Andy Stumpf and Mike Sarraille—former recon Marine, scout sniper, SEAL, and Legacy Expeditions founder—debate military training’s brutal realism, like CS gas exposure during BUDS, while criticizing progressive policies undermining special ops secrecy. They compare MMA fighters’ injuries (e.g., Volkanovski’s broken legs) to combat resilience, noting modern sports’ focus on victimhood over accountability. A December 30th high-altitude skydiving expedition in Antarctica, Chile, Spain, and more aims to raise $7M for military/first-responder scholarships, with one tandem seat auctioned at $1M, after Stumpf’s scathing critique of a reckless Iceland jump. Sarraille’s hip surgeries contrast Stumpf’s luck, sparking Rogan’s push for FDA-approved regenerative medicine like stem cells to prevent long-term damage. Their work honors fallen veterans through extreme expeditions and education, proving legacy isn’t just about money—it’s about preserving the unspoken bonds of combat. [Automatically generated summary]
Mike Cirelli, born in California as well, enlisted in the Marine Corps, was a recon Marine and a scout sniper, and eventually crossed over to the SEAL teams as an officer and retired after 20 years like Andy.
We served at the same place, but I've got to tell you about the first time I met Andy.
Because people ask me, like, what's Andy Stumpf like?
Because I meet people that are like, oh, Andy Stumpf.
Two combat deployments at a conventional SEAL team is four years.
Because you got to do an 18 month workup, six month appointment, maybe they'll push you out to 12, depending on what's going on operationally.
The deployments that I came back with was like three and a half years worth.
So the velocity that I was getting the experience Was just crazy different in the compressed nature of it because it would be overseas for 90, back for 180. Overseas for 90, back for 180. And just constantly going and going and going and going.
So about the same amount of time, but four times the amount of experience.
The civilian populace, one of the things that they totally lack is something called shared adversity that we have in spades.
And with guys you rolled with for years, you could not see them for 10 years.
You see them all of a sudden, it's like you saw each other last week.
When you go through BUDS or you go through the hard training, because BUDS is not the end of the hard training, there's this homecoming belonging, this relationship esprit de corps built.
That will never die.
And so while we promote competition, it pays to be a winner, as we say.
There's a line at which if somebody wins, if Andy wins, the question now is, okay, Andy, what did you do differently than us?
And share that, you know, transfer that knowledge to us so that we can elevate our game as well.
So we understand, you know, Proverbs, was it 2717?
But at the end of the day, he's going to enter a room.
Well, first off, I'm an officer.
I wasn't entering any rooms.
He was for most of his career.
But, you know, I might be on his back and he's trusting me.
So if he's got knowledge, he's going to transfer that knowledge to me in training before we go to war to make sure that I'm the very best to cover his six.
The thing about things like, whether it's SEALs or any high-level military operation group, whenever you're dealing with people that have done something that's extraordinarily difficult, there's like a rite of passage you guys have gone through that a lot of people think is missing from particularly young men in our society and culture.
There's no real moment where you recognize that you've done something incredibly difficult and you've actually become a man.
I think you got to consider the source on that one.
You know, like the most recent thing that came out, I'm sure you saw this, Mike, was there was a video of training that occurred.
I'm pretty sure it was on San Clemente Island because that's where they CS gassed us.
And there's guys who are outside and they're getting exposure to CS gas.
Which I remember before I joined the military, if you look at any movie, probably up to and including like Full Metal Jacket, or if you even went into a recruiting office, exposure to CS gas is something that you do in basic training.
Probably they don't, but let's assume that they do.
It was completely standard and normal to see.
And that room sucks.
You go into a room, you have a gas mask on, and they make you take it off and they make you either do something or say something or talk so you can't hold your breath.
That's the point of all that.
So this video comes out.
Of students that are outside, which, one, is actually a huge advantage because it dissipates quickly, especially if there's any kind of wind, and they're getting gassed.
And there's already issues with the story that I'm telling because, one, who the fuck is filming this?
Just the fact that there was somebody there who was filming this thing and it made it onto the internet in any way, shape, and form is a mistake in and of itself.
So the students, the last four weeks of training, you go out to San Clemente Island.
It's called third phase.
And you get a very basic indoctrination into small unit tactics, rifle, weaponry, explosives, you throw some grenades, you do some underwater demo, but you're out there for like the last tight four weeks of training.
The students, I mean, I don't even remember having a cell phone when I went through actually in 97. I'd be shocked if they're allowed to have cell phones on there.
So it had to have been an instructor.
But they're getting gassed.
They're being made to sing happy birthday again so you can't hold your breath.
And it looks horrible.
Because it is horrible.
And the point of that training is, is it's supposed to suck.
It's supposed to be difficult.
You're supposed to be exposed to that.
People are like, well, this one person looked like they were passing out and there's mucus coming out of their face.
Yeah, it's CS gas.
It sucks.
But the first time you experience that shouldn't be in a combat zone.
So it's a volunteer-only program.
You can leave this particular training block if you want to at any given time.
And oh, by the way, every branch of the military exposes their people to this.
So although there are people who are saying, yeah, it's too difficult, I think you have to consider the source.
I don't think they know what they're talking about.
Navy launches investigation into SEAL tear gas video.
Newly surfaced video showing Navy SEAL recruits being tear gassed is adding to scrutiny, adding to scrutiny over elite military units training practices.
We went out into a demo range and they had sprinkled in CS powder into the dirt.
So we didn't actually realize we were having exposure to it.
And people were just covered in...
I remember I'm sitting there and we were trying to do demo calculations or like cut debt cord.
And you're like dry heaving.
I would say the reason that this is probably the bigger issue is that there was a high profile death in SEAL training not too long ago.
With a student who had just completed Hell Week and died in the hospital shortly thereafter.
The young man's mother is a nurse and she's very vocal about what has happened and there was an investigation involving that.
So it seems like not to...
Horrendous to lose your son in any way, shape, or form.
I don't want to take anything away from that.
But from that incident, this is like another layer on top of the onion on something that people were already talking about, which you combine the two and it just seems like, for one, I wish SEALs could get the fuck out of the news in general.
But since it starts, you know, they're layering on top of each other, it can seem to be a bigger deal than it is.
It's a string of reporters from New York Times that have just been, they've had a hard-on.
For the SEAL teams.
They have been going out.
In fact, they wrote a book, and you have the author, Matt Cole, Code Over Country.
And they have just, for the last half decade, if not more, have made it their personal crusade to bring down the SEAL teams.
And the Eddie Gallagher incident...
did not help.
But here's what I'll say.
One, Eddie is a friend.
Eddie didn't handle all situations well.
But it's amazing how Eddie can have, and I think Eddie had like eight combat deployments, how he can serve honorably.
And he was number one at the SEAL team, his SEAL team, I think, for E6, I believe.
He served honorably for 19 years in the last incident he's involved in, which he was acquitted for.
That defines his entire career.
The last sentence of his chapter as a SEAL defines all the 19 years and all the good work that he did in defense of our nation for those who would never even think of serving.
The branch in San Diego was never held accountable for, let's just say, bad practices that they implemented while trying to bring Eddie down.
