Jocko Podcast 291 w/ Mike Glover: Are You Prepared? Stack The Deck In Your Favor

this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was just prepped man i was good and it wasn't a difficult thing but i saw dudes fall apart and when i went to survival school it was the last thing that you did in the q course if you failed you failed everything you just you just spent two years of your life training to be a green beret and they let dudes go how many people fail that we'd have a couple per class i mean it was it was common to have a couple per class that would self-select and they'd be like i'm done you're like you just did two what's making them quit the stress man what's stressful well i mean getting a like even just the hood like people aren't used to taking if you if you don't grow up in those martial arts if you don't grow up in um impact sports and not used to making contact when that hood comes off your head and you get slapped by a dude's hands who are like pickle fingers mcgee and he slaps your face and and you can't do anything that starts breaking you down and by you know day two of that experience you know laying naked in your cell flex cuff in a box a lot of guys self-select i thought it was i was into claustrophobia i like being in small places i i hid i slept and i was like this is awesome just keep me in this box man i got slapped so hard when i got captured at sears school the it surprised me yeah like it was i mean this guy freaking out of nowhere the hood comes off i'm standing up against a wall it's out in the middle of the woods and they have like a wall and i think it's almost like a hollywood wall where it when you get pushed into it it kind of gives a little bit yeah yeah so he pushed me into it once and like whatever i must have had some kind of punk ass freaking smirk on my face like whatever and this dude did not like it at all and he cracked me i mean i'm talking as hard as a human being can i mean i've been punched in the face it was like that but his hand happened to be open and i i got the little uh got the little flash and i was like oh damn this is real i was like yeah and believe me that was that was number one because he followed that one up um yeah but i like you i i can't imagine that that would have made me quit but i guess if someone's not used to you know maybe scrapping and whatnot that's it yeah a lot of people not really for them yeah i had what the interesting thing in the psychology was you're playing you have to be resistant right the whole game is you're resistant i remember we were building um in the sand a sickle that represented the communist you know scenario and we were building a sickle and half of us were sabotaging the sickle so guys would make it and i remember i had a guy who i highly respected he was platoon started in the infantry had gone through training with me i was scooting all the stuff out after they were building it knocking it over and he turned around and he walked to me because what are you doing i'm like uh what do you mean what i'm doing like dude i like worked an hour on that i'm like wait a minute you realize that we're supposed to be subverting this whole circumstance like you're not supposed to actually be making this and he's like oh and he was in the scenario man freaking bridge on the river kwai oh dude it was insane some of these guys were like the headlights i mean it was they had the deer in the headlights look and they thought for real they were in the back country of vietnam i mean it was it was crazy it was crazy to see it but cool cool experience go ahead what kind of claustrophobia stuff did they yeah a lot of it was um this this guy right here is kind of claustrophobic yeah we've been working with them yeah yeah exposure's the way to deal with that but it's it they had i mean it was it was very um tight secluded spaces where you couldn't sit down on your butt and you couldn't stand up all the way so you're in an uncomfortable stress position and then they would close the box on you and turn up the lights um and then they play the music like crying babies all kinds of different stuff and a lot of people um they would transfer you into different boxes based on your fear so if they saw the fear coming out of you they were exploiting that fear they're like oh this dude in a big box is getting scary let's put them in a small box and so it varied from small boxes to big boxes um but it it that jacked up a lot of people i mean it was it was significant and then how long do you have to stay in there so a long time you you lose track of time because you're sleep deprived here's one story i i thinking i was a smart guy i i was like similar to the i have to piss right now but i had to piss really bad and so i'm like if i piss in this box they're going to hook me up i can't piss in this box so this is my i'm thinking logically i think and i'm like this is completely logical wait so hook me up is a bad thing hook like like pull me out of the thing and slap my face off my face and i'm like look i'll piss in my boot and then i'll take it outside and we're in the gravel i'll dump the piss off forgetting about this whole thing called displacement right i pee in my boot i take off my boot you don't have socks you're naked get these bare pajamas on i fill my boot with piss and then i'm like okay i got it in here i feel good it's not all over the thing and then i put my foot back in the boot damn and then it goes everywhere and i'm like and then it immediately occurs to me like that was a horrible idea and so i'm standing in piss and then my foot my naked foot is covered in piss and i'm like dude that did not work out i had a plan that was not how i thought i was going to execute it was horrible man yeah it's funny because as you were thinking about that was you were talking about that and then when you asked that question echo you know there's some look i don't know if this is some um you know just straight up sam harris meditation type scenario but you get your brain where you just aren't there anymore yeah you're just like cool you wanna put me in the box cool and you're sitting there and you're thinking about freaking whatever kentucky fried chicken and lemonade and what and you're just in a totally different world and you don't know if it's been an hour or five hours and you're getting slapped it's like cool whatever like whatever they're gonna do to you you you just sort of and it's the same thing when we were talking earlier about humping a rock it's like okay look there's just i'm not the pain is there but it's like somewhere else like it's almost like you're watching it happen and you kind of can be like yeah whatever hey keep going yeah completely you're you're you're sedated man you're just going with the flow it's it's similarly to i think about when you accept at some point when you're in water that you're just gonna pass out and you accept that you're like i'm okay with that that bridge in that gap and just accepting it is the the first part in being successful in that environment and then you like you create your new happy place where you're like man as long as i'm in my head and i have this space that i'm comfortable with i'm good you could do whatever you want there's nothing you can do yeah if you are present in the [ __ ] that you're going through yeah that's gotta suck i can't even i can barely even relate to it because i i think eventually you just get good at being like okay cool whatever that's what we're doing cool whatever i can't it's got a real that's what that's you know what that when i start thinking about what makes someone quit it's because they're present in that [ __ ] that's going down they're actually in it yeah and now they're in it they're looking at the future going it's just more [ __ ] in the future so oh this is horrible and forget it i'm going to ring out yeah it's that fear response it's the contemplation of impending doom where you're just thinking about the next thing that's coming and then your whole life is all these little small progresses of like doomsday doomsday doomsday it's like dude i'm i'm on the beach drinking a pina colada eating a piece of chicken right now i'm i'm living my best life in my head and i'm good you must have learned some of that the tomb situation because that stuff doesn't sound fun to me i would rather go through school 20 times right now than yes do uniform inspections i would rather do that as well i would take the the tomb taught me about um self-awareness and being present within my own mind and developing this relationship with the conscious voice that's in my head but also like this passive observer this person who's kind of observing the narration of the voice in my head and sitting back and like measuring all these inputs because when you're standing still for 21 seconds at a time before you take 21 steps repeating it times an hour for a long walk during the winter hours times four to six walks a day you have to get real good at being comfortable with yourself is there a facing movement in there there is so it's um you face washington dc 21 seconds face down the mat 21 seconds walk 21 steps and repeat for the entire duration uh and it's one hour one hour and seven minutes with the walk and the guard change how often would you be in total autopilot where you'd get done and be like oh that was constantly checked constantly you you know that that that's referred to as the flow state you're completely in a flow state because you're what i like about you you're talking about time time has always been an important metric in fact we should probably get more closely because that relationship with time i think sets and establishes these gates and disciplines for your whole life the structure of your life right when i was a tomb guard um one thing that you had to train to do is count 21 seconds exactly and then turn into face for 21 seconds and get this rhythmed and cadence down but when you got into that flow state it was unconscious so now i'm just on autopilot and i'm in a meditative state there's times that i came off um the mad after an hour walk and feeling like the best i've ever felt like super calm super relaxed super focused and like i was doing meditation in my own head space that translated throughout all of the uncomfortable even experiences and gunfights and everything else i did in my life created a structure in my head for being comfortable in my own head in physical stress in my environment sometimes when i do jiu jitsu i don't really know what happened for the last hour yeah like i'm just like what how did you get that i'm like i don't remember getting anything yeah and i remember early on in my uh in my seal career like entering a room and shooting some targets and then and then all of a sudden be like wait a second is my weapon i put my weapon on safe did i put whatever not safe and not want to draw any attention to myself because i don't want anyone to see that i don't know what my weapon was on safe yeah i did it without and then you know did it absolutely without thinking about it that was pretty early you know and eventually you're just like doing this like a freaking robot that's just executing yeah that that high level i mean it's theta and alpha and these these wavelengths of like this neurological consciousness when you're in that alpha state and you're taking that information similar to like uh when you're in a shower on a drive and all these thoughts come to you this creativity comes to you those things happen in that flow state because you're streaming information and that's when you're most i think when you're at your best right it's when you're flowing in cqb and everything comes together and you're like what just happened like we we were just objective secure in 17 seconds how did that happen i i barely remember anything but i was so conscious because you're in that alpha state of flow it's it's a it's an amazing state to be in and i think very rare for people to find these days with the distractions they have you wrap up the q course the last thing you do is robin sage working with you know role-playing in dige and then you said you're almost immediately in afghanistan right out the gate deploy with third special forces group on a mountain team and then do nine months in afghanistan a remote firebase just right off the gate right out the gate during operation red wing my company was involved in red wings when i got to a team it was the traditional green beret mission we're going to put you in a remote fire base on the border of afghanistan and pakistan as an 18 bravo i had 150 afghan soldiers that weren't even soldiers this is before afghan national army was even stood up and solidified especially in our region of nuristan province and we trained assisted and advised these guys made them afghan special forces guys and started conducting operations in nuristan what kind of operations were you conducting movement to contact we did sr um special reconnaissance we did d.a a lot of training um and a lot of getting attacked i mean we got attacked every other day in the remote location that we're in we're the furthest for uh northern firebase beyond jbad beyond assad abad in a firebase called naray right on the border surrounded by the hindu kush i mean we were at the bottom of that bowl so rockets and direct attacks almost every other day and so we did a lot of direct um you know react to contact immediate action drills and a lot of patrols i mean we drove up and down one msr i go to that went to parakaut um and you know eventually ended up in chatral pakistan and conducted uh a whole bunch of air ops and ground ops in that area was this like a traditional oda team of 10 or 12 guys 12 guys with a small contingent of civil affairs for a period of time one combat controller and a firebase two hours from air in jbad so as remote as you can get i mean we were self-sustained i i learned a lot even fast forwarding with uh how i teach survival and sustaining oneself and what we call just homestead as we teach it about how you have to take care of yourself because you don't have the opportunity uh in those remote circumstances to depend on any kind of assets i mean a snowstorm in that area would shut us down for a week at a time where we get no air support no air support no casts no resupply no medevac platforms so we are solely dependent on the men and their skill sets that they have based on their experiences that's freaking sketchy it was the wild west the greatest time i had in sf to be honest we didn't have a flagpole we had simple 5ws for con up submissions it was it was a good time and did you realize that while you were doing it i did i had the introspect i mean when i remember when i showed up and um we landed at 10 000 plus feet of elevation and i was pissing mellow yellow i mean i was like dude this is insane and i look i remember standing in the middle of my fire base we were along konar river um very small base i mean i could throw a football and hit every gate i remember looking around going well this is my home for almost a year get comfortable with this because this is how it's going to be and immediately transforming and using those cultural tactics and building relationships but getting comfortable with time because i didn't know when we were going to get out i didn't know if we were going to survive we lost a lot of guys that rotation operation red wing had happened so there's a whole bunch of circumstances that happened during that trip where i'm like dude this might be it i mean this this is a pretty hot circumstance are you gonna get out of this stop thinking about that it's like the character in band of brothers that the officer who said you know who's basically is walking dead just accept the fact that you're gonna get killed i had those kind of moments going this is it man we're focused on the mission and it changed a lot of how i what i assumed at war in practice and how it executed in real life a lot of it was theory and concepts and didn't necessarily translate or what i discovered what was the delta between the two the biggest thing was my relationship um in the oda was teaching tactics and creating a base defense plan and so the doctrine told me to do specific things that didn't work in our environment so you had a base defense plan for example where i would exercise my guys and say hey i want you to hit the walls hit the roof be prepared for that direct attack well that's the dumbest tactic when you're receiving 107 millimeter rockets that have a kill radius of 100 yards and so you put dudes on the roof which i did myself on the first uh direct attack got on the roof with a 240 machine gun and i'm like dude what am i and i'm getting and we a 107 screamed over me my 18 charlie my engineer and impacted a fuel blivet behind us and exploded and i'm like what am i doing and also in practice you could immediate action to death what it's like to react to contact with small arms but how do you react to contact when it's a 107 millimeter rocket when it's an 81 millimeter mortar all of the things that you prepare for change rapidly when that kind of ordinance and munitions and firepower come to bear completely changes everything so i'm like oh this isn't like running through the wood line in fort bragg north carolina this is a little bit different and so that changed my perspective on a doctrinal conventional answer and solution versus being creative and coming up with new ways and tactics as you evolve at the speed of war did you guys have any um counter battery or any anything like that none i had did you have mortars i had 120 millimeter mortars i mean nightly that i would go out and we'd be dropping on on point of origin sites on poo sites um but that's all we had um the biggest weapon systems we had were munitions and and caches that we found and caches that we found where we took them and turned them around on bad guys we bought a mark 21 107 millimeter pod we get one rocket from the bad guy the sit rep would read you know oda 366 responds with 57 107 millimeter rockets 106 millimeter recordless rifles we had mounted the atvs we had rpgs that we carried with us in backpacks and we were using chinese-made 120s to respond and react to contact so it was truly a i think a significant green beret firebase mission you ever seen the movie heat before yeah yeah this makes me think about this is the second time i've thought about it in recent times but you know like um the cop is telling that the the cop is saying hey you can make mistakes or no i can make mistakes doesn't matter if i catch you or not like i'm gonna go home at night yeah you make one mistake and it's game over yeah and and that's what i think of you know the enemy in that situation they don't have to take very big risks at all they can lob [ __ ] at you from wherever and they just have to get lucky one time that's a to get a guy yeah and you've got to be vigilant all the time and you got to keep your guard up all the time and even if you keep your guard up all the time you're still just exposed just by the nature of the fact that you're in a valley surrounded by indirect fire or direct fire in