Haley's Out, Facebook & Instagram Update, Surviving Civil War w/ Andy Stumpf | PBD Podcast | Ep. 376
Patrick Bet-David and Vincent Oshana are joined by Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf!
Patrick Bet-David and Vincent Oshana are joined by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf as they discuss Nikki Haley dropping out of the 2024 Presidential campaign, Facebook and Instagram back up after being down on Super Tuesday, and Andy explains how a Navy SEAL prepares for Civil War.
3:04 - Andy discusses his style of training during Navy SEALs boot camp.
10:35 - Andy's reaction to the first time he was shot at while serving in the military.
15:15 - Andy discusses the accuracy of military intelligence.
20:49 - Andy addresses the skepticism regarding the death and sea burial of Osama bin Laden.
26:04 - Victoria Nuland, key State Department leader, exits Biden administration.
31:53 - Andy explains how much he trusts the FBI, CIA and other three letter government agencies.
34:51 - Andy explains that U.S. fought wars over the last 20 years was a waste of resources.
41:57 - Do Navy SEALs ever question the missions they're assigned to?
49:23 - What percentage of the soldiers who join the military are doing it for pride?
59:14 - What is causing military recruitment numbers to drop in 2024?
1:10:23 - What the military can do to fix the recruitment crisis.
1:16:06 - Theories behind why Facebook and Instagram go down on Super Tuesday.
1:27:01 - The upcoming movie Civil War predicts the second American Civil War.
1:40:27 - Is the current state of the United States government sustainable for the future?
1:45:55 - Sean Strickland says no Navy SEALs could train with him.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you pet on Goliath when we got pet dated?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hated.
I run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, episode 376.
And I want to start it off by challenging you guys to kind of take inventory of your resume because let me read today's guest's resume.
So imagine you're, I don't know, 11 years old, right?
And from that moment, you already know you want to be a Navy SEAL to the point where you enlist in the Navy while you're in junior high school.
I went into the Army, but I enlisted six months after leaving high school.
This guy already knew in junior high school, he was going to the Navy, ends up going in, becomes a SEAL, then he goes to SEAL Team 6.
He goes on 100-plus operations, you know, combat operations that he goes on.
And here's what he ends up getting by the time he's done with his career.
And by the way, if it's not correct, please get upset at the Wikipedia, folks.
But here's what we have.
Five Bronze Star medals, four with Valor, Purple Heart, the Joint Service Accommodation Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Accommodation Medal with Valor, three Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, two combat action ribbons, the presidential unit citation.
I can go on and on.
Later on, when he gets out in, I think it's June of 2013, he gets a couple years later, he decides to break the world record after jumping from 36,000 feet and flying over 18 miles in wingsuit in an effort to raise a million dollars and for the Navy SEAL Foundation, which he does.
And then at the same time, for some of you guys that maybe you're like, I'm a little wild, maybe you go paintball shooting.
You got shot and you have those wounds that stay.
You're like, look at me.
You go to work.
It hurts over here, right?
Or maybe some of you were rebels, you know, and we were kids fooling around and you got shot by a BB gun.
He said, I just want to know.
I have the pain tolerance.
This guy got shot by an AK-47.
Okay.
And we're going to talk about what the pain, the difference between getting shot by a BB gun versus a paintball versus an AK-47.
And on top of that, without even knowing, he's already on Manect and a lot of people are Manecting with him.
So if you'd like to ask Andy any questions, that is his QR code.
You can directly Monect with them, send them some love.
I know there's a lot of people that was doing a General Mastermind earlier today.
They're like, dude, I can't wait for today's podcast because I want to talk to this guy.
One guy couldn't even say what his job was before because he worked for the government directly working with guys like you, Secret Service.
You know, he said a bunch of different things, which there's a question he asked me that I'll probably end up asking you.
But these are the types of people, if you want to ask for mental toughness, emotional toughness, and he's also a consultant working with a lot of different people.
You can simply get a hold of him on Manect.
That's his QR code.
Ask the man any questions.
Andy, it's great to have you on the podcast.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me out here.
Yeah.
I was looking at your picture.
I'm like, okay, this guy, the picture we put on the thumbnail of the, I'm like, he sells insurance.
Today he looks like he's a Goldman Sachs money manager.
Professional guy.
I go right there, that video.
I mean, I could have sent you guys a different one.
That's too perfect of a picture there.
And then I watched your video, the one video where it's, I don't know how many, it's got 13 million views, 50 million views of you as an instructor.
This is like the water polo team, yes.
And you know, I was watching that.
And you know what was the biggest thing for me?
And I wonder, like, maybe you're going to give a different perspective.
When you're in boot camp or AIT, you know, the stories of drill sergeants would come and they would hit their, you know, their hat against your forehead and it was like screaming in your face, you know, all this stuff.
Your style was like, look, fellas, my job is to get you to quit today.
And it was very monotone as an instructor.
You were not somebody that was very, was that a big difference at the levels?
The higher the levels are, the less you have to scream.
The lower the levels are, the more you have to scream.
Or is that just purely style of leadership?
That goes back to when I went through as a student.
The instructors that yelled at me were the ones I paid no attention to.
So the louder that you talk at somebody, the less likely they are to receive the information.
The quieter that you speak to them, the harder they have to listen.
So that video is, it comes up all the time.
And I got to set the stage for how that actually happened.
I got a call about two hours before that team showed up because I was the closest instructor that lived to the base.
So you have no idea this is like one month in advance?
No, I get a call.
And I was a Buds instructor at the time.
And what I will say is I actually, in the 18 months that I was there as an instructor, I didn't raise my voice a single time.
You don't have to raise your voice.
It's actually, it terrifies people a lot more if you just clearly and concisely explain to them how you're going to ruin their life in a very casual, lower tone of voice, and then follow up on what you just said to them.
But I get this call.
Hey, we have this water polo team coming in.
We need you to come in as an instructor.
My dad was in town visiting.
So he just happened to come down and watch it as well.
So I was pissed that I had to be there.
And I just made it my goal in life to grind those people into dust.
And their coaches pulled me aside before.
And sorry, coaches, if you'd never told the team this.
They're like, hey, we need you to, these guys, I'm trying to think of the exact words that they used.
Debutante came out for sure.
Entitled came out.
Very high-level team where people are getting catered to.
They're at the apex of where they were from all of the, you know, the different, there's a huge water polo league in Eastern Bloc countries.
I had no idea it was, people making real money.
So a lot of the players are over there making real money in the offseason.
They come back together.
They're trying to make an Olympic team.
And the coaches were struggling.
And so as soon as they said to me, we need your help destroying them.
I actually stopped listening to everything they said after that.
And I was like, I got you.
I'm your guy.
But the way you did it, bro, I'm watching you.
I'm like, you know what it reminded me of?
It's like, you ever seen those scenes in Liam Neeson or even the one, is it Equalizer with Denzel?
Where, you know, where he says, you have 16 seconds to do this because I'm going to do such and such and such to you.
And they laugh at him.
And he just doesn't raise his voice.
And then all of a sudden, like, there's no way this guy.
That one scene when he walks into the apartment with the girl they were the prostitute date.
I don't know if you've seen that's great.
I think it's Equalizer 1 or 2 where he's a cab driver.
He sees these guys taking advantage of a girl.
Have you seen this or no?
No, it's a six scene.
He goes into the apartment as if he's delivering something, walks in, sees what they're doing in the room.
They're doing Coke.
They're doing all this stuff.
The girl he drops off at the hospital and he sees, he says, you need to go, Paula.
Do you know what the girl's name is?
I don't.
The guy starts talking shit to him.
Denzel very calmly goes to the door, locks the door, comes back in single-handedly.
Obviously, it's a movie.
Destroys everybody.
And you're just like, dude, I freaking love it.
They didn't raise his voice, didn't do anything.
And that's the feeling you gave me.
I'm like, if this is the way this guy is, you know, you can just visualize a scene.
He's out there at war.
Look, we're not, if you just listen to us, nothing's going to happen.
But if you don't, we're going to destroy you and kill you.
It's that simple.
Is that kind of the style when things got hot as well?
There's a variety of reactions when things are real life overseas.
You see some people's best moments, and then sometimes you express your own personal worst moments.
So it really is a spectrum.
The leaders that I had the most respect for were the ones that, regardless of what was going on in the world around them, they were cool, calm, and collected.
Because what people don't realize, and this is something that movies among almost everything that they get incorrect, in movies, it's a large group of people together accomplishing a single task.
Most of the time overseas, like if we were to come into a room this size, it'd be a two-person problem minimum.
There'd be no more than two people in this room unless there was a compelling reason to get more people to come into the room.
Realistically, one person could handle it, but even just the size of the building that we're in, you'd have maybe eight people and it would cover the clearance of the entire thing.
We would have more, but people are very spread out.
So a lot of the times, the only way you're communicating with the people that you're with, unless it's the person you're directly with, is over radio.
And people can see this in law enforcement videos, even on YouTube, where you can hear the tone of voice of somebody on a radio call and they are emotionally escalating everybody around them, to include the officers that are getting ready to respond to the scene.
They're not there yet, but they're arriving kind of primed and preconditioned to an emotional event.
I've had leaders who, you know, there's been moments in my life where I was pretty sure I was going to die.
And somebody in that exact same type of situation comes over the radio and they sound like they have their feet in the ocean drinking a Mai Tai.
And it just calms everything down.
And that influence, that ability to either escalate or de-escalate, and I would almost always recommend de-escalation versus the escalation, is one of the most impactful and powerful tools that a leader can have.
You know, it's crazy you say that.
What is that quote that I think Patton says where he says, you know, in less than 40 hours, you're about to go to war.
Here's what's going to happen.
But for some of you guys that are scared, where this is your first time, what you don't know is your spirit's going to show up and without even you knowing naturally it's going to show up and you're going to react in a way that you never knew you could react yourself, right?
I don't know the exact words.
I'm just kind of like spitballing what he said.
Oh, there we go.
In 40 hours, in 40 hours, I shall be in battle with literal information.
And on the spur of the moment, we'll have to make the most momentous decision.
But I believe that one spirit enlarges with responsibility and that with God's help, I shall make them and make them right.
It seems that my whole life has been pointed to this moment.
When the job is done, I presume I will be pointed to the next step in the ladder of destiny.
If I do my duty, the rest will take care of itself, right?
And he continues to say more things about what happens with this.
First time did it happen?
You don't know, right?
When you're a kid, first time you go out with a girl and you don't know what's going to happen, right?
When you're starting your business the first time, you don't know what's going to happen.
When you're a salesperson on commission, you don't know what's going to happen.
What was the first encounter when you went to war and you're like, Andy, you got this?
Andy, you got this.
Andy, you got this.
And you're like, maybe you don't have this.
Maybe you're scared.
What was that first, first reaction with, you know, the level of anxiety?
What was that like?
The first time that I got shot at, I didn't realize it was happening.
So I started off pre-9-11, which I actually look back was a fantastic, fantastic place to start my career because it gave me context to the military in a pre-9-11 setting versus what the monster became in the post-9-11 world.
So I had gone from a West Coast SEAL team and I put in my paperwork to apply for development group, which is the official name of SEAL Team 6.
I got selected for their training program shortly after 9-11, started in 2002.
We finished early and we surged over to finish up the end of the Hamid Karzai security detail.
This was post-the assassination attempt on him.
We were largely there.
The team that was there needed to roll back just from a manning perspective so they could rest and recover and refit.
They brought some new bodies in.
We were there for like a month, came back and we started training for Iraq.
And the first target that we were going to go on was the number one chembio target that they had available in Iraq.
And we had specialists.
I mean, we had architectural plans.
We were looking at satellite imagery.
I basically, it was basically, I was Jason Bourne.
It's not that big of a deal.
It was like 60 Jason Bournes in a room all thinking we were super badass.
And we had, you know, air conditioning experts talking about like, listen, you know, look at this roof.
Look at all the pieces of air conditioning on the roof.
And they're definitely moving air here.
And it's, you know, like level four and all this.
Or it's really hot in Iraq in the summertime.
You know, no big deal.
We can get back to that.
So we look at all this stuff.
And it was a Kembio target.
So we were going to, we went on what's called MOP level four, which is mission-oriented protective posture.
Full Kembio suit with gas mask.
We had blowers that would blow air into the gas mask so it makes it a little bit easier to breathe.
But we get on this helicopter flight.
It was a four-hour flight in to the number one chembio target about half an hour out.
We started putting on our, it's a very choreographed, you know, get the gas mask on.
There's a like a drape that goes underneath your body armor.
It's, it's a nightmare.
So for people who have never looked through night vision goggles, it's not a full field of view.
It's very narrow.
The closer you can get it to your eye, the better.
But a gas mask means you have to have more offset.
So now you're looking through a soda straw that's looking through a soda straw.
We get all of our stuff on and at like a minute out, I was in the third helicopter that landed.