They also had a hard-on.
NCIS is not always...
Your friend.
And they're looking to make a name for themselves as well.
And in fact, I was investigated the day I retired by the same crew of people from NCIS San Diego, only six months previous to when the whole Eddie Gallagher thing sort of came on.
But, I mean, they tapped or they put a bug into Eddie's lawyers' emails so that they could read all the documents coming into that lawyer.
What I'll say is this as somebody who was a BUDS instructor, There is an evolution sheet and matrix for every single thing that happens in training, to include remediating the students.
When they fall short of a standard, there are limits to how long you can remediate them for.
There's limits to the exercises that you can use.
There is an oversight matrix of who's in charge of the evolution, what's the ratio going to be student to instructor.
There is somewhere a matrix and evolution sheet for exposure to CS gas in BUDS. There is absolutely no way that those instructors are like, hey Mike, you doing anything tomorrow too?
Let's go gas these fuckers.
That doesn't happen.
Every single day in BUDS is templated.
Why that person said that, I'm not sure.
But as somebody who worked in that pipeline with that curriculum, It exists.
And what they need to say is, yeah, there's a reason that we do this.
And the reason that we do this is so that their first exposure isn't in an environment where their life might be on the line.
That would actually shut it down.
Because what that does is it leaves the door and it leaves question in people's minds.
Did they make a mistake?
Were they hazing people?
Do we need to do this?
My resounding answer is yes.
And also I'll add to that.
My answer when people ask me about students who have died in BUDS, and I think there have been 10 in the history of BUDS since the 50s, is that it needs to continue to happen.
I don't want it to happen.
I don't want anybody to lose their life.
But if the training becomes so exceedingly safe that that's not a potential, then we're not serving people in that training and we're not preparing them for what the battlefield is going to expect.
There is a diversity, equity, and inclusion chief at the Pentagon now who wrote a book that basically called the first responders menaces and basically painted them as white supremacists.
It's going a very bad direction.
I will say this about the military.
What people don't understand is it is highly professional.
I've always been impressed.
There are standards.
There's doctrine.
And instructors know that they follow that playbook.
They mitigate risk to the lowest level because you always have the risk of getting investigated for something like this.
So who's letting these progressive policies infect the military?
How is that ever an option?
Is that just people who are blissfully unaware because they're on the outside?
How does that ever get in to the point where you're considering things like elite groups like the SEALs having to deal with this sort of politically correct nonsense?
Personally, I think the policy of transparency that was made or popularized by President Obama, and I'm not attacking President Obama.
He was aggressive on the war on terror.
He made a lot of aggressive decisions, but there are certain communities where transparency, like the CIA special operations, is not the best policy, is they should remain in the shadows, and there should be Just public trust that we are doing the right things.
We don't want anyone to pass away in training.
We don't want to get anyone hurt.
But we also don't want to advertise our capabilities or our training or capacities to potential military peers like China or Russia.
So, the transparency for me, propaganda, do it with the regular military, keep special operations out of the bubble.
I don't have an answer for how it started infiltrating other than it seems to be the groundswell.
I mean, the military is just a group of people from normal societies, so I don't think it's uncommon to see things that our society is dealing with working their way into the military, but I do hope that there is a backstop against it.
And in my mind, everything needs to be worked in a reverse direction.
What is it we're asking these people to do in the real world execution of their job?
Now let's work our training pipeline to prepare those people for that.
I don't know where the progressive ideology falls into that or how it infects that.
Or how it got started.
And I'm a little bit detached from the teams at this point.
I've been out now for almost 10 years, but I still stay in contact with people.
And what I am hearing, though, is that it is pushing at the corners and it is pushing at the edges.
And it's not enhancing what they're doing.
In their words, not mine, because, again, I've been out of it for almost a decade.
And their word's not mine.
It's not enhancing their ability to perform on the X. But I can't understand.
Let me say, well, to this point, I wrote a book about this called The Talent War, how special operations and great organizations went on talent.
It was about performance and about building high-performing teams and how the special operations goes about it.
Because when you think about it, in the private sector, people hire you based on how much industry experience you usually have.
Well, in our profession, I can't go to a high school or a college and say, who here has special operations experience?
Nobody would raise their hands.
So by nature, the assessment and selection process, which we're talking about, basic underwater demolition school, is hire for character, train for skill.
And that's why we push these men and women to their limits, their mental and physical limits, because that's where true character emerges.
And that's what we're looking for.
We're looking for mental toughness, resiliency, the ability to work as a team.
And that brings up a point.
You know, one of the former commandants in the Marine Corps just wrote an article and basically was arguing, keep your hands off the military.
The military runs off a different set of ideologies.
Those ideologies are conformity to a degree, which conformity is not always a bad thing.
You know, if you have a baseball team, you want some conformity to SOPs, standard operating procedures.
But it's also to operate as a team.
So in this training, we break people down in their individual selves and we build them up as a team player, where the public sector sort of Let's say they trend towards individuality, which is not bad either.
We do want people to be people.
Like Andy has a personality.
I have a personality.
And we almost breed this...
I like to call it in the SEAL teams a healthy disrespect for authority.
To push back against...
I don't want to say my orders.
I never gave orders.
These are my orders.
I've never said that.
But, hey, here's my decision.
This is what we're going to do.
If it's not a good idea and I outrank Andy, Andy's going to come back and be like, yeah, we're not going to do that.
That's stupid and this is why.
So he does it in a professional and tactful way.
But I'm sick and tired and, you know, I do place very high-performing veterans into jobs.
That's what I do for a living.
But people, based off Hollywood, have these bad, Sort of perceptions of what the military is.
It's because Paramount and Warner Brothers don't paint us in a good light.
We're not the Chris Kyles.
This guy and all the guys I served with were the most lethal warriors in the world.
I was not.
I ended up there and I was proud to be part of a team.
I told Andy, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Meaning I was part of a good team.
We got that mission done.
We got that bride married.
But the most lethal warriors I knew who no one will ever know in the public We're kind, empathetic, respectful, and they loved their fellow man.
And they were husbands.
They were fathers.
They were sons.
They were wives, daughters, mothers.
And when they needed to dial empathy down and do the bad part of a job, they did it and they did it with lethality.
And then they dialed the empathy back up.
But people naturally gravitate towards Hollywood and they paint this bad picture as a veteran.
I mean, I came from Atherton, man.
It's one of the most affluent towns in America.
And I ended up amongst a lot of guys that came from nothing.
And their character far outweighs a lot of the people I know in the public sector.
I think it's harder to tell the full story when you have a time compressed medium to tell that story in.
If you want to have people put their butts into seats and it's the last 20 plus years of sustained combat operation, you're probably going to make a movie about things exploding, bullets flying over your head.
You might dive into a little bit of the storyline on some people's lives, but it's an easier Unfortunately, story and narrative to tell than to truly unpack what it takes to live in that world for that long.
That's probably the only exposure, other than things like this, like a podcast where people actually get to sit down and talk, that the only exposure these people ever have, if they don't know anyone that was in the SEALs or anyone that was Green Beret or Ranger or what have you, they don't know.