terms of rockets yeah yeah our strategy in that firebase um was a test bed for creativity um we built a mosque like i physically built a mosque with my hands my oda brick by brick helped build a mosque why because we wanted to build rapport with having a place of worship inside of our firebase for afghans but it also deterred indirect fire because no terrorists wanted to be responsible for dropping a mosque in the middle of an american fire base like we had to think outside the box and um we truly were set up almost for failure in that circumstance but every firebase had to hold its territory before vso where village stables stabilization operations where you're setting up in the actual village the idea of firebase is derived from obviously from vietnam er from john schrecker meyer error of hey let's go out set out these bases and establish a presence and so were present and the bad guys knew about it and it was a sharp learning curve steep learning curve to say the least where are you getting food from uh typically uh in initially we were flying it in until we started getting creative we built a a bread house where we were making foot bred afghan foot bread in the middle of our fire base then we started procuring goats and sheep and then slaughtering them and then eating them and then rice and we were getting supplies from pakistan uh because it was right across the border and bringing it in to to make actually good mills versus the mermaid child that we're getting that was garbage it was disgusting did you uh did you take any casualties from all those attacks yeah i mean we've had we had wounded in actually i killed an action on a company um we you know during the mid range um which was we just had the anniversary of operation red wings which was the 28th of june we got hit up for that mission task for that with that um camp vance which was in bagram kind of assembled the quick reaction force that eventually went out and lost one of the birds on the mh-47s that were shot down so we did qrf for that um did some big operations in what kotya valley near bear account and took casualties we lost mh47 during that trip um pretty expensive bird but it was i mean it was overall it's a good trip i mean our our firebases were successful in disrupting the enemy but we just started over man the the detriment to warfare is this vicious cycle and when you take a playbook and you plan the playbook but you don't put in the same continuity pieces to establish a long-term relationship you just start the vicious cycle all over again every detachment commander every team sergeant wants their mark in history on that battleground and it doesn't do well long term in in warfare which is obviously where the point we're at today i mean pulling out of afghanistan what'd you do during red wing we you were on the recovery op so uh two of my companies in asada bad and jbad um south of us got tasked to actually do the uh rescue of marcus citroel so a good buddy of mike kent was the ground force commander for that two odas and then the rangers went in with some intermittent special operations guys we got told because of our proximity to the actual site crash site uh to hold fast they sent chinooks to us to be the qrf for the other group and then the rest of our company all the other odas did the body recovery with uh battalion so there was a the whole company was involved in some way but i sat on an airfield for the entire operation not doing much so your leadership lessons on that deployment were you know you got to think you got you can't follow the doctrine all the time yeah look green berets are known to be unconventional and irregular warfare experts and thinking outside the box this idea of hey you're not stealing you're acquiring these creative tasks to bear that benefit you on the ground is what i learned about i actually learned that you know being in a remote firebase in afghanistan with minimal to no resources at all it you had to come up with solutions so i learned about establishing problem sets coming up with creative solutions and the path to execution for those which is a formula that i used in you know a combat rotations later and you're running a company of 150 afghans yep yeah i ran so i was the when i went i was the only bravo typically you run a junior and a senior i would have been the junior because i was a young staff sergeant um my senior had surgery so he couldn't show up until later on in the deployment my team started came to me like on the first day and he said hey there's a formation outside with your guys i'm like my guys like yeah you got 150 afghans out there you're the commander and i'm like what am i roger that i go outside i'm like guys let's uh let me give you an in brief let's we're going to do assessments i give them the plan and i i have to build rapport with these dudes these dudes are looking at me like i'm a child and i was i mean i was a 25 year old child so they challenged me immediately one of the guys says to me um mike uh they want to know if you're a good shooter and i said well what does that assessment look like you know well what they like to do and i'm like okay so this has been done before what they like to do is take a piece of bubble gum wrapper and they delaminate it and they put a one inch square at 25 yards on the target and they said whoever gets closer whoever is closer wins but then you earn our respect i'm like did you guys watch a movie man is this like is this the thing because i don't i don't remember seeing this anywhere and like it's it's part of their tradition okay cool so we're getting the prone and i said so it's rifle not it's rifle ak-47 so but no red dot iron sights and i don't even know the point of aim or impact on this gun there's no dope oh it's a random random ak yeah so i said so i say to the guy i said um this is the same weapon that you shoot at the circus at the little red star exactly exactly notching the star out the county fair so he he sits down and he's a well-respected neurostanding these guys look like me i mean i i look like i belong in that tribe and they're all chinese influenced and so they always got the the asian eyes and so rapport initially right off the bat is like accepted but i have to prove myself so this guy gets down on the prone and he takes a shot and we go up and inspect it and he's like an inch off of the pasty so i'm thinking in my head he's holding it and he's shooting it but he's a little bit high and at 25 yards flash to bang not much change at muzzle velocity at 25 yards so i'm thinking let me just aim at the base of this thing so i put my i i lolly pop this uh one inch pasty and i break a shot and it goes through the the piece and i try to contain my excitement because i'm like yeah i don't want to be like yeah what's up but i knew it was part of the this whole story in this journey so i go up there and they they bust out and they're like yeah oh my god and they're so excited and from that moment it's like i was their commander and we have this relationship where i trained them every single day i broke bread with them every single day and it was a beautiful thing man i felt like i had a company worth of valuable human beings who would lay down their life and and when i found out later and this is this is in hindsight looking back and talking to different guys when i left i had those afghan commandos i handed them over to another oda when third group came back in they rotated in and there was a guy by the name of uh uh rob uh rob i can't remember rob something i can't remember his name he's horrible i can't remember his name and he rotated in with him as the 18 bravo so when he gets in that position he starts grooming these guys and they're telling stories of of that circumstance so as this evolves later in the war i find out that one of the guys that we had from third group that was killed posthumously in a gunfight running uphill with a machine gun um gets killed earns the medal of honor and dies fighting side by side with these same guys in fact some of those guys that i trained were killed in that action where uh a third guy won the medal earned the medal of honor sacrificed his life but those afghans died on that same hilltop running uphill against an enemy machine gun nested position and i'm like dude i mean you know you look for all the the light and darkness and i'm like man that that means the world to me that maybe i had an impact on these men that stood side by side and and fought uphill and that that truly meant a lot and so those guys um you earned their respect you operate with them but when i left him it was it felt like the end of the world and you know you talk to guys like john striker meyer that's a common theme it's something that we're not very good at in fact we're pretty horrible at and now of course you must be kind of sick to your stomach seeing that we're pulling out and those guys will either be rounded up and killed or they'll join the taliban because that's what they got to do to stay alive more likely all the intel has been leaked already they already know who they are and their they have their target deck built and right now i mean if you look at all the different places especially the remote places of afghanistan which is very tribal very geographically regionally they're already taken over i mean they'll have the estimates from the experts is in the next six months bagram and kenar will fall to the taliban if not sooner because there was a formal agreement a diplomatic agreement that means they're supposed to take over in some capacity anyway but what that means to the rest of the men that we fought off all over the country all these guys will be rolled up and more likely executed which is a it's a it's a damn shame yes um hearing some reports that the taliban would go to you know some of these villages or whatever and send a note into the police chief and say hey man um yep it's over you can get on board or we're gonna kill you and kill your family and the police chief or whatever the local afghan leaders like roger that you know i'm on board and that's that yeah those guys just like in iraq um just like i've experienced in yemen in pakistan um in africa um it's a vicious cycle that doesn't stop and we don't learn those lessons um but i don't know the answer i don't know the solution i mean making them citizens and bringing them up taking the fighting force that's the most capable human beings there and doing that i don't know what the answer is but it's uh it's a horrible thing that i know is transpiring likely right now so you get done with that deployment yep get done with uh afghanistan immediately come back and go to uh sephardic which is our version of advanced cqb hostage rescue to be aligned with a d a company you know the when i work with the the seals and 0607 all the the latter rotations it was mostly with a company called the commander in extremist force which has now been renamed the crisis response force which has been recoined a deep underground um unit for uh tunnels and stuff so get part of that unit which our focus is d a sr hr and get through sephardic no problems and get immediately reassigned to the commanders in extremist force which is hopping on a plane uh the next month to go downrange so how long are you home for four months home for four months and how long was that deployment to afghanistan nine months total yeah so nine months get back do sephardic for two months and then get about a month and a half before we burn out for iraq for baghdad have you like gotten married or anything at this point yeah i i i forgot about that i actually got married right before this rotation and in a courthouse my grandmother passed away at that same time period didn't get a lot of time to to have any kind of anything with the family and then we were turning and burning for iraq four months home and now what's this deployment so this is now your first deployment to iraq first development to iraq yeah going down range and ct is the and this is oh six oh six yeah and so you ended up working in baghdad in baghdad yeah baghdad international airport man we were at camp uh not at camp vance uh area four okay yeah so we staged area four had a couple of mission sets you know working with iraqi counterterrorism forces working with task force as a unilateral force and then working with the eru which is the emergency response unit the the equivalent of the fbi hrt that prosecutes targets in iraq iraqi that's an iraqi unit yeah like the mic force until you know the mike force strike unit until we get there and we start doing joint operations with navsof and then the sif so it's it's like a couple guys from my sif company which was b23 the third group stuff working hand in hand with six or seven guys from a facilitator and we would go out and at the time we weren't they weren't doing operations with americans because a company a contracted company was training them but they weren't advising them but they weren't doing counterterrorism operations so we actually took over and started doing the first counter-terrorism operations with them side by side um using our assets to bear but doing uh the true ct for an internal defense mission so you're rolling out hitting targets hitting targets yeah every night it's basically what this is smashing targets every night i mean our our pdss our pre-deployment deployment site survey we got in a gunfight and killed dudes in our pdss so we were like it's going to be a hot year and that was the year you were there yeah yeah i was over in ramadi you guys were down in baghdad and you're working alongside some of the guys i was with well that i knew over there um just basically nightly ops reverse cycle nightly ops we had a cycle of you know red amber green you're training dudes um even if you're training dudes you're probably gunning on truck trucks or acting as a machine gunner on halves on helicopter assaults but every single night we're prosecuting targets sometimes two three targets a night depending on what's going on so we had a target deck everybody else in task force had a target deck and at the time which was um in transition for the big surge we were prosecuting at the time um shia based targets and so um mokta al-sadr and his network of [ __ ] we were going after yeah every night were you working mostly in and around baghdad or all over the country pretty much all over the country i mean we have with uh navy assets flying us out the 60s um we were using pavlo or the 53 um or you used some tassource 160th so little birds 60s depending on what was going on it was all over all over and what was your specific job on this deployment so i was i was an assaulter i mean in the sift i was an assaulter i was a breacher i actually was deployed with um at the time jeremy wise jeremy wise was a young east coast-based sale team member who winded up getting killed with the cia as a global response staff officer he posthumously was awarded the cia star um and we were both preachers together so we every night we did breaches we did unilateral pieces of our op so a couple americans like me and another sif guy and like three or five seals would go out and do our piece we'd hit one building and then the iraqis we were with would hit another building so unilateral assaulters is basically what we were this is radically different deployment than what you did in afghanistan i mean like not even the same freaking ballpark insane completely different i try to use some of the you know the similarities where we were training them in the back end but they were these guys if you saw them operating when they're kid you would think they're americans like competent assaulters snipers americans yeah they had all american gear and weapons because yeah i was telling you i went over on pdss and because we were gonna go i actually if that would have happened i would have been co-located with you and we would have been running the same app we would already know each other we'd be bros yeah we'd be rolling together yeah we'd have rolled out but we ended up not going there we ended up going to ramadi instead but yeah the the the ictf and the eru had like american issued weapons they had night vision had everything everything they had everything yeah they had everything and they were well trained well-trained they had to be the best trained ira and most reliable iraqi soldiers by a landslide yeah the combination of the iraqi counter-terrorism force which we pulled out of iraq and jordan and isolating train and the eru that turned into the emergency response battalion were the highest paid trained experienced units that eventually took isis these same guys like i lost probably half my fighting force that i worked with over the years against the fight against isis in 2014 when we pulled our guys out and those dudes went to war i mean they went to missoula they went to baghdad they went to kurdistan they were fighting their bill they were probably with close air support meaning the jtac piece for the sole reasons that isis doesn't exist in iraq today so it's it's a it was a long road ahead of them we were just in the beginning stages of it what did you prefer for for the deployment what did you like doing better man that's a tough question so different so different right but in the things that i enjoyed like over landing across afghanistan and the wild west uh with not a lot of oversight and just winging it and learning a lot of lessons in that versus that deliberate like land on the x fast rope on top of the building and kill bad guys i enjoy them both i mean if i could have if i could overland to an objective and fast rip on top of it that whole culmination it'd be perfect man i love both of them and then how long was this deployment to baghdad six months yeah so we were doing six month rotations did you did you guys take any casualties on that deployment we did we took uh every deployment that we wanted him taking we wound up losing a team guy um so we were working with joint task force which included tier one units and the rangers um and us and this and the navy you guys were taking casualties um there was efps that were affecting guys gun fights uh we took a casualty one of my guys in my troop was killed that rotation uh tongue nguyen um was killed and then um we had a ton of purple hearts dudes getting gun fights um it was it was an active year was uh was tongue the first guy that you lost that was in your actual element yeah and that was on my team in my troop first first dude um didn't know him great i mean i knew him i was a new guy there but one of the uh most respected members of that unit i mean he was the guy on the pdss with his long gun who wound up killing like three bad dudes on a pdss i mean who goes tdy and kills a few dudes comes back after you know getting into like you got some intel on target you know he he was that kind of guy vietnamese descent too so um me and him were the only asians in that group and he took he took uh um he he took his job serious and when he saw me come into the company he took me under his wing and and he tried to take care of me experienced assaulter belonged to c11 which is the first group