They did a pre-assault strike of the electricity producing transformer, whatever it may be.
And this was, again, the first mission we did in Iraq.
So of course, in our infinite combat savvy wisdom, there was the fire and we just landed the helicopters in front of that where the people were shooting at us, which is give it some light.
It's like, oh, you guys can't see us?
Hold on.
Let's swing around.
Let's get some cultural light.
Not surprisingly, every helicopter that landed absorbed a little bit more lead, thousands of feet per second.
And I had absolutely no idea that we were getting shot at.
The next day, we went back out.
Oh, the number one chembio target ended up being an agricultural school, by the way, that had a robust air conditioning system because it's super hot in northwestern Iraq in the summertime.
But we land the next morning, or we landed that night.
We got back.
I woke up and we actually went out and looked at the helicopters.
There's 27 holes in the helicopter.
Nobody killed.
The door gunner, who was right next to me, did take a round in the head at about one minute out, but he lived.
Jeez.
Not the same person, obviously.
But we went back and looked at where all those, and so we had probably 25 people just sitting on the floor of the CH-47.
And I swear people must have like reached up to like scratch their ass and a round just came through.
We could not have put those people back in the helicopter, shot it that many times, in my suspicion, shot it that many times and not have somebody get hurt or killed.
So I'm getting here.
Number one combat operation, absolutely no idea I was even getting shot at.
I was just standing there on a helicopter.
How are you taking it?
How are you handling it?
Like yourself?
Like, are you like, holy shit, it's going on?
Or did you actually feel everything slowing down?
I've only had that happen one time, and that was the night that I actually got shot.
But after that operation that morning, when we went and looked at the helicopters, I distinctly remember a buddy of mine who had gone through selection with me.
I sat down.
I said, you know, if we keep doing this, I'm not so sure we're going to survive.
You knew this at this point.
And Andy, I just don't know how many times you can absorb that level of firepower and just roll the dice of chance.
And you said that for the first mission, for it to be, you know, air conditioning, and they give you the green light and you guys go, come to find out, you guys risked your lives.
It's not even what, what, what type of intelligence do you have to get?
Because this is just, you guys are just going satellite and there's no way on the ground, obviously, going into check.
So how many of those type of instances where they're like, I mean, we obviously went there because of weapons of mass destruction.
There wasn't any.
Did we?
What?
Did we really go there for WMP?
I don't think.
Hey, really?
Yeah.
I remember the justification and the argument.
Yeah, but did we?
20 years in the rearview mirror, I think an argument could be made that maybe we didn't go there.
I'm with you 100%.
So my question was, so those type of, how many of those, and you're saying that that was the first one, how many of those types of missions happen with like, well, not, you know, not very infrequently.
Well, as far as things happening on the ground, not what you thought all the time.
Yeah.
Intelligence, whether it's signals intelligence, human intelligence, electronic things that you're looking at.
We looked at that target for a couple of months before we went to Iraq.
Once you were there in country, you were kind of processing things in real time.
So you would not have that much time to really analyze and scrutinize that level of structure.
So we did that.
And then the second objective that we actioned was the Jessica Lynch rescue, which was, I mean, that was real time.
And we were, I think we had some satellite imagery, but I mean, we were taping stuff out on concrete to try to figure out which direction we were going to get to her bedroom.
So you go from three months of robust planning to, you guys have 48 hours and go get some.
But I would say, God, people will hate to hear this.
70% of the time, the intelligence is wrong.
Wow.
That's freaking crazy.
And you almost lose your life.
Not that the information is wrong, but where you think the person is that you're going after is not correct.
And does that frustrate you guys or is it part of the job?
It's part of the job.
So is it kind of like, guys, we think they're here.
We're not certain, but we think they're there.
Let's go find out.
Or is it, guys, he's here.
Let's go get him.
Which one of those two is it typically?
It's a combination.
So humant or human intelligence, obviously, you know, single source human intelligence.
You have a person coming and saying, this is where this person is.
You need to use that with caution, obviously.
If you can vet it and you have multiple person human intelligence, I'm not sure the exact risk threshold that mission, the people who are approving the missions would have let it go, but single source, humant is pretty dangerous.
But then maybe you can combine it with some SIGINT.
We have electronic data.
Maybe we've been tracking the person's handset.
And I'll talk broadly about this stuff or how we were able to do that, but we were able to geographically fix somebody's location due to an electronic device that they had.
If you can link those two things up, things are starting to look a little bit better.
More often than not, it was a combination of those things.
Got it.
So when it comes down to earlier, you're talking about WMD, did it, did it?
Weapons of mass destruction where we're going, you know, hey, here's what's over there.
And you are sitting there sacrificing your life.
You're on the front, front, front line.
So there's different kinds of lines, right?
Like you go to a nightclub, first you're in the club, then you're in the VIP section, then you're in the upstairs private room that nobody's there and you're seeing things others don't see.
You guys are in it, right?
Where you're seeing all of it.
At what point, like, did you guys ever look at each other while you're on these missions saying, guys, this intelligence is so wrong.
What the hell are we doing here taking these orders?
Like, and you know, in the military, it's like chain of command, you know, coachability.
Hey, go what they tell you to do.
You don't question it.
You just kind of go through it.
You know, ranking.
You don't question the ranking above you, whatever that may be.
Was there a moment for you guys are sitting there saying, there is no weapons of mass destruction.
What are we doing with this thing?
Was there a moment of, like you're calling somebody out saying, this is bullshit?
Why are we doing this?
We only did that first target that was WMD based.
After that, we were looking for individuals, you know, the deck of cards.
So we did the, I mean, truly, I never, I never did a targeted weapons of mass destruction mission after that.
And I'm thankful because the mop level stuff is horrible.
And if you are exposed to any of the WMD, the process of actually getting out of that gear is ridiculous as well, because there's full decontainment.
And we would practice that stuff as well.
Not only getting the stuff on, but like the structured approach to how do you decontaminate a certain amount of people so they can decontaminate everybody, decontaminate everybody else.
What do you do with their gear?
What's the process?
It's a nightmare.
And I'm glad that we didn't do any more of that, but it just, it never came up again.
From that point on, right after the Jessica Lynch rage, we raid, we surged into Baghdad.
We were on the first set of airplanes that landed at BIAP, Baghdad International.
And from there, we were going after individuals at that point.
And it never came up again with the WMD.
What were some of the major projects you worked on that you can talk about?
To be honest, I mean, I consider my career to be aggressively average.
The only thing I probably ever was involved with, and I was a super small cog in a very big wheel, was the Jessica Lynch rescue.
I mean, other than that, I left the command in 2006.
So a lot of the things that whether it's the Captain Phillips or the rescue of the aid worker in Africa or the bin Laden raid, all of that happened well after my time.
So I think people in that era, even though they would be unlikely to want to raise their hand and directly attach themselves to that, a lot of that stuff happened post-my time.
Crazy question for you.
So announcement comes out.
Hey, we've killed Bin Laden.
Okay.
And okay, sounds good.
And he's dead.
And you know, the speech that Obama gives, which I think his speech was like nine minutes and the famous Trump speech is 48 minutes.
Abu Bakar Baghdadi is dead.
Shy like crushes that.
Oh, my God.
By the way, it's one of those things that my kids watch it on repeat over.
I mean, you know, most of the time, people, you knock on the door before you go.
No, we didn't even knock.
We just came through.
I mean, the way he told the story.
But anyways, so Bin Laden, okay.
We found him.
He's dead.
We dump him in the middle of the ocean.
You expect me to believe that?
And so then the question for you, like a guy who's on the inside, I don't know, man, if you caught somebody, can we see a face?
Can we see a body?
Can we see, why are you so quick to drop the guy into the ocean?
So, I mean, listen, this is just us speaking.
It's just a form of a story.
Nobody's struggling.
It's not like it's a problem.
I'm on the watch for him.
Nobody's watching it.
So are you certain that Osama bin Laden is actually dead?
Yes, because I am friends with people who were there that night and I've had conversations with them independently.
The decision to dispose of the body in the way that they did, I've heard it phrased in a couple of different ways, but one of the main ones was that they didn't want to create a place where followers would come and use it as like a place of worship or connecting and then connecting and doing something else with those ideas.
I've heard it say that they were trying to, at least in some way, shape or form, respect the religious beliefs of that individual.
And there's a third possibility that maybe you guys have or have not considered.
Maybe there wasn't much of a face left to take a picture of.
Got it.
Okay.
And I get that.
And could we add a fourth possibility?
Oh, we can go.
I mean, he might be on a space shuttle right now.
Well, I don't know.
Like, how deep do you want to go?
No, it's actually the truth is the aliens came.
They took him.
They went to a different planet.
And they're hanging out over there playing back.
And no, but the fourth option would be, could it be possibility that you announce you dropped him in the middle of the ocean, but you have the body and it's buried somewhere else that nobody else, is the military and our intelligence capable of lying to the people of what they did with the body?
I would say possible, but not probable because there'd be too many moving pieces.
It's the same reason where when I hear people talking about 9-11 being an inside job, I've worked with some of the people at the absolute highest levels of the intelligence organization and apparatus and the military.
And I'm sorry to break people's hearts.
It's not a bunch of Jason Bournes running around.
If you pull back the curtain at the agency, and I don't mean this from like a case officer level or the individuals working there, if you're looking for Jason Bourne, you're going to find a donkey with the fly buzzing around its head.
Right.
And it's a huge bureaucratic organization.
They do many, many, many things.
But, you know, what's the saying?
A secret is something that only two people know.
As soon as you start adding layers to that, you know, because there's the helicopter crew or everybody who's on Target, right?
Who supposedly, let's assume that the body, they have a mannequin in the body bag.
If they even put them into a body bag, I'm not sure.
So everybody on Target would have to be a wedding participant in that.
And then how'd they get to Target?
Helicopters, right?
So, okay, the helicopter crew is now exposed to this as well to include the support personnel that's gassing up the helicopter, all the things that make those things fly.
Then you go back to a Ford operating base, all right?
So how many people at that base are now going to be included in this particular narrative?
And then it makes its way out to a United States Naval vessel.
And you know what I mean?
To me, again, not impossible, but it becomes much more improbable as you start adding those extreme layers of exposure and individuals.
That's where I'm at with you on 9-11, because for me with 9-11, by the way, we had, is it Richard Gage?
Am I saying the last incorrect?
Richard Gage.
We had him on here.
How long did his episode last on YouTube before they took it down?
Like that day?
I was just saying 20 minutes.
What did he say?
They took it down like within a, it may have been a day or two before they took it down.
And his entire story and the premise is the fact that, you know, it was an inside job.
Lex Wexner was involved and, you know, how the other buildings had come down, building seven and all these things.
So, but for me, I asked him, I said, how many people does it take to do something like that?
You mean to tell me you can get 50 people quiet?
Well, how could you keep them quiet?
Everybody has their individual thing.
People want to brag about their legacy.
You mean to tell me like, you know, a guy's not going to sit there and say, well, let me tell you what I do.
It's kind of like when you, you know, a guy, Gianni Russo, is like, well, let me tell you, I hooked up with Marilyn Monroe.
People want to brag about, you know, what they've done.
It's like later on, I was actually part of it and you're at a bar drinking.
So those 50 people who were involved would need to remain non-alcoholic for the rest of their lives, never get drunk, never do drugs.
And either you kill all 50 of them, which 50 of their family members would come out and say, why did all these 50 people who were working on the building get killed?
That's the challenge that I go to, right?
But with something like this, you heard about Victoria Newland today, resigned?
No, I did not hear that.
Are you familiar with her, who she is?
No, okay.
So Victoria Nuland, Rob, if you can just maybe go to her Wikipedia so we can just kind of read.
Just Google Victoria Newland.
So she just resigned, I think, earlier.
I don't know what time it is.
She resigned either yesterday or today.
Okay.
She is known as Toria Newland, an American diplomat currently serving as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs since 2021, member of the U.S. Foreign Service.
She served as Assistant Secretary for EU Affairs 2013, 2017, 18th U.S. Ambassador to NATO.
And anyways, she is fully, fully decked out.
She was ranked as the third highest ranking U.S. diplomat.
Okay.
And her husband, if you can go to her husband, by the way, on what her husband's done, Douglas, I think his name is Douglas.
Is it?
Yeah.
Robert Kagan.
So Robert Kagan, he is a founder, co-founder of neoconservative project for New American Century, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute.
Anyway, so they're politically connected, both sides.
She served under both sides.
And a lot of people don't trust her.
Rob, can you pull up one of these videos?
Pull up the one where she's being interviewed.
If we ever put people as presidents in or political people in, this one right here.
Watch this clip here.
This is her.
Go ahead and play this.
We of course never choose candidates in any country.
But what we do do in countries that proclaim to be democracies is we offer the opportunity for candidates of all kinds to learn how to put themselves forward to best effect.
Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?
Oh, probably.
We're not doing that now.