So, you know, maybe they read an article in the Times like, oh, these people are assholes.
This is terrible.
Look what they're doing to the recruits.
We need to dial this down.
We need to dial this back like I have to do at the office.
Like, they don't have a comprehension of, like, what is necessary to get the job done or what you guys have to do.
Yeah, if I could rewind the clock back to 2010, my last deployment, and you take somebody who says that the training that we were talking about is unnecessary.
Like, why don't you just get in my hip pocket for tonight?
Why don't you just come with me on target and at the end of this we're gonna do a debrief and you let me know how difficult you think the training should be so you can perform at this level in an environment that might take your life and they're gonna go okay well I don't know what they would say but I would assume they would say yeah you guys need to make this as really as hard as possible and I'm totally good with you gassing people and maybe you should gas them for longer many more times and you should do this it would blow their fucking mind what is actually required to be able to perform in that environment And I can't fault them for not understanding that because
And if they saw the atrocities that we saw over there, they would understand why.
You know, evil exists.
And you've heard the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to stand by and do nothing.
I mean, we saw ISIS throwing gay men from seven-story roofs with the people in the town watching.
There is evil, and unfortunately, sometimes you've got to go to hell to send somebody to hell.
It's a famous quote.
It's an ugly job.
I think you said it best.
I watched an interview where you said war leaves a fingerprint.
It leaves a fingerprint and that fingerprint will always be a part of our DNA. And I question some of the things we did and the outcomes of the war.
And I even went back as a BUDS instructor.
I was the junior officer training course director for the SEALs at graduated BUDS. And my job in one month was to turn them into ground force commanders, GFCs as we call it.
And I worked at Hell Week Evolution.
And when I worked it, I was the, what do you call it, not the phase officer, but the OIC for the evolution.
When you go back and actually, because you go through it the first time and it's so abstract because it's just day after day after day.
And you go back as an instructor and there's not enough instructors to, in just first phase, which is where Hell Week occurs, they augment from all the other phases because it's a 24-hour training pipeline from a Sunday till about Friday afternoon.
And you watch people who are on the verge of death.
And they're there voluntarily.
And even though you went through it, you sit back and you're like, holy shit.
Like, did we look that bad?
I remember specifically asking other instructors, like, do you think that we looked as bad as they looked when we were in training?
And I, even going through it because I was a prior recon Marine, so I thought I knew what they were looking for, made a judgment on some of the kids that were going through Buds with me.
One of them was a little Asian kid who was sort of passive and unassuming.
I mean, the main tools that you have at BUDS is the beach, so you have sand, which is obviously an amazing abrasive, and the cold water.
And the main tools at BUDS are telephone poles, which are super low-tech, these IBSs, inflatable boats small, which is an air-filled rubber boat carried by three on each side and an officer in the back, generally, because As Mike knows from his career, they're just generally doing less than the enlisted.
I would describe, and this is my description, not anything that I think the Navy would agree with, but I would describe Bud's training as an ability to look at who somebody really is.
When you're at the lowest point you ever thought you've been at.
Emotionally, physiologically, psychologically.
And when presented a choice, are you going to take care of yourself or are you going to take care of the people that are next to you?
And you can think somebody as hard as hell, you know, at the beginning stages of BUDS, and then everything changes in that one week.
And, you know, what we found, personally, this is my anecdotal sort of learning, is that people who faced a lot of obstacles early in life before getting to SEAL training...
Usually have the scar tissue of resilience, and they do pretty damn well.
And the thing about Buds is you don't know anyone's story.
You know when no one's—I mean, yeah, you may know that Andy's from the Santa Cruz area and Mike's from Palo Alto area, but you don't know their background.
Point in case, Johnny Kim.
You know, I know Johnny for 15 years and then we finally hear on the Jocko podcast where he sort of goes into his background that his dad was killed by police and he was sort of, you know, he's the one that called the police on that day.
His dad had a standoff and he blames himself.
We never knew that about Johnny.
But had I known that before making an assessment of Johnny, I would have realized that that kid at the time had been through a lot more in life than I had.
And for clarity, the selection process is not perfect.
There are still people that make their way through.
I have seen people who have been fully made it through the multi-year training pipeline, who have been awarded their Trident, maybe even done a combat deployment.
I have seen them quit.
I have seen them give up, which is supposed to be what that training crucible is all about.
Finding those people that in theory would never be able or would never allow themselves to make that decision.
It's just not perfect, but it's as close as I think we can possibly get.
Ultimately, in the career of a SEAL or Army Special Forces or 75th Ranger Regiment, they all go through very similar training.
That's just the entrance exam.
It's a long entrance exam, and it's the longest behavioral interview probably in the world.
And to Andy's point, we still get it wrong, but that's the entrance exam.
And then the next part of your career, the next, you know, potential five years, 20 years, 30 years, it then sort of transforms into performance.
Can you perform?
Can you do the tactical and technical side?
We already know you have the mental toughness, the resilience, but there's a lot of guys that graduate BUDS that just, quite frankly, to his point, this talent distribution, this normal distribution, this bell curve.
I mean, we've got our top 2%, and they're completely in a different realm.
And then you've got the 98%, and you can split that into multiple tranches of the high performers, middle-of-the-road performers, and then we call it the bottom of the barrel.
Yeah, I'm a little over my skis on this one because they changed it when I went through.
We did a bunch.
So the goal at the end of the day is to be awarded your Triton.
It's a metal pin that you get handed and they change your NEC or what does that mean?
Naval Enlistment Classification?
It changed it to a 5326 for an enlisted person, which means you're a SEAL. When you show up on, like, you're now officially a SEAL. When I went through, it was BUDS, it was Static Line Jump School out at Fort Banning.
We checked into our team and they put us through another six months to a year of training and then you went around all of the departments and you tested in front of your peers and you were doing calculations for a demo.
You were planning a dive with currents.
You were taking apart weaponry.
I mean you were talking about tactics and it was a very – at the time I was like this is unbelievable.
Like I thought it was just this robust test of knowledge.
I look back now.
I'm like holy shit.
Those were the entry level.
Like those were just the chapters.
I didn't understand the words that were even on the page.
So each team kind of did their own thing.
And, you know, post 9-11, a lot of things got course corrected, and I think this is one of them.
They realized it's not a good idea to have SEAL Team 5, which is literally a nine-iron golf shot away from SEAL Team 3, doing different training.
Probably better if we all get the same product at the end of the day.
So now when you graduate BUDS, you go to a program called, it's SQT, SEAL Qualification Training, which is going to be like another maybe two years, depending on when you time it, and you go through cold weather training.
Jungle training, desert training, everything, comms, all of that stuff.
And at the end of that, they graduate as a class, they're all awarded their trident, so they all have the same baseline level of training, and then you go to your SEAL team.
So you're two years into a pipeline before you show up for your first day on the job at a SEAL team.
Is it difficult to get people to – is it like – do you have the same amount of people that are trying to become SEALs now as there was in the past or is it – I would say so.
It's more competitive to even get into the training.
Because they've got thousands of kids competing for only 250 slots per class.
And these kids are better athletes.
They're smarter.
