Gene Yu | 1st Special Forces Group officer & CEO of Blackpanda | Ep. 113

hi folks this is the team house episode 113 i'm jack murphy here with dave park apologize that we're a few minutes late tonight no big deal though we're going to roll right into the episode we're really excited tonight to be able to speak to our guest gene yoo jean is a former first special forces group officer he hold up we got no audio right now now we have we just got three no audios in a row can you guys hear us i can hear you sounds up all right we're good all right let's start from the top okay so guys this is episode 113 i'm jack murphy here with dave park our guest tonight is gene u he is a former first special forces group officer he is the ceo of black panda and he is the author of the yellow green beret book series uh gene has had a whole series of wild experiences really a very colorful career that you've had thus far gene i really enjoyed reading your book i and i've enjoyed you know following your exploits really i mean there's a whole series of different things that will get into here uh your time both in and out of uniform so thank you for joining us tonight it's my honor to be here thank you thank you jack appreciate it also nice to meet you dave my pleasure yeah so our our first question gene uh we ask all of our guests is for their origin story if you could tell us where you grew up uh what your upbringing was like and sort of how that molded you and and propelled you towards the military eventually yeah sure so so i was born in concord massachusetts uh up in new england uh which is the uh you know the uh the location where the revolutionary war started so it's actually a quite patriotic place for being in a liberal area of the of the states um i always like to tell the story that uh growing up as a kid you know walk to the bus station uh in the mornings in my one of my neighbors where i would cut cut through the uh the lawn would have a uh a flagpole with the american flag up and i would stand there and say uh the pledge of allegiance on my way to the bus stop as well to make sure to hit it you know on the way into his school as well you know and so i think that's honestly is where some of my patriotism came from was growing up in new england being around all the history of the revolutionary war starting and just kind of being inculcated that with that you know in my education um growing up you know as a child when i was 10 um i moved out to uh northern california um and uh basically uh kind of finished out the second half of my childhood in the bay area grew up in cupertino so um you know it's the heart of silicon valley so i started programming in pascal and fortran when i was like 10 you know my parents were both computer engineers and kind of came up in this this other world i guess i'm speaking to barry being very tech centric um something i'd like to share as well is that and actually i'd be curious to know what you guys think about this as well i didn't realize it was legal for public uh schools to restrict military recruitment onto campus right which doesn't make sense to me as a public school but in my high school actually restricted military recruiters uh on the campus and so there's very little and this is northern california right right you know there's very little uh influence or exposure to the military and uh so in terms of like i guess an origin story of how i became attracted to the military wasn't through anything from the normal recruiting or around what not it actually for me was coming across a book called honor of duty which is written by an asian american named gus lee who went to west point back in the 60s right and had grown up you know kind of in that era and had written a book semi-fictional about his own experiences when he went to the school and when i read the book i never heard of west point which is crazy right like you know again growing in northern california there's very little exposure in the military and so i read this book when i was i think a sophomore junior in high school and uh when i was reading it i remember thinking that this is a book kind of like hogwarts from harry potter you know it's like holy [ __ ] there's a there's a school that just literally in every aspect tries to turn you into not only a scholar but also a warrior and all these type of things and so i was pretty taken by the book and the story but i didn't realize i didn't think that west point was a real place so i finished the book and just thought it's a fictional story and you know i know it's funny right yeah you know but this is how liberal northern california is right so um so uh uh you know i played very competitive tennis when i was growing up and i was recruited uh by a lot of top schools and all this type of stuff um you know one point i was nationally ranked and you know top 10 northern california et cetera so west point center recruiting letter and uh and i looked at it and i was like oh my god this this school is real further and uh went out for a recruiting trip um and i'll pause after this westminster but uh you know i went uh on the recruiting trip i was uh recruiting at both the naval academy and west point and uh to be honest you know as a 17 year old kid the things that are attracting me about the military was just you know how cool i thought the uniforms were and i was thinking about going to the naval academy because i thought the uniforms looked better than west points which is the gray you know kind of kind of draft thing and so i visited the naval academy first uh you know i had an interesting experience there kind of living in the you know the barracks and seeing what the midshipmen were going through when i went to west point the thing that struck me was nobody cared at all about my kid my experience like i was kind of like escorted around quite a bit when i was in naval academy and recruited and everything when i showed up to west point and stayed in one of the rooms they were just like hey man do whatever you want we don't care about you if you want to come here you come you know what i mean if you want to take on the challenge you take it and that morning that i didn't uh be able to roll out at like whatever it was 5 30 or 6 in the morning and i remember going outside into one of the areas where formation was being held first in the morning and it was pitch black and snow was coming down heavily and all the cadets were standing out there in the overcoats just stoic standing there just like this is nothing and i remember being like this sucks but this is hardcore this is a military academy right not what i saw at the naval account you know et cetera and uh weirdly that that is what attracted me because i wanted to do something really hard right and i think that i would imagine you know the same thing for for you guys as well in military experiences eventually one of the reasons why we went was because we wanted to accomplish something or do something so hard that nobody could talk [ __ ] to us about again right it's just something that you could stand on for the rest of your life and point and be like i did that right and i can be proud of that and you can't take that away from me for the rest of my life and that's something for me to stand on so let me just pause there because because that's question so broad jacket no no no this is this is great i think one of the things that everybody who's listening this probably wants to know is was the recruitment letter from west point delivered by an owl or an eagle yeah i mean it was snail mail you know old school back in the day right in 1997 but um yeah it came in with a brochure i remember and just being like it was actually kind of tacky to be honest schools because it's government yeah you guys know a courier font right font size right everything is looking like that but there's an element of that of a bit of that uh idyllic you know romanticism of how old school the place was you know seeing it even from that font and the way they did things in retrospect now and you guys know this having been served as well you know that just somebody just didn't update it and you can't get with the time right but time had actually served as a strong recruiting tool because i was like man you guys were really og in old school and uh that attracted to me the tradition and and uh just how um just how things were always done in a certain way and i wanted to be part of that story right i wanted a piece of that you know i wanted my identity to be rolled up a part of that that stronger and bigger brand above me right so when you read honor and duty uh i that's the name of the book right honor and duty yeah yeah were you also before that or after that were you reading other military books did you have an interest in the military or was it until was it up until like west point sent you a letter that you go oh i can do that yeah for me actually i was not a military uh you know aficionado or anything like that um i actually showed it at the west point and thought hey they'll teach me everything when i get there right so i remember showing up and not knowing the difference between a sergeant and a captain sort of which obviously didn't work out well day one where everybody is very well prepared showing up and it's read up on all this or come from you know army families and all this type of stuff so it's very much a fish out of water the things that i read when i was researching west point was i read books that talked a lot about the sports cultures because that's actually where i found the most content was about like the army navy game it was a very uh interesting book talked about um talked about like just the history of the rivalry between west point and annapolis and that helped me kind of fear it out like what are the cultural differences and what's a better fit for me that was the type of research i did i didn't read up a lot about the army itself it took actually west point itself to change my mindset and make me think oh yeah actually the army is something that i you know i'm not only going to be an officer in but uh something i should care about and something a bit more meaningful in terms of uh the learning and growing that i could do uh in terms of challenges um anyway so i guess what you're getting at we'll go to answer your question is um that i was not a military kid right i was not a kid that was like soldier you know blah blah i was just like look honestly i always describe myself as like the most average asian kid you could imagine growing up in cupertino california and that whole society like down here by the way and i am in san francisco right now so down here i'm actually physically here um you know where i grew up my high school was like 60 percent asian right like i grew up in like a little asian-american bubble where's asians that speak english like like me and and operate like this way but we're our own little ecosystem i guess so to speak in silicon valley and so coming out to west point was a massive eye-opener in terms of just the rest of the country and like being a you know going from 60 to nom like two percent you know in terms of the you know in terms of minority and all that type of stuff and all that was very eye-opening and shocking and it was my evolution at the time at west point where i started to get into the army and start realizing there's a lot of interesting things here that could challenge me well beyond where i thought that you know sport or academics could ever push me and and then of course 9 11 happen when i graduated and the whole world changed and all that's wrong so that was your senior year at west point 9 11. uh yeah exactly so i graduated um june 2nd 2001 and then a few months later right all of us remember exactly where we were i was a brand new butter bar lieutenant uh in docking at fort knox getting ready for the uh armor officer basic course sitting in the emergency operation center um if you guys remember we go through courses you snowbird and blackbird et cetera i was snowbirding before the officer basic course started and classic form just doing random cq duties around posts and everything so that day i got to sign the emergency operation center which ended up being the nexus of all the senior officers that come to at fort knox to plan what they were going to do because of 9 11 and as you might imagine it was just a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off running around and talking about how they had to protect the gold and all these rumors going around like oh what's next is they're going to come after the gold they're called knoxville armor up right all the over megalomania and self-importance like cobra commander yeah yeah yeah exactly oh they're coming here now and hey lieutenant you are you keeping a log on this i'm just like dude look this is this i don't know what's going on here but i'm just here in cq and answering the phones but that was my experience i know when 911 happened but yeah the whole world changed for you guys and us as well my whole mentality what this being a game changed on 9 11. you know it's like okay um what are we doing here it's guns up it's guns up and just roll out yeah did you choose armor or was that like how did you end up in armor yeah so um so at west point and i'm pretty open about this uh um i discovered later on that my personality is more of an infantry uh type of type of fit you know i like being very physical outdoors active i'm very like i'm one of those people who's very mechanically uh uninclined you know like i look at a car and i'm just like yeah i'm aware there's an engine and transmission it interests me not at all to learn about the inner workings of the car i'm just happy to drive it that's it so actually i discovered in the armored community it most of the personalities are very mechanically inclined right you you love vehicles like you're you're passionate about you know trucks and like you know how these all things work and when you have that you can imagine right if you're that type of person that a tank is an incredible uh technological feat 60 beast that just rolls around at 60 miles per hour et cetera so what i'm trying to share is that uh even though my personality and my interest my personal interest seemed to be more of a light fighting standpoint i was so turned off by the way that west point presented infantry that i hadn't wanted nothing to do with it right it was all these like very strict conventional rigid infantry officers with high-end tights who talked nothing about uh who talked would incessantly just talk about how important ranger school was and how you were not a real basically and especially at that time period uh very much non-pc around the 90s now you're not a real man if you didn't go to ranger school like all this type of stuff and it just got like i just wanted to throw up in my mouth it was just like too much you know i mean there's just like this this alternative army strict high entity like you're joining a cult or something yeah yeah you know it was just like i didn't really get it you know what i mean like like why they were so you know so intense about all of this and so um i was influenced by a few for whatever reason during the time period i was there a lot of the history professors were armor officers right and um and i just happen to have some really awesome history professors who are armor guys and uh it ended up actually being i saw their names in the credits the movie fury as being the choreographers because if you've seen that movie from an armored officer perspective that is an amazing tactical armor movie right tank movie it's one of the better ones that i i've seen like they made sure to add in all the the kind of like the dream tanker you know kind of scenarios about scenarios everything like that and when i saw my professors my old westbound professors names pop up on the uh credits i was like of course right like you know they're the ones who showed or talked to me about that all that so i i really was inspired by those guys and i thought like okay well you know i transitioned my in my time at west point where um when i first went like i was saying i was not an army dude right i just wanted to be a computer programmer in the army wherever that was and in the army um the closest uh branch you can get to would be signal core for that so like when i before i went to west point my plan was to become a single signal core officer and then post in hawaii get like a motorcycle you know ride around learn to serve like that was my dream right and it's also the late 90s where clinton had downsized half of the army and people were getting out actually west point you're supposed to serve five years right they had this uh kind of like clause that was going on in the late 90s where cadets were uh coming in and then able to get out after two years like you just have to apply for a waiver to get out after two years which and then in some some cases cadets were just leaving straight after school which sounds crazy right because of the government paying all the education and everything like that but this is the time period when the military is being downsized and also the dot-com boom so i mean there's there's a lot of jobs yeah i think just in general like from a political standpoint the the economy was roaring right like the tekken was going off in late 90s you know the cold war it ended right uh you know there's academics like francis fukuyama writing these really how the end of the end of war has occurred right we're at peace time forever now that the cold war is over so this if you guys remember right that was the mentality of america at the time and so when i signed up for west point i had no intention of going to like thinking of going to war combat like all these type of things i thought i was getting us a really interesting uh and challenging four-year education and i'd like kind of mess around this army thing you know and maybe go to hawaii and have an adventure and then my dream was to come back to cupertino and work an apple in a cubicle and just program that was literally my dream in high school like i just want to sit in the cubicle and program and write code and uh and i changed a lot when i was at school right and so um you know i was inspired by uh these these uh these uh these history professors and whatnot and started thinking like you know that itched inside i think a