Clint Emerson: Violent Nomad, 100 Deadly Skills Author

[Music] this is the danger closed podcast beyond the books with me jack carr welcome to the danger clothes podcast an ironclad original presented by sig sauer my guest today is my friend clint emerson now clint did over 20 years in the seal teams was involved in shipboarding operations prior to september 11th the initial push into iraq and then got pulled in to the best way to say it is i guess the darker side of special operations so you might know him from escape the wolf 100 deadly skills and violent nomad you can find him at clintemerson.com that'll send you to all those different places to check out what he has going on so i had a great time talking to him uh absolutely fantastic conversation i'm gonna have him back on i got so many more questions for this guy so uh that is today's podcast and if you like it please don't be afraid to leave a five star review uh and uh help us beat those big tech algorithms so now without further ado flint emerson dude i have like five books of yours maybe and i have calendars i have like a full-size calendar i have the little ones for the kids where they rip stuff off you know each day they learn a new skill like all that stuff is amazing so i want to talk to you about how you came up with all that stuff because you have you do something that's a lot different than anybody else really in this uh you know space for lack of a better term uh yeah and uh and which is which is i love you know there's not like well he does something that's pretty similar to this guy like no there's nobody else really out there that's doing what you do which i find incredible i love that part but uh let's go back to the beginning a little bit because uh so we didn't we weren't on the same teams together in the in the seal team so we linked up after but uh so i'm gonna go back a little bit when did you decide you wanted to go to but what did you find out about seals oh geez i was probably 10 years old traveling through frankfurt germany i was at the airport with my family we were coming back from saudi because that's where i grew up and so the saudis are weird they'll give you a 11 month work visa so my dad so so what did your horses got oil my dad worked for a ramco and so that's you know was the largest i think it still is the largest oil company in the world you just most people have never heard of but it's a r a m c o and that's arabian american company and uh so they've got all the oil but they hired the westerners to come and pull it out of the ground for and my dad was kind of in the engineering field and so we were there for you know 11 months per year right and then then they then they force you out to go renew your visas and all that crap and so we were traveling back to the states and uh i i was waiting at the gate and there was a uh there was like a bar slash restaurant or whatever and i ran over to the bar to get a coke and there was a guy standing there and he had a hand his tattoo on his arm and he looked kind of cool and so and i was a very inquisitive kid so i'm like hey what is that he's like it's a trident like what really what's a trident it's like it's a symbol that represents something i'm like what is this something he's like where are you from kid i'm like i'm from saudi i'm living i live in saudi but i'm from america from texas and he's like okay he goes you know when we bomb libya yeah cause i remember vice president george bush came into country and i was his color guard right i was a boy scout so i was holding the american flag while he basically said hey americans you know uh we're having issues with libya and if something goes bad or he retaliates against you guys since you are the closest americans that he could affect uh we'll have c-130s all this stuff lined up to get you out saudi and so he kind of gave this brief to everyone and um and i was there holding the american flag so i told this guy that same story he's like all right well then you get it so you remember when we bought it yeah remember he goes well the b-111s went in really really low drop the bombs to prevent collateral damage like okay that's collateral damage so you know innocent people don't die oh okay and then he's like so we had to go in take out the anti-aircraft guns before the b-111s could come in look i'm like what does that mean take out he's like killed all the guys manning the guns and then we blew up the guns it's like whoa so up to that point i've i i wanted to be a ninja right so yeah and then this guy tells me about seals i'm like okay i'm switching over to seal from ninja yeah not too far of a jump by the way not too much in alignment and i i joke about all the time i say you know the difference the big difference that i learned and the reason i switched to the seal world is because if you kill somebody as a ninja it's called murder but if you kill someone as a seal you're a hero though i was like okay i'll go that route instead you know lots uh so yeah anyway so that yeah he that guy told me the story now here's the best part so i show up to seal team three who owned the middle east at the time you know before force 21 and all that crap so i go in to the command i start talking to everybody especially guys who've been around for a while i was like did this team ever go over and like take out any aircraft guns before b111s went in nope and then later in my career i end up with damn neck and i'm thinking okay maybe that was a damn negation you know so i go over there talk to those guys they're like nope so my whole my whole passion and drive to be a co was probably ignited by 100 fraud that's fantastic i know as you're telling the story i'm like i think i would have heard of this either you know in real life you know having better teams or in all the research that i did leading up to uh going in never happens oh my gosh the sound is damn good it yeah it's a great story you know it's a very tom clancy-esque you know going in the end of uh which which book was that anyway at the end of that book where they go in and paint the target you know it's the first time i think about i think i heard about that sort of uh thing fantastic so between ages 10 when you met this uh imposter in the airport and uh and going into the seal teams uh what did you do you guys keep going back and forth between saudi and the states and uh yeah so i was there from second grade all the way to high school so what way it works over there is it only goes to eighth grade and then most of your ramco brats um the kids go to switzerland or somewhere for boarding school smoke pot and ski for uh four years and then go to college and probably smoke pot ski some more but uh my dad was kind of done with the culture and real move back to texas uh specifically plano and so i finished you know high school at plano senior high and then uh then went to college for a little while and then of course went in the navy nice nice and new how long did you do college oh i did three and a half years so it was a semester from graduating and i went to my dad and i said uh yeah i gotta i gotta i gotta scratch it i gotta scratch the itch and he was like what i'm like he's only got a semester i'm like yeah i can finish that semester anytime which i did and uh and then he uh he's like all right whatever so i went and signed the dotted line and often maybe i went nice oh what year is that and that was uh 94. okay yeah got it got it so you came in made it through buds right to seal team three and uh while you were there what was your so time frame did you get to do ship boardings during that time pre-september oh yeah okay yeah yeah we got lucky i mean team three was really the only heck them and then you remember the strike platoons and seal team-mate that were attached to like aircraft carriers like those are really the only ones if you were on an arg pre-911 then you were going to get to work right so but nobody liked the arts but i did hell i showed up to well i get down with buds and then i had to go through short course at the time they had our our seo