So it's more competitive.
So the process has worked.
There is something to say for Hollywood.
And, you know, the Paramount Plus show, you know, SEAL team, they are a funnel filler for recruitment, for high-performing kids coming out of high school or college that want to give it a shot to see if they have what it takes to become a SEAL, an Army Special Forces Green Beret, Ranger Regiment, MARSOC Raider.
And that's the whole point.
The whole point is we hope the next generation coming behind us is better, faster, stronger than we were.
It's interesting you ask that, though, because in one of those articles, and I believe it was around, I read it in an article, it was around the young man's death.
It was talking about the attrition rate, you know, the number of people that are making it through.
And it would appear that the attrition rate, or the number of people making it through, is decreasing, which gives you an opportunity to look at that in two different directions.
I know I have my take on it, and then there seemed to be a more popular take that was being talked about.
And the more popular take was, well, this training is too hard.
Why are we doing these things?
The way I look at it is, let's assume that the training has actually been the same largely since its inception.
I think it was in like the 40s or 50s when they switched from being the UDT into the SEAL teams.
If the training has actually stayed the same and we're using the same fucking telephone pole logs, I wouldn't be shocked if we were still using some of the actual same telephone pole logs from back in the day.
Then what is it that is actually changing?
And the answer is the people who are attempting the training.
So instead of vilifying the training, maybe we ought to take a hard look at our society, and maybe the curriculum is doing just fine.
But as a society, we're getting softer and softer and softer with less resilience.
And that to me explains a lot more the differences in attrition than the actual curriculum itself.
It's hard to argue that that's not the case in terms of the people that you see today.
It seems like today people demand more.
They feel like they deserve more.
They feel like they're entitled to more.
And they feel like they want to work less.
I mean that's a narrative that you see pushed over and over and over again, which is the exact opposite you want.
For any kind of extraordinary achievement.
That attitude is going to keep you from ever being extraordinary at anything.
If you think that the world owes you something, you think that you're entitled to something, you think that you're working too hard.
The people that excel in any endeavor in life are the people that are willing to work the smartest, the hardest, and the people that are able to get out of their own fucking way and realize that they're task-oriented.
They get the job done, whatever the fuck it is.
People that concentrate on, and this is something that's enforced in our society, people that concentrate on the negative aspects of things.
Like that, you know, why is it so hard?
Why is this?
Why does this person have something that I don't?
You know, why do they get a chance and I don't?
And that kind of thinking is encouraged in our culture today.
It's like encouraged that if you didn't succeed, it's more likely that somebody fucked you over.
It's less likely that you're kind of fucking lazy or entitled or, you know, nobody wants to tell anybody that today.
Nobody wants to tell anybody that you're not working hard.
I would be shocked if it wasn't another elite jiu-jitsu fighter.
And I'm not even positive that's what happened, but to me, in my head, I'm like, okay, that would probably make sense if they were to take that action.
Which is kind of fucked because I actually had a conversation with Zuckerberg about him.
He's like, do you like the way he talks online?
I'm like, it's fun.
No one's getting hurt.
The people that he's doing this to are also people like that.
Now, you could be that person who wants every martial artist to behave like a noble warrior who's out there testing their skills with respect and dignity.
Or you could be the guy that fucking fills up arenas because people want to come to see him.
That's what Floyd Mayweather is.
That's what Gordon Ryan is.
Like the elite of the elite who talk a ton of shit and there's a psychological warfare aspect that I don't think, I think non-competitors don't understand that.
There's a thing about that guy.
He gets into your fucking head.
When you go to sleep at night and you think about the fucking Instagram post he made about you, you're like, fuck!
It worries me, though, that, you know, obviously, Zuckerberg maybe replaced him with somebody else, because that guy literally could probably throw the switches at these companies.
But what does it matter whether or not I like the way he conducts himself online?
Like, I'm super appreciative of the rights that we have in this country, but I've yet to come one that says you have the right not to be offended at any point in your life.
You don't see heavyweights operate at the same pace that you see welterweights or lightweights.
There's a reason for that.
I don't think you can.
And if you look at someone like Demetrius Johnson, who's a fucking whirlwind in there, he's 125 pounds.
The demand for oxygen is very different than Francis Ngannou.
You don't see a guy like Ngannou that fights at that pace.
They literally cannot.
These variables need to be taken into consideration when you apply tactics and strategy and how you choose to, you know, obviously he has a different amount of force in each shot and that is also the case too.
I talked to Max Holloway about that once.
We were talking about Jose Aldo, and I was asking him, like, he knew that Aldo was fading after, like, one or two rounds, and he said, it's power.
He goes, those guys have more power than me.
He goes, they're hitting harder, you know, and that shit takes up a lot of energy.
And he was kind of laughing about it.
He's like, I don't have any power, man.
He's like, those guys have so much more power.
He goes, I gotta hit a guy a lot of times to take him out.
But these guys, these one-shot guys, they're all like...
That's Conor, Conor McGregor, who's got that incredible power.
But that power, when you throw at that explosiveness, you're essentially sprinting.
Whereas other guys are running marathons.
You know, a guy like Max Holloway is putting that volume on you.
The difference is MMA fighters are individuals competing against other individuals.
It's not a team sport.
I could see the merit in having a structure like a union.
I just don't see fighters going along with it.
Because, like, let's say, like, a big fight's coming up, right?
Like, Alex Pajera is fighting Israel Adesanya.
If Pajera gets injured, and he can't fight Adesanya, and, you know, there's a bunch of people that are saying, like, I want to fight, and then there's, well, you have to get paid the same amount as Pajera, this is our union dues, and then someone comes along and says, listen, I'll fucking take that shot for half that money, because I want to be the fucking champion, and I want that opportunity.
You're going to get fighters that cross that line.
And if there's no union, that makes it easier to do.
Could you conceivably form a union where people would get paid the correct amount?
Yes, I think it could be done.
I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how it could be structured.
But I think there's some arguments.
There's some arguments that a union would be a good thing.
And then there's some arguments that...
It's better to have a group like the UFC, an organization that cares deeply about the fighters and tries to compensate them fairly.
Do they?
You know, again, it's not my world.
This is my world.
I sit down.
I put the fucking headsets on.
I understand what these guys are capable of.
I know their history.
I know what they're doing.
I talk about what's happening during the fight.
I try to give honor and respect to it.
That's what I do.
Other than that, all I can say is I want them to be compensated fairly.
All the freak athletes that I've ever met in my life.
I talked to Luke Rockhold about him, and he's like, even when you hit that guy, he's made out of metal.
Yoel Romero is a famous story.
I've told him before.
Forgive me if you've heard this.
He went to a doctor, because UFC sent him to this doctor.
After one of his fights, because he had a fractured orbital, and the doctor examines him and then calls the UFC and goes, where did you find this guy?
And he goes, yeah, he's fucking amazing.
He goes, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.
I've never seen a human like him.
He goes, I have been studying medicine and practicing medicine for more than 40 years.
He goes, I've never seen a person like this.
He goes, the ligaments and the tendons in his eyes are three times larger than a normal person's.
Like the structure of his face is different.