uh sif and did a whole bunch of operations in the philippines all over southeast asia and just a highly respected dude i'm just a great guy and when in how deep in deployment was that um man right off the gate i mean it was only a couple months in uh we still had uh four months of that rotation and then at the end of our rotation was the surge so we got super hot super active um probably some of the closest experiences to death i had in that in that rotation for for me personally from gun fights from ieds now gun fights i mean i was on a uh a rooftop in sadr city once in a sniper overwatch position for a hostage rescue got pinned down to the roof um i had a big army sniper team that was with me that that one and a half hour gunfight small arms rpgs water rounds all in the same um gunfight all on our position um i'll never forget i was like you know laying on the roof trying to keep my head flat and staying in the fight because we had a retreat option we could have went down in the into the building into the third story that we were on and i looked over and my buddy chris because there's only two of us with a big army sniper unit was um laying underneath the satellite dish and we're three stories high so we're above most of the city but there's still second and third story buildings inside saunders city and he's getting the satellite dish disintegrated over his ass a couple feet over his butt and i'm like oh these guys are close they have us dot they have us dialed in and then i looked up in the sky because i something caught my attention i looked up and there's rpgs air bursting above us and i'm like this is not good so we we basically started waylaying bad guys that were squirting into the objective like trying to infill on containment and that we're breaking contact out of the objective and all black mighty militia dudes black pajama kind of guys and um a lot of it was command and control because we had cass i had control i had coms with a close air support f16 that was above us and we were trying to relay and report all the information but we were having comms problems so what lulled that fight you know in the long story of it um what lulled that fight was an f-16 uh because i marked a vs 17 panel in the middle of that roof came out of its rotation its orbit and over 500 feet above our building did a pass and pop flares i thought he was going to do a gun run and kill us all because we lost comms so i popped that vs17 and i looked up and he started banking in and i'm like i yelled at my combo guide i'm like do we have any comms and he came down and ran the perimeter road which i think was um used to call it home base where at the base of the leg of solder city from home base to third base he ran that entire road at 500 feet turned his wings you could almost see his his face and pop flares and it lulled the gunfight enough for us to get out break contact into bradley's and break contact yeah we killed i mean total during that up over 100 dudes and gotta shut down for like a month on a solder city became a big i mean tanks were tanks were destroying buildings five feet in front of them because they were i mean they were just getting smashed with rpgs and everything else pretty pretty gnarly gunfight and that was the that was the end of your deployment in o6 uh about mid rotation that was that was about mid rotation good times you come back do another workup uh instant workup getting ready for a new deployment and then we go down range um 07's different beast the the height of al qaeda um on the tail end of that rotation the surge begins the sunni strategy uh they start the sons of iraq they start empowering sunnis you know there's a war going on between the sunnis and shias and typically it's like you know dick sauter city versus everybody else in the country and now the sunnis are getting supported by the us so we're going to war with um iran back shias and we get into that rotation and our task force does a couple things they have a mission set where they go hey you guys are going to go and do bilateral operations working with indigenous guys like ictf like eru like we like we talked about but there's another component our mission set where we work with jsoc joint task force so we were under a joint task force conducting counterterrorism operations hunting hvts on a deck um for jsoc as part of one of their action arms that whole entire rotation and it was it was epic it was one of my best rotations so this is now oh seven you're back over there oh seven iraq yeah in baghdad again uh yeah we're at uh fernandez mss fernandez uh named after a unit guy was killed and you're doing and you're doing one hit you're working with the indige one night and then two nights later you get a package from jay sock and you're going out and hit that target so we divided our troops oh okay so my troops just doing unilateral we're just killing bad guys landing on the x every night just kind of yeah that was great yeah that was that was how how big is your unit that you're working with 20 so our troop is about 20 plus guys and at the time i'm a sniper now so i moved over to the sniper section so i'm a sniper team supporting to assault teams for hits every single night so my job specifically was containment so setting and establishing containment a lot of building climbing that rotation um a lot of overwatch killing squirters running out of buildings uh killing bad guys trying to get to the fight and it was like the gloves are off i mean the strategy that we got passed down in rules of engagement were um kill them all i mean that's what that's what we were doing and so it was a it was an epic rotation we had a lot of hvts a lot of foreign fighters a lot of gunfights um a lot of casualties on on our side and a lot of dead bad guys were you guys mostly taking vehicles were you doing helicopters all the time most of it was halfs with helicopter assaults with little birds and uh and mh-60s so all blackhawks and little birds every i think pretty much every night it was that i don't remember too many ground assaults a couple here and there in strikers if we had to go to sauder city we took tanks that would lead the way into sauder city suck up all the efps we call them team rock they would get blown up for us even to the point blossom yeah even to the point where these guys would get blown up they'd pull over the side of the road and we'd just bypass they were just a breach point and uh they were the hammer we were going through and hitting our surgical targets and it was a great rotation man we we lost a guy one of our uh team guys uh justin monsky was killed stepped on a pressure plate id we had about uh in my company we had about 15 purple hearts so a lot of dudes injured shot blown up um and a lot we killed a lot of bad guys i mean it was a good trip for killing bad guys how are these um your what what's your position as far as leadership inside the company here so i'm uh i'm a two ic so i'm right behind my cell leader um as a new sniper um so i do what my cell leader at the time jason tells me to do and most of my role is because i was pretty lean and a good climber me and a couple of the other guys were in the climbing team and so if we had a containment set we hit a building we used ladders or even building climb traverse ladders um from building to building and set containment from a high position called high team to be able to contain the objective from top down while the assaulters hit a deliberate target set so traditional countdowns five four three two breach goes off at two and then and we hit the target and you're doing an open night basically sometimes the other yeah sometimes a couple more than that yeah we a lot of this this time period was taking advantage of ssc there was an emphasis on sensitive site exploitation doing a lot of post analysis on the objective a lot of tactical interrogation to lend itself to taking advantage of the opportunity on a target and flexing to other targets to take down networks so super aggressive you know the combination of tutu uh sas ranger battalion uh kag us and dev uh five action arms under task 416. and this is stanley mcchrystal's big project right his his um his big uh machine of war what what it was was one of the most significant i think most significant strategies in the war especially of attrition of taking out bad guys as you're you talked about um you're losing some guys now how's how's your um how are you guys handling that so the reason i asked this question is because somebody's going to be listening to this in 10 years or 17 years or 23 years and we're going to be in a situation where there hasn't been any casualties in a long time and all of a sudden someone's going out and doing what doing what soldiers do and they're going to take casualties and i know when i when i took my first casualties and had lost my first guys there was no one that was telling me like hey here's what you've got to think about not just from a look we get the protocol of hey here's the here's the book that we're gonna follow here's the calls we gotta make but now you got a bunch of guys that just lost one of their best friends and what are you gonna do about that how did you guys go about it great question um a lot of responses that are um doctrinal would have guys stand down have a moments if not days of mourning a process i remember when we lost tongue uh in 06 our immediate strategy at the tactical level so you're talking cell leaders and troops aren't majors said listen we're not waiting we're hitting targets tonight and we got aggressive and we went out um and in 06 and 07 we had a vindiction vindication board this vindication board was uh filled with team guys that we lost and there was dozens of them on one side and when you killed a bad guy because you took that call sign patch and then you know if it was tony yoast who was a third group team sergeant i was killed you would carry t-y on your left shoulder under your call sign patch and if you killed a bad guy and you were successful in your mission you'd come back and you put it on the vindicated side and we had all the pictures of the guys that were killed on that and every night we'd fill that board and cycle them back and forth because we understood that getting killed was a part of the job comparatively and and you know this you're very schooled in this history of of warfare including the vietnam war where thousands 60 plus thousand americans were killed sometimes hundreds in certain battles were killed entire mack v sog teams taken off the planet they accepted that risk so when we lost guys in our community there was no warning there wasn't time no more we get back on helicopters i remember um something that really stands out to me from the 07 trip we lost two two sas guys they were killed on target and there was two or three of them that were killed the task force commander had us come outside and the 2-2 sas commander briefed five different task units and he spoke to warfare and he spoke to the importance of understanding the fight we're in how this works and getting back in the fight it was a 10 minute spill and we're all sitting there in kit with guns in our specific units and at the end of the speech he gives a hand in arm signal and all the little birds and all the 60s spin up and we load five different task forces up in little birds and m860s and fly away and smash bad guys that whole experience was what the task force was depending on what unit you were you might have that experience but if you're on task force that was the experience every night we accepted that risk we lost guys and then we got back in the fight because we had no time to mourn it wasn't a time for morning that's um same strategy i had yeah got to get your [ __ ] back on get your gear back on and go back out and um do what you're supposed to do yeah and do what your boys would want you to do exactly yeah any good leadership lessons or any leadership lessons from that deployment that stand out the biggest one is i'll say his name now because he's retired um he was the commander that we worked under his name was tom detomaso he was a platoon leader in blackhawk down as a young ranger at the time was a kag commander and he was our commander when we got to that country we had gotten used to the way that we did business breaching blowing every door shooting bad guys in the face and he briefed us and he said man we're going to start this new tactic this year and it's called call outs and we laughed we joked it was comical to us we even we even wrote drew cartoons about how comical this whole tactic was so let me get this straight you want us to go to a building land little birds offset surreptitiously approach and then knock essentially knock and call them out yes that's that's what we want you to do so the whole time we're like this is ridiculous this is insane until we hit a foreign safe house that had libyan foreign fighters and in the war in iraq positions two and four out of the top four guys killed on the battlefield that were killing americans formidable foes were from libya two and four number one was saudi arabia number two was um libya out of these uh foreign fighters uh they were training in the green mountains of libya they had gear that was comparable to ours a solo boots suntow watches chess rigs suicide vests proper guns with a red dot optics and all the tactics to bear we hit a foreign safe house offset on infill which was a about a 4k 2-4k offset which is offsetting away from the objective so you don't get compromised we get compromised by a early warning position our little bird attack helicopter kills six dudes right off the bat on infill birds get straight the bird i'm in the 60 i'm in feet hanging off the 60 takes incoming rounds um in between us and the chalk in front of us we land we make movement we think there's a couple foreign fighters there's 13 and they're all suicide invested out um you know long story short i have a dog saved my life uh a cag dog by the name of vinnie been a suicide bomber 15 meters in front of me um sacrifice his life for mine we get into the house we kill everybody we establish um ssc after objective secure and realize they have pkm machine guns barricaded and positions a threshold deep away from the reach point if we'd have breached that like every target set we breached prior we would all die we would have got the first assault element would have been zipped up they would have broke contacted out of back and we've been fighting for our lives we were fighting for our lives and containment we had offset containment called them out and we were in a hand-to-hand um uh range so you did end up doing containment and doing a call out on them we did yeah we did we did exactly what he trained us to do and even in that i mean i threw six hand grenades on the other side of a berm in direct engagement in contact with the enemy i mean the hand grenades i was throwing with my teammate were landing in bad guys laps on the other side of the berm these dudes were ready to get it on we decimated the target with 105s from a spectre gunship we recovered vinnie's body and then we dropped a a j dam on it on xvil in daylight and we got back you know uh vinnie was covered in an american flag the whole task force there was uh there to salute us and we're you know we got blood on our shoes uh some dudes are injured and we're like this makes sense and i realized from that experience don't be in a rush to die so many guys want to get on the x and they want to do this thing called kicking indoors and shoot bags in the face but they don't understand the tactics and techniques procedures evolve every single day at the speed of war and it was the realization where i had the coolest guy because he's the coolest commander of the coolest unit telling us something that didn't seem cool and then that realization coming home and going damn okay now we gotta change tactics we gotta think outside the box we can't get uh we can't conform to convention and to routine and think it's going to be the right solution every single time because times change and that was a huge impact on my career moving forward yeah i went through a similar transition in 0304 where we were breaching every door and um we ended up hurting some some people you know and sometimes not the right people and we started getting some pressure like hey you can't just keep doing this and so well if you're not going to explosively breach then that leaves you mechanically breaching if you're mechanically breaching well now you're sitting there with the huli swinging at the door and now you're really exposed so why not just take a step back and say hey get the terp on the horn and and tell these guys to come out and now we kind of know what we're dealing with and and yeah as you can imagine um the pushback i got was was you know pretty strong from from the guys because they're thinking we're giving up this tactical advantage we should explosively breach every time and and i was getting pressure from my boss and what i realized is if it makes sense to explosively breach awesome we will do it and i told my boss if it makes sense for us to explosively breach we're gonna do it and if we don't need to we won't and if we call out as appropriate we'll call it as appropriate so right there's three courses of action which for the first few months i was there there was one course of action and how long does it take the enemy to figure that out and and like you're saying by what was this now this is oh seven of course they'd figured out oh we can put a barricaded sandbagged position two rooms deep you know on the main breach point and we'll have a field day yeah yeah it was their their mo i mean look guys uh often think about warfare and they think the opposing side is are these shadows and these entities and these paper targets these are creative human beings who aren't conformed to convention they don't have doctrinal time hacks and requirements that they have to abide by they wake up they use their imagination and sometimes that imagination trumps the fighting force conventional uh tactic that you bring to bear and you gotta adapt you gotta be malleable yeah i mean even the idea of what we ended up calling combat clearance and i don't know if you guys called the combat clearance but like hey we're gonna open the door and we're gonna look like hey i'm not why would i run in there yeah and are there times we gotta run in there absolutely we're getting shot at in the hallway i'm gonna get into this room we're getting shot out in the street we're gonna bust the store we're gonna get in this building that's what's gonna happen but if we're safe in the street and it's secure and we open this door or we breach the store what are we running in for there what are we running in why would we do that so again that was another thing that was contrary to everything that not everything i had learned but to the bulk of what i had learned which is hey speed violence of action like we're gonna get when that door opens we're going in and i get it there's plenty of times where that's the appropriate behavior absolutely there's also times where that's not