Evan Hafer and Mat Best—veterans turned coffee entrepreneurs—expose the absurdity of military spending, like a $30K espresso machine or impractical armored vehicles, while critiquing the U.S. government’s neglect of veterans’ health, including burn pit exposure and denied care for injuries like Mary Dagg’s. Hafer’s shift to a carnivore diet mirrors Rogan’s month-long meat-heavy experiment, both rejecting rigid dietary dogma. They blame careerist leadership and defense contractor profits for endless wars like Afghanistan, urging politicians to prioritize real issues over performative distractions while questioning how wealth aligns with their stated priorities. [Automatically generated summary]
And I'm out here and I was roasting coffee on my stove and going way down the rabbit hole with Jack.
And he's taking notes, you know, for his book.
And he's a former SEAL, you know, so we're talking shit.
And he's like, you must have just been picked on in the teams, right?
And I was like, yeah, maybe.
Yeah, I guess.
That's why, you know, I was like, if you just have to run fast, because if you're going to do something weird like this, you got to be able to run really fast, do a lot of fucking pull-ups and push-ups, and shoot really well.
I think that was one of the things where I was like, man, I got to be really good at all these things because it's got to offset...
We both had similar professions post-military as contractors, and I was in this fob, and I'm sitting there, I'm like, why the fuck is there this $50,000 espresso machine for a very small base in the middle of nowhere?
Well, come to find three years later, I'm chatting with Evan, I'm like, yeah, dude, I don't know, the agency bought some stupid-ass espresso.
He's like, yep, that That was me.
So he convinced the supplier or whoever to buy this super intricate freaking espresso machine in the middle of nowhere.
So, and I've got a myriad of them, but we had a field of up-armored vehicles that were really fucking expensive, like $500,000 a pop, give or take.
We couldn't take them anywhere because...
They were so obvious that it was a up armored vehicle that you just drive around and people would want to take pot shots at you for the fun of it.
So you have these beautiful half a million to a million dollar cars that you can't use.
So you got to go when we're working in the low viz capacity.
It means, like, you're just trying to blend in, just not get shot, man.
Like, don't pick a fight.
Like, let's just blend in, do our job, get the fuck out of here.
But if you have a really expensive looking, like, G5 or something that's just really a G5 in the middle of fucking Baghdad in a war zone, people are going to want to take- What's the pressure washed and all clean?
So to my point, you'll have fields of shit that you can't use because some dumbass is pulling the trigger on your government tax dollars going, this looks good to me.
And obviously, you know, your job is not to stick around and kind of absorb the rounds, but a level 7 is what it's called.
And so when you're in a level seven armored vehicle, it's getting shot at by either seven, six, two by 39, or, you know, increase the, the caliber of, of rifle or belt fed.
It will absorb a certain amount of rounds.
Sometimes it'll be loud and sometimes it'll be really muted and quiet depending on just where it strikes, where it strikes, how it strikes.
So if it's striking an angle, if it's perpendicular to the round, where is it hitting, uh, You know, so how close are you to the shooter?
How perpendicular you are to the round?
How big is the round?
So it'll kind of...
It'll sound different depending on where you're at.
And you can kind of gauge, like, where's that coming from?
And I think that for every one of those, whether it's wine or cigars or coffee or whatever it is, right?
Which is a total sidebar story of it as well, which is I went and had dinner with Crowder one night and we went to this cigar bar.
And he's a hardcore cigar aficionado.
Is he really?
Yeah.
And so he was taking me down, you know, Cigar Street with whatever he's doing.
And I was taking him down Coffee Street and...
And so the geekiest conversation in America was taking place between Stephen and me as we're trying to eat steak in this bar in Dallas not too far from his office.
But I think for every one of those, you actually find a niche subculture of people that also share your...
You're saying passion for just obscure details and things.
So when you're talking about wine or coffee, you do have some type of common kinship, I guess, because I get it.
I totally get why people are into this one little thing and they want to go as deep and as interesting as they can.
I totally get it because I'm like that with coffee.
I never get bored of it if I go to Panama or Guatemala or Costa Rica.
Coffee is so fascinating from every aspect, whether we're looking at it from the international historical consequences of this entire commodity, whether it's commodities trading, whether it's growing and processing the future of coffee,
where is it headed, how are we optimizing the growing process so we don't run out of it, whether you're looking at it from a roasting or a drinking, all of that You can go as deep and as detailed as you want and it doesn't get fucking boring.
Yeah, plus, you kind of don't want America to fuck it up.
Right, exactly.
So it's like, keep it out there.
So, like, none of the American politicians can fuck that thing up to the point where we can't go out there and at least enjoy it in a peaceful, in a way that's beneficial for everybody.
Well, I think it's pretty much America's vacation spot, where we're like, we'll take that island, so we have bachelorette parties, we can just roll out there and sit on Kauai for a couple days and drink margaritas.
The thing that I was thinking about when I was flying out there, which is really kind of a morbid thought in some ways, where I was thinking about all the fat that has flown across the ocean so they can go eat more fat on the island of Hawaii, in the sense of just people and the obesity of just generally flying seven hours, landing on an island, and then essentially sitting and eating in a buffet, and then flying back.
And I was thinking about the fuel That's being utilized to cart just general fat back and forth.
That's what I was thinking about when I was flying to Hawaii in January.
And I think a lot of people don't know in Texas with the exotics here, what happened over the last, you know, whatever, hundred years is the rains and storms wash out the high fences.
And then you get the Axis that escape.
And now they're like rampant where I live in hill country just an hour away.
Yeah, which is so weird because elk used to be native.
They used to be native here, but they were extirpated, and then now that they're back again, because they're not standard for Texas, they're now considered exotics, so there's no hunting season for elk out here.
But the hunting out here is crazy, because some of the high-fence ranches, and we're talking tens of thousands of acres, and if you ask them, can you shoot a giraffe?
They're like, everything's got a price tag, old boy.
Yeah, because a lot of those animals, if they get out, like a Zedonk crossover, then you have like, you know, Red Stag and Elk can actually mate together and make a hybrid crossbreed.
That's my favorite part about living in Texas is I live a bunch next to the hillbillies and I mean that in a complimentary sense but like my neighbor I don't know two months ago was like hey man I just killed a bison on this ranch I got like extra meat he gave me like 150 pounds of organic bison so I mean I love it because everybody's killing shit around here and you eat so good Well, at my studio in LA, I had three commercial freezers.
When we were, I would row down the middle fork of the salmon in Idaho.
So we'd do like five, six day trips.
And I would pack shitty coolers with dry ice and ice and they would last five days.
So even with a Yeti cooler, a little bit of shade, you can stretch that out for, I don't know, man, you could get a week at least out of that stuff.
But the funny thing is, with just meat in general, as far as...
One of the questions that I was trying to ask you earlier was, when you're on that carnivore diet and you were eating nothing but meat, were you eating wild meat or were you also eating some beef and some other things in there?
That's the only reason I'm motivated in life to be pretty good at business is so I can buy pretty good whiskey and be a fat fuck any time I go to a restaurant and buy the lobster roll that's $37.
That intermittent fasting thing is a weird sort of torture cult.
They're torturing themselves.
There's benefits to it for sure.
There's real benefits to not eating all the time because you give your body a break and you let your body digest food.
And there's benefits to going into ketosis and your body goes into ketosis when it doesn't have glycogen anymore and starts eating fat and burning off the fat.
There's a lot.
There's a host of benefits.
I'm not the guy to tell you about them.
There's also a thing where guys do where they want to see how long they can go.
And so there's a thing where you're hungry, but you're like, nope, not until 6. I don't eat until 6. Yeah, that's a super aggressive internet minute fasting is weird to me when they eat for like two hours a day.
I get it if it's like 12, but like 18, 20 hours, that's too much for me.
But if you're out there in the mountains and you're at 8,000 feet and then you have 100 pounds of elk on your back and you have to walk over this ridge and it's going to take you two miles to get to the truck...
I mean, I've always made that joke when people are like having a donut and they're just like, I have no energy and they're chugging coffee.
I'm like, eat some fucking good carbs and some meat and you're going to feel great.
It's just, yeah, the diet in America is very interesting to me, especially when we travel and we're with some of the other guys that don't have the same dietary habits as us.
And I'm like, you ate gas station burritos and a hot dog and that's what you had today.
And I think that's where the intermittent fasting, at least for a lot of guys, it can really help because it's ultimately saying...
I'm not going to take part in just the ease of all the food that's available all the time, and I'm going to take part in two or three hours a day or whatever it is.
Well, first of all, there's real evidence that sugar and these companies that made sugar paid scientists to fuck with data to put heart disease and all these problems that people are having with clogged arteries.
To push that off on saturated fat and to take that away from sugar.
And sugar is terrible for you.
Sugar in that form is so unnatural.
Fat in the form of meat is very natural.
It's what human beings have been eating since the beginning of time.
