions that I took because at the end of the day, I made the decisions of my actions.
I got to wear...
I was super lucky and privileged to wear the American flag on my uniform.
And I got to be...
The example and the beacon of what I wanted the U.S. to be every time that I got, I mean, I would encounter people who didn't know what the U.S. was.
They'd never seen an American before, and how I acted was the U.S. to them.
So I think it was important, and I'm proud of those things, but I just hope at the end of the day I made a difference, you know, instead of trying to run uphill on a soft sand berm and go nowhere.
No, I don't think we ever have been either, but do you think we ever would be if we were attacked?
Remember that last one of the Reagan speeches where we talked about how quickly we would put our differences aside if we were attacked by an alien force from another world?
Instead of being local in San Diego and having, or in LA, the flags up, if the entire world was challenged with something that we had to come together with, I bet you there would be that feeling and it would cross.
But I do feel like, almost like what we were talking about with 9-11, right?
Like that being attacked made people more...
More acceptable to each other more they felt more connected to each other You know let people in front of you on the highway that kind of shit Hey when you have your mortality in your life thrown in front of you I think it creates a palette that is much easier to appreciate the little things and I don't think most people experience that is it weird for you when you you know you've spent so much time in combat and spend so much time overseas to come back and see all these people that Really don't know the darkest side of the world currently.
I mean people have a view of Thank you.
Of what the earth is in 2017. And if you live in San Francisco and all you do is, you know, you work at Silicon Valley and hang out in the tech industry, you think this is the world in 2017 because this is your world.
Like we were talking about, you don't really know the world until you go into the forest.
You go into the forest, you go, oh, this is the world too.
The backcountry is still the world.
It's just, oh, this is what it's really like when we don't have these artificial structures.
And when you spent so much time in combat and you come over and you see all these people that are Fighting over these insignificant things and squabbling about the use of the preferred gender pronouns and all this crazy shit that people find significant today.
It is very challenging for me to listen to the things that people feel are important.
And the lack of...
I would say it's the lack of what I would consider to be perspective.
And it's funny.
If you do...
Say I did 17 years in the military.
Let's say a guy does 20 years.
You actually don't spend that much time in combat.
Let's say you do a six-month deployment.
You're working even at every night of that six-month deployment, which isn't going to be the case, so every other night.
So now you're working 90 days.
Of that time, you might spend 30 minutes in combat in those 90 days.
Multiply that by five, six, seven, eight, nine deployments.
In 20 years, that's your total time combined in an actual combat environment, not a theater of war, but a combat environment where you're directly involved in it.
But that time period, for me, changes the way that I view the world.
Not only that time period, but just the time spent in those countries and seeing what's the standard in other countries and what's the standard here.
And when I hear, and again, I think we talked about it before, you know, people talk about inequality or oppression here in this country.
And I'll be the first to admit that there's inequality, which is fine because there's inequality everywhere.
Let's take a little bit of perspective here.
If you are fortunate enough to wake up in the United States of America, the water that you sit down on the toilet over to take a shit is cleaner than most of the water people on Earth are gonna have access to.
You go to Starbucks and you may pay more per ounce For a cup of coffee, for the fluid, then you do the gas coming out of your pump, going into your car that exceeds the annual income of most people on the face of the planet.
You living in a first world country where instead of spending your time trying to find that water, you get to spend your time sleeping in line in front of the Apple store waiting for the new iPhone to come out.
And then you have the balls to bitch about how bad you have it.
That to me is a super tough pill to swallow.
Because you want to talk about oppression and suppression of freedom of speech?
I've seen street corners that are still red from lopping dudes' heads off because they voiced opinion that was counter to the opinion of the day.
That will change your perspective on whether or not words hurt you and, you know, what rights actually mean.
And you'll be like, you know what?
What you say is actually really offensive.
You know, it's offensive to me, but I'm glad we live in a place where you can say those things.
If I'm being totally honest, I don't want to say that I'm antisocial.