medic training broken up into basically two blocks so you did short course first which was basic paramedic basically right this is that and then i was the last class at fort uh at 4cm houston in san antonio uh before they moved everything to bragg and so i did six months there then jump school um and then checked into team three uh and then you know the old school route of you know you're a nobody new guy waiting for your your peers to decide when you get your trident after you pass your chiefs board and your walk throughs um which i think man that's how they should just keep it like i don't you know i know they had to standardize everything but jeez it's like that was a great way of uh keeping people humble that's for sure it was cool yeah i did like that i liked it because maybe it's because i grew up reading all those books where you found out hey there is probation you'll be on probation for at least six months with your platoon and then the guys will decide whether they want you at their side going into combat that's kind of how it was reframed in those books that i read growing up it was like oh man so cool you get that tried from those guys and i remember the day we got uh got our tridents and man just getting lined up against the conex box and putting those that tried and everybody just boom and i really remember is that some of the guys that i thought wouldn't hit uh that hard oh my goodness like those guys were and then some of the guys i thought would just be so painful like didn't hit as hard i don't know why that stands out to me but uh against the context box so you can't for those listening so that there's nowhere to go like you're gonna absorb the entire impact of that fist into that trident which was that was pretty cool way to do it that was man i've got a great picture of my chest like a couple of days later where my entire left pec is completely black and blue except where the trident was and so there's this white flesh area and the perfect outline of the trident but everything else you know from my shoulder all the way over to my collarbone down to basically my nipple was black so but yeah same thing we they put us up against like the the seal team free wall down uh by ordinance and uh pounded it in but uh nowadays all those guys will be going to captain's mast for that today don't name any names they might come after them retroactively oh yeah me and you know how hell yeah how that kind of works yeah um but yeah so did team three and yeah we got to do shipboardings uh you know we did wreckies over on that peninsula just you know kawaii you know everything coming up yeah spent a little time there yeah so you know the deal and uh you felt like yeah we're cool we're doing we're actually working um responded to the uss cole got on there a couple days after that was hit and uh yeah i mean it was i mean the boardings were the highlight reel i mean we were boarding everything dows big tankers you name it it was uh it was a good time what'd you guys do on the coal uh really it was uh we showed up um several days because we just happened to be in the area it took us about a day to get there we got on board and providing security because intel had that there was going to be follow-on attacks um at the time there was going to be follow-on attacks in aden and then also up in dubai and other major port cities in the middle east so um they started you know they put out snipers or we did um and then we had uh a little bit of medical work so you know most of your injured were gone but there was like i became a uh how old was i late 20s became like a therapist you know for some of these some of the folks that were still there just giving them somebody to talk to uh we're helping out the crew the best we could but we had a rotation uh basically just providing uh overwatch in case something came if anything came within you know 500 meters then it was going to get lit up and that was our main job and so we had a boarding we did we had a yemenis vessel come cruising in didn't pay attention to rules it had uniformed yemenis guys on it and so it was kind of funny the only people that were available at that point to jump on a rib real quick was me and mike ritland and uh so we intercepted this thing as it's coming just full speed like are you crazy after an event like this and you know they're just gonna it was it was the oddest way of a host nation or that country to like provide support you know they did everything backwards all the guns right they put all these these anti-aircraft guns and all this stuff out around the port right but they pointed the guns towards us not like away from us they pointed them towards the cult yeah this is my this is my shocked face yeah exactly you're not surprised but uh you know it you know it was just so many little things we're just like what is wrong with these dudes right so here comes you know the yemenis boat we jump on we just board it and we're already like super aggro um mainly because we had been out there cutting squares for a while at this point and i remember like the rations we had run out of food and we were eating this uh i forgot what the hell they were but they were like for veg for for veterinarian use only rations that were on the ship we were eating these things uh like once a day and we were just done man it was one of those uh 60 days straight kind of just running this rotation on the coal until the blue marlin could show up and pull that thing up onto this big dry deck and take it back to the states oh wow um it was it was really an incredible experience but a majority of what we were doing was you know just dealing with the yemenis uh crazy maneuvers they would make to that we're just like don't you know like we're going to kill you if you come near this ship but uh they once they got it they got it and we didn't have to deal with too much but yeah no kidding did you guys send guys to uh stinger school did you put guys with stingers out for for aircraft i don't know they no we didn't have any uh we didn't have access to that kind of stuff um we had a couple guys that would go to that school that i always wanted to go yeah i thought it would be kind of cool to figure out that identify friend or foe thing i never got a chance to to do it though but no neither did i that's good stuff though and then and so you did ship so free september 11th for those listening shipboardings were the deal um unless you were you know in uh in mogadishu or at one of these flash points between really the end of vietnam and the september 11th we weren't involved in sustained combat operations but one of the things we did do were shipboardings or certain teams did shipboarding so before september 11th man we wanted to be you guys so i was at team five and you're hearing about team three doing these shipboardings and we're like yeah if only we could do a shipboarding and september 11th happens and uh we fly and we think we're going to afghanistan but instead we take over for team three in kuwait doing those exact same shipboardings that still had to continue to enforce the embargo against iraq so coming out of iraq by that little place and then taking a left there heading for iran so that was the only time during my 20 years that i actually did any shipboardings operations and i think that was the only time i really spent much any time on a ship and speaking of the the veterinarian only food source uh we actually went off a uh an australian ship out there after september 11th so we went to this australian ship and i'll tell you what everyone on that ship was happy the food was delicious they didn't have wine like a glass or something with your meal like totally different than any us ship i remember we got a resupply in everybody just runs up to help out not because it was your job just because it was time to help out and unload and then we turned into a qriket game and now like high bay deck thing whatever that's called um so yeah it was totally different than spending time on a us ship what was just miserable on a u.s ship for whatever reason everybody's