Well, unsaturated fats that come from vegetable oils, I think it's called linoleic acid, is fucking terrible for you.
Not only is it terrible for you, there's real evidence that it makes you hungry.
That you're eating it and there's no nutrients in it, so your body gets hungrier.
Throughout human history, there's never been a time until recently where people got oils directly from plants in large quantities like that you know if you got oil from plants it was like oil from avocados like natural or you got your oil from you know beef fat or chicken fat or things that's natural for human beings right these saturated fats that are natural your body knows what to do with them your body doesn't know what the fuck to do with canola oil What is it?
But it doesn't seem to me like that's a stretch in logic, right?
So for just the American diet in general, for us to look at the traditional food pyramid and say, well, that's bullshit.
Ultimately, you know, if grains and processed foods sit at the cornerstone of your entire diet...
You're going to have some issues.
You can kind of look around.
You don't even have to be a rocket surgeon to figure that out, right?
It's like, holy shit, obesity is an epidemic in the United States.
We're eating a ton of processed food, and all the guys that I know that are healthy are eating whole foods for the most part.
And it's not because you have more discipline or because you have more access or wealth.
I know a ton of guys that are not very wealthy that eat whole foods, and they're feeding in certain windows, and they're still in the military, still doing fucking incredibly difficult missions, and they're really healthy.
So when I look around, I say, well...
Okay, if you stick to whole foods and you limit your amount of caloric intake, we're not dealing in a high intellect thought process here.
It should be pretty easy.
But I think what people want is they want their easy button, right?
You're not stretching and connecting a lot of complex thought there in the sense of...
When people are trying to sell me on the idea, like, no, it's great.
Don't worry about it.
It's like, no, man, like, those chickens are eating arsenic and they're packed in, you know, right on top of each other, shitting on each other everywhere.
Like, I'd rather have a free-range egg.
I'd rather have that.
I'd rather have free-range chicken.
It's no offense to however you want to eat, but it's just a preference of eating.
It's pretty easy.
I think that the argument comes from maybe corporate impact in marketing where Americans will consume it without thinking and go, well, it's good because Jack in the Box told me that it's organic.
Diacin often insists that people should eat brown rice.
Majority of your protein.
Brown rice has also been reported high levels of inorganic arsenic, which is what I said, which is a toxin known to potentially cause liver, lung, kidney, and bladder cancer.
Some arsenic is just naturally occurring mineral.
But the inorganic kind comes from chemicals and pesticides.
A researcher named Alan Aragon said, He's a very highly respected fellow.
I've read his shit online.
Run two different research projects comparing the effects of white rice and brown rice on the body.
See the findings below.
White rice actually has an equal or better nutritional yield and also has a better nitrogen-retentive effect than brown rice.
This is also because fiber and fight.
What's that word?
Phytate.
Phytate.
Fiber and phytate content of brown rice act as an anti-nutrient, reducing the bioavailability of the micronutrients it contains.
Since no one is reading the fucking link, I'll just lay things out here for you.
Yeah.
So the problem with things that are posted online is that there's a lot of people that want to get you to eat a certain way.
And they'd like you to eat whole foods.
They'd like you to eat plant-based foods.
They'd like you to eat...
Carnivore, they'd like you to eat keto, and they'll try to spell things out with user bias or with confirmation bias.
If you've talked to people that are carnivore-based people, they'll just tell you, this is the only way you should eat, and this is why.
You talk to people that are vegans, this is the only way you should eat, and this is why.
More now than ever before, people think that plant-based is the way to go.
So oftentimes when you Google brown rice or white rice or vegetables or whatever, you'll only find the positive consequences.
It's very rare to find the negative consequences of eating leafy green vegetables, but they exist.
The negative consequences, first of all, oxalates.
My Cyrus's old boyfriend Her ex-husband.
He had to get fucking surgery because he was getting these kidney stones because he was eating so much leafy green vegetables.
But then there's other people that'll tell you that greens are super healthy for you and there's all these benefits to eating greens and that a certain level of...
I think a certain amount of eating greens, there's a hermetic effect where your body is like, certain plants have chemicals that they release to try to discourage predation.
So they'll release these chemicals and these chemicals, they'll discourage animals from eating them.
In fact, when it goes back to giraffes, there's certain giraffes that have actually starved because, and this is really crazy.
When the giraffes upwind were eating certain plants, the leaves downwind caught the fact that they were being eaten and they changed their taste profile.
So they release a certain chemical that makes the giraffes discouraged from eating them.
I've been hearing more and more of this, and it's interesting because when I look at what's going on with your gut, right?
I was just having this conversation earlier with a retired Special Forces guy, a good friend of mine, and we were talking about our life in the military and what's happening in our gut biome, right?
What's happening with the balance of your ecosystem down here.
And we've lived this life of going overseas and overseas repetitively on a yearly, sometimes more annual cycle in these developing world countries and combat zones.
We're nuking our gut every time we go over there and anti-malarials, anti-inflammatories, all of the different things.
We're just dropping bombs in our gut.
And then we're eating high-preservative foods, so meals ready to eat.
And when we're talking about plant-based or carnivore or paleo or any of these other things, how much is it really dependent on the individual and whether or not they were breastfed as kids?
And they'll tell you based on their own anecdotal evidence.
The thing you need to know, though, about vegans is there's a number, I think it's more, there's a giant number of them that eat meat when they're drunk.
I'm not even going to call those guys out, but it was interesting.
My wife posted holding up like six fillets like a year or so ago.
And man, a vegan, she got posted on some vegan page.
And they just went after her like, I hope you effing die, you this, you that.
And I was like, damn, she's just having a filet, man.
But I think that anything on the diet side and fitness, it's super individualized for success because not everything that works for you would work for me.
And I think a lot of people are too lazy to figure out and do the actual effort to see what best diet for them, their work routine.
So if you're going to analyze your diet and you're going to really do it right, you've got to be disciplined.
So if you're going to do it, you should really do blood work.
You should really exercise and write down your routines and write down how you feel after you exercised and then try to figure out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong.
And that's one of the reasons why people like the carnivore diet is because it's one of the best elimination diets.
You're basically taking everything out except meat.
And then you kind of find out, hey, you know, my body doesn't react well to this.
Or my, you know, my body has a real problem with that.
Or some people it's caffeine, and some people it's just fucking whatever it is.
It's like, you gotta find out what's fucking with you.
And most people don't.
Most people just, you know, they go to a doctor, the doctor prescribes medication, they keep eating the same old shit, but now they have chemicals in here that are supposed to offset whatever negative stuff that they have in their diet.
I'm like, What's an interesting segue on that, too, because that's like, in part, some of the nonprofit stuff I do on this side is solely based on that, the individualized treatment for veterans, specifically in law enforcement, because you see a lot with the military, DOD, the VA, like you're saying, you show up, don't feel good, and it's a blanket treatment, right?
Here's some antidepressants, here's all that, but it's a Band-Aid for a bullet hole, and if you're not actually...
If you're figuring out what the cause is and you're treating symptoms, then the third and fourth order effects of those treatments are going to make that individual worse.
Some of the issues they have, like I think I have PTSD, if that's a guy saying they're PTSD, they go through and they find out they have TBI and 40% memory function, short term memory function.
And so now you go to cognitive therapy and you get the guys or gals working through it that way.
But the only way to figure that out is through brain scans and blood work and actually focusing on the individual rather than being lazy and say, Here's some antidepressants when the whole time the issue was something completely different.
So the veterans hospitals don't have enough money to send you through all these different scans and all these different doctors and specialists and try to fine tune what's wrong with you.
Well, I think that that's, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is our politicians, we'll say, our leadership.
They love to go to war.
They love it.
Like, you know, hey, how many times can we send more guys to war?
How many countries, you know, and I'm a participant in that endeavor, by the way, right?
I've invaded Iraq.
I've spent a lot of my adult life in war, specifically in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the thing that I've noticed in my adult life is that politicians love it.
They love to send 18 to 26-year-old men and women.
They love to send them to war.
What they hate is paying the fucking bill.
That's what they hate.
They hate paying for the after effects.
They hate standing by their word in the sense of...
Hey, we're going to take care of you, all your health problems, your education.
We're going to start really fixing the VA system so there's long-term care.
What most veterans that I know, what they have to do is they have to continue to lobby the government over and over and over for them to prove that what's happened to their body is connected to their service.
The issue that I continue to see is that this is a lack of, one, it's a lack of experience for our politicians.
They don't quite understand what war is and the long-term effects on individual soldiers.
After decades of service, and I think hundreds of my friends, every one of us has some type of long-term effect from their service.
Every one of us.
In the sense of, do you have sleep issues?
Do you have gut issues?
Do you have inflammation?
Are you missing a limb?
And really, it's disgusting the amount of emphasis there is on going.
And then the lack of emphasis on care.
It really saddens me as a society when we have to rely on non-profits.