My wife would say that she probably wishes that I was more social, but I just kind of just take a step back and just try to avoid interactions With just about everybody that I encounter.
Well, I would imagine that your spectrum is so much wider than the average person's spectrum in terms of the atrocities that people are capable of committing.
You've seen...
I mean, most of the time, right, you're operating in this one small little sort of village in the spectrum that most people are that are in civilization.
Like I said, it puts me in a position where I almost have to sit back and I have to bite my tongue because I don't share the opinions that most people share.
Because if the military service that I have gave me anything, I think it gave me a different perspective on the world.
It's only because I traveled to more of it than I think most people get the chance to do.
And I got to see more of it not through my phone and my Instagram screen, but through my own eyes.
And all it really did is just changed my value perspective of life, of the little things.
I think the times that got me the most on that is where you would see adults Talking kids into becoming suicide bombers.
Just the evil, evil motherfucker who, instead of having the stones to come and face you, will go and try to talk some innocent kid into strapping on a suicide vest or a suicide belt and walk into a crowd and clack it off.
I mean, that is to me the most insidious type of evil because...
They're not willing to actually engage in themselves.
They want to prey on victims.
If there's anything I hate in the world, it's that.
It's the victimization of innocent people.
Watching that and seeing that, that forever throws a different shade on your glasses for sure.
If you're around human behavior that would put people on their heels and turn them white in the face long enough, that is going to become your default position whether or not you want it to be or not.
I'm not a violent person.
I'm probably the last person you could draw into violence, but I'm not also surprised by violence.
And I'll react to it accordingly if I encounter it because it doesn't surprise me.
I would just think that I mean, I've just got to believe that a person like you that has experienced that insane level of cruelty and evil, that your view of the world, that you would be really intolerant to people that do have this sort of narrow-minded view of what the United States is and our role in the world and how the rest of the world views us and who the rest of the world is.
You know, and I understand the idea of the non-interventionalist foreign policy, that if, you know, we never were in these places, we would never have issues.
Oh, well, if we didn't do this, then they wouldn't do that.
No.
How about real evil does exist, and there are always going to be people who want to do something about that, regardless if you're a pacifist, you're a Catholic.
Fill in the blank.
You will have your axis somewhere on Earth, and they're coming for you.
I think one of the biggest differences that I saw between Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States and, you know, a couple...
I actually know definitely those two countries in the Middle East is that there's just a different appreciation for life.
There's less of a value of life because I think they almost find or expect that it's going to just end sooner.
It's very, very different culturally.
And Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if that oil and water will mix, or if it ever can mix, or we need to have a third party that acts as something in between that allows us to gel.
Like, we're always involved in some sort of a conflict, but what we think of as a war is when we have our troops over there, our citizens over there enlisted, then we say, oh, okay, well, now we're actually at war.
In my opinion, I would say that they are trying to do their best to stabilize that region of the world by supporting the government would be my best.
Just murderous, murderous in the sense of not being able to describe a properly explanation of what's going on.
And Iraq is the same way.
Don't think for a second that we ever had boots off of the ground in Iraq.
It's just talked about a lot less.
We still have a presence there, but people don't understand.
We still have a presence in Korea.
We still have a presence in Europe.
That's how long you have to stay if you're willing to invest the time for stabilization, which the US military, I would argue, is not very good at those type of operations.
You can do it, but you could also probably do open heart surgery with a shovel, too.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the cleanest.
I'd do better with it there, but I'd spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about that stuff, trying to make sense of that amount of time in my life.
Well, I actually nursed it out for eight more years after I got shot.
I did another deployment after I got shot, which was probably not the best call because I had some residual effects from it and almost got to the point where I was like, okay, I need to call a helicopter in and come pick me up because I'm inhibiting the other people that I was with.