just like bummed out at least on the ones that that i was on which was not that many so the rest of the us navy might it might be very happy place in my little experience might be the only one but uh those are my two uh you know juxtaposed different points the time on a on a us amphib same ship and time on an australian amphib which used to be a u.s ship that they bought and then just somehow made a lot nicer for whatever reason you know i did some time with some aussies yeah same thing it was a totally different experience and the food was dramatically better yeah yeah so why aren't we doing this yeah ridiculous yeah yeah yeah so september 11th where where were you on september 11th uh yeah i was actually going over coronado bridge uh heading in that morning when i walked on the seal team three quarter deck they had a tv going there's about three or four guys already standing there i walk in and the second plane hits the second building and uh the kind of were all just sitting there going what the what is this you know and you know you didn't believe that it was an attack you know remember at the beginning everybody thought it was like some kind of air traffic control like problem um or just you know no one knew and then uh so we kind of sat there and i remember just debating it but yeah that second plane kind of confirmed that there was something more nefarious going on and um and then i remember within weeks you know the team but the other platoons that were already ramping up to deploy where they started reconfiguring their pallets and they got shifted to afghanistan so you know let's see a couple of those seal team three platoons were the one of the first ones in there for nsw and uh it wasn't me but it was a bunch of guys you know yeah yeah they all got to get in there first and yeah we did the high fives with those guys gave them uh you know i think we gave them our snowshoes uh because of course we'd done the cold weather warfare training from team five so we came in we passed off our snowshoes and some of the stuff to those guys i think um did the high five with them did a little turnover op maybe on the shipboarding stuff and then off they went to afghanistan yeah um with our stuff we're like dangit we thought we were going to miss real good i mean if you remember you probably thought the same thing you're probably like dang it i'm not deployed right now i'm going to miss this whole thing because that's what we thought we're like oh man they're getting they're giving us the shipboardings team three's getting it right now some other people are getting it but uh man we're gonna miss it that's what we thought and here we are everyone's going to get plenty of experience yeah 20 years later that uh that fear was unfounded apparently yeah because we are still over there right now um yeah which is insane so when did you first uh get over there then or what was your what was your path after september 11th um you had a very interesting career as far as going into the special activities stuff and nsa stuff and very unique for uh for a seal yeah it was it was um i got lucky i just told you you know you get you get the right timing right place and you got the right master chief asking you know hey you want to try something that i can't tell you about i was like sure why not yeah the answer that question is always yes yeah of course i was like yeah sure yeah yeah so i mean like the rotation okay so a lot happened during that time as you know the force 21 kicked in i went to long course somewhere in the middle of uh and i just got back from one course where i was yeah so that's another six months of medical jobs yeah so long course another outport brag and that's that takes you to the next level in trauma medicine and stuff so uh somewhere in there i had to go knock that out came back took the lpo position uh for the platoon and then we pushed we were the initial push into iraq working for general kelly general maddox and those guys you know so um that was a whole other experience you know not many people get to experience like true combat right i mean like when you push in and you're sleeping in or under or on top of your vehicles every night or the marines in anastaria like actual trench warfare and we pull up and we're just jumping in the trenches and just to get a couple of night's sleep you know and then keep moving forward we were staying usually ahead of the marines as we moved you know swept the country north doing recce uh you know once we got into anastaria general kelly it's the first time i think since 1953 or something where you know a colonel had been made general on the battlefield and so that's where general kelly picked up his first star and i'll never forget we arrived tom nozzeria they just got their asses handed to him jessica lynch is sitting in the hospital you know uh prisoner of war and he comes up he's like i'm glad you seals are here he looks every single one of us in the eyes and tells us i'm authorizing 100 killer operations right now starts with you guys and your force recon brothers over there by the way we look over at them and they're like covered in blood and dirty and had just been in it for days on end by the time we show up and uh it was it was amazing and he and so the funny part was he says this and it's in front of a certain captain at the time and you know this captain gets on his helicopter seal captain and heads back to uh kuwait and then immediately gets on comms and tells us don't do anything that that that general's telling you to do i don't want any seals dying on my watch and there was this and if you remember at the beginning there was this very like risk adverse like weird thing going on and uh the way they saw it at the beginning was hey you know spec ops job is done here right you guys did a great job they didn't know what our place was in a conventional war it had been a while right so we didn't have any leaders that had that kind of experience so no fault of their own right they've been sitting in cubicles far more than they had been sitting in a in a humvee or any kind of vehicle right so it only made sense that there was a little bit of turbulence uh at the beginning um but anyway we had a good we ended up still having a good time and made the best of it as we transitioned from different leadership on the battlefield and we basically worked our way all the way up to to crete um and then uh this was uh you know several months in and then our deployment cycle was up and that's when you guys i think it was team five came over and we did the big high five in kuwait and then uh you know we were all just bitter well because you understand there was a lot of uh hey no you can't do this nope you can't do that no you can't do that no no no and so um you know it got to the point where we were like forget it we're just gonna go do and then report instead of asking and getting told no right so there was less otherwise directed is what uh yes that's called right which which i used to think was fantastic reading all the vietnam books you know you just leave like a nerd on someone's desk who's not gonna let you do something unless otherwise directed we're leaving here knowing they're going to get it later it doesn't work so well today i did actually do that uh and it yeah it didn't work the way it had in the vietnam books no no there was a lot of there was a lot of guys worried about you know seals dying and so they wanted to kind of just keep us for very very special things and not for if it looked anything unconventional at the beginning it was no no no that's not our job and um obviously you know you know it took was a couple more deployment cycles and that all went away and everybody was getting in the mix getting in the fight and you know pushing limits so but the beginning was a little rough you know for everyone and um so that's where i came back from uh you know you came back from that deployment and that's when they said hey there's a special program going on you know do you want to play and i was like sure and then that's when i