Right.
to pay for the care of veterans because the military or the DOD and the tax, the taxpayer essentially, and I think if they understood this, if they knew they weren't paying for the long-term care of our service members to the degree that they needed, they would absolutely have no issues stepping up and saying, they would absolutely have no issues stepping up and saying, Hey, we have to do something about this.
And it's, it's really when we look at the entire system and how it's, it's put together, there's no way that a person, and this is a good story from my friend, Clint.
He's missing both his legs recently from last year during COVID.
What was happening is that his leg was changing as far as the shape of it, because he was growing an additional, additional layer of bone where his leg was blown off.
And he needed a new leg, but he couldn't get in to get a new leg.
So he was confined to his wheelchair for almost six months during this process and he couldn't get an appointment.
There's no reason why that should happen.
See, that's unacceptable.
There's literally zero reason.
We can't have the largest transfer of wealth from a taxpayer into the military-industrial complex in modern history without zero ethical argument as far as our entire political system, and then not continue to care for our veterans.
There's just no way that we can do that as a society, because I think ultimately that defines us and who we are collectively, and it's not a good grade.
Well, there's a long history of the United States doing that.
Remember when people were coming back from the first Gulf War and they were having all these issues with radiation because they used that depleted uranium rounds.
And they kind of denied, first of all, that they used them.
They denied that this effect was related to that.
And then birth defects and all sorts of weird radiation sickness issues that people were having.
They were calling it Gulf War Syndrome.
But they did their very best to not take care of these people.
Well, you look from Agent Orange in Vietnam and the long-term effects of that and all the studies and research that's coming out right now with the burn pits and the carcinogens and how much cancer, but then they're like, ah, you can't really draw the conclusion that it came from burning shit for six months, you know?
And to Evan's point as well, it's tragic, to be honest, that there's tens of thousands of nonprofits that are having to do the legwork.
Without government grants or funding, the money is coming from people that are participating in philanthropy saying, I want to do something good for these guys and gals that have real issues.
To Clint, he's missing his legs, and you're going to make him be in a wheelchair for months?
For me, that's just absolutely unacceptable, and there has to be change.
One of her good friends, Mary, she's an EOD tech, had both of her arms blown off when she tried to catch some ordinance that they were going to dispose of.
Essentially, she has a full-time caregiver, and she went to go see her family for, I believe it was a month.
During that time, she didn't have the caregiver because she was with her husband and family, and they were taking care of her.
Well, the VA determined after that stint that she doesn't need a full-time caregiver because she obviously was fine that month she was away.
And this is a young lady, amazing person, just nubs.
She calls herself Wonder Nubs.
Bless her heart.
She's fucking hilarious.
But she can't do things that come so easily to us, like grab things, use the toilet.
And she has a really funny Twitter about wiping her ass, I believe she said.
The fact that that's happening and someone in the VA wasn't like, oh, that's fucking stupid.
It's numbers on a piece of paper, and I don't think people want to be reminded.
One, these are bad decisions.
As we look back in history, and we look at Iraq in particular, and we look at the tens of thousands of service members that served in Iraq, to include myself, I don't know if they want to be reminded of that section of our history on a regular basis either.
And so when we have amputees and we have health issues with the burn pits, that really I think is our cause that we need to talk about as our Agent Orange is, you know, I think Jon Stewart just recently brought it up and we're active in the Hunter 7 Foundation,
which does a lot of research in this, but there's zero reason why the government is not funding to the tune of millions of dollars of research to figure out what's happening to the service members with their directly related lung and health issues from burn pits.
There's zero reason because the only reason is because if they acknowledge that it's a problem, they're going to have to pay for it.
And not only that, you're going to have young privates out there with sticks rolling it over in the smoke with probably some knitted fake mask that they're wearing that they got.
And they're the ones in there actually rotating the trash to burn it through completely.
So they're completely subjected to that environment from a very long time.
Really, really smart, you know, officers and contractors.
The same guys that decided that, you know, the invasion was going to be a really good idea of Iraq.
They're the same people making those types of decisions in the way that, you know, obviously, when we look at this now and we look back on it and we go, that's dumb as fuck.
There was somebody in a series of people at that point in time in 2003 to 2009 in Iraq that were saying, this is a good idea.
And that type of mentality, I think, is the same type of mentality today that says, this is a good idea for us not to fund the research to figure out what the fuck is going on.
So we can do something about it.
And when we talk about it, right, our voices are only so big.
But I think if people knew what was happening with our generation of veterans, because, you know, I'm 43, you're 33, 34. 34. You've got all these guys that are coming up with strange cancers.
One of Jocko's friends and our friends, he just died of cancer.
He's a Medal of Honor recipient.
Had a strange heart organ cancer or some kind of cancer in his back, and he just died six months down the road.
And what's happening, and when we talk about the other foundations and people that are diving into some of this research, it's incredibly underfunded.
They're starting to have this direct connection between the burn pits themselves and the chemicals that ultimately we're exposed to or were exposed to.
And a lot of the cancers that guys are coming, when I say that, they're developing, I guess.
I feel like a counter argument to that would be like, well, whatever idiots you signed up for it.
That's not an argument.
Find those people.
Yeah, exactly.
If you're willing to spend a hundred thousand to a million dollars on a guy or a gal to train them up to do a specific job because you look at how much it costs to put them through training and school after school after school and then they get out and we're just like, have fun.
Especially guys and gals like we're talking tier one units.
I have friends that have done 16, 17, 18 deployments.
And it's an injustice because they're willing to sacrifice their life, limb and body and eyesight for, you know, I guess the politicians to send them to war.
But then it's a moral obligation as our society that we have to fight.
Which is interesting because I think a lot of people that have deployed, if you said, hey, we got to get this trash burnt, we got to do it, we signed up for it, we got it.
But then you got to give them the research and the medical clinicians that understand this going forward and after the fact to actually...
One of the things they're finding out when they're doing these satellite overviews is that methane, like they're trying to find the largest sources of methane and what's contributing to greenhouse gases...
It's fucking landfills.
Landfills where you take all your food, they pour it into the ground, they just cover it up with dirt, and it's just leaking methane into the atmosphere.
It's fucking terrible.
Like, I don't know what the solution is, but the solution's definitely not burn it right where the soldiers are sleeping.
No, and I think that Now that as we continue to evolve, hopefully as a society, and we look at the way that we deploy service members overseas, we've at least identified this as a problem.
But the big thing that I see is we have to continue to look at the problem, fund the research, and look at the direct connection between these types of activities, meaning burn pits.
We're looking at burn pit and I'm saying, That's burn pit, but it's also...
I know Tim, obviously, he's been on the podcast.
He's an SF guy.
I'm an SF guy.
But when we look at the long-term effects of, we'll call it the special operations community, because I'm obviously from that subculture, but sleep deprivation, anti-inflammatories, anti-malarials, burn pits, multiple rotations, PTSD, this is a holistic health issue for most of these guys returning.
If they don't have direct or visible combat wounds, they have some type of residual, they've been affected by the war in a long-term residual way.
And I think what happens is the VA continues to evolve at least past these wars.
We have to look at it as a collective and say, how do we turn everybody's attention within the VA system to directly take care of these guys in a very positive and impactful way?
So we don't have people like Mary Dagg that get denied a full-time service caregiver.
But yeah, at least give the resources and the funding necessary because I'm sure VA as an organization wants to do good and wants to do great things.
I think that when people just say, the VA sucks, it's the wrong way to look at this.
It's how do we critically think and solve the problem and put in process and a plan to go, here's the resources you need so we can fix the issues that are right in front of our face.
Yeah, I couldn't imagine being a VA bean counter or being someone who works for a VA bean counter who gets the call that you have to cut the budget by X amount.
So figure out where you're going to slash these benefits.
And then you have to look at these people that you're talking to either on the phone or through email.
You can't even look at them as a human.
You've got to look at them as a number on a ledger.
And then you have, you know, an incredible giving nation that backfills that need through, you know, nonprofit organizations.
Yeah, I guess my only intent in that conversation is I think the government needs to do a much better job of leading the conversation than being towed around by the entire conversation.
They need to get out in front of it.
They have to take responsibility for it.
And I think that's the big one, which is taking responsibility for, you know, war just in general and then taking responsibility for the after effects of the individual soldiers, sailors, Marines, post-war.
That just seems to me the thing to do.
And I think most people, if they realize these things were happening, I think the last time I tried to schedule a VA appointment, it was going to take me 200 plus days to get in to see a physician, you know, about a shoulder injury.
But there are a lot of people that have been directly affected by this that need care.
And now we have the ability, I think, based on the current administration, to go see a primary care provider outside of the VA, which I think was a huge step.
But there's still a lot to do.
For us, having this company and what we're doing with it, it's a big part of the mission of how we run the company, what we're doing with the company.
The guy in front of me in line with a black rifle coffee t-shirt on.
I'm like, all right, man.
There's something to what you guys are doing that resonates with people that it's not just a coffee brand, but it's a coffee brand that supports first responders, military, veterans.