What the hell is wrong with that guy?
I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience.
He's the guy, you know, what he needs is Klech and Tany Book on the outside.
He needs to be talking to them four times a week.
You know.
I just think Klech going in, he's going to be at that level working for Jatsenyuk.
It's just not going to work.
We, of course, never choose candidates in any country.
We offer the opportunity for candidates of all kinds to learn how to put themselves forward to best effect.
And we always support the right of peaceful political protest in any country.
So, I mean, she says that, right?
And then in another interview, she's being asked about.
Let me see what other clip you got, Rob, if you can go to it.
Yeah, this one's going to be funny because this is her asking a question.
And look what she says all the way at the end about why we should be given this money.
And this is recent.
This is not a long time ago.
Go ahead and play this clip.
It is.
And I do hear you and the others in the administration and supporters talking about the vital necessity to do this.
But as people say, hope is not a strategy.
And do you have any actual belief or reason to believe that eventually this bill will be paid?
And if not, how are you going to make sure Ukraine gets vital weapons and ammunition?
The end is shocking.
Christiana, I have strong confidence that when the House comes back after they've been out in their districts hearing from the American people, after they have heard from Ukraine, they have heard from Europe, which, by the way, just passed $54 billion in additional aid itself, that we will do what we have always done, which is defend democracy and freedom around the world, not just for victims of tyrants like Putin,
but in our own interest in preserving a free and open international order.
That's what we need to do.
We've done it before.
And by the way, we have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the U.S. economy to make those weapons, including good-paying jobs in some 40 states across the United States.
You know what she just pretty much explained?
What is she saying?
What money's coming back now?
She's just pretty much explaining the military-industrial complex.
So people are confused about the Ukraine aid is it's less money directly being sent to them, and it's largely excess or dated military equipment from the U.S. being sent over under the guise that it will be replaced and technology will be advanced through money, like he just said, into the military-industrial complex.
So it keeps the wheel spinning.
Those videos are, I mean, they're interesting.
How about, I mean, we should probably start with one of the great American lies and just get the elephant out in the room.
A lot of the things that we say we won't tolerate other countries doing, we are also doing exactly the same thing.
It's so hypocritical to say a lot of the things that she said.
Oh, we don't meddle in other elections.
We don't tolerate that.
Yes, we do.
And we're involved in that as well.
And until we can start having those honest conversations, I don't know if our country is going to be headed in the right direction.
And the reason why I brought this up is because maybe for you.
Okay, so let me ask the question in a different way.
For someone like you that served from 96 to 2013, June, 17 years, 100 operations.
You know, you've seen a lot.
You've been a lot.
And you've got relationships.
They want student for that long.
You got relationships all over the place that you communicate with.
And maybe you're on different signal group chats and you guys all chat with each other because I'm on that, except on a much lower level military.
We stay close.
I'll give you different organizations and institutions.
And you tell me based on your experience now where your level of trust on them is.
Sure.
The FBI.
You want to go one through 10 or 8 through 10?
Zero to 100.
0 to 100.
Zero being not a lot of faith.
Zero faith.
100?
I think absolutely I trust them.
The FBI.
Zero to 100?
Man, having talked with some people who work at the Bureau, 10?
Shit.
Okay.
I'm with the IA.
CIA.
And so, well, this is a tough one.
Actually, all of these are tough because all of these organizations are populated with people.
And it's easy to judge the organization versus the things that we hear about certain people doing that actually makes the news.
I do think that most people at the FBI are there for the right reason.
Can the FBI be weaponized?
Fuck yes, it can.
Same thing with the agency, right?
So I don't want to, I guess what I'm saying is I'll answer these through the lens of the overall organization without making an attempt to judge the individuals that make up that organization.
Okay.
Because it's because it's tough.
I totally get it.
For sure.
Like when people say, you know, China, this Chinese people are very good people.
No one's talking about the Chinese people.
It's just we don't trust the government of China and what they're doing.
They don't give the right reports.
So CIA, what would you say with CIA?
10.
What do you think you were your fifth year as a SEAL?
80th to 90th.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
I remember arguing with my father about WMDs being present in Iraq.
My dad was a Vietnam.
Vietnam vet.
Not a great experience in Vietnam.
He worked peripheral to SEALs.
He was on the first squadron of patrol boats that was working in the Mekon Delta.
So he would take them in and out from time to time.
That's where I first heard the term SEAL.
As with a lot of people in his generation, one of the things that they never want to see our country do again is commit to a war under false pretenses.
We argued back and forth.
I was arguing pro-invasion of Iraq, having just come back from my first tour in Afghanistan.
I wish I could sit down with my younger self and change at least my optic.
I was making the decisions based off of the information that was being presented to me at the time.
But now I land in such a deeper place closer to where my father is than I did when I was 20 in my early 20s, call it 23 to 25, having those arguments with my dad.
Meaning at 23, 25, you're kind of like, no, America, I'm doing this.
I also wanted to do my job.
You know, I didn't join the SEAL community because I wanted to sit around in a team room and talk about how awesome it would be if we did our job.
I wanted to do my job.
I wanted to be tested, which I think a lot of young soldiers fit into that category as well.
And I made the mistake of blindly believing what the government was telling me.
What percentage of the wars do you think we've had the last 50 years?
Let's say, not even, go 30 years.
Okay, 30 years because we're the same age.
So you've been following us since junior high school.
Let's just say you're 15 years old till today.
What percentage of the wars, the last 30 years, were a waste of our time?
What percentage of them?
We did the right thing being involved in them.
I think the way that we executed them, they were all a waste of our time.
I think Afghanistan in that time period was probably the most altruistic as far as what we were going there to try to accomplish.
But if you look at the raw data, we accomplished what we were trying to do within about two months.
And then we stayed for 20 years.
So, the executive, I mean, and everything that happened after that.
And it was wild to see from somebody who went back and forth between Iraq and Afghanistan.
You know, my first time that I was in Iraq, we're in thin-skinned vehicles.
There's no IED threat.
Well, maybe there was an ID threat, but it was incredibly low.
In Afghanistan, you know, there were landmines, but not the IEDs that we were seeing as well.
And you watch these two theaters of war evolve and morph over time.
They're only separated by one country.
So, of course, the flow of information is coming back and forth.
And the U.S. military has proven time and time and time again in an active war zone, we're not great at occupation.
It's not what we're actually designed for, and we're also really not good at nation building, which shouldn't be the role of the U.S. military anyway.
And time, I think, has proven us to be unsuccessful at both of those.
That's pretty wild to be thinking about that.
So, some of them were worthy wars that we got involved in, but we could have gotten them done in two years, two months, save the money of the $3 trillion we spend the next two or three trillion dollars we spend the next 20 years, and taxpayers' money would have stayed here.
But we kept going, and on the back end, like Victoria said there, the great news is a lot of that money comes back and it creates jobs in these incredible companies like Boeing and General Dynamics.
It's great.
You should support giving money to these different countries for us to go out there and do what we're doing.
Well, there's another aspect of that, too.
I mean, I actually recently was hosting a podcast where we pulled up the list of what we are actually sending to Ukraine, which at this point in time in our history is going to be viewed as an ally.
We are not giving them three and four generation behind equipment.
We're talking javelin missiles, sniper rifle, body armor, night vision goggles.
I mean, we are outfitting a modern military, and who knows in the future whether or not that is going to be pointed directly back at us, much like what happened with the Taliban.
It's funny you're saying this, Rob.
Go to the other clip.
They're a clip of Marco Rubio.
This was one of the concerns why this has taken place.
And Rubio asks her a question.
I want to say this is a year ago.
No, two years ago.
Look at that.
March, exactly two years ago.
Go ahead and play this clip.
Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?
Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.
So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.
I'm sure you're aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they've uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country and with NATO's coordination.
If there's a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100% it would be the Russians that would be behind it?
There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves.
By the way, just so you give a little context, that's two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, February 24, 2022.
That's two weeks later.
So we're just barely trying to learn what the hell is going on.
Yeah.
Who's behind it?
Why are we, you know.
And for you, at the time when you were in 2013, you're done.
How much of what you guys were doing and running into behind closed doors were the concerns of who has biological weapons, who doesn't, what their plans are.
Was that one of the threats at the time that you guys were working on, or that wasn't really that much of an item back then?
By that time, I had left development group, and not that they're the only Entity that would deal with those type of things.
I was back at a conventional SEAL team, my last appointment in 2010.
I don't remember WMD being mentioned really ever past mid-2003.
Really?
As far as it impacting what we were looking for, our operational world.
I'm not to say that there were people who were not tasked with that full time.
It never fell back again onto my plate as an individual in that community.
I never put on another piece of mop gear or a gas mask after that time.
Andy, how much of what you learned and what you saw?
Because you're awake.
You're not woke.
You're seeing what you're seeing.
You're having this conversation with your father.
How much of what you were seeing and all this failure of intelligence, this stuff isn't what it seems.
How much of that played for you to get out?
Like for you to leave the military, or was it just your time was up?
0% of it played into.
I would have stayed in longer if my body would have physically allowed me to do so.
I got medically retired, which just, well, you guys know what I mean.
For the listener or the watcher, you got to do 20 years and a wake-up call, meaning, you know, 20 years plus a day to get out.
You're going to get a retirement check, which I do believe should be reframed as the money you use to find your second job because you're not going to retire.
Yeah.
And more importantly, probably medical benefits.
And I know a lot of people have harped against medical benefits or direct interaction with the VA.
My experience has been fantastic.
Thank God.
And I think, well, and it's for most people, it's very good.
Oftentimes, as with traditional media, what's going to lead the news stories is not necessarily things that are great.
So I got retired essentially early due to, I'll call it the wear and tear of my career.
And it allowed me to maintain my retirement and medical benefits.
I would have stayed.
I enjoyed the job.
I thought it was an impactful job.
But you also have to develop a level of comfort at some point in time where you realize that you may not agree with the leaders above you in politics and you may not agree with the policy.
And if you want to go fight those things, you need to get a different job.
You know, I could do and impact the world around me only where my feet touch the ground.
It is not my job and it would never be my job in the role that I held to actually change policy of the United States.
And a lot of people, actually, I sound fair to say, I'm not going to say a lot of people.
Some people spend more of their time focusing and arguing and worrying about the things that they can never control when they have an impactful job.
And what you really need to do is just try to impact the world around you.
See, the difference is, though, like when I'm processing this, you know how they did a study where if you're killing somebody on behalf of somebody else, you have an easier time killing that person.
For example, I'm killing you for my country.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
I'm killing you because God told me to kill you.
You never have that thought, though.
In what way?
From what?
You don't have time.
No, no, I get that.
But what I'm saying is from the part, what I'm saying is, if you know, like is it something where I almost want to disclose, not disclose all the information, even to my Navy SEAL guys.
I don't want to give you all the intelligence because some of the intelligence, if you had, you wouldn't execute it.
Is it almost like, hey, guys, okay, here's the next mission.
This is what we're doing.
We're sending the 25 of you or whatever the number you were saying.
Like in a property like this, you only need two to come in, maybe eight and then 25 if it's around, you know?
And maybe some people we don't even know about that's on the outside.
Okay, cool.
But it's kind of like, okay, guys, here's a mission.
Here's the enemy.
Here's a target.
Here's the equipment.
Here's a date.
Here's your orders.
Here's how much time you got.
Go tell your wife.
Tell your family.
Be ready.
5 a.m. tomorrow.
We're out.
Is it like that?
And then do you guys go?
What do you know about this mission, Vinny?
Not a lot.
You cool with this?
I don't know if we're doing this, man.
If this is what I think it is, because I saw what happened in the news the other day.
Guys, listen, no asking questions, guys.
We signed up for this.
It's our job.
It's our mission.
This is what we raise our hand for.
Let's roll.
Is that pretty much how it is?
It's kind of the opposite of what you described.
So the SEAL teams, the conventional side, and then, you know, so it's considered white soft or, you know, the white side SEAL teams, and then there's the black side SEAL teams, which would be the JSOC elements.
Both of those are just on a rotational or deployment cycle.
So you're going to be relieving somebody when you get overseas and somebody is going to come in and relieve you.
But you are going to be working for a battlespace commander.
What you do in that country has to align with the overall goal of the battlespace or theater commander.
We don't get to just come in and say, this is how we're doing things.
This is what we're taking on our timeline.
We can come in and look at working with the battlespace commander.
They're going to have a deck, call it from one to 10 of the people that they are looking for.
Again, not us telling them who should they be looking for.
We could, of course, they could work with the staff and develop those type of things.
But when we identify, let's say we have the number one person that you're looking for, you're going to start, you have in the joint world, it's J2 or in the Navy world, it's N2, the intelligence.
They're going to be working with those packages, working with specialists, bringing to the planning cell the N3 or J3 operations.
They're going to start a planning cycle.
There's going to be go-no-go launch criteria.