moved into special activities and uh yeah were they standing up those new teams then or was that uh just kind of like a part of what you were doing that was actually yeah that was a small part of the bigger piece you know we i went over to warcom and uh worked directly for the admiral it was just me and a couple of guys and they were like ready go just go figure it out like figure out what just figure it out oh okay well so we started getting footholds inside embassies all over the globe and we started basically going into sales mode while we were in sales mode we were also in training mode and and then getting deployments under our belt in either small teams or as singletons and then establishing a little bit of uh you know battlefield experience if you will but most of the time we weren't even inside the theaters and really it was all about collection you know against uh anything right if it financed we we wanted to know about if it was so if it was financing terrorism if it whatever any any support arm of terrorism that was that was the deal was like go after it and be as creative as you want and so it grew and kept growing and kept growing uh and then i had an opportunity to go to the nsa and they had one seal bill that we put out there was that a number or did that already exist no it was new we put it there um and we the the master chief who recruited me he went out and sat in that seat first just to kind of get a lay of the land and figure out what our job was going to be and then i was the second guy and then i hung out there for a while it was kind of a hybrid i was wearing a lot of different hats i was running some training i was also deploying for them uh and then also you know when you once you were in dc you're kind of seals in dc end up getting leveraged for all kinds of stuff so you know i was i was wearing a lot of hats and it was a great great uh experience did you deploy with the nsa or is that uh was that mostly a management type position yeah no they had a couple of gigs that i went did that was uh very techie related yeah um did you have that training beforehand uh that techie type stuff or was that like on the job type stuff so you had to do that beforehand when you're when you're learning this new skill after that that first iraq push you're coming back you're going to these different schools with a special activity kind of bent to them getting that skill set yeah so any yeah the back up there the training there was i mean there's dozens of pipelines right and so i went to all of them i mean anything that existed i went to if it was whether it was the agencies or dod you know anything i could find that related to any of that world um yeah i was in it and then i would go on deployments uh and kind of do a shakeout if you will right i'd go over hang out at an embassy and then drum up work and then sell it right say hey this is now an nsw capability even though it was they didn't know that there was just me and like one other guy at the time yeah so you know yeah we got a lot yeah we can do this yes yes yes we just said yes to everything and um and it ended up leading to a lot of you know interesting stuff and then at the nsa it kind of bumped it to the next level on the tech side um and then while i was up there you know some master cheese from down south came up for a meeting they realized wait there's a seal up here and he knows how to do all that i'm like they're like you're coming with us and then so i ended up at damn neck and then uh yeah and then i finished the career out there no way when you when you went to nsa what was your what was your rank i was a chief okay you're chief by that point i didn't know you had to like pretend you were something higher like i'm a yeah i mean gs yeah it may have been probably equivalent to like a 12 gs 13-ish during all that stuff yeah with a blue badge you know you name it so it was it was uh you were kind of in and you know the sky was the limit really and your imagination was the limit uh at the beginning then you know once we got overseas started kind of figuring out what our path was going to be and where we could fill gaps that other units you know weren't able to do or weren't doing um it really allowed us to lead the way to the point where some of the training pipelines i set up got accredited by socom and became socom programs record along with the technology if you remember there's a lot of these kits that started getting pushed out to the teams and you know that was you know just you know whatever six of us that really kind of laid the foundation to get all that out there and then heck man it just took off after that it had you know just like any program it had a lot of ups and downs and a lot of characters and leadership that come along you know the deal or something some leaders are like yeah i support this and others are like i'm pulling your budget and it's like okay you know it's a little bit of a roller coaster but it eventually planed out and you know it's uh it has served the community really well i think in a lot of ways that most community will never know about yeah that's amazing what um what's your favorite part of that training that's different than uh you know most seal training the stuff that we normally do we and for those listening we go to like land warfare training mountain warfare training close quarter battle stuff you go to uh urban combat you dive you jump you do all these different things and uh what clint's talking about is definitely different outside of that realm um what was your favorite part of that different kind of training you can if you can talk about it yeah um well the comparison i like to use and i know you'll appreciate it is is the jed bird teams of world war ii which was these jed birds were started by the oss and if people don't know that's the office of strategic services and they they were the predecessor of the cia and those jetberg's were a coalition team right you had a usually a brett a frenchman and of course an american and they would jump in behind enemy lines uh and run sabotage reconnaissance you name it uh you know in nazi territory and uh one of their biggest responsibilities was to be gray right they had to as soon as they'd land by parachute in the middle of the night uh they immediately would throw on the clothing uh that the villagers wore depending on where they were operating and the country and they immediately had to assume projection and demeanor skills so that if they were co-located with nazis that were driving by and you know occupied territory they just had to blend in with everyone else and so i think you know when you fast forward and you add technology and you add a whole lot of just cool stuff uh that's probably the closest uh comparison i can make to um the kind of things that we were involved in uh training wise i mean man there was so many you know when you're a seal it's body armor night vision guns and you know you've got your your 22 buddies um with this world it was business casual business class you know and you didn't have your 22 buddies with yeah right so it was a complete 180 uh to taking your alpha male kind of instincts and demeanor and aura and subduing it with penny loafers and a calculator watch if necessary right so um but at the same time kind of cool yeah yeah it was like yeah i'm i'm you know you get on a plane and to go uh do whatever and you're you're on your own and that was probably the best part and then later i started to really specialize uh in cmoe which is clandestine methods of entry and i another program that i got to build from ground up and uh did it the same way i built the others was you know you gotta get trained and then you gotta immediately just get overseas and start putting it to use and so you know being able to get in to you know vessels vehicles structures and containers is really what we focused on being able to get in with zero forensics and zero attribution united states government was the number one goal and so with that comes a lot of technology um and a whole lot of uh different operational