And it means a lot to people, I think, because of that.
Yeah, I think something I'm really proud of with the company, too, is giving a more, like, visceral understanding and perspective of the veteran experience, because before the company and kind of the commercials and stuff we did, I think there was a very singular perspective of what a veteran was.
It was kind of the chest-beating, you know, chiseled Navy SEAL. Tattooed, bearded.
Yeah, and while that exists, I think that it's good to shed light on...
But like bringing light to the community that there's so many creative people and veterans are humans.
We're just Americans.
And a lot of these guys and gals have other professions and they're talented.
They're artists.
And I think humanizing that a little bit allows people not to look at veterans like the two ways that I've seen a lot throughout the years are you're their Captain America.
Or you're a pill-popping, depressed veteran that goes to bed every night beating your wife.
And you're like, 90% of us are in the middle of just people that want to do, hopefully normal people, trying to do some extraordinary things in the name of a free society.
I think it's just a cool thing that people like supporting companies like yours that do have a great message and that do do good things.
It's a nice aspect that you guys can put that message out there and people understand what you're about and that this is a company that was really started by two guys who are veterans.
I mean, it's a big company now, but Really just came down to you guys and your love of coffee and just deciding to do this and then start doing good with the money.
And people love that, man.
They really do.
It resonates with people a lot.
I mean, I've had Black Rifle t-shirts on before and people talk to me about it.
Well, I mean, we're thankful that it means a lot to them because we wouldn't be in the position we are to kind of focus on the things that we think are matter and support the organizations that we do.
And I mean, I think that's both of us's end user and end user experience is exactly what we want to have a great quality product and something that motivates people to wake up in the morning and kick ass.
And if they didn't purchase it, we wouldn't be here doing what we're trying to do.
I'm really fortunate just as an adult in America right now in so many different ways.
But I get to do this coffee when I say I'm in coffee every day and I get to explore any piece of the entire aspect of coffee anytime I want.
And get as detailed into it as much as I want.
But the thing that I've found that is just as interesting, if not more interesting than coffee, is as the company gets bigger, you know, developing our ecosystem as a company.
We have 400 employees now, right?
It's a bigger company.
50-plus percent of them are veterans.
And as I look at our ecosystem and how we support different nonprofits and what we're doing in the company, it's an incredible high—well, it sounds like a commercial, but I love seeing this incredible high-quality product because I love going to these countries.
Central and South America working directly with the farmers and then pulling it back through and then uniting the customer and the company as one in this really fucking cool ecosystem.
And it wasn't something that I started out necessarily thinking about where, you know, I wanted to be in charge of a company of 400 people.
That's not what I started out to do.
I literally was roasting coffee in my garage because I was trying to find something else to do when the CIA told me that I couldn't work for him anymore, right?
I deployed probably seven out of those nine years.
I was angry, and I don't want to say that it was directly my fault, but the organization that I started with in Iraq and kind of went from Iraq to Afghanistan...
I was tired and burnt out.
And I was fucking angry.
And honestly, they had probably every right to tell me to hit the road.
And I'm glad that they did.
At the end of the day, it was a wake-up call.
A wide variety of reasons.
I was callous.
I was emotionally unavailable.
There was a fucking laundry list of things that were broken.
I really thought about it It was hard for me to think about it, but I was most fearful of not being able to love my daughter because I didn't have the emotional capacity to do that.
And it was eye-opening.
It was actually very scary because that's not the kind of person that I wanted to be.
And we've all seen examples of people who are that and then realize it later in life.
The saddest thing in the world is when you see a parent and then they have a grown kid that they fucked up because they did have all these other problems they never dealt with.
And then it's too late.
And then you have this angry child who you were never there for.
I looked at it, and I knew in order to be a loving father, a good husband, and a good man, I had to change a lot of shit.
I really had to have a very difficult series of conversations with myself and give myself a lot of fucking tough love.
And starting a business was one of the things that I needed to do because it gave me...
I couldn't work for anyone else after that.
I was kind of done with working for other people.
I was not necessarily searching for purpose, but I knew that I really wanted to do something with coffee and, you know, a wide variety of reasons that I love coffee.
Black Rifle was an homage to my service rifle.
And I found myself wanting to teach myself a new skill.
And then what I wrote was a mission statement.
And my mission statement was just a mission statement for my life in general, which was to transition out of government service and live a happy and fulfilling life.
It had nothing to do with money, you know, running a company or hiring people.
I just wanted to find how to be happy and fulfill myself outside of being a commando or a CIA guy, whatever that definition for myself was.
But more importantly, as I've continued to develop myself, and I'm not saying I'm even close to being a commando It's a constant state of evolution to be a better man.
And I also knew that all the lies that I told myself up to that point of, you know, I'm a Green Beret, so, you know, I'm less than a one percentile and I'm a fucking badass and I'm this and I'm that.
All of that would have been a lie if I would have been a bad father.
All of that would have been meaningless.
It would have been garbage.
It's just propaganda.
Every one of my combat rotations, every one of my friends that has been killed or maimed in this war, it would have been a complete unjustifiable lie to myself to say, if I don't be the best man that I possibly can be...
And work on it now, then all of that is for naught.
It's all shit.
So I literally after my first year in business, I was sitting in my garage and And I had sold everything that I had owned, you know, and I was chips in on this entire thing.
And I didn't have anything left to sell.
I didn't have, I was living in this shitty rental.
My wife was, you know, packing boxes and roasting coffee.
And I was getting kind of down on myself and I was crying on this Pelican case in my garage.
And it was a distinct turning point in my life where I said...
Get up.
Stop making excuses.
Stop being a fucking pussy.
And do something about your life.
And when I say that, that's the conversation.
That's the exact conversation I had with myself.
And I've had that conversation almost every day in the last several years about just how can I continue to develop this ecosystem that meets my mission statement for my company that...
Quite literally has nothing to do with money, but how do I continue to be positive impact in my environment versus negative, taking away or contributing to toxicity, which is, man, I don't want to have anything to do with that life anymore.
There's a lot of people that have a problem with the way they are, and they make a decision to change, but they fall back into their old patterns because it's comfortable and because they're used to that.
It's kind of recognizing that you have an addiction when you have an addiction.
You know, when you have emotional or anger issues and you're just angry or whatever it is for no real reason...
I think, one, you have to recognize that you have a problem.
And I think, you know, I've continued to recognize that I have a problem.
And it's like quitting a habit or anything that you're doing, whether it's quitting smoking or working through a very disciplined diet.
And it's every minute you have the ability, sometimes every second you have the ability to make a decision and have a conscious effort to focus on improvement.
And when I feel myself, because there are times when I feel myself sliding backwards a little bit into more of a negative Evan situation, And we do it all the time.
And this is one thing I will say about the guys that we have together is it's not just myself.
It's, you know, my friends in the military, they're called, it sounds so ridiculous, but it is.
It's like we have our battle buddies, for lack of a better term.
But Matt and Jared, our other partner, we formed a team.
And the other people within our company that formed a team, We can talk to each other in a way that's very candid.
We can emotionally expose.
And the other thing is, Matt and I will do it all the time.
If we're talking and we're talking about negative and we're grinding ourselves into a negative hole, we're like, stop.
Stop right now.
We got better shit to talk about.
Pull ourselves out.
Dust ourselves off.
And...
If you're by yourself, it's much more difficult.
I think when you have really good friends for us, we're business partners.
I can be that guy for him and he can be that guy for me and Jared can be the guy for all of us.
And we have really good friends, we have good business partners, we have good people in the company that...
They help.
They really do.
And leaving one culture, one subculture of, you know, really tight-knit special operations group of guys, starting a business by yourself is difficult enough, right?
I would imagine it's an extremely difficult endeavor.
Doing it without your friends and people you can trust and people you can rely on, I can't even imagine.
Because the things that we've had to go through in the last several years and the reminders...
he won't, he won't let me be a shit bag and I won't let him be a shit bag either.
In the sense of if I seem dragging, if there's something going on, what I call him, like, what's going on?
How are you doing?
What, what can I talk to you about?
So I think one, it's focusing on yourself, identifying you have a problem, looking at every minute and every second at times, depending on when it is, uh, on how to be better.
And then building a, building a supportive team around you that understands what's going on and how they can continue to get you up.
And we've had to do this for a lot.
We've had to cut a lot of toxic people out of our lives.
We've had to cut some toxic people out of our lives because they're just negative weight.
That's probably been the most challenging thing for me over the years.
There's always going to be extraneous influences that impact you, but...
I've had to change environments about five different times and find the right team for me and that my core competencies work with theirs.
Because a lot of people have asked this over the years, like, how did you get the team?
Like, well, we went through seven different teams, you know, toxic relationships or ones that just didn't mesh well together.
And the hardest part of that is just taking that leap of faith and saying...
Well, this is going to be really weird, but I'm packing my rucksack.
It's what I did.