He had a fractured bone in his orbital.
He said they brought him in a few days later.
He goes, it's already healing.
That's Yoel.
I mean, he was on the Cuban Olympic wrestling team and he was a part of that program.
He came on the podcast and Joey Diaz translated.
He was speaking Spanish and Joey's also Cuban.
It was a beautiful thing.
The way he was saying, the way he was describing it, he was like, when you go to that program, he goes, you become a fucking machine.
You become a machine.
You know, the elite wrestlers get better food, they eat more often, and so it, you know, motivates the people below him who they're training with every day to beat them and get better.
Yoel was a freak.
And you gotta understand, Yoel's still elite, and he's like 43 or 44 years old.
He's a fucking freak, man.
He's a fucking freak.
By the way, cheated against Tim Kennedy.
Let's just say that right now.
Tim Kennedy had him really badly hurt, cracked him, rocked him, and his corner did some sneaky shit and kept him on the stool.
And he got to the corner, sat down, and the corner, look, they did their fucking job.
Just like Angelo Dundee did with Cassius Clay when he fought in England.
What the fuck is that guy's name?
So a gentleman in England who caught, it's not the tip of my tongue, who caught Cassius Clay when he was young with a vicious left hook and dropped him.
And Angelo Dundee cut his gloves and they had to change his gloves.
So this is the end of the round, goes back to his corner.
Tim's got him fucked, right?
Look at him.
He's really bad.
Now, at the end of the round, the round's over, and Tim's there, and he's still sitting down.
The round's supposed to start.
He's still on his stool.
They're wiping him off.
They took all this extra time.
And then finally, I want to say it's a legit 20, 30 seconds later, Yoel gets up, and Yoel eventually catches Tim with that right hand and finishes him.
And Tim lost that fight.
But there's a real argument that he should have won that fight.
There's a real argument that he should have stopped that fight when he was not ready and getting up at the beginning of the round.
Because if you don't get up, you're basically quitting.
You're saying, I'm not ready, which means you're not ready to fight, which means the fight's over.
I think once, I mean, obviously not everybody trains, but once you start training a little bit, you have an appreciation for how hard it is to actually hold down somebody your size, probably the same skill level.
That wants to get up.
Like, the cage work, it can look boring, but again, now they understand what's going on in the fight for the underhook and the head, you're like, oh shit, this is badass.
What are we talking— I mean knees on the ground, knees to the head, knees to the head on the ground, kicks to the head on the ground.
They're doing that in one FC and they're doing it in a cage and a lot of people think it shouldn't happen in a cage because there's times where you can't get away and you're trapped and someone could soccer kick you or stomp you.
But that's a real fight.
If the problem is the cage, I think they should eliminate the cage.
I don't think they should eliminate those weapons.
Because there's positions where guys go into where it appears like they're safe.
Like if a guy's in a turtle position and you've got like a head and arm and you're above him, there's an amazing option to knee someone in the head and stop the fight.
And you saw a lot of that in Pride.
Like Mark Coleman stopped a lot of guys in Pride because he would get to that position and he would drop knees on their head.
Because you should be able to.
That's a legitimate position.
If you can knee someone standing and you can knee them in a clinch, why can't you knee them when they're on the ground?
You should be able to.
It's a legitimate move.
And if knees are legal, if a knee to a head is legal, why isn't it legal on the ground?
Why are we making it safer to fight with strikes on the ground?
It's like this is the last bastion of chaos in combat sports.
And to eliminate certain weapons, I think they eliminated some things initially in the beginning because they felt like those things were too dangerous.
That's the reason to this day you can't do a 12 to 6 elbow.
Which makes zero sense, because it's not even the most strong elbow.
The most powerful elbow is actually an elbow where you drive down, like, to the side.
The most powerful elbow, I believe, is like this.
It's not like this, because this is not necessarily the best move, like, kinetically.
I think kinetically, the shoulder comes back and it's a downward elbow, probably has more force.
And I'd like that measured.
Because this is still illegal in 2022. It's so dumb.
And the reason why it was illegal, and Big John McCarthy talked about this, Big John, in the early days, you know, he was a martial artist, black belt in jiu-jitsu, and he had to go, and he was the referee.
He had to go in front of these athletic commissions and talk to them about the sport and try to convince these people to approve it.
And one of the things these fucking normies, they didn't like the fact that people could break bricks on TV. Like on ESPN, you see the karate demonstration.
They're buckled into their seat, and they start the fight while they're in a car, and they have to get out of the buckle and beat the shit out of each other.
Yeah, David LaDuke, he's been on the podcast before.
He's a fucking savage man.
In his style of fighting, they incorporate headbutts.
So he practices headbutts with the mitts.
So he's like, his combinations involve headbutts.
It's like crack, one, two, bam, headbutt, elbow, headbutt.
Like he throws them in, in like technical combinations.
So that would be good for him in there.
The headbutts were a big part of Mark Coleman's early career, too, because he would get guys on the ground and he would get into their guard and fucking headbutt him in the face and punch him in the face.
It would save lives because I've seen situations induced, and I think this happens sometimes with law enforcement as well, where you reach the limit of your tools.
And you know as well as I do, if you apply too much pressure in certain places, people are going to freak the fuck out.
And you probably could get compliance with a lot less force if you knew what you were doing.
But there's also – you have to understand what the government contracting – Each person is selling their system and there's some politics, but it got better and better.
I mean, where you were at, they were bringing in Rasputin.
I wrote about him in my book, and funny enough, and I know Johnny well, and we, again, came through BUDS, went to SEAL Team 3 together, we're together.
When I wrote the book, I put a 4.0.
He got a 4.0 in mathematics at the University of San Diego.
And he called me.
He was like, Mike, it was actually a 3.98.
Hey, Dickhead, you can round that up.
Johnny, shut up.
I rounded up.
Just don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
But by all rights, he could have returned to the SEAL teams as an officer.
There's exceptional people in this world and the only way to find out if they're exceptional is to go through exceptional difficult scenarios and really tried and true.
No one's just exceptional for no reason.
You have to do something.
And it's hard.
It's hard to do those things.
That's why this disparaging of elite combat groups like the SEALs is so disturbing to me.
It's because it's done by people who aren't exceptional and who don't understand what's involved in something like that.
It's not necessarily what I have read in print, because what I have in my own personal experience, Mike, I'd be curious to see your thoughts on this.
Often times in the print medium, I find that they're coming at it from an angle.
And they may, I don't know what necessarily their motivation may be.
Sometimes I would even describe it as they have an axe to grind.
And I don't know where that motivation comes from, from the axe to grind.
But I think that transparency from this, like the SEAL community is not perfect.
And I can only speak to the SEAL community that I served in.
We could have done things better.
We could have evolved faster early on in the war.
It's tough to evolve at the speed of war.
It's very, very hard and we were behind.
I don't think that criticism is a bad thing and I don't think that you have to be a SEAL to look at a program and say, hey, maybe you could look at doing something like this to improve it.
But it should be positioned that way, not a hatchet job that's trying to hobble the legs of the community because you haven't – you know what I mean?
So it's almost as if the motivation from the person who has that criticism matters almost as much as the criticisms.