risk factors that you know most people have no idea i would say a cmoe operation is probably one of the most like it takes a lot there's a lot involved you know i can't go into it but i mean there's a lot more than just walking up to a door and looking at the doorknob and you know and going inside yeah there's there's a lot to it and uh that uh especially when you talk about cameras um you know alarm systems uh there is a world of uh sensors that we had to uh overcome um and when you talk about like a worst case scenario target where they have you know five layers to their perimeter before you even get to the door you can imagine right it gets a little crazy so um yeah that that was all probably the best stuff that i uh got to play around in yeah yeah that's incredible then when you get to uh development group you continue to do kind of the same thing just on that side of the house some of the similar things you're doing with uh with nsa but now you're doing it just for a military specific entity yeah yeah you could say that i mean i'm being careful yeah i mean you know as you know like that world is um it's it's massive right so you get a lot of people that come knocking on on doors saying hey can you guys go do this for us so i would say a majority of you know like the work was always for for other folks you know and we're always going yes yes yes right we're the other proverbial hookers in socom we just say yes to everything and go for it so it's uh but yeah that's that's pretty much everything i did was always for someone else for the most part i'd say very rarely for sw yeah and you're continuing to build your skills where you're at that command there's uh oh yeah the uh the capabilities and and everything else are expanding because we're at war here so now we're we're learning we're figuring out uh some things we need to get better at we're getting lessons learned we're doing all these i mean we've had yeah 20 years but when you're doing that we're you know at the seven eight nine year mark at being at war so we're learning lessons and we're figuring out some different capabilities that we that we need that we don't have um and then so you're continuing to build those skills at a place where where you can yeah yeah i mean everyone always asks the difference like money money money money and support is the main difference i mean it yeah it makes a world of difference and it allows operators to concentrate on being an operator without all the admin crap you get to just solely spend the rest of your career becoming a true subject matter expert in whatever it is you want to be a subject matter experience some guys go down the path of combatives and you and i know a lot of great guys that are just ruthless right and they became ruthless because they were given that ability to just concentrate on what they wanted to concentrate on in order to be a better operator you know so it really that's the beauty of of national level worlds is it allows guys to concentrate solely on what they want to be just incredible at and uh and that's it without any of the yeah that's amazing so you're continuing deployed continuing to do the job and you finish up your time there is that where you is that where you exit yeah for the most part there was a towards the end like basically you when you know you're going to retire you move over to a different place and and then you can just it gives you the opportunity it basically opens up a seat so that someone else can jump in you do your turnover and then you go over to another command and now you can just kind of go into your twilight you know a year basically a year out yeah i just did nothing but do retirement stuff yeah that's where i started writing yeah and i explain it to people like hey you're getting out of this gigantic bureaucracy you've told them you're getting out they take you you go in this other pile and the whole community that you've been focused on your entire career is now continuing to move forward well you get to go stand in line at medical at dental get read out of secret programs maybe turn in a little gear here or there but also stand in line to make your appointment and then stand in line again you know to do all those different things and it just takes a while and uh so it's nice to take a breath and think about okay time to start writing so is that when you started developing uh these different companies that you now have yeah it started with escape the wolf escape the wolf started as a self-published little handbook because when i was looking around state department cia you name it looking for a gray man course it didn't have one it was crazy to me like how the hell do you not have a course teaching people like protocol and etiquette right hey here's the differences if you go here do this don't do that when you go over here do this don't do that depending on the country depending on the culture but um you know they didn't have that they didn't have anything that taught you know like the next level of situational awareness um so through my deployments i ended up taking all my lessons learned and turned it into a little book called escape the wolf and it got passed around it wasn't anything i was selling i just wanted the binder full of crap i collected to actually just look and feel like a book so i sent the binder to uh the self-publishing company and was like hey can you just turn this into a book how much does that cost and they're like yeah cost you like i think i paid 800 bucks and then they put they put it into a format book format and print it and then said all right yeah these will cost you a couple of bucks to print each and i was like all right cool and so i'd order a box every now and then i would hand them out for free um go to people going through any of my pipelines or any of that kind of stuff yeah and so um i got a call one day uh from the global security director of the wall street journal this was after danny pearl you know ended up on youtube getting his head cut off right and uh he's a retired fbi guy and he's like hey i got your book and uh i want you to teach all 700 of my most elite journalists everything in this book and i was like well i'm in the navy i don't think i can pull that off so and so i uh i kind of waved him off he said well if you if you go turn your book into e-learning then i'll buy it and i'm like oh okay cool or e-what yeah so you know i went and took the book to a developer and said hey so do you do e-learning it's like yeah i do e-learning all right can you turn this thing into e-learning he's like yeah sure that'll cost you i'm like how much it was like some astronomical number that i put on my credit card i just took this total risk wow i didn't have a contract with the journal nothing right and so it took about six months or however long i don't remember and uh and i was already into retirement mode and i called that guy up and said hey uh you still work at the wall street like yeah i said you remember me right i'm the guy that you said to build the thing and he's like yeah yeah i remember okay so i got it done uh are you do you still want to buy it he's like sure how much i'm like i don't know how yeah exactly i just came up with some number and you know of course this is the beginning like i don't know what i'm doing when it comes to business it should have been a license i should have treated my software you know so i sell it to them for basically what i owed like a dumbass or i can't remember and uh and so they bought it they put it on their servers and they uh pretty sure they still use it to this day but that they basically took the book and turned it into a company um that i could roll over into the civilian world and start you know building crisis management programs for you know fortune 500 non-profits places of worship private schools and that's pretty much what i've been doing full time since i've been out okay so that still escaped the wolf side of the house yeah okay and then where does 100 deadly skills come come into play and and violent nomad and all that kind of