I had a good life.
I was making a lot of money in my business at the time.
And I didn't like the direction things were going.
And Evan called me and was like, do you want to jump into Utah?
And let's go.
And I packed up, moved out of my house, broke up with my girlfriend at the time, drove to Utah in my Tundra in one bag and said, well, time to start over at 26, seven years old.
And I completely started over.
I lived in an Airbnb for six months.
And I think...
At face value, that was terrifying.
But the second I landed in Utah and got in that Airbnb, I was like, fuck, all I got to worry about is the one bag of clothes I have and going to work tomorrow is something that I'm passionate about and that I love.
And the rent's paid, so we're good.
And from there on, I've just chased that feeling.
And then all the toxicity that has impacted my life with relationships just get out.
You know, I see people that are involved in business and I see the conversations they have and it's almost like they're speaking some strange language, some fake language and they all get together and talk corporate talk and then they get out of there and they take these big...
They take this big deep breath and they have a drink or they drive home because they're living bullshit.
They just blow hot air and don't do anything, and they don't believe in their mission.
And I think that's been the most impactful thing for us is we believe in it, and it's easy to be authentic or communication style between the team.
And again, the hardest part is probably maintaining that cultural ecosystem in the company, especially as you scale it, because you want people to be authentic.
Open, candid, radical transparency.
Obviously, we're not saying, you know, making fun of people, but we want to be able to say, fuck, let's get this done, instead of...
And that's why I think we've done so well so far, is because we just stick to the mission and grind it out.
I mean, we're all kind of a bunch of knuckle-draggers.
Yeah, and I think to your point, maintaining mission focus, all of these things that we learned in the military, write your mission statements, maintain your mission focus, radical transparency.
I'm a zealot at the end of the day.
I love coffee.
I love the company.
I love the ecosystem.
And it's easy for me.
I can go in and high-five everybody and we can joke around in the company.
We have incredible atmosphere as far as the ecosystem of the company.
I love going to work there.
I would hate to go to work in a corporate environment.
I actually hate the word corporate.
Because to me, it just says, this is stodgy, spreadsheet-driven bullshit where you've got a bunch of people that pontificate about things that they have no idea what they're talking about.
And what they want to do is they want to run a company only for the profit versus the pursuit of authenticity under a real mission.
There's a huge difference.
I've stepped into corporate environments a lot and especially like finance guys are some of the worst fucking people ever in the sense of, you know, they're not funny.
They have no sense of humor.
I've told bankers to get the fuck out of my office when they're like 15 minutes late just to get some like payback and how many times that they've screwed good people over and So the company itself, in the sense of any company and how you kind of create that environment, I don't like this standard corporate templatized system that people work through.
It's confusing to me as well because you know when people are fake.
You know when you're having a conversation with some executive and he's like, oh yeah, Susie, you're...
You're an incredible asset to the company.
It's like, you don't know who that person is.
It's inauthentic.
It's fake.
And I would hate to go to work in a place like that every day.
That's really what a lot of people are going through every day, just not having any real connection to what they're doing, where they feel good about it, they feel like they have a purpose, they feel like it makes...
Like, they matter.
Like, they really do matter.
You know, and then when a lot of these people, when they wind up getting fired by their company, you know, after 30 years of working there, and they realize that they were nothing.
I think a lot of people like kind of succumb to like that social construct and like this is what you have to do the nine to five kind of thing but not to be a fatalist but something like my positive mindset like we're all born terminal the second we come out of that womb we're gonna fucking die and I've always wanted to be super proud because you know I think there's certain aspects of the former jobs I had you have to kind of I agree and be comfortable with the fact that there's a high probability of dying and or life-changing events.
And I think once you realize that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when.
Whether that's when I'm 60 and have a heart attack or I live to be 90 or I die tomorrow.
And that drives me every single day because I look back and go, I don't want to miss out on this fucking crazy thing called life.
You have one chance to live this cool fucking experience, whether or not you believe in afterlife or not, but we're all going to die.
And it's very bizarre for me that people don't take leaps of faith because they get so trepidatious in everything that they do.
And they're like, whoa, whoa, what if?
And they hate that uncomfortable feeling.
We just fucking punch it in the face and go kid it.
And that's one thing I will say about this is, you know, combat to me taught me so many different things about myself.
But the one thing that it taught me was that life is finite.
And in order to live, in order to live, you got to risk.
You got to risk it and you got to suck a little bit.
You know, for the payoff at the end, you know, that last minute of light that you have in this world, you don't want to be sitting there doing an audit of all the things you should have done.
You know, those are the things where it's like, I want to jump out of planes.
I want to, you know, experience a foreign language.
I want to go to war.
When you look at those things as a younger, when I looked at them as a younger man, when I look at them now, I'm not going to be...
You know, whatever age it is, thinking back, going, man, I really wish I would have tried to be a commando.
I've already got that.
Now I can focus, I think, a lot more of my energy on how do we, you know, become a better father, how to become a better business owner, a better friend.
But I didn't leave anything on the table in the previous 20 years.
I didn't leave any of that shit on the table going, man, I really wish I would have done that.
No, man.
Like I... I pushed it as hard as I could with whatever was given to me.
I did the best that I could with what I got.
And honestly, I'm operating, I think, at about 150% right now.
I'm overextending what capacity I have up here to try to put it all together.
Honestly, I'm just trying to fucking run it as hard as I can because the machine...
That I was given is like, I'm very fortunate.
I understand that.
But I got to run this thing way past its capability to get the most out of it.
Now, there's some guys that, you know, maybe they're phenoms and they're much more intelligent than I am.
That would be, you know, one of the things I joke around, I say is like, man, I'd love to be an astrophysicist.
Unfortunately, I'm just not that bright.
So I'm gonna have to settle for what the fuck I'm doing.
And then I realize, like, oh, but all that shit that they tell you about, like, ADHD and being hyperactive and not being able to pay attention, that's actually, you have energy.
You don't want to sit in a fucking chair when you're 10 years old while some person who doesn't give a fuck about you or what they're teaching is just rambling on in front of you and you're just going crazy.
You can't wait to get out of there.
And the doctor's like, this man needs to be on some medication.
I think all of us have this ball of fucking energy and it zaps everything around us.
And if you try to point it in a direction where it doesn't work, I could never be a finance guy.
I could never be a numbers guy.
Any of that.
I am too fucking ADHD. But what that allows me to do is think in the clouds and be super creative and write and build content and music and all these things.
And we had a really cool exercise in the business.
And I should have been out portaging boats on like really nasty, you know, in British Columbia somewhere by some asshole dude that was, you know, here's 10 minutes worth of work.
Now you're just going to work you into the ground.
And when I say that, that's the level of, I guess, patience that I had for any of it in the sense of you can't sit a kid at a desk, or at least kids like me, for six or eight hours a day.
And at least now, the one shining star I will say to this is that hopefully we come out of this with the ability of some type of homeschooling system that actually works.
Because the one thing about homeschooling for the nation is, what's the one stereotype of homeschooled kids that we've all kind of- Religious psychos.
But now we're at least living in a time where hopefully this catches up and we can educate children from our home and maybe a balance between the home and the school that gives them some form of adjustment that works for them.
That's the one thing I will say about this where I'm like, God...
This has been a good thing from a perspective in my life, which is I don't travel as much.
I've chopped a bunch of travel out of my schedule.
My wife stays home with the kids.
I've been home with the kids way more than I have in the last five years.
And it's forced us to look inside the family a lot more than, you know, on the go, constantly driving outside of the family, doing things outside of the family.
It's really forced us to be, I think, a much tighter family unit with the four of us.
And I'm always trying to find the positive in it regardless.
There's plenty of negative out there.
We've all talked about it and we hear it on the fucking news every day.
I will say the forcing function in all of this has made my family, I think, tighter, much tighter.
I hope it has for a lot of other people, but I know it's been very detrimental to a lot of family units, too, because they have a lot of financial issues.
They have domestic violence issues.
But for my family, it's really forced us to look inside and really work on us.
And so I can say, we're going to try to come out of this a much better family.
And it really depends on what the struggle is and where you're at when you come into it.
And I think for a lot of people, this is a real eye-opener about your health.
And that's what I'm hoping, that more people pay attention to your body.
There's a direct correlation between your health and your ability to overcome diseases.
And I really, really hope that that message gets out there and that more people understand that if you are obese, if you do have a bad diet, these are things you can handle.
You can do something about this.
And this is the wake-up call.
Please, fucking take care of yourself.
It may be the difference between catching this shit and living through it and maybe in some cases breezing right through it.
I have a bunch of friends that caught it and like, yeah, I had a cough for a day.
What the fuck is going on?
Quite a few friends that had a cough for a day and felt like shit for two or three days afterwards and then we're done with it and we're working out five days later.
It's interesting, too, because a lot of things that people rely on as far as substances will absolutely go away if you follow a healthy diet and exercise routine.
