Andy Stumpf, a former explosive ordnance disposal specialist (2001–2019), shares brutal insights into concussive trauma—his gunshot-wrecked sciatic nerve, metal fragments blocking MRIs, and seven parachute malfunctions in 20 years of extreme sports—while Joe Rogan parallels military and MMA brain injuries. They critique modern outrage culture, from Russian troll farms stoking violence to social media’s role in escalating anonymous conflicts, warning that online calls for aggression lack real-world consequences. Stumpf dismisses Hollywood’s war distortions and argues military intervention should be a last resort, not nation-building, while Rogan questions peace strategies amid humanity’s endless conflict. The episode ends with praise for podcasts as a low-cost, accessible medium for honest dialogue, recommending Stumpf’s Cleared Hot for unfiltered discussions on war, killing, and mistakes. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, during the time that you were serving, from 2001 to 2019, where we're at today, I mean, there has been a significant change in outrage culture in this country, in entitlement, things that people think that they can get offended by and not offended by, things that are important and not important.
The beauty of that is most of the time I was serving, so it paid zero attention to any of it.
The disaster part of that is when you come off the off-ramp, you know, out of service, and you go, what happened?
What happened to the environment that I left?
But, I mean, I went from Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up, where it could well be the origin of outrage, culture, and social justice warriors, to the military.
To back out of the military.
So I had very different optics when it comes to perspective, where I started and then what I was seeing when I came out.
Well, that's the take that I always see from people that are in the military or have been in the military, is their understanding of what's important and not important is so much different, because it's truly life and death.
I probably would have used different terms in different places throughout, but the concept that he was talking about absolutely made sense.
I mean, so the SEAL team is one of the, whether or not people live up to this, an argument could be made, but one of the key tenets is, you know, the brotherhood, which is just another way of talking about a tribe.
I just felt like it was really interesting to me, like that book, the most moving part of it was how connected these people are when they're together and when they're at war and what that brotherhood is.
That camaraderie means to them and how they feel disconnected when they're back in regular civilization and they get depressed.
It's like their life had been led at such a high vibration, intensity, so much on the line.
It means so much.
Everything means so much.
There's so much dedication, so much commitment.
And then to go back to the regular life is very, very difficult for a lot of people.
Yeah, I don't think it would be unfair to say that some of the people that I served with, I probably have closer relationships than I do with my biological family.
Even probably, I've shared, I don't know, it's not that the things that we shared were important, but the value and our connection was so tight.
Honestly, tighter than my definitely biological family and potentially even my wife as well, too, and my own kids.
Well, I only get in trouble for my wife on days that end in Y, so nothing's going to be new about that.
But I think she also understands that because I certainly have struggled.
I struggled quite a bit for about the first 18 months I got out of the military.
And I look back on it now and I think two pieces of it.
One, I went from seeing those people that I share those experiences with on a daily basis.
So there's that...
Everything you have in common.
We talk about stuff the same way.
I just know the ins and outs of those people, and then I became detached from them.
I used to have what I thought was a job that had an immense amount of purpose, and then that was gone, too.
So I lost a little bit of my identity and a little bit of the purpose.
At that same time, like I said, I come off that off-ramp of being in the military, and I'm looking at the world.
It doesn't make any sense to me at all.
People are arguing about things and talking about how they're oppressed while they're standing in a Starbucks line paying for a coffee that costs more per ounce than a gallon of gasoline.
Stuff that probably couldn't be – you could couch it in terms other than oppression.
And none of it made sense and you just – it's rough when you get detached from that environment.
So I got medically retired, which is not based off of any one instant, hopefully.
I mean, people who get an IED strike and they'll become a quad amputee or a triple amputee.
That's one incident that they're going to get retired for.
For me, it was more the culmination of a lot of things.
So the gunshot wound obviously didn't help.
And then the operational history of exposure to Explosive blasts, the concussive forces, all of those things just kind of added up.
I went through a 30-day protocol where they baselined me and took a bunch of tests and basically came to the, you know, they write out a massive document of all the things that they were able to at least document.
Like for me, I can't get an MRI because I still have metal in my body from ferrous metal from the round that clipped a piece of rebar on its way to me.
And it clipped my sciatic nerve on the way in, and they're concerned that if they image me, or what I've been told by the doctors, if they image me, it might react again with my sciatic nerve.
Just pull a piece of metal by it, and I'll be right back where I was.
So for me, I got shot in the hip, high up on my left-hand side, but by the time I made it to the hospital, my single complaint was my ankle.
I didn't remember falling on my ankle, I didn't remember hitting my ankle, but it felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and just beat it into powder.
So they were very careful, and they cut my shoes off of me.
They cut my pants off me, and the first thing they did was take an x-ray of my ankle, and they're like, dude, you're totally fine.
But it felt like it was destroyed because it was the nerve they got interacted with high up.
It short-circuited all the way down to the terminal point of the nerve.
And for me, it never came back.
I'm hoping that, obviously, for the fighters, it eventually comes back because I had dropped foot for six months to a year.
I eventually was able to start dorsiflexing my foot again, but I still can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down on the side, the far left-hand side, and as it wraps over the top of my foot, it's completely numb.
That was an interesting part of being hurt as well is talking to people who have decades of medical experience and having them look at you and go, I don't know.
Because they're worried about it being pulled out.
Same thing why the concussion history that I have, it's an estimate based off of operational history because they can't throw me in that same machine and image my brain.
And there's metal all over the left-hand side of my pelvis, and I don't know how much it would have to move, but if it just clipped that nerve again...
I mean, it was probably one of the more difficult times in my life.
My leg felt like it was on fire 24 hours a day, which I could ignore during the daytime, but where it got me was at nighttime.
I would lay down in bed...
And it just felt like I had dipped my leg in gas and put a lighter onto it.
So I was on high dosages of gabapentin and neratin, which are central nervous system suppressors.
So I started feeling the cognitive effect of that, so I backed myself off of that.
Wasn't in a great phase of my life, so I was, of course, washing those down with massive amounts of alcohol, taking three to four Ambien, staying awake because my tolerance to all that stuff was so high, and the last thing I ever want to do is go through that again, so I'm going to stay away from the spinning magnets.
And the night that I got hurt, many other people got hurt.
Eight people got hurt on that particular target.
I was one of the least injured.
There were people who immediately flown into surgery.
A guy almost lost his arm.
A guy took a...
He was right next to an explosive blast that literally peeled back the layers of his ballistic helmet.
He was conscious but blind.
He'd taken such a shot to his head, he got ejected out the backside of a building.
There was some other gunshot wounds.
So I'm laying in the hospital bed.
I hadn't taken any morphine because I had watched too many movies and I thought if I had auto injector Surrettes on me at all times, but I thought if I had jabbed myself, I was going to start drooling.
No experience whatsoever.
And the doctors finally start working on me and he says, "All right, we're going to take a look at this." I'm going to basically stick my finger in the hole.
I was like, let's take a pause here, sir.
Can I have some pain medication?
So he comes out and just juices me with morphine.
First time I've ever had it.
I wish I would have taken it in the field.
It did almost nothing.
And they played around a little bit with the holes and then slipped me into an x-ray machine and said, do you want us to try to take this out?
And I said, well, what is that going to entail?
And he said, well, because we can tell that there's ferrous metal in here, what we would do is we would knock you out, put a tube down your throat, lay you on your stomach, and hold up a two-dimensional x-ray and basically just start slicing and pulling apart, slicing and pulling apart, looking and searching for these metal pieces and pulling them out of your body one at a time.
And I said, "Is there another option?" He's like, oh yeah, totally.
The body will encapsulate it in calcium, and as long as it's not touching a bone, you're probably going to be fine.
Yeah, with an MRI. I had heard about some kid who accidentally died because he had an oxygen tank in the room and they turned the machine on and the tanks slammed into him and crushed him.
Kat Zingano, who's a UFC fighter, she essentially had been hurt really bad in a fight with Amanda Nunes, and she got hypothyroid condition from that fight.
Her thyroid wasn't functioning correctly.
She was gaining weight like crazy.
Her motor skills were all fucked up, and they fixed her with that.
The number that is often touted, I'm hesitant to say that number is accurate because if you look at how it was derived, it wasn't...
They could have done a better job of getting that number.
And I don't want to say inside of the SEAL teams that there's a suicide issue, even though I do know a few people that have committed suicide, and they were the ones that I would least expect it from.
But they were also the ones who had quite a bit of Yeah.
And how easy it can be.
Because you know this.
I've heard you talk about it before.
You don't have to get knocked out to get a brain injury.
And I know countless times where I either did something dumb or was just standing in the wrong place or had a hard parachute opening and I cracked my head against the metal risers and your head hurts for the rest of the day.
And I've seen the change in behavior in some people and I know the stuff that's tied to it as well, the low hormones, all of that stuff.
That is happening, I think, at the highest levels in the military, probably military-wide, but specifically those people who are kind of more on the front leading edge of combat operations.
And I think as a country, we're in a total unknown area because we're in a sustained period of war longer than we've ever been as a nation, and nobody knows the outcome of that.