stuff so so 100 daily skill so i'd already kind of been laying the foundation for escape the wolf and so i had another uh buddy of mine um who you should totally have on the podcast this guy has incredible stories uh an older gentleman naval academy grad vietnam era guy and i met him at the nsa director energy hey clint there's this guy that you should meet and i'm like okay his name's keith i'm like all right so i entered i meet this guy named keith and but anyway he had already written a whole bunch of books he's uh you know tied to hollywood and was also you know chairman of the board of mcdonald's uh i mean this guy's been there done that with all kinds of stuff in life and so he was like let's write a book together i'm like i don't really want to write a book because all the guys that write books are i had the typical team guy thing right and now you're on book which number is this yeah exactly i tell people all the time i'm like i was one of the guys in the squadron space like totally making fun of dudes who wrote books and then i get out and i became one of them but uh you know anyway he kind of says yeah let's just do something fun and this and that i'm like all right so we started batting around this idea of like a skills book that would be kind of cool and retro and illustrations and you know and it became 100 skills but like at the very beginning like right after we signed the contract with simon schuster um he calls he's like i gotta get back surgery so you're on your own i was like what and so yeah that was that was it i was doing it because he was already kind of a published guy and had been around for a long time and uh and he was kind of talking into it and what sold me i was like book is the best marketing platform you could ever do that you'd never have to pay for and i was like huh and uh he goes into well-placed ink on paper will outweigh gold any day of the week as far as value and you certainly know this better than anybody well-placed ink on paper i'm thinking about it now i love that i've never thought of it in those terms because i loved it but uh interesting now i might use that in a book i'll thank you in the acknowledgements that's fantastic yeah so anyway that's a whole lot of uh i think i did about a thousand tangents in that one run but uh yeah i ended up doing 100 daily skills uh um and i looked at it is so i knew what i was putting out for employees right if you got a company that's responsible enough to give their employees the training they deserve in order to stay safe and secure for the eight hours that they're sitting at work i was like well what what can i what can be the consumer version of that the person who works for a company they do nothing which is a majority of them yeah right majority of the companies out there do not protect their employees they just they just buy insurance you know and so i looked at 100 skills being a fun creative entertaining way to give people the skills they need um without it being e-learning and all the stuff that i do for escape the wolf it was just a it was a more you know informative way of doing it so that thing that thing hits and then is that like a deliverable when you go and people ask you to come to come to companies and do do a talk do they get get a book or how does it turn into what it is now how does it turn into gear and violent nomad and t-shirts yeah this blade right here thank you very much by the way awesome yeah look at that thing this thing's solid too and i love that it says made in the usa you know that's made in the usa outlaw yeah yeah no i thought you'd like yeah no thank you um yeah it's a uh yes okay so good question so 100 daily skills i didn't want to say i guess that's not true a lot of guys would you know maybe leverage navy seals do this maybe seals do that right and i didn't want to i didn't want a skill book to say that i didn't want to i just didn't want to abuse the community that way the navy seal leadership book or the navy seal survival book within navy seal so you want to do something a little a little different yeah so 100 daily skills is a seals guide to blah blah blah but when you get inside i reference not a navy seal does this but if i don't know matt does this i don't know mad um i love that term i really love it so much i put it in a book uh i don't know if you caught it i put it in one of the books i can't remember which one it was but i just slipped it in there um which is yeah it's awesome i love that term yeah i appreciate that that's no i didn't know you did that that's awesome um yeah violent nomad was actually the code name i gave to a program that i built okay i put the name on the program before it was going to go into classic classification mode where it would get its own unique two-word code name right and so uh i it was temporarily called violent nomad and well it went nowhere and i really didn't like the name you know and so i was like i'll just use that to describe a person that knows these skills and then it evolved after that you know so a violent nomad really nomad is someone who's self-reliant self-sufficient can roam the planet and be okay right and then violent just means hey you have the ability to flip that switch when necessary uh for good not for evil and that is that really is the violent nomad and then when the success of book one people were hit me up like do you have a t-shirt and i was like no so of course you start making t-shirts and t-shirts turn into now it's turned into an e-commerce site that is you know it does well because it does better every year yeah it just gets better and better more people are more recognized the more it becomes uh recognized in different worlds then obviously the better it's become or done and that's right behind you is that fulfillment stuff going out right behind you in that warehouse there doing your fulfillment yeah so in the morning it's usually all fulfillment goes out you know so that we try to do a 24 hour turnaround so orders that come in the day prior are going out the next day no matter what that's awesome so we were doing that in our living room out here until christmas like uh and my wife's like all right and stop all halt we need to we couldn't we can't couldn't fulfill orders we couldn't meet the demand it was like boxes all over the house not just the living room it was like living room kitchen garage bedroom boxes everywhere in different stages like it was it was crazy and for fun i can't imagine you're you're because your stuff has hit it hard and fast i mean i'm sure it's been mine i've had time like right mine's it's survival books it's not it's not fiction like yours where i mean once you hit you hit and it hits hard like what you've done mine has always been what i call a longevity book right it's it's always going to be on the bookshelves right next to the sas survival guide it is it's always there i see it all over the place which is awesome yeah but it's never going to have i mean it has its moments you know gifts gift season you know typical book run type when you take a book and you put it on the calendar you're going to have your high points you're gonna have your low just like with anything you know um so i've i've had time to scale yeah so you're scaling like literally overnight because of the success of these books man it was insane so at christmas so now we're getting a two-way fulfillment center which i thought would be a little quicker anyway it's taken a little bit so i think in the next couple weeks we'll finally have everything at a fulfillment center they'll be doing all that stuff sending it all out keeping track of orders we'll have different drops throughout the year you know that sort of thing so just needed to outsource that because it was uh me and my wife doing it it was just too much with podcasts with merchandise we're writing the book books everything else that goes along with that the scripts for the series like that was that was a lot going on for for for me and my wife so hey at christmas it's just you guys right it's just us just yeah and yeah at