lot of that a lot of men all share of you know wanting to feel like a warrior and all this type of stuff kind of started coming out when i was at school you know and and more the latter half because uh to be honest i sucked at everything the first year i got haze a lot i was always like the last one after you know just i just sucked you know like and so i started kind of catching up and getting used to things by the by by my third and fourth year at school at the academy and changed my mindset tremendously about wanting to be in combat arms and all this type of stuff and i was like i can't make that full leap into infantry it was just like the officer i didn't mess with just they met at school which was so just i just couldn't connect with him at all and thought that maybe armor was the better route for me to go because of the professors that i've met and it was still front lines etc but quickly found out that wasn't for me so armor was not necessarily your thing but at the same time 911 had just happened and you you're relating to this sort of warrior archetype you have this in you that you want to go and be a warrior what was the next step for you to branch into special forces how did that come about yeah so okay so i have to go back to even like like attending ranger school right which is not normal for a tank armor officer right um and so i had this really good friend uh who actually was a computer science undergrad with me and we both went armor and uh it was like to be honest the fort knox armored officer course the basic course was really uninspiring it was not well run and you guys know this tradoc schools you know generally send like career e5 types you know that just kind of homesteading out they're kind of you know kind of done and kind of checked out it was a very just uninspired course and so um in the middle of it uh this uh this particular computer science classmate had been begging me to you know to try out uh for ranger school right and so for infantry lieutenants generally speaking if you want to slaughter a ranger school it's actually like i think you're almost forced to go to raider school as an infantry lieutenant right yeah really it's not as much you know there's not a lot of room for that right and uh but from armor you know why would you like the thought process why would you need to go to ranger school you're gonna be on tanks you know blah blah even though you know the argument it's a leadership school blah blah blah and so um and so that the trial is that this particular classmate i remember uh he uh first he convinced me to go to ranger school right he just called me up and said hey you're gonna be my ranger buddy for free ranger right here at fort knox and i was like i don't know man like i took off the summer of uh holiday and all this other stuff that sounds kind of i don't know and he just goes don't be a [ __ ] right and as you know motivate you yeah that's that's a way to motivate you very quickly right and you just said it like that and i was like you know i'm gonna you know i don't want you to think of a [ __ ] so i'm gonna try out for this thing so i'm pretty proud of the results of all that like look armor officers are not generally well suited for this sort of stuff but we had roughly about like 80 i want to say like 80s and 90 lieutenants show up for free ranger on day one and the the guy that was running pre-ranger at fort knox which is hardcore cardio dude so the workouts for pre-ranger which were like three times a week we would just be like running at like seven minute mile paces like eight ten miles to warm up like that was like just immediately just go which is actually more hardcore than some of the things that later on he was a very very fit guy and would pts to death for like two hours a lot of people dropped out uh only 16 uh armored lieutenants got slots to ranger school and i was the only one that graduated wow yeah um and so uh when i was in ranger school i started getting the sense i was like man maybe i am not as much of a like to use my friend's word or as a [ __ ] than i thought it was right maybe i'm a little bit harder than i thought it was and i do you know i just went to my west point 20th class reunion which happened on 9 11 um and i was talking to one of my classmates there who was at ranger school with me and he brought up a memory that i i have thought about and talked about before where we're sharing a tree right strong pointing around the tree as you do and just laying there for hours and just you know talking or whatever trying to stay awake and he asked me he's like this is in darby phase or maybe mountains um and he asked me it's like hey man he's like do you feel like you've been pushed to the envelope like to your limit right because that's everything that was talked about about ranger schools it takes to get a limit like they did all that stuff and he asks like have you been taken to your limit like are you pushed to the very edge and i looked at him i was like and i smiled and i was like i don't think so actually and he smiled back and he's like you know what man me neither right and we but it was just it was one of those like brief moments where we realized like yeah this sucks but we have a little bit more you know i've got more you know i can go i can go a little further i can go a little bit longer you know and when i um actually to be honest kind of luckily just got strong platoons but i graduated true blue out of out of uh range school um i saw that itch you know i was like man maybe i'm a little bit tougher than i thought it was you know when i was the you know the asian kid growing up in cupertino and everything like that you know and when and by this time the war started right you know i finished ranger school in like april 2002 but i'm stationed in korea and you know korea's the hardship tours you know i'm patrolling the dmz and all this type of stuff so i'm out of the fight whatever although in the initial days um unbeknownst to us we thought afghanistan if you remember in the early days over like two months right right like the cnn the the the the green you know the the in the night vision videos of rangers parachuting in and taking the airfield it was just lost over and uh while i was in korea um all the you know the invasion of iraq started in 2003 and that was the big one for my class of 2001 if i think about it from the west side um pretty much my whole class went went to iraq and that in that first thing but i was left out in korea right and i felt immense amounts of guilt right being out there not participating yeah now of course the thunder run everything like that that was over very briefly as well and then there's the you know movement into counter-surgery operations in iraq um and i started hearing the stories about how artillery platoons and units were being uh turned into infantry units and patrolling the streets trent or even i heard some stories about transportation companies even right logistics companies being transitioned into infantry units controlling the streets and i was like okay i'm definitely going okay i'm not i'm not not participating in this thing because i'm still super pissed off about 911 and believe those all tied together right and uh but if i'm going over there i'm not walking around with a bunch of tankers okay who refuse to get off the tank who are watching my six and don't know anything about patrolling and it's like i need the ncos for experts at this right to go forward and so that's when i i started thinking like well you know i speak fluent chinese right um asian you know uh you know i think that maybe like i'm saying maybe a little bit tougher than i thought it was maybe the green beret is a good place for me you know in terms of the skill set of just who i am and let me just go try out and if the army thinks or that or sf thinks i'm good enough then actually i feel like it's almost like my duty and responsibility to serve in that in the regiment because so few people can pass all those courses so why don't i just try and then if they deem right that i'm worthy then that's that's the best place that i can serve right that was my mentality it wasn't even so much that now of course i love i love being a green beret you know green bread as well so i'm so proud of all that but uh when i went in and decided to throw my hat in the application for selection and all that type of stuff i my mentality was not like oh i'm i'm a badass like i should be whatever it's more like oh well hey we all have our roles to fill here and if i'm uh measured weight and and and decided that this would be the uh the most appropriate place for me then this is where i should serve right now that's that's sorry very long answer but that's that's my route into sf coming from that actually seems though like a very resilient um you know mentally resilient way to go into a selection because i think so many people put so much pressure on themselves whenever they go into like a selection course and you know and jack and i like we've talked to people and tell them like treat it like it's just part of the job don't treat it like it's this big mountain you have to climb to get to where you want just treat because there are days on the job that are worse than any selection so just treat it like a day on the job you know right that's right that's right and i think i think you guys saw this as well i you know just as a kind of a side comment one of the things i was quite surprised about in my experiences at the so-called hard schools right like whether it be selection or ranger school is how many people quit before it even starts you guys can remember yeah oh yeah yeah right that's that's that's or or after and it's not a hard event like if you remember at like at night staying inside those quonset huts out there at camp mccall and it's like there's nothing going on it's just that in between moment where you can catch up on some sleep and guys would tap out and they'd quit you know because it's yeah in their head yeah and you'd see that like yeah you see it rip you know you do this like ball buster wrote you know basically road run you know a ruck run you know for 12 miles wherever you know people are falling out because of heat exhaustion and you get to the end of it and then dudes quit it's like if you were gonna why didn't you quit like in the middle of that thing you know like really it's it's a it's a really interesting cycle i i would love to see some data out of this you know somebody just around it about the psychology of us being our own worst enemy you know what i mean right yeah like just uh like my example that i like to use this scenario so i went to so uh i went selection twice i failed the star exam the first time and i run it back and and the way it was for me i had to wait a year before come to selection i did two winter uh sorry i screwed that destroyer the first time i went in a summer uh selection and i had to wait six months i went to a winter i remember in the both the summer and the winter courses um more in the winter but if you recall they just like have you come out and stand information and then like nobody comes out to talk to you and you're just like standing after information for a long time wondering what that was going on right and it's all right there to to mess with you right but especially in the cold right people would just quit from standing out there in the cold yeah i remember just like watching them like go walk forward and just quit and be like what are you doing right right and like no i can't do this anymore it's just and you just see it and you realize that they just have these demons inside just yeah that voice right that voice within your head who's the biggest [ __ ] that you've ever met is constantly telling you you're not good enough causing doubt in your head you know causing you to be anxious and all this type of stuff that voice for those people was so loud they couldn't take it anymore and nothing had happened just walked forward and just didn't believe in themselves and quit yeah and it really shows the value of just trying yeah right just willing to put up your hand and just try right and uh you know that anyway that's that's what i you know clearly so just real quick for our viewers who are who don't uh know what the star course is or it's just a long distance land navigation course through really really rough terrain um and so and a lot of guys because you're using a map and a compass to navigate long distances and it's actually land navigation courses are easy to fail if you are not like that that last sfas class they run before uh christmas exodus it's a little cold and wet it wasn't no it's not fun no no yes i i i think the okay so um yeah most land navigation exams to the regular army right in my experience at least in the 90s right was um there would be like a large fluorescent orange sign on a tree like 20 feet up nailed there right and that would be the point that you have to find you could see it so far away and then a lot of the land navigation courses on terrain like small areas where been used so often like whether it be a bedding or you know whatever not whatever and you would just get close to the point there'd be like a little trail there right like it's like an animal yeah yeah like oh and then also the way that they would run their courses where it'd be like everybody generally were around the same points so when you got close to a point you'd see like four other dudes kind of walking in the same direction you are and you kind of quietly unofficially check together and kind of like yeah we're all kind of going some direction kind of okay i'm getting validated that you're thinking the same right you know and you get it but the star exam if you guys if you remember is a individual you know an sf guy you know camping out in some camouflaged relatively camouflaged tent you know that is near them right right where the point is and being as quiet as possible right in that space um in the summer right if you go to do the star exam the foliage is so thick you need to pretty much walk right on top of the point to see the point right there's no vectoring in from a distance and there's also nobody around you because the distance are so far uh anyway i could go on and on i have a lot to say i'm sorry gene you you did make it through selection on the second try you were potential special forces material there make it into the q course and uh you know there's one story i'm not gonna let you out of this without telling uh so folks out there listening to this i first heard about gene not by name but i heard about him because he was uh a few courses ahead of me and they were lecturing us sincere school not to be like this certain student don't don't do what he did and that turned out to be gene i didn't find out it was him until i was reading his book many years later but gene could you tell us the infamous seer school story from the horse's mouth from the man himself the legend around camp mccall okay i'll try to keep it i'll catch you um so so i guess like the first the first okay look uh it's winter uh or you know when you're on the evasion course uh nobody is really living off the land that well right like everything is picked whatever you could remember from the powerpoint classes you can eat in the woods it's like day seven or eight or something and um if you recall there's dog teams tracking you and you're running through the woods we found a place to rest and uh we wanted to build a fire right and so i grabbed two two guys and we went out to look for firewood um we were wandering out we started hearing like latin latin music right and uh realized oh there's some people here and it's the middle of nowhere right it's western north carolina you know and my thought process was like we should go towards that music because there might be some random people who are squatting on the fort brag military reservation and they might have food right they're not supposed to be there maybe we can kind of right they're not going to be friendly maybe we can coerce them you can say it you can blackmail them so we emerge out of these woods like emaciated you know wearing our you know our food you know our unifor our bdus and uh your your knife right and these guys uh there's like a whole bunch of latino dudes playing soccer right and there's an rv there little music etc and the tr and train tracks and i do remember that we signed some stuff before we started the course don't cross the train tracks i i do i do remember i very much there's no point that i ever claimed that i didn't know you're supposed to across the train tracks and i just mention it because it's like i remember looking in the train tracks and then looking at the dudes across the train tracks and being like well it's only 50 meters from the train tracks you know what i mean like maybe you like at first actually i actually if i recall correctly we actually went up and stood on the train tracks and tried to talk to them at the edge of the train tracks initially to try to play within the roles and they're like what are you doing you know you know if you want to talk to us come over here anyway we rolled over there um you know i speak a little bit of uh spanish from spending uh time overseas in ecuador when i was in high school i did this like public health volunteer project just enough to say like a lot of vocabulary and communicate right and um okay so i'll try to keep this short so basically we uh built up a report right speaking spanish one of the other guys with me was actually a fluent spanish speaker so both of us were kind of you know doing our thing talking different people and eventually i was like okay look you know let's cut the [ __ ] we're extremely hungry we've been trying to survive like eight days do you guys have any food you know here at all and it's like look we're really sorry we've set a party but we can take you to the local tinder down the store right the local the local store down the road sorry and uh um so we're like okay sounds pretty close by and like oh in fact we'll drive you right oh wow that's really nice to pull up the pickup truck and the three of us jump jump in and he starts rolling out but he gets on the hardball and starts rolling out like 60 miles per hour right i thought it was like around the corner right the way he's maybe because my spanish is not good so just