You're going to have to make sure that the weather is at the right time.
So it's not going to be like on this date at this time.
We are going to tell the battlespace commander what we're going to be doing.
You get into country, and that's why it's like a left seat, right seat for about two weeks.
Some people will stay from the element you're relieving and they'll go out with you and they get you up to speed on what's going on in the theater.
And a lot of the times what you end up doing is taking over targets that they were looking for, that they couldn't locate, that they didn't have execute or launch criteria for.
But again, it's a cog inside of a wheel.
You don't have the ability to go to a battlespace commander and say, this is what we want to do, and this is how we are going to do it.
And they never would direct us, this is what you're going to do.
They could say, hey, we want you to go get this guy.
But at that point, you leave it to us to plan how we're going to do that and when we're going to execute.
Got it.
It's not, you know what I mean?
So it's a lot more collaborative than it is directive.
A motive is never revealed to you because they don't even know the motive, right?
Even the people above you don't know.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, I mean, it's pretty clear on the motive because you are going to get, you're going to involve almost everybody in the planning process.
Not, you know, the youngest guys are maybe going to be involved in like just a packing list of things that you're going to need to have on you.
The senior personnel are going to start looking at the individual, where they live.
How are we going to get there?
The assets.
Do we need to do an offset?
What can we have overhead to tip the scales into our favor?
So you're going to know about the person that you are looking for.
You may not have a true understanding of where they are in the global sense, but you are going to understand where they are connected to the individuals or like a threat network in those particular countries.
You will have an understanding of that for sure.
Does the SEAL ever team up with CIA or are they two separate things?
They team up with them all the time, but I would say it was much more from an informational perspective.
Working with them, you know, the agency is going to be, they're going to have a heavy hand in the human or human intelligence of those areas, working their sources, working with the people.
I mean, honestly, one of the hardest things to do is find people who don't want to be found in an electronic age.
You turn off all your electronic devices.
You can have all the high-speed whiz-bang sensors and ways that you could locate people.
But if you're not using those things, you're going to have to rely on people who are willing to talk and put their life at risk.
Are there, for example, like, let's just say if I have a crew going, Navy SEAL, and there's like five of you guys going.
Are there ever Navy SEALs who are also operatives and they're agents of the CIA or no?
It would be separate in my understanding.
There are plenty of guys who have gone over and they will do contracting work through the agency, or if they have a college degree and they want to go through the case officer program, they can do so.
I am not aware, and maybe I'm wrong, but in my understanding, I am not aware of anybody who has done both simultaneously.
You know what I'm asking, right?
So I'm kind of like a, you know, like, let's just say there's somebody in the U.S. government that's like, look, I know we got these killers, Navy SEAL guys, we need them desperately, but one of those guys that's on the inside, we need to have one guy give us intel to see if everybody is fully aligned.
So one of the guys is not questioning to make sure we don't send them on the next assignment that's going to be complicated because he's going to confuse the other, you know, the other guys.
I think I know what you're saying, but it's the pushback from guys saying, I don't agree with these orders.
It was not directive.
In the community that I was with, I mean, it takes two years to get through even just the basic selection pipeline and process to get to an operational SEAL team.
The level of buy-in on why you are there and what you are willing to sacrifice and work for is incredibly high.
And it's an additional layer of training.
It's an additional layer of capability.
You have better equipment.
You have better support.
It is not, it is far less directive.
And I have the absolute and utmost respect for anybody who serves in the military.
But it is the opposite of, say, somebody who's been maybe in the Marines or the Army for a year.
You need somebody telling you you're going to do it like this at this time with this gear.
It is the opposite of that.
It's very collaborative.
So they're coming to you saying, what should we do instead of do this?
They don't come to say, this is who we're going after.
How do you guys want to do it?
How do you guys want to do it?
Okay, got it.
But you guys don't ask, why are we going after this guy?
No, it was pretty clear.
Deep in the mountains of Afghanistan, why we're going after him.
Got it.
Okay.
So that part of it is clear why it's happening.
Okay.
Now, I'm asking this question to see.
So think about pride, right?
The pride of soldiers in a country, okay?
You know, seeing others, what they're fighting for versus what we're fighting for at the lower level.
Why are you joining the Army?
Man, I need the GI bill.
Why are you joining the Army?
They're helping me pay off the bills.
For enlisting six years, they're paying off $12,000 of my debt.
Why are you joining the Army?
Dude, I just don't like living here.
I want to go and see the world.
Why are you joining the Army?
So I would want to know what percentage of the guys that joined the Army joined because of the benefits that's attractive to join versus join because like I'm from Israel.
I have to go serve for my country because that's just what we all do, right?
The dinner we were having a couple nights ago is one of the things that they do.
It's mandatory.
You're going to go serve or you go to jail.
I would agree with that here.
I wouldn't say necessarily military, Doctors Without Border, Red Cross, whatever.
Just serve something greater than yourself for two years and even more beneficial if it happened somewhere where you didn't live.
Okay, so, and we're on the same page fully because I think it did something to me.
One of the best decisions I ever made in my life is joining the Army.
I have a regular job.
I was getting nice orders.
I was about to go 18 Delta because I was at the fifth group.
My guy went to Virginia, got the orders, came back.
I'm going to Sear School, DLI in Fort Orr in California, Northern California, Carmel, because I spoke five languages.
So I was going to go that route.
And at last minute, I decided to get out.
But it was the best decision I made getting in the military, hands down.
I think a lot of other people would benefit from it as well.
But the question I'm asking is pride.
The pride of, and let me qualify pride.
I'm not talking about gay pride.
I'm talking about pride in joining your country that you're proud of, you know, what you're representing.
Do you think, you know, the level of pride our soldiers in the U.S. have in why they serve is different than other soldiers like in Russia, in China, in Iran, our enemies?
And if yes, how different is it?
I would say yes.
One, you know, they're not being conscripted currently, where a lot of the other countries are, Russia being a good example.
You're kind of voluntold right now.
Either you're in prison and you have the opportunity to get out or you're voluntold, you're going to the front lines.
But I would also say the answer would depend on when you ask them and even the motivation you're talking about, the socioeconomic reasons to join the military.
Pre-9/11, like all three of us were in, how often did you hear about the GI Bill?
Were people just joining because they wanted to take a rung up on that socioeconomic status and move somewhere else?
It was one of the most common narratives that I heard.
I didn't hear a lot about the GI Bill after 9-11.
You know, the people lining up on September 12th at the recruiting stations and the videos and the pictures of those lines, yes, they were probably going to get told about the educational benefits.
They weren't there for that reason.
So I think the pride in what they probably felt their purpose was post-9/11 might have been a little bit different.
And not to measure like a value equation.
That's a very good way of putting it.
And so, and not that the people pre-9/11 had any less of a sense of pride, but they probably recognized that they were serving something greater than themselves.
But it was also maybe a 50-50 gambit.
Like, I'm going to get my pound of flesh just like the military is going to get their pound of flesh as well.
And I would say, probably the biggest thing when you're talking about our enemies or the countries that we have squared off against, whether it's by proxy or directly, we have different values as a country and freedom.
And I know that the United States is not the only country that has freedom, but our expression of it, I think, is unique in comparison to our enemies.
The people who are going to wear the flag and have it issued to them on their uniform, I think it's personally very rarefied air.
And I think it's a special thing and it should be protected.
And it has that sense of pride because, underlying in that, you know what that flag means and what it stands for.
And what sucks for me in the modern era is that people can't even agree on what that is.
Yeah.
And how about the enemies?
Because if I'm going up against, you know, the enemy who is an opponent, and that guy, his name is Buster Douglas, and he's doing it because his mother died 30 days ago.
And I'm going up against Mike Tyson.
Holy shit, this is just a bad fight to get into.
I'm just fighting because I have a five-fight contract on my $100 million, whatever it is, and I got to get it done.
The other guy's fighting because his mom just died.
Do I really want to go fight this guy?
He's probably emotional, psychologically, a little bit off, in pain, all this stuff.
It's a very, and I've interviewed both of them, Buster Douglas, and I interviewed Tyson multiple times.
You wonder where they're coming from.
What is the pride the enemy has, specifically those three countries that you face off-Russia, China, and Iran?
Probably can't.
I mean, I can't really describe necessarily the pride that they may have, but what I can say is their depth of belief is probably equal to our depth of belief in this room.
And I actually, you know, it's something that I have disagreed with on people that I serve with.
I have nothing but respect for the people who want to fight for what they believe in.
I may not agree with your ideology, and I'm willing to potentially sacrifice my life for the ideologies that I hold dear.
And if you're willing to do so, well, fucking, let's meet up in the arena and see who's ready to get after it.
Like, I have nothing but respect for somebody who's willing to do that.
Fully agree.
Their level of pride, I don't understand, but I can respect their level of conviction and their dedication to being able to toe the line.
But again, I ask that because today, let's just say today, there's an eighth grader, okay, or ninth grader, whatever, junior or high school, Andy Stumpf, who is fully loves America's grandfather, was a Vietnam vet.
Father.
But I'm saying grandfather.
Okay, I got you.
The reason why I'm saying grandfather is that.
Yeah, I'm saying today, you're an eighth grader.
I'm not doing this parallel.
You're right.
We're in the multiverse now.
But the benefit he has is he has a case study of an Andy and who's like, doing this for my grandfather.
He fathers on, and I'm going to go represent my country.
And ta-da-da-da-da.
And here's what I want to do.
I want to go be a Navy SEAL because it's worth me fighting for.
Would you say, dude, go for it?
Or would you say, you know, after 17 years and seeing what I've seen, I don't know if the level of pride to say go for it is as high as it would have been as in 1996.
What would you say to that kid?
I would do my best to educate them on both sides of the equation, the pros and the cons.
And, you know, my father did not want me to join the military.
My mom and dad both came from military families.
My mom's, you know, my grandmother was a nurse in World War II and actually left the Army due to, or I'm sorry, left the Navy due to post-traumatic stress from treating the soldiers coming back from the front lines, lied about it and got back into the Army and continued on as a nurse, ended up marrying a Supply Corps officer.
So my mom, one of many children, as military families have, as they're traveling around, she didn't want me to join the military.
My dad served in Vietnam.
Not a great experience.
His father before him and his father's brother served in the military, World War II era.
The last thing that they wanted for me to do was to come home as a junior in high school and say, I've got something in my backpack.
Oh, and I brought the Navy recruiter with me too.
I shotgun to him.
Get out of here.
Oh, fuck you.
And I said, I'm not old enough to sign this, but I need you to sign it for me.
And neither of them tried to talk me out of it.
They didn't sign it that day for clarity because we had a few conversations.
They expressed to me their concerns and then they let me make the decision.
And so how could I ever rob anybody else of that exact same opportunity?
If it's your kid, would you advise him?
Would you support him joining?
I would support them joining.
I wouldn't push for it, but I wouldn't advocate against it.
I think the benefit I could have to anybody is just giving them a more objective approach of what military service actually can entail, the long-term consequences, especially from a career field that has exposure to a combat environment.
I mean, like when I first joined in 96, or same as you guys, did you guys ever hear about TBI or really much talk about post-traumatic stress or CTE or, you know, I hadn't heard the term burn pit before, you know, and because that wasn't, you know, we had gone through a period of decades of peace.
It is a disservice to the people who want to join to not at least give them the total picture so they can make an educated decision.
If you know what you know now, would you have joined?
Yes.
You still would have joined.
Yes.
Great.
And that's a very interesting perspective that you're given.
And by the way, for some of the people that are watching, the most common question I get from parents about their kids joining the military, hey, can you talk to my son?
Should I let him go?
Should I do this?
Should I do that?
If there's anybody to ask that question of that's going to give you very, very good insight, it's probably going to be Andy here.
And if you want to ask the question from me, you can always connect with him and see about a chance.
That's transition.
Wow.
I mean, that's a decision to make or not.
Andy would be the right guy to ask the question on Manek.
But I asked the question because I wonder, like for me, it's all about pride.
If you got pride and you're proud of your country and your country's representing you well and you want to go out there and, you know, contribute and give back, go for it.
But if some of the fights we're fighting are unnecessary fights that's just taking lives and you're making bad decisions, that's also discouraging for a parent to say, go for it.
When I was in, it was Bosnia, Kosovo, and what else did we have?
A flooding in Honduras that everybody went and came back married.
I don't know if you remember the Honduras flooding that took place, I think, in 98 or whatever that was going on.
That's why it's the question from you in regards to the pride.
And so you talk about the pride, and then I've been wanting to ask you this too, Andy.
So.
So I think our fighting force is the smallest it's been in 80 years.
The number of white recruits, I think, is at all time low.
It's culture.
It's this or that.
We saw a video of the transgender lieutenant colonel that's up there that's basically pushing for focus and exclusivity.
Mind you, we're in wars, bro.
We are everywhere.
Like, what do you think?
What do you think that shift happened?