And people who I would have never guessed would make the decision to take their own life, I'll get a text and, hey, you know, so-and-so just went out into the woods.
And no other external injury, no other marker than obviously something happened in the geometry between their ears that caused them to make that decision.
And I suspect it's from the repeated exposure to the brain injury.
Yeah, it's something that people are just starting to understand over the last couple of decades.
I mean, obviously, there was a focus of that concussion movie, and I don't know if you saw that Bob Costas was actually pulled from football, and they had told him that he'd crossed the line.
But this problem was so poorly understood just two decades ago.
So everyone's just sort of coming to this realization that...
I mean, according to Dr. Mark Gordon, who I've had on, who works with the Warrior Angel Foundation, Andrew Marr's setup, where they're helping all these veterans that have traumatic brain injuries, and I've had Mr. Gordon on several times.
He says that you can get traumatic brain injuries from things that don't even remotely knock you out.
He's like, people get them from doing moguls when they ski.
They get them from jet skis, bouncing around on jet skis.
I mean, you can get it from a minor car accident.
You can have a traumatic brain injury.
And for guys like me that got hit in the head for years, who knows what the fuck is going on in there?
And for professional fighters, it's almost inevitable.
For football players, it's even worse.
For football players, they did some crazy study, and I know we quoted it, and I don't remember what the numbers was, but it's some insane number, like in the high 80% of people from high school on through college and into the professionals have TBI. Or CTE, or some signs of traumatic brain injury.
It is interesting to, like I was saying, so when I got medically retired, they sent me to a medical facility called NICO, which is attached to Walter Reed, and it's the best care that I ever received, because it's a civilian facility.
It's called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.
Well, the money was well spent because I went there and I probably would not have been medically retired had I not because I left with literally a 150-page dossier.
But it's interesting tying it back to TBI because I spent a lot of time as a requirement talking to psychologists and psychiatrists.
And the TBI-PTS... In the military, it gets interesting because it seems like they're treated as different issues, and I'm probably misquoting the number a little bit.
I think there's 13 recognized symptoms of both, but there's an overlay of like 11. So I can't remember any of the symptoms off the top of my head, but you could describe one and it could apply both to TBI and to post-traumatic stress.
So it gets even more muddled on how are you treating somebody for a brain injury?
Are you treating somebody for a post-traumatic stress?
Are you lumping everybody together?
Because I see a lot of people, specifically a lot of veterans, getting stuck in that world where...
It's a lot of focus on PTS, but the reality is it could just be from the trauma received over a career or nearly two decades for most people to make it to retirement.
When I was in, it was called Nonel, or a shock tube.
So you put a charge wherever, a gate, a door, a wall, and you basically have to attach an initiator to it because the charge isn't going to go off by itself.
So you need a highly reactive charge to set off an explosive that is less reactive.
You keep them separate, obviously, for safety, except for the main breacher.
He probably has at least one hooked up so he can be really fast.
But then you just extend that flash tube and they come in long reels.
I mean, you can get 30, 40, 50 feet.
And each charge, mathematically, we do math on it to determine the minimum safe distance of every charge and it's written on the charge so you know how far you can get away.
But sometimes you're in a situation where, like I said, you think you got an awesome hiding spot and the guy lays out the flash tube and he's getting ready to fire it off and you realize that you're staring directly at the charge and you have nowhere to hide.
It's kind of crazy when you think about how long people have been studying the human body and this is just something they've really got a real understanding of in the last couple of decades.
I don't even know if I would characterize it as a real understanding.
I think they're farther along than they were two decades ago, but I think the amount we know versus the amount that we don't know is much more weighted on the amount we don't know.
For the first time, she asked me to stop in June of last year.
But, of course, it was tied to a very close friend who did a jump, didn't go the way he wanted it to go, or anybody would.
She happened to know him.
And it really was the first time that I seriously considered giving it up.
I haven't touched a wingsuit since my buddy Alex died.
And he was my main base jumping partner overseas on most of the trips that I'd done.
And I'm not going to say I shepherded him into the sport, but I was there with him on his first jump off of a cliff in Italy, the first time he put a wingsuit on.
And that one stung a bit.
So it's on pause, potentially forever, as far as base jumping goes.
I'll still skydive, but it's a question mark on the base jumping side of the house.
So the canopy size, the main canopy that you're flying, the wing over your head, the smaller it is, the faster it goes, the faster it descends, but also, quite frankly, the more fun it is.
But with fun, there's consequence.
So there are canopies that you can initiate a turn with.
And if you initiate the turn too low, you cannot pull the canopy out of the turn.
You will impact the ground at a high rate of speed regardless of what you do.
And if you get under that canopy with not enough experience, obviously your odds of making a bad decision are going to go through the roof.
So most injuries and fatalities, at least from the stuff I have seen, is from people making poor decisions under good equipment or choosing to execute an emergency procedure, which would be cutting away your main parachute and deploying reserve.
Either out of sequence or doing it too low where the reserve parachute doesn't have time to open.
To me, that's not a failure of the parachute system.
That's the failure of the individual who is driving that parachute system.
The right-hand side, you literally need to do this in the correct order, even though people have killed themselves by going backwards.
So you pull to full arm extension.
It's literally just a pillow with Velcro that has two cables, and the cables are what's actually holding the parachute on your shoulders.
If you pull that out, a three-ring release system, which is basically just a load reduction system, unwinds itself and your parachute's gone, and you're going back into free fall, and you just pull the other pillow.
It sounds worse than it is, and before I had my first cutaway, it was terrifying.
And then after you have four or five, you're like, okay, I got this.
Deploying a parachute and just sitting there looking at it as it's – because they want to open and you can – I can tell now within an instant of trying to deploy my parachute whether or not it's going to open or not just by looking at the shape, by sometimes listening to it and just seeing how it opens.
Sometimes – I mean so packing a parachute people think is really difficult.
If you can fold a t-shirt, you can pack a parachute.
Sometimes, though, you just get off of a jump and you only have 10 minutes to make the next jump.
So you skip a few steps, or you rush through a few steps.
I looked up and I said, okay, that's not going to work.
Reach, pull, reach, pull.
And your reserve opened so fast.
Like by the time...
I felt like by the time I had pulled the reserve handle, because I had a handle at that point, by the time I had moved my arm to three quarters of extension, it had fired off.
I mean, the first wingsuits were literally just fabric that had like the little thumb loops you'll find on like cold weather long sleeve shirts sometimes.
But, I mean, I think Patrick Day Gardin is how you say his name.
He was one of the first.
And they would just sit there and just, they would just jam their appendages and lock them out and use their entire musculature to sail this fabric as far out as they could get.
As to the conditions that led up to it, and one thing people generally don't want to do is place the responsibility on the individual making the choice, but from everything that I have seen, he made a choice to jump at a time when he should not have been jumping due to visual conditions.
So even though the suits are amazing, really the only thing that doesn't seem to be evolving is the person that's jumping it.
Most of the time, just like skydiving, it's just a human being making a very poor choice, to include Alex.
I think when I initially started pushing hard down that path, I was trying to replicate a headspace or a feeling or a sensation that I had in my old job.
So if you want to talk about clarity of thought, and I think we might have talked about this the very first time that we sat down, stripping away all ancillary bullshit that has absolutely no meaning, but for me at least, I spend 99% of my time worrying about things that have no impact whatsoever.
So you sit on a helicopter, pick the battle space that you're in, and you get a five minute warning.
And you really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage.
And then you get a three-minute warning.
And then you kind of stop worrying about whether or not you just had an argument with your wife or you just sent off some snarky email.
Then you get a one-minute warning and a 30-second warning.
And the closer and closer and closer you get, everything is gone.
And it is still to this day the sensation and state that I have been in that is by far – I had no question about my purpose and I had the utmost clarity that I've ever experienced in my life.
And you get used to operating in that headspace of just being in the moment.
The first one to three seconds in front of you, nothing else matters.
I'm going to solve this problem and move on to the next one.
This problem and move on to the next one.
Well, then I lost that ability to do that.
And it sucked because I liked operating in that headspace because it helped me deal with all the other bullshit in my life because it reset for me my what matters and what doesn't matter ratio.
I was able to get rid of like, I would describe it as just the white noise in my head.
Or another way I'll describe it is, Like Jamie's got a bunch of levers that he can push up.
I think, and I'm included in this, I think most people are pegged out at a 10 almost all the time.
They're fucking white-knuckling through life.
But if you can get into that state where you have that clarity of purpose, clarity of focus, I felt like it pulled everything back to a 3. And so that state helped me in things that had nothing to do with that activity and it lasted for a long time.
So when you're base jumping and you're standing on a cliff and you're scared out of your mind and you can't talk because your mouth is so dry and you have a P ring on your suit, which is why you always get dark suits so people can't see your P ring.
Every alarm bell in your body is telling you, don't jump.
And I had the same experience.
I wasn't worried about checking count.
I wasn't worried about what was going on in life.
I was just living in that moment.
And it helped me be a better dad.
It helped me be a better...
Husband.
It helped me be better at any business decision that I need to make because it allowed me to pull all of those stereo levers back down.