the appropriate behavior and it's difficult to overcome what you always i always feel like what you look what the first thing you learned is what you kind of um you prefer right whatever you learn first whatever methodology you learn when you're a new guy you think that's the way it is and it can be hard to overcome that barrier there's a bias there's a there's an actual bias around that i forget what the name of the bias but there's a cognitive bias around whatever oh anchoring so whatever you learn first whatever piece of information you get first that's kind of what you anchor to yeah so it can be difficult to overcome and say hey wait a second does this really make sense and believe me i mean i i met that stiff resistance with a lot of guys along the way and and what i tried not to do was be like you don't know or this doesn't i'd be like okay well let's talk through it you know and actually i'll tell you what let's break out some ammunition and let's give it a shot why don't you show me how it works out when you go rushing into this room when you don't know what's in there and there's no reason to rush in there look if you're getting shot out in the hallway i get it but if you're not man what are we doing yeah yeah don't be in a rush to die yeah uh so that was a freaking savage deployment then it was it was epic and once again what's you you knew it at the time i mean every time every night you're loading up birds going you're this is as good as it's ever going to get yeah i i had multiple conversations with guys in the team room in the kit room getting loaded out like it doesn't get any better than this guys remember every single moment of this because you'll never get this again how old were you 26 7 now but that's you so that's your third deployment though so you knew it yeah yeah and you got to relish in it i was comfortable in war that was that was i was getting i was fixing mistakes i was making and honing this craft and i was getting pretty good at it and you know there was opportunities inside of my unit to do whatever i wanted to do and i took all those opportunities and it was it was a great playing field for creativity and we we did a lot of cool stuff man it was it was amazing it was uh that task force crystal's task force um was awesome um colonel or sergeant major command sergeant major nacie was the unit major at the time and uh i remember we had a team patch and a brief and our team patch had some skulls on it and it was like one of those you know badass like punisher skull deals right and i'm thinking sarmade or nace is going to see this and he's going to be pissed so during a brief we're doing a brief right before we load helicopters and he looks at it and i see him side eye one of the patches and the patch says kill them all on the patch and he kind of side eyes it and i'm like oh [ __ ] and i go to uh my cell then i'm like jason dude he's side in that patch we're screwed and this is the unit sergeant major and so um he he comes over and uh he says hey who's whose patches are these and jason steps forward and he pulls them in the hall they come with me and he goes um let me see that patch and he pulls it off his shoulder and i see this go down in the hallway i'm like oh dude this dude is like jason's going home like we're not doing this hop and he hands in the patch and sergeant major reaches inside of his pocket and pulls out a handful of jsoc coins that's a task force and has all the numbers it's a skull on the back side it says uh something like operating at the speed of war and he hands him the coins he goes this is the coolest patch i've ever seen and he slaps it on his arm and he walks out i'm like that did not go the way i thought i was gonna go i was like we're in the right place this is this is where it's at right now yeah and um this is where this is where you lose people i mean mentally you lose people yeah because if you're not if you if you if you don't know what we're talking about if this sounds like uh hyper aggressive or crazy or whatever what you're forgetting is that the whole object of war is to kill the bad guys that's the that's what we're doing that's the purpose i remember i heard a story they were you know i read some news story and it was i think it was a marine unit and they were talking about the fact that this marine unit had um like a scoreboard on the wall of number of bad guys killed and each one of them was like a k bar like a little k bar was drawn up there and the tone of this article was you know just just disturbed by this uh can you believe that this u.s marine corps unit and i think it's a marine corps unit who had these you know was keeping score of the number of enemy that they killed and proudly displayed a k-bar knife and i was just thinking man what how what do you think we're doing over there yeah what do you think we're doing over there now where you got to be careful is is well for one thing you got to be careful because you got you got to protect your guys and if you get them in that mindset they can go too far with it of course you've also got to be careful because you're not building good relations with civilians or reporters or the public at least part of the public because part of the public goes what are you doing what do you mean kill them all so it's a it's a touchy thing it's a touchy subject and yet the the entire purpose of a military unit is to kill the bad guys and man i said this the other day somewhere and people were like freaking out about it and and i'm like well no i mean i understand you've got supply people but one of those supply people supplying they're supplying bullets so that the front line guys what about the people that are you know collecting intelligence well they're collecting intelligence so the frontline guys can go kill people like everyone that's what we're here for that's what we're here for there's no other thing and sure are there humanitarian missions yes are we gonna try and win hearts and minds yes all those things all those things are secondary the fact that a military is to kill bad guys are they here to protect and defend yes absolutely how do they protect and defend kill bad guys that's it so you wrap up that deployment wrap up that deployment and then um start doing advanced training i mean i i have a lot of catching up to do so um because you've done four back to back to back deployments yes yeah in every break every month or every day of break is get get more honed you know like you need to get more trained um i think that year in between those rotations i went to sniper school i went to free fall school i went to jtac school um all to again become an asset more of an asset on my team so i went to special forces snipers course um how long is the special forces sniper school uh a couple months it's pretty long i think it's uh two and a half months a little bit of technical a lot of tactical a lot of long gun um but it's evolved over time um rangers go to that same school cag snipers go to that same school and special forces snipers go to that school as well um great experience learned a lot i think out of those out of that break what i learned most was the difficulty of close air support i was one of the few guys that got picked up and tasked to go to the school and i'm like i'm going to sotac with sotac especially operations terminal air control school i'm like dude i don't want to go to sotech like look if you're a sniper and you're doing sniper operations you want to keep the team small so somebody has to have that skill set so you can drop bombs i'm like well that makes sense all right does that mean i'm tethered to a radio likely but it means you'll kill more bad guys i'm all about that so they sent me to one of the most difficult schools i've been to a sotac by the way how long is that school uh a few weeks i think three weeks it's a couple weeks of uh ground and then an air week where you call live fire and uh all different aircrafts and platforms only school i've almost failed really i i was blatant about it the technical aspects of speaking big art big military language like lat long i mean i i could speak mgrs in braille like i'm good at mcrs but then they said lat long and i'm like what the hell is lat long so so the air force controllers that i went to they're like you don't know what lat law i'm like dude i've never even heard the term like what's lat long like i have to learn this like it's all that long because you have to communicate to the aviators and they speak that long i'm like oh no and so i was you know doing the homework late at night i was a senior e7 i was a class leader and i was blade running i almost failed that course so i was this close and i think the air force dudes there they didn't want to see me uh pass they they were a little stoked they're like oh this senior sf guy this dude's all he's blade running damn savages bro yeah they wanted to see me fail out i passed though and i got my air uh close air support uh certification and then i rotated back into 08 another war and what are you doing this last this last time in oh wait so 08 um i was a troop advisor for the ictf the iraqi counterterrorism force was born and bred by the sif companies a15 and b23 uh fifth group um sif and third groups pulled these guys into jordan isolated and trained them and then infiltrated back into the country smashing bad guys and the ictf the young operators of the ictf they don't get breaks they don't get a uh a red cycle right they they stay in warfare and they through the culminative years of war got the most experience and were some of the most experienced operators i've ever served with so i advised the whole troop and at the time we were downsizing american forces so me a navy eod guy a camo guy maybe a combo guy and then a troop full of icts spanking targets so what time of in 2008 were you there the entire summer so probably march april time frame until you know six months into it almost to christmas yeah and this is smashing targets all all by we are calling them true bilateral operations right and we're trying to work ourselves out of a job a lot of guys were bummed out by it um things were getting political in no way i was signing shooter statements if i was admitting that i was killing bad guys which we start stopped doing i mean we stopped admitting we were killing bad guys because at that time if you killed a guy he wrote a shooter statement and it went to the doj in iraq i actually remember one time i came back from an op and my commander my company commander comes to me goes hey mike you're good to go back out on ops i was like i just got back from a knob sir what are you talking about oh you're being investigated for that last shooting yet i'm like what what do you mean investigated like well yeah they had to do a trial process and they took it to trial they did the shooter statement with witnesses and everything else and then you're good i'm like what i went to my teamster i'm like dude what is going on they're we're going on trial and and through paperwork and then we're shut down from operations he's like yeah just it's part of the climate i'm like uh and it's it's it's one of the first times in in in leading because i was leading a troop an entire troop of ictf that i started getting affected by the political climate all the other times i've been insulated by cell leaders team sergeants good leadership who knew that they just keep all that [ __ ] away from the guys and let them do their job and it's the first time it started trickling down and i'm like oh oh wow yeah yeah i was thinking about that when you're talking about your 07 deployment i mean your le your focus was 100 on your job that's it and so people above you in the chain of command and that's a huge that was a superlative supportive chain of command as well yeah and so you weren't dealing with any of this other crap now all of a sudden you show up in 08 and you find out you're under investigation super political yeah super political so did you uh you you just kept doing ops backed off a little bit did you back off a little bit or just so the ops weren't as aggressive like i remember telling my new guys because i was a cell leader at the time and a tripadvisor i remember telling my new sif guys bro it's about to be on get your stuff ready bring the thumper plenty of fork before mike we're about to kill some bad guys and going and we went to sadder city and it was crickets and i'm like this isn't normal i was like dude it's going to happen we're going to get ambushed efps nothing and i'm like what is go we got back i'm like that that was probably just random we're going to get back into it and we're going to go kill and they then we get went out again and i'm like there's nothing happening what is going on and because of the um at the times the sunnis and the shias were doing a ceasefire and any time they killed americans they would pay for it politically they started pulling back and just just isolating building their uh their infrastructure in their castles and not do not being aggressive but all the things that we were hitting were dry holes we we got in a few gunfights killed a few dudes but it was it was not what i expected it to be and it was the transition of what became i think the transition out of that other that fight yeah i know when um one of my buddies took over my task unit and went into solder city with snipers in i want to say it was uh june of 08 yeah and they killed all kinds of bad guys and they did about four to six weeks of operations there and the freaking um uh the shakes they're kind of like all right we're good we're we're good we don't we don't need any more of this yeah and they made that truce and stuff yeah um and you know the way i looked at it was like they'd been doing operations for so long like the the the the moddy army and stuff out of sauder city and they would take so few casualties yeah i mean they go out set off in the fp and kill an american or two or what you know go lob and like i said they don't really have to they don't have to win every time like it doesn't matter they're going to go back and they'll attack again tomorrow night or the next night and uh but then once they started taking some massive casualties yeah like i think we've had enough for this yeah it was pretty bad i remember that time period um so i was a sniper at the time so in between my troop being up i did stay behind sniper operations and we actually took from what i understand we took one of the missions that you guys had you guys were doing daylight overwatch for the guys who were building the tea barriers around sauder city and you guys killed a whole bunch of people when we came in they switched it to night ops and we couldn't kill anybody like i sat on a rooftop for like days and weeks going where the hell are the bad guys and guys were talking like the navy killed them all like where are they they're like they're not coming out they all gave up their if once you did reverse ops uh that tactic worked because they were getting smoked in daylight and so and i think chris kyle at one point had that up yeah and um so i remember we remember hearing about his name and some of the guys and like oh dude they have a high body count we were so excited and we infilled day one it was like crickets and i'm like what is and they had a they had a drone i remember seeing a drone overhead and they were low flying this drone during the building of this wall and the completion of it i'm like no wonder there's no bad like all the bad guys hear this drone on purpose as a tactic that we applied but they're all keeping their head down and we couldn't kill any of them and i was like oh this sucks but the stay behind stuff was fun yeah the that that was a big kind of a when i was in ramada it's the same thing like the bad guys were they knew not to come out at night now yeah 90 whatever probably 97 of the bad guys that got killed by my task in it were in the daytime yeah the other three percent were at night because they knew if they came out at night it was a bad deal for them so they came out in the day and it's the same thing that those guys did in sadr city um that's another so it's another deployment another six months this six months yeah and it's going out hitting targets but it's definitely more mellow on this deployment yeah it was more of a a leadership role in troop advising the server major because i was acting as the ground force commander for every op so i l i started learning a lot about processes you know like before i was just in a nug assaulter i was called a ghost assaulter just there doing my little narrow piece of the pie now i had to step back and get the big picture i had to control air assets i had to flex to different targets i had to strategize on the fly with my troops major deploying his troops and we had a whole bunch of incidents like where you know me and the eod guy the navy eod guy are hitting targets by ourself because they're hitting a building we get intel i don't have enough time to flex that whole troop we have to do it so we go inside of houses by ourself and it was fun man we had a blast it was like it was cool because we had the leash off and even though it wasn't as active i mean we were doing i remember we had an intel from a soccer field that they had a couple handsets that correlated to the soccer field and i was like all right we got to get the soccer field so i said hey guys we're going to move to the soccer field so we started walking i'm like i need you guys to move out and they wouldn't move out i grabbed the eod guy we sprinted to the soccer field as we ran around the block that we were an ambient street light the group of guys were meeting and they were in the middle of soccer field the middle of night like two in the morning they see us and we're sprinting across an open field trying to shoot like 10 dudes who move in 10 different directions and we miss everybody and and when we get back the uh everybody in the jock and the talk is laughing because they're like dude that was the best [ __ ] we've ever seen because we saw you guys break contact from the main element and you're like screw it and you start sprinting but they all went 10 different directions so we couldn't track any of them and we're running and shooting and we're standing there in the field like damn it that was our opportunity it was good times man uh wrap up that deployment then what's next so i i i get back and i go to kag and i'm in kag in a a techno curl reconnaissance role and i go back to iraq and tip to blot and i only i i run because of my reconnaissance background is how i got recruited in i run a joint interagency task force of um interagency organizations with jsoc to do reconnaissance over the entire country of iraq um i was i was undercover as a lieutenant colonel so i was an oic young oic nobody believed it but put it in that position to see to and control all the things that were going on for reconnaissance assets in the country now in balad at that time period because everything was uh downsizing including the base of blood what year is this now oh nine yeah so stuff's really slowing down really slowing down