Because I was in during 9-11.
I was in, and I was, when Bush went up there and he spoke, and like, I mean, I had friends that started joining.
I got emotional, you know, I was emotional because he was up there.
I mean, Heinz, finding out later on, I was like, shit, we were duped.
But why do you think, is it because we haven't had a major incident, a major war?
Because the attitude of all these people, nobody's joining.
People are getting out.
I mean, the vaccine, everything had something to do with it.
Why do you think all that pride and everything is like, it's gone?
You don't see it anymore.
I don't know if it's gone.
I think the other side of the narrative has a more powerful voice right now.
I think that most of the things that we see online and people talking about the country, you're hearing the vocal 10% as opposed to the silent 90%.
And values change over time.
I distinctly remember Bush landing on that aircraft carrier a few months in, telling us that we won.
And then it's like, that's weird because I'm still deploying.
You're getting shot at.
But I thought we won.
You know, it's.
drop your gun just we're good guys the military is in is the they execute the foreign policy of the united states Foreign policy and ethics and morals are going to shift depending on who we vote into office.
So as those things are, I don't know the right word to use.
I would almost say infecting our culture.
If we have people in positions of power who have ideologies and beliefs that are counter to what I at least believe this country stands for, it's no surprise to me that they're going to work their way down.
You know, it's a cascading effect downstream.
I think it's why it's so important that people actually take the time to get involved and vote.
You know, it's going to start at the top.
It's just people.
It's people.
And those people might bring certain policies and those policies are going to permeate throughout the entire organism.
And by the way, while you're saying this, that's the speech right there.
Oh, man.
Talking about it.
Mission accomplished.
And meanwhile, Andy's in the thick of it.
Like, wait, what?
I mean, it just needs to wrap around a little bit and say sort of.
Oh, man.
Let's do this on the other side.
Oh, by the way, you were talking about the speech.
Can you play that speech, Rob, that Vinny was talking about with one of the greatest motivational speeches of all time?
This was, I mean, if you want to get into a war.
No, no, Rob, the one you just pulled up.
You pulled up a video of the Lieutenant Colonel right here.
Going to play this.
If this doesn't make you want to join the military, I don't know what that is.
Super inspiring.
I'm about to rejoin.
We must set our sights higher and focus on intentional inclusivity because there are still far too many people out there, not just LGBTQ individuals, that feel marginalized, shut out, or discriminated against.
So for all of you out there, I ask you to set out your symbols of pride.
Share your pronouns in your email, particularly if you're a person who doesn't think they need to.
Initiate difficult conversations about racial and gender barriers and share a bit of your vulnerability in a way that draws others in.
Why is this necessary?
And by the way, I watched this.
And here's what I think about.
I watch this and I say, okay, Putin sees this.
What does he think?
Xi watches this.
What does he think?
The Middle East watches that.
What do they think?
The enemy watches it.
Do they say, oh my God, U.S. is getting so much stronger, guys?
Be careful.
These guys are starting to put their genders in their emails.
Are we going to beat these guys?
Like, we don't do he, him.
There's no way we can beat these guys because that's an advantage America's having because they're being more fluid about their, you know, gender and all this stuff.
Does that inspire the next generation to say, I want my kids to go into the military?
I mean, not in my opinion.
And I would add, if the countries that you just mentioned, if I were them viewing this from the opposing lens, I would do everything I could to support something like this.
The role of the military is to execute United States foreign policy.
And at the end of the day, if you drill it down even further, it is to execute, conduct, and win war.
Anything that you do that is not directly associated with those things is not going to benefit the warfighter.
You know, the last, let's see here, I think the stats are the last 10 years, every branch except for the Marine Corps and recently Space Force, which I'm still trying to figure out what they do.
Their uniforms are fantastic, though.
My sister works there.
She just retired, so I still haven't, she still hasn't given me an answer.
They've missed recruiting goals.
I think this last year was 25% across the board, again, except for the Marine Corps.
There are promoting, promoting, you know, inclusion is actually, I think it's a great thing.
If you look at our country, we're a country of immigrants.
We are certainly a melting pot.
And I think being able to have an ability to listen to and hear all those voices is a great thing.
But diversity and inclusion, just for the sake of diversity and inclusion, I'm not so sure that is the best path forward for foreign policy, especially when it comes to policy in the military.
Because I can tell you in my own personal experience, the battlefield doesn't give a shit.
It doesn't care what you believe.
It doesn't care if you're a man or a woman or you're confused about the two.
A bullet coming at you at a few thousand feet per second is not going to veer based off of what it is that you believe.
So we need to prepare, train, and equip our warfighters to the best of the ability of our country.
In my personal opinion, videos like that, like I just said, I think that diversity, especially of thought and discussion, is essential.
That type of video is one of the reasons that we are having a difficult time finding people who want to serve in the military.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Can you imagine being in war with somebody like that?
And you're like, you're under attack and like, let's go get them, guys.
And that person doesn't go because they're like, you said, guys, I'm not fighting.
It's like that.
You might have watched too many movies.
And the whole, let's go.
Let's go, guys.
Let's get them, boys.
I've seen that only in the world.
You know, I've actually thought about that.
The movies of trench warfare where we're going to blow up.
We're going to, okay, so all three of us are in a trench.
You know, they're going to blow a whistle.
And we're going to be charging another entrenched position that has just been aiming guns at us for months.
Yeah.
When the whistle goes off, you're telling me you don't have a thought in your head.
We're like, oh, I pulled my hammy.
Oh, I'm vomiting.
I'm not on the ground.
You know what's crazy?
Rob, can you pull up the link I just texted you?
By the way, I mean, obviously we're joking, but it's also partly serious.
Like, I also want to, you know, today I'm talking to a guy who is going through a certain escapade right now.
And we're having a good conversation upstairs.
And I got off the phone, and then I'm having a conversation with one of the other guys saying, so what do you think is going on with him?
I said, look, in life, you know, at 18 years old, nobody could tell me what to do.
No one could tell me what to do.
You just couldn't tell me what to do because I was a reckless 17, 18-year-old kid, not coachable, didn't fear anybody.
Mom, dad, teacher, nobody could tell me what to do until I joined the army.
Then I met Drill Sergeant Green.
Then I met Drill Sergeant Purdle.
Then I met Sergeant Ward.
Then I met Lieutenant Colonel Peacocks.
And then I realized you can't mess with these guys.
They checked you and you're like, holy shit.
Okay.
I've met my equal, not even equal, superior to me, Alpha.
You got it.
I'm with you.
Salute.
Let's roll.
I'm following your lead, right?
I want my military, the country that I'm going to go and see leaders like that that are putting that fear and the respect in you based on results, expectation, life, the things you've seen that I haven't seen.
Where you look at me and say, who's this kid?
Why do you act like, you know what I've seen?
What are you talking about with your time out here?
You don't even know what I've seen in my life.
But pump the brakes, you drop, go run 10 miles, go do this, and then you break them.
They're like, now you realize I'm the guy in charge.
It's okay.
Salute.
Moving forward, I'm the guy that's going to tell you what to do.
That's the part where if you have to now be careful on how you challenge me because, God forbid, you're going to offend me or make me.
I didn't like the way the drill sergeant talked to me.
I kind of felt like he was, he had something against my skin color because I'm brown from Iran.
I remember my drill sergeant, first time I'm shooting a, I'm trying to get my, what do you call it?
Whether I'm going to be an expert, marksman or what's going on.
I'm 16.
And I'm sitting there and the drill sergeant comes and says, what kind of a freaking nose is that?
I mean, I've never seen a nose like that in my life because you know you're putting it here.
He's like, dude, you put it the wrong way.
It's going to break your nose.
So we're having this conversation.
I have to tell him as I'm from the Middle East, I'm from Iran.
He says, dude, I've never seen a nose like that.
That Iranian nose is problematic, right?
Can you imagine today you're like, it's racist?
Oh, yeah.
Because he's like, I'm from Iran and I'm offended.
So then I go and I complain and that drill sergeant's fired and now he's going to a different place.
But all he was doing is he's just kind of talking to one of the soldiers.
And I'm okay with that.
By the way, the size of the military.
Watch this.
Rob, pull up the first one I sent you.
Is this the one?
Go lower?
Is this the one?
Okay, right there.
Check that out.
Active duty force since 1990.
This is before our time.
Even when it was 1996, it was around 1.5 million, let's just say, right?
But look at 1990, 2,065,000.
And it's gone down to where it's at right now.
And then I have another report, Rob, that I sent you.
I don't know if you have the second link.
The second link shows that we've gone from 1.4 million to now 1.2 million, give or take in 2024.
And so the 60 billion we spent to give to Russia, or this is the recent one that they want us to spend the money to.
What are we doing to get kids to actually want to join the military?
Our military is getting weaker and weaker and weaker.
Fewer people want to join and enlist.
You were reporting the numbers earlier that everybody almost pretty much for recruiting numbers from the last decade.
Except for one, which is the Marines, that the numbers came up.
Which I can't blame them.
Their uniforms are fantastic.
God, they look so good.
Sick.
Why did you join the Marines?
Dude, what else?
Just Google Class A military or Marine Corps uniform, and you actually might consider joining too.
Let's see.
I love that shit.
I was jealous all the time, bro.
So sharp.
Is it really, though?
Look at that.
Look how clean that thing is, bro.
Look at that.
Come on, bro.
That's sick.
That is sick.
And it's not even capturing the pants, which I believe are blue with a red stripe.
Look at that.
Yeah, they are.
That's sick.
Sick.
Matt Sapala was in the Marines.
Yeah, well, shout out Matt.
Yeah, Matt Spoller was in the middle.
He was combat too, right?
He was.
He did three tours.
And so, so, you know, again, recruiting.
What do you think needs to happen for recruiting in America to go up, except for a massive event, like another 9-11?
Without a 9-11 happening, what do you think you step before recruiting become attractive again?
I think as a country, we would be better served figuring out who we are and what we stand for.
Because right now, I think there's a real argument about what even the truth is.
And you can pick the subject.
And it's, I have heard, you know, anecdotally, and not many people would approach me directly with this, but the way that the military is being reframed as, you know, we are just imperialists.
We are throughout the globe imposing our will.
And I'm actually not going to sit here and say that there's an essence of that that isn't true.
Like I said, the big lie, all the things that we despise and disdain other countries for, while, you know, behind the curtain, we might be doing a little bit of that as well.
If we don't change the way that we talk about military service, and one of the big things that I would actually talk to the younger generation about, especially given the cost of going to college, is the amount of vocational and trade ability that you have inside of the military and what you can do with that afterwards.
I mean, I have three kids of my own.
I'm looking down the barrel of what it would cost to send them to college.
And I just, I don't understand six-figure debt as a late teenager, somebody early in their 20s.
Like, what a great way to set somebody up for struggles later in their life.
You know, there are fantastic educational benefits in the military.
You're going to get the chance to serve something greater than yourself, and it's probably going to be overseas, which is a great lens to view what we have versus what other people have.
So many people in the United States who never leave the U.S., and I think the stats are about only 20% of Americans actually have a passport, and a small fraction of them actually use their passport.
So it's super easy to sit and bitch about how shitty this country is on your $1,000 phone with your $8 latte while somebody else would literally trade everything they have and walk to the point of losing family members to try to get into our country.
I think we have to do a better job of educating what the military can provide for people, not only while they're serving, but later in life as well.
It sets such a good foundation of, I mean, for myself personally, interpersonal skills, integrity, discipline, leadership.
I mean, the things that not only organizations are looking for for people, hard work, work ethic, teamwork, camaraderie.
We can go down the list, right?
You can just pull a list.
Tell me that a company hiring in this country wouldn't want every single one of those checked.
Do you consult for companies?
Oh, you consult.
Is it independent yourself or are you with somebody?
Myself.
Okay, yourself.
And how do they find you?
That's actually a good question.
I mean, I have my own website, andystumf.com.
Couldn't think of anything else to call it, so I just went with something that's a good question.
A good website.
Very, very creative.
Very clever.
But most of it is from a leadership perspective.
Like, I'm not an expert at hiring.
I can talk to organizations about leadership, leadership in small units, decision-making, all of those things.
So it's an engagement at that level.
I'm not the guy to talk to you, like, how do you scale your business?
That's an expert somewhere else.
But even if you were going to go into the trades, all of the skills that we were just listing, if you're going to work for yourself, you're telling me you're not going to be head and shoulders above almost everybody else if you embody those things.
It has such immense value beyond service to your country.
And then, of course, there is the service to your country.
And I mean, it's hard for me.
I don't think I have the vocabulary to describe exactly what that means or the opportunity that I saw it as, especially when I was 11.
But it's an amazing opportunity.
And I hear it being described as almost anything but that in the common narrative.
Yeah, and I agree.
Because I mean, think about it.
You nailed it with the college.
I think a lot of the youth have literally no skin in the game.
They can care less.