just think about this right like we're like oh [ __ ] you know and i'm looking at the the two dudes with us and they're just like i don't know and i'm like i don't know too i mean like and i remember at the time having this thought like this is a major watershed moment in your life and i wasn't sure which way it was going to be it was like it was a spirit was talking to me like this big moment i'm going to see where this road takes us this is just so interesting and so we roll in and you know where we end up uh is aberdeen which is a major town in western north carolina's farm yeah from because the evasion course is out in carthage that's right aberdeen is far man it's like 60 miles so it's a long drive like i think we actually fell asleep on the way over there anyway so we get there and i'm in survival mode so i'm thinking like we need like cool i just want like bread and like meat and maybe like cheese so let's roll into this like gas station okay and let me go talk to let's go in there and see what we can do and i'm thinking of myself like i don't know we're in survival school right so i'm like trying to kind of like you know role play and thinking like i'm even thinking like maybe we should just steal a bunch of food right like and just you know just be guerrilla you know whatever um if you recall when they strip search you before the evasion course all you have is your id card and then that knife right and so um i had memorized my credit card number because i at the time i was ordering a lot of stuff online and you have to manually enter it in in the early 2000s every single time and so at one point i just realized that i memorized maybe like 12 over the numbers and i was tired of getting up every time to go find my wallet so i was just like i just sat down for like five ten minutes whatever and then just memorized it and then it reinforced it every time i was entering my program so that that's why i had to memorize credit card number i was accused later on that i had like plotted this whole thing like it's a huge deal to memorize your credit card is it guys it's not that hard it's 16 numbers right like and a date and then three numbers it's not that crazy um and so uh i had also uh uh so in this gas station i roll up with my id card and the young high school you know aged female attendant is like okay who's this dirty asian dude in videos coming up and showing me his id card and asking me to buy bread and ham you know using a memorized credit card she basically was like can you please please call the cops right so we get we leave the gas station and i tell the driver i'm like hey man um okay that didn't work but i know there's is there a papa john's pizza in this town because i know where i live in fayetteville i call papa john's pizza all the time and i just give my credit card number over the phone and they're good to go so logic would tell me that if i just tell you face to face i know it's weird that i'm face to face telling you but technically you should sort of process it so he says yes and so we drive down to a small papa john's in aberdeen i walk in i ask for the manager negotiate she thinks it's weird but says you know what you're right there's no difference between calling the phone and doing it in person uh fine and they want to support the troops yeah yeah yeah that's you right so at this point i'm like okay cool well now it's gloves off right like credit card number like i'm thinking of all the boys i bought like 10 large pizzas all the buffalo wings all this like you know drinks right because it's just like well it's unlimited right it's unlimited and so i bought like something like three three hundred dollars worth of pizza or whatever and so i actually also even added uh charge and tipped the the drivers i give like 40 bucks in cash or something so we roll back now to the training area and now we've been gone for a long time right and if you remember like this is a little bit like we just went off to go get wood and our team is probably thinking we got eaten by a bear or something like that when we come back in uh with these 10 pizzas everything like that i always tell this like this in this way i've never seen that grown men jump in the air for joy before right right there's actually a question on the sf psychological exams all the little bubble ones i remember they ask you have you ever physically jumped in the air for joy before i remember being like hell no and when we came back all of the team members were jumping in the air celebrating you know whatever like it's just the greatest thing ever right so we ate and inhaled all the food i'm not even kidding like probably five minutes right it was just it was the best pizza i've ever tasted in my time maybe the best food i've ever tasted my entire life yeah that [ __ ] and then through all the trash with the fire to burn all the evidence right um the next day we got uh picked up to go to the uh the rtl right and so um uh if you guys recall there's a there's a part of it where they strip searching naked and pose you down above all stuff so um for whatever reason uh i forgot to get rid of the receipt right and i had weirdly which nobody ever does right in that video uniform i took the receipt and put it in my left upper breast pocket which nobody uses i remember right nobody uses the bdu pockets right right it's just not used it's like this weird fashion statement on the bdu that nobody uses right and so i put it in there for whatever reason and forgot about it and uh when they found that receipt they're like this is weird this is 300 pizza yesterday any sense right they let me go through the rtl for probably like almost a good half of it right like i had seen a lot at the rtl the pow camp yeah the po sorry the pow cab you know where you get you know beaten and whatever you're practicing pow resistance techniques and so um when they pulled me out uh you know they pulled me in a room and i thought i was getting like some extra hard identification like that and uh the the syrian commander the officer in charge suddenly appeared it's like do you know who i am you remember who i am like yes and then he throws the receipt on the table and i see it and i'm like okay my rule is and i did this at west point the whole time as well i will break almost all the rules in in in pretty egregious ways but if you ever catch me okay i will immediately tell you everything yeah lie about it that's a weird it's kind of like a weird thieves code that i have but obviously it's not technically uh you know full integrity to break the rules but i i like breaking rules but if you catch me i will never lie about it right so they threw the receipt and immediately i'm like yup got me this is exactly what happened and the officer as you would imagine officers they're like just getting angry and angry as i'm telling the story whereas like the first sergeant and the ncos are like high-fiving each other laughing just like like it's just such a such a different scene you know in the room while people are just reeling from me just unloading the whole reality because because what i found out later is they were so confused they didn't know what to do right because they found this they're like this can't be real but it's but israel and then also um this was during the search right this is 2000 well jack i think you're pretty close to me in the few course uh q core states right so if you remember they're trying to push as many sf guys as possible we didn't get more sf guys because the funnel was the funnel but they're trying there's a lot of political pressure trying to get more sf this is like john kerry ran for president and one of the things was on his campaign was i'm going to double special operations right if you remember this time period and so um there's a lot of pressure on the officers to graduate right because i'm literally that serious school at that time i don't know what it's like now but at that time that was the last phase of the whole qualification course right so you've been through you've been in training now for well over a year two yeah almost two years yeah it was two years right right both training all the time stuff right and so um or maybe actually more 18 months right because i skipped the microstrip but it's a long time right and you've gone through a lot of dates right a lot of people have come by the wayside and now i'm like one of the very few officers right that is about to graduate and they're like do we bring this up or do we just let this gate and that was a it's interesting cause later on i befriended a lot of these people and got the whole story from their side and apparently they went through like vigorous debate for like two days like what do we do here right and ultimately what they decided to do was like you know what let's just ask gene what what the hell right just put the receipt and they were shocked that i was just like oh this is what happened right they were surprised that i was so open about it and then they were almost they're shocked at that point too what to do right and so in a follow-on meeting with that uh the commander of seer school uh he asked me he's like hey man like officer officer what would you do and i gave him the straight up answers like you must give me a number to return right like you must make an example that's that's the standard stock answer right it's like you must get no return but you should you should allow all the ncos that are in my team to to come back to search because initially they kicked out everybody in the whole team right and uh and uh so that's exactly what they did um they gave me an effort to return and then um all the answers had to recycle into the next they got into the very next year's school uh see your class right and uh so how did i get back in right and all that right so when i was in korea i had a short unique time period where i kind of finagled my way as an armored lieutenant to more like in civilian terms the best way to describe it was i was an intern at a unique special forces attachment in korea called um uh special force detachment career right and it it's a unique team it's not an oda really right it's a it's a team of all generally uh post team sergeant eva's right filled out the team and each one is a special advisor to the korean special forces brigade around the country very interesting kind of liaison team in korea i don't even know if it's still around yeah yeah no it's still around yeah that's over okay so so i finagled my way down there to be the exo or executive officer which really didn't mean anything they don't need an xo so i was just like this extra lieutenant but i built a rapport when i was down there with the special operations command korea chief of staff whose name is colonel rick thomas and he was the ascending first group commander right and so he was the one that actually helped facilitate all that um of me getting into that unit uh during the the week that you leave that you're supposed to leave or you're allowed to leave to go back to the states on a fully paid ticket home and have that trip i use that time to volunteer for an exercise uh to just get coffee basically for carl thomas and the officers to try to figure out and learn a little bit more about what sf was because i couldn't find anything on the internet at the time i had no idea fascinated by it but i didn't know exactly and i did well enough during that during that exercise they actually gave me a joint accommodation medal afterwards that's why i randomly have one of those and then built a relationship with rick thomas and so when i was kicked out of uh serious school never to return i'm just like okay well i've done a year and a half uh for my five-year commitment i'm just gonna go home my army career is over right i screwed up i'm a piece of [ __ ] whatever i'm done okay and so uh another mentor of mine uh tony bell um first group uh long time uh sf sf nco sergeant major uh when he left um i called him and i was like hey tony i'm [ __ ] up right he was at deck he was one of my mentors at the in korea and all he said was like hey man just okay that's that's really bad that's really bad but what you should do is uh just email uh uh rick and just say hey sir i screwed up this is what happened i'm sorry to disappoint you some of the wisest advice right not ask for help anything like that you know just states this is what happened and uh if you know rick thomas is one of those guys just like remembers everybody's names so he's so caring and empathetic he responded within like i want to say like three minutes and was just like the email was like uh give me a phone number i can reach you and don't go anywhere right and so he immediately called uh cam mccall was like hey i want jane you as captain of my group right i don't care what he did you know yeah and uh you put him back in the next the next class that she can get right and this is coming from a you know rising group commander right out of one of the five and so the secret commander against you know what he wanted to do uh brought me back in and colonel thomas called me right afterwards go standing from the mirror standing attention while i talked to you about all this but i was allowed back in the course i did receive a uh general letter of reprimand i still have in my files actually right here talking about the whole thing and everything i don't have that as a piece of pride it's just an interesting you know case for me just a relic of the situation but it went back you know and and uh yeah i did i did a uh the uh second uh winter course which was uh did they treat you really any differently because of that event yeah so what i what i discovered and you know having gone through serious school twice from a student perspective was that there's very there were slightly different cultures from the different phases of seer school right so like the survival instructors or certain way the asian guys resistance whatever it's mostly it was the uh evasion guys were super pissed because they they want to see you living off the land from the stuff that they teach you right uh there's the more the survival guys were more like their split where they're like well you took the spirit of survival right i say you improvised and overcame yeah i i would say that that you're the the lesson like the lesson the mistake wasn't going to get pizza like the mistake and the for seer the mistake was having the receipt he literally and not having a story for it literally kept the receipts yeah yeah i mean but but really because literally the evidence yeah literally the documented listed evidence that you would even use in a lawsuit right but if you say i i found this receipt flowing on the ground and i kept it because because the name is the same of mine and i thought it was so random and he could use it so random tax right off the end of the year right i i but honestly like using locals to go get pizza is really in the spirit of proxy during like the immediate aftermath i would say about 50 of people came with that and then other percent would come directly my face and just be like you're a piece of [ __ ] right yeah so it's just like this very awkward kind of like in between and as time went on in my career um when i proved i i think i proved that i was you know i wasn't a total idiot you know as a as a team leader people just be like you know this funny story about gene you know it was a little bit more enhancing right i think to my persona i guess but um i never celebrated or you know like what i was saying it was actually to be honest all very embarrassing i don't wasn't seeking this attention it was this sort of thing right it was uh it's the way i told it now i i hope you know it conveys a bit of the whole target of opportunity sort of thing which kind of stumbled into it and just kind of kept on talking on the string and see where well there there it is folks a seer school legend the man himself you heard it you heard it you heard it here on the team house thank you gene um i'm going to ask you about your uh special forces career uh and some of the further adventures that you got into there but i want to take just two seconds to tell our audience about the sponsor for tonight's show it's bluebird botanicals they are a cbd company they make uh there's a chapstick there's cbd oil there is uh a lotion the lotion is really nice i use that lotion a lot uh it's it's a menthol and cbd it's a full spectrum cbd do you use any cbd have you used cbd before uh yes i have yeah various products yeah yeah it's quite bombing and i think it's important for veterans particularly ptsd yeah yeah i mean and bluebird is a i mean it's a fantastic company a very pure products and it's full spectrum i guess one of the differences is that like with cbd you need all these different parts of it for it to actually be effective and a lot of people just isolate it down to like one small part and so you're not really getting you're not really getting the uh you know the fullest i uh i used the uh oil uh actually before bed and it helped me sleep uh quite a bit much deeper deeper sleep than normal so better than a six-pack yes and healthier for you also much healthier for you so uh people who watch the team house and uh enjoy the show you can go to the bluebird botanicals website and use the promo code team 50 and you'll get 50 off your purchase there 50 off and seriously guys i mean if you especially if you're a veteran but but anybody in particular like if you have trouble sleeping if uh you know with with the oil if you find yourself getting tense throughout the day it doesn't like kind of it calms you um and then with the oil they have like or the lotion they have like this menthol lotion that has the cbd in it and i use it on like my arthritic spots and it it really helps i like it a lot so gene after this these multiple adventures through the q course you graduate you're a newly minted special forces officer looking to get into the war but you're in first special forces group uh which is focused around asia and so it took you guys a little bit to get into the fight can you tell us about there you're i believe before uh before getting into the middle east you spent some time in the philippines um what were those initial assignments what was it like arriving on a team in some of those initial deployments yeah so uh because because of the pizza thing um i was actually