And again, we already talked about that video should have never existed in the first place.
Like, do your job as an instructor.
Don't film the fucking students for your personal highlight reel.
But, you know, that training needs to exist, but somebody can weaponize that and then begin to try to like hobble the community as opposed to looking at it for why we do it, the reason behind it.
It's some of the motivations and the access to grind.
They're very deep.
And it just it's not helping the community.
It's actually hurting it.
And I don't know if that's what those people want.
I don't know if they want notoriety for writing those.
Rarely, though, do the instructors in first phase have to launch people.
Most people predominantly are DOR. And we see them out in a very professional and tactful way.
And we make sure, hey, what did you learn from that experience?
What do you want to do in the Navy?
And sometimes the Navy will just let them exit out of the military.
But, dude, we put a precedence on leadership even then, even though, I mean, the two organizations that wrote the manual on leadership are the Army and the Marine Corps.
Not the SEAL teams.
We copyrighted or plagiarized everything from the Marine Corps and the Army.
And, you know, the funny part is every kid that comes out of BUDS has the potential to be a great SEAL. You know, the next step is who do they end up under as a mentor?
Because we sometimes allow bad actors to stay in the community, and guess what they do?
They impact the young SEALs below them.
And the young SEALs, whatever they learn from them, believe that that is the standard and that's acceptable within the community.
And that leads to bad seals.
But, I mean, there was a name up there, Admiral Keith Richards.
That guy's a stud, man.
Is he perfect?
No, but he's a good, good man, and he's in charge of the community now, as was Wyman Howard, who just retired, who was beloved.
The guys would do anything for Wyman Howard, and Wyman Howard wouldn't ask them to do anything illegal.
That would get them in any trouble whatsoever.
I mean, these guys are ethical leaders, but that's overlooked in the media, and they just go for that one thing.
What has been asked of people in the military, like the execution of their normal job, and I'll speak only from the special operations perspective.
You're operating at What I would describe the limits of the gray area, oftentimes, where decisions are going to be made in a super time compressed environment.
Now I'm talking about like on target, super time compressed environment with extremely limited information and mistakes get made.
And what I'll say is in every, I've worked with at least every military branch and probably every one of the special operations communities.
If you spent only your time looking into the shadows, For things that if you were to measure against, are these above the board or below the board, did they meet the standard?
And you're only looking for things that were below the board that didn't meet the standard.
You're going to find a lot of them.
A lot of those stories are written about or told, and it's hard to, again, balance the narrative.
It can make it seem as if that is the ethos of the community.
This is who we are.
This is who we breed.
And it's almost impossible to balance it because I don't know how we talk about Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Bin Laden.
Like, that was very public.
That was a success.
That's a way to balance the narrative or show the success of what the US military is capable of.
But how do you show that when you go on a deployment and you're banging out 90, 120 targets doing everything that everybody would want?
There's no way to And you shouldn't talk about that.
You know what I mean?
It's like this negative – the negative aspect of it, which does exist.
I'll be the first person to say that not everything is perfect, but it's impossible to balance that with, hey, look at all these things where we did – because it just – you also don't want to share those things.
But when people discuss that operation publicly, when they give interviews, when they write books about it, what's the general attitude in the teams about that?
I think to a degree some of them still are depending on the angle that you take.
Jack Carr, good example, mutual friend.
He is like a 98% nonfiction writer, 2% fiction, and it's beautiful because it falls into the fiction category, but it's so precise in so many ways, which I think is what people like about the books.
There's that sense of realism.
It's like this gun and to the point where I'll be like...
Hey Jack, man, I like your books, but shut the fuck up about the serial number on the gun.
But to my knowledge, he hasn't gotten any negative pushback, nor do I think he should because he's not trying to write the book of, hey, no shit, there I was.
It's truth layered with fiction that tells a fucking fantastic story.
And again, opinions are going to vary depending on who you talk to when it comes to people who write books.
Jocko is another example.
It's He is writing leadership books based on his experiences, not, hey, there I was, no shit, on target.
I think where people who start flirting with some negative reactions are the ones who are like, it's all, hey, no shit, there I was.
I know you got medically discharged, but I'm saying a lot of the guys that write those books, there I was and I single-handedly won the war.
Usually serve two to three combat deployments, maybe four.
And Jocko and Leif did a good job with extreme ownership.
They were trying to do something.
They were trying to do, again, a knowledge transfer of what they learned that worked well leading organizations.
And it was the same with my book.
I hate the fact that it's so cliche I wrote a book, but actually the book I wrote was more about the Army Special Forces community and the process they had created.
But when somebody writes a self-grandizing book about how great they were, that's where it goes wrong.
And I've got a second book coming out January 10th, The Everyday Warrior, and it's a self-help book.
But it's not about me, nor was the first book.
To say guys can't write books that will benefit other people, like Dave Goggins wrote a book.
Whether you love or hate Dave Goggins, the community is conflicted there too.
I loved every single one, whether I liked them or not.
And regardless of whether we liked each other, and there's guys that didn't like me, on Monday, we came together.
We looked at the board and said, what's the mission?
We're overseas for four months.
What's the mission tonight?
We're going to operate this team with professionalism and tact.
We're going to accomplish a mission.
We're going to bring all our boys home.
And then at the end of the deployment, they went their way and drank with their buddies.
And I went my way and I drank with my buddies.
So I loved all my brothers.
And again, this is another thing that people in the private sector get wrong.
I usually, when I talk to companies, they ask, how did you lead?
I led through love, man.
I led through love.
I loved, and it took me a while to recognize this, and I went through some rough time here in Austin.
Freshly divorced, just left the SEAL teams, and it got dark.
And I was doing a lot of reflection.
And I came to realize I loved the men and women I served with, my left and right, a lot more than I hated the enemy.
I don't care about the enemy.
But if somebody was going to threaten one of my brothers or sisters, then, God help me, I was going to step in and do whatever it took to annihilate them.
But it's the same thing with your kids.
You know, the highest form of compassion is accountability.
And you've got kids.
If your kids do something wrong, you correct them.
Because you want them to become competent, good human beings.
And that is love right there.
That's accountability.
And it's driven through your compassion for them to do your job as a father or a mentor.
You can put ice cubes in it, Joe, or maybe you just rub it on the edge just to give it like, you know, it's like the little dusting of, you know, pumpkin spice on the top of the latte.
And so I got a hip resurfacing, which is basically like a hip replacement for young people.
And, dude, I was just going through depression sitting on the couch because that is a lot worse, the recovery, than a traditional hip replacement.
And a buddy of mine, Fred Williams, who runs Complete Parachute Solutions, they basically train a good portion of our special operations in how to parachute, and he's a former SEAL himself.
Just even if you hike the trail, it makes you feel so small in a good way.
It's almost like a wake-up call.
Like, I need to do more as a human being.
And so, I had created sort of this proof of concept called Legacy Expeditions.
Because I believe, you know, our Fallen, who I will speak volumes about, and in fact, I got a book for you that's coming out in November about Michael Monsoor, who was a SEAL who was awarded posthumously the Medal of Honor for jumping on a grenade and saving two SEALs.