They're getting brainwashed from here, from TikTok, from everything.
Why do you think all these Israeli people that we know, they freaking love Israel.
They stick up for the country.
Why?
Because they all did something for the country.
They all signed up.
They put their life on the line.
And if you see them, like Israelis, I see Israelis all the time, bro.
Have you ever heard of one of them going, nah, Israel's not?
No, never.
Over here, a lot of people here are talking shit about this country because, like I said, zero skin in the game.
So like, yeah, whatever.
They don't give a shit.
Yeah.
And not only that, the level of respect for somebody like, you know, to look at whoever the hero is, the heroes today are not the heroes of putting their life on the line to go out there and fight for this great country.
The heroes are today are the TikTokers.
It's a very confusing model on what's happening as well.
So, it's not going to make it attractive to join the military.
And not only that, if you're not edifying them from the top, if from the top they're not being built up, if from the top they're not being edified, if from the top you're not selling America as the greatest country, from the top, you're not inspiring people to want to give back to their country or what they've been given.
The mindset isn't like, hey, what can you give me?
Give me this welfare, give me this Section A, give me this GI Bill, give me this.
Okay, but what are you giving to this?
It doesn't matter what family it is, whether it's Kennedy or Bush.
Both of them had a very clear values and principles, which was: make your money, protect your family.
When you're done, give back to your country through charity, through church, or through public service politics.
Figure out a way to give it back.
We don't have a messaging right now of doing that and valuing that.
Military is a form of giving back to your country of what it gave you.
And a part of that is like family values, rituals, you know, all that stuff.
We don't have some of that stuff going on.
Let's change the subject into something else.
Okay.
So did you see what happened this week with Instagram, with Facebook, with it?
Gut down.
It was a catastrophe.
People were just fists at the sky.
Crazy.
I thought it was glorious.
What?
You're free for like a couple hours?
It's like two hours I didn't have to check that shit.
I love that.
But as crazy and funny as that is, of course, it's exciting to get a break from the phone.
Like, I don't have to worry about it because nobody else is doing it anyways.
But there were a lot of things that who were the ones that were down that day, Rob?
Can you bring it up?
Was it Facebook, Instagram?
There's a bunch of things.
Let's look at that right number right there.
The big picture self-reported outage on both platforms surged, reaching more than 583,000 reports on Facebook alone.
More than 92,000 outages were reported on Instagram.
During the news, earlier technical issues caused people having difficulty accessing some of our services.
Stone added that the issue had been resolved as quickly as possible.
Some users also reported being logged out of Facebook accounts.
Meta acknowledges Facebook login status page that the platform was experiencing major disruptions.
The same happened with threats and Facebook Messenger.
The outage occurred on Super Tuesday when over a dozen states head to the polls for presidential primaries.
Now, Super Tuesday, it's not like Nikki Ailey won anything but Vermont.
And she, I think, announced that she's stepping away and this morning.
Yeah, she announced it this morning.
Such a devastating.
Do you have the clip when she announced that?
Because I know there was like a, I think there's a video of 300,000 people in front of the White House crying.
I'm going to get emotionally out there.
I'm going to get emotional.
Can you play this clip, please?
In all likelihood, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee when our party convention meets in July.
I congratulate him and wish him well.
I wish anyone well who would be America's president.
Our country is too precious to let our differences divide us.
I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee.
But on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, Never just follow the crowd, always make up your own mind.
It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him.
And I hope he does that.
You know what she really wanted to say?
Guys, listen, I thought the Supreme Court was going to get him out.
They messed up.
Now I got to talk.
I got to drop the hell out of you.
That's what she was hoping for.
That'd be a better speech.
Wouldn't that be better?
Just be honest.
What if they had to write their own speeches?
Oh, my God.
You know what she wanted to say?
She wanted to go up there and be like, thanks a lot, assholes.
I thought we were in this together.
What happened?
Now you guys are fucked.
Whatever happens is your fault.
And she smashes a day.
She walks off.
Oh, 55 million views later and 600,000 new Twitter followers.
Oh, I'm back in it because now people want me to keep running.
Yeah, you guys told me he was going to get disqualified.
What happened?
What do you think makes her an unattractive candidate?
Maybe you think she's super attractive, but it seems like almost majority of the people you talk to, there's something about her that they find unattractive.
She's just the one that didn't quit.
I have, I've watched very little video of her, and I honestly missing out.
Yeah.
Well, have you guys ever watched the movie Ready Player One?
Of course, where they shut down, what do they call it, the Oasis?
Yes.
Like that, I'll answer your question, but to go back to like Facebook and Instagram, one of the first things they did is limited people's time on it, and life is probably going to get better.
So I wish we would do something like that.
The videos, the first thing that I caught in that is that she seemed very robotic.
And I do a good amount of public speaking, so I understand the pressure of being up in front of individuals, but I also only say things that I actually believe in, things that I wrote.
And so it makes it different.
I know I have a natural way to deliver things.
That seemed to me incredibly flatline and baseline.
And that's just not the way that that's not the way that people are.
So, I mean, that's my first assessment of just looking at that specifically.
What do you think happened with the Facebook and Instagram and all this stuff happened on the same day?
A day after, I mean, first of all, it happens on Super Tuesday, but it happens a day after Colorado ruling 9-0.
And, you know, where you said earlier that the enemies of China, Russia, Iran probably love the fact that that transgender lieutenant colonel is up there screening and they're like, we want more of this and we want more of this and we want more of this.
This wasn't a small little glitch that happened with one company.
A lot of companies were affected.
So it can't be tied to a Facebook error or a meta error.
What do you think happened there?
I would be curious to know how many people truly understand the digital infrastructure required to make all of these things run in real time.
I've heard interviews of people like the founders of Chat GPT or people who are working on AI.
They can't actually describe precisely what is going on and how.
They have some boundaries, but I think that these, I mean, that organization, I can only imagine the server farms required to keep Facebook and Instagram open and the amount of code and interaction between those companies and other companies.
You know, non-conspiratorially, I would say, you know, there's probably trillions upon trillions of lines of code.
I fall short of my job standards and expectations sometimes.
Maybe a coder was having a little bit of a rough day and one of those got highlighted.
Conspiratorially, you could say these entities or enemies of our country, I mean, before having a full-on frontal assault, maybe it's good to test the boundaries a little bit.
Maybe it's good to put some code, you know, and if I were them, though, what I probably wouldn't want to do is shut it all down.
You would want to test it in a way where it maybe would make a little bit less news because then you could keep building upon it, which is why I don't think it was necessarily conspiratorial.
But yeah, if you're going to have a bigger, a larger scale attack, send in a reconnaissance element, see how it goes.
And Pat haven't come to the border, which is completely wide open and everybody from every single country.
It depends on who you ask, sir.
Yeah.
It's humanitarian, Vinny.
But if you think about it because Andy, I mean, if you think about it, if you're trying to bring soldiers in here, the hell we're doing it covertly.
You're not airdropping people in and just literally walking through the board.
And they've told us that China has told us this is what the CCP has been trying to do.
Meanwhile, in California, Xi Jinping is paraded around San Francisco with the red carpet, all of our flags taken down, all of their flags putting up.
They just hired the girl that is in charge of their election.
It's almost as if we're welcoming this type of, I'm not saying it was China, but who the hell knows?
From the level of how many people have been here.
Let me ask a question a different way.
Do you think America knows who was behind it?
Do you think our U.S. Do you think CIA, you think the U.S. government knows who was behind it at this point?
Maybe.
I mean, I was one of the things that did shock me about Elon Musk buying Twitter or X, whatever it's called, it was the level of direct communication between those platforms in the government.
I would have to assume that there is a similar level of connection across all of them.
I think it would depend on how complex it was.
And again, I'm not an expert in the electronic realm by any stretch, so I don't know how they reverse engineer.
Like when I say a line of code broke, like is there like a little flashing red?
Like this one was supposed to be.
I don't know how that shit works.
So I think depending on the complexity, it would be hard to say.
I would say it's, I mean, again, possible, but I don't know.
That's not my, it's not my expertise by any stretch.
You know what I would say?
If they don't, I'm very concerned.
Because you know what it's like when you go to the doctor?
What's the worst thing a doctor can tell you?
Like, I got stomach pain.
You go to the doctor and the doctor says, yeah, so I need you to go see a specialist and he's waiting for you right now in an hour.
He lives 30 minutes away.
You need to go there right now.
I'm scared.
You're like, oh, shit.
Yeah, it's not good.
Then you go to the specialist and the specialist is like, yes, okay.
Yeah, get him in here right now.
Guys, I know this is just gas.
And you go and say, okay, I need you to go to the hospital in Miami and see this other specialist to see what he has to say.
He's got an appointment open right now, an hour and a half.
You need to go there right now.
Do you know what it is?
I don't know what it is right now.
We have some speculation.
Then you go to the next person.
By the third doctor, if none of them know what's going on with you, that is the scariest answer a doctor can give you because you're then sitting there saying, holy shit, how did these guys not know, right?
But if you go to the doctor, doctor says, yeah, here's what you got.
Here's your options.
Take this, do this, or do that.
Okay, cool.
Let me get a second opinion.
Same thing.
Take this, do this, or do that.
All right, I'll do this.
Cool.
Let's go with that, right?
If America doesn't know who was behind that, I'm a little concerned.
If America knows the U.S. government, when I say America, if the U.S. government knows who was behind it, whether they want to tell us or not, I can understand why they don't want to tell us, but I can also understand why they would want to tell us.
The style of who's going to tell who is going to be based on the style of the leader running the country at the time.
Weird.
Okay.
If, you know, and some people, the style of some people is to do what?
To just kind of go two days, news cycle is so fast.
People will get over it.
Trust me.
Within three days, they'll forget about it.
People are looking at the next thing that's going on, right?
I'm just hoping they know what it is because they say, hey, president, we're getting a report on what happened with Meta and all these other companies.
This is all it was.
It was this, this, that.
Some hackers from India were working on this and da-da-da-da-da.
Okay, cool.
What are we doing with these hackers?
They're from India.
We can't do anything.
Okay, sounds good.
All right, next.
Well, you know, we found out what it was.
We got some of our contacts that's coming from Iran.
We're trying to find out if it was a, you know, regular citizens doing this as hackers or if the government was behind it.
At this point, we are 50-50, but we'll have better intel for you in the afternoon today.
Okay, great.
Now, that's stuff I want to know about, right?
Because if it is one of those three countries that's doing this, that are capable of doing this, and they do it on the day that they do it, a day after Colorado, they do it on Super Tuesday.
I kind of want to make sure they don't mess with this when it comes down to November 5th.
Because if they do something like that on November 5th, it's a different story.
Did you watch the movie Leave the World Behind or something like that, the Obama movie?
I think I did.
If I'm being honest, I consume a fair amount of movies, so sometimes they blend over.
I'm talking about the ship that's coming and the kid is like, the ship is coming to the beach.
Oh, I got, damn it.
Yeah, I was watching that.
And then one of my children decided to do something idiotic, which is sometimes what they do.
So I had to go deal with that instead.
I didn't get to finish it back.
Bro, you got to finish it.
You got to finish it.
But you know what movie's coming out next month?
Civil War.
Yes.
Civil War.
Movies coming out next month.
It's like a playbook.
Basically letting you know the playbook, isn't it?
Zoom in a little bit.
It's a dystopian action film written directly by Alex Garland.
The film stars Kristen Dunst and a bunch of other guys.
There's a journalist who travels U.S. during the rapidly escalating Second American Civil War, which has engulfed the entire nation.
And Civil War will have its premiere at South by Southwest March 14th, which is next week.
And it's scheduled to be released April 12th in the UK.
Hey, all I'm going to say is that image there of the turret on top of the bunker on the.
So it looks like it's a sniper hide, and it just shows you how little these people know about war because that would be a terrible position.
100%.
Why is that?
Well, first off, there's not a whole lot that's shooting distance from Stafford.
Yeah, we should water.
And if you do start taking pot shots out of that, everybody's going to know where you are and they're going to launch something in there.
It's so, so freaking funny.
Well, yeah, those sandbags aren't going to stop anything.
I mean, it's in the middle of the water.
Andy, when's your birthday?
Because I don't know where your birthday is here.
October 10th, eight days before yours.
No shit.
Oh, wow.
Are you eight days before?
So like literally, you're eight days older than me.
Yeah, 77, 10, 10, 77.
Your seniors.
Listen, sir, I respect you.
Respect you.
Respect your elders.
I want to make sure I do that.
So do you, are you, are you a pretty optimistic guy?
Is there an element of yours where you're kind of a little bit paranoid?
And if yes, what are you most concerned about as somebody that's served at the highest level for 17 years?
Man, I would actually almost have to point you towards other people to give you a good assessment of who I am.
I would say that I'm a realist.
I think some people would say I'm a pessimist.
I just try to look at things as the way they are, not necessarily what I want them to be, which is not always easy.