still being punished when i showed up to okinawa and was put on i was not given a team right so i was on probation right so at the time uh 1-1 which is the you know the fourth deployed battalion for first group in okinawa was heavily engaged in the philippines and advising filipino military forces and dealing with you know the abu sayyaf offshoot offshoot organization down there right and so um so i went down there for a punitive tour to be a staff officer and then just to you know on probation while i was down there um again unfortunately people realized that uh you know i wasn't a complete idiot i could do a few things and be of value and uh the staff quickly really uh knew that saw that i could uh write an op order and do some uh decent planning and so i got quite involved in helping uh write a campaign plan uh the timing was just as such that uh the joint forces were planning on uh embarking on a you know so-called invasion you know of uh the main stronghold island down there called holo island and uh so when i showed up uh after settling in for about a month i immediately got hot and heavy on helping write that entire campaign plan across six filipino battalions and various special operations for something like 500 or so that were coming across amphibious landing craft and then hitting the beach and coming up and trying to take out this uh you know this one defensive position where you know supposedly maybe like 40 of the hvts uh were uh betting down and so um you know i ended up being the the battle captain uh for that uh for that mission uh there was an odd circumstance where uh the ground force commander had decided to move out to more remote location to be more forward on the uh on the uh uh on the field of operations and he lost a lot of communication back into the talk and so by de facto as the battle captain and ranking officer in the uh the talk essentially i became the main locust point which was a really unique and uh overwhelming experience to be honest because look i'm 26 you know what i mean um the gisota p commander the commander of all american forces there uh 06 you know um he we had built a bit of a rapport when i spent time in the headquarters before going down into into holo and you know it's just seeing what happened and just met every day i was just you know his operations guy on the ground and executing all the different you know movements etc moving the different you know surveillance aircraft around and it was about 12 days right before we ended up calling it quits it ended up being a big failure of a mission but um i think that uh even though it wasn't successful um you know in terms of actually taking out all the ibiza at the time uh for me i think i had proven again like i said it was not a complete idiot and i was given a choice of which teams i wanted to to join out of that particular company that had been deployed in holo which is bravo company and fortunately fortunately or unfortunately for me wherever how you want to look at it uh these days but uh the one team out of okinawa that goes to iraq was in bravo company and so i raised my hand to join that com that team that was about to deploy to uh to iraq so i i was uh uh fortunately or unfortunately um you know my first my first trip to iraq was out of that one uh oda out of okinawa that goes into northern northern iraq it's based out of irbil kurdistan it was meant as a liaison mission via the u.s state department to work with the korean special forces what i just described is literally all the information there was about this mission there's actual cable from the state department saying just lace with korean special forces so it was completely open-ended i think that in retrospect it was one of probably the most creative and um most autonomous uh sf missions uh in theater if not maybe elsewhere as well i mean there's literally no ending of what you what you're to do and as a first group team we were attached uh underneath uh either fifth group or tenth group which were the rotating uh groups in iraq and they were just like who's this random first group team from okinawa right that shows up as attached to my you know battalion or company or whatever and what is your mission you know there's a lot of creativity for each team leader from okinawa that comes in and changed the nature of the mission according to what they think is the most pressing thing for for me showing up in late 2007 yeah 2007 and in 2008 that was during the search right and so uh for me it was like look we got to just get in the fight man like we got to be in mosul we got to be down south in places like huija and kirkuk and whatnot and so um we trained up a a group of peshmerga right the kurdish kurdish folk out there and built a couple strike forces and yeah we're out as much as we could um crossing the border across the green line from kurdistan into into iraq and hitting targets in eastern mosul and south and trying to try to contribute our art piece to it um yeah there's a lot more to it but i'll just kind of pause there you point you point out in the book that uh the south korean government wanted to support the coalition and you know we're one of america's partner forces and and all this but at the same time it was politically unacceptable for them to have any casualties uh coming home uh so it sounded like you were in kind of a interesting spot as a liaison that you're working with the south korean special forces guys who want to go kick some ass with you but when it's time to go and do the missions you kind of like have to wave goodbye go do your thing because they're not allowed to leave the base yeah that's right when i was there uh on the trip we actually uh did very little joint work with the korean the korean forces were meant to to do so um but but because of uh the political sensitivity of uh for the koreans in terms of participating in the iraq war there was like there was a i think there was an actual mandate that they could not have a single korean soldier uh have any type of casualties right whether i think wounded or killed and uh and that's why to certain agree why the koreans have been were in the uh such a safe region up in kurdistan et cetera et cetera a lot of political pressure around their their presence and involvement in the war and so um uh we were actually handcuffed at the beginning of the trip because the tenth group commanders had taken a very uh black and white line of saying like well your mission is here is to work with the korean special forces if they're not willing to come across into the into the uh into the fight you can't go either and so we were handcuffed for the first few months we were getting a lot of good intel you know this type of stuff and getting targets that we wanted to hit but we ended up having to pass them off to other teams or infantry units because we were not allowed to go forward um and then uh i think it was like may of 2008 uh if i recall correctly uh one of the largest uh suicide uh vehicle bomb attacks actually in the theater at the time happened in urbil right um a you know a huge truck and i can't remember the numbers of how much explosives but it leveled a few of the buildings and uh was this massive explosion i remember it was like i thought that we were under attack actually at the team house you know we all ran to the rooftop with our you know weapons up everything i thought we were being attacked it was so loud you know and huge though the reverberations of the explosion and um in respect i think what uh al-qaeda was trying to do at the time was there was a lot of um recall sectarian conflict i think was the term right between the shias and the sunnis uh a religious uh battle right and i think that uh what the what al qaeda was trying to do was hit the kurds and try to pull them into the fight and make this an ethnic conflict as well between kurds and arabs right trying to make greater chaos that's that was the mo or the mission or the the strategy of al qaeda was to create as much chaos as possible and in the middle of the chaos try to grab power where they can't right so um so after that explosion and attack the koreans buttoned up right like they're just like holy [ __ ] like i can't believe the fight came here thanks man you know um getting on the base became a sudden like major issue because their security was so high but i won't delve into that right now so what i what i was able to do was because i had built um not a rapport but i had met the two-star korean general who's uh in charge of the base and realized this might have been an opportunity where let us present the intelligence that we've been able to collect about what's going on outside which you can't the koreans cannot access because you're not out there and you're not engaging in the community and all this type of stuff so i gave him a report and he read the report and like the next day called me for a meeting into the office and was like how did you get all this intelligence this is invaluable and i said well sir like we go out and talk to the terrorists right like you know we go and talk to them and uh when i say talk to them i mean like we should go on missions and capture them and attack them and he's like that's a great idea you should talk to him it's like can you give me more intelligence like this um for forced protection of of the koreans here i was like yes that's exactly what i would do let me draw which i did a memorandum right that authorized from from the koreans that you request my team to go forward and collect forced protection intelligence to protect to help your self-defense at your base right um and in that way is for me to go inter like question terrorists right so the implication is now is now you know and i took that memo which he stamped signed etc you know and i went drove them uh you know convoyed out to mosul to brief the 10th group managers like look the koreans are telling us to go out and gather intelligence and they they agreed with it and then we were cleared hot from there and on to do missions and it was awesome it was a great trip we did 25 25 raids if i remember correctly and you know picked up a lot of bad dudes and it was very fulfilling at the mission right so wow man how the korean morale must have been low because the sf the korean special special ops guys i mean this best force guys like they're hard dudes they they are they are warriors and they must have been miserable not being able to go out and and do the job yeah i know i would say so i mean like i think what's interesting and maybe because i have this experience of working with uh foreign foreign militaries as well is that there's a rapport felt between each other even though maybe culturally a different language et cetera there's like this warrior kind of understanding between us right is that we're we're fighters right and i felt that you know with uh with the koreans as well um and every time that i came into the base and he would come and see us he would always pound his chest about how badly he wanted to go out with us on the missions and yeah just couldn't take him out you know um yeah you know uh yeah so to your point uh to your point yeah absolutely correct when i was reviewing uh my highlights of uh of your book in preparation for this podcast because i it was years ago that i read it you mentioned uh going back to the philippines working with uh denio i was wondering if that was general pomona uh that you were working with ah man i don't remember right now at the top of my head jack i'm sorry yeah no oh no no no no it was um it was general ramon uh diesel yeah yeah no diesel is a character and diesel remembered you when i talked to him yeah yeah yeah we actually um he actually works at black panther for a little bit oh really i think he was in i think he commanded when when the white reaction regiment was the white reaction battalion i think he was uh commander and then maybe he came back again and then he was also in charge of the presidential security group as i recall you're absolutely correct so he uh when i when i met him and worked with him uh he was the joint special operations group commanding commander so all of special you know there jason right and uh uh and i was assigned to him as his advisor right just kind of shadowing him and uh helping out helping liaison you know stuff for him um after he finished that i think he was at the presidential security group and then from there he left he uh he got out he retired yeah yeah he said he's sitting on lots of boards as chairman in philippines now he's doing quite well i i yeah i know i bet he he struck me as a you know he's a pma graduate of course struck me as a very sort of like blue blood officer yeah yeah yeah he's uh yeah he comes from the upper crust of society yeah he's just a yeah anyways great guy yeah um yeah we were able to do a lot of stuff together at blackpink as well yeah well uh we'll get into that in a moment too um before we move on i mean we talked about kurdistan was there anything anything else about the philippines and and working with uh their soft guys or any other the experiences you had over there that you you think are worth mentioning um yeah no i mean you know the philippines uh mission i guess just overall i think most would agree was uh fairly frustrating but really great by way of just aspect of military diplomacy right the connections and the the deep relationships you know um obviously there's a long-standing history as well from the u.s and the philippines but um i noticed particularly because again sorry i know we're talking about later but uh you know doing business business there and whatnot um and interfacing with whether it be police or military there's always extremely positive uh just kind of feeling and uh rapport with uh uh with us us personnel and folk and i think that's you know when i look at that because it's actually i think the total amount of time well over 10 years right that sf and various other units uh were operating in the philippines um and there wasn't really a very you know clear result you know afterwards right i think that most would agree right now that afghanistan was a loss right iraq questionable right these are things that are discussed openly right like in terms of like you know the philippines is a funny one where a lot of people don't know about it and they just never really had any resolution just kind of you know whatever 10 years plus something just quietly just went away and applesafe is still there and i don't know is that considered is that considered a success i don't i don't know you know it's one that's just not discussed really yeah right right um yeah there's so much going on with uh you know we talked about it previously gene about how complicated the politics of the region are um i'd love to get deeper into it uh another time uh but perhaps uh for the sake of this show uh we could talk about getting deployed to baghdad with a sif and it sounded like that was a really interesting experience for you um and again a first group team being deployed to go do da ops in uh in iraq it took you guys a little while to get there um i i guess because of your regional focus yeah absolutely it was actually uh an interesting i think cultural dynamic as well is because first group ended up almost having a bit of a complex about it right because it's everybody was going and first group continued being left out i think was like the last group to get in you know in that time period that i was there of course i think it all opened up uh you know by 2010 or whatever where everybody was in but there's a weird time period for about five years where first group was kind of getting crept on you know what i mean for not going as though it was our choice and like guys were like get like team sergeants were getting out and going to work for blackwater and stuff because they were upset about it absolutely there was officers as well that were looking to transfer out of first group um after the captain's time because they wanted to make sure you get in the fight and all these sort of things so we're kind of a weird dynamic right and so yeah for me like again i got uh again however you want to look at it lucky or unlucky you know look i volunteered for all of it right so i say that with a with tongue-in-cheek but um uh for the individual missions as well um yeah i actually i was planning on trying out for one of the the higher level units you know and then saw that the sif uh that i i just recently joined was planning on going back in the uh the next summer and they the siff had just done um you know a rotation where it was uh uh i don't know one of the things that was interesting about our chat here is i have no idea where the lines are these things about all this information you know but uh maybe may i just say like this was in um in baghdad the year prior and then the year i went uh we were training and working with the iraqi uh counterterrorists of course right who had um third group and fifth grade i think every sith by then had already gone through and was training them and building them up and blah blah so they were when we showed up i mean these guys were just pipe hitters you know when we showed up you know like these guys have been doing this for whatever it was three or four years straight day in and day out you know and that was a really different experience from being a uh a team out in kurdistan that everybody just thought was a state department at least on the koreans you know i'd go out on missions and i would be lucky if i got like a kiowa you know right and there's air support you know what i mean like i'd be like hey guys we got like a cut we got coyotes support you know and then going on the baghdad trip if you didn't have the ac 130 right like sometimes the guys on my team who had experiences the year before they would say things like i'm not going out there unless there's an ac 130 like that's a minimum requirement for me and you know it's a very contrasted kind of like you know resource element right like if i were to say my first trip in that era maybe was one of the most under resourced uh you know odas operating right by way of resource and because nobody knew what the hell we were doing up there right going to the sith mission in baghdad we were probably the most resourced you know unit at the time you guys are getting supported by 160th uh you're getting jsoc