So it's less for me, and I can only speak for me, it's less about thrill-seeking because I get that all the time.
Like, you're an adrenaline junkie.
I'm an adrenaline enthusiast.
I certainly enjoy that, but I actually like what I get from the activity more than the activity itself.
What do you think is going on where people are pegged at 10 all the time with nonsense and that something that's life-threatening can bring it back to a 3 and offer clarity?
I mean, there has to be something that you've discussed or thought about in depth.
It helps by not having, like when I'm standing on a cliff right before I get ready to jump, there is absolutely nothing that I am thinking about other than where I want to be in the next three seconds.
By being able to focus on something so singular, and maybe I don't meditate, but I've heard people talking about it.
By being able to clear your mind, it helps them deal with everything else.
I think there might be some connection there.
But I just think that The removal of the noise that bombards everybody all day long, even for a little bit, helps you.
You have iPhone and headphones for sure, right?
Have you ever noticed when you're listening to it, you listen at the same volume level, but then it doesn't seem to be as loud?
So what do you do?
You click it up a notch, right?
And then you get used to that volume level, and then you click it up a notch.
And then you get used to that volume level.
Receptor downgrade phenomenon.
Your body gets used to it, so it adapts to it.
But if you pull that stimulus out and leave it at that high volume, but listen to it like two weeks later, it's going to blow your ears out.
It'll seem loud.
It's not gonna blow your ears out, but it's gonna seem much louder than it would if you slowly just incrementally started adding that volume.
So there's something in there that is allowing me, and I'm not recommending that anybody pursue therapy via the directions that I do, but there's something in there that's allowing me to...
Instead of add and add and add and add, that activity allows me to detach, and then when I come back to it, I realize it just feels different for me.
I don't know if that's a good description of the mechanism, but that's the best that I can probably describe it.
I don't have enough experience with jiu-jitsu to truly speak about the long-term benefit, but what I can say is this.
If I stop base jumping, what I will replace that activity with is more jiu-jitsu.
Because what you just described, when you're simulating murder in your pajamas, and somebody is trying to choke you to death, you are not thinking about anything else.
But they're weird songs, like Christina Aguilera, I Am Beautiful.
Like, sometimes that'll be playing if I'm rolling.
But the song, it's almost like, it sounds strange, and I never talked about this before, but it's almost like a mantra.
Like, I'll play certain parts of the song over and over again in my head so that I can think about that instead of the actual training and the actual strangling.
I don't want to use the term mastered because I don't know if you could master it, but where you are, you are at a...
Like when you roll with somebody, I was talking with somebody about this not too long ago.
When I roll with a black belt, the outcome is preordained, right?
Unless they bought their black belt at Macy's and they're pretending.
In which case, I don't know.
I still don't know enough.
It might be preordained.
But the difference in what I'm thinking about versus what would happen if you and I rolled and what you are thinking about...
It's going to be massive.
So I don't have the hard drive space to sing Christina Aguilera.
And you probably don't even remember half of the things that you do when you roll or how you think about it because you have experienced it so many times.
The weirdest thing about jiu-jitsu and training, and you could say this about striking as well, is sometimes things happen and you didn't even think about doing them, you just did it.
Those are the weirdest moments.
There's sometimes where you'll kick somebody.
Someone will move and you'll move and then before you know it, you're like, wow, I didn't even think about throwing that and it lands.
It's like your brain recognizes, oh, I know what happens here.
You step to the left and throw that left kick and it just lands.
You just There's nowhere to go.
And then the same thing happens with jujitsu.
Like sometimes there's a scramble and in the scramble all of a sudden you're choking somebody.
It's like this movement happens and your body just falls into place.
There's moments where, particularly if you do a lot of drilling, which I don't know how much drilling you're doing, but it's one of the things that I... It made me way better.
When I first started training with Eddie Bravo, one of the things that we did a lot from white belt to blue belt time was a lot of drills.
A lot of drills.
Just constant drilling.
And drilling is...
Overlooked and underappreciated because sparring is so fun.
So if you and Jamie were both learning together, you would do a few drills.
Okay, here's how you do the arm bar.
You're going to secure the arm.
You're going to swivel the hips, throw the leg over, and tap.
Because I'm bigger than most people that are there.
And I've heard enough times that if you rely on your attributes early on, what's going to end up happening is you'll have success early and then you're going to nosedive.
I actually think that's one of the best parts about it.
Like, I love...
So my body tells me I know who I'm going to have a really, really tough role with, and they're probably going to beat me, and I can feel it bouncing against my ego.
But if I just go roll with that guy over there, I bet you I'll be successful.
And I feel that inherently, and I'll just go roll with the person I know who's probably going to beat me.
Because I love that choice.
One, something that protects your ego, and something that keeps it in check.
Because it is humbling.
And I've been a dumbass.
I should have tapped earlier before, and I'm sitting there.
They completely have me locked in.
But I'm going to try to muscle my way out of this, and then my arms soar for three weeks.
Well, it's actually important to do both, believe it or not.
It's important to be humbled, for sure.
It's important to have a realistic perspective of your abilities, but it's also important to tap people.
I always tell people that one of the best ways to get really good is to strangle blue belts.
Get people that have a little bit...
A little bit of technique, and then they have a little bit of understanding of what's going on, and just put the choke to them.
But also drilling.
But then, you know, you have to roll with people that are legitimately far better than you just for a perspective enhancer, to understand how quickly someone can close the distance, how quickly someone can take advantage of an opportunity, and then also the feeling of being set up two, three steps in a row.
Like one of the things, like when I roll with John Jack Manchato...
He's a multiple-time world champion.
And you'll see, especially over time, the many, many, many times of training with him, you'll see he's setting you up several steps ahead.
If he's sweeping you to the left, he's sweeping you this way.
He's expecting you to base.
And when you base, he's going to adjust.
And when you adjust to him adjusting, he's going to grab your leg.
And then, boom, you're on your back.
You're like, fuck!
It's like he already saw the path, and all you're thinking of is, oh, don't let him sweep me.
But he's sort of trying to sweep you.
I mean, if you just give in like a bitch, he'll sweep you, but he's really wanting you to base.
And then when you go to defend the base, then he's going to trap you.
And then when you go to try to adjust for the trap, whoops!
He's got your leg and you're on your back.
And then his knee's on your belly, and you're like, motherfucker.
And he saw the whole thing so many steps ahead.
I mean, it's a beautiful art form.
It really is, because...
I always say about the guys that I know that are some of the best guys in the world, they're so different than what you'd expect.
They're really like nerd assassins.
Because they're really smart.
Because you're thinking almost like...
It's like kinetic chess.
You're thinking about all these moves.
It's just that you can get your chess pieces to move better than other people's chess pieces can.
It's like chess, but you can make your chess, if you do a lot of box jumps and plyos and you do heavy-duty strength and conditioning routines, you can get your chess pieces to move better.
I talk to a lot of them that train, and a lot of them get super addicted.
They're there five, six days a week, and wrapping up their elbows and their wrists and taping up their fingers, and they don't give a fuck.
They just want to keep going.
They'll literally roll like this with one arm because their shoulder's blown out.
I'm like, you're not going to take time off?
I'm just going to work around it.
Work around it.
Which is not always good because eventually...
I know a lot of guys who've reached a point where they maybe could have rehabbed something and now they have to have surgery because they've kind of blown it out to the point where it's fucking dangling.
I really backed off a couple years ago because I had some bulging discs that were impacting my nerves, and they were making my hands hurt and my elbows hurt.
And it was my neck had some bulging discs that were pressing against my nerves.
And I got Regenikine on that.
I did some spinal decompression and I relieved all that.
Then I tore some meniscus and I had some shoulder injuries.
The shoulder injuries were really bothersome because it was also fucking with archery.
And I was really worried about not being able to...
It'll have a little bit of impact on my timing, but luckily, during this entire time, I've worked out very hard.
So my body's physically in very good shape.
Like today, I ran the mountains for the first time in like six weeks since my meniscus injury, and it seems to be...
100%.
I mean, maybe not 100%, but no pain at all.
And I ran a good, steep course where it's, you know, like heavy-duty running in the hills, and I was getting cysts, like recurring cysts, because where the meniscus tear was, there was some, you know, it was loose, and so, like, as I'm pounding, the blood would pool up, and then it would, you know, swell up, and I had to get it drained, and they'd stick this fucking fat needle in there and suck all this puss out.
It was nasty.
So I got exosomes and platelet-rich plasma six weeks ago.
So from then, I waited the six weeks, but during that time period, I mostly did that echobike, that rogue echobike, because it's not impactful, so it doesn't put the pounding on the knee that was causing the cysts.
But fuck, man, does that thing build your cardio up.
Well, it's definitely, there's a difference though.
The pathways get sharper when I train more.
Like the last time I was doing like serious training was over a year ago.
And when I was doing it, like after a few sessions, the pathways sharpened.
And like, you know, you clinch up, there's less hesitation, there's more of an understanding of what's got to take place, there's more of like a familiarity with training.
But you know, as you get older, you know, I'm 51 now, the thing that happens is your fucking joints and your body does not want to hold up to this continued stress.