Super, super young in comparison to where I am now at a place I wanted to be operating at a level that I wanted to be operating at and then you know I'm in an Indy car doing 800 around the track and it's like oops just put it in reverse by accident there goes the tranny down on the track and just to try to rebuild that and it took a while but yeah I ended up strapped it on one more time and then at the end of that it was like okay I can't do it why did you want to go back like what was what I mean this is something that Sebastian younger talked about a lot in tribe I
think for me it was more, I needed to do it for myself.
When I got shot, it scared the shit out of me.
You know, there's a lot of, a lot of times in the movies there's this just blind heroism and it doesn't matter what's going on and you're like, I'm just going to run through the hail of bullets.
Well, I was flat on my back.
And when the round hit me in my hip, by the time I hit the ground, my first thought in my head was that my femur had just been shattered and I was going to bleed to death in the space of your hamstring and your quad.
You can fit your entire blood volume in there.
Like, I'll be dead in about a minute.
That's what I was thinking in my head before I hit the ground and then what ended up happening that night happened eight people ended up getting wounded I was one of the least wounded people so they were flying people out on helicopters I got put into a Bradley fighting vehicle and taken to the green zone in Iraq But it scared the crap out of me and not only did it scare the crap out of me It absolutely crushed my confidence and my ability to do my job which up until that point I thought that I was at the very least competent and capable of doing my job and
I had Everything was going great up until that moment, and then it didn't.
And I had nothing but questions in a void that I had to pull myself out of.
And it was probably very selfish in my desire to go back and my desire to continue doing what I was doing, but I had to build myself Back up to a point where I thought I could operate again and I remember very distinctly going back to Afghanistan in 2010 and Standing outside of door getting ready to go into a door on a house thinking in my head Do you still have it?
and then going into the door and I needed for myself to do that again So I guess regain for me a sense of who I was and to regain my confidence Wow What did you fear would happen if you didn't do that?
I feared that I wouldn't know who I was because when I was younger I'll be the first to admit that I believe I put too much weight into what I did as opposed to who I was.
I had too much attached to being a SEAL. It was And I, again, in my opinion, the problem that I see with people that struggle when they get out of the military is if they attach too much of their identity to an occupation that they've walked away from, they really...
Struggle most times not always but most times and those people can end up getting themselves into some pretty bad positions and when for guys who get out from that career When they go off the rails fuck me they go off the rails in a big way because we have two speeds We have fifth gear and hold my beer.
That's the only two speeds that we have yeah, and I thought I had lost that and I I was at a point in my life where like I said I was where I wanted to be Doing what I was wanting to do.
I thought I was doing it right I thought I was going to die.
And 36 hours after getting shot, I got off the stairs of an airplane in Virginia Beach and my wife had my son in a stroller and was pregnant with my middle son.
It just was such a bizarre...
Series of events that happened so quickly and I went from going so fast to nowhere to having nothing to do to not Understanding why I couldn't train my body to get back to where I was It was the only job I had in my adult life other than working for my father I had too much I had too much invested in that occupational title and I think one of the best things that I was able to do in my military career was to survive it and get out and to move on and That's one of the hardest things for fighters as well.
Well, they're probably not thinking about anything else when they're in the middle of fighting, which is very common with people in the military, too, because the job does require a very focused, myopic sense of drive.
This is what you need to do, especially in the SEAL teams.
It's the team comes first.
Team gear, personal gear, then take care of yourself.
Worry more about the person to your left and to the right, and then worry about yourself.
You know, consider the impacts of your actions and your words on the people around you, and then on yourself.
So it's very...
It is very driven down into a laser-like focus, but that's also required to survive and thrive in those environments.
But if left unchecked, you'll end up at the end of your career not prepared for the next phase of your life.
And say you do 20 years in the military, which is what you need to do to get a retirement.
You join when you're 18. So, hey, you're 38. Well, the average lifespan of an American is, what, 80, 85?
You got a lot of time left.
What are you going to do?
And if you haven't thought about it, It's, I see guys who struggle.
I see guys, and I struggle myself, but I think I went through that struggle while I was still in, and I think that struggle allowed me to lift my chin up just a little bit to look around and start thinking about the future.