intel fed to you all that stuff yeah just even the facilities right there's like a beautiful gym there's like all this food and protein shakes and everything like that like before we're living in like a team house in the middle of a bill like actually in the town and we're like eating couscous you know every day with our syrian local chef you know totally different like the first mission was the classic green beret indigenous you know intermixed with everybody and it was it was what i signed up for you know what i read by the time i was researching sf about like the vietnam era you know that type of stuff was like what really attracted me like when i saw the first green berets on the horses with the scarves right like riding through afghanistan i was like oh damn like that is hot like i want to do that you know and uh and so the zip mission was something entirely different where it's like there's nothing i mean it was just it was just kicking ass we just went in and stomped on people every night you know and they're just fed you right like that the mission was fed to you everybody's everything's so specialized um and yeah we were out every single night in sauder city right and and that was a very different mission you know so when i look at my sf uh career which was very short you know it's a common thing as you guys know as a joke like oh officer's summer help now being an older you know an older man at this point yeah that was like a short period of time it's like you know four years for me um but in that time period i i think that i was really uh fortunate um that i saw from my four combat tours a really wide range of different missions like a really wide range right like the first one i'm a staff officer planning campaign plans of like 5 000 dudes you know and all the logistics and applied supply training to come with that and running a talk and you know fire emissions and all that then what it's like being you know a very traditional oda intermixed with curves and building forces out of like barbers and shepherds and giving them you know aka and some boots and then running in and just hitting people and then back to advising you know a high level filipino special operations group and helping them kind of organize and what what all it looks like and that was a really interesting experience a couple missions down south on that as well um and then these this mission in baghdad which was just just a straight you know sledgehammer going around right you know in my house there's a very wide range of experiences um which ultimately is i think is the reason why i got selected for uh for early promotion was more the experience based less about the quality that it was you know i like to think that it i feel like at a very unique time period a time time you know experience which uh which ended up lending um lending to uh you know just i guess catching attention even from uh from big army i guess yeah you know i i you uh you mentioned uh being there for a short time and actually one of our viewer questions uh refers to that about you know 18 alphas so let's take some if you don't mind let's let's get to some viewer questions real quick um uh andrew thank you very much uh can gene share any good or funny stories about usma i asked uh lenomani this question on a prior episode and responded there are no good stories about west point he wrote he really let me down on that one well uh i will share that uh recently i just went to my 20th class reunion and we're class of 2001 911 just happened et cetera and then literally afghanistan rolls up this year exactly 20 years right and so this reunion was incredibly meaningful for me to attend i've been i live in singapore these days um you know i run cyber security company out in asia black panda et cetera um i'm back i've been back home for the summer for various things i've been taking care of business-wise but almost predominantly because of this reunion i wasn't missing this really you know um you know maybe this is maybe so funny but an interesting story about class of 2001 which i'm very proud of being a part of of now i believe i'm still waiting for somebody to challenge me on this but i believe class of 2001 is the longest continuous combat class in the history of west point now right 2001 to 2021 right 20 straight years right and um one of the things that is unique about the class is that during the acceptance day parade like you finish beast which is our boot camp and then you have this big parade they come in in at that time they told us never in the history of west point has a parade happened and where they told the cadets to turn around and run back into the barracks okay there was a lightning storm where lightning was literally striking the parade ground and never saw this after parading doing like feel a million parades at west point but um we're standing out there in attention and suddenly they got on the loudspeaker or like cadets about face and then just start marching back and then suddenly just they caught me laughing you're like all right let's just run just go like the most undisciplined military movement that you'd ever imagine and you just see a bunch of cadets just like with their little m1s and the bayonets like just start running just just you know just a gaggle all the way back in and so the so the the lore of west point is that if if it rains on your acceptance day parade it means your class is going to war okay so over there oh really history of that so it started a new mythology basically yeah so on our class crest right for 2001 there's a big lightning bolt in the middle which this is all pre-911 right we didn't even know it was just like oh you know because it was such a distinguishing feature right of our expansion parade and then actually for a graduation day parade it also poured on us which never happens actually uh or rarely happens actually in the summer and it poured throughout our graduation as well and so this isn't that funny you know maybe this question i just thought about it just now because this came up at the reunion uh which for me was a seminal experience because i hated west point okay i i i wanted nothing to do with that place the moment i walked in and realized what was going on and i was like holy [ __ ] why did i sign up for this you know and uh i really didn't know what i was getting into but uh i have so much too much shame to quit yeah you know such a big deal about you going i would say this for everything ranger school q course whatever i mean the reason why i never quit was like i'm too ashamed to quit to face everybody after i quit right so i'll just do this until i die because i'd rather die than go out and be and face everybody with the embarrassment of having quit and um and so look you know i hated it at west point when i graduated through through that white head in the air and drove away and you know i thought i would never return to west point ever again when i saw in the rear view and going back for the 20th man like that place is really special you know like it's hollow grounds to me now like as a you know as a you know relatively middle-aged man at this point and looking back in my life and how crazy all the last 20 years has been that place is that place is hollow grounds man it's it really is something that i didn't think it told me at the time that i would love it later on but definitely not the time yeah i joke around all the time people ask me like oh how was west point i'm like well it was a minimum security prison with a strong vocational training program we were prisoners right we're literally prisoners okay and just shoved all this vocational education just like constantly on your throat six days a week and all the every you know year year-round for four years right so gene out of curiosity coming from a predominantly asian community in silicon valley how did your parents and your friends react to your decision to go to west point yeah so i actually forged my parents signature to go to western no [ __ ] wow yeah which i just i guess admitted to just uh government perjury if they want to come after me government documents whatever i was 17 when i i had a late birthday october so i was just late in terms of not having been 18 when i decided to uh to start the school year and um so there's a uh there's a chinese proverb okay uh my parents are from taiwan uh there's a chinese program that says um you would not use a good piece of steel to make a nail in the same way that you would not take a good man and turn him into a soldier okay that is like a fundamental like proverb in the culture which is why i i think not only chinese but just general asian culture can be and there's some like japanese and korean i would not put in this category but generally are non-combative non-uh martial non-militant you know these sort of is the sort of attitude and so uh when you know hogwarts came around and i started thinking about west point and i uh mentioned to my parents they were like hell no right like are you kidding me no way you're gonna go to the place it's like throwing away your life it's like going to prison not like what i just described an insecure person right with a strong official like actually prison they actually think it's equivalent of like you're throwing away your life right and uh and then my friends are like why would the military why don't you go to the military don't they like making you push-ups and throw dirt in your face right right this was the stupidest thing ever right right yeah so to answer your question like i yeah i ended up having to you know do do a little signature and once once i got in and started and then some people started actually praising you know me to my parents of having taken that plunge then they were like oh okay this is fine yeah so we're still proud of our son so we're proud so i would have been a great picture so this kind of establishes a pattern show i mean at least just two points showing that maybe the the pizza receipt or the pizza incident was not a a singular decision in your life to break to break the rules i know yeah i know i love breaking rules yeah it you know i also joke around sometimes but i think if i stayed in the conventional army i probably would have went to jail at some point yeah actually yeah you know whereas look you know and i think jackie or you guys know this as well is that there's this conventionalization happening to sf like in the 2000s i don't know if this is still hotly yes topic something i felt strongly about i i i felt that okinawa at least in my in my era which was very much still holding onto that vietnam kind of age of how oda teams operated the independence you know i noticed when i went to tenth group and fifth groups um uh uh italians people walked in each other's team rooms without knocking like the doors were just open and i thought that might have been a function of how closely uh odas work together in iraq and uh you know in joint joint team missions and things like this in okinawa dude if you walk try to walk into a team room without knocking you're going to get your ass kicked right it's serious business you knock and you wait outside until that team allows you to grace them with like to allow you to come into the material that's a really big deal and uh there's like little little things like that culture wise that i understand that used to be preferable across yourself but it kind of went away as a team went so anyway so uh uh kind of going off uh going off a tangent here oh it's very interesting little natural detail andrew added uh like i know usma had one eggnog fueled riot so that's at least one good story [Music] well uh yeah i mean okay you know i so because i just went recently and we're going over a few stories i'll share like one of my most fun memories is um uh and again i have no idea if they do this anymore but during the christmas dinner before cadets are released and allowed to go home for two weeks which is a really big deal obviously there's a big dinner christmas dinner in the mess hall and uh in the middle of dinner they start singing um 12 days of christmas all together and as they go through 12 days of christmas when you hit five golden rings they'll sing it out slowly and then uh each iteration uh each table and there's four thousand cadets in the missile right uh eating it simultaneously they'll grab the tables and then lift them up as you sing five golden rings and each iteration the cadets get crazier and crazier and stack more and more chairs they get higher and higher and higher it looks like a circus kind of thing like it gets really dangerous and very very high like you'll actually stack other tables on top of the tables and those stories and stuff like that and all the kids are lifting up this table and a cadet cadets will get on top of the tables as well and lifting up and everybody's singing five golden rings it's the best feeling at west point it's that christmas uh that christmas song so my first year senior year um you know the army being more political correct blah blah blah they're like no more table raising like like maybe like two days prior to the christmas dinner which everybody looks forward to they said no raising tables and everyone's like what the [ __ ] like grumbling we go into the the dinner and uh there's officers everywhere standing around watching us like hawks to see whether or not we're gonna lift the tables and uh um mobile hold as you might imagine you know after a few iterations where cadets are kind of like sitting on their hands and getting irritated somebody breaks out and starts trying to lift up the table over five golden rings and all the officers swarm like sharks over there try to get them to stop but the next one another table goes up and then eventually by the end it was just mayhem and the whole thing was going up seeing five golden rings and that is the number one best memory that i have from west point where we all collectively said [ __ ] you yeah right and said we're doing this tradition uh you can't take christmas away from us you can take everything away from us but you're not taking that right you know and uh and that's that's i'll share that as my my favorite memory you know in terms of uh that's great um can jean talk about uh general uh son lee jin at all uh rock general and vmi grad oh man i'm sorry i don't know who that is um yeah i apologize yeah uh oh he said the merchant marine academy uses comic sans i think for the recruiting uh pamphlets okay that's that's funny that's a horrible thought that's a horrible punch yeah thank you jackson what was life like on a sift troop compared to traditional oda life how much better was the training funding and op time and you talked about this a little bit do you feel like qualitative that it was better or was it just different yeah this is a great sf kind of topic um just different it's definitely not better uh i think these are gone now right i think the sith is gone yeah but but uh is that true yeah the ships are gone now so there's a lot of civ hating in the battalions that have the cysts because there's a perception that the cysts get treated on a pedestal higher maybe they get a little bit more funding and equipment you know here and there but the experience as a as at least as a team leader like when you're an oda team leader like you have so much freedom you know with your team to do what you think is necessary like you plan out and have so much control over your training your schedules almost like even the missions you go on that you almost like bid for and pitch for and uh that autonomy completely goes out the window as a team leader in a sith you're basically a squad leader right because you're part of a larger group now that is focused on direct action et cetera et cetera so from a personal uh satisfaction and you like job satisfaction perspective i used to actually have dreams when i was in the sift that i would somewhere somehow got fired and then went back to bravo company to be a an oda team leader just because i was just happier there from the autonomy now the other side that was great about the sith is um sometimes you hear grumbling of civ haters say like oh what's so special about them they just we do the same thing we do we do door kicking and all that stuff the levels are like apples and oranges honestly you know you go through sephardic like that course uh rain at range 37 is absolutely insane like the amount the skill level and the standards of what's required to pass that course in terms of combat marksmanship shoot house you know all that type of stuff i mean it is incredible and there's a high attrition rate as well right and it's a real thing to graduate the course and come out and that everybody in the sith is so far to qualify when you're in a regular oda just having one or two guys like that is like huge you know to help train the rest of the the team so imagine again you have like 60 dudes who are also qualified and then go back to the concept of like uh somebody told me once one of my mentors said hey just because you go to airborne school and do those four jumps when you come out of that are you a paratrooper like are you really comfortable being like yeah you know i can do airborne operations right no man like just you just have like the driver's license that allows you to participate now you need a lot more time before you could really call yourself an expert at any of that you know and that's something that i would share is for maybe maybe other you know sf guys that know a little bit more about sephardic and everything is that sephardic is just that ticket that you're allowed to participate in the sif and then the sif itself will continue on with intense train ups and everything like takes it a whole another level it you know it is really another level when it comes to direct action and then also particularly hostage rescue which is a whole separate thing right right um a very high level specific skill set so so i guess when people ask me like what were the differences is that as an individual you gain some insane skills which i really think that they should just call it school ninja school okay like learning how to climb over the buildings and you know you're upside down blowing up you know windows and coming through them you know on repelling and it's just crazy like things that they they have uh teaching and having to do there um so you learn