I mean, the euphoria and how I feel post-workout is one of the most amazing feelings I've ever had.
So it's not only like a bodily function, it's a cognitive one as well.
All the endorphins you get, and you're like, I'm ready for the day, and then you feel accomplished.
I mean, it's like, incremental success makes great success.
And those little wins throughout the day, and I think working out is one of them, more people need that feeling of, fuck, I feel good.
But he's the most authoritative UFC referee because he was a cop for years.
He's amazing.
Stand over there!
Stand over there!
He fucking controls the situation.
He would have controlled that.
Man, yeah.
Why can't we have the conversation?
Because you can't be mean.
You can't say, hey, stop shoving sugar and fucking saturated bullshit and fucking oils and vegetable grease and all the crap and fucking all the nonsense that people stuff in their face.
Stop!
Stop doing that!
You're fat!
It's fucking you up!
There's a fucking picture, man, from like the early 1900s.
Of a guy at a carnival, and he's the fat guy at a sideshow.
He was so fat that people were like, holy fuck, look at this guy.
You could see when Disneyland was open, you could see a hundred of those guys rolling around on scooters.
He's a normal person today, like a normal overweight person.
Because people didn't have the access to bullshit back then.
To get that fat was hard.
When you don't have that kind of sugar in your diet, the amount of gluten and grains and fucking nonsense that people eat today, it's so easy to get that fat.
But back then it was really hard.
See if you can find that picture, Jamie.
unidentified
I typed it in and I found a lot of giant fat guys.
The subculture that we grew up in, right, in our 20s, when we were 18 to 20, 30, whatever it was, like, man, we would have guys slapping food out of your hands and going fatty, because in the middle, back in the day, and I'm not saying back in the day, right, I guess it makes me sound old, but...
Dude, you could shame the shit out of people, and that's just the way it worked, which was, hey, fatty...
And if you weren't meeting a task or, you know, task condition standard, you would have guys in NCOs, non-commissioned officers, in your chow line selecting your food for you.
Yeah, but you know what's not nice is dying of diabetes, especially if it's coming from an empathetic position, where you're like, I'm saying this because I want you to live, which means I like you.
And when you tell them that they're fat, all people like to consider is, like, you are shaming a person because of their body shape, and that's terrible, and that's awful.
That's true.
But if you also say to that person, like, hey...
I love you.
I care about you.
But I'm going to be honest with you.
You're fat as fuck.
And you need to lose weight.
That's also fat shaming?
But there's very few ways to get through to someone.
If someone's drunk, if they're a fucking alcoholic and they get drunk every night, and you pull them aside and go, hey man, You are a fucking drunk.
And you need to stop.
You need to get your shit together.
And they feel bad because they love you.
Like, wow, Evan says I'm a drunk.
I respect Evan.
Fuck.
What am I doing?
God damn it, I gotta get my life together.
Somehow or another, that's okay.
But telling someone that they're a fat fuck is not okay because you're fat shaming.
Well, because you're making them feel bad because of their addiction to food versus their addiction to alcohol?
If you see someone smoking every day and go, hey man, those fucking things are going to kill you, are you cigarette shaming?
I mean, these are like trained warfighters doing one of the most difficult jobs on the planet, and we're going to bring, you know, bureaucratic, like, weird fucking bullshit into it.
It's like, no, we are training them to do the world's worst act, which is kill another human being in hopefulness that it's saving more human lives.
I mean, this is not a PC job.
You're getting trained with hand grenades, rocket launchers, guns to put night vision on and sneak into houses and shoot motherfuckers in the face.
And then if you bring all this bullshit into it, then you're decreasing the survivability and the training that these guys and gals need to succeed and be a high-functioning unit to live.
Well, I... I think that's a really good point from the entire warfighter.
When we look at the entire warfighter across America, we have a very small subsection of guys that carry the lion's share of the warfighting.
And, you know, the special operations community, the infantry, and the combat arms.
So when we look at that, it's a really small number of guys.
And to Matt's point, it's the most politically incorrect profession in the United States, quite possibly in the world.
Because what you're doing is you're taking human life.
You can't have these two things.
You can't be politically correct and shoot people in the face.
You can't have both.
I'm sorry, America.
You can't have the two.
You have to have your warfighters that are out there, especially when you're America, you have to have the guys that are trained to go out at night and do this every fucking night and take it to every terrorist, every bad guy internationally to protect you in your sleeping beds.
You have to do that.
You can't have a politically correct warfighter.
Knock, knock.
I'm sorry.
You identify as a politically correct nonviolent terrorist.
I guess we'll move on to the next house.
That doesn't work.
It's completely illogical.
You can't fight wars with a politically correct attorney.
Yeah, and those types of people have no regard for human life, you know, and I've seen it personally, when politics get involved in wars, it kills people.
I mean, I have a few instances where there were, you know, you can't drop ordinance on guys you just got ambushed by, because the local village said you can't use, you know, bombs from planes.
And you're like, we, one of our guys just got shot.
We killed the three that ran out the front door, but the six that ran out the back door, I'm just supposed to let them go live from an ethical perspective.
They're going to go do this again, and I hope they don't go plant bombs and blow up a whole engineer vehicle and kill six Americans.
Where's the efficacy in that?
Because you didn't want to offend somebody?
Politics don't work in war.
Obviously, you need rules and regulations and ROE and things that...
But that's where the training comes in.
You're acting on an ethical basis on the ground.
But again, I don't think anybody understands, if you haven't been there, how dynamic and complex some of these situations when it's completely dark, you're under night vision and a laser, and you're having to make moments...
Seconds, milliseconds to make a decision whether you survive or you don't.
There's no black and white with that.
It's very complicated.
And that goes back to the whole thing where you've got to look out for veterans and post-service because they're put in some very, very, very difficult situations.
Well, I think that when the expectation for the overall, you know, the warrior class, really what it is, for them to kind of adapt to this politically correct culture, we've seen it, I think, and I've seen it, especially when we look at some of the other countries that we actually have fought with.
Some of these guys have to come to the United States, for instance, to get really good weapons training because weapons are illegal in places like the UK.
So you'll have British soldiers that'll come over here, especially their special forces.
They'll come over and train with us because they have restrictions on how often they can use firearms in the UK.
So that's a great plan.
Let's make all firearms illegal.
And then, oh, by the way, our special operations have a hard time training with them.
And there's a very distinct and huge difference between the proficiency and the way that they're utilizing their weapons and the way that we do it because of our culture.
So our warrior class as a society, we really have to look at it and say, how do we protect them?
You know, and if we're going to continue to maintain, you know, our sovereignty and security of the nation, we really have to create a place where these guys are not affected by the bullshit that goes on in the United States as far as,
you know, woke cancer culture bullshit and We've got to protect them from this, and we've also got to just decide that these guys are trained at a high proficiency level to do something exceedingly difficult, and we want to keep them over there.
They are a break glass in case of war, and now wars are just perpetual, essentially.
So keep them separate from the rest of this because we really want those guys to be proficient so we can go to bed every night and kind of rest easy.
One of the things you talked about, about where this probably came from, it's a reoccurring theme in Jack Carr's books as well, is that there's these officers that are career politicians, really, that are also in the military, and they're really just trying to advance their career.
And it's...
It's one of those archetypes that resonates.
You go, oh, I bet that guy's real.
It makes sense.
It makes sense as sort of an evil, sort of a bullshit artist that happens to be an officer and claims responsibility for all the good things and doesn't take responsibility for the bad things, winds up getting people killed or winds up being corrupt.
It's often, and we run into it, and I've described it a lot, as you have a group of, and it can be non-commissioned officers or officers, and you have a group of guys.
What's the difference?
Non-commissioned officers are guys that have enlisted in the military, and they either went to college or didn't go to college, but they've enlisted and they've worked their way up through the ranks.
Officers have gone to college, they've gone to either ROTC or the academy, and And there's two distinctly different ranking systems.
So enlisted, I just go down, raise your hand, join the military, work your way up.
The officers are typically in charge of the NCOs.
That's most of the time.
There are some special operations units where that's a little bit more fluid.
But in any government bureaucracy, specifically in the military, and I think even in the intelligence community, you have...
You have personality types just like you do in any organization.
You have the mission first guys, people.
They're like, I'm ready to fucking do whatever it is I need to do in order to accomplish the mission.
They're the bread and butter of what's happening overseas, and there's a ton of those guys.
And then you have a minority of me's.
And the me's are the guys that are, I'm here to elevate and rank.
I'm here to shirk responsibility and make sure that I take responsibility for other people's actions.
And I'm here to be a careerist, essentially.
And I'll do anything to get promoted to include what they call throwing our guys under the bus.
So Andy Stump's a good example.
He was an officer, but you would never know that, right?
He would never throw his guys under the bus.
Jocko's a great example.
He'd never throw his guys under the bus.
You know, good leaders eat last.
They're not careerists.
They're not trying to do anything or say anything in order to get promoted.