I think the thing that worries me the most, and this is a common narrative, but I think there's an aspect of it being true because I'm seeing it bleed over from social platforms into personal interactions.
That is the divisiveness in the country.
And we would need smarter people than myself to see exactly where it's coming from.
I think it's solvable.
You know, you hear the poster for Civil War.
I don't remember younger in my life, people legitimately talking about it as not only something they were concerned about, but others talking about it as something that they were looking forward to or something that they wanted to have happen, which, first off, for people who are calling for that, you don't know what you're asking for and you 100% don't want that.
Slugging it out in the streets of America against other Americans.
Like you have no idea what you're talking about.
The divisiveness, the divisiveness worries me because I don't believe it's accidental.
I think that it, and again, if I look at it from the lens of our enemy, it doesn't even need to be our own government doing a job of trying to divide us.
I would try to divide a populace that I was going to either fight directly or in cyberspace or on proxy or all of those things.
It's concerning to me, I would say.
It's probably the top issue.
And is that one of the reasons why you live where you live?
No, I live where I live because my ex-wife was born and raised in Montana, and people from Montana seem to have this gravitational pull back at some point in their life.
So we kept visiting.
We ended up buying an investment property, and I just saw the impact that it had, or we saw the impact that it had on our kids, and spent a good amount of time there.
And just, it was a better, it was more in line with the life that I wanted to live.
And then we got divorced shortly after.
But still, you stay there because of the three kids.
That's the family.
Yep, the whole family.
Yep.
She did as well.
All three kids are there.
You're the third person in the last week.
You, Gina Carano, and Sean O'Malley, Sean O'Malley left and went to Arizona because of fighting different reasons, but he's also from Montana.
Are you a prepper?
Are you somebody that would you consider yourself one or not really?
Depends on what you mean by that term, because there is, of course, a negative connotation associated with the term prepper.
It's the guy who has a school bus buried in his backyard and fixed machine gun positions.
I am not that.
But again, I do my best to try to take the world as it is presented to me and not the world that I want it to be.
You know, from a statistical perspective, we're living in the safest time for human beings ever.
But that doesn't mean that wild shit doesn't happen.
And so where I live, you know, response time on a 911 call could be up to 30 to 45 minutes.
Holy shit.
Well, you know, we're talking, so I live up in Kalispell, which is, I still can't get somebody to give me an exact number of people that live there.
But let's say Kalispell specifically, like 35,000.
Whitefish, I think, has like 20.
The whole valley, you know, the Flathead Lake is in the south portion of it.
Maybe 100,000 people in that entire valley.
Beautiful place, by the way.
It's amazing.
And I'm friends with a lot of the law enforcement.
And one of the questions that I hate asking them is, hey, how many guys do you have on shift today?
Oh, six.
I'm like, what?
What are you?
Not worried at all.
I mean, so there's sheriff's department and police departments.
Whitefish has their own and Kalispell does, but the veneer is thin.
So I am prepared to take care of situations that present themselves to me to a certain threshold.
Like I have the ability to, you know, treat minor medical issues with me in my car.
I've been the first person to pull up on an accident a few times in my life.
And it's, you know, so many people want to focus on being able to put holes into people as opposed to being able to treat them medically.
The likelihood you're ever going to poke a hole in somebody is super low.
The likelihood you might pull up to an accident where somebody needs a tourniquet or a bandage or whatever it may be is high.
So I have a medical kit in my car.
But I'm not, I don't have 300 days worth of food in the basement.
I don't have a crazy water filtration system and water storage system.
I'm prepared.
I'm prepared to be my own first responder to a degree.
I am, of course, going to have to leverage or levy other government entities to a certain point.
And then people are like, oh, what if civil war breaks out?
I'm like, well, then I have a lot of guns and bullets because your supplies will become mine.
So why don't you stockpile water?
Because I know other people that are and they don't have any guns.
So they can work for their water ration.
Wow.
What a way of thinking about that, right?
It's like, I'm going to get my hands on it no matter what.
Yeah, I'm getting it.
But because we, and mind you, the leave the world behind at the end of the movie, it kind of led towards the Civil War was coming.
So it's all in the set.
It's like project.
What is it, Robbie?
Projective or programming or they lay?
Predictive programming.
Predictive programming.
Thank you for clarifying it.
And you talked about, Andy, this divisiveness.
It's the powers that be that thrive on it.
Divide and conquer.
We've heard that a million times in our lives.
They want us to be like this.
They want us to hate each other.
We're trying to all get along.
We're trying to do it.
But they keep putting the race.
They keep doing this.
They keep trying to divide us.
We see what they're doing, what they've, you know, they're trying to do with Trump.
They're threatening all the people that are pro-Trump.
They're the threat to democracy.
We're the deplorables.
We're the problem.
I think if they see at some point that they can't keep this power, and dude, look at how many times they're trying to keep this guy out.
Do you feel, though, if it gets to a point where they're like, oh, shit, this guy's going to win?
They're not going to drive and push the American people to get to that point.
If something like that, if a power outage goes out on November 5th, I'm not necessarily saying people are going to want it, but it's going to be pandemonium.
Don't you think?
I don't know where the quote comes from, but it's nine meals from chaos.
And that's basically where most first world countries are if something were to happen.
We're about nine meals away, meeting three days from people starting to go at each other's throats.
What I would remind you when it comes to the divisiveness, and this is something I have to remind myself, is that our participation in that system is optional.
You know, the turning social media off for a little bit.
There are other ways out there to communicate and connect with people other than these main social media platforms.
Podcasting is a great example of this.
You think traditional news outlets love the fact that we're sitting here having a conversation outside of their purview?
But more importantly, ad revenue?
They're not having that shit.
So you don't have to be on these systems.
And the reason I worry about divisiveness is that I have seen it.
There's a lot of things I see online that do not bleed into my everyday life.
These issues that people are screaming at the rooftops, and it seems like everybody is talking about it.
And I've never had a single conversation with anybody in real life about it.
I have started to see some people like arguing face to face.
And it breaks my heart because at the end of the day, your neighbor shouldn't be your enemy.
You know, like I said, I've been a first responder to a few accidents before, and I've never pulled up to the vehicle and walked around to the back to see what their bumper sticker was.
Like, oh, you're on that side of the aisle.
I'm not going to provide help.
No, the only thing you care about is helping somebody who is in need.
Why?
Because they're a fellow American.
Or maybe they don't even, maybe they're not American, right?
Because obviously that would be an assumption.
You're humanity, just as a human being.
Yeah, I don't give a shit about their political ideologies when they're leaking hydraulic fluid.
I want to make that stop so they can continue on to live whatever type of life that they want to.
I don't think it's accidental that we are being nudged towards that level of divisiveness, but we are in absolute and total control over the amount of volume that we consume when it comes to that.
And, you know, these anxiety rectangles that are in all of our pockets that we're on all day long, they're not helping the issue.
It's a part of who we are and the life that we live, but people forget that it's optional.
But I do think it is dangerous.
Yeah.
And it looks like it's getting it's.
I don't know if we're ever going to get to civil war.
I hope not.
I mean, the idea of people slugging.
I mean, I just don't think people understand how grotesque and horrendous that actually is in real life.
It's not a movie.
What does that look like?
What does that look like?
It depends on who you listen to.
If you want to talk to some, you know, out in space dudes, they're going to make their, you know, they're going to go get some like armored vehicle and just be driving into neighborhoods that they don't align with and mowing people down with a 50 cal.
Like, first off, you may have never left your mom's basement.
You don't have the physical ability to climb into the back of that vehicle and probably not the mental capacity to actually end another human being's life.
But sitting there on your anxiety rectangle with your thumbs, it's really easy to talk about those things.
I don't think we are as close as people say that we are, but I am worried that we are closer than we should be.
So let's say November 5th, they do this power outage.
Everything goes down from voting centers to all the social.
Nobody could contact with each other.
And we know the writings on the wall that they're cheating.
I don't care who it is.
It could be us, you know, the deep state working with China.
What happens?
What happens to the United States?
I don't know, but I think we'd figure it out.
You really think?
You don't think people would go nuts in the streets?
Of course they would.
But then they get hungry and tired.
They'll go home.
Nine meals.
Nine meals.
Nine meals from Kale.
Alfred Henry Lewis.
Nine meals between mankind and anarchy.
And I'm with you, Andy.
I hope to God that people go, hey, guys, this is what they're doing.
Let's not let it ruin us.
But that's easier said than done because, you know, at the end of the day, we're human beings.
We're going to freaking go on instinct and lose our minds.
Look what happened during COVID.
We're like a global pandemic that's going to probably kill millions of us.
You know what people did?
They went to Sam's and Costco and beat the shit out of each other for toilet paper.
That was the number one thing.
I kind of support that actually.
It was super entertaining to watch.
Some guy was selling it in the parking lot to me and I was like, dude, I'm good.
Whoa.
Are you anti-capitalist?
No, no, no.
I thought it was poor.
I would judge his business model.
Very inappropriate.
But the week before, I already bought a bunch of them the week before.
But it's like, think about it.
Some little thing happens.
I'm not saying it was little, but look at how we responded for COVID.
And the reality was there actually was enough for everybody.
It was the instantaneous stress on the system by the few that put the majority at jeopardy.
Exactly.
And by the way, I think if it does, November 5th is going to be very different than what happened 2020.
I think it's going to be very, very different.
I don't think people are going to be okay with it.
I think the reaction is going to be very interesting.
And, you know, we'll see what happens next few months, by the way.
That's going to tell how ugly it's going to be.
Because again, when you're playing against an opponent, if he and I fight, okay, and you have the reputation of, let's just say, fighting fair, okay?
Meaning your weapons that you use, I know those weapons.
But I have the weapons that I use that you know I have a bad reputation that I'll go use those weapons.
If we're willing to go to a certain level that you're not, it's just a matter of time before you lose.
So it's going to be very interesting what other weapons the establishment's going to use the next eight months to see how they're going to, you know, divide America and prevent things from happening.
If they do, I think it'll be very nasty.
That's all I'm saying.
If they do.
Do you think our current political system is still viable?
I think they're selling it constantly as a democracy, and people are no longer calling it a republic.
And in a republic, you and I are protected.
In a democracy, we're not necessarily protected from the majority.
In a republic, we are as individuals.
They prefer democracy.
Democracies never last.
Republics do.
And more and more, we Republicans are starting to say we're a democracy.
Heck.
What did Nancy go to Nikki Haley's Twitter account?
If you can go to Nikki Haley's Twitter account, just go to Nikki Haley's Twitter account.
Let's see if she took off the video that she had pinned all the way to the top.
Oh, she removed it.
Okay.
Her video all the way at the top.
Matter of fact, is that pinned?
That is pinned.
Okay, so she hasn't removed it.
Fantastic.
Click on that tweet.
Click on that tweet and go lower on response.
Go lower, Not this one.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
She's talking to a guy.
Keep going.
Keep going.
That's the one right there.
Click on that one right there.
Watch this.
Tiny question.
Can I ask you just like a tiny question?
Do you think it's responsible for politicians to spend like $100 million in Iowa on TV ads, which go to mainly news stations that have lied to us for years?
When there's homeless veterans out there that could use that money, when you didn't even come close to beating Trump, you spent like $100 million in TV ad money.
Do you know my husband's a veteran?
That's fine.
Do you know that when the media doesn't tell the truth, the whole reason you put commercials on is to tell the truth because the media doesn't.
My point is, you're not going to beat Trump.
And all the money you're wasting could go to better causes.
I appreciate that.
That would make the Republican Party actually.
You know what?
Tlashaw is a democracy.
So we're going to keep working for a good democracy.
Thank you for your sorry for example.
But even she, even Republicans, are convinced America's a democracy.
Also, who gives a shit if her husband is a combat?
What is that irrelevant?
It's completely non-sequitur to the question that's being asked.
He asked a very good question.
$100 million being wasted in Iowa.
He asked a fantastic question.
And she's trying to say, I am a supporter of veterans.
And, you know, my husband is a veteran.
And he's like, that's not what I'm asking.
That's not.
It's the money that you're wasting when you know the race is lost.
You started knowing you were going to be a bad person.
What a great question to ask, though.
I love it.
You can tell she really enjoyed it.
Yeah, very obvious.
When she said, thank you for your service.
By the way, even after making the announcement, even if making the announcement, she still has that tweet at the top.
And you know what the tweet is, by the way?
You know what the tweet is?
Her tweet pinned all the way to the top.
It's all about making fun of Trump.
Go ahead and play it.
He just can't help himself.
I love that voice.
The ranting and raving.
Chaos follows him.
And he's getting older.
We were recently.
So are we all?
Peace through earth.
Running to settle old scores.
It's about him, not you.
Nikki Haley took on the establishment in Colombia.
Men took on the world's dictators.
A conservator, a patriot who knows we're blessed to live in America.