personal skills but then maybe from the perspective as a team leader um and then also as a general sf guy is that i i signed on to do the full gamut of unconventional warfare foreign internal events i love that indigenous intermixing with the local populace and figuring out how to leverage them and go the whole buy with it through and all that type of stuff um so it was exciting and door kicking and trying that out but over time intellectually for me i got i got bored right um you know i i like the autonomy and the wide range of missions that a nsf team only an sf team can do it's so unique to that to that mission right uh rs thank you how long the hudson hell on the hudson dam the class of 1902. i don't know what that means somebody's from the class in 1902 that doesn't make any sense they're alive no hell on the hudson hello damn the class of 1902. i uh jackson uh thanks furthermore what's life like as an 18 alpha on a sift troop are you as active as the assaulters snipers or in the range house arranged house uh best advice for crf18 alphas yeah so i mean in terms of like the daily up-tempo life of course you're at the ranch right like you know you're gonna shoot with all the guys and and make sure that you're uh you're on point as well right because uh when you're on missions you're a gun too you know so on the actual missions of course i'm in the back right the the assault troop commander is running the actual assault itself right um you know what i need to be worried about and is uh sticking with the jtac the rto making sure that uh if there's a counter attack coming in on us once we've secured the site that somebody is not actively engaged that can make the fast decisions of bringing in aircraft and moving you know blah blah blah so to be honest like as a as a shift team leader troop commander my job was pretty easy because i had really awesome assault commanders who just ran the whole the whole raid right and i just kind of showed up afterwards cleared moved up to the top yeah sometimes we had to move force around whatever based off contingency plans but um in terms of training yeah you got to be on the range there's no like there's no like jv status for you as the team leader in terms of your ability to shoot move and communicate you need to be able to perform at the same level or better because you're meant to set the example and lead right you can't just show up and and uh and not be the same right so out of curiosity i mean i know that on this if you guys had the iraqi special forces and you know your advisors and and whatnot um i know with like ranger battalion because people think of like a raid and they think of us maybe a swat team who are doing it in a permissive environment you can have a small element because you don't have to worry about anybody coming in from your flanks so when you have rangers they have enough support to sort of do their own cord and then their own security and you know some of the other tier one units they they could they have access to other units for you guys were you mostly relying on the indigenous or was it easy for you to get u.s forces to to do that external security for you and whatnot yeah so it it variable uh invariably dependent on the mission of course right like in who who had an interest and a stake in the game on the actual uh the entrepreneur itself um for the most part uh my experience in iraq was always with uh indigenous right so like i said the first mission was with the peshmerga you know we recruited them and built them into strike forces from scratch where i talked about the shoot you know all type of stuff and then the second one i just fell in on this like badass like hardened you know iraqi ctf dudes who just were like you know it seemed like you know 100 times more combat than any any other of [Music] for the most part they went they were the first to the door as well right um there were a few times that uh in both trips that um uh that we did you do unilateral missions right just based off just the circumstance and the way we split off or the way the mission unfolded um you know my first team sergeant was very good about making sure to spread out the responsibilities so i had the chance to or chance or he kind of forced me to be like the gunner you know on some of the convoys and feel that fear of being out there when you know there's an idea being the first guy explodes you know and all that type of stuff as well as on some uh some raids being the number one man through the door putting you know the uh explosive on and and running through and that's the same case in both both missions and and i thought that was uh that was a good experience you know not only in just the sense of like showing everybody that hey i'm willing to take the same risk as well of course and uh number two um number two actually understanding like yeah that is [ __ ] that is scary it is scary to be the gunner and understanding what our guys are going through every time they are going through it being the number one guy and so i thought that was very right a good call and and that's important i think sometimes for an officer or a leader in general to to have those experiences to know what other people are going through yeah exactly you know without because it's hard to describe right like i mean without being the number one man right and you're standing on that dark-ass street and you're putting it on there man like that pucker factor and how your heart's going and the metal butterflies in your stomach that's hard to explain right like to really communicate that as the as the as the commander or team leader you know i mean like until i felt that i really understood it was much more sympathetic about making sure to rotate this position you know as evenly as possible you know ship this out there's a lot of considerations yeah and i i think it's very important to step in the shoes of as many people as you can to try to get the context right right the personal context of what they're going through as well right gene let's uh talk about your post-service career um you got out of the military embarked in some various commercial endeavors um it sounds like what really kind of changed things for you was when you got involved uh with rescuing a taiwanese citizen from the philippines and that was the catalyst in some ways for the creation of your company black panda could you walk us through a little bit about that about your experience getting out of the military um the rescue and the company you founded yeah sure so so after i got out of the uh the military i went to go study chinese intensively in taiwan and then and then spend a year at johns hopkins uh school of advanced international studies i didn't finish i um i was poached out of the school when i was on a career trek in hong kong by my current co-founder and chairman matthew pecko who actually was a sith team leader as well out of okinawa which is 20 years before me right and actually almost the same team even and so uh he uh is uh at the time was serving as head of um one of the major divisions of credit suisse the investment bank and we basically met for i would say like about 10 minutes and he's just like what are you doing i'm poaching you out of grad school and why don't you come trade equity for me on the you know uh and uh join wall street right and so that to be honest at the time i didn't know what an investment bank was but i knew you know knew that this was a great opportunity and looked at the paycheck and i was like yeah okay come down here and see what this is all about so i went down to hong kong and i traded uh equity swaps across pan asia 12 hours a day six screens you know trading floor all the you know the type of stuff that you see in the movies uh you know with with uh with all that so it's a really interesting experience as well um you know to be honest i didn't like it so i i left after a short period of time and went down to singapore to help start up counter technologies asia division um this is early early days before it became a very large company but still pretty large at the time um and that's where i started getting reconnected into my tech routes um as well as with cyber right and so um after i left volunteer i was getting ready to join some smaller startups and uh take take a bigger leap into entrepreneurship and start that road and i get a call of the blue when i'm in hong kong and my mother tells me that her best friend from childhood uh his younger sister was kidnapped um you know out of a malaysian resort in the middle of night and her husband was shot eight times you know and killed and she's just gone and nobody knows what's going on and um my mom was uh in taiwan visiting family at the time i had some spare spare cycles so i jumped over to taiwan to go here and the news was just all over taiwan like nothing like this happens in taiwan to taiwanese citizens you know it's a very very safe place right and so uh for me i mean with the experience you know we just talked about i realized immediately i was like that's probably obvious right i mean like where she got kidnapped was in uh borneo um near uh cipidon islands a place called pom pom island so sipped on a really famous diving location and um and uh and so her really good friend angela who had come back to taiwan from the states to try to handle the the situation reached out and asked to have breakfast and just get some advice when i went to have the breakfast and the whole chain plan came out i realized very quickly that uh because of taiwan's status not being recognized as a full country even though it operates completely as such right totally autonomous government military political currency etc it's not recognized it doesn't have any formal diplomatic channels with any uh well only a few handful of small countries around the world uh not the philippines so there's no police law enforcement military real connection between the two and so when i listened to the situation heard that basically a you know a uh a low a low-ranking police officer from the anti-kidnapping group was just assigned and all they were doing was liaisoning about the progress i was like dude you know jack's been the philippines you knew nothing was happening right nobody is helping them at all with this and uh i had a bit of uh time off you know so went back into the country and started calling um you know when i basically when i looked at them in their faces and realized like nobody's gonna help you with this i spent all those years helping uh well i believe helping people in iraq and other places that um to be honest we're all strangers and i don't stay in contact with you know really right it was all for and now here's a somebody who is very important to our family right my mother and uh i have some skills and connections that might be able to help in the situation and uh decided that uh you know i couldn't couldn't look at myself in the mirror and not at least help a little bit so i ended up getting on a plane going out of manila and trying to connect it with previous contacts who were no longer the positions of power like ramon dizon and these types right but could introduce me to their their buddies who would replace them and see whether or not we could get something going so i try to keep this story a little bit shorter but essentially uh we put together a group of uh filipino scout rangers who are able to help tremendously lieutenant colonel dennis eclerin who is a 93 west point grad and showed up a connection through another another west point uh west point uh connection um came up and and uh about a week in and said hey i'm gonna help you west point or west pointer uh scout rangers have uh intel assets in the camp that uh your family friend is being held uh we have izone right and uh we also found a group of private military contractors that were just uh living almost maybe in exile in the philippines kind of shadier characters from european countries etc um these two groups essentially transacted the uh the uh the recovery i'll call it uh of evelyn okay and uh we were able to uh sorry i'm trying to save this story for some some other purposes sure sure also some you know so let's talk a little bit a little bit around it but basically in the exchange we were able to use technical devices to track their locations and i gave that uh and wrote this wrote the plan you know in terms of the uh in terms of follow-on raids for the scout rangers and once we got evelyn out they followed on and hit their hit the opposite about four times and killed like 37 of them etc etc so it was a recovery and then the action happened afterwards through the filipino scout rangers right and they the problem previously was that every time they made contact the opposite would recall very good at ripping banana leaves off the trees and then putting their their wounded and then spiriting them off into the jungle which is you know the terrain is like their backhand right and um so the problem is they make contact make it maybe a few casualties and then they disappear so by being able to put a technical device advice you know on them uh they were they made contact immediately followed on in pursuit in three successive raids and uh made a pretty big impact according to them in terms of kia that's fantastic and you're writing a book about this right gene yeah so um so so it's been a it's been a long time i've been a lot of people have been talking about this uh you know when my story came out um there's a lot more attention i expected you know because it was especially in taiwan yeah taiwan was huge right that really shocked me when i got back and um for about for about a week my face my entire life and story was being broadcast every major news channel i won like four page spreads on me and like every newspaper because the the thing that made the story really big was that i was an unknown entity as the nephew of the sitting president of taiwan my angel right and so you can imagine right like the taiwanese people are like oh man like one of our citizens got kidnapped yet again our government and status is so impotent you know we're in this horrible place that nobody can we can't help our own people and then suddenly the president's nephew who's this west point special forces goes in and puts her back and everybody's mind's just like right just exploded and uh so the story was really big it was kind of joke around about it now because it's uh now it's like eight years later it was like 15 minutes of like boy band fame in taiwan around it like i'd walk around you know the streets and people would run out of cafes and restaurants take photos with me and just say the most you know just incredibly ingratiating things and things to me it was it was obviously it was fun and um uh yeah so it was a really big story uh there and then there's a lot of attention around that people contacting but after the initial media blast and kind of coming out a little bit it's kind of like man i don't really know why like i care to tell the details of the story like what do i really where am i forwarding my interests and time around that so i kind of just pushed off for a long time and then now actually what's inspiring what's brought me back to the table to tell the story and i've signed a uh um i'm signed by a united talent agency right to uh to to do this uh we're getting ready to uh submit the proposals and everything like that and get to get the story out is because i realized that my story uh you know might might have use in the platform of telling just an asian-american story right particularly with what's going on in the states i'm watching that from afar in asia and quite appalled at all that and if nothing else i hope that my story can come out and for me to be a platform be like hey you know don't don't ignore us we're here right um with backgrounds like myself that contribute and uh don't overlook us right and don't um yeah many things i could say along those lines about what's going on with uh uh with the uh just uh just the perception of asians in the states and right hope that my story can come out is hey here's here's one story that uh to uh to to just bring more eyeballs i uh i really look forward to reading it gene and uh we we're really just scratching the surface with you here tonight so i hope we can have you back on the show it's yeah and yeah definitely when the book comes out please we want to have you back on so talk talk to us about how this rescue then kind of led you to forming a security company and and uh founding black panda yeah so so the thing with that was a unintended and ancillary benefit was that with my name coming out being a you know semi uh semi-known figure around asia was that uh people were very fascinated uh by me like particularly investors right businessmen et cetera i kind of joke around and like about it sometimes like oh i'm a zoo animal right like i can get meetings because people just are interested to meet me and then it's up to me to be like okay here's my business but i can usually get for a period of time it's very easy for me to get that first meeting and uh that that's what helped propel me into more of like the entrepreneurial role where um it was not i don't say it was easy but uh easier for sure from my previous status of meeting a high net worth individuals that were willing to cut you know 500 000 million two million dollars uh to me because they believed in you know hey just this person seems like he's very capable um and believe in supporting uh what this is an initiative he uh that i was undertaking so that that's one aspect of just being able to raise capital okay um in terms of an idea uh it was a little bit ill-advised i would say that but uh the original black panda group like we just thought it'd be really cool if we just got super smart sf guys together because we're so awesome and we'll just figure out a business that's more or less how we started you know and then ventured into security consulting and you know that uh it's a long story around those and there was the pivot of pivots where we went but essentially um where we made a major turn and the business was struggling because uh if you ever start a business it's a horrible idea to just be like what do i think is cool right and just started no you need to find out what other people think is cool and we'll buy actually right the market is what you need to talk