They're mission first, very capable and driven people that ultimately don't care if they get credit for what happens.
And most of the time, those guys sacrifice their career and their promotions.
Because they're going to always default to what's right.
The me's are always going to default to what's best for me.
And then what happens is those me's start to get a, they move up much faster and more effectively than the mission guys.
And the subsequent effect of that which you see is you have the me guys that are moving up in ranks and then it is a massive you know downside to the guys that are mission first because they want to focus on their team and getting what they need to get done done and then they pretty much get out of the military because they're like ah I don't like this political crap.
The retention on a lot of the really great guys and gals that serve, I think, is directly correlated to the me people because they're essentially all about professional progression rather than how do we do the best mission and then give the team...
Everything's a team effort in life.
You can't accomplish shit on your own, really.
Just like a podcast, you need...
The producer, you need the book.
It's a team effort, and sure, you have the leader, but when you have the officer types, and even at some NCOs, I did it.
And they put a lot of the guys at risk where they'll do dumb shit on target.
It happened to me where we did land, sea, and air movement for the sake of doing it, and I was the routes NCO. I'm like, hey, why?
Why aren't we landing on the X or the Y? Like, we're good to go.
Like, 160th said we're in.
Like, shut up, Vest.
This is what we're doing.
And it was essentially because an officer wanted to use his Rangers by Lancey or Air for whatever no write-up that he might get a Bronze Star for when the only thing that happened was risking the lives of Americans and special operation guys because you just made them move X amount of clicks farther on that movement to target, which, you know, Why isn't there checks and balances to eliminate those guys or to make sure that those guys get exposed?
Because I would imagine that for the enlisted men and for the NCOs and for all the people that have the right thoughts in mind and the right intentions in mind, they would not want that to be there.
And I would imagine that that's the majority of the people.
I think that that's why the special operations community has such a high rate of volunteer because they're escaping the conventional military where there's more careerism in the conventional military.
And when you go to the special operations world, There's less of that.
It's more of a peer system.
It's driven on the individual capabilities in the sense of this is my team.
Everything that I do is going to be evaluated by my team.
Ultimately, if I'm an officer that's messed up, I can be fired.
My team can fire me.
There's less of that in the conventional military system because there's a hierarchy of tradition.
Now, I think the conventional military can definitely take a page out of the special operations community book and ultimately make really good decisions on how they select officers and leaders just in general.
Because leadership is, one, it's a dying art in society.
I think it's a dying art in general because of what's happening.
Well, that's why Jocko does so well, bringing that knowledge to business and doing all these speeches where he's so well sought after because they want to hear a real leader.
And for my example that I made earlier, that was a one-off.
I mean, the leadership that came out of Ranger Battalion, I mean, I couldn't have been more thankful to be a part of that unit.
And you see a lot of those guys that work their way up through the ranks of Ranger Battalion move on to Tier 1 units and do have extraordinary heroic careers.
And you can definitely tell the cultural differences from a special operations leadership to the conventional armor.
And that's not a knock on the conventional, because I think if you raise your right hand, you're epic.
I think there's some knots to be untied with some of the leadership and the career officers because there's a certain point probably when you pin a star, you're no longer an officer, you're a politician.
You're a politician and you're appointed by politicians.
So once you move up past a certain rank, you're essentially appointed by politicians.
And which now every four to eight years, obviously there's a rotation in how you're selected, who is selected for what.
So you'll start to see different aspects of the officer corps shift based on administration because it's led by the administration.
And then it takes a few years and then ultimately it goes back and forth and back and forth.
But, you know, to go back to your original question is how do you continue to develop that?
I think the checks and balances are, it's a very traditionally based organization, right?
the military is incredible at a lot of different things.
And one thing that there has to be is there has to be somewhat of a firewall from what's happening and the newest trend and, you know, the newest trend in social science and how it affects our military.
I think there really has to be a big wall as far as what's affecting it and what isn't.
And I think that as far as how we get the right people in the right places in the military, boy, that's probably a three-hour podcast in itself as far as unpacking that.
There's some incredible, and not to take away from anything that's happening, but there are some incredible people that continue to serve in the most honorable capacity in the United States military day in and day out.
They're mission-first people that we never hear about.
go through 20, you know, 30 years of a career, they retire and they move in next door and you'd never know what they did.
And those are the guys that, you know, when we, when we look at the community, when we look at what we're doing just in general, uh, those are, those are the guys that I really respect in the sense of, uh, you know, we have our subculture those are the guys that I really respect in the sense of, uh, you know, we have our subculture and our friends, but you know, the, the people are trying to earn our respect for the guys that we know have always served in silence that are the silent professionals that
And if we have their respect and we can continue to promote in different aspects of what they're doing in their mission, we do that all the time.
And when we do that, what I mean by that is, you know, whether it's donating money or time or all the things that we try to do, we've shipped hundreds of thousands of bags of coffee overseas.
To guys that are serving the country, to our friends that are in command-driven units that are doing really difficult work.
And our little sacrifice that we make, and it's really not a sacrifice, our little commitment to them is just ship them coffee.
How do we dedicate more time and money and encourage the good people that serve the country day in and day out that...
They're the heroes, right?
When we look at this, when I look at the SEAL team memo, for instance, and I say, there's a guy up there that made some change because he wants to get a promotion.
But that's not really going to change the teams.
The teams are going to stay the same.
Those guys are going to go to work every day just like they have.
They're going to be silent professionals doing very difficult work day in and day out.
It doesn't matter if you identify them as LAMP or their or thems or who's or whatever it is.
Well, that's the fear that I have of people that don't have an understanding of this that are involved in policy.
When you talk about people defunding the military and when I talked to Tim Kennedy and he talked to me about the stark difference between the previous administration and when Trump took over.
And one thing, say good things are bad things about Trump all day long.
But one good thing you can say is he gave the military the money that they needed and he let them off the leash.
He didn't politicize it.
He just gave them the money that they needed and they stopped ISIS in a year.
And he talked about it in great detail.
He's like the difference was so stark between the previous administration and when Trump took over and having the resources to do what they needed to do and get in the green light.
When you have radical fundamentalists like that that are doing wild shit, man, and you could watch the videos that do get leaked.
I mean, it's fucking horrific.
And the idea that somehow or another these policies are dictated by people who don't understand what's happening there and not by military people, not by people that are on the ground.
Why did I... I don't know exactly what the answer is to that, which is when you have professional politicians, and especially career politicians, that really, they're fundamentally corrupted by ultimately the military lobbying aspects of our country.
They're going to be driven left or right in any one of these countries.
And when I say that, Afghanistan is a really good example.
How many days did it take us to overthrow Afghanistan or the Taliban in Afghanistan?
What, 150 days?
And that was back in 2000, September, October, November of 2001, right?
Right.
So roughly 90 days after the towers went down, we invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban.
It took us less than six months to essentially go from north to south in that country with a small contingent of special operations and CIA guys, roughly, give or take.
And then you have a long-term war of occupation, which has lasted almost 20 years now.
And we have the special operations units that essentially invaded, overthrew the Taliban, and then we have a long-term war of occupation, and we have several different administrations that have continued to increase troop size.
To what reason?
Why?
And then Trump, like him or not, is saying, well, let's downsize our troop involvement in Central Asia or Afghanistan.
I think the only bipartisan agreement that they've had in the Senate and the Congress in the last six months was to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan.
I think, you know, and I think personally, yes, I think large-scale wars of occupation are about the transference of wealth from the taxpayer to the military-industrial complex, because I've seen it.
A small-scale special operations contingent, as far as we'll use Afghanistan as the template, You can do a lot with a force multiplier, and it's by, with, and through your local nationals.
And I think it's typically a more mature soldier that already has a mature and developed brain, too, by the way.
You know, past the age of 24, typically special operations guys are a little bit older.
And then you have a force multiplying effect, and ultimately you don't have a large...
Large-scale war of occupation, which now you have 18-year-old kids that are driving around in tanks, that are flying around in big, robust C5 logistics, but it's less...
It's more cost-effective to do that, and...
I think it's also not as politically advantageous for politicians.
So people love to support and celebrate the previous administration for all the great things that Obama did.
Okay, but he increased troop levels in both Afghanistan.
They say, well, he withdrew from Iraq.
But no, we had another surge in Iraq after that.
And we surged in Afghanistan after that.
Well...
There's really not a coherent and logical argument that I can hear or that I've heard in the last 10 years that I've either been in Afghanistan or Iraq for a large-scale military occupational force in either one of those countries.
So when you have a president that's saying, I think we should downsize our footprint, And you don't have the left or the right supporting that.
It seems fucking crazy to me.
One, it seems crazy.
And two, where are our media outlets and where are the other people saying, maybe we should break this down and look at it from the second and third order effects of a troop downsize.
Can we still maintain the sovereignty and the security of the United States and At a more cost-effective rate, meaning less blood, less treasure.
Can we do that?