christmas i decided all these things started to arrive and she's like what are these boxes cause i didn't order them i'm like oh i put out on social media that i'm gonna do a thousand um a giveaway thing where i just say thank you to people you know we're gonna we'll just handle it we'll just pay for it all and we're just gonna send these cards out they have like a patch and a sticker and a card into this and she's like well who's gonna put all these together i'm like oh you can just print the labels right she's like you are honey yeah she's like she's like you know how long it takes to print a thousand labels on this system that we're using i'm like no she's like okay so yeah that was that was kind of the uh the end of it so we got through those got all those out uh got all the rest of the stuff out of here that we had on the you know that had sitting in the uh in the laundry room and uh now we're we're outsourcing uh to this other place down the road here so that'll be that'll be good you know yeah well she's a team guy wife so right you've been with her for how long have you guys been here 20 years 12 21 years now you just got to look at her thank you for reminding me by the way yeah figure it out yeah hey honey just figure it out yeah i realize that we're not in the teams anymore so that's not the right answer but uh yeah so we're working on it but uh yeah 21 years so that reminds me i need to probably do something coming up we got a couple weeks left so thanks for thanks for the reminder crazy busy times busy times yeah but uh and the other thing so you are the is it the only seal inducted into the international spy museum in dc so they say yeah that was that's crazy it's kind of cool yeah um yeah it's a little uh i donated um i donated some stuff to them that you know that i had the opportunity to use and i couldn't think of a better place i i've always enjoyed that museum it's one of the most trafficked ones in dc um i'm sure you've been i haven't been to it i was going to it and covet hit i was doing a a book thing there and uh yeah and then covet it it was like right as coveted like early march or something like that if if memory serves maybe late february so it was just starting to hit and then they shut this anyway it didn't didn't work out so i went there did the book thing somewhere else but i never got to walk through unfortunately but i want to get back there i heard it's amazing it's right up your alley i mean if you're i mean we're kind of the same with this this world that i worked in and i mean it's uh yeah i mean you could the new building is mind-blowing like it's so high-tech and and so like espionage spy yeah related um so i donated um some stuff to them that they've got on display and became a uh an attraction if you will so there's this crazy big you know picture of me and weird stuff that i'm always like oh that's cool i've seen pictures yeah i know i've seen pictures of people can go to your instagram i think there's a picture on there like wait if you scroll way down um it's on there i think but it's uh yeah it's an aw it's awesome and what a cool thing to be a be a part of that's that's awesome yeah i think it's cool for the community for sure you know because it's uh they they really preserved his the history of espionage and intelligence gathering and it's not just us right it's like the history of espionage globally i mean they've got even a big chunk of the berlin wall in there um that tells stories about all the things that happened prior to that to make that happen and become reality um they've got heck they've got a pred hanging from the ceiling nice uh you know they've got a lot of just cool stuff so anybody who can check it out you should if you're in dc yeah i think it'd be great for kids too i remember going to dc when i was a kid going to go to new york dc going to battlefields up and down the east coast when i was in third grade with my parents and i still remember that to this day i remember going to valley forge i remember to go to the smithsonian uh i remember seeing those planes hanging from the ceiling at the air and space museum like all that stuff really resonated with me especially during that time that you know were very it was very impactful uh when we were very impressionable uh that first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth grade time frame you know it's a really good time yeah and i think the spy museum would fit right in there same thing with the seal museum have you been down to one of fort pierce florida oh yeah yeah amazing i was so impressed uh with that and then yeah when you were going to and from doing your nsa stuff did you go to uh to langley to go to the cia and see their their museum oh yeah wow yeah nice and even there they even have another off-site one uh down at camp paradise they have another museum there that's uh that literally has a padlock on the door and they unlock it and you go inside and it's like a whole other world of stuff that they can't put on display that's really cool awesome dude i love it give me book ideas as we're talking that's fantastic i love it i love it yeah i never went to the museum i was doing uh when i got back from baghdad in 2006 i was going to jump over to the agency because i had such a great experience working with those guys um branch i was going to do this program where you were in the military kind of one day and it really all it did was take a few of the steps out that you would need to do if you were coming from from anywhere else and applying um but i was going up on over and do that because i had such a great experience down there and actually it formed the basis for my second novel true believer but uh when i was at uh cia i always wanted to go and see the see the museum and walk through i never i didn't ask though i didn't spend enough time there to be able to go in and do that but i would have loved to have gone and checked that out it sounds like an amazing place to visit yeah they have it they have it split um so they have it's actually kind of two too small so one that's more oss world and then the other one was more modern day okay uh of of stuff and uh interestingly enough most of the stuff in those museums at headquarters are owned by one guy like he went around and bought all of these artifacts and has filled up the museums at langley and at the spy museum nice so yeah that's really interesting stuff yeah yeah i keep hearing about them reading about different things in there look you know i'm looking at the time and i realize i have another interview you have to jump on but yeah and i know we had only scheduled for an hour anyway but i'd love to keep talking to you um i hope we can meet up in person again very soon and do i have this right did you run with the bulls at some point in papillona yeah when did you do that yeah so i took uh oh i took hemingway's book then also son always this yep and i used that as my tour guide to spain nice so i flew into barcelona went up through the pyrenees came down into pamplona did seven days straight of running every morning i did it all seven days yeah seven i did one day yeah july through the 14th right i think so every july and yeah did every morning and then uh and then i continued on to because he talks about san sebastian you know went over there what a beautiful city some of the top chefs come out top 10 chefs in the world always come out of san sebastian then hook back down but i basically followed that book to the team that's awesome that's another book in and of itself you know violent nomading through uh through spain that's incredible yeah i did the first day that was enough for me i can't believe you did it seven days yeah i did it the one day and uh what i didn't realize i thought you just ran through the streets i kind of didn't get that you if you your goal is to make it to that stadium at the end and that's what i did i made it to that thing i made it in there and uh and it funnels for people that don't know like and this is gosh i'm going back 30 years anyway a long time i did it so you're