So you have to really be careful about when to train and how hard you train.
Like my friend Eddie Bravo is going through that right now.
He has a fake disc now in his lower back.
He had to have his disc replaced with a titanium articulating disc.
He had knee surgery.
He had shoulder surgery.
And now he needs wrist surgery.
This is all within a couple of years.
And he's a couple of years younger than me.
So his body is hitting that point where this...
Years and years and years of strain and pull and choke and resist and base and push.
Your body just doesn't want to do that all the time.
So you have to be smart in terms of how much stress and how much recovery you put on.
I think you also have to be really smart about working on your flexibility and working on your recovery, whether it's through cryotherapy or sauna use or massage.
But rest, too.
You can't train like a fucking wild demon six days a week when you're 50. You just can't.
You might get a couple of days in hard, but you also have to understand, like, flow rolls.
Flow rolls are giant.
It's the same thing with flow sparring.
Like, I remember some of the best gains that I made as a kickboxer with training with guys who I knew I could trust to not fucking brain me.
Like, that we would tap each other.
And so then you're carving pathways...
But you're not taking the kind of abuse that you take if you're just going into...
Because sometimes sparring...
It's not really sparring.
You're fighting.
You're fighting people in the gym.
You just get together and you're lacing up your gloves.
And I find that I rotate through a lot of the different positions and I find myself working out of other problems more than I would in like a normal five minute just open roll.
Mm-hmm.
And I realize how limited my offense is because I like holding on to the pajamas and basically holding on to a freaking doorknob on somebody's collar.
It makes sense to me now when I've heard you talk before like, yeah, go ahead and wear that sweatshirt.
Now I'm like, ooh, I don't really want to wear a sweatshirt.
And they do it across the street from each other on purpose so that they'll interact with each other.
So that people get there...
There's no one organizing it, because there's no real person on the ground, because they're doing everything from Russia.
And this is just one example.
They do a lot of things with Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter.
They were pairing them against each other.
Black pages that were supporting anyone but Hillary.
This was their message.
Anyone but Hillary.
Hillary Clinton does not support the black community.
We should vote for Bernie Sanders.
We should vote for Jill Stein.
We should vote for anybody but Hillary.
And what they were basically trying to do was weaken the support that the Democrats traditionally have from the black community.
And they were doing this through these pages.
And there was not that many pages when you find out there's like 80 pages or 100 pages they were running.
But then you find out the amount of interactions that they had with them.
Millions and millions and millions of interactions.
So comments, likes, shares, and then people are – this message that they think is coming from people from their community is actually coming from Russia, and it's actually a calculated attempt to sow dissent and to sow this conflict in America.
And the idea is – And it sounded so crazy to me, because I wasn't really paying attention to it that much, but the idea is that they're trying to make us fight against each other about everything, so that it fucks up democracy.
I would say that they've achieved that goal, whether or not they're responsible for it or not, but it certainly seems like we're trending in that direction.
I can't remember a time where there's more conflict and more outrage and more people willing to jump into the fray, regardless of whether or not they're informed.
Well, there was a lot of that from Russia as There was a lot of fake Antifa pages.
There was a lot of that.
There was a lot of that where they were telling people that the only way to get people to understand is through violence and that you must be willing to do whatever you can by any means necessary and violence is good if it achieves the desired result of peace and prosperity and making sure that progressive ideas get pushed forth.
It's fucking crazy because people who don't know what violence is, it's like, here's one that people say, they'll say to a martial arts person, like they'll see someone like John Jones, like, if I was John Jones, I'd just fucking kick everybody's ass.
Like, no, you wouldn't.
No, you wouldn't, okay?
You know, and all the problems that John Jones has been in, one thing you should notice is, never been in a fight, there's no street fights out there with John Jones, you know what I mean?
But when you look at it from someone who has zero understanding, they're like, oh, if I was that guy, I'd be kicking everybody's ass.
But no, you wouldn't because like violence.
People don't just accept violence.
You don't just hit someone to get away with it.
They think about that shit forever and they try to get you back.
Either they hire someone to get you back or they get you back on their own or they wait for you to not remember it and then they come around the corner and fucking brain you with a baseball bat.
This is what people do.
People don't like getting fucked up.
If you kick someone's ass, they're gonna remember it.
And this idea that you're gonna be able to suppress people...
By attacking them and hitting them with bike locks and not letting them speak at universities that you're protesting at.
It's madness.
And it's so confusing because it's not indicative of what I always thought of when I thought about left-wing people.
I thought they were peace-loving people or well-educated.
Instead, you're getting these people from their fucking computer.
I know, and especially calling for violence when it's not necessary against Americans.
What you had to deal with in the military has to be the most intense form of violence.
Of conflict that's available on planet Earth.
The most intense form of conflict is war.
That's the real conflict.
That's real consequences.
You've suffered them physically.
You've seen countless friends suffer them physically.
That's the real shit.
So when you're seeing people from universities, from these coddled environments, and these people with a really completely ignorant perspective as to what the actual consequences of violence are, calling for it, it's just bananas.
On one hand, I'm glad that they haven't experienced it because I can tell that they haven't just by the way that they're acting.
And I'm glad that they didn't have to do that.
But on the other one, it's a tough pill to swallow because I just don't understand.
War is a...
It's about as high consequence as you can get, for sure.
Like I said, it resets your perspective, and the last thing that I would ever want to see is that here on the streets of the U.S. Like, I just, I can't even imagine how destructive, well, it would destroy our country, for sure, but I also don't, I can't figure out the route out of where we are.
So people are calling for violence, right?
You've got other countries trying to incite Get groups together.
I'm hoping that things don't have to come to a head.
I'm hoping that we don't have a Kent State or some horrible event in this country where protesters and And the people that oppose them get into some horrible, deadly, violent encounter.
Because so far, other than Charlottesville, that time that guy ran over that woman with a car, we're seeing most of this violence being at least somewhat contained to fisticuffs, right?
And the professor that hit that guy with a bike lock, and there's a few other instances of people getting knocked out and punched and hit with sticks.
We haven't seen mass violence.
Shootings and murder, but goddammit, that shit's close.
Especially when they're doing rallies and people are like, you know, let's do an open carry rally and everybody show up in their operator-chic apparel with...
I look at the pictures of that, I'm like, okay, you have a lot of stuff.
First off, that's on fucking backwards.
I'm like, okay, you have all the tools, but you obviously don't practice with them.
But the danger of just...
You know, what's the next step?
First, we're just going to, you know, we're going to wear all of our stuff.
All right, well, if it started at fist and then went bike locks and then went show up with your Civil War gear.
I just don't remember a time where the country's been so divided.
I don't know whether it's because of social media and because of the Russian influence on social media compounded with having Trump as a president, people that feel like they're disenfranchised and they don't feel like they're...
You know, you hear about this all the time in regards to income inequality.
People feel disenfranchised.
They feel like the system has failed them.
And that's why so many young kids are favoring socialism.
And why so many young kids are moving towards that.
They think that anything's got to be better than watching these fat, rich cats with all this money controlling the world.
And that the only way to get out of that is revolution.
But damn, you know, like...
There's a lot of people that are not those fat, rich cats you're positioning yourself against.
They're just normal, regular Americans who happen to be conservative.
And conservative does not always have to equal racist.
It doesn't always have to equal white supremacy.
It doesn't always have to equal all the negative connotations, you know, religious fanaticism and all these different things that people always attach towards conservatism.
It doesn't have to mean that.
It could just mean people who are prudent with their finances, who are, you know, they're cautious with the way they think.
They're more conservative in their values and their ideals.
That's not a bad thing, necessarily.
But we've got it lumped into these two groups, left versus right.
If I had a problem with you, I'd be like, Joe, I would talk shit to your face, or I'd have to find out what your phone number is, or mail you a letter.
And then I'm going to get to the other side, and they're all in these weird communities of people, like, you know, my grandfather would always talk about how racist people were against Italians, and then there was a lot of that against Irish, and all these, like, immigrant communities on the East Coast, and then what happens is they would get in their car, and they would go, fuck this place, let's go west, and they would keep going until they got to California.
And I think that's why California is, like, one of the most progressive places, because it's the furthest away from where people landed, and So the people that wanted to get the fuck away from them, they got as far away as they could.
They probably have one place where they have a video camera up where they can capture a certain amount, multiply it by a magnitude, and then extrapolate that over, like, I don't know.
I think our take on it, though, is really essentially based on how many people are registered in this area, how many people we absolutely know, and then how many people have pushed into this area from other places.
It's an interesting thing, like population, because when you fly over the country, you look down and you go, wow, look at all that spot that people could live in.
I just wonder, like, how a person winds up in that double-wide trailer miles away from Barstow.
Like, how do you...
Like, what path do you get from being a baby coming out of your mama's vagina to one day being holed up, sniffing bath salts, you know, smelling your own farts.
Which is an ice cream headache over and over and over again as the ocean breaks over your head.
It's pretty bad.
And the cold weather immersion test is there where you have to get into the water with just a pair of shorts on for five minutes and just then rewarm yourself.