in fact the reason they brought me in is because reconnaissance is obviously another way we get involved without involving packs on the ground people on the ground so we still had to have a have eyes on but we had to use technical means of reconnaissance and not just depend on dudes and hide sites in fact during that time period there was a restriction of one or two americans per target and you had to stay in containment so if you're moving to a bad guy place you leave behind the americans they'd stay on containment with the vehicles um indigenous force would hit the objective come back and then you'd roll out and so at that time working in the joint interagency i didn't feel like i was missing out on much i felt like i had a broader role to fill in that in that capacity and then and you're just overseeing all this reconnaissance elements that's what you're saying all of it i i had daily vtcs with uh still team command navsoff mostly which was the main effort by the way there wasn't a lot of sf guys in the country at that time so i had daily vtcs with the navy and supported their operations and technical reconnaissance means tagging tracking locating all the all the sexy stuff for uh technical recon um for the entire country and that was based on the fact that you had sniper experience yeah i got recruited experience or whatever yeah i got recruited i went to selection all successful and then um my background my entire life my background in special operations was mapped for that that feel of expertise uh in the transition coming back from oa till nine i went to jay sock's uh technical reconnaissance course which was like six months a pretty intense course and learned a whole new world of of operations that i didn't even know existed i know a little bit but when i went to that course i was like whoa now this is this is some cool [ __ ] so i i did that for task force for jsoc for my 09 rotation and then what happened after that um gap back and then got with another squadron and at that time we hadn't been in iraq uh since we killed zarqawi the task force hasn't been in iraq um really since i mean intermittently um we we owned iraq but afghanistan we completely gave up so our eye wasn't uh on the ball in afghanistan because we were too busy in iraq and then all of a sudden we had a change of heart like al qaeda was on the run we didn't even know this thing called isis existed and we decided to do a surge as an organization to afghanistan and i was on the first thing smoking so my first real good deployment with that organization with a special emissions unit was in afghanistan and when we got there um the rangers on the battle space colonel carrillo was in charge and we were the red-headed stepchildren and i was like what how's in smu the stepchildren like when i got there i was taking showers with bottles of water in an open field and i'm like this is the premier ct unit on the planet and i'm doing this and like dude we have to we're building everything from scratch so we set up shop there and started targeting bad guys and it the first two months was prep and then the second two months was killing bad guys um and we did a lot of it that that that second 60 days of that four-month rotation we i saw more bad guys killed in a two-month period than anything that i experienced before and it was because of the assets that we brought to bear um good rotation though and you were you were still overseeing recce at this point yeah i was i was that squadron's reconnaissance nco which just specialized in recon so everything from ops to technical recce to uh um interagency like even controlling aircraft for for isr and it was an active trip i mean we lost a dog we had guys shot we had guys blown up um a lot of active operations during that period of time it was it was amazing to see the talent and you can't really get an idea or understanding of that talent and capability when you when you focus on individuals but when you see it come together in a single combat operation where everybody's so efficient and effective you really see the benefit of the selection process the training process and the support mechanisms that make that unit the the most elite unit in the world yeah you know you hear like the um sports analogies of like well you know it's like a professional sports team but these are like that the champions right these are the nfl freaking super bowl winners that you know that you see the super bowl guy that like um whatever gets his right arm massaged so that he can whatever and he and this other guy's doing speed drills with the first four meters of his sprint and he's going to work with a specialist that's going to get him even a little bit you know one millisecond faster and then they're getting their helmets dialed in so that they can have calms in there and they got this you know they get all like this 100 pure focus for every individual to be as good as they possibly can and then you put that team together and every one of those individuals is 100 focused on being as good as they possibly can with all the support they could possibly want and that's what you end up with just just freaking the best yeah it's the big leagues for sure and i what i realized in that unit even being a very competent shooter a respected member of um special forces and um being a pt stud at the time that um there was men above me and beyond me that i'd never catch up with that were just so talented and i was like it was humbling and i'm like well i'm not the most elite dude i thought i was i woke up and went dude i'm crushing it and then i see the talent pool over there and realized um there's this thing this machine and like you said before um these guys aren't trained to be diplomats to be fit experts they're trying to kill bad guys and they're the best at it i mean the navy version and the army version they're the best at it in the world and it was a humbling and honorable experience of being part of that so what came after that so at a very young age actually at the age of 29 i made e8 how's your wife handling all this by the way she's good she's a champ at the time i don't she's not married to me now um so it didn't last but she's handling it well man i mean i mean look she her her perspective was if i was happy doing what i loved uh that was my moment in time and she would support me um do you have any kids no kids no kids none so it was easy for us right she was busy getting her nursing degree phenomenal woman um just just handling business and grinding and then when i came back she was my support and make sure made sure because you knew i was coming back and in that unit especially those those boys don't have any downtime it doesn't exist even when you're down you're not down you're up on a a call cycle for being able to quick respond or you're in a down cycle and you're training you're always gone i was gone more than any part of my career in that organization so um when i made the e8 list i made it on the black side there's the blacklist and the blacklist is just it's not advertised and i was the just to give i don't know the exact numbers but for that year it was something like 160 guys were promoted i was 159.7 on the blacklist because the blacklist like you're like a intermittent number that's not advertised i was the last guy on the black side which includes the navy that was promoted to e8 which means i was the last guy to get picked up and i was 29 years old i was an e8 as an e8 yeah and so i i you know i it was mainly because of the combat experience i had and then in e7 school which is for us it's called a knock i won the leadership award and so those two things set me up to get promoted that fast but i wasn't prepared in my operational career to go you're an e8 what's next so if i stayed in that unit then i would have just been what i was you know um in that unit you're not what's called blue chips you don't get blue chips because uh you have experience you could be a 20-year special operations guy when you show up to that unit day one you earn your blue chips one day at a time and so me starting i was starting starting from zero leaving the unit and going anywhere i could have gone i'm a team sergeant i'm a god in the in the special operations right and it's the job that you want because you're controlling and and operating with your oda with your detachment i had no look i wanted to go back but i was like if i go back they'll put me on a regular oda and not meaning that in a derogatory way but just not a sif company not a specialized company randomly a gentleman by the name of command sergeant major bob irby who's a legend in social forces command communicates to me that he heard i heard i made e8 and he heard about my experience and he wanted to recruit me to stand up a new cariff a new a new commander's response force for the the continent of africa we didn't have one because we were so busy fighting in the middle east we didn't have one jay sock approved that and long story short i stood up a sif as a plank holder from scratch we went into a company in 10th group me and another guy from the unit stood it up from scratch had full power to train anything we wanted to with our guys uh reconnaissance guys and build this unit from zero uh as we built the unit we got vetted and validated and then benghazi kicked off which by our benefit winded up being in africa so did you deploy immediately i deployed immediately i was the first team to deploy for that unit to benghazi to libya this is after the september 12th attacks yeah september 11 and 12 attacks in 12th in 2012. um during our train up we literally get tasked to go to libya we start developing intel and then benghazi kicks off and when that happened i was actually in a special missions unit compound doing cross kle briefs with libya and then this thing happens and then um a few weeks later i'm in tripoli libya going building out a counterterrorism force going after uh abu qatada the guy responsible for it did you run it we didn't run any of those ops though did we so um one we didn't do anything about it right it was a big 13 hours in benghazi is kind of reflective of that understanding but we had the opportunity to kill abu katala in about 60 to 90 days uh there are other use of sock elements with us and they positively identify that dude in a short period of time i was there in the meeting when we proposed it to the country team which included the ambassador char jay alexander pope who was appointed and he denied it he said the political climate won't allow us to do this the representative from yousuf senior e8 stood up and almost detonated i mean he detonated in a very tactful way um but that was the climate we were dealing with it was it was so politically charged they wouldn't allow us to do anything for six months i was in that country fighting to kill bad guys to do our job as the commander's response force but also representing yusuf and they wouldn't let us do anything it was horrible it was it was the worst political military experience that that i faced so what'd you do when you got home from that that had to leave a bad taste in your mouth well it did uh three weeks after i got back i was out of the army i dropped my paperwork as a senior e8 with how many years in at the time 16 16 years when i was downrange i got recruited by the cia and i was going to take a job called paramilitary operations officer which is a you can go on us or cia.gov and apply for it um job description there yeah yeah mike spann was one of the first casualties of the global war on terror on september 11th and um he was actually a paramilitary operations officer i wanted to be mike's man i had i had just finished my college degree which took me 15 years to accomplish which is a prerequisite for government service and federal federal government and i decided at that point i wanted to step aside and work for this agency because i saw the good things they were doing at the time after i got back and out processed very rapidly where people were like my troop and my my the main element wasn't even home yet and i was already out processed my independence was july 4th of that year of 2013 and immediately started contracting went straight back to libya i was in libya on terminal leave back in libya as a civilian and then uh started contracting with the agency uh for the la for the next two and a half years while at the same time in a reserve component of special operations um and where i was a team sergeant in texas then made sergeant major in texas and so i was contracting deploying with interagency coming home and then deploying again deploying again yeah put on my uniform jump on a plane i mean one time i came back from yemen a week later i was back in nazir africa with a serpent major uniform on doing a counter-terrorism staff operation or staff exercise that turned into an operation came back put on my civilians and then went back to yemen so i was just in a cycle of it give us a little bit of a brief on what you're doing as a what your job was as a contractor so honestly um it's nothing sexy uh i was babysitting case officers i mean my job was to protect him overseas um i was outside of the what people would uh normally refer to as industrial contractors so i actually work directly for the agency and and babysat case officers and protected them um when you're a case officer and you come out of school uh you got a 500 pound head lots of experience in training but it's all concepts when they go overseas we only have enough time to repair the biggest and brightest minds on the planet to do what they do and so we we are the um the shield that protects these guys to do their job and at the time that i applied you had a minimum experience of six years in special operations and you had to shoot your ass off and i when i showed up for this job i vetted it's a shooting call you shoot and you meet the standard or you leave my class we had probably 10 10 dudes that are senior level dudes operators in the most elite units half of them probably went home because the shooting calls you're competing for a six-figure job also so the pressure is high and the shooting standards are the the hardest shooting standards i've seen apparently in federal government because you're a federal law enforcement instructor after you get through this experience it's the toughest federal law enforcement call that's informal it's not actually doctrine and when i went down range with that organization i was confident that even me and my writing partner typically were seals that with our little glock 17 pea shooters and a waistband that we could do some work uh enough to fight back to our vehicle or back to the machine gun in our vehicle um and do some work but it also taught me about uh what these interagencies and these brave men and women do every day which is they put it on the line like you don't have a qrf uh ranger battalion element in mh-47s prepared to come rescue your ass it's just you and i'm like dude you guys do this like yeah we've been doing this since the beginning like what just driving around randomly doing your thing and like that's all like what what's the nearest task force oh they're about three hours away like okay so we're out on our own that changed everything for me i mean that's that that changed everything i thought in uh that i potentially knew about singleton operations and low vis operations we think love is our guys thought low vis was like putting a chimaga on you know and hiding their chest carrier or play carrier underneath their their dress their man dress it's not it's it's a it's a new game it was crazy you you do that for two and a half years two and a half years yeah and did you so you you originally wanted to actually be in the cia not a contractor you did were you continuing to try and pursue the job of actually being a member yeah i wanted to be a staffer i wanted to be a blue badger i wanted to be a full-time employee and i had a change of heart when i was in yemen yemen was super political the houthis the political climate all these things that were transpiring was doing what i didn't think was possible in that interagency which was um debilitating their ability to do their job and i saw great guys that were on operational side on the operational side that were getting uh um stagnated and i i couldn't believe it i actually i remember thinking to myself on one rotation wait this doesn't happen to these guys there's there's no way these dudes there's no way these guys are getting there's got to be something going on cloak and dagger and it wasn't because uh the oversight of how the interagency the ic works in the intelligence community with well over 17 agencies now there's so much direct uh directorate national level oversight and micromanagement they can't do their jobs and so i had my whole thing with getting on the military was if i can't kill bad guys i don't belong here so i left because i went to an organization which i thought were still killing bad guys and they still were in some capacity but where i was in the situation i was in they weren't and i went dude i have to make i have to have a change of heart here i have to figure something out because the war for me is over there's no more killing i mean eventually isis popped their heads up and there was a whole new cycle of killing that i missed which i i wish i was part of but i had to make a decision to get out yeah and then that was it that was it i was in pakistan and i made that decision i i brainstormed um my my riding partner who was a seal his brother was a dev group guy that was killed on a raid trying to rescue a hostage in africa and um he is one of my best friends and i said hey man i want to start a business he's like what's brainstorm and we had course of action development man we sat down after work and mapped out some plans and and many conversations over dinner trying to figure out like what i could do and um you know with our background expertise the obvious route is a tactical something right but i didn't want to do that man i i i saw these dudes who are getting out and they were dealing with all the backlash of coming out and saying hey i'm this guy because at the time i didn't have any social media and i'm like dude i don't i don't want to be a tactical kind of guy i want to do something kind of different and i wrote down survival and you know primitive survival is what most people think about when they think about survival but i said what if there's this niche in developing like this modern survival take on preparedness of training citizens not just military and law enforcement but citizens to be better prepared in their culture what year is this this is 2015. damn so you were ahead of the curve yeah yeah this is 15. and i'm like there's something here and i wrote a mission statement i did a con op i wrote a whole five paragraph op order on the whole business plan and resigned from my position with interagency came home talked to my command sergeant major as a sergeant major i was an op sergeant major at the time and said hey man i'm thinking about doing this and he goes dude like you haven't like there's nothing going on