to and so um in mid 2017 the resorts world manila where we had uh we had an office in the philippines um was attacked by a gunman and burned down half the casino 37 people died etc we were hired by resource world to be the physical crisis responders to help them get their gaming license back and fix the security the second day or third day that this happened a whole bunch of cyber attack started coming in into the casino taking advantage of all the physical chaos and exploiting um the confusion and money was being you know stolen and ripped out and so i went forward to help the company try to find cyber instant responders or cyber firefighters right kind of like crisis cyber guys it's a huge field in the states which is the most developed cyber market in the world et cetera and discovered that there was no such real boutique capability like that in asia and so we put together a hodgepodge group of folk ended up making a lot of money more money actually uh i think on the cyber side the physical side of that deal and i realized whoa this is a way better business right being physical security side right and at that point we had already started working with voids of london on trying to tie an insurance component to the physical security we're getting a little bit delving a little bit in the kidnapping ransom insurance political violence insurance and then us being the services that are paid for with the insurance policy that gets delivered to the client and so i learned a lot about that industry and how that worked and so after even evelyn chang and everything like that i've handled uh you know numerous kidnapping ransom negotiations and cases which is an interesting and actually very fulfilling uh line of work as well which is not very lucrative because just happened enough right but you know what happens a lot right now is ransomware right right and it's just blowing up right and so what i saw was an opportunity to take a lot of things that i learned from the physical security world and you know i like to still consider myself a classically military trained uh tactician strategist and this uh i fundamentally believe that cyber security is not an i.t problem it's a security problem right it's not a computer that's hacking on the other side it's a human being and that human being has friends that are organized they have different desired end states and thus different abuse approach and different courses action that they can take it's just straight up old school mdmp you know there's still terrain analysis rather than jungle urban or forest now it's digital but there is key terrain obstacles avenues of approach it all still there is there you just need to figure out and match the terms over to figure out that strategy so i saw a lot of parallels to that i mean i have a little bit of advantage there's a computer science undergrad and i am technical and then i try to marry that with my sf background and then a bit of the finance background getting into insurance and those connections of connecting up in the lloyds so what i'm doing today what black panda is is we're together with uh our company kinematics underwriting we're the first cyber security insure-tech firm in asia uh we're partnered with lloyds of london who permits us to underwrite insurance policies up to five million us dollars um and essentially we sell the insurance policy that has black panda attached inside the policies so if you get breached or attack cyber attack the policy will trigger not only coverage for your losses but also pay for all black panther's fees to come in and put out the fire for you so i make money twice on it on every client this way so that's that's essentially what i'm doing uh these days we're headquartered in singapore i have offices in hong kong tokyo manila kuala lumpur so um in the middle of raising a large financing ram right now and plan to scale the company across most of asia actually we see offices across most of the countries so where do your clients tend to be then yeah so i would say predominantly in hong kong actually all across asia uh hong kong and singapore predominantly because those are our kind of like dual headquarters uh we have a lot of uh enterprise uh clients in philippines indonesia thailand like for example oh well i don't want to name it clients sorry sure for sure we have some very large clients in these these regions and um and uh yeah that's that's what we operate super cool man i i mean it's just like an incredible journey from you know uh kind of like nerdy kid in cupertino california to west point to special forces officer to private security guy and then kind of like all the way back to tech and cyber yeah you're a tech kid from kubernetes but you but you took all those experiences along the way and kind of brought them with you into that field yeah i think we all do right you know we're all on our own pathway and journey and and uh the weird twists and turns that we all take end up just leading us faster i think that where we're supposed to go you know what i mean like in a lot of ways you know whether for better or for worse right right and uh yeah it's been an odd journey for sure for the last 20 years a lot of people sometimes say like oh yeah what would you say in terms of like your successes and how do i you know and i always say like don't follow anything that i did that's a horrible idea to go to the pathway that i did that's ridiculous um and in general when i'm usually giving advice i try to point out the mistakes i made and tell them and share like okay here's the mistakes i made for this watch out for this landline i worry i would caution just in general i share this is that i think that people who give advice about something that they did well often times forget how much luck was involved yeah they could rationalize how awesome they were oh yeah do this yeah or and or also are just like validating their own decisions because they want somebody they think is promising and smart to just do exactly what they did so that that's my take personally when i see people yeah it's interesting because i think that and you're you're a great example of this that it's not just sort of luck that leads you into things but a lot of times i mean those connections that you make in life and and your job performance like how hard you try at something regardless because we probably all have moments right like your receipt incident we all have moments that could have ended us or or or not ended us but where our life would have been dramatically different if it hadn't been one person stepping in one you know patron sort of taking us under their wing or taking care of us um somebody making a different decision that's right that's right i agree with that i mean you know the pizza thing um if i didn't didn't have the pizza incident i would have uh gone straight to the sieve actually i was assigned a team there already and so i went straight to that team and then would have gone a very different career route right maybe i would have gotten one deployment to oif at the time or to iraq at the time and then probably that probably would have been it you know and they would have changed a lot of the trajectory of my career you know along those lines you know in that sense you know like the your happenstance and how many missions i did you know and i mean can you imagine i'm sure you would be successful in whatever way you define success but can you imagine where your life may have gone had that uh never return order stood if you hadn't had somebody step in yeah well i try to i always try to think like number one is that um you know most of human suffering like all of our suffer like our mental suffering comes from rooting about the past or worrying about the future right always think about regretting like regretting our previous decisions or worrying for the future right where we're happy is we're just present in the moment so when i think about like you know the decisions i guess so to speak that have gone on in the past that's i try to i try to right this is this is an ideal of course i still worry and regret things you know but um i try to think about like well that decision was done which was likely made almost an uncontrollable emotional reflexive way you know and it's my job just to make it right going forward right there's no such things i've heard this you know recently from a professor at uh at stanford where i finished this business course this summer where he said there's no such thing as right decisions uh you just have to make it right afterwards right right you like that it's like yeah you know i did the pizza thing just make it right afterwards for you you know make it work for you after right right i [ __ ] this up i [ __ ] that up make it right and make it work for you afterwards right yes uh let's get through the user questions yeah we have a few more questions that people donated to uh to ask so uh we can breeze through these uh and i know we've kept you so long and you've been so generous with your time and we appreciate it um alejandra thank you he says dude what is it about one one and okie that that turns dudes who go there or who come back to lewis into a bunch of weebs straight up uh white waifu obsessed uh what's obsessed waifu waifu waifu right yeah the japanese the term for the japanese like the ideal wife you know waifu husbando waifu it's a wee turn yeah it's a total animator okay yeah i don't know too much about that i mean like i didn't have a lot of interaction with with lewis in my time yeah i did swing through a couple times but uh yeah i don't know i think that uh i'm just gonna rip off that and just talk about okie culture a little bit i mean um so you know what what uh somebody said to me that kind of recruited me about the idea of going to okinawa was he said um nobody says i saw you or so they don't say i was with you in okinawa right they say we were together in okinawa right like when people talk about the experience of going over there because it is ends up being a insular and very tight-knit community particularly around the sf community because you're when you're in okinawa and you're at tory station which is this tiny little army uh base away from the main body of kadena air force base and uh some of the marine corps marine corps bases and everything like that so you're kind of your own isolated community and you know and obviously there's a little bit of a somewhat you know more hush-hush kindness nature of being an sf and kind of on the side you know you do come socialize in the main areas like that but it gives you a sense of um you know that you're you're you're a unique community separate of that and also that you're just so random not randomly of course there's a very good reason why in okinawa but um but away from everybody as a forward-deployed battalion right which has you know there's only two in sf and it is a unique thing right so um yeah i don't know what else to say about that do you like comments do a lot of guys do a lot of guys at first group consider okinawa like a hardship tour and they don't want to go oh no i would be shocked if you know i don't think anybody feels that way about go to okay now it's it's um uh well you know my uh my roommate um west point grad and uh still in that some officer he he didn't want to go to okinawa he got assigned to go he wanted to go to third group or fifth group you know and php as much in the fight as possible right so he was one of the guys that actually left and then went to lieutenant group after uh okinawa so that's the only definitely not about living in okinawa right now it's japan right it's a first world country right it's super peaceful it's so beautiful the ocean i mean it's it's it's an awesome place to live you know i lived on the beach like stones dude is gorgeous yeah so yeah yeah uh walker thank you um any work with 95th civil affairs uh yeah i mean some you know came across them a couple times in the philippines um yeah i mean no i don't have too much to say about that you know they have their own mission and we see them attached to teams from time to time um very important mission right in terms of uh some affairs and engagement with uh civilian populations um no major uh no major comments uh for me for kind of alejandra being in group response for the pac paycom area do you have any unique or funny jset stories uh thank you for coming on gene cheers okay thank you uh thanks for having me um yeah adjacent stories um uh i'm trying to think of i mean nothing i'm sorry nothing really comes to mind right off the bat i mean like you know we did we did the i did a lot of them around um well i will share one thing that i think is maybe kind of interesting then uh so um so one of the uh the units that we stood up in okinawa was the japanese um special operations group so this is after the north koreans admitted to like coming across on the beaches and kidnapping japanese citizens like we heard we know told us about this too yeah oh go ahead yeah yeah and then so this is crazy right when you think about what an awesome sf mission like if you're just purely from that's like right watching like go swim underwater and kidnap civilians on the beach and drag them back in the water and bring them back to the boat anyway crazy so that's what they did in the 70s and they admitted it i think in the mid-2000s somewhere um that they had kidnapped these japanese civilians to teach north koreans japanese and japanese culture for their um further spies and things like this so the japanese kicked into gear and we're like okay we need a plus of some of our own uh units and they built a uh an sf unit called sg and uh so they would come down to okinawa and train with us in the earlier years quite a bit and they were extremely well funded uh extremely professional um almost certainly one of the top if not top um sf units in asia almost overnight right and uh one of the funny things i remember when they were in the shoot house once was that um one of the things that the japanese do do and i see this in private sector as well uh is that they love pulling out video cameras and documenting everything and researching it and watching it again later and then pouring through all the details and figuring out exactly what it is that you're doing and then try to not only um not only make sure that they try to mimic all the great things that they're learning from you and then from there to innovate and improve right and so when they when they came down uh you know in this the time that i had a chance to train with them they were awesome on the range like they out shot us actually which was really shocking i was you know after just such a short period of time like four years and uh well the thing that i want to share that was quite funny was uh we did a few runs through the shoot house and they're all on the catwalks and everything with the cameras and as soon as we finished i'm walking back uh you know the the japanese uh kind of team that i was uh kind of like attached to or coordinating with they jumped around me and there's like 10 video cameras right in front of my face and they're like okay jean-son why did you walk after you finished the you know the run why did you walk back in the way that you did and i'm like what do you mean like i didn't walk back in any way like the exercises over i'm just walking normally they're like no no your walk looks a little bit different and then they pull out the video they're like showing me like how i kind of like sauntered back like maybe i was feeling like look good about myself shot some targets you know so i was kind of be bopping back a little bit they're like no no your walk is very different like how do we is this is this required like after you know the shootout like yeah we do how do we learn that walk and it took me like a like a while to explain it's not a thing right don't worry about this you know it just shows like a little bit like the cultural mechanics yeah a little bit of a little obsession yeah yeah yeah or just the attention detail that culture is like talk about attention that culture is like man it takes that to a whole nother level right now so yeah i also just want to announce i guys uh and folks we really appreciate but we after we finish these questions what's on there now we can't take any more we have to we have to let gene go um uh as a civilian that strikes me as weird that 18 alpha spend relatively little time in command of an a team would it make sense to linkedin that that time or allow officers join later in their career as an alternative to up or out it's an interesting one so one of the one of the tough things for um sf officers is that uh the timeline so you remember like there's there's the aspect of like making sure to take care for sf and there's the officer's career track as in as a us army opposite right and by going to the q course you lose two years of time that you're normally in the career track that all the other branches whether the infantry armor artillery that you're knocking out certain staff time and certain command times and all this type of stuff and so actually when you're competing later on when you come out of uh just a strict sf jobs and you're coming out as an sf officer and competing for other staff positions let's say at the pentagon or whatever you're like way behind okay your timeline was compressed um where you um you're missing certain things and particularly like if you're a team leader like like me who ended up getting two teams and then longer time right i was like i was on a team for like 40 44 months or something like that and so i was a little bit longer than the normal team leaders meant to generally speaking on average it should be like 24 months right so um so in terms of getting more team time my actually i have a west point classmate who was an officer and then ended up his story was he didn't want to leave the team so he became an 18 brother right and then became a warrant and so he showed up at the 20-year classroom union in his green beret and he's like a cw3 and on a team right so it's like so i think like for officers that want to stay on a team then you have the option to do so just don't be an officer right right like the team leader is just meant to be there for a short period of time the team is run by the team sergeant right the ncos are on the team the team leader is there to get you know there