Yeah, and then rewarms himself with basically all Sitka's gear and figures out how to get your body back.
What I thought was interesting that I never really considered was that eating food actually ramps up your body heat because you have to burn off the calories.
Your body starts processing the food actually is good for elevating body temperature, eating food, especially if you can get hot food, of course, but just eating.
That makes sense, but those arctic conditions, I don't know, at least in the modern theaters of war we're engaged in, I don't know where the applicability would be.
So it might be a little bit of a benefit versus time expended to teach the guys that stuff.
You know, because unless it's, we're talking like Korea, probably farther in the northern, you know, latitudes.
And that's why I said there's an aspect of learning and there's an aspect of just this is going to suck.
Hey, you guys, guess what?
You're going to do a 20-kilometer hike into the backcountry in snowshoes.
There is no end state to this.
There's no target you're going to do anything on.
You're just going to go out there and you're going to do it and you're going to survive out there and it's going to suck for three days and then you're going to come back.
So, I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this recently.
I'm of the opinion that really the only thing that I learned how to do when I was a SEAL was to enhance my ability to learn other things.
You're selecting for people, and to get to that point, you've got to maintain control of your emotions, whether you're in pain or you're hot or you're cold.
So there's that essence of self-control, but then they require so many different skill sets and so many different things that the selection process is looking for, and then at the end of it, teaching people how to become better learners.
And then you just refine that over and over and over again over a career.
It's the ability to learn is probably the biggest takeaway that I have from my time in the service.
I think that's the best thing you could ever really learn, is learning how to learn.
Learning how to learn correctly, learning how to actually pay attention to what someone's teaching you and absorb it and follow the steps rather than fuck it up with your own ego and your own insecurities or whatever it is that's going to trip you up.
If you can get good at something, you can apply that to almost anything if you really focus.
As long as I wasn't more than three feet off the ground, yes, I'm totally comfortable free soloing and moving laterally but not vertically away from the ground.
Sometimes you get to a place and you're like, "This is the perfect piece of gear." And of course you're only like six feet off the ground when the perfect piece of gear.
And then you'll get multi pitches up in the air.
So you'll be two, three hundred feet up in the air and you're a lead climber.
So there's nobody above you and you're setting your own pro and you're starting to get emotionally involved in the situation that you're in.
Well, you've got to think it's double the distance.
If you're 10 feet above the last piece of protection you put in, you fall the 10 feet to the protection, then the 10 feet past the protection, and then it pulls on the pro.
So it's actually double the height that you are above it.
And it was just me and him and a world-class climber.
And I was at the East Coast Command at the time, so budget was no option.
I had the newest, shiniest stuff.
I'm like taking plastic off of climbing gear to go climb this rock.
This guy pulls up in a van with a Marlboro hanging out and, you know, tennis shoes that have laces probably on one of the shoes and an old pair of pants.
And he's climbed like every mountain ever.
So it's me and my buddy.
We're climbing our way up.
I'm leading this pitch.
So you switch.
One guy will climb.
He sets an anchor.
The other person comes up and they pick all the protection out.
So you can just switch and then the other person leads the way on the next one.
So I'm like halfway up this pitch and...
I can't move because I'm losing my shit.
I'm like 15 feet above the last piece of protection that I just put in.
I'm convinced that I feel my feet slipping off of the rock.
I have my hand jammed into the rock and then you make a fist to prevent it from falling out.
You can actually see Alex doing that in Free Solo as he's climbing up.
They'll slide their hand in and then they'll manipulate the shape so it pulls.
And as my world is collapsing on me and I'm just sitting there, I've got full sewing machine leg just sitting there just shaking, I hear a voice just over my shoulders like, hey man, just put the piece of pro right there.
And I look over and this professional climber is right next to me with no rope, in his fucking tennis shoes, smoking a cigarette, which is what he was using to point to where I should have placed the next piece of protection.
Cool, calm, and collected.
And I almost fell off the rock because he scared me so bad.
I was so freaked out at what he was doing that I almost fell.
I'm like, you need to get away from me immediately.
Alex Honnold was telling us a story about one time he was free soloing and he was halfway up and he, well, he was in the middle of this journey up this fucking mountain.
He realized he didn't bring any powder, so he didn't have any chalk with him.
So his hands are sweating and he's just climbing with no powder.
So he met a guy halfway up, these guys that were using ropes and they were doing it the right way and he's doing it with no ropes and he goes, hey man, can I borrow your chalk?
And the guy gives him a chalk bag and he goes, I'll leave it for you at the top of the mountain.
So he takes the chalk bag, passes these guys, see ya, and just keeps going, and then leaves the bag for the guy at the top of the hill.
I'm like, what in the fuck, man?
How could you start something like that?
And apparently he said that once you start climbing, you are committed to climbing.
Well, and he talks about it a little bit, more so in the promos for the film, but how sketched out he was to actually be involved and sit there and film, and how much of a burden he felt to stay out of the periphery and not get engaged in the headspace and make Alex do something different because the cameras were there that would, of course, cost him his life.
I can't imagine the pressure of doing that, or just...
I wouldn't do it.
Like, if a buddy of mine was like, hey, will you come film me?
I would say no, because I would be so afraid of just watching them peel off.
But I could go to the edge of that cliff and zip up my suit, absolutely no problem, and send that off there, and I bet you he would want no piece of that.
I mean, I say that and I would totally agree with that, but I also understand why he's doing it.
I mean, the end state for all of us is predetermined, and I would suspect, having never talked to the guy, that he would rather meet his end like that than at 80 years old as a geriatric.
Had to come back to LA from Colorado and I didn't want to, but it was just one of those things.
And when I was starting it, it was really just a goof.
I'd always wanted to do something like that because my friend Anthony Cumia, he was from Opie and Anthony, he had a setup in his basement and he would do this thing, he would call it live from the compound from his house.
He had a green screen and he built a set in the basement.
I was like, wow, if he could do that.
I didn't have the money to do anything like that at the time.
But I was like, but if he could do that, maybe I could figure out how to do something like that.
So I just started off slow with webcams and shit like that and stumbled my way through it.
And I've gotten, I mean, just in the last few years, I've gotten so much better at listening to people and understanding and trying to see things from their perspective and trying to ask questions that get them to expand on their ideas better.
It's given me an insane education.
In a bunch of ways, not just in terms of gathering information, but also in terms of how people react to that information.
And, you know, human psychology and how human beings react to controversial subjects or, you know, how they forgive people for mistakes, too.
That's an interesting one for me.
There's some people that have such an unwillingness to forgive people and they have no empathy or compassion.
Those people are confusing to me.
Because I'm like, look, I know you fucked up.
I know somewhere...
Oh, for sure.
Maybe it's not digitally recorded like other people's fuck-ups, so you think you're safe, but you fucked up.
So you're being a hypocrite.
When someone gets busted, it's really interesting.
There's just so much opportunity.
And one of the things that I was talking about with Jack Dorsey from Twitter...
One of the things I was talking with him about was how everything, like literally from here forth, will exist forever.
And, you know, we're going to have to figure out a way to recognize that someone from, you know, 10 years ago when you were a 15-year-old kid and you made some crazy fucking tweet, you're not that same person now.
And you can't just break...
Like, didn't that happen with people, with athletes recently?
They were giving them shit for stuff that they wrote when they were teenagers?
And I think there should be a path to redemption for virtually everyone who's not murdering or raping people.
You're not stealing.
You know, people make mistakes.
We're all human.
We're all super flawed.
Yeah.
To deny that seems like a real...
It's going to be a real problem in terms of progress in the future.
And I think that's one of the things that we were talking about earlier in terms of people disagreeing with them on the left or the right.
We've got to figure out a way to communicate with each other more civilly.
And to approach people...
Instead of approaching someone's actions and who they are like they're the enemy.
Instead of that...
Look at them with the most compassionate or forgiving view possible and look at the things that you have in common rather than the things that are inexorably separating you.
I would like to think that most people actually do that.
I think that, unfortunately, extremism is winning in the country, and the vocal minority just has a much larger megaphone or microphone than the non-vocal majority.
I think most people do that, but I don't think the people that do that waste their time posting about it or just filling the narrative so it looks like there's only two positions.
I think people are getting more and more upset at it.
And I think as people recognize it's more and more preposterous, there's more and more pushback and resistance.
What's really interesting with progressivism is that People are getting in trouble now for things that seem like there's something, like Martina Navratilova just got a bunch of shit from people calling her transphobic because she was saying that she didn't think that biological males should be competing with biological females and that there are people who identify as transgender who keep their penis And compete as a man.
And her position was like that.
Or compete as a woman, rather.
Her position was like that.
Listen, that's not a woman.
That's a man.
And they have an advantage.
And she was citing all these instances.
And so she got...
All this shit from people.
So then she said, I'm going to step back and I'm going to research this.
So she stepped back and researched it and then came back and said, no, I've looked at all the data now.
And now they're attacking her and calling her transphobic.
Like, listen, this is not transphobia.
This is a real thing that you're going to have to address when you're talking about physical activities, when someone identifies.