The SEAL to his right, three feet to his right.
Is that their legacies die the second we stop telling their stories.
And additionally, I also raised $200,000 for the kids of Extortion 17. Extortion 17 was the largest loss of life, single incident loss of life in Afghanistan.
31 Americans were killed.
Most of them were SEALs, and they were our former teammates.
And so I think something like 25 kids were left without their fathers.
And so even though their families get a $400,000 check, I think that's after or before taxes, that money doesn't last long.
Carrie Mills was, on a Saturday morning, she got a knock on the door.
And, you know, her son, Cash Mills, was 18 months old, can't remember his father, and all of a sudden, she's on her own with an 18-month-year-old.
And so that $400,000 doesn't go far.
So one of the things beyond honoring their legacy and keeping their stories alive is honor their memory, educate their legacy.
And we raise, and with this, what we have coming up, uh, triple seven expedition, which has never been done.
Seven continents, seven skydives, seven days, folds of honor, uh, Educates the spouses and children of disabled and deceased military service members as well as first responders.
And so we're trying to raise that $7 million to give scholarships to those kids to go to college, to go to trade school, things along those lines.
But Andy and I... Man, I'm just so bored.
I have fun with my job, leadership development and executive search, but there is just, you miss that thrill.
And that's why I called Andy, who had also raised money for the SEAL Foundation on his record attempt.
It's really hard to figure out what to do with any skill that you learned from our previous job that has any application in the outside world.
Like the leadership stuff, I totally understand that.
But if you look at the...
The vast majority of the rote training that we did, what the fuck am I going to do with that outside of the military?
You could apply it to law enforcement for sure, some contracting.
For me, that never seemed appealing.
So I took a 17-year chunk of my life.
One of the things that I absolutely have loved, though, since I started doing it was skydiving.
It's not even a useful skill.
I think it's been used a half a dozen times for real or something like that, maybe more.
But the reason they don't use it in large group nighttime insertions is dangerous as shit.
People get hurt all the time.
But it's something that I learned from my past that I still can enjoy today, which is a singularly useless hobby.
Unless you can get people to pay attention to it and then use that attention to try to educate them on organizations like Folds of Honor.
I mean it sucks.
I mean the – is that brass or copper?
I know it changes your skin green.
But like I don't know how many people – I have so many of those but I never chose to wear them that much.
And those are the names of people left behind.
And all of the people that we served with and we worked with, it's so easy to look at the guy who's kitted up, who's boarding the helicopter, and think that that's the only person that's impacted with the death, or that person, when they get on target...
The only reason they're successful is because of the training that they went through.
And then from my own personal experience, that's not the case.
It's a support network of your extended family.
It's a support network if you're married to your significant other who are playing pickup basketball when you are on the other side of the earth in limited communication, doing shit that's really dangerous.
And then if you don't come back...
At least from what I've seen, the military does a good job for a short period of time, but the military's job is to be forward-thinking, not looking in the rearview mirror.
So eventually, the wheel continues to move on.
And I can't think of a better way to A, honor the people that we served with, but B, continue to pass their legacy along by...
Elevating what their kids are capable of doing through education.
So that's – when he explained that to me, basically what he said was, hey, do you want to go do this jump?
And then he told me all this other stuff later.
I was in on the jump.
But conceptually, it's a good tie for me and I would say probably for you and everybody else that's involved.
It dips a toe back into your – into our old world.
Like we're planning.
It's going to be logistically very challenging.
It's going to suck.
I mean, we're going to fly economy, try to get all over the world in seven days with the skydive in between, going through customs and all this stuff, sleeping in hotels.
But that's kind of the shit that we used to do.
I really enjoyed the hardship of the job.
The skydive, easiest part for sure, except for Mike.
So this is hence why we've named this organization.
We're fundraising on this one for Folds of Honor.
But our organization is Legacy Expeditions.
And where Andy and I want to take this is set up these type of expeditions.
Because when I went to Everest, a buddy of ours called me.
He was like, hey man.
And we were leaving in two weeks.
He was like, hey, I need this right now.
How can I get on this?
And I'm like, fuck.
First off, it costs this much.
And he's like, yeah, there's no way I can afford that.
But there have been multiple guys that reached out like, hey, how do I get involved in this?
So we want to set up expeditions where we're taking veterans for that spiritual experience.
But you're right.
You know where the spiritual part comes in is when I'm surrounded with these guys again, there is like this camaraderie, this homecoming and belonging.
And whether some of the guys didn't know each other, they start making fun of each other and it's just like you're back with the tribe.
You're back with the boys.
And then we also want to train veterans who have never jumped, even amputees, the gift of flight, and get them trained up and dedicate a parachute to them so that, you know, whether they live in Omaha, Austin, LA, they can go on their own and they've got an outlet to just, as we say, air it out.
Because, I mean, when you're jumping from 13,000 feet, it is the best view in the world.
You put terrain around that, like Everest, or where we're starting out in Antarctica, that is, it's ridiculous.
Which will be cool, but actually capturing everything that goes into it, I think it's way harder.
The jumping, in my opinion, we haven't done this yet, is the easiest part.
Like, oh, okay, gravity works, checked it many times, get out over the DZ, land on the DZ, but then everything else that goes in between, weather, aircraft, like, that's actually the hard part.
Most people do their entire skydiving journey at an airport, which is really linear like this table, the plane.
Skydiving in San Diego is a perfect example.
The plane takes off to the west.
It always comes back towards the mountains and most days, depending on the wind, it is going to be going back towards the west and it looks the same, you land the same, the landing pattern is the same.
People still get hurt in that.
There was a group, a large group of people who paid a substantial amount of money to go to Iceland and it was pretty readily apparent that the net, if you will, the safety net that existed Was non-existent or barely there.
Things, you know, inability to talk to an aircraft, inability to talk to the jumpers once they were on the ground.
Varying levels of experience from low hundreds, like low 100s jumps up until I think one of the guy there had like 20,000 jumps.
And I have been around enough people and have done enough jumping and watched people getting hurt that, again, I wasn't worried about my safety and I wasn't worried about Mike's safety because I knew my background.
But after watching what happened the first day and then somebody getting hurt on the first jump of the second day and then some stuff that transpired in an aircraft and we jumped into a location where the altimeter settings were incorrect based off the information.
So I got to the ground and my altimeter read negative 750 feet.
It can be digital or it can be analog, but either way it has to be set correctly.
Otherwise, what you're looking at, whether it's analog or digital, is not going to be giving you the correct information.
So the second jump of the second day, we were told by the person running our aircraft that we needed to offset 750 feet.
Which is not that big of a deal.
And also, by the way, on the reserve parachute, there's a computer with a small pyrotechnic charge that has essentially a razor blade that cuts your reserve parachute if it senses a barometric pressure, I believe, barometric pressure speed and altitude criteria.
And these things have, like, hundreds of documented saves.
Unconscious skydiver, the thing goes off, your reserve comes out, and at least you land under a reserve parachute.
They can be offset as well.