is a role obviously on the team itself but there's a there's that's just the beginning of the officer's career right he's only like a late 20s you know individual that has this whole track record of things to go through and you know all the higher ranks and everything like that so it's difficult to say you know for officers to go back to a team um doesn't quite make that's career track right um thank you uh isaac why is the invasion in philippines complicated i'm not sure what he means by that yeah i'm not either um yeah let's go on yeah if it's just for the record i shouldn't call it an invasion it wasn't like it's not like america or anybody or the philippines invade anyway it was just the operation was weird amphibious raid right thank you jackson how rare is it seeing former uh sif 18 alphas go to go to the unit or tfo like a tier one unit uh do many asian alphas regret commissioning just because of lack of team time yeah so i think that um uh there's nothing special about the sif being a place to ascend into tier one units i think that's important and um and kind of actually that's just that question kind of values why there's like a lot of there was a lot of stiff hating from other sf you know because it's really it isn't like another level up really right it's like yes you got to go to a specialty school and everybody went to that special school and has a very specific skill set that's the way i try to describe the sith um so just in general in terms of ascending into uh tier one units then that's just equal opportunity for everybody across the board right and so whether you're sf or not right um and uh then the other question sorry about more team time again there seems to be a lot of questions like yeah dude 18 alphas regret yeah do do you have to forget commissioning just because the lack of tmi and actually there might be another question that we can just include with that uh from brad and we can add this to it ever wish you went enlisted win in sf so i think that they're kind they kind of yeah you know i'd share like the happiest time uh that i was ever just like whether you course or all the way 15 times the happiest however was was during the alpha portion of the q course where i was the junior echo on the team and i was not in charge right and all i had to do was worry about making sure this radio right you know and which i still didn't do a very good job but that's all i had to worry about right was getting this this uh you know the cinders up and uh you know so so yeah definitely there's a lot of times that yeah it would have been a lot more fun just be one of the boys right i mean it's very lonely being the team leader um in many missions and cases right when i was in kurdistan i mean like dude like we were out there just by ourselves right out in you know grill and yeah like the the boys are all hanging out and yeah there's certain things that you just don't get invited to you're the you're the nerd on the team right like right let's be honest right you're gonna get made fun of all the time and like it's it's awkward right it's kind of like man i just feel like [ __ ] on like socially all the time but i'm a pretty cool guy right you know right you know just kind of just kind of outcasted you know so yes so definitely there's many many times and i think every sf officer especially when you're a team leader you wish many times that you could just be one of the boys yeah like how it feels when you're going through the courses and you know it's much more i think you guys know this from all the schools too right when you're in schools whether ranger school or cube course and we're all students the difference you know the separation between ncos and officers or elicit is very it's much more blurry right we're all suffering together equally and we're all teammates etc like that is the best camaraderie feeling that i ever had uh whether i was when i was training or doing emissions in the army so for sure definitely along those lines but at the same time and i will say this because you know there's a culture where sf officers are you know if you don't constantly fight to try to stay on a team non-stop like you're it's viewed very negatively like why don't you want to stay on a team and you're supposed to fight for that and get a second team and all this other stuff i would share definitely by the end of my team time i i was done by that point i was ready to do something else because i wasn't growing and learning as fast as what i wanted which fundamentally is why anybody i believe why anybody even does any job or stays the name job you need to feel like you're learning and growing all the time right that's what keeps people engaged and so for me i kind of seen because i was an experienced team leader at that point ready to move on where's ready to move on like how many more j sets can i do that i'm going to see something new it wasn't you know or you know even going on missions and things like this are ready to move on yeah right for me it was time yeah so this uh if you don't watch the show this is totally an inside show question um but just give it your best guess what do you think the price of a giraffe on the black market is the price of a giraffe on the black market in the united states in the united states usd yeah in the u.s do i get the context like is there something valuable on the giraffe no no no it's just a giraffe uh owned by like a drug dealer on his exotic on his exotic back forty you know i read once that a tiger only costs like 250 bucks so why not say that yeah i've read a tiger cub is only like 250 bucks what ends up happening is the cost of feeding it and maintaining dude i'll buy a tiger cub right now and keep it in the studio right but then what i just said like the the cost of maintaining it like giving it that out later how big can it get and and this is our our time to pitch our patron if you guys want to see us get a tiger cub and um we need money funding for the feeding and the raising as gina said you can call uh carol baskets from tiger yeah okay giraffe you know because of because of that data that i think is correct on the tiger i'm gonna go with a low number i'm gonna go with like i don't know i think like a few thousand bucks wow man yeah do you remember what it was it was like thirty it was like thirty six thousand is it thirty six yeah i thought it was lower than that but wait even 36 when we talk about like higher numbers that's not that much that's not that much i mean it's about the size price of a prius right we had a higher ceiling maybe yeah yeah right um yeah we'll need a hippo um jim it seems that cyber security it seems that a cyber security is a popular fuel for former retired sf officers is that the future of unconventional warfare oh wow that's a great question um so number one i didn't realize that a lot of officers were getting into cyber i'd love to know who they are and network with them but uh um i do think that and i'm glad that question got asked because i do think that uh veterans should if they're listening should look at the cyber security industry um the background that we have uh dealing with stressful yeah okay so the background that we have dealing with stressful crisis scenarios as well as again like i was talking earlier about the fundamentals of security at the fundamentals patrol these all apply and are translatable into cyber to certain degree what you're missing is the technical capabilities right you're missing you're not trained on the 240 right you're not trained on im six you just don't know how to operate the systems and that requires some technical training but the gi bill will cover uh your cyber security training right and i saw by the way i still don't get this why people who served after 2011 have like an unlimited amount of time for gi bill and guys like us you know that came in really weird yeah it's really weird yeah so but anyway so if you have gi bill left the sans institute sans is the us uh kind of like uh gold standard of cyber security courses and for us when we hire the sans courses and the certifications man if you just have one of those you're going to get a job maybe not from us sorry she said but just generally if you have a certification in one of those sans courses which is usually about a week long and like 8 000 bucks and you take the test you're going to get a cyber job like there's three million jobs in cyber security in the u.s alone that are unfilled and trying desperately looking to to for people so a lot of people get intimidated because i think it's very technical but the truth is actually right now is that there's not it is a bridge that can be crossed um and it's just about time against the skills that you need to learn and just be willing to dive in right it's the i feel like a lot of veterans might have a a blocker mentally similarly to what we were describing earlier where people show up to the self-assessing yeah correct you're self-assessing yourself out um and uh you don't need to like if the gi bill's willing to pay for it take the money get the training and then just go out there and see you know i i think there's a huge opportunity for people transitioning cyber security uh eclipsed over a trillion dollars of cyber crime losses last year it is this year already larger than the global drug trade if it wasn't for covid and people are already talking about cyber non-stop mistakes if it wasn't for covet it would be even more there's so much cyber attack going on it's insane our phone is off the ring off the hook uh in asia with business and um i just don't and it's never i don't see it stopping its growth in our lifetimes the technology in advance and how things are being created so quickly as people rush to market with different products and introducing cyber security flaws in every single one which is exponentially increasing this problem there's a lot of good business and money to be made and i think getting back to the roots of um a lot of things of what veterans were attracted to by joining the military right of defending you know getting utility to have a specific skill and mindset as a warrior which is now translated distributed or communicated through digital needs right which to the person's uh question is unconventional warfare i think that's a good application of unconventional warfare for sure right like getting in rather than putting boots on the ground why not penetrate um penetrate the the the network systems and disrupt and whatnot and soften up the target beforehand or gather intelligence i actually have gone so far um and to write some articles about how i think that uh airland battle doctrine will be changed by cycle warfare as well so for for people that don't know that one in the 1980s the soviets wrote something called airland battle doctrine which has become kind of the standard of conventional invasion a control warfare invasion where you get air superior force and air superiority first and then you follow on with the land forces right you soften up the target and come in what's safer than even air air power coming in obviously just sitting back behind your computer right and things like the colonial pipeline hack about the russians uh potentially interfering with elections and pushing out on social media fomenting disruption and social unrest in the states absolutely this is unconventional warfare right and um and i think it's going to be the front lines um as things continue to mature you could i believe that you'll be able to take out i think that i think the great powers of the world right now us uh china europe blah blah blah i think that entire warfare can be fought via cyber right now um and be decided before you need to bring in physical rights when you start talking about uh not just computers but iot ot you know i i mean and ot is such an incredibly vulnerable feel right now operational technology is such an incredibly vulnerable field that i mean it's like you say i mean you can prep you know do preparation of the battlefield without ever deploying a single a single you know armed force yeah that's right that's right i mean again i think the the most alarming hack that we saw recently in headlining news of the colonial pipeline yeah right actually uh actually disrupting a national uh security asset right by resource a national security resource fuel right gas you know like these sort of things can get arrested by uh the right cyber attack and if it's not defending the right way and i think that's the front lines yeah honest yeah it's fascinating last couple questions yeah um did your actions in taiwan get china's attention uh not like i mean nobody from the government reached out you know if it means like that uh you know certainly some chinese media whatnot were interested in it because uh just because of the political nature of my affiliation in taiwan and whatnot but uh yeah i mean generally uh yeah i would say that there's some exposure uh in in china around that but would you feel comfortable taking a vacation to beijing uh probably not because i've just been there many times and it sucks so yeah uh yeah i think i've traveled extensively yeah where in the in the uh after i got out looking around and seeing what things were like there um uh yeah i've traveled in china and whatnot it's um yeah i'm getting that you guys have not i have no i haven't i am not i thought yeah yeah yeah i mean look the impression of china right now i mean it's uh one it's extremely polluted you know like if you when i went to beijing you can't see across the street it's so polluted right the deep amount of fog and all this other stuff obviously when you go there you get a magnitude of the size of china and we look at the cities and see 30 million people when you're on a you know the skyscraper and get the size of how big that place is and everything like that um yeah i don't know where the conversation's going it's kind of like right now yeah yeah thank you jerry this last two questions uh what do you think about the about russian hackers yeah so they're considered right now to be the the best they have the fastest uh uh recorded dwell times which is the amount of time that it takes for them to penetrate penetrate penetrate to end points um yeah they're very prolific uh look if i were uh if i were a smart kid in russia or other another country that didn't have a government or police force that could come after me i would do nothing but attack and hack people and steal their money right right you can't come get me so right like i mean let's say i'm in nigeria which a lot of attacks are coming out of as well these days i've never signed up cyber financial crime um i would sit there because i know the government can't come get me right and sit there just try to steal as much bitcoin as i possibly could so uh just a side comment about it you know so but yeah russia right now has uh one of the largest uh so china has the largest volume of hacks russia has a smaller concentration but is um extremely effective and very high level uh interesting stat the dark web uh uh forty percent of the dark web is in cyrillic really it will give you a little sense you know you know and uh kind of demonstrating the prolificness of russian actors for sure their top top flight yeah uh and then last question uh isaac thank you i wasn't able to join the military but to want to major in cyber security and i hope to one uh to do special ops because of oh he wants to do special ops or work in that kind of field in cyber security what should he do to get there yeah they should fly to the nsa um so the nsa has like kind of like a delta force uh unit there that does um it's called tailored access operations this is open open uh i have never worked there this is made from open source information uh but we do see uh cds of these seven people uh coming around they come out and start very successful cyber security companies um so that's that's the unit that kind of has the lore you know of being like the most of the offensive cyber security community in the states um there's another one in israel that's uh that's uh bandied around quite a bit because there's a ton of really amazing israeli cyber security startups that have come out and now come to the states and uh brought brother products and services here um their unit is called unit 8200 and that's kind of like the israeli cyber security military unit as comparison point but to this person's uh particular question yeah if you want to go to the top and nsa and certainly there's channels in the military as well every army navy air force etc has some type of cyber cyber command and separate unit there um in the military too but on the more civilian side yeah we're talking nsa and the other three letter agencies yeah yeah gene this has really been an awesome informative conversation um is it okay if i steal just another 10 minutes of your time is that uh all right thanks thanks man and uh just to wrap wrap up the main format of this show um thank you everyone who joined us tonight and spending your friday evening with us and and hearing some of gene's stories and experiences and we really appreciate him joining us tonight um make sure you go down in the description to this website there's a link to our patreon if you want to get involved in supporting the channel and have access to the bonus segments please uh give us a thumbs up uh share the video with your friends spread it around let people know about what we're doing here um and gene for people who it's it's blackpanda.com yeah blackpanda.com okay um and then um no word on your book yet people can't pre-order that or anything at this point they can go and check out the yellow green beret series there's that's right they're up on amazon highly recommended they're really funny really funny too so i hope you guys will go give them a read yeah yeah hey thanks everybody we really appreciate it gene we really appreciate you next week uh ray mcpadden a ranger battalion officer he wrote we march at midnight about his time in afghanistan

Channel: The Team House

Views: 27,277

Keywords: The Team House, Jack Murphy, Special operations, Special forces, Gene Yu, Black Panda, Global War on Terror, Green Beret, Cyber security

Id: EYZ0lzCEvco

Length: 145min 14sec (8714 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/R0binSage]

His books were great. Kinda soured my opinion of West Point though.