Look, if you want to identify as a woman or identify as a male, I think we should all support people doing whatever they want to do as long as it's not hurting anybody.
But when you're talking about competition and you're talking about someone identifying, I don't care if you identify as a giraffe.
If you compete in an apple picking competition with a giraffe, you're going to fucking lose.
You're not a giraffe, stupid.
Right?
I mean, this is just, I mean, this is an extreme version of it, but that's nonsense.
That doesn't make any sense.
If you decide that you're a woman and you want to enter into a fucking weightlifting competition and you weigh 220 pounds and you're beating all the other women by, like, fucking insane numbers.
Like, there was a few world champion weightlifting winners that are women that are actually biologically male.
So they're winning weightlifting competitions.
what the fuck are you talking about?
Like, this is crazy.
This is not a matter of whether or not someone should identify with something, but you're talking about making it fair for actual biological women.
Like, there's a reason why women don't compete with men.
It's because physically they're not as strong.
So, and obviously there's some exceptions, there's some weak men, there's some strong women, and there's some sort of a spectrum, and you find yourself somewhere on it.
But if you're allowing biological males to compete with biological females and just say, oh, he identifies as a woman, let him in.
Yay, we're all being very progressive.
And then you look at the results and you go, wait, he just broke all the world records first time in.
People getting upset in time, time of these instances, enough of these things happen, enough discussion, where enough of the actual reality of the facts and the data are shoved in everyone's face enough that The new generation comes to some sort of a rational understanding about what is and is not fair,
as opposed to where people are now, where they just, no matter what, they're scared to not push this progressive agenda, and they're scared of the blowback of Martina Navatilova, who is an LBGT hero, right?
She was a lesbian woman who was a world champion tennis player, and now the left are attacking her.
So they're eating their own in a spectacular fashion, where you have these trans people who don't want to look at reality, and then people that support the trans people because they don't want to be considered in any way, shape, or form anything other than the most progressive of progressive.
And all the mass shootings, what do they have in common?
Guns.
They all have guns in common.
And they want to take away guns.
And then there's the people on the right, and they're like, I've never done anything wrong with my gun.
You're not taking my fucking gun.
And then there's this fucking unstoppable battle between these two sides.
And that there's a lot of factors.
Like, what happens to a human that leads them...
To get to this state of mind where they're able to go into a school and shoot it up.
Like, what is that?
What could possibly be going on?
How do we stop that from ever taking place?
These people have to be in some sort of insane pain.
There has to be something unbelievably wrong with their life, that they're capable of doing this.
How do we stop that?
How do we look at that as like, if this is our global community, if this is our national community, how do we stop this from happening in our national community?
I think there's an answer to stopping school shootings and not to oversimplify anything.
I would say there's a couple key issues.
One of them is location, the other one is motivation.
You can solve the location issue.
Like if we as a country were legitimately interested in stopping school shootings, how many have ever occurred at a school where the president's children go?
Zero.
Why?
Because it's defended, right?
They actually take a proactive approach to it.
They're going to have layers of security, defense and depth.
They're probably going to have somebody looking out the front door or a system looking out the front door, controlled entry points, entry and exit points.
You're going to have a metal detector.
You're going to have security staff on site.
So you can control the location aspect.
And I go to...
Every time I'm at my kids' school, or unfortunately, or fortunately, every building I've ever been in, I'm viewing it from a pseudo-tactical perspective at least.
So I'll go walk around my kids' school.
There's issues that I see from a perspective of somebody who would want to exploit that from an aggressor's perspective.
But they could all be solved.
But that doesn't solve the second aspect of that, the motivation.
Because I have absolutely no answer as to why a 17-year-old kid would think that a solution of any kind would be to kill their classmates.
I don't understand that at all.
And although people...
It's funny, like...
At every shooting, surprisingly enough, there's two things, a gun and a shooter.
And the vast majority of the time, I hear people talking about the gun.
I think we've got to balance that conversation and talk about the motivation.
The rise in psych medications has got to be correlated with the rise of school shootings.
I mean, the amount of people that are on psych medication, and I understand that correlation does not equal causation.
It's not necessarily that the medication is forcing them to do this.
I don't know what study has been done on what is the effect and is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication?
Is there some sort of a connection between taking certain types of psych medication with certain biological makeup that allows you to have this Diffusion of reality.
Some weird thing happens to them where they're capable of horrific things, horrific actions.
How much of that is monkeying with human neurochemistry?
I think you're 100% correct in that there doesn't seem to be any real, there's no real plans to stop this stuff, and I don't think anybody has a real answer.
And that's one of the reasons why it's so confusing to people, because you could dwell on it and roll it over in your head all day long, and there's nothing that stands out as obvious.
And the low-hanging fruit, the metaphor for the school shootings would be, there's a gun, go pour water on that.
But the more nuanced and complex problem is actually the human being behind it.
And I see people, they just, well, that's too difficult, so I'm going to throw my hands up and give up.
But also, too, I think it's important to point out that actually, thankfully, it's incredibly rare that it actually happens.
And it's funny because you look at the stats and you start digging into where the stats come from and Two groups of people, and I'm sure you see this across a variety of topics, will take the same study and derive two different sets of numbers.
There's school shootings, and then there's shootings that happen at schools.
And you can make one number look bigger and one number look smaller.
Like if you wanted to include the number of people who commit suicide in a school parking lot, which at a national level is considered a school shooting because it occurred at a school, you can inflate and conflate the number of times and the frequency with which it happens.
If you strip that information out, it gives you a much more accurate perspective of how often it's happening.
Same thing when you remove suicides from gun violence and the total number of deaths.
But again, that takes a refined and nuanced person that's willing to actually look at it as opposed to just repeating what their bumper sticker says.
Yeah, I saw that when Ted Nugent debated Piers Morgan on television.
He was talking to him about gun violence and the actual numbers, and he was saying, well, these are the real statistics, and this is why the numbers are so high.
How many of these, when you're including gun violence, how many of these people are, like criminals, are being shot in the act by police officers?
How many of them are people defending their home from a break-in?
How many of them are...
Suicides.
And once you get through that, you get to the end of it, then you get to gang violence.
How many of them are responsible?
How many deaths are attributed to gang violence?
How many deaths are attributed to, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different factors.
Then you get to these mass shootings.
So the mass shootings, it's a relatively small percentage, but that doesn't give anybody any comfort for anybody that's suffered.
What fundamental changes have to happen in the way human beings exist that we stop...
It would be a terrible world if we said, hey, we're just going to have to accept that people are never going to evolve socially, emotionally, whatever it is that's causing people to lash out the way they do.
What a horrible world it would be if we say, no, people are just going to be like this forever.
We're not just flawed, but flawed and ruthless and cruel and violent and awful, and that's just the way people are forever.
But that doesn't mean – my default position is we can do better.
Right.
There's ways that we could...
I think that the reasonable gun legislation that already exists, there's ways that we could improve communication interagency.
Like the Aurora shooter is a perfect example.
It took a pistol and killed five people the day he got fired and injured five police officers.
He shouldn't have had the gun.
He was a convicted felon.
His felony did not show up when they had the background check for his job, but it did show up for the background check, I believe, for his concealed weapons permit.
Oftentimes I see it where there's this disconnect between agencies not sharing information.
Very much like the military, civilian military infrastructure prior to 9-11.
Agency didn't want to talk to the FBI and the NSA because budget and relevancy and this is mine and that's yours and this is my rights.
We'll get the fuck away from me.
I don't want to share information.
I think we could do better on the regulations that are in place.
I'm not saying add any more, but maybe let's figure out a way where we could share information or at least make sure we're living up to the letter of the intent and the letter of the law.
On that side of the house.
And then on the other side of the house, you had a pinned tweet for a long time, and I'm going to totally murder this when it comes to exactly what it was, but something along is, we don't have a gun crisis, we have a mental health crisis.
And just like we can do better on the firearm side of the house, we can do better on the mental health side of the house.
And I just see people throwing their hands up and attacking the low-hanging fruit because I think the mental health side of the house is a more difficult issue than the firearm issue.
And I think everyone that I know, including myself, has had bad moments in their life and has struggled.
And the struggle, especially mental health struggle, struggle with depression or being unhappy or anger or any of the things that keep you off of a healthy baseline, those moments in life vary wildly in how people experience them, to what level people experience them, what impact they have on them, and whether or not they can recover from these things.
And for some people, they feel like there is no recovery and the only way out is to just go out with a bang, like literally.
And this is a lot of what you're seeing in these school shootings is suicide by cop.
This is one of the things that people want.
They want to go out in a blaze of glory.
And what the fuck is going on where we let people get to that point without stepping in and trying to help?
And do they have anybody that even notices?
Do they have anyone around them that knows that they're this fucked up and this far gone?
We all like to think that that could never happen to us, that we could never get to a point where we're so despondent and filled with anger and hate and fear and self-loathing that we want to do something horrific.
But every person who does something horrific is a human being.
And the difference between you and them might be genetic, it might be environmental, it might be life experience, but they are a human being, just like you and I, and something horrifically went wrong in their life to the point where they are in this position where they show up at that school shooting in Illinois just a couple days ago.