running through the streets and people like the spaniards are on the side like trying to push you back in like push the australians you know the british the americans like kind of back into the streets in the path of these bulls and uh and i remember it going down these streets and then it like funneled down into the stadium remember it like bottlenecked if my memory serves which is like been a while and then it drops down and then goes in uh and i didn't really expect that but then everybody who's running gets bottlenecked so it slows down but the bulls don't really slow down and i meant and i remember getting into the stadium like yes i made it that was crazy and then what happened was they let fresh bowls in because the ones that have been running through the streets they're tired at this point and then they open up the fresh bowls that are just raring to go and then they run in and the stadium was full of people and they're just cheering you know they want to see some people get skewered and uh that was awesome it was a great experience i keep going back and looking for photos i'm trying to find a photo somewhere in like these boxes we've moved so many times there's got to be at least one but uh but yeah i've done the same a couple of times where i've i have found a couple yeah and i found a video uh that of me running by and it was it was one year where it made the newspapers where this one bull just totally destroyed somebody crazy you know and it's uh yeah it's the it's the beware of the lonely bull that's the question that's the biggest thing if they're together they stay calm but the one that gets separated from the pack is the one that's going to kick everybody's out it's a lansing yeah yeah wow super wild yeah i highly recommend people do that yeah no it's super fun mean i only did it once and i probably wouldn't do it again but uh hopefully i'm a little bit wiser now but uh back then you know in the early 90s that was that was a good time but uh so this is the latest one 100 deadly skills combat edition bam i absolutely love it i love what you did here i love it you're going to visit these guys around the country i mean stephen hayes you went to go see you went i made it so awesome uh so i love that you're that you're doing this and uh and what number book is this one so that one's the third skill book yeah third skill that one yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you've got the the puzzle the hundred dollar skill puzzle which is human generated puzzles for cognitive and awareness that's what it was built specifically for so that you could be more jason bourne if you want to be able to remember everything that's the book for you um but yeah that's yeah combat edition is my favorite out of bunch and as you've seen it's got qr codes attached to each illustration that takes you to videos of dom you know rapier i mean all the guys you get to learn from them in that book as long as you have a smartphone in the book it's so awesome so awesome then you get the right kind of crazy out there too all right kind of crazy yeah i always tell people like right kind of career is just total flop because it was a pandemic basically the russian scandal came to an end the pandemic began and all of my media got cancelled right so just i never had one opportunity to push that book uh it's so crazy but hey you win some you lose something there you go and it's still out there it's it's it's yeah it's you can find it you can definitely still find it so uh so do so so uh brother i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna let you go but uh yeah let's do it again soon i'd love to link up in person hopefully things are getting a little calmer and we can start moving around a bit and uh and get back together very soon well hey jack i appreciate you having me on i love all the success all the crushing you're doing and keep it up and thanks for having me absolutely and one more time people can find you a bunch of different places but 100 deadly skills on the social channels and where else can they find you yeah i would say my my whole ecosystem exists at clint emerson.com that's the easy one yep so the podcast all the book stuff company stuff clint emerson.com awesome awesome thanks brother appreciate everything and uh we'll talk to you soon thank you welcome to the gear highlights section of today's podcast so usually what happens with these is i look around the room and grab a few pieces of kit that i think would be interesting so today i'm going to highlight a few veteran-owned businesses that are owned by former teammates of mine so where should i start i think i'll start here protector brewery so check out protectorbrewery.com and uh just just awesome this one in particular right here is a half face blades and protector version so half face blades right here my buddy andrew arabido does these face blades this is the one from savage sun uh you might remember it's the hunter skinner from that one we did a limited run of these things and we probably limited it too much because they sold out in a few seconds but uh those are pretty sweet and if you remember from the terminal list you might remember the carambito right there so those are uh those are beeto's half face blades right there and uh he teamed up with protector brewery and created this beer which is awesome by the way it's the last one i have left so i wanted to make sure that i talked about it before i drank it but uh sean haggerty and ryan sangster uh buddies from the seal teams ryan and i were in iraq together on my last deployment and they started protective brewery they have a a tasting room in san diego so if you're there stop by say hello and have a few beers check them out but uh if you keep your eyes open you might recognize ryan sangster from the terminalist starring chris pratt coming sometime in 2022 but uh yeah awesome stuff organic beer and uh it's absolutely amazing so check this out i want to crack it open right now but i'll wait till the podcast is over so that is that and let's see if you've been following me for a while you might recognize this so this is the combat flathead from dynamis alliance i absolutely love this thing daniel winkler makes these and designed by dom just like this daniel makes these but uh dom rasso dynamis alliance he uh he designed this so great blade i think i have three or four of these bad boys and uh yeah just awesome yeah daniel winkler right there winkler tomahawk you might recognize that from the book and uh right there at a piece of art as well but uh great great blade uh what else so this is probably the most well thought out backpack on the planet but uh dynamos alliance you can go to their website and check out everything they have going on all the all the blades the the training bags gear all that stuff so uh in here i keep a little trauma pack right there a low vis uh pretty thin right there and then uh free fall people you will recognize that yep exactly so this is designed for off body carry so i keep a little tourniquet in there extra mag right there and then right here is the sig p 365. so if you've been following me for a while you know i've been carrying this for quite some time great pistol right here and using this uh sig ammo with it so um bam yeah check out dynamis alliance half face blades winkler knives and protect your brewery i'm gonna go crack this right now thank you for tuning in to the danger clothes podcast in ironclad original presented by six hour you can find clint's book everywhere books are sold this is 100 deadly skills combat edition this is absolutely fantastic love this book got it for the kids uh check out everything he has going on at clint emerson.com and uh i will definitely be having him back on the podcast be sure and leave that five star review leave a rating and i'll see you next time on danger close you

Channel: JackCarrUSA

Views: 180,591

Rating: 4.8972573 out of 5

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Id: ev-6_N67Tps

Length: 65min 10sec (3910 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021