I'm Nikki Haley, and I approve this message.
She left us at the top.
Dude, I love the music of the God.
Catastrophic campaign, by the way, to stay this long.
And what the next move for Herbert is.
I'm telling you.
By the way, did you hear what David Axelrod said about her today?
Did you hear David Axelrod's tweet this morning, 7:30 in the morning, by the way?
What he said.
If you just go on Twitter and type in David Axelrod, zoom in, and where he's specifically talking about her.
Is that the one?
No.
Zoom in a little bit and go higher.
It's past seven hours.
Nikki, right there.
Zoom in a little bit and show more.
Okay.
She showed skill, strength, grit, determination to outlast a large field of challenges.
She stood up to the principles more associated with the era of Reagan than the era of Trump.
As the race narrowed, Haley steadily torqued up her criticism of Trump, but ambitious for a future in the GOP.
Haley carefully, sometimes torturedly, navigated around the third rail, refusing to hold Trump accountable to a principle of fair election provoking violent insurrection.
That much courage was adjusted to costly by an ambitious politician who currently wants to reserve the option to fight another day.
So when you get a compliment from David Axelrod, that is an invitation to say, if you were part of the Democratic Party, we can actually do some great things with you and give you a great future.
Maybe she'll consider that.
I don't know.
Maybe she'll consider.
And you know who David Axelrod is?
He's not a heavy metal guy.
He was not in a band?
No, no.
Oh, I thought you were talking about Axelrod.
No, no, this is David Axelrod.
Oh.
He's a consultant analyst for Barack Obama.
Oh.
He was a senior advisor to Barack Obama.
This is not a, there's not a lot of positions like that.
So she is now praising Haley, tells you where she's at.
But yeah, going back to the Civil War stuff, I don't know.
I think if we go back and sell America for what it was founded on, it's going to be okay.
But if we're allowing them to do what they're doing and they're able to get away with it and we don't hold them accountable, then I think a shit shows around the corner.
And who knows how big it's going to be.
But last but not least, I want to keep the most important topic for the last one.
This one's an emotional one.
And I'm wondering if you're going to, you know, get emotional about this.
Breakdown.
I'll try to hold it together for you.
Do your best to do that.
And I want to prep you, Rob.
If you can pull up the Sean Strickland clip.
Have you seen this or no?
Yeah.
Okay.
So Sean Strickland says this, and this one has a follow-up with a Navy SEAL guy in the back of it.
But he didn't, you know, he said something.
Well, I'll just let him tell you what he said about Navy SEAL.
Go for it, Rob.
One fucking Navy SEAL who could survive a week training with me.
I'm kind of sick of seeing it because like you guys think you're badass.
Come train with me for a week.
I'll show you what's up.
I'll fucking break you.
Sean, we get it.
You're a badass, bro.
But check it out.
Your training partners give millions of dollars and they actually live.
My swim buddies, they die every single year.
Do you have any idea what that means?
We've already proven that any kind of beatdown will not break us, but our training will simply just end your career, Sean.
I'm talking about skin grafts on the thighs.
Sean, you talk about taking people's souls from their body.
Well, me and my boys, we've actually taken a lot of real souls from people.
You know what I'm saying, bro?
Your training is absolutely brutal, man.
We get it.
I understand.
But your training doesn't kill dudes every single year.
And that's the world that we live in, brother.
My best advice for you, Sean, is to stay in the octagon.
Keep fighting for that next purse.
And us SEALs, we'll keep fighting for your freedom, brother.
Is that guy active?
No.
Oh, he's not active.
No.
What do you think about what Sean said?
Because apparently.
I replied to Sean on that video.
Did you really?
And he replied to me.
Did he really do that?
And we had a completely professional conversation on Instagram.
What he's talking about, I mean, like there is an essence, I understand what he is saying.
He is talking about physically fighting in a ring.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
We can all agree upon this.
You can't compare training to be a UFC fighter with the training of SEAL training or anything that the occupation comes from after that.
It's not a fair comparison.
I understand exactly what he was saying.
And he basically, at the end of it, he was like, dude, come out and like watch a fight week.
Because I'm like, hey, I have enough TBI and concussion.
I don't need you punching me in the head.
And he was totally professional, totally kind about it.
He's playing a character.
It's part of who he is and what he does inside of the UFC.
If you think that the SEAL or the guy who was a SEAL that responded to him is also not playing a character, then I don't know what to tell you because that is one of the worst representations of the SEAL community possible.
That guy.
Yeah, he needs to shut the fuck up.
He's a Navy SEAL.
He was.
Who gives a shit what the job title used to be?
Maybe Google if the guy spent time in prison for fraud.
That'd be a good start for people when they want to listen to what he has to say about the SEAL community and taking souls and all these things.
It's like, dude, you're a professional soldier.
Stop being a clown on Instagram.
And the only reason that he is responding in the manner that he is is to try to draw more attention from the video that Sean created.
No, that's a guy I actually did a platoon with.
He defrauded many SEALs on the West Coast.
Was he a SEAL?
Yes.
Oh, what the hell was he doing?
That's a different guy.
Mortgage.
Yeah, that's a different guy.
I'll leave his name out of it.
Wow.
Yeah, it's the guy who responded on that video.
Like, you know, it's again, it's not the same thing.
Sean was talking about physically fighting in the cage for a short period of time.
That guy was talking about the pipeline that, yes, people occasionally die in the pipeline.
The skin grafts on your legs, that's from what he's probably talking about is the abrasion from sand during Hell Week because you're running so much.
I know of zero people ever who have gotten a skin graft.
And I can't speak for the community.
I'm just saying in my time, zero people ever who had gotten a skin graft on their legs because of that.
Yeah, it's just, you know, do some research as to whether the guy worked with, I think his name was, was it McCaffey?
He, I might, I'm pretty sure I'm not over my skis on this, but pretty sure he went to prison for fraud.
And he's also, you know, he's trying to gain awareness for what it is that he is also selling.
And people need to take both of those things into context when you're thinking about it.
Is that Jimmy Watson?
Yes.
Okay.
Got it, Rob.
So it's Jimmy Watson.
If you type in Jimmy Watson, you're going to get.
Yeah, it was a pump and dump scheme, essentially, for, I believe, a digital asset.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there was a lot of that going on a couple years ago.
This has to be recently.
What year was it?
This was 2022.
Yeah, that was recently.
There was a lot of that going on.
A lot of guys did that.
This whole like, we've taken souls.
Shut the fuck up.
Shut up.
Like, dude, it's go write a Hollywood movie if you want to talk about it like that.
Yeah.
You know, it just, that stuff absolutely.
Why does that upset you?
What part of it?
Because it nauseates me.
I was a professional soldier, not a psychopath.
I am not out there trying to delicately navigate my way through the spiritual universe and take this soul and that soul.
And then it's like, dude, most of the time, maybe if I had a half a second to make a decision and a life and death matter, I was happy.
You know, sometimes you come like, ah, the guy surprises you with a gun.
It's not about, it's about doing your job in support of the overall mission, which is in support of the overall theater guidance, which is in support of the overall policy of the United States of America.
It's just this stuff gets romanticized.
It gets portrayed poorly in Hollywood movies.
And it's just like, just take the drama down.
You're at a 10, sir.
I need you at a two.
Exactly.
You know?
So, I mean, are you going to be announcing today about the new podcast you and Jimmy Watson are doing?
Is that what's it called 10 and 2?
No.
You should see your face, God.
But here's the thing.
There's so many people who would do that just for the short-term return.
And I want no part of any of that.
By the way, you know what's crazy when you're doing this?
I had a friend of mine, Jeff.
I don't think you ever met him.
You'll meet him.
Dude.
So he gets out and he reaches the SEAL Team 6 level, but on the Army side.
And you know what that special ops is.
It's not, you know, special forces.
So anyways, he reaches that level.
My orders led to him being that.
Okay.
And for 10 years, I can't get a hold of this guy.
So assume I get out in 99, 2000, I can't get a hold of him from 2000 till 2010.
Can't get a hold of him at all.
And whatever the timeline is.
And then eventually one day I contact the army to see if the guy's alive or not.
I'm Googling all his names, can't get a hold of him.
Eventually, I get an email.
Hey, what's up, B?
Hey, we get together, we sit down, and he's about to ETS.
He's doing his 20, and we have a serious conversation, and he's emotional going through it.
And I'm like, what's up?
What's he said?
I'm really going through a lot of things right now.
I think he's on his third marriage.
Didn't work out.
And you know how it is when you're choosing that life.
It's just divorce rate is high for cops.
It's like this when you're choosing special ops.
I remember going and getting interviewed for a fifth group and they said, before you choose to take this job, go sit down with these three guys that have been there and they did 20 years.
I go, sir, what do you think?
What's more important to you?
Serving your country or maintaining a marriage with your kids?
So I want to have family and kids.
It's probably not for you.
What are you talking about?
What's the next guy?
I was like, yeah, I'm on my third marriage.
Next guy.
I'm on four marriage.
Really?
Why?
What do you mean?
Why?
Do you know what you and they're breaking it down for you?
Do you, you sure?
It's like almost they're pushing you away from the job, right?
And I'm like, you know what?
You guys did a great job telling me I'm not choosing this life.
I'm out.
I want to go.
I want to go into business.
I want to do bodybuilding.
I want to do other things.
At that time, I wanted to be the next Mr. Olympia.
Anyways, didn't happen, but I wanted to get out, get into Hollywood and bodybuilding.
I talked to my friend who gets out and I'm seeing him on the camera.
And he's like, dude, I actually don't know what I'm going to be doing.
And I'm having very weird thoughts.
Okay.
So I'm like, dude, this is not good.
I get on a plane and I go visit him in Madrid.
And I haven't seen him since 99, so 2000.
I haven't seen him for, when did I go, Madrid?
2018, 2019?
So 19 years I haven't seen him, we go to Madrid.
He sees me, we hug, you know what kind of hug it is?
It's like, dude, it's like the freaking kind of hug that you feel like a brother, right?
And we're both emotional because I love this guy.
He loves me.
He's my brother, right?
It's a very unique moment we're having.
And it's recorded, our first hug, because I was with Steve and my guys.
And then once everybody's away, we sit down and we start talking.
I said, what did you see?
He's like, let me tell you, I was at T-Crid.
I was at this.
I was at that.
He was at this.
Okay, got it.
I said, so.
What do you think I should be doing when I get out?
I said, dude, why don't you start a podcast and talk about this and talk about that and talk about this?
And he's like, no, I didn't do it.
I can't do that.
And his level of pride, there was a guy who was from his background, what job they had in Frisco, Texas, who was the founder of this program that wrote a book about it.
And he himself was so disappointed that the guy that was the founder of this program that they came up with for special ops on the Army side that was publicly talking about what that training was all about.
Why would you do such a thing like that?
That's his level of pride.
So when you're talking like that and somebody does that, he's like, dude, I didn't do this for because I want the, you know, brag about who I killed and who I did this and who I did that.
So today, what does he do?
Nothing related to this.
He completely took a different route.
And no matter how much I talk to him to say, hey, he's, I can't do that.
I can't do that.
So that level of pride for men who see it from that perspective, you got to salute and give props to them.
And for someone like you, brother, that you're sitting here, we are able to do what we do because brave men like you are willing to put your life on the line.
And I respect you for it.
I thank you for your service.
I've been looking forward to us speaking as well.
And my feeling of who you were when I'm watching, I'm like, and now you're exactly who I thought you were.
I don't know if that's good or bad.
No, no, no.
You're a guy who's a proud man who served the country for the right reasons from the beginning, why you joined.
You still defend the decision that it's still honorable to go and get into that job.
It's very obvious you love America and you love your father.
All of that stuff is all characters of a great man, great human being.
And I applaud you and I appreciate you for coming out.
Really enjoy talking to you on today's podcast.
Yeah.
Thank you guys for having me.
This has been a blast.
Okay, gang, Rob, are we doing, what do we, do we have anything tomorrow or no?
9 a.m. tomorrow.
We'll be live with Shail Sanin.
Shale's on tomorrow morning.
Yes, sir.
Holy moly, that's going to be entertaining.
And then Friday, 9 a.m., we have Candace Owens and Chris Coma at the Comedy Club together to go live for three hours.
They've never sat face to face.
At the 5990 live.
5990 Comedy Club Cigar Lounge.
We'll be there together.
It's going to be an amazing thing.
And then Saturday, for those of you guys that are going to the UFC, we can't wait to see you at UFC 299 card, which I believe is going to be.
They're saying it's a better card than 300.
It's a stacked card.
If you're going to the UFC or some of the VT, your PBD podcast, we'll spot you guys.
Yes.
We'll be going there deep with a big group.
And oh yeah, that's right.
Last but not least, if you enjoyed Andy today, send him a manec.
Give him a shout out.
Follow his content.
And he's got a podcast as well.
Rob, let's put the link below in the description and the chat.