Overseas, when I lose close friends, the first absolute feeling you have is an anger that I don't have the vocabulary to describe and all you want to do is burn the world to the ground.
But it was fleeting and I didn't do it.
And I just don't know how we provide the barrier for people if they can.
And when it comes to mental health, I mean, somebody with more horsepower between the ears than me is going to need to solve that problem because I don't understand it.
Character and discipline and a lot of things that many people lack in your ability to mitigate these horrific feelings and this severe depression and anger.
Some people don't have those mental health tools.
They don't have those tools.
I mean, you're already a seal, right?
You're already a guy who's endured more than most human beings will ever in terms of physically and emotionally and how to get through that hump to become one of the elite operators in this country.
Just having that as a baseline.
You have the tool set to endure more than most.
Some people are just not capable of handling any real adversity.
Anything bad that comes down the pipe for them, they just fall apart.
And I think for many people, there's a real extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life.
There's an extreme feeling of a lack of meaning, that nothing they do matters, that they don't matter, that no one cares about them whether they're there or they're gone.
People either mock them or disregard them altogether, and they want people to know who they are, and that's one of the reasons why they do these things.
I can see that for sure, but Again, if I'm being objectively honest about myself, I did have those tools.
And probably the only thing that prevented me from acting out in that moment is that I didn't have access to the individuals that I wanted to act out against.
And I mean, like I said, I understand it.
I don't have a solution for it at all, but I understand it.
Yeah, well you would be able to understand it more than most in coming from that place of having lost friends and being in that intense and also being in this environment where people are shooting and killing people on a regular basis and you're directly a part of that and directly connected to it.
Well, I mean, at the same time, I don't want to paint a horrible picture.
There's a ton of misconceptions about what I used to do, right?
And it comes from books and movies and TV shows because in 60 minutes, all that happens is bullets whizzing by your head and shit blowing up.
The reality is you're not exposed to violence that often overseas.
You are over a long term, I guess, in the aggregate.
But it's not as bad as people...
It's not as bad as people, I think, often would maybe want to romanticize it as being bad, because then they can maybe excuse away behaviors that come from that.
If my wife was here, all you'd have to say is, do you enjoy watching a war movie with your husband?
She'd be like, oh my god!
She just said, get out of the room.
Get out of the room because I can't do it.
It drives me nuts, but it also sets bad expectations.
I mean, I had some of the best times of my life overseas as well, and it wasn't all about loss, and it certainly wasn't all about loss of life.
There'd be whirlwind periods of time where that happened, and there'd be other periods of time where we're just training people.
You know, or we're going out and actually meeting leaders in the city and having meals with them.
And then, yeah, that night you might get your stuff on and go banging for a night.
But at the same time, it's a mix of all of those things.
I'm grateful for the experiences that I have from my military service.
Probably the best day of my life was the day I got shot.
It changed my perspective of who I thought I was.
It forced me to lift my head up and think about the future more than just the job that I had because my ability to do my job was thrown into my face.
I thought I was, well, one, once I realized I wasn't going to die, I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do the job I've always wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So I started thinking about the future.
Again, I would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn't been shot.
And when it happened in that moment, it was the worst day of my life.
And I look back on it, and it probably wasn't the best day of my life, but perhaps one of the most meaningful changes in direction for me as a human being.
So there is positive that comes out of that negative.
It's not all bad.
I think I got more positive, more good than bad from 15 years at war.
I had never thought about anything in my life except an insatiable desire to be a SEAL. And then I became a SEAL. I'm like, this is awesome because it was pre-911.
So we just worked out, drank, and then worked out and drank.
And then 9-11 happened.
And my world went from conceptual to practical.
And it was way different than I thought it was going to be because I'd watched the same movies.
And then you get over there and you're like, oh, whoa, this is substantially different.
And it built and it was a lot of the things that I thought it wasn't going to be.
And even more than I thought it possibly could be in some of those directions.
But I don't know.
People, I think, often paint war or the experiences associated with war as solely negative.
I also, just like when it comes to the conversations and being on the extremes, I would love to pull that more back into the middle and actually have a conversation about it.
I think amazing changes can come from people in those environments.
Well, you know who I hear trains diligently and really hard, and takes it super seriously, and is like, one of the most humble guys you'll ever meet is Keanu Reeves.
Yeah, because when you smoke, there's just, like, a casual, relaxed way that you're holding the cigarette, and the way you're drawing it, but when someone's, like, never smoked before, and they're like...
It's like another thing that bugs me is you watch any tactical scene where they're like moving down a hallway and it's like, why is your gun pointed at your buddy's face?
Like, that's not cool.
Why are you aiming?
And then the way that they make entry into rooms, it's like, awesome.
I like to play Russian roulette with my life as well.
A lot of the things in that movie were based on real events.
However, if you're trying to get tickets to get people's seats...
They're butts in seats.
You've got to glamorize stuff.
So a lot of people, because in that movie, the source drives up in the vehicle and detonates himself.
That actually happened.
That killed a bunch of people and koused.
As long as you look at it as entertainment, that movie's okay.
If you look at it with a refined eye, like, are they doing this correctly?
No.
They're all gonna die.
I mean, it's, it just, we would need another four hours to literally go down the list of things, but it's just, things are compressed, things that would never happen happen for the sake of creating an entertainment.
An intoxicating or emotional scene on camera.
And it's tough to watch.
Because I'm sitting there, I'm like, get out of the door, get out of the door, get out of the door!
I'm getting anxiety watching these damn movies.
Because you don't hang out in front of open doors unless you want to get shot.
Given how I can, again, having not been there, and I can only imagine how horrific that incident must be for him to deal with on a daily level, I would bet he wasn't very involved.
I would almost rather them, if that was me, I think I would almost rather say, you know what?
Just make the movie that you want to make.
Because I don't want to sit here and explain exactly what happened and recreate these scenes and talk about how this person died over here.
I would say there are people who are maybe a little bit higher and people who are a little bit lower.
But you're not going to spend more than, at most, maybe 10% of your career in combat, even if your job is directly tied to combat.
Because you've got to train.
You've got to plan the missions.
I mean, our normal planning cycle was 24 to 72 hours.
Sitting in front of PowerPoint, considering whether or not I should hang myself or blow my brains out because we're arguing over the font that we're using to submit for mission approval.
With all your experience in the military and your knowledge of what the real world in these combat environments is like, how do you feel when you hear people talk about defunding the military or decreasing how do you feel when you hear people talk about defunding the military or decreasing the military or that we don't need it or that we shouldn't have the kind of budget
The people that don't understand the real threats that are out there and that if you do not have a well-trained, well-funded, experienced military that really understands these things, you've got real danger at your door.
I'm glad that they live in a place where they have enough space to develop those thoughts because they're not under pressure because the military is doing the job that they should be doing.
There are, like I said, so many misconceptions about what the military does What we do overseas, how many countries we are in overseas, how deep we are into some of these countries, how forecasted and how forward looking the military is, looking for emerging threats as opposed to just responding.
And all of that creates space.
So people can exercise their right to voice their First Amendment right of saying those things.
I'm grateful that they live in a place where they don't have that great understanding.
Because, like I said, they have the space to be confused.
They're not pushed under a thumb.
They're not being told, you have to say this or it's going to be your fucking head in the square.
It is frustrating for me at times, but I balance that with...
That's what this country is supposed to be about.
You're supposed to be able to voice your dissent, right?
And I believe that the system will correct, and it does correct for itself.
There are people that believe that, but I think the majority of people, again, silent majority versus extreme minority.
I think those people are in the extreme minority, but they're very vocal.
I think most people are incredibly appreciative of what the military does.
But having said that, if you've never served in the military and you've never been in a combat occupation and then you've never applied that occupation for real, there's going to be a gap.
And there's going to be a gap in understanding.
And that's okay.
So it's frustrating, yes, but I'm glad that it exists, and I'm glad that they are not, and this country is not in a position where they are getting drafted and forced into that position.
I'm glad that it was me that did that and had to bear any weight or burden that came with that to allow them to have whatever opinion they want.
Because initially, I have to fight back the initial anger.
But eventually, give me a little bit of time and the hopefully relatively sane head is going to prevail.
And I had, you know, again, that night I got hurt.
It changed the way that I thought about things.
If I had never gotten hurt and I had never thought about my own mortality and I had never thought about – I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not what I did in the military hasn't had any impact,.0001.
I don't know if I would have thought about that.
If all I had ever done was just doing the occupation that I did, I needed that lifting of my head to have that perspective.
I did.
I don't think all people do, but I needed that.
I was going to say, I think that night in some ways helps me have the perspective I have now with those people.
How long is the average career of someone who's a CEO? Well, if you want to retire, you've got to do 20 years and a wake-up.
What's a wake-up?
Wake up the next day.
You have to do 20 years to the day.
So wake up the day after your 20th.
But they need to change the term also.
Retirement pay in the military should be, in my opinion at least, replaced with money that you are going to get paid until you find your second career.
You're not going to retire on $3,000 a month.
But if you want to make it to retirement, you have to do 20 years.