But if you're going to be jumping into a place, let's say you were supposed to land 750 feet higher, and now all of a sudden you're going to land somewhere that's 300, you know, sea level, which is essentially what we ended up doing, both the computer in your reserve parachute and the altimeter on your wrist are presenting information to you that is incorrect.
So when I thought I was at, or if somebody thought they were at their normal pole altitude, say, of 3,000 feet, they're actually at 2,250.
Let's say they have a malfunction and you normally will give yourself a certain amount of time to work through that.
You could easily burn through the criteria for your reserve to fire and the next thing you know you have dual entanglement with both canopies out and that's how people die.
So we landed.
I looked down.
It said negative 750. They audibled in the aircraft and just pulled out a phone and said, hey, we're jumping in here.
Nobody had ever seen it.
There was no real wind indicators on the ground.
And at that point, Mike went and picked a woman up out of a field with a broken leg on the first jump of the second day.
So that had already happened that day.
We got into the plane.
I'm glossing over a lot of things to try to be as kind as possible to paint a broad picture though but it had reached for me when we got onto the ground like my safety go no go.
I was absolutely just done with what was happening and again I was just I didn't want to see anybody else get hurt.
It's a dangerous enough activity as it is so one of the organizers happened to be there and I had one of my you know about every decade falling short of how I should actually talk to people and yeah let them know exactly how I felt.
We'll run every expedition from here forth because we just do it in a way—that's the one thing I love about the military is we just mitigate risk, man.
We go through the checklist as mundane as that may seem or prescribed as it may be, but that's why we have so, you know, very few fatalities in our operations compared to, let's say, the civilian skydiving world.
And so to come to find out that there actually should never have been briefed an offset for the DZ, the altimeter should have just been set for zero, it highlighted the lack of structure and communication in the chain of command of that organization.
Each individual aircraft load was largely operating on their own.
And there's some inherent danger in that, of having something that is actually set, briefed, this is the standard.
And again, it's one of the beauties.
I mean, the military can get very overkill sometimes with briefing and risk mitigation, but there's a reason for it.
And the reason is they've hurt people by not doing that.
The second aircraft, I think the closest jumper, landed three miles from us, to include people landing about five miles away over a river that had a water temperature that was one to two degrees above freezing because it was glacier melt.
But again, at the end of the day, Joe, I love it because it ties me back into that world.
Yeah.
I know too many people and have seen the detritus that's left behind when shit goes south.
I'd rather make an impact in their life.
I consider what I personally did overseas to be utterly and meaningly useless in the grand scheme of things, but I think helping those people out has a greater value than I can describe.
I was just happy to be there with the team and watching these guys display selfless valor on a nightly basis.
I still smile at it.
But with the documentary, it's not for us.
We are also jumping in memory of one to two veterans on each continent.
And so Dan Myrick and Christian Kremple controlled the documentary.
We know nothing about how to do that.
All we asked is that you focus on the story of those guys we jump in honor of.
And so...
Hopefully it'll show a different side, as we talked about in Hollywood, painting us a certain way.
It'll show a different side of the military veterans and the special operators we know and who they are, and show the professional side, again, the empathy, the respect.
That's important to us, that this thing comes out and tells those stories the right way.
777.givesmart.com And if somebody wants that million dollar seat, contact us at lrobinson at foldsofhonor.com That's lrobinson at foldsofhonor.com And hell, we're still taking sponsors to fund this thing, but it's a go.
December 30th, we leave.
And then we have to sit in Antarctica for a little while.
Before we can get the jump in, and we're still trying to contact American Airlines to get assistance or get FedEx to fly in a plane and pick us up in Antarctica.
I think I'm having dinner with the CEO on Friday or Thursday.
So, I can't get into the specifics, but eventually, if he wears that out, and that's lasted, now it's relatively young, a new procedure, only the last few decades, some people have lasted 25 years, but if he's still fighting...
I mean, you're doing the in-home small movements for about a month and a half, and then you go to physical therapy, but they want you to stay away from any running or major deadlifting or things like that for about four to six months.
So my theory on that is if you start stacking me, I'm going to let you right the fuck past.
Because I care more about my neck.
And honestly, who gives a shit about what happens on the mat?
I like it.
I realize that I'm never going to master it.
I enjoy the training.
It's physically healthy for me.
It mentally helps me.
I can tell that there's no end to the journey.
Nothing that actually happens on the mat matters unless you choose to make it matter and derive your self-worth from that, which I think would probably lead to having pictures like that out there because you're going to take stuff too far.
You know, the thing is you getting into it when you're in your 40s is better because you have a better understanding of your vulnerability and also your ego.
And this doesn't matter.
Training is about getting better.
It's not about winning each and every interaction.
And in fact, if you try to win each and every interaction, you probably won't get better because you'll be so defensive and you'll be so focused on trying to protect yourself and win that you'll never learn new skills because you won't open up enough.
And I want to do it when I'm 60. Yeah, well, pros and cons to picking it up in my 40s.
Origin camp.
I think we talked about this last time.
So they're opening that camp up to 500 people this year.
It was 350 last year, and it's the coolest thing ever because you get to see people in their 20s who have been doing jiu-jitsu since they were four, and they laugh at you, and you're just like, motherfuckers.
And then you see dudes who are late.
So you have an example of both of those things.
But I think for me, the safest bet to continue forward, and I try to take this approach even when there, because there, you want to talk about unknown looks?
There's no way you could, well, I guess you could probably roll with everybody who's there, but...
You would be really, really exhausted.
You get to see all of those looks, but at the end of the day, none of it actually matters if you're just there to learn.
And that's the approach that I take to it.
Spoiler alert, I just turned 45 last week.
World champion is not going to ever be on my...
You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter to me.
But I'd really like to have a 60-year-old still on the mat and can still be competitive to whatever degree would be expected at a 60-year-old.
My coach has said, you know, when you get a new belt, one of the best things that you can do, because I can tell you this from personal experience, that imposter syndrome is super real.
So if you get a belt, go and enter a competition because you're going to have somebody likely at your age, at your weight, at your belt, and you can feel it out with somebody who is not in your position.
Because you know the game for most people in your gym.
They're doing a lot of great stuff though with neck and spine now.
They can go into the actual disc itself and inject stem cells and they're having a fantastic response from that.
People actually regenerate disc tissue, which is really amazing.
So it alleviates a lot of impingements and a lot of pinched nerves and a lot of bulging discs and shit like that.
Yeah, it's a great time now for biologics, for, you know, the intervention of, you know, stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, injecting them into areas and getting some pretty fantastic healing that just wasn't available in the past.
I think there's probably pressure from pharmaceutical drug companies that would lose money if people developed methods to treat people where they didn't need painkillers and didn't need anti-inflammatories.
I mean, it would affect the bottom line.
I mean, that sounds gross and evil, but I think there's a legitimate concern.
You know, I mean, the idea that they're doing it to protect people is nonsense because you don't have a lot of people that are doing this overseas and doing it in Colombia and where have you and getting fucked up from it.
That's not the case.
It's not dangerous.
In fact, it's extremely beneficial.
You know, I know a lot of people that have gone to Panama to Neil Reardon's place and they've gone to Colombia, the biotech place.