My answer to that is absolutely we should be able to do that.
Absolutely.
But you know why we can't?
Because it's more cost-effective for us to have a special operations smaller contingent, and it's more costly to move big logistics, you know, tanks and airplanes and fuel and everything else.
That's where taxpayers, you as a taxpayer, are essentially paying to fund all of that.
I keep waiting for the congressmen and the senators and a few of these other people to step up and say, wait a minute.
Can we decrease our footprint in these countries and still maintain security and ultimately protect the sovereignty of the United States?
I think we can.
But nobody is stepping in to the shoot after Trump and essentially backing him and saying, yes, I think this is a good idea.
The left should be all over this.
They should be, hey, less war, right?
I mean, this is the hippie movement.
Like, less war is good.
No, you had the left fighting him over his Syrian troop withdrawal, which is insane to me that you had media outlets that were defending the increase of troop levels in Syria.
I have heard the argument, and it's to maintain stability because they don't want the state to ultimately collapse and cause a failed state, which then puts us back into the previous circumstance where the Taliban can continue to increase their power, ultimately developing a new terrorist organization or harboring terrorist organizations.
And my answer to that is...
You don't need tanks on the ground to do that.
You need a bunch of commandos and a few CIA guys.
There's 23 provinces in that country.
It's really not that big.
You have Pakistan, obviously, and a few of these bordering countries, but you don't need a large scale occupational force to do what you're talking about.
I don't think so, because I think that they've proven that they can, if the mission or the end state, and that's the other issue, what's your success criteria?
So lay out the success criteria for Afghanistan.
Have you ever heard the United States government's success criteria for Afghanistan?
And that's because there really isn't one, which is a fucking problem.
Right.
Go to war without success criteria.
It's really easy to maintain a military footprint for an endless amount of time because you're always chasing a new definition for what it means to succeed.
There's no definition of win.
There's no end to it.
So why is there not...
Minimum success criteria is something that you need to have on anything.
What do I need in order for this organization to deem itself a success?
The expectation for our politicians and our leaders is they have to publish minimum success criteria for any war they ever go into.
And then once we meet that, there needs to be a post-effect plan as to how the hell do we get out?
So do you think essentially what happens is the military-industrial complex or the lobbyists or the special interest groups, do they make agreements with politicians?
Do they communicate with politicians and tell them what their goals are and here's where we're going to help you, this is what we want you to do?
I think that they have a very complex way of organizing and funding think tanks the way that people think about war, the way they think about stability.
I think that they have access, right?
So when you have access, and most of these companies, if you go to D.C., You know, drive around and look at what companies are inside the beltway.
Look at what companies are publicly traded, publicly traded large companies within this type of industry.
And they have access.
And their entire monetization strategy and how they make money requires war.
So how they continue to grow their company and profit is Directly is related to how much war is being conducted.
So if they have close relationships with all of the politicians within DC, and their entire monetization strategy is built on increased war...
Do you think they're working for the taxpayer, any kind of withdrawal troops?
When I say that, it's directly contradictory to what I think the majority of the public would like to see.
I think the majority of the public would like to see a decreased footprint, decreased war, especially large-scale occupational wars, and they don't financially benefit from that.
It seems like he's at least the only president in our recent lifetime that's actually brought up the fact the military-industrial complex is actually influencing these decisions.
I would love to have any politician, especially Trump or the president, talk about the military-industrial complex and how affected DC politics is and how effective we are in the DOD as a nation in funding overseas wars.
And say what you want.
And I want to say that as far as the pro-Trump, anti-Trump.
But, you know, a lot of the left, they continue to kind of parade around about all the great things that Obama did.
He increased our war capacity overseas.
He didn't decrease it.
Did he shut down Gitmo?
Did he do any of these things that he said that he was going to do?
For a group of people that claim that they're so anti-war, the one thing that they should be saying, gosh, this guy might have a point.
So if you have minimum success criteria, for instance, in the case of ISIS in Iraq, you have success criteria that are clearly laid out, which is defeat and destroy ISIS and eliminate any stronghold, essentially any occupied land that they have.
you go to work and you take it all away from them, and then you're done.
You leave.
That's what you do.
And that's what they did, essentially.
And now, granted, we still have forces in Iraq, but not to the degree that we did when we were increasing to push ISIS out.
So with success criteria and ultimately clearly defined goals and objectives directly associated to any war— That's what you do.
That is an absolute expectation that we should have for any politician voting yes, and we should hold our politicians accountable for strict adherence to the success criteria of any war.
The problem is, is they keep changing every two to four years.
They keep changing the success criteria.
Well, that's endless war, and he's right about that.
These guys want endless war.
And both sides.
So, both sides want it.
Democrats and Republicans.
Why?
Why do we want endless war in these places?
That doesn't make sense to me.
It really doesn't.
And the only thing that makes sense to me in this capacity is that...
These guys all have a direct benefit where they're all being persuaded by the same organizations to keep the troops and keep the transference of wealth from the taxpayer into the military-industrial complex.
And I'm sure there are a lot of people that would love to debate me over what's actually happening.
You'd be hard-pressed to find people with two guys sitting across the table that have more experience, specifically in these countries, working in these countries.
I have seven and a half years in Iraq and Afghanistan in my life.
Seven and a half years in both military and as an agency contractor.
And when I look at what we do in those countries, and I'm not thinking about it in theory, right?
I'm not thinking about it in theory.
I'm looking at it saying, this is what I saw.
This is my firsthand experience.
And this is what I've kind of looked and being able to reflect on it for the last five, six years since I left the military and the government.
I've been able to reflect on it and really ask a lot of complex questions as to why do we keep doing the same thing over and over and over again?
And it's frustrating because I understand what it takes to stabilize these countries.
Well, and the hard part with that, I think, is there's been such a diversion away from the wars that no one's actively thinking about how many U.S. soldiers, men and women in the military, are currently deployed.
There's so much going on in the nation that that conversation's not even happening.
I'd venture to say most people are like, oh, we still got people in Afghanistan?
And they're going out on missions and stuff, and it's like an injustice to not have those conversations about what's the end goal, what is the success criteria for Afghanistan, because I'm sure they want to go out and do their job, and they're willing to risk their lives for it, but what's the job?
And you don't really see any of that coming out of what that mission, what the end goal looks like.
And if there is an end goal, why are we there kind of thing.
And I haven't heard it from friends that are on the ground.
They have our international strategic counter-terrorist objectives, which is to deny sanctuary for any terrorist organization.
And I'm sure that we could pull it up.
But at the end of the day, we're occupying a foreign country with our military.
We should be talking about this on a national level as to what are our goals, what are our objectives, what are our success criteria, and when the fuck do we get out of this place?
We should be having that conversation on a regular cycle because guys are still dying.
We're still spending a lot of money and we're still spending a lot of our time and lives with the men and women that serve our country.
These people are still getting wounded and killed in places like Afghanistan and we're not having a national complex conversation about it.
It's crazy to me.
It seems certifiable.
Like as a country, it's like, man, you guys are crazy.
You're going to have kids that are going to Afghanistan that were, from the first wave of soldiers that were fighting in Afghanistan, you're having children.
To me, as a guy that's served in both of those countries, and to me as a guy that loves our country, we really need to have that national conversation with everybody and say, this is a generational war, everyone.
Is this something we really want to continue to pay for with our blood and our treasure?
Is this something we really want to do?
And I think, obviously, I'm biased, but I think these are the important issues that we should be discussing, right?
So how much more do we really have?
Do we really have the patience for?
Not necessarily the patience, but how much more is really acceptable in And how do we elevate and have these complex conversations without the interference of people that ultimately profit from war, too?
I think that's the conversation.
We have to take that out and have this as a society, and they don't want to have it.
And if they're being influenced behind closed doors, they're also being influenced overtly through, I would say, they're overtly being influenced by think tanks and studies that are funded by large institutions that they're overtly being influenced by think tanks and studies that are funded by large institutions that
So instead of the government spending its time really investigating and looking at complex war plans and how we pull out of these places, you know, we're trying to figure out, you know, how we can change memos so we don't offend anybody.
I think that it's one of those things, and you've talked a lot about it in your podcast.
I think the expectation for us to expect more out of our politicians, I think, in sourcing different types of information from a wide variety of people, I think for us, this is white noise, right?
When you look at all the white noise issues that are out there, we have big issues.
We have big issues.
How the fuck do we get off this rock if there's a bigger rock coming towards us?
That's a big one.
Holy shit, do you think we should figure that one out?
I don't know, but these are complex conversations that I think we should hold our leaders accountable for sticking to the hard problems and having those conversations versus these ridiculous sideshow white noise conversations that ultimately are just a distraction from From what we as a nation should be making our government do for us.
It's almost impossible for a human being to look at the whole picture from above and see all these different factors that are playing against each other.
Well, that's the worst thing ever is when politics stopped becoming a service to your country, it became political gain and monetary gain because you can get paid.