it's like we're about to activate the entire unit and you'll be a staff sergeant major sitting in a talk for a year in afghanistan there's nothing going on do what you want to do i said how hard is it for me to resign he goes i'll i will type the paperwork that's how easy it is and then i'll just send it to you and you sign it for for your position and your rank you don't have to do anything but technically resign and you'll go into irr status inactive ready reserve and that's it and i remember i did that and the next day i was like holy crap like i just cut the biggest umbilical cord known to man in the history of man and now i hear flapping and i have to make it make [ __ ] happen and are you still married at this point i'm not i'm i'm i'm three years removed or two years removed from a divorce and um but you're not you don't have to take care of anyone but yourself it's just me yeah and so it's kind of like a little bit of big umbilical cord but i mean let's face it you're gonna be able to you know give me a ground pad yeah i'm i'm i'm winging it man i'm i'm i think i probably was living in on a ground like a pad like i i was probably an air mattress inside of a abandoned place i was smart with my money because they call it the thousand air club because you're making a thousand a day and you're bankrolling most guys go home blow it on harleys and trucks and come back and start the vicious cycle again um but i took that money i think it was 25k and invested it and started my business what was the first move the first move was education i had no idea educating yourself educating myself i i had no idea about marketing about um like i have a degree in homeland security what's that going to translate to not much in my new field of expertise so i took my business plan started doing um trying to build fidelity on the correlation between a concept and then the execution of that concept trying to use historical data and there was none there was no good case studies or examples of businesses in that genre that weren't very narrow in their field perimeter survival yeah sure you could find a hundred business plans they all suck and they're not doing very well but what is this cultural thing of like this genre of call preparedness where mindset self-awareness uh technical training um you know all the things that we did in our culture and purpose in special operations how does that translate to citizens and how do you scale verticals in business that that was intense for me it's something i still learned today you know five years later with 40 plus employees i'm like dude i'm still learning i'm trying to figure the [ __ ] out what was the first move that you made then in terms of like what's the first gig that you did so the first gig was uh tactical training because i could make a revenue stream so i'm like wait do i figure out like 12 to 24 people 500 a slot pistol carbine let's make some revenue then i built the website then i started marketing social media for me was brand new and i think at the time was new for people to see special operations guys doing it i know at the time there was only a handful of us doing that and people were like oh and they gravitated towards us i remember tim kennedy i was his boss tim kennedy was a is an mma fighter um successful entrepreneur i was his boss at the time and i'm like dude how are you doing this he plugged me on his social media i got 10 000 followers and i'm like this is how it works this network building that's how easy it was and so i start building it i design a um a survival kit i as a contractor i went to um the luxury of doing the interagency direct contract position i can go to any training i want to and they sent me to a whole bunch of high-speed schools including a survival school where they had high-speed contractors who developed this like ziploc bag theory there's this guy right now who works for me kevin estella he's in the field right now day two doing a 72 hour ziploc bag challenge on fieldcraftsurvival on our instagram and we're updating it and the idea is if you're in a foreign country that's semi-permissive non-permissive the worst case scenario for you is it loses its sovereignty a coup happens and now you're on your own the first star in in the 50s that was applied to the cia board was a guy who escaped and evaded from china and got killed in tibet by a random security guy shot in the chest with one round with like a 32 british pistol revolver that's a thing and there's dangers of it so the idea is like a ziploc bag is the things that you can carry on your person your physical body so i took that and i literally in the course went everything you guys put in this bag how did you guys come up with it well we did r d like the best things that we could put in the bag and you're going to live out of it for 72 hours which happens to be uh appropriate amount of time to escape evade and then carry the appropriate amount of stuffs in reconnaissance like not overbearing and i said i'm going to take everything in these bags and i'm going to turn into a survival kit and sell it and he's like dude you should do that like hell yeah i'm doing it and so i our first survival kit i sold like a thousand on day one of that kit and i was like there's something here there's a product thing here there's a training thing here there's these revenue streams that i'm seeing and we we built it from very small diversified and and built up all the verticals one one by one so you sell a thousand of these survival kits almost instantly instantly so now so now your theory is correct there's demand there is demand i'm creating a new demand signal but there's demand um that that starts off what year is that six the very beginning of 16 the very beginning of 16 so five years ago you get the word out you sell a thousand these kits and so well then what's the next move now you know there's a market you start developing [ __ ] what's next well i think part of it was i have to develop a culture here like there's a there's this thing that exists that i'm trying to redefine um most people who think or have seen us on the surface even think that we're a primitive survival company because survival is synonymous with with primitive survival like rubbing sticks together in the woods and so i'm not a big fan of that i'm not an expert at that there's guys that are talented at that i hire those guys now but that's not me i'm the guy who understands that you know 20 operators can go out and deliberately hit the worst case scenario and come out on top and so in my hypothesis like why is that happening why do why do intentionally men put themselves in harm's way to kill the bad guy and why statistically do they come out on top and so if you start looking out and laying out all the reasons why it's not because of one widget one school it's because the culture they're immersed in it's they all got selected together they train together they pay attention to all the details they can do contingency-based planning they have service support they do course of action development they rehearse they pay attention to their equipment and everything they do and ultimately they're conscious to their culture their world they're they're here right now paying attention to what they are doing and when i look at citizens and everything that's happening in our world that we never learn the lesson from we're completely complacent in freedom as a benefit of freedom because we're comfortable and routine and that happens to be our mo as americans which is beneficial right that you live in sovereign societies you get all the luxuries and freedoms of all the men who go out to war and and do this thing but what is it to the detriment well it's the if you look at statistics and this is what i did this is this is the greatest start point is doing this research i started realizing there's no understanding of what this even means there's one guy that i found there's a couple guys but one guy significantly by the name of john leach who did a study on survival psychology he asked the question why do people live and why do people die specifically in catastrophes he has this theory um based on this case study analysis of mostly natural disasters some of them man-made that there's a breakdown of about 10 80 ten ten percent of the population happens to be making the right decision and they survive eighty percent probably broken in half fifty fifty make sometimes the right decision sometimes the wrong and then ten percent are the bottom of the barrel they're they're like the guy who runs this is in a survival situation of some kind this is a catastrophe a disaster so all of the things coming together uh typically uh associated with um compressed timeline high intensity stress so the bottom 10 percent is the bottom of the barrel and children happen to be in that bottom 10 percent and so the the the question is why are some people at the top 10 and why are people at the bottom 10 and how do we get the people who are at the bottom even children into the top ten and that was the premise of my business in answering that question we need to figure out why people die um what is their background and experience what mistakes they made and how can we put them in a bracket and a 10 bracket to make sure they survive that that was the the question that had to be answered that's where that's where it started and then you started looking at okay what did you find what did you find as far as a curriculum that you put together that moves people from the bottom ten where getting killed to the top ten the the most impactful thing that i've found which i i see a lot of correlation in what you're with whether it's discovery or just dissemination of your books and all the information that you're doing is self-awareness breeds situational awareness right so there's this lack of awareness there's really a lack of understanding uh the analogy i like to use is um you know i have a land cruiser i'm a big fan of land cruisers so i i take my land cruiser which is a 94 land cruiser which is um fcg80 if you're a land cruiser nerd head gasket problems are notorious for these things they overheat their head gasket blows and then it's catastrophic so the question is when you're driving down the road and you see smoke how do you address smoke most people see smoke and they go oh crap smoke let me pull over right i'll call aaa so they have a dependence on something else an institution uh an insurance company whatever it may be and so they don't source sole source the solution another course of action is you keep driving because you don't understand what's happening so you just push through and you think that pushing through hey because it's only 10 minutes away from home is the answer so you saw the smoke you didn't have a answer there's a void a darkness in the back of your head so you just do something random it's randomized behavior you drive you get home and before you get home when you get down your street your car catastrophically uh implodes you hear a pop you hear noise it starts the the buck you pull it over the side of the road you lift the hood and you realize you have a blown engine right that analogy is uh representative of people's brains and the understanding of the brain so a lot of things that we have that happen to us uh in our lives um mostly affected by stressors which happens to be a catastrophe by the way a stressor is just either low-grade or high-grade catastrophe we take in stress we start filling these things and then we don't know how to control it we don't know how to diagnose it we don't understand mechanical processes and then so we ignore it until it becomes catastrophic so now you're in the vehicle accident and your only role is to do certain technical things to help the person who's burning alive but you don't know how to do it why because you don't understand how to break glass you don't understand uh the fortitude that's required to push past the pain and break the glass or maybe if you understood technically that you could just crack off this wire antenna and slap it that you could shatter the glass or if you even had more uh forethought maybe you carry a tool like a breaching ass a winkler a breaching axe and you smash the window but then you let that person burn to the ground hopefully it's not a family member hopefully it's not you but this happens and this little thing happens to everybody in some kind of circumstance and what i tell people is if it hasn't happened it's bound to happen the difference between us and our experiences and civilians is that we've seen the detriment of not following these basic processes and the understanding of what takes place is when you don't understand them so what i want to do is lend these processes and understanding so people can self-diagnose be aware of what's happening sympathetically parasympathetically and then give them more awareness so when they see smoke they go oh that's not smoke at all that's water vapor that's coming from our radiator oh i'm gonna pull over i'm gonna let the car idle and sit i'm gonna let it cool down oh i carry gloves and a rag in the back of my car i'm gonna pop the radiator cap oh i realized because i looked in the reservoir there's nothing in the reservoir i carry coolant because i have a 94 and it eats coolant i get coolant put it back in it top it off sit it let it idle everything seems fine and i'm on my way and i just survived that whole thing is not done in a very tactful and intelligible way and i think we need to change that so it requires processes it requires progressive learning it requires a different a lot of different paths that haven't been created which is the which is the business challenge because it's easy to articulate it to do a podcast to do a book all those things but to create a progressive path for civilians who are disinterested in the first place it's the best in my opinion business problem to have because it lends itself to a new challenge which i'm all about so what do the courses look like how do let's say you just sold me and i'm like hell yeah i'm in the game um freaking uh jocko the whatever insurance salesman and you just sold me what do i do there's three progressive paths to this the first path is phil crass arrival fieldcraftsurvivo.com it's it's it's the website it's physical training it's like physical things that you can do it's gunfighter pistol gunfighter carbine it's first aid uh tactical combat casualty this is via a website via website so you're for instance on on on a video explaining to me how to put a tourniquet on my kid this component is you physically come to our training okay so there's a difference so you said website but then you said physical so you go on the website you get you sign up for the training right and then the the in-person physical training is one component of it that training includes equipment augmentation and equipment look we're not the we don't own the monopoly on medical gear but i'll i will sell you the best medical gear that's made north american rescue the same cats seven tourniquets or cat tourniquets that we used we've seen them save lives so we sell tourniquets survival kits all the augmentation for enabling people to be better prepared that's phil craft survival the second component is progressive learning you have to be able to learn progressively at a start point and understand the path i realized that deficiency years into this whole thing because people go uh oh i train gunfighter pistol what's next and i'm like uh get fighter pistol two and they're like well outside of that what's next like well i need a holistic path to this so we hired a girl um her name's amber stay-at-home mom uh nurse somebody who understands lms systems we actually teamed up with osmore which is a learning management based system the same thing we did with online learning for your master's for my bachelor's where we take um an online learning approach to get people involved including families so you can go online you could sell up you could sign up on wetheprepared.com and sign up for an lms component that includes like stop the bleed so you take a class where you receive a tourniquet you apply that tourniquet and you have an interactive experience virtually it's online learning but it's for the preparedness minded it's for people who you know who don't have the time or money to fly from north carolina to utah to take a physical class in person so there's a progressive learning path that touches all the fields that we break down to what's called pillars of preparedness which i can go over of how we how we uh disseminate this information so people can understand it the last component to that is what i've realized uh that preparedness is is it's this thing that brings people together that's not super toxic like everybody can get if you're a liberal in san francisco or conservative in rural montana you can get on board that you need this idea of preparedness to make you better prepared for the worst case scenario generally speaking so when i have classes in person or online i see this community building built based off of this one thing that's not segregating people or that doesn't have toxic uh underlying things about it right it's not fringe so we started uh american contingency which is a communi community-based program where if we educate people to be better prepared what's next what happens when you get around people that you like because you're you're thinking about the same considerations like i want to take care of my family i want to protect myself um how can you inter-operate well there's look there's a there's a bigger picture right the breakdown of the family unit breakdown of uh communities when we me and you grew up we knew our neighbors we knew our our neighbors friends and family now if you see your neighbor and he's checking his mail you're like you're like who's that guy like why is he looking at me like that's your neighbor man like what do you do like for the first time in history you could be in an apartment complex with thousands of people in a vertical and not know one person and be disinterested in knowing anybody but what do you do when you have to band together because a hurricane just destroyed the infrastructure of your town well american contingency we actually have a members.americancontingency.com that allows people to group and network we have hundreds of groups that are inter-operating now that are like-minded that train together that work together that build assets and their capabilities together and then to break bread together which is building relationships so in every tier and this just happened which um you know look i think the the most impactful thing that you've done in your career in your in your life is what you're showing in um and what you do and your actions outside of the military right it's a it's somebody for me as a young entrepreneur i look at you and go these are the right things writing a book in publication that is that exposes your ideology and your thinking to impact young people who don't have anything to lean on and purpose is the most impactful thing that a human being could do especially from