The only reason I get a retirement is because I was medically retired.
So they basically, I don't know how it happens in the system, but they put me in that category as essentially I've been made at 20 years.
It's a lot of money if you're used to having your head down and you're used to making 90 a year and you're in your late 30s and you realize, oh my God, I could buy a house with that money.
You'll take it.
And every year that you do over 20, they will add, I believe, one half of a percentage point to your military retirement.
So if you do 20 years in the military, you will get 50% of your base pay.
Which doesn't include the dive pay, demo pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, all the difference in money that I made.
I get the exact same retirement, which is totally fine, and I signed up for this as a person who was in front of a radar scope for 20 years.
We get the exact same paycheck at the end.
If you do 21 years, you get 50 and a half.
22 years, 51%.
So it keeps incrementally going up.
So some guys will go up to 30. Most guys, by the time they get to 20, and I will say this, it depends on what's going on in the world.
When it was peak wartime, 2000...
In 2007, 2009, not a lot of guys were getting out.
Most of the guys were re-upping because they wanted to strap the boots back on and go back overseas.
And they're like, hey, I'll re-enlist while I'm overseas.
Tax-free money.
I get to go do what I want to do.
It's a win-win.
But most people, as the operational temple has slowed, anecdotally, what I've seen is they are looking more towards the future, going to get out around 20. If not, they'll get out around 25 after they take that re-enlistment bonus.
And if you're staying in to your 30s, you're in for the long haul.
I'm just kind of curious as to what the news agencies are reporting, because having lived on the other side of that and doing things that will eventually make the news days, weeks, or months later, the news is generally behind on that cycle.
And the military does do a good job and has continued to do a better job of kind of forecasting those things and spreading out as much as necessary.
And when you see, you know, the debate about that or actions, possible actions against North Korea and all this kind of stuff, like, how do you, do you view this?
I mean, obviously you view this as a guy who has served and has been overseas.
Well, the Syria one, there are guys from the community over there.
They've been actively engaged.
Iraq.
It's funny.
The news reported for a long time, we've withdrawn from Iraq.
All U.S. troops are out of Iraq.
No, they weren't.
We've always had a presence there since we invaded in 2003. And I can go...
Tit for tat on a lot of issues where the news gets it wrong, which is why I don't necessarily look at it for me to inform my opinion.
Syria, certainly any area where we allow a place for, and the only word I have for it is evil, to grow, it's going to happen.
The problem with the strategy that I see it is that actually – so we started in Afghanistan.
And again, this is my opinion, not the military opinion.
I can only speak for myself.
We went into Afghanistan.
We were incredibly effective.
So we cut the head off of that snake, but it spawned two more.
You go into Iraq.
You can argue whether or not we were effective, but then all of a sudden we started seeing foreign fighters coming in from all of these different countries.
And the tactics that we started seeing used in Iraq – like my first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003 – no, 2002 – Welcome to my show!
Where they had the ability to allow, again, for lack of a better term, that evil to grow, to learn, to come across the border, to engage American forces, then to flee into a sovereign nation we couldn't do anything about.
Then we started seeing that in Afghanistan.
But we got effective any time that these people would get together and have a large group.
We'd get effective at either capturing them or killing them.
So they realized they need to be disaggregate.
So now we've spread this.
I think the last stat that I saw was ISIS is in 64 countries.
And the problem that I see with the US military is that we're very, very good at going in and cutting the head off of the snake, but we're not good at creating and holding infrastructure.
And the timeline required to hold that infrastructure is well beyond the palette, I think, of most Americans.
And the best example I can point to is South Korea.
We still have bases with an American presence in South Korea.
That war ended decades ago.
We still have bases in Germany.
We have bases in Italy.
Now, we're not necessarily using them for the same purposes, but if we really want to control that area, we have to be prepared to stay there for that long.
And I don't think the U.S. military, one, has enough personnel to do that, and I don't think the American populace has the palate to allow that to happen.
Do you think that that's necessary, that in order to protect people from, whether it's ISIS or whatever, comes after ISIS? I mean, obviously ISIS is fairly recent, right?
I think we should use the military as a measure of last resort.
I think that war should be a measure of absolutely last resort and I would love to see us evolve to a point where we use it less and less and less.
I describe it as you're standing at a dam and you can see a little spout coming out.
Do you put your finger in the spout Knowing that it's not going to fix the problem, but it's going to buy you time to hopefully have somebody come and fix the dam, right?
That's the option I would go for, versus just leaving it as it is and allowing it to continue to weaken the dam, or another sprout would come out.
My theory, that the military is really well served to provide that space, to put that finger in that sprout.
So yes, I think if we find an area where these ideologies are thriving, We have to do what is necessary to remove that ideology and hopefully destroy it.
Not resettle it somewhere else, but actually destroy it.
So yes, the short answer is, absolutely, if we find areas where we can squash this down, we have to go.
But I just hope that there's people smarter than me that have a much longer-term strategy.
Because all we're doing, in my opinion, is the finger in the dam.
Like when you see all the global conflicts, I mean, is there a time that we could, I mean, it sounds insane to say that there's never going to be a time where there's no war.
I don't know if there's ever been a time, at least globally, not that the U.S. was involved, but I don't know if there's ever been a time where there hasn't been war.
I don't think there can be because, and I think we talked about this the first day I met you, there's X people and there's Y people.
They're not going to get along.
It doesn't matter what your belief is, you have an axis somewhere that has another belief.
And if you go to the extreme end of that belief, that individual may be willing to take action against you, violent action against you, for your belief.
And I don't think there's a way around that, because humans are just too diverse.
But is it possible that one day we'll move past this?
I mean, is there any plans at all to try to facilitate some sort of a peaceful world civilization where, you know, all nations kind of get along in some sort of a mutually agreeable way?
I mean, does anybody have some sort of 100-year plan?
Isn't that hilarious that that's a funny thing to say?
Since the inception of human beings, it seems like, at least at some level, and thankfully it's microscopic in comparison to the overall total, but it's happening.
I think it's happened since man has been walking on Earth.
That we feel today that we can protect ourselves is to have the more dominant, more powerful military and to make sure that we're the ones who get to dictate whether or not evil flourishes.
Yeah, I mean that's – I would want maybe a – I want the dominant ability of our military to continue to grow, but I'd like to see – and I think it's already moving in this direction – smaller, more surgical uses of it.
I just – the military, in my opinion, is not good at building infrastructure and holding terrain for a long period of time.
It's just not what we're designed to do.
It's not the design of the military, for that matter.
I will get answers from I think we're making a difference to we're wasting our time.
And I got that the initial invasion of Iraq, the initial invasion of Afghanistan.
One of the things that I enjoyed about the community I came from is that critical thinking is rewarded.
There's no attempt and people think about this.
You watch Full Metal Jacket.
Choke yourself with my hand and you get told what to do and how to do it and how much time you have to do it.
People think that critical thinking has no place in the military.
But where I came from, that's what we're looking for is people who are able to critically think.
So there would be – we would have political arguments, religious arguments, philosophical arguments in the team room and then come together and go do exactly what it is that our nation expected us to do.
So you're going to get both – there are people who are conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat and everything in between.
So I wish I could give you like a very precise answer, but I have heard every spectrum of answer from this is awesome to this is stupid.
I've heard different opinions on Assad, whether Assad is evil, whether he's gassed his citizens, or whether or not he's a victim of propaganda or some mass smear campaign.
It's frustrating, because when you don't know whether or not this is some propaganda, or this is a real threat, or whether it's something like The Saddam Hussein situation where, yes, he was an evil dictator, but also removing him might create a power vacuum like Libya.
I don't know the long-term solution to those problems.
Like I said, I spend enough of my waking hours truly questioning whether or not anything that I was involved in made my family or your family or Jamie's family safer.
Did my actions erode what the rest of the world thinks about the United States of America?
And, I mean, I flow back and forth.
I think it had an impact in the moment.
I think it had an impact stopping the water coming out of the dam.
I think it was essential that it needed to be done.
But I don't know if any of that has an impact beyond that time period that it occurred.
But it's also, like, in terms of motivation, he's a mindset alterer.
Like, you hear the way he discusses things and thinks about things, and if you can adopt those ideas and put them into your own head, you really can shift who you are and how you move through this world.
If you can adopt a fraction of his ideas, or it'll change your philosophy.
There are some people that I see go very, like, they seem to be searching and they just want to dive in.
It's like, you know, maintain some of yourself.
and adopt as much of that as you possibly can because you can go too far in anything but yeah the stuff that he's doing the number of people the number of times his name comes up and in a positive manner it's unbelievable and i mean i listen to the jerry where you're like you know what jocko i'm gonna tell you something that i think i've said too much you should start a podcast well you know goggins is another one you know
You know, Goggins, just being a guest on this podcast, I know he hasn't started his own podcast, but one thing he did do is, if you listen to Goggins' audio book, in his audio book he has the book itself, which is read by another guy, and then him and that guy discuss various chapters in the book and discuss the real events that led to this, these different things and how he felt about them.
So it's a podcast wrapped up in a book and it's excellent.