our backgrounds so i said i'm going to do pillars of preparedness teacher's thing let me get a book deal nobody wants to touch me for years they thought i was fringe i mean i've been called everything from right-wing extremists which is bizarre because i'm half asian um to um you know neo-nazi to all this weird stuff because i'm i'm talking about this idea of being prepared um just two weeks ago i signed a book deal with a major uh publisher that vetted me for two years which means they just paid attention about writing a book on preparedness and i'm like that's big that's huge for me one to be able to impact some somebody via the written word which i grew up with is impactful but two a publisher that published michelle obama and also jordan peterson on both sides of the spectrum is taking a chance on me and i'm allowed i'm i'm humbled by the opportunity allowed to have the opportunity to pass this word and mainstream to people who might be thinking about this but don't know how to contextualize it is a sign to me that this is making sense to people like it's a hard genre because it's so uh it's spread so thin but the time and the place that we live in our society right now where people's cell phones their virtual realities are more important and significant than their actual reality at the detriment to their physical and mental health and wellness it it needs we need to be bringing this to bear in conversations to get people involved in something outside of their cell phone so it's my mission but it's become something so different than i thought it was going to become as far as scaling a business vertical let me tell you what i think this is what i think is very cool and and i was wondering if you would get there um just from what you've seen so far to to what my perspective is and what my perspective is is you're sort of like what everything you just said to me is the tip of the iceberg actually it's just the tip of the iceberg and i'll tell you what i mean by that if you look at for me um jiu-jitsu jiu-jitsu for me was a huge component of my life not because i learned how to fight not because i got in good physical condition but because i learned a new way of thinking and i started to understand the world from a different perspective and i started to see correlations between jiu jitsu combat tactics leadership interacting with other human beings the way i approached problems the way i thought jiu-jitsu became a way of thinking and it's actually i can't say it's jujitsu is that way of thinking because it's everything combined it turns and translates into this sort of just the way of thinking for me well when i start thinking about being prepared about handling situations about about reacting to emergency situations about handling contingencies all those things you can learn you can learn for the specific for the specific genre of actually applying to a survival situation just like you can learn an arm lock for actually applying to a grappling situation but guess what you can take that mindset and you can apply to everything that you do so you can take what you're teaching about thinking through a problem about foresight about preparing for a certain scenario and the contingencies around that you can actually apply that not just to how you're going to handle a fire or an earthquake or a civil unrest but how are you going to handle a business situation that you're in how you're going to handle an interaction with someone in your own family it's not a hostile interaction but it's an interaction that you need to think through so the way that you're talking about preparedness and i've told this to people before they're like well you know how good do you have to get at jiu jitsu like i mean at a certain point you're a blue belt you're 225 pounds jocko um you're okay you can handle yourself in a self-defense situation yeah absolutely i can what about shooting well what are the chances jocko that you're gonna get into a gun fight you're 49 years old you know you got a wife and kids you live in a nice area what are the chances you're getting in a gunfight why do you need to be training why do you need why should i be training people ask me why should i work with a firearm well let me tell you why because yeah you have this narrow chance that for whatever reason somebody enters your house or you're in a situation somebody tries to steal your car or hurt you or whatever where you got to use your firearm the chances of that let's face it they're they're they're tiny but guess what you get guess what you get from practicing and art like shooting you learn how to control your breathing you learn how to detach you learn how to refocus after you throw a shot and and still take the next clean shot without worrying about what just happened you learn how to calm you you calm yourself down you learn how to associate or disassociate from problems that are happening right in front of you so there's applications to the art of shooting a weapon that you can apply to everything you can do there's applications for what you learn in jiu jitsu that apply to everything you do there's applications to if i went to one of your courses and you taught me how to what what i should put together for a go bag for a car here's what you should think through cool i can promise you i'm gonna use that i'm gonna put a go bag in my car i'm gonna put together a good one but guess what else i'm gonna do i'm gonna think about a contingency for my business and what we can do as a business to prepare for a certain contingency what do i need to prepare what do i need to think through as a leader to to be ready so you're talking about a narrow when you talk about this mindset of preparedness you're talking about a pretty narrow thing how am i going to survive a situation to me it's applicable to everything that a human being does and and why does a special operations guy when there's a uh you know an earthquake or a flood or a car accident part of it part of the reason that they survive is hey they know what to do they know how to break a windshield they know what to do in that specific technique they technically know what to do but part of it is number one they've been under pressure before and number two they know how to think through the problem that they're facing so what you're teaching isn't only applicable to survival it's actually applicable to everything and that to me is it should broaden your audience to everybody and i like the fact that you said you know there's a certain alignment with what you're doing the alignment is you know we're one of those with businesses sometimes if you go higher up enough the the alignment ladder in a business you know you might want to do something one way i want to do something a different way ultimately i say hey listen do we want to take care of our clients yes do we want to make some money yes we do do we want to take care of the people on our team yes we do so we're going to be aligned there like there's no one you're not going to if you and i are in business together you're going to say well actually i don't want to make any money or actually no i want to screw over our clients or actually no i don't want to take care of our team no you're not going to say that and if you did say that we're not working together but 99 of the time you go to any business they you can go to a point where you're aligned where you and i are thinking the same hey listen we want to take care of our clients we want to take care of our team we want to make some money we can agree with that what you just said i don't care where you're from i don't care where you're from you take what did you say a a liberal in san francisco or a freaking redneck in montana and you pull them into a room and say do you want to be able to take care of your family what are they going to say they're going to say yes do you want to be able to handle yourself in a pressure situation they're going to say yes do you want to be able to take care of yourself they're going to say yes so there's an alignment that's that's inherent in what you're teaching that absolutely will bring people together but it'll make them better not just because they're able to survive it'll it'll teach them a way of thinking that will progress them in every aspect of their life and that's why i think it's even more powerful than what you're saying because i could take some uh company executives and send them to one of your courses and and yes it's a cool benefit that they're gonna learn about survival just like i run a program where we take our guy we take civilians we teach them how to do a room clearance we teach them how to move between buildings right this is a one this is a this is a 45 minute session right how to clear a room and how to move from building to building in a group that's what we teach them then we say okay here's your mission and we start giving them missions now what do they learn about clearing buildings doesn't matter it doesn't matter at all but what do they learn about leadership what do they learn about thinking under pressure what do they learn about how to get people to move in the right direction what do they learn about being able to detach and take a step back and not get caught up in the fire fight we use we use labor attack not get caught up in their laser gun and and freaking out about that so we take people and put them through this tactical training not so that they can become great tacticians but so that they can lead better so what you're doing hey listen it's great you put people through some training that they learn survival skills but to me an even even higher up of the hierarchy of of benefits is that they learn a way of thinking that's going to benefit them in every aspect of their life i think that's badass yeah yeah i appreciate it the the lessons learned that we found is exactly that that most often people aren't exposed they they have limited exposure so when they have the opportunity to do something like you know a five-day uh experience like we have you know we do corporate training we do um we've done it i've consulted for oracle and some other companies it's not about like you said the technical experience the bottom line is they're not going to learn enough reps to build that technical expertise unless that's on their own but the life lessons they learn and taking it back and processing stress like you said is so important and valuable i think what's happening with this introduction of technology in our lives is it's limiting our ability to be exposed so um one of the advices that i give for people who are like how do i change my mindset you know a lot of people say mindset mindset mindset what the hell does that mean in in our field of expertise it has to do with resilience your ability to bounce back your ability once suppressed to bounce back and to be stronger to thrive instead of just survive and get by so when we expose people to new challenges it doesn't have to be extreme you could just i mean we have extreme versions of this we do seer school we have a civilian school which is fun to run but those guys will come back from that experience from a five-day seer experience survival escape resist evade and they'll go this is the most impactful thing i've ever done in my life and i'm like really and like okay let me reflect on my impactful experiences oh yeah ranger school when i was in ranger school and i'm exposed and i'm i'm vulnerable it's impactful because it's something different and we understand this obviously about even single-celled organisms if you're exposed to trauma that is the first stage in growth because no growth takes place without exposure to trauma and so whatever that form factor is getting pummeled on the mats and jiu jitsu you are learning as you go you're breaking to build and so uh what's fascinating about this whole movement that i that i think is preparedness is that it's positive there's not a lot of negative things that take place in preparing people to be prepared for that worst case scenario you see a lot of positive impacts on community with law enforcement with relationships uh with people's understanding and for me um getting getting all this collective of information and making sense of it and being able to clearly disseminate that is the biggest challenge but it's the funnest thing about the business i mean the lms for example of of creating this idea that you can learn online and you can learn about these life-saving things the naysayers came out and said why would you teach somebody how to apply a tourniquet online like don't you think that's kind of like a it's high in liability and it's neglectful i'm like dude you could build a a rocket ship inside of your garage off a youtube video so i could think i think i could teach somebody how to stop the bleed with a technical tourniquet applied to their body to help them survive and so i i'm fascinated by it's it's my passion obviously but um i think you're right i think especially when it comes to leadership uh there's a breakdown in our in our societies with guys not willing to get off the bench and do anything for themselves i was doing a podcast with pete blaber he was a former cad commander wrote the mission the man and me and work uh just wrote part two of that which is the common sense way and one of the things he talks about is this idea of collaboration when you collaborate with somebody when you have communication and you have reciprocation then you you create the environment of us willing to learn from each other but you also give people the confidence to stand up in their own communities and do something about it i don't care if it's not their community like yeah you want to run for city council that's great you don't and you just want to stand up and get off your ass for your family or even for yourself you're fat you're sloppy you're lazy and you can make a change inside yourself because you re you come to that realization that's good and for me there's no revenue generated there it could be a podcast it could be one-way dissemination that impact is priceless it's worth everything in the world so what are people going to do if they want to get in the game with you so they go to they go to fieldcraftsurvival.com that's it i mean phil cross survived look we're all over the map on fieldcraft's survival we'll get a podcast we've got the website uh we could port you to theweedtherepair.com which is the lms or or members.americancontingency.com um the start point is start like in this experience listening to the long-form versions for free from youtube from podcast and start developing an understanding of what you want and then you know it's it's it's all over the map on like on instagram uh phil craft survival my personals mike.a.glover but every day i'm living this one thing i haven't detracted from is consistency i might be making wrong business decisions i mean i might be jacked up in many ways but one thing i could never be criticized for is consistency so i wake up every single day with this on my mind and in the last six years that i started this venture i don't think i've had one day off and that's okay because that my grind is this purpose and you know selfishly i don't know if this is a tactic maybe it's done um when we're unaware of it but i've built a thing around me that felt and feels like the team life that i had the culture that i came from and i i get the feeling in it in here and then in your gym and this in the people that i i've met and and in a similar experience i'm doing the same thing on my end in a parallel parallel but also synergistic universe is there any um mistakes that you made from a business perspective that were close to catastrophic have you screwed up anything really bad or they all just kind of little learn as you go kind of learn as you go i think early on i almost made a mistake early on where i was told in the diversification of all the things i was doing was too much and i get that if you if you looked at me even today i mean there's a lot of things we've got going on but at the time that all the verticals were spread so thin that nothing was gaining traction and so i was told find one vertical one thing one kit one training session and double down on that create one little tiny vertical scale that you can make revenue from and then diversify and i said no i can't do that i said because this whole thing that's preparing us is very diversified in the first place i can't teach mindset without teaching physical training i can't teach physical training without an understanding of a mobility platform into your life so we have to do everything at once and so doing that was challenging because it almost broke me i mean literally it broke me like i lived in my business uh with my girlfriend for four months and we literally lived in a warehouse for four months and showered it didn't have a shower it had a pump shower that we camped with that was our living circumstance but you make those sacrifices in business and then all of a sudden everything's scaled at once and then you're like oh okay so this is the place to be now so now it's about tactics and you know developing the right flow uh supply chain issues all these things that everybody's dealing with in business it's it's a it's a train wreck but i wouldn't trade it for the world and where are you based out of so right now we're in hebrew city utah uh headquarters is there we're standing up kevin owens a former sniper teammate of mine who's unilaterally running philcraft nc he's standing that up and then raul martinez my training director has 20 subcontractors that teach all over the u.s he's standing up in um in arizona near phoenix north anthem arizona which is north of phoenix so we're standing up these small little verticals um evan hafer who's a buddy of mine owns black rifle coffee has given me the opportunity to sell in a display about the size of this table field craft survival swag and and gear that we sell for equipment um and that will be in every black rifle coffee it's in two right now being four next week being hopefully in a thousand when he's competing with starbucks um but yeah we're all over the map man it's freaking awesome well hey man i think we've been going for uh i don't know we get four hours yet i don't know three and a half something like that um i don't wanna i don't wanna take up too much more of your time and i know you got a little little uh plane to catch echo echo charles you got anything i do not thanks for coming good to meet you nice meeting you too man no questions from echo charles no not today we covered it all you you one podcast we were talking about living off the land yeah and um you know i was a i was a radio man in my enlisted day so i was always traveling light and you know carry like no food just water batteries in the radio and and then we were talking about whatever was uh like we were talking about the civil war and how those guys would just they would live off the land right and echo chimed in the fact that you know he had also he could also live off the land not exactly so all right he was saying you know if he's going to la for a couple days yeah he doesn't need to pack a lot yeah cause worst case scenario live off the land you didn't bring a toothbrush brush cool roll into walmart yeah roll into a walgreens you get a toothbrush wow that's what i'm talking about bourbon survival that's freaking surprising man i'm surprised you didn't ask about like what the best you know store was to get toothbrushes at cvs they're pretty consistent whatever conceptually it was the same thing same same instead of packing a big bag or whatever like we live off the land yeah urban sprawl that's an urban sprawl that's urban land it's the same thing yeah yeah it's an ecosystem let the environment provide that's it right yeah there you go right on it sounds good mike any closing thoughts no i i just want to uh just take a second and just say thank you for the opportunity i i will i will say just like i say on a lot of podcasts with guys of your caliber in your background that you're doing something that i wish a lot of guys with our background would do which is um get off the bench and and take a stand and commit to this burden of responsibility what you're doing is growing a business but what you're also doing is impacting young people's lives and every walk of life to do something with their lives that's purpose that's different than anything else that that's a structure and business plan that this is an impact on culture i think from you know as far back as we could record every major um battle that's been fought those men came from war and affected popular culture whether it was cutting you know p51 mustangs making hot rods chopping harleys um having an extreme impact there is a burden of responsibility of men like you and me that need to step up and accept that reality the john plasterers the john striker meyers of the world are the ones who affected my life and me stepping up and doing something about it i'm not talking about just military service i'm talking about doing something impactful for your life and this the books the business that's the vertical in revenue that that's what scales the hierarchy um and and grows but the impact it transcends across society and without you uh without your abilities to stay in it and stay committed we wouldn't we wouldn't be affecting popular culture like we are uh and i think you're leading the way in that way you know i'm humbled to have been on this podcast and to have the opportunity to speak to your audience uh but i just want to let you know that personally um it's a big deal and uh you're doing it you did it in military service to me we come from similar lines that's not the greatest greatest impact the greatest impact is what you're doing right now so i appreciate it well thanks i appreciate it i i'm not sure i'm all that you've uh made me out to be but but um when i look at what you did in the past and freaking just talking about your deployments i mean not not even there's not even any words to describe and and i know that you sit there and think in the back of your head of like you know guys that did 12 more deployments compared to your whatever five or six and i think that's the feeling we all have all the time and you even said it today there's you found out i found out there's there's someone and not just someone but there's a bunch of people way better than we are at that job and god bless him for going out there and getting after it and and that being said what you did to hold the line what you did to carry the torch appreciate it and then back at you once again what you're doing right now you know i think what you're doing right now is going to have a huge impact and is having a huge impact getting people's mindsets straight in a time when mindsets are all over the map seeing you do that that's impressive and i hope you keep doing it brother thanks brother will do right on and with that mike glover has left the building appreciate mike coming on um freaking great story um a lot of incredible stuff and what he doing right now is awesome talking about preparedness talking about being ready seems like we should start fundamentally there's one area we can start to be ready sure today echo charles what do you think there's always ways to be ready be more ready i think that self-evaluation part was kind of critical i mean it wasn't surprising like oh you know like but it was a good like kind of reminder it's like that is like one of those answers that lies like right be below the surface that you already know is there but it's not always revealed self-reflect evaluate where are we you know you would think that's obvious but it's not it's not happening a lot of people go through life without evaluation evaluating where they're at where they could improve what they could do better yeah it's true and like i'd say this before where it's in a way depends on how you look at it it's a good problem to have it means a lot of our problems are solved you know if you're not worried about this or that happening that just means that it's not happening very often you know kind of a thing which is a good thing solved problems tends to be a good thing tens do okay anyway so we got to be careful about that kind of stuff we do want to keep ourselves ready strong healthy you won't have to exercise strength every single day aside from in the gym see i'm saying like you doing 20 rep squats right like the results the reason you do that that reason is not going to be demonstrated displayed put into play every single day in real life you're not gonna i guess maybe conceptually it might but no it won't but there's a bigger purpose here see i'm saying it's just it's to stay ready realistically as ready as you possibly can and all these different elements so while we're on this path of readiness capability health mental and physical we might need some supplementation good good news is jocko has supplementation called jackal fuel so let's start with discipline go rtd cans it is the new it's the new era of energy drinks actual energy drinks yeah mike glover said something real simple but real true he's like i like it i like that it's healthy you don't have to worry about poisoning yourself anymore so i'm paraphrasing yeah that last part but it's true though and it you know i said before too well yeah you sometimes i'm gonna drink two of those in a row sometimes three i did drink two of them just now yes in a row so you don't have to there's no back-end price anymore it's like oh wait i'm actually technically i'm not physically i'm not worried about becoming a type 2 diabetic diabetic this afternoon correct i didn't just drink 72 grams of sugar or whatever no no i had monk monk fruit which is technically good for you yeah that was a good point you made this off air by the way where you're like yeah you know there's five calories and some the new ones this 15 calories because it comes from food that's right yeah the sweetener comes from food not some chemical that shouldn't be in your body yeah they can't provide any kind of calories between five and 10 calories per can why is that like you just said because it's not chemicals you know what has zero calorie calories a chemical that's what has zero calories what has some calories monk fruit has some calories yeah five yeah so it's one of those deals man like i said the new era of energy drinks you can drink some energy drinks there's your energy drink right there on the path hundred percent too it's not like it's like well you know i'm putting something in there to preserve it partially it's not partial path 100 on the path 100 no deviation so yes you can get these there's new flavors up by the way you're gonna have to check them out yourself very impactful exciting flavors as far as flavors go anyway you can get them at wawa if you're in the area that you have wawa you can get them at uh vitamin chop by the way talking about flavors uh what i find interesting is some families of beverages they kind of all taste the same they might have a different label on it or a different name this stuff tastes legitimately different like you might have one and be like this is the best thing i've ever tasted you might have another one not like it try a different one yeah because there's definitely more variation in flavor with these flavors than there is with a normal uh company a normal drink who's just like look they know what the flavor profile is to get people addicted so they put a bunch of sugar in there name it something and cool they're moving forward we're not doing that we're giving you legit flavor profiles with different tastes it's a good point keep your mind open also you can get them at originusa.com also as far as supplementation goes we have stuff for your joints super krill oils and joint warfare also for immunity vitamin d3 and cold war also if you need additional protein if you want additional protein or if you want dessert and or total win and it's not like i was like let me just choose the p i just grabbed any one and it happened to be that yeah so i'm like cool i i went kind of hard though i don't recommend this all the time i put some chocolate chips in there on accident put too many not that not way too many but too many and then kind bananas disqualifies everything you're saying a little bit huh you can't just add chocolate chips and be like oh it tasted really good you added chocolate chips bro but it was like almost too sweet i think because of the additional chocolate chips yeah i pondered the whole thing don't get it wrong it was still very very good you know what you do you you know those uh the dark chocolate chunks you can buy dark chocolate you know whatever percentage put that in there that would have been perfect even if i accidentally put too much that won't shake anyway there's other flavors as well so don't you know don't slack on that either way whatever flavor you like milk additional protein another clean deal it's not like some sugar-filled deal it is once you put freaking chocolate chips in it you know it's going to depend on the level of dark chocolate roberts with the freaking sugar cubes under your tongue it was just one of those things you know it happened something but i don't put chocolate chips in there it tastes freaking delicious yeah totally does so there you go get some milk get some get what you need yep chocofuel.com and and by the way this is important it's important oh just this is important i think i'm gonna say something that is the thing that's important is if you want to get you if you want to get free shipping get a subscription if you subscribe you get free shipping um we know we're competing with some large maybe even the largest of organizations in the world that are shipping stuff for free no big deal we're shipping for free too subscribe we got you yeah it's true um also i mentioned originusa.com this is where you can get american-made denim american-made jiu-jitsu ghees rash guards so basically apparel for work a pair for jiu jitsu and then everywhere in between basically forever for the whole life increased jiu jitsu yep 100 origin usa.com again all made in america from the ingredients or materials not ingredients the materials all the way to the end product boom all made in america so you're supporting yourself are you supporting america as well also chocolate win win-win big time big time also jock has a store called jocko store so you go to jackalstore.com and this is where you can get rashcards t-shirts trucker hats flex fit hats hoodies all this good cool stuff representing the path discipline equals freedom good when things are going bad there's always some good that comes from it iconic video words from a man right here nonetheless you want to represent that that's where you can get the shirts on jacko's store so is this the video that's iconic or is it the words i don't know i didn't evaluate it kind of seems like both i guess technically but you're saying you made an iconic video is what i'm hearing either way good job either way we have a subscription situation as well for shirts design's a little bit different than iconic designs well you know it's that's the subject for debate i think but people do seem to like them you know you wanted a cool new shirt every month high quality by the way boom you can subscribe for that uh to that it's called the shirt locker you can get it on jocko store also subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already leave a review if you're in the mood that's kind of cool yeah that's that's that's cool also we have jocko unraveling which i do with my my brother daryl cooper dc grounded podcast warrior kid podcast you can also join the underground jocko underground.com we have alternative podcasts we're going into some pretty cool subjects on there look we made that in the event that there's problems in the in the podcast realm and people start trying to block or erase or put inject advertis all this stuff that they could do if that gets out of hand which it could we will make adjustments and we'll be on jockowunderground.com if you want to support that you can sign up you can subscribe to eight dollars and eighteen cents a month and you can listen to all these alternative additional podcasts that we're making and we're gonna do other cool stuff that we haven't really even um started yet but we got cool ideas that will come out we have a youtube channel subscribe to that if you want to see the videos that i am the assistant director of and the videos that sometimes i i am um in them which is kind of cool that i do role i both the assistant direct and i and you're the talent yeah both talent either way yeah but it is true we do have a youtube channel video does it make you mad when you're when you're um directing a video and then i give a little suggestion and it kind of makes a big difference because you always seem a little bit frustrated no no no no no you always seem like a little bit frustrated you kind of you kind of the good thing i'll say you're humble enough to be like you do the shot whatever the adjustment is but then i feel like it it i feel like you have a hard i think those nights you don't sleep as good as you do if you come in and you got the shots well a wise man once told me and when i say once i mean plenty of times that as a leader i need to always my goal should be to do your team member's idea not your own idea so from a leadership perspective you do a good job yeah of going like yeah okay good that sounds like a good shot we'll do that shot i like it a lot that's good even if it's an eighty percent solution even if it's what i'm asking you so from a leadership from giving you a you know an a minus you know yeah but what i'm saying is when you go home at night and the little demons start to knock at the door and you wonder you wonder why the assistant director had to come up with that shot yeah i had this had to say hey let me give you a little little help sir look like what it makes me happy that you know we were able we were able to collectively come up with a viable idea you want to know why you got the a minus what because i can see it in your face i can see in your face i can see the frustration when you don't come up with the shot when it's when it's when you have to take advice from the a.d when you have to take advice from the ad you know that's when i realized a little frustrated i can see it in your in your face i can see it in your eyes i can kind of feel it too yeah well i'll give you credit it's still an a yeah because you still do your best to get the good shot i haven't had you sabotage a shot yet and said yeah you know it actually doesn't work but i can see that it's frustrating yeah well you keep talking talking to me with that in condescending tone i'm about to go c plus on you pretty soon either way anyway psychological warfare if you know what that is an album with tracks jocko talking to you through your ears about why and how to get past moments of weakness even if he imposed those weaknesses on you himself as the case may or may not be sometimes okay check hey dakota meyer's got a company called flipsidecanvas flipsidecampus.com you can get cool stuff to hang on your wall i got a bunch of books i got a new book coming out it's called final spin it's a we're not sure what to call it it does tell a story parts of it are not written normal it's a strange story there's some interesting characters in there some literature or something maybe literature maybe poetry maybe a transcript we're not sure what it's called it's a new form of writing if you want to check it out it's called final spin pre-order it so that the publisher knows to print a bunch of copies leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol display equals freedom field manual weigh the warrior kid one two and three and four then we have mikey and the dragons we got about faced by hackworth we got extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership that i wrote with my brother leif babin who i also have a leadership consulting problem if uh a leadership consulting company where we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront.com for details on that we have extreme ownership academy extremeownership.com where we have virtual learning and live virtual learning leadership is not an inoculation you get a shot now you know it no you got to go to the gym every day the leadership gym come and get it next live event is the muster in phoenix august 17th and 18th and then las vegas october 28th and 29th we've sold all these out go to extremeownership.com click on events get registered and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families you want to help gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want if you want more of my colorless chroniclings [Music] or you need more of echo's inane interjections you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram on facebook echoes adequate charles i am at jacqueline mike glover mike glover's on twitter mike a glover1 on instagram mike.a.glover and then of course he's got field craft survival and fieldcraftsurvival.com check his stuff out lots of great information and um well thanks to mike once again for for coming on for sharing your experiences and knowledge mike it's awesome even more thanks for your service for taking the fight to the enemy which you most certainly did worldwide freaking outstanding thank you and to all our military personnel that are right now out there taking the fight to the enemy thank you for what you're doing every day to preserve our way of life and the same goes to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for preserving our safety here at home and everyone else out there let me ask you a question are you ready are you ready for contingencies are you ready to maneuver if you have to are you ready to save your friends your family yourself are you ready well you should be we all should be so get your mic glover on train plan prepare by going out there every day and getting after it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 515,972

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: tiARo